The Amazon workers who walked off the job at warehouses across the country at peak season are trying to establish a union beachhead against one of the most important — and most anti-union — employers in the world.
Amazon workers picketed their employer over the weekend through blisteringly frigid weather and, in New York, a flooded sidewalk as part of an escalating series of strikes by a minority of workers across the logistics behemoth’s supply chain. These strikes, waged from coast to coast at nine warehouses, are part of a nationwide movement to consolidate organizing at the logistics giant in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).
In 2022, the Teamsters launched a division to support organizing at Amazon. The union now represents 5,500 workers at the hulking JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island that formed the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU) over two years ago. The ALU voted in June to affiliate with the Teamsters, creating ALU-IBT Local 1. Amazon has refused to recognize the union and bargain a contract.
As the strikes wrap up as peak season ends on Christmas Eve, it’s difficult to know how disruptive the limited-duration walkouts were to Amazon’s operations. Amazon has claimed the strikes have had no effect. Several workers at different facilities, however, have said that the number of packages they moved per day dropped by a third or more.
But just as crucial is whether the strikes help build momentum for a national movement to organize Amazon. The Teamsters say the union represents ten thousand workers across ten facilities. Workers participated in strikes in nine cities. Teamsters also extended picket lines to dozens of Amazon fulfillment centers across the country, leafleting drivers and warehouse workers. In Monroe, Ohio, a group of Amazon workers who were already organizing with the Teamsters saw the picket lines and spontaneously joined the strike.
The independent union Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) went public with its petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on December 23 — synchronizing their timing with peak holiday shopping season and the national mobilization by the Teamsters.
The election filing is the result of nearly three years of organizing at the two-million-square-foot fulfillment center RDU1 in Garner, North Carolina. Those three years have seen multiple arrests and firings of key organizers, the union says.
CAUSE president Reverend Ryan Brown, who was recently fired by the company, said the union went public with the campaign once workers determined they had reached a majority of their coworkers and to ensure it keyed in on the end of peak on Christmas Eve, when Amazon lays off its seasonal employees.
“There’s a lot of eyes now on Amazon thanks to the good work that so many organizations — the Teamsters, Amazonians United, our comrades at JFK8 and ourselves — have been doing,” said Brown. “This election filing, it puts it on the conscience of the American people.”
Amazon Sets the Standard
At midnight on Saturday, Amazon warehouse workers at JFK8 walked off the job, thronged by their cheering off-duty coworkers, into a gusty and snowy night. One of these off-duty workers joining in the strike was Angela Daly, who has worked at Amazon for four years: “My father was a Teamster, so he would turn in his grave if I didn’t join.”
Hauntings from beyond the grave aside, Daly wants longer and more frequent breaks to prevent injuries. The grueling twelve-hour shifts have taken a toll on her body, she says, and the ten-second breaks Amazon allots workers every half hour to do stretches is not enough when “physically carrying stuff up and down ladders.” She has sustained two injuries on her hands.
JFK8 warehouse worker Ken Coates, also from a family of Teamsters, walked out at midnight. “Amazon hasn’t come to the table in a little over two years to negotiate this contract, and it’s illegal,” he said. “Amazon is a huge company, and they will be setting the standard for how the working class is treated in the future. If we allow them to treat us any way, that’s saying any working-class person can get treated any way a company deems fit.”
Workers at Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub in Southern California, who demanded union recognition December 11, walked off the job at noon the same day. “It’s a nationwide movement,” said Anna Ortega, a warehouse worker at the KSBD air hub. “We are supposed to be processing up to 200,000 packages a day. These last couple days, they sliced it in half. For them to say that there is no impact — I think it’s very clear to us here today that absolutely there is.”
Amazon did not respond by publication time to requests for comment on production impacts and other worker allegations in this story.
The Teamsters have made inroads into organizing Amazon drivers in the company’s 4,400 delivery service partners (DSPs) program, who are nominally employed by contractors while Amazon retains full control of their operations. Two big air hubs — KSBD in Southern California and KCVG in northern Kentucky, both previously part of independent union organizing efforts — have now affiliated with the Teamsters. Amazon says 390,000 drivers work at its DSPs. That’s 60,000 more drivers than the Teamsters represent at the United Parcel Service (UPS).
The escalating strike pickets boomeranged on Sunday, December 21, back to Queens, New York, where two dozen delivery station warehouse workers joined more than a hundred drivers who kicked off the strike at 6 a.m. on December 19.
Ira Pollock, a DBK4 warehouse worker, said he and his coworkers similarly walked out last year around the same time. But this was the first time warehouse workers and drivers had struck together. “We were met by a whole lot of drivers who are also picketing,” said Pollock. “The drivers have been leading this struggle. One thing we learned is that it’s a lot more impactful when you include drivers and warehouse workers together. We’re seeing it impact Amazon’s operations.”
Even while Amazon has adapted to pickets outside the facility and has brought in new drivers, Pollock said, “we hit them with a walkout on the inside of the warehouse. Because of the lower head count inside the warehouse, less packages are getting loaded into vans. That’s more money they’re paying on this building to process less volume.”
Before the strike, warehouse worker Dylan Maraj was riled up about Amazon hiring union-busting consultants to dissuade him and his coworkers from building a union. Maraj has participated in walkouts previously and organized petition drives. But he was impressed with the solidarity he saw on the picket line between warehouse workers and drivers across classifications and other divisions.
“The strike has helped people get hyped up about the overall direction of what the organizing is,” said Maraj. “People at the warehouse are really skeptical about whether it’s growing or not. Once they saw the picket and the strike, and they saw that the strike was becoming a national event, it has been growing in support ever since.”
Speaking on the picket line after walking out, Amazon warehouse worker Sean Dennis said managers felt exasperated: “‘Here we go again,’” he characterized their mood. “This is the third day in a row. They’re just fed up.”
Warehouse worker Maria Carnrike has worked at Amazon for four and half years after transferring from Tampa, Florida, to the Queens facility. She said striking was “really empowering, especially when you’re walking out and you see the look on the managers’ faces, like, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To go fight for our rights.’”
Carnrike said one manager alternated from resignation to joviality. “When we went to go clock out, he just had his head down. He looked really upset.” He then tried a different tack. “‘He was like, ‘Hey guys!’ And I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m walking out.’”
The response from management was a small victory. While Carnrike wants her topped-out $24.40 an hour wage to increase to $30 an hour to compensate for the physical toll on her body, the main sticking points are safer working conditions and management accountability. She said that managers routinely penalize workers with secret write-ups and disregard the accommodations she was granted after sustaining an injury on the job.
A Worldwide Strike
Even in the cold weather, the picket lines have grown. On Saturday afternoon, water gushed from the DBK4 delivery station’s fire suppression system, flooding the picket line, damaging union paraphernalia, and soaking the shoes of picketers. Workers waded through water to salvage boxes of T-shirts and hats, their feet drenched as water swooshed out for thirteen minutes, according to time stamps from video reviewed by us. The Teamsters blamed Amazon for flooding the picket. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment. Police onsite dismissed any suggestion that the flood was intentional, according to the Teamsters.
“We were all out here picketing, and we just noticed a wild stream of water hit the pavement,” said Danny Batista, a DBK4 Amazon driver. “It had to be at least two to three gallons a second. The only way I could describe it to you is, like at a water park, when they’re like spraying water down the slide. It’s a disgusting display of aggression.”
The flooding comes after the New York Police Department arrested and released a worker and a Teamsters organizer on the first day of the strike. For all the talk of the strike’s insignificance, the response from police in the New York metro area has been repressive.
On midnight on Saturday December 21st, members of Amazon Labor Union Local 1 began their strike at the JFK-8 warehouse in Staten Island. They joined eight other striking Amazon warehouses across the country in Georgia, Illinois, New York, and California. In 2022, ALU-1 made history as the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country and their movement has not been deterred by Amazon’s years long court battles attempting to delegitimize their election. Sultana Hossein is one of the many leaders of this movement. Sultana is a socialist, something which had been increasingly rare in the labor movement, despite labor’s roots in radicalism.
In this interview with Emma Lucía Llano, Sultana discusses what it means to “meet people where they’re at”, how Amazon workers’ struggles are connected to anti-war movements, and the future of the labor movement under Donald Trump.
Emma Lucía Llano is a Peruvian-American writer and activist. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in Journalism at New York University. She earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, where she authored a thesis about the role of janitors at residential colleges. She is a former union organizer for SEIU and has worked as a paralegal assisting with immigration and civil rights matters.
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