Fujishige v. Amazon.com Servs.

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AMY FUJISHIGE, Plaintiff, v. AMAZON.COM SERVICES LLC, Defendant.

No. 22-cv-06397-EJD

United States District Court, N.D. California

January 30, 2024

ORDER GRANTING MOTION TO DISMISS

Re: ECF No. 19

EDWARD J. DAVILA, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

Plaintiff Amy Fujishige brings this putative sex-discrimination class action against Amazon.com Services LLC alleging that Amazon's various productivity policies violate California's Fair Employment and Housing Act (“FEHA”) because the policies have a disparate impact on female employees. First Amended Complaint (“FAC”), ECF No. 15. Plaintiff also brings claims against Amazon for failure to prevent sex discrimination in violation of FEHA, unfair competition, and sex discrimination in violation of Title VII. Id. Pending before the Court is Amazon's motion to dismiss or strike the FAC (“Mot.”). ECF No. 19. The Court took Amazon's motion under submission without oral argument pursuant to Civil Local Rule 7-1(b). For the reasons discussed below, the Court GRANTS the motion with leave to amend.

I. BACKGROUND

A. Amazon's Fulfillment Centers

Amazon operates large warehouses, or “fulfillment centers” where employees receive, stow, count, pick, pack, and load onto trucks consumer products. FAC ¶ 2. Plaintiff's claims center around Amazon's use of eight-feet tall movable storage shelves called “pods.” Id. ¶ 5. Amazon uses these pods in fulfillment centers to store inventory, and employees working at the fulfillment centers interact with the pods in various capacities. Id. ¶ 50. For example, Amazon employees can be tasked with putting new inventory that has arrived at the fulfillment center onto the pods (“stower”), scanning items on the pods for inventory purposes (“counter”), and taking items off the pods when orders come in (“picker”). Id.

B. Amazon's Productivity and Safety Policies

Productivity Policy. Plaintiff alleges that Amazon requires employees in its fulfillment centers to meet a quota of items processed hourly. FAC ¶ 63. To maintain these quotas, Amazon “uses a suite of productivity metrics and disciplinary policies and practices, and incentives” which come under an omnibus “Quality and Productivity Performance Policy” that Plaintiff refers to as the “Productivity Policy.” Id. ¶ 64. Plaintiff believes that Amazon's Productivity Policy entails tracking employees “based on several variables,” and ranks warehouse employees by their “Productivity Score” on a weekly basis. Id. This “Productivity Score” considers the number of units (i.e., warehoused items to be stowed away in pods, counted for inventory, or picked for shipping to customers) scanned per hour (“Units Per Hour” or “UPH”) and the amount of time employees spend “off task” (i.e., not scanning units) (“Time Off Task” or “TOT”). Id. ¶¶ 7, 64. The Units Per Hour requirement can vary depending on the day or type of item being processed. Id. ¶¶ 65-66 (explaining the UPH may be 306 if picking mostly smaller items or 297 if picking mostly medium-sized items). Regarding the Time Off Task metric, Plaintiff alleges that after accumulating a “certain amount of TOT,” employees receive notifications indicating they have spent too much TOT. Id. ¶ 67. Plaintiff alleges that prior to June 2021, Amazon enforced a 30-minute TOT limit per day, but Amazon has since modified its TOT policy to “average TOT over an unspecified longer period of time” before disciplining employees. Id. ¶ 68.

Plaintiff alleges that the remaining factors involved in generating a Productivity Score are unknown, because Amazon “only reveals UPH and TOT metrics to an employee when issuing a written warning for productivity issues.” Id. ¶ 7. Employees in the bottom 5% of the Productivity Score rankings each week, Plaintiff alleges, are then subject to discipline in the form of a written “productivity warning.” Id. ¶¶ 9, 64. If an employee receives six written warnings of any type--or three productivity warnings--within a period of 12 months, that employee is subject to termination. Id. ¶ 69.

Safety Policies. Plaintiff claims Amazon enforces certain safety policies with respect to working with the pods in the fulfillment centers. Id. ¶¶ 58-62. For example, employees must not lift their arms above their heads to access an item on the pod. Id. ¶ 59. Instead, each pod workstation includes a step ladder that “must be used to reach for bins or items that lie above the employee's head.” Id. ¶ 60. Failing to use the stepladder in this instance, Plaintiff alleges, “means that the employee is overreaching, which can subject an employee to discipline.” Id. After an employee has used the stepladder, the employee must push it back to a designated area within the pod's workstation because “leaving it out in front of the pod is considered a safety hazard, and the stepladder may be blocking the next bin to be accessed.” Id. If a bin is too high to reach even with the stepladder, employees call a Process Assistant to assist. Id. ¶ 62. Plaintiff alleges that because “only one Process Assistant was assigned to each floor, they were hard to track down, and waiting for one could use up precious time.” Id.

C. Plaintiff's Experience Working at Amazon's Fulfillment Centers

Plaintiff is a five-foot-tall woman who worked for Amazon at its Fulfillment Center in Sacramento, California for about ten months beginning in September 2020 as a “picker and counter.” FAC ¶ 71. Plaintiff's job duties included scanning and picking items from bins organized on the pods. Id. ¶¶ 73, 48. Plaintiff alleges that, being five feet tall, she was not able to pick and scan items at the top of each pod without assistance from a Process Assistant or violating the safety policy against overreaching for items over her head. Id. ¶ 73. Plaintiff was reprimanded for failing to use a stepladder, which she claims she did to “meet the strict Productivity Score standards and stay out of the bottom 5% of Productivity Scores.” Id.

Plaintiff further claims that Amazon's stepladder policy and the requirement that she call a Process Assistant to assist with items she could not reach with a ladder “forced [her] to spend more time completing the same tasks as other, taller employees, resulting in a lower average UPH measurement and a higher average TOT measurement, lowering her Productivity Scores.” Id. ¶ 75. After receiving six written warnings for failing to meet Amazon's Productivity Policy requirements, Plaintiff was terminated on July 8, 2021. Id. ¶ 86.

D. Procedural History

On August 29, 2022, Plaintiff filed a putative class action complaint in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara, Case No. 22-cv-403296, alleging claims for (1) sex discrimination in violation of the FEHA, (2) failure to prevent sex discrimination in violation of FEHA, and (3) unfair competition based on the FEHA violations. ECF No. 1. On October 21, 2022, Amazon filed a notice of removal to this District. Id. On March 1, 2023, Plaintiff filed the First Amended Complaint to assert an additional claim for sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. ECF No. 15.

Plaintiff brings these claims on behalf of herself and three putative classes of all female Amazon warehouse employees who are “involved with processing ‘pods'” and “who were subject to Amazon's Quality and Productivity Performance Policy or practice.” FAC ¶ 29. The first class includes female employees in California during the period beginning three years to the filing of the complaint, the second includes female employees in California during the period beginning four years prior to the filing of the complaint, and the third includes female employees in the United States during the “applicable limitations period”. Id. ¶¶ 28, 29.

On March 27, 2023, Amazon filed the instant motion to dismiss or strike the FAC. ECF No. 19. On April 17, 2023, Plaintiff filed an opposition to the instant motion (ECF No. 20 (“Opp.”)), and Amazon filed a reply on May 1, 2023 (ECF No. 21 (“Reply”)).

II. LEGAL STANDARD

Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires a complaint to include “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” A complaint that fails to meet this standard may be dismissed pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6). Rule 8(a) requires a plaintiff to plead “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007). “A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009). While a plaintiff must allege “more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully,” the plausibility standard “is not akin to a probability requirement.” Id.

For purposes of ruling on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, the Court generally “accept[s] factual allegations in the complaint as true and construe[s] the pleadings in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party.” Manzarek v. St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co., 519 F.3d 1025, 1031 (9th Cir. 2008). The Court need not, however, “assume the truth of legal conclusions merely because they are cast in the form of factual allegations.” Fayer v. Vaughn, 649 F.3d 1061, 1064 (9th Cir. 2011) (per curiam). Mere “conclusory allegations of law and unwarranted inferences are insufficient to defeat a motion to dismiss.” Adams v. Johnson, 355 F.3d 1179, 1183 (9th Cir. 2004).

If the court concludes that a 12(b)(6) motion should be granted, the “court should grant leave to amend even if no request to amend the pleading was made, unless it determines that the pleading could not possibly be cured by the allegation of...