Federal warehouse worker protection bill introduced

Warehouse workers nationwide would no longer have to meet speed quotas and employers would have to establish national ergonomic standards, according to legislation introduced by Congressional lawmakers last week. The Warehouse Worker Protection Act, introduced last week by Senators Ed J. Markey (D-Mass), Tina Smith (D-Minn) and Bob Casey (D-Pa), immediately received the support of several national unions.

“The Warehouse Worker Protection Act is about dignity, safety, and respect for the workers that make companies run,” Markey said in a statement. “When corporations repeatedly use and abuse warehouse workers, they show us that their number one obligation is to their profits. This bill would guarantee that we have basic standards in place to protect warehouse workers from the worst of corporate greed and move us one step further towards true worker justice.”

The bill’s introduction comes as lawmakers in New York have been fighting to pass the Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Act, which would require warehouses in the Empire State to be designed for safety and open to yearly evaluations by ergonomic experts.

State Senator Jessica Ramos, the sponsor of that bill, applauded the senators last week for introducing the federal legislation. “A uniform, federal standard would be so helpful in our efforts to try and level the playing field between employers who want to escape their responsibility for managing a safe working environment and states’ desires to protect their working families,” she said in a statement.

Ramos, with a similar coalition of unions advocating for the Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Act, passed a legislation in 2022 that limited quotas in warehouses.

Markey was joined at the announcement by several warehouse workers employed by Amazon, the company that accounts for more than a third of all warehouse employment in the United States, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Center. The report found that Amazon’s injury rate in their warehouses is triple that of Walmart, another employer that has at least 10 warehouses with more than 1,000 employees each.

Also joining Markey at the announcement was the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Sean O’ Brien, whose union is seeking to organize drivers who deliver packages for Amazon. “Warehouses can be very dangerous places to work if safety isn't a priority," O'Brien said at the announcement. “And employees like Amazon have proven that their only priority is the bottom line of their balance sheet, not the people that make them the success that they are. And that's why we're here today."

Josh Pomeranz, the director of operations for Teamsters Local 804, which represents thousands of warehouse workers at UPS in New York City and Long Island, said he’s in support of any bill aimed at protecting warehouse workers.

"There's definitely injuries that occur that these similar bills would help prevent or at least track,” he said of the state and federal bills. "[Warehouses] are certainly a dangerous workplace and any way to lower injuries or make sure those injuries are properly reported is something that’s going to be important to working people regardless of whether they're in a union or not."

Local 804 will continue to lobby for the Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Act, Pomeranz said: “The stronger the enforcement is, the more places that workers can go to be protected, the better.”