Amazon ‘Plainly Has Standing’ to Fight Constitutionality of Wash. Law

When the Washington Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) issues citations alleging employers failed to address ergonomic hazards in the workplace, Washington law “unconstitutionally presumes employers violated the law and forces them to incur unrecoverable abatement expenses before the government proves that any hazardous safety condition exists,” said Amazon’s opposition Friday in U.S. District Court for Western Washington (docket 2:22-cv-01404) to L&I’s Nov. 18 motion to dismiss.

Washington law also requires that employers “concede under penalty of criminal prosecution that hazards exist and deprives them of any meaningful opportunity to challenge the citation and abatement requirements,” said Amazon. “Rather than respond to these constitutional defects on the merits, L&I argues that Amazon lacks standing to challenge these aspects of Washington’s workplace safety regime” and moves for dismissal of Amazon’s complaint, it said. L&I’s arguments are “unavailing,” and its motion to dismiss should be denied, it said.

According to L&I, Amazon’s injury -- being forced to spend tens of millions of dollars to abate alleged ergonomic hazards before the government proves hazards exist or face substantial fines for refusing to abate -- is “not fairly traceable” to “stay of abatement provisions” under Washington law “because Amazon is at fault for not timely notifying its employees of its decision to appeal” L&I’s citation, said Amazon. “L&I is mistaken,” it said.

Amazon challenges several aspects of Washington’s stay of abatement regime, “including the reflexive denial of its stay request based on technical violations of employee-notice requirements,” it said. “Amazon plainly has standing to bring its constitutional challenge.”

L&I spends most of the rest of its brief defending the policy of a state appeals board in “automatically denying a stay request if an employer failed to provide timely notice,” said Amazon. That’s “notwithstanding that L&I never raised the employee notice issue” before the appeals board and “did not oppose Amazon’s motion for reconsideration of its stay request after Amazon provided said notice,” it said.

The notice requirement is “only one of many deficiencies that Amazon challenged in its complaint,” said Amazon. “When L&I finally gets to the merits of Amazon’s central challenge, it defends the stay procedures by offering perfunctory and misleading arguments that rely on inapposite case law.”