By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -A New York federal judge has ordered Amazon.com to comply with a subpoena from a U.S. civil rights agency investigating claims that the online retailer discriminated against pregnant warehouse workers.
U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield in Manhattan late Thursday rejected Amazon’s claims that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) subpoena was too broad and sought irrelevant information.
The EEOC is seeking data on requests that pregnant workers at five U.S. warehouses made for accommodations such as limits on heavy lifting and additional breaks, and whether Amazon granted or denied them.
Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said the company has cooperated with the investigation since it began three years ago and disagreed with the EEOC’s characterization of its conduct. Amazon is proud of the benefits and time off it offers to workers who are pregnant or whose partners have given birth, he said.
“We take this issue very seriously and look forward to showing why the EEOC’s concerns are unfounded,” Stephenson said in a statement.
The commission’s probe was prompted by complaints from five women who say they faced pregnancy discrimination while working at Amazon warehouses in New Jersey, Connecticut, North Carolina, and California.
Amazon said it has provided the EEOC with about 370,000 pages of data in response to the subpoena, but not in the specific format requested by the agency.
Schofield in her ruling said the information sought in the subpoenas was necessary for the EEOC to determine whether Amazon engaged in illegal discrimination. The judge gave Amazon until Aug. 9 to comply with the subpoena.
An EEOC spokesman declined to comment.
In 2022, a New York state agency filed an administrative complaint accusing Amazon of requiring pregnant and disabled warehouse workers to take unpaid leaves of absence, even if they were capable of working, instead of providing accommodations. That case is pending.
Amazon has denied wrongdoing and said it strives to support it workers, but acknowledged in a statement responding to the New York complaint that “we don’t always get it right.”
The EEOC issued a subpoena last year seeking five categories of information, including data on accommodations Amazon provided to warehouse workers with disabilities. At the time, federal law only required companies to provide the same accommodations to pregnant workers that they gave to employees with disabilities.
A law passed later last year mandates that employers accommodate workers’ pregnancies regardless of how they treat workers with disabilities.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by David Holmes and Josie Kao)
