In March of 2026, Connecticut enacted a new bill intended to protect warehouse workers from being overworked through the imposition of productivity standards, or as the bill calls them, quotas. It may, in fact, protect workers, but only because the reality is that the terms of the new law will make warehouse operators decide they can no longer operate in Connecticut.
By way of background, on March 3, Governor Ned Lamont signed into law a large omnibus budget package that included the Warehouse Worker Protection Act (WWPA). The WWPA was rushed into the omnibus package without the usual process that would have allowed the business community to participate in its development.
Importantly, the omnibus package included new provisions that were not part of earlier versions of the WWPA. Most notably, the law prohibits employers from using comparison data to evaluate workers. In other words, no matter how little an employee produces or achieves, relative to his or her peers, an employer is not allowed to use that data to evaluate performance. Not only does this create problems for the employer in determining whether an employee is actually working, but it will likely create morale problems among other employees who see under-performing workers suffering no consequences. This prohibition on using peer-to-peer data for evaluation is unique to the Connecticut law—literally no other state does this.
The overall thrust of the WWPA is to make the use of any type of productivity standard so onerous that employers will abandon them altogether. The new law contains a provision that requires extensive recordkeeping if the employer maintains any type of standard, but relieves the employer of all those recordkeeping requirements if the employer does not “assign or require” productivity standards.
Perhaps the only industry that will benefit from the new law will be plaintiffs’ attorneys who will be able to bring actions against employers if an employee feels they were “aggrieved by a violation” under the WWPA. So, if an employee was held accountable for not performing at a level consistent with his or her peers, that would be grounds for a lawsuit.
Connecticut’s new law could result in warehouses leaving the state entirely, chilling job growth and economic development in one of the hottest sectors of the economy. That’s one way to protect Connecticut’s workers from being subject to productivity standards—by ensuring the jobs no longer exist.