Yet again, Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce giant Amazon is in hot water with regulators for messing with the wages of its workers, in this case its drivers. The company is set to pay a fresh $8.2 million penalty in a class action settlement for wage violations, as indicated by a court settlement notice for eight former Amazon delivery driver contractors in the Seattle area in Washington state.

The $8.2 million fine is yet another entry into the long list of fines that Amazon will pay as penalties for apparent wage theft, coming just a week after the state of California fined the company $6.4 million for failing to pay overtime and and offer rest breaks to over 700 contracted delivery drivers in Southern California between 2018 and 2020.

Shortly before California’s fine, Amazon also agreed to pay a $62 million fine levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for pocketing delivery drivers’ tips. Tracing back to other years, the company has numerously landed in hot water with regulators across the US for labor violations. 

• Amazon’s fresh $8.2 million fine traces its origins to a class action suit brought against the company by two former delivery drivers, Gus Ortiz and Mark Fredley, in 2017. They alleged that an Amazon-owned delivery subsidiary named Jungle Trux required them to deliver between 150 and 200 packages daily and failed to provide legally mandated rest and lunch breaks for them and thus deducted their periodical pay for missed breaks.

• To that end, Amazon is likely to pay a $8.2 million fine of which $5.7 million will be doled out to eight drivers who filed a class action against it. It’s indicated by the court settlement notice scheduled to be presented to a judge for final approval in May 2021.

After these settlements, Amazon won’t definitely be resting as the e-commerce behemoth still faces class-action lawsuits with accusations of wage theft in the states of Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, and Washington state. This was brought to light by an analysis of court records by Vice News.

Amazon reported a whopping $386 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in profit in 2020 so the fines levied on the company are merely peanuts on the face of it. 2020 was a year when the company saw sales surge by a high margin amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s such that Amazon reported its first quarter with over $100 billion in sales in 2020.

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