Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers at seven facilities in the metro areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Southern California, and New York City are out on strike today, in what the union says is the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history. Unionized workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 fulfillment center have also authorized a strike and could soon follow.
Workers in all these locations—five delivery stations and two fulfillment centers—have already shown majority support and demanded union recognition. The Teamsters set Amazon an ultimatum: recognize the unions and agree to bargaining by December 15, or face strikes. Amazon hasn’t moved.
“They are skirting their responsibility as our employer to bargain with us on higher pay and safer working conditions,” said Riley Holzworth, a driver who makes deliveries from the DIL7 delivery station in Skokie, Illinois.
At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, cops swarmed and arrested an Amazon driver who stopped his van in support of the strike. Then they forcibly broke the picket line. In anticipation of a possible strike at JFK8, police had camped out by the facility in advance.
The Teamsters have made organizing Amazon a priority; the New York Times reported that the union has committed $8 million to the project, plus access to its $300 million strike fund.
‘ALL YOU CAN THINK OF IS SLEEP’
The strike’s timing is strategic: package volumes balloon around the holidays, known as “peak season,” so it’s no easy feat for Amazon to cope with disruption. During the 2023 holiday season, Amazon netted 29 percent of all global online orders.
To keep up with the surge in demand, many workers are forced to work mandatory overtime—childcare and other obligations be damned. “They give us one day extra, plus one hour extra a day,” said Wajdy Bzezi, a shift lead steward who has worked at JFK8 since 2018. “I barely see my son.”
“Whan you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,” said Ken Coates, a packer who has worked at JFK8 for five years. “And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.”
To help meet the increased demand the company has hired 250,000 seasonal workers across the country. This influx could also dilute strike power, though seasonal workers face the same stressors and often support the union push.
PEAK SEASON, INJURY SEASON
Rushed training for the seasonal hires has knock-on effects that leaves everyone less safe.
“Just this past month I think I ran into half a dozen new employees that didn’t know how to do the job,” Coates said. “Not due to any fault of their own, due entirely to the fault of their trainer not giving them adequate time.”
For instance, Coates says, new workers assigned to rebin duties (moving items from the conveyor belt to a designated shelf so packers can package and ship them) can unintentionally push items too far across the shelf, where they fall off the other side and hit packers.
Peak season at Amazon means peak injuries for workers. A July interim report from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that injury rates skyrocket during Prime Day and the holiday season.
During the week of Prime Day 2019, the report found, Amazon’s rate of recordable injuries would correspond to more than 10 annual injuries per 100 workers—more than double the industry average. During that same period, Amazon’s total rate of injuries (including those that do not need to be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA) would correspond to almost 45 injuries per 100 full-time workers. That is to say, if they kept up the Prime Day pace, nearly half the workers would be injured in a year.
“There hasn’t been a year that I’ve worked at Amazon where we haven’t broken a record in the number of packages we’ve handled,” said Coates.
‘IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE A JOB THAT SHOULD BE LEGAL’
Even outside the busy season, the work is grueling. Amazon’s relentless productivity quotas are nearly impossible to meet safely, forcing workers to barter their backs and knees for $18 an hour.
A new report from the same Senate committee has found that Amazon’s injury rate is having a “significant and growing impact on the average injury rate for the entire warehouse sector.”
Amazon is a corporation that transports goods and breaks down bodies. And why wouldn’t it, when this level of exploitation is incentivized at every turn? Reporting requirements are easily bypassed; the company appears to be using its on-site health facilities to obscure the true number of injuries sustained by workers on the job, or to shift the blame to workers for using improper technique.
“I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been injured on the job,” said Coates. “In our bathroom there’s a mirror that says, ‘You’re looking at the person who is most responsible for your safety.’ It pisses me off every time I have to see it. That’s just them passing off the buck.”
The OSHA penalties for instances that do get reported are capped at around $16,000 for each serious violation, the report notes. For a company making $70,000 in profits per minute, that’s just the cost of doing business.
“It doesn’t feel like a job that should be legal,” Holzworth said. “I’ve had a lot of different jobs in this industry, and this one by far feels like my employer is really getting away with a lot.”
A GLOBAL FIGHT
Workers organizing at key chokepoints in the supply chain have managed to extract a few concessions from Amazon, including increased pay for Chicago-area delivery station workers and the reinstatement of a suspended air hub employee in San Bernardino and another in Queens.
But Amazon has made significant investments that reduce its vulnerability. The expansion of its fulfillment network allows the company to reroute orders within its network of warehouses and reduces its reliance on any one location in the event of strikes or disruptions. Building sufficient power to tip the scales will require organizing across the global supply chain.
Around the world, the company has fiercely opposed organizing efforts, leaning on anti-union tactics like delaying elections, holding captive-audience meetings, and going on a hiring spree ahead of a union election to dilute the vote.
Between 2022 and 2023, Amazon spent more than $17 million on union avoidance consultants. And where other companies are content to bring in these swindlers to train management, Amazon is sometimes cutting out the middleman and hiring them directly as managers.
‘TAKE SOME ACCOUNTABILITY’
For delivery drivers, there’s another wrinkle: The drivers officially work for third-party contractors known as delivery service partners (DSPs), allowing Amazon to skirt responsibility.
When drivers unionized last year at a DSP in California called Battle-Tested Strategies, Amazon ended its contract and cut ties with the contractor, effectively firing the 84 drivers (Amazon was the company’s only client, and the company hasn’t operated since.)
This year, Amazon pulled the same stunt when drivers organized at a DSP in Illinois, Four Star Express Delivery.
Amazon maintains that since drivers are employed by DSPs, it has no duty to bargain with the workers. But drivers call bullshit, insisting that Amazon meets the legal standard for a joint employer: “We drive your branded van, we wear your uniform,” said Rubie Wiggins, a delivery driver at Amazon’s DAX5 facility in Southern California. “Take some accountability.”
‘WE CAN BRING THEIR STANDARDS HERE’
Safety is a central concern—and a key organizing issue. Delivery vans are packed to the brim, forcing some drivers to jam packages behind seats and behind any available crevice.
“It looks like a crypt in your van,” said Andrew Wiggins, Rubie’s husband, who works for the same DSP. “A lot of drivers put packages on the dash, wherever they can. It’s very unsafe, but people are just doing what they have to do.”
Rubie and Andrew talk regularly with UPS delivery drivers about the benefits of a strong union contract. “It’s amazing what you hear that they have,” Rubie said. “They have mechanics on site, they can watch their vehicles on site, we don’t have any of that. When you see that UPS is less profitable than Amazon and they’re able to do that for their drivers, you really want to tell Amazon, ‘Please take care of me like that.’”
“At Amazon it’s like, in order to perform, you have to think in your head a complete system of exact steps,” Holzworth said. “I’m gonna organize my packages in this way and as soon as I stop, I’m gonna engage the brake, pull out the keys, take off my seatbelt, in this order every single time so that you’re wasting as few seconds as possible.”
“If Amazon can have this as their business model, what’s the future working conditions gonna look like for other corporations?” Rubie Wiggins said. “We have nieces and nephews, I have younger brothers. What’s the workforce gonna look like for them in a couple years?
“You get a lot of ‘Why don’t you work for UPS?’” she said. “We’re drivers already. We can bring their standards here. We can start making the working conditions better here.”
Amazon Workers Launch Historic Strike to Demand New Contracts & End Unsafe Labor Practices
Thousands of Amazon workers on Thursday launched the largest strike against the retail giant in U.S. history, pressuring the company at the height of the holiday period to follow the law and bargain with those who have organized with the Teamsters union. The strike includes warehouse workers and drivers at seven distribution centers in some of Amazon’s largest markets, including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco; Teamsters have also set up picket lines at many other warehouses nationwide. “We’re engaging in a coordinated action to try to put the pressure on Amazon to stop breaking the law, come to the table,” says Connor Spence, president of Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1, which represents workers in New York. “This is an unfair labor practice strike over their refusal to bargain.” We also speak with Ronald Sewell, an Amazon associate in Georgia, who says workplace safety is a major driver of worker discontent, including insufficient access to water and overheating. “The danger is real. It’s not something that we’re making up,” says Sewell.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of Amazon workers organizing with the Teamsters union have launched the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history. In the midst of peak holiday shopping season, drivers and workers at seven facilities in New York, Georgia, Illinois and California went on strike Thursday to pressure Amazon to come to the negotiating table as workers demand better benefits, higher wages and safer working conditions.
The strike comes days after the Senate Labor Committee, led by Senator Bernie Sanders, published a report that found Amazon systematically ignores and rejects recommended worker safety measures and deliberately misrepresents workplace injury data.
This is a video from the Teamsters with workers explaining why they’re joining the strike.
AMAZON WORKER 1: I believe a strike is definitely going to make Amazon realize that we’re not playing. We’re serious.
AMAZON WORKER 2: DBK4 has started a revolution, and I believe that Amazon will wilter under the pressure and cave in and pay us.
AMAZON WORKER 1: Amazon is not respecting us. We’ve been trying to get Amazon to recognize us as Teamsters, and they’re not coming to the table.
AMAZON WORKER 3: And that’s why now we are ready to strike and to actually show them what exactly we are fighting for.
AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday night, just before the strike began, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos dined with President-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. Bezos also committed to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund through Amazon.
As workers continue to join picket lines at hundreds of Amazon fulfillment centers across the country, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel claimed in a statement most of the workers on strike are, quote, “almost entirely outsiders, not Amazon employees or partners, and the suggestion otherwise is just another lie from the Teamsters,” unquote.
The $2 trillion company employs more than one-and-a-half million people. The Teamsters represent about 10,000 workers. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement, quote, “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it,” unquote.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Ron Sewell is with us, an Amazon associate at an Amazon facility in East Point, Georgia. He’s joining us from Fort Worth, Texas. And here in New York, we’re joined by Connor Spence, the president of the only Amazon local, ALU-IBT Local 1, at the Staten Island Amazon warehouse, the first Amazon facility to unionize.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Connor, let’s begin with you. Explain this strike and respond to Amazon saying these are all outsiders who are striking.
CONNOR SPENCE: Yeah, so, for more than two years at our facility, JFK and Staten Island, Amazon has been refusing to come to the table and negotiate a strong union contract with the workers. This is obviously in violation of federal law. Now, across the country, they have the same obligation with bargaining units, over 20 of them across 10 states. We are all joined together as part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters national Amazon Division, and we’re engaging in a coordinated action to try to put the pressure on Amazon to stop breaking the law, come to the table. This is an unfair labor practice strike over their refusal to bargain.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk more about the significance of this largest strike against Amazon in history?
CONNOR SPENCE: Well, in the U.S., there hasn’t been large coordinated action like this. And actually, I do want to comment on the point Amazon is trying to make that this is somehow just an outsider action. You can go to any one of these picket lines where the workers have walked off the job, and see that’s not the case. Last time I was on the show, I talked about how Amazon has 150% turnover in their warehouses nationwide. Something like this, organized on this scale, has to be internal, has to be worker to worker. It has to come from the inside. The idea that this could be done by outsiders is just ridiculous on Amazon’s part. It’s really a narrative I think they want to push so that other workers who are not yet organizing don’t see this and become inspired that they can also fight to change their conditions.
AMY GOODMAN: At the Amazon picket line in Queens here in New York Thursday, police arrested, then released Teamsters organizer Anthony Rosario, as well as Jogernsyn Cardenas, one of the striking Amazon workers. NYPD agents also threatened the crowd with mass arrests. Journalist Luis Feliz Leon of Labor Notes captured the moment of Cardenas’s arrest. New York police officers swarmed Cardenas and blocked him in the cab of his van.
STRIKING WORKER: I already know, we’re good. We good. You’re going to get out. We good. You good. Yo, you good. You good. Here unite! Here unite!
POLICE OFFICER: Step back!
STRIKING WORKERS: Let him go! Let him go! Let him go!
POLICE OFFICER: Step back!
STRIKING WORKERS: Let him go!
POLICE OFFICER: Step back!
STRIKING WORKERS: Let him go! Let him go! Let him go!
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can describe the scene and the scene around the country, Connor?
CONNOR SPENCE: I would say there’s a lot of energy, a lot of activity. I mean, I don’t think it’s like — I think it’s very significant to point out to people that it’s the dead of winter. We’re nearing the holidays. People would rather walk off the job than spend another day in the warehouse under those conditions. And I think you can really — when you go to these picket lines, you can feel that energy. The workers are — they’re tired. They feel exploited. They feel abused. And the only thing stopping more workers from taking action is just the time it takes to organize in these conditions. And it’s going to keep building, and you can sense that when you’re on the line.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also bring in Ron Sewell, Amazon associate working in East Point, Georgia, also an Amazon learning ambassador, helps train new hires and other associates, punished by Amazon for organizing on safety issues. He filed an unfair labor practice against Amazon, and Amazon settled. He’s usually in Georgia but now in Fort Worth, Texas. Talk about the issues that you face and other workers face.
RONALD SEWELL: Thank you for having me.
Yes, the issues that we face there is the common safety issues, such as clean water, cool air in the South, overheating building, people passing out. And no — when I say no response from management to even speak with us or talk with us, and therefore that’s why we are in strong support of the New York picketers, and we’re doing the same thing here in the location East Point.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the dangers that workers face, the level of injury on the job? Talk about what Senator Sanders talked about in the Senate.
RONALD SEWELL: Well, the dangers in the job, what Senator Sanders talked about, is real. We have employees — just recently, last week, I had to assist an employee who passed out, that was working the early morning. And he was trying to get to a place where he can sit down, either in the break room or in the restroom. But before he even reached that area, he passed out on the floor in front of me, hitting his head, hitting his face.
So, the danger is real. It’s not something that we’re making up. We have an older population, as well as a younger population. And that’s something health-wise, safe-wise, that we submitted a request to OSHA, and we got a visit by them, and they went through the whole facility.
AMY GOODMAN: Has ATL6 in Atlanta, in East Point, unionized?
RONALD SEWELL: No, we have not unionized, but we do have the full support of the Teamsters and what have you. And we are fighting for our individual rights. And we will continue doing that and continue supporting the Teamsters and all others in getting Amazon to come, at least management, talk with us, listen to our demands, listen to our concerns.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can explain who’s unionized and who hasn’t, Connor? And explain your position. You’re the only president of a local Amazon Teamsters unit.
CONNOR SPENCE: So, in 2022, we were the first warehouse to win an actual NLRB election. Since then, many other warehouses across the country have gone through the NLRB process, not quite the same way we did. Instead, they signed a majority of their co-workers on union cards, demonstrated that majority to the company. The company, under a newer NLRB ruling, had about two weeks to contest that majority, file elections with the NLRB. They refused to do so. So, in doing so, it was a tacit recognition that those majorities exist, and therefore, that has happened at over 20 bargaining units across the country. And that number continues to grow as the movement expands and we organize more workers.
AMY GOODMAN: The Teamsters President O’Brien spoke, controversially, at the Republican convention. Do you think unions will do better under Trump?
CONNOR SPENCE: I mean, I think it remains to be seen. I’m very much a fan of the current NLRB general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo. But I think that, ultimately, what we’ve learned, even in the past four years under Biden, is that the NLRB is not the main instrument of change here. It’s building worker power. And we have to do that under any administration, under any NLRB.
AMY GOODMAN: And are you calling for people not to use Amazon, to boycott Amazon?
CONNOR SPENCE: I think a better thing for me to say is, if you choose to shop on Amazon this holiday, a good thing to do would be to meet with your driver, have a conversation with them when they drop off your package, ask them about their working conditions. If there are things they would want to change, tell them that you’ve seen Amazon workers organizing on TV, that they should consider joining the Teamsters, and they have the full support of you and the community if they choose to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Connor Spence is president of Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1. And I want to thank Ron Sewell for joining us, Amazon associate working in the ATL6 facility in East Point, Georgia, talking to us from Texas.
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