Study warns of 'irreversible transition' in ocean currents that could rapidly freeze parts of North America

A large system of ocean currents in the Atlantic – which includes the Gulf Stream – has been disrupted due to human-caused climate change, scientists reported in a new study published Thursday. If that system collapses, it would lead to dramatic changes in worldwide weather patterns.

© Julio Cortez, AP Images A beachgoer walks along the water as waves crash in Manasquan, N.J. Swells are up from recent hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, including Jose, which is expected to stay out to sea, according to meteorologists.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm, salty water from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom.

“The Atlantic Meridional Overturning really is one of our planet’s key circulation systems,” said the author of the study, Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Findings from a similar 2018 study drew comparisons to the scientifically inaccurate 2004 disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” which used such an ocean current shutdown as the premise of the film. At the time, study authors said a collapse was at least decades away but would be a catastrophe.

A potential collapse of this ocean current system would have severe consequences around the globe, authors of the new study said.

If this circulation shuts down, it could bring extreme cold to Europe and parts of North America, raise sea levels along the U.S. East Coast and disrupt seasonal monsoons that provide water to much of the world, the Washington Post said.

It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets, according to the Guardian.

Researchers who study ancient climate change have also uncovered evidence that the AMOC can turn off abruptly, causing wild temperature swings and other dramatic shifts in global weather systems, the Post said.

August 3: There's a 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico this summer that's bigger than Connecticut

July 20: What is La Niña? Does it bring more snow? How climate pattern could affect US weather.

The study was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Climate Change.

Climate models have shown that the AMOC is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years, Reuters reported. However, it has not been known whether the weakening is due to a change in circulation or the loss of stability.

"The difference is crucial," said Boers, "because the loss of dynamical stability would imply that the AMOC has approached its critical threshold, beyond which a substantial and in practice likely irreversible transition to the weak mode could occur."

By studying key data from the AMOC, scientists determined that the recent weakening is likely linked to a loss of stability: "The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse," Boers said.

The study said that a number of factors are likely important for the disruption of the AMOC – factors that add to the direct effect that the warming of the Atlantic Ocean has on its circulation. These include freshwater inflow from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, melting sea-ice, increasing precipitation and river run-off.

Freshwater is lighter than saltwater and reduces the tendency of the water to sink from the surface to greater depths, which is one of the drivers of the overturning.

Other climate models have said the AMOC will weaken over the coming century but that a collapse before 2100 is unlikely, Reuters said.

Levke Caesar, at Maynooth University in Ireland, who was not involved in the research, told the Guardian: “The study method cannot give us an exact timing of a possible collapse, but the analysis presents evidence that the AMOC has already lost stability, which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think.”

Study lead author Boers told the Post that "it’s one of those events that should not happen, and we should try all that we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. This is a system we don’t want to mess with."

Contributing: The Associated Press

How France Secured Major Oil And Gas Projects In Iraq

By Simon Watkins - Aug 04, 2021

Even more so than Iran, Iraq remains the greatest relatively underdeveloped oil (and gas) frontier in the Middle East. It is little wonder, then, that it has been and remains the focus of an ongoing power struggle between the U.S. and its allies on the one side and China and Russia (via Iran) on the other. In all of these central Middle Eastern tussles, especially involving Iraq and Iran, France has liked to see itself in the role of the ‘honest broker’, not especially aligned to either side, as was notably demonstrated by its attempts to stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then to stop the U.S. from unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (‘nuclear deal’) with Iran in 2018. Given this, it is not surprising that France’s flagship energy company, TotalEnergies, has secured a massive deal with Iraq to advance four major projects across the country, all linked to its huge oil and gas resources.  

In broad terms, the prize for France is exceptional. Officially, Iraq holds a very conservatively estimated 145 billion barrels of proved crude oil reserves (17 percent of the Middle East’s total, around 8 percent of the globe’s, and the fifth-biggest on the planet), plus nearly 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (the 12th largest in the world), according to figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Unofficially, the figures are likely to be much higher.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has stated a number of times that the country’s undiscovered resources amount to around 215 billion barrels and this was also a figure that had been arrived at in a 1997 detailed study by respected oil and gas firm, Petrolog. Even this figure, though, did not include the parts of northern Iraq in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, administered by the KRG. Prior to the recent rise in exploration activity in the KRG area, more than half of the exploratory wells in Iraq had been drilled prior to 1962, a time when technical limits and a low oil price gave a much tighter definition of a commercially successful well than would be the case today. Based on the previous limited exploration and development of oil fields in the KRG area, the proven oil reserves figure was first put at around 4 billion barrels. This has been subsequently upgraded by the KRG to around 45 billion barrels but, again, this may well be a very conservative estimate.

The key logistical problem in the south of Iraq that has precluded an advance in crude oil production to its 7 million barrels per day short-term target or to the longer-range targets of 9 million bpd and even 12 million bpd is the completion of the Common Seawater Supply Project (CSSP), and this is one of the four projects now taken over by TotalEnergies. The project involves taking and treating seawater from the Persian Gulf and then transporting it via pipelines to oil production facilities for the purposes of maintaining pressure in oil reservoirs to optimize the longevity and output of fields. The long-delayed plan for the CSSP is that it is used initially to supply around 6 million bpd of water to at least five southern Basra fields and one in Maysan Province, and then built out for use in further fields. 

Both the longstanding stalwart fields of Kirkuk and Rumaila – the former beginning production in the 1920s and the latter in the 1950s, with both having produced around 80 percent of Iraq’s cumulative oil production – require major ongoing water injection, with reservoir pressure at the former having dropped significantly after output of only around 5 percent of the oil in place (OIP). Rumaila, in the meantime, had produced more than 25 percent of its OIP before water injection was required because its main reservoir formation (at least its southern part) connects to a very large natural aquifer which has helped to push the oil out of the reservoir.

Although the water requirements for most of Iraq’s oilfields fall between these two cases, the needs for oilfield injection are highest in southern Iraq, in which water resources are also the least available. To reach and then sustain Iraq’s future crude oil production targets over any meaningful period, the country will have total water injection needs equating to around 2 percent of the combined average flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, or 6% of their combined flow during the low season. While withdrawals at these levels might appear to be manageable, these water sources will also have to continue to satisfy other, much larger, end-use sectors, including agriculture.

Before the latest ward of this contract to TotalEnergies, there were always only two companies with a realistic chance of taking on the giant CSSP work: U.S. supermajor ExxonMobil, and its China equivalent, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). However, it was understood by all involved that only the U.S. company had all the technology, equipment, and expertise required to complete the entirety of the CSSP on its own, with CNPC involved for various geopolitical reasons and for funding. Early in 2018, though, negotiations between Iraq’s Oil Ministry and ExxonMobil over the CSSP broke down, leaving the road open for CNPC but its progress since that point has been unclear, to say the least. As with so many major oil and gas projects in Iraq, it seems that the real reason why ExxonMobil was unable to proceed with the CSSP plan was that the risk/reward matrix was too skewed towards the risk side, specifically risks arising from the endemic corruption in the country, highlighted repeatedly as the prime cause of project failures in Iraq by Oilprice.com.

Related: Merger Mania Paves The Way For A New Era In U.S. Shale

The prospects for TotalEnergies’ second major project of the four – collecting and refining associated natural gas at the five southern Iraq oilfields of West Qurna 2, Majnoon, Tuba, Luhais, and Ratawi,- appear to be better than for its involvement in any stage of the CSSP, though. Another separate project to further develop the Ratawi is the third of the four major projects to be given to TotalEnergies.

To begin with, there is a clear economic imperative for Iraq in that currently this vast resource of associated gas is simply burnt off, akin to burning cash. It could instead be easily monetized into gas exports or used to generate power in Iraq’s chronically underpowered grid. This would also mean that precious crude oil would not have to be used to generate power and instead could be exported, which would additionally go some way to alleviating the severity of the cash crunches that Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has faced since taking office. As it stands, Iraq still ranks as one of the worst offenders for flaring associated gas in the world, after Russia, burning off around 16 billion cubic meters last year, despite it joining in 2017 the United Nations and World Bank ‘Zero Routine Flaring’ initiative aimed at ending this type of routine gas flaring by 2030.

The associated gas project is expected to produce at least 300 million standard cubic feet of gas per day and double that after the second phase of development. The agreement between Iraq and TotalEnergies follows the signing of a memorandum of understanding on 27 January to develop various large-scale projects, including associated gas developments in Ratawi in the south, Diyala in the east, and Anbar in the northeast. TotalEnergies already has ongoing experience of working across Iraq, holding a 22.5 percent stake in the Halfaya oil field in Missan province in the south and an 18 percent stake in the Sarsang exploration block in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in the north.

Successfully capturing associated gas rather than flaring it will also allow Iraq to revive the also long-stalled US$11-billion Nebras petrochemicals project with Shell, which if it went ahead in a correct linear fashion could be completed within five years and would generate estimated profits of up to US$100 billion for Iraq within its 35-year initial contract period. This theoretically greener approach to its energy resources is also seen in the last of the four projects to be undertaken by the French company, which will be the construction and operation of a 1,000-megawatt solar energy plant.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

Study of Middle East DNA Reveals Complex Human History in the Region

Isaac Schultz 11 hrs ago

A team of geneticists has sequenced 137 modern human genomes from the Middle East, shedding new light on how humans arrived in the region and how those populations changed as areas dried up.

© Image: FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP (Getty Images) The 2,600-year-old rock-cut tombs of Al-Khuraiba, in Saudi Arabia.

The research goes a long way in a region where precious little is left of a fossil record. The recent aridification of the Arabian peninsula, especially, means that bones can get so brittle they can simply disintegrate when archaeologists pick them up, as Mathew Stewart, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Human History, recently told Gizmodo. Genetic evidence is easily lost to time. The team’s results draw on modern samples from eight different groups in the Levant, Iraq, and Arabia. Ancient genomes that had previously been constructed were also included in their analysis, which is published this week in the journal Cell.

“The Middle East is an important region to understand human history, migrations, and evolution: it is where modern humans first expanded out of Africa, where hunter-gatherers first settled and transitioned into farmers, where the first writing systems developed, and where the first major known civilizations emerged,” said Mohamed Almarri, a geneticist at the Sanger Institute in England and lead author of the study, in a Cell press release. “However, despite this importance, the region has been historically understudied in genomic studies.”

Expansions out of Africa, agricultural developments, and even climatological events can be interpreted from the genomic data, Almarri’s team said. Looking at ancient genomes from past Middle Eastern populations, the team determined that populations were able to grow as people began to settle down and started farming.

© Photo: HAZEM BADER/AFP (Getty Images) A Palestinian farmer on the West Bank in June 2020.

The researchers used a relatively new sequencing approach, called linked-read sequencing, that allowed them to reconstruct population histories as far back as 100,000 years ago. Geneticists can use the approach to analyze more of the genome, in this case identifying millions of genetic variants unique to Middle Eastern populations.

The researchers found that Middle Easterners descend from a population that left Africa between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. That makes a mini-mystery of the 88,000-year-old human finger bone found at a prehistoric lake site in Saudi Arabia; it may be that bone belonged to a human group that dispersed early and did not contribute to the modern gene pool in the region. Many anatomically modern humans left Africa earlier, but these genetics suggest that modern Middle Eastern populations descended from the group that left Africa around 50,000 years ago.

“Our study fills a major gap in international genomic projects by cataloguing genetic variation in the Middle East,” said co-author Chris Tyler-Smith, also a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, in the Cell release. “The millions of new variants we found in our study will improve future medical association studies in the region. Our results explain how the genetics of Middle Easterners formed over time, providing new insights, which complement knowledge from archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics.”

 Photo: NOAA (Getty Images) A satellite image of Saudi Arabia and environs in June 2007.

Almarri and his co-author Marc Haber, a geneticist at the University of Birmingham in England, said in an email that a benefit of the research is being able to connect archaeological and ancient climate data with shifts in local population genetics. Population bottlenecks in Arabia 6,000 years ago and in the Levant 4,200 years ago point to moments when the verdant east began to dry up, the study authors said, with rapid aridification causing decreases in population sizes.

Based on when different groups mixed thousands of years ago, the team also evaluated how Semitic languages might have spread beyond the Levant, specifically pointing to the Bronze Age as a major point of intermixing, based on coincident timing between some of the genetic variations and previously determined dates for language divergence and evolution. The researchers also noted that Arabian populations have a much lower amount of Neanderthal ancestry than other Eurasians, indicating there was less admixture between our extinct close relatives and Arabian humans.

“It is exciting to see so much new genomic data from a crucial part of the world. It is interesting to see the genetic coherence of recent social groups, and, as the authors say, for things like understanding modern health, it is important to have good sampling of people around the world,” Huw Groucutt, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who wasn’t involved with the recent study, said in an email. He added, however, that there are limitations to genomic studies and that the recent team’s interpretations should be considered just that.

The team intends to follow up the research with a look at adaptation signals in the dataset, which could indicate how populations in the Middle East learned to survive in their environments when the region dried up. The recent discovery of a trove of animal bones, including human remains, in a Saudi lava tube will likely help in efforts flesh out this genetic portrait of the Middle East.

More: Hyenas Left a Massive Pile of Bones in a Saudi Arabian Lava Tube

'World's oldest' coin factory discovered in China
Jillian Kramer 6 hrs ago

© None None

Archaeologists excavating the remains of Guanzhuang—an ancient city in China’s eastern Henan Province—have discovered what they believe is the oldest-known coin mint, where miniature, shovel-shaped bronze coins were mass produced some 2,600 years ago.

Their research, published today in the journal Antiquity, gives weight to the idea that the first coins were minted not in Turkey or Greece, as long thought, but in China.

The walled and moated city of Guanzhuang was established about 800 B.C., and its foundry— where bronze was cast and beaten into ritual vessels, weapons, and tools—opened in 770 B.C., according to Hao Zhao, an archaeologist at Zhengzhou University and the paper’s lead author. But it wasn’t for another 150 years that workers began minting coins outside the southern gate of the inner city.

© None None

Using radiocarbon dating, the team determined the mint began operating sometime between 640 B.C. and no later than 550 B.C. While other research has dated coins from the Lydian Empire in what is now Turkey to as early as 630 B.C., Zhao notes that the earliest mint known to have produced Lydian coins dates to sometime between 575 B.C. and 550 B.C.

The Guanzhuang mint, Zhao says, “is currently the world’s oldest-known securely dated minting site.”

During their excavation, the researchers found two spade coins—which look like shrunken versions of the gardening tool—and dozens of clay molds used to cast them. One coin was in near-perfect condition: Just shy of 6 inches long and about 2.5 inches wide, the bronze coin weighed about 27 grams, or less than six sheets of standard-size computer paper.

© None None

Strong evidence, not proof

Coins are often found “bundled together and completely lacking any of the original context of their production or their use,” says Bill Maurer, a professor of anthropology at the University of California Irvine and director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. “But in this case, you’ve got the whole mint, and you’ve got the casts that were used.”

The completeness of the discovery is what’s remarkable, says Maurer, who was not involved in the research. Finding both coins and their molds is what allowed the researchers to radiocarbon date the mint, lending weight to their assertion that it’s the oldest known in the world.

Coins are typically discovered isolated or hoarded away from where they were made, stashed in the rafters of a house or buried in a hole in the ground, Maurer says, “completely divorced from any sort of context that you can definitively say was associated with the coins themselves.”

If such coins are found with evidence of fire damage, researchers can radiocarbon date them—but they won’t be sure “if that burning has anything to do with the time period during which the coin was used,” Maurer explains, or if the coins were instead burned in a haphazard fire.

But here, “you've got a foundry which is full of carbon residue associated with the production of the item itself,” Maurer says, which can prove how old the coins and mint actually are.

George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, says that while the discovery is impressive, “It doesn't change our basic understanding of when the first coins were produced. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that China did it first.”

That’s because while this research proves how old this particular Chinese mint and its coins are, it doesn’t definitely conclude that the Chinese remnants are older than the Lydian coins “often cited as an alternative starting point for coinage,” says Selgin, who was also not involved in the research.
Trade or taxes?

Zhao and his team speculate that the mint’s location—close to the presumed seat of the official city administration—could signal that “the minting activities were at least acknowledged by the local government.” But they hasten to add that conclusions can’t yet be drawn: “Political involvement in spade-coin production [remains an issue] for further research,” they wrote.

There are two prevailing theories about the origins of money: that it was created so that merchants and customers could barter, or so that governments could collect taxes and debts.

Maurer says while the discovery proves nothing, what it “demonstrates—in the routinization, the standardization, and the mass production of these items associated with a political center— lends weight to the hypothesis that anthropologists and archaeologists have long held: that money emerges primarily as a political technology, not an economic technology.”

Frozen cave lion cub found in Siberia with its whiskers intact is 28,000 years old

Found frozen deep in the Siberian Arctic, the cave lion cub looks like she's asleep and one touch might awaken her.

© Love Dalén A frozen cave lion cub found in Siberia with whiskers still intact is more than 28,000 years old

By Katie Hunt, CNN 

The cub's golden fur is matted with mud but otherwise undamaged. Her teeth, skin, soft tissue and organs are mummified but all intact. Some 28,000 years since she last closed her eyes, her claws are still sharp enough to prick the finger of one of the scientists who are studying this remarkable -- and unprecedented -- permafrost-preserved specimen.

The Siberian Simba, nicknamed Sparta, was one of two baby cave lions -- extinct big cats that used to roam widely across the northern hemisphere -- found in 2017 and 2018 by mammoth tusk hunters on the banks of the Semyuelyakh River in Russia's Far East.

Initially, it was thought the two cubs were siblings, as they were found just 15 meters (49 feet) apart, but a new study found that they differ in age by around 15,000 years. Boris, as the second cub is known, is 43,448 years old, according to radio carbon dating.

"Sparta is probably the best preserved Ice Age animal ever found, and is more or less undamaged apart from the fur being a bit ruffled. She even had the whiskers preserved. Boris is a bit more damaged, but still pretty good," said Love Dalen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden, and an author of a new study on the cubs.

© Jacqueline Gill Love Dalén measuring Sparta, a cave lion cub found frozen in the Siberian permafrost.

Both cubs were just 1 or 2 months old when they perished, the study said. It's not clear how they died, but Dalen and the research team -- which includes Russian and Japanese scientists -- said there were no signs of them being killed by a predator.

Computed tomography scans showed skull damage, dislocation of ribs, and other distortions in their skeletons.

"Given their preservation they must have been buried very quickly. So maybe they died in a mudslide, or fell into a crack in the permafrost," Dalen said. "Permafrost forms large cracks due to seasonal thawing and freezing."

During the last Ice Age, Siberia wasn't the empty place it is today. Mammoths, tundra wolves, bears, woolly rhinoceroses, bison and saiga antelopes roamed, along with cave lions -- a slightly bigger relative of African lions that live today.

Video: Take a look at this perfectly preserved Ice Age animal (CNN)


It's not known how the cave lion adapted to life in the harsh high latitudes, with its rapid changes of season, strong winds and cold, dark winters.

The study, published in the journal Quaternary, found that the cave lions' coat was similar but not identical to that of an African lion cub. The Ice Age cubs had a long thick fur undercoat that might have helped them adapt to the cold climate.

Tusk hunters

The mummified remains of a number of extinct animals -- a woolly rhino, a lark, a cave bear, a canine puppy -- that once roamed the Russia steppe have been found in recent years, often by hunters, who blast tunnels using high-pressure water hoses into the permafrost primarily in search of long curvy mammoth tusks. There is a lucrative -- if controversial -- trade in the tusks, which are prized by ivory carvers and collectors as an alternative to elephant ivory.

Russian scientists like Valery Plotnikov, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Siberia's main city, have accompanied and developed working relationships with the tusk hunters, who unearth astonishing finds from the permafrost's mud and ice.

"In 2017, ... I worked with them in the hole, the ice cave," Plotnikov said on a podcast produced by the Natural History Museum in London that was released last month.

"It's very cold, very dangerous and very hard to work, terrible conditions, many mosquitoes," he added, saying he lost 10 kilos (22 pounds) in the month he spent with the tusk hunters. But the relationships he forged have generated a scientific bonanza, with Plotnikov saying he's come across the cave lion cubs, a wolf head and a family of mummified mammoths.

The climate crisis has also played a role. Warmer summers -- the Arctic is warming two times faster than the global average -- have weakened the permafrost layer and lengthened the tusk-hunting season.

"There are definitely more finds being made these days. The main reason is the increased demand for mammoth ivory, meaning more people are out searching in the permafrost. But climate change also contributes, making the melting (and thus field work) season longer," Dalen explained via email.

The scientists have to test the frozen remains for infectious diseases, such as anthrax, that can lay dormant before they examine them in detail, although Dalen said that it was unlikely that the remains harbor ancient pathogens. The sex of the cubs was confirmed by CT scan and genetic-based sex determination.

Dalen said that the next step would be to sequence the DNA of Sparta, which could reveal the evolutionary history of the cave lion, the population size and its unique genetic features.

The advantages of unionization are obvious, so why don't more workers join unions?

Larry Savage, Professor, Labour Studies, Brock University 

and Stephanie Ross, Associate Professor and Director, School of Labour Studies, 

McMaster University

It’s well established that unionized workers earn better wages and have better benefits than their non-union counterparts. Unionized workers also experienced much greater levels of job security during the COVID-19 pandemic. But if the advantages of union membership are so obvious, why are fewer than one in three workers in Canada unionized?

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette Thousands of teachers from the Peel District School Board hold a one-day strike in Mississauga, Ont., in February 2020.

While there’s no consensus about which factors are most likely to sway support for unionization, dissatisfaction with working conditions and the desire for dignity and voice at work are often cited as key reasons why workers seek out unions.

Wanting a union and securing a union, however, are two very different things. That’s because there are enduring obstacles to unionization that make it incredibly difficult for workers to turn their initial support for the idea of a union into reality.
Barriers to unionization

Labour laws play a fundamental role in either helping or impeding unionization. For example, independent contractors and the self-employed are legally excluded from union membership in Canada and, in many provinces, so are agricultural and domestic workers. For workers who can legally unionize, provincial governments — under pressure from the business community — have generally made it more difficult to exercise that right in recent decades.

Employers intent on resisting unionization frequently exploit loopholes in labour law to build opposition to unions within their own workforces. While many union avoidance tactics are illegal, employers are often less fearful of the penalties they may face for engaging in “union-busting” activities than of the consequences of unionization.

© (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) Amazon fought hard against a unionization push, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

Union avoidance is a multi-million dollar business. Lawyers and consultants devise strategies for managers to maintain union-free workplaces. These strategies can include active intimidation and surveillance of union supporters, exploiting divisions within the workforce to stir up opposition to the union or spreading misinformation about the implications of unionization.

These common union avoidance strategies are difficult to overcome, especially given the power imbalance between employers and workers.
Union substitution, suppression

Effective anti-union campaigns often rely on a combination of union substitution and union suppression.

Union substitution techniques are the carrots designed to increase worker loyalty to the employer, thus making employees less likely to identify with the union. Some non-union companies operating in highly unionized sectors try to keep wages and working conditions in line with those of unionized workers in an effort to dissuade their own workforces from considering a union.

If union substitution represents the carrot, union suppression techniques are the stick. Union suppression seeks to plant anti-union seeds of doubt in workers’ minds and play on fears that unionization might result in job loss. Suppression techniques often include targeting pro-union employees for discipline and dismissal.

In recent years, retail giants Target and Home Depot had their slick anti-union videos leaked on social media, providing insight into how much money and effort employers are willing to pour into such initiatives.

Walmart, meantime, uses a “Union Probability Index” to monitor employee behaviour and morale. If a store’s index gets high enough, head office sends teams into the store to ensure it remains union-free. And, as we saw in the cases of Walmart in Jonquière, Que., and Foodora in Ontario, some companies will shut down outlets or operations rather than tolerate a union.

Read more: Despite Foodora ruling, app-based workers face uphill union battle
Shortage of unions

Despite these aggressive union avoidance tactics, public opinion polls indicate that, if given the choice, many non-union workers would opt to unionize.

However, many of these workers, particularly those concentrated in relatively small workplaces in the private sector, simply can’t find a union willing to organize them. Organizing small workplaces is generally cost-prohibitive for unions and rarely results in broader bargaining power for workers in a particular sector.

Union supply problems explain why we’re more likely to see unions in large workplaces with more than 500 employees than in smaller workplaces with fewer than 20 employees.

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes Swissport employees protest outside Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport in Montréal in December 2019. About 108 workers who are responsible for refuelling planes walked off the job.

The lack of union supply, labour relations power dynamics and the union avoidance strategies of employers all work together to dissuade workers from exercising their right to unionize.

This outcome isn’t accidental. It’s no coincidence that the rate of unionization has fallen in conjunction with the passage of anti-union labour law reforms in most provinces. Those reforms have made it more difficult for workers to exercise their legal right to unionize and easier for employers to interfere in union-organizing campaigns.
What’s ahead?

Governments could certainly change labour laws to facilitate unionization and crack down on employers engaging in union avoidance activities.

Many of the proposals contained in the former Ontario Liberal government’s now shelved Changing Workplaces Review could provide a road map for offering workers the necessary tools to exercise their rights more meaningfully, including a framework for broader based bargaining that would help workers in small workplaces.

Given growing levels of social and economic inequality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to facilitate unionization is more urgent than ever.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Stephanie Ross receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Larry Savage receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/08/anatomy-of-anti-union-meeting-how-no.html

How No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company, squashed a union drive

Online workers are creating new tools to improve their working conditions. Will it work?

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet

About a year ago, shortly after having a baby boy, Brittany set out to find ways that she could contribute financially as a stay-at-home mum. She soon discovered the crowdsourced work marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) – and after working her way through the platform, started landing jobs that pay up to $50 per hour.

© Image: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images Mechanical Turk requesters outsource paid tasks and processes via the platform, where they are made available to workers, or Turkers. Image: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images

At times, she laughs, she is even making more money than her husband.

That is not to say that the "good work" came easily. Some savvy Googling and a few Reddit channels got things moving, but she still remembers starting off with "crappy stuff".

"I compare it to a video game," says Brittany, who did not want her full name reported. "At first you have to do what's called grinding to get the good gear and stuff. When you first start Mechanical Turk, it's like that. Then it starts to get better."

"Mechanical Turk" is a reference to a fake chess-playing machine developed in the 18th century to fool human players into thinking they were competing against an automaton. In reality, the elaborate machine could hide a flesh-and-bone chess master, highly capable of beating their opponent, but leaving them dumbfounded in the face of what seemed like monumental technological progress.

In many ways, three centuries later, the work of Amazon's Mechanical Turk resembles that of the ostensibly magical chess-playing machine.

Within the online marketplace, posters – also called requesters – outsource paid tasks and processes via the platform, where they are made available to workers, or Turkers.

Turkers can pick, mix and click through the offers, called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). Some HITs consist of simply responding to surveys as part of a research project; others will require more in-depth work, such as conducting data validation and research.

AMT has made a name for itself because of the platform's huge role in assisting artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The AI models that now prevail in every aspect of contemporary life, from moderating content on social media to assisting driverless cars, are effectively based on huge datasets that require manual labeling. Much of this labeling, as it turns out, is done by Turkers – the human knowledge inside the AI's decision-making box.

For example, ImageNet's 14 million-strong database was largely checked, sorted and labeled by AMT workers. Twitter relies on Turkers to improve its real-time search. And with the global data collection and labeling market expected to reach $3.5 billion by 2026, it is unlikely that AMT's workforce will find itself out of HITs anytime soon.

The nature of HITs varies immensely.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US last year, Sarah was working in retail and, like many others, it wasn't long before she found herself in a shaky situation.

She left her job out of fear for her health, only to find that she wouldn't be granted unemployment benefits. As the crisis worsened, Sarah (not her real name) moved states to look after an older relative; and after browsing for quick money-making options, she signed up, hoping for the best, to AMT.

Sarah says she read toxic social media posts to help with content moderation, or was shown unpleasant images as part of research projects recording her reactions. "I have a folder saved of all the weird things I've encountered doing this," she says.

Yet after one month of continuous work, she says she had made less than $500.

It's up to requesters to determine how much they pay Turkers, with no obligation to commit to a minimal wage – meaning that some Turkers, especially when they have nowhere else to turn to for financial help, end up accepting minute rewards for their work.

"Really gross" is how Sarah describes the requesters who jump on the opportunity to get work done for very little money. "I think they forget we are real people," she adds.
New ways of organizing and institutionalizing work

Whatever their experience of the work, in the age of the gig economy, workers on services like this are self-employed – meaning no sick leave, no minimum wage, and no employee rights.

It is difficult to know exactly how large a group Turkers constitute: while Amazon once reported 500,000 registered workers, analysts have previously estimated that 2,000 to 5,000 workers can be found on the platform at any time, amounting to a total 10,000 active Turkers. Amazon did not respond to requests from ZDNet for comment on AMT.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic shapes into a global recession and national levels of unemployment reach new heights, workers are increasingly turning to platforms like AMT, despite the instability of the job, in search of paid gigs.

Although Amazon doesn't share precise numbers, early research seems to confirm this, with requesters on the platform reporting that they are seeing double the number of newly created accounts picking up their HITs, compared to pre-COVID-19 times.

Fabian Stephany, a researcher in computational social sciences at the University of Oxford, is trying to quantify the impact of the pandemic's economic repercussions on gig workers in general. His recent work highlighted a clear increase in the number of registered online freelancer profiles in the US since the start of the crisis, while at the same time, demand for workers unusually fluctuated, potentially as a result of companies facing restricted budgets.

In other words, ever-more precarious workers are joining the gig economy, and the competition for jobs is getting even stronger.

Services like these are new forms of work, and new ways of organizing and institutionalizing work. Stephany tells ZDNet: "With this change, you always have to ask the political questions: how fairly should you pay, what should the working conditions be, and so on."

© Provided by ZDNet Ever-more precarious workers are joining the gig economy, and the competition for jobs is getting even stronger. Image: picture alliance / Contributor / Getty Images

Those questions are not new. For years, in fact, some Turkers have been vocal about the shortcomings of AMT, a platform that Jeff Bezos himself has labeled as "people as a service".

An early example of Turkers coming together to express their grievances occurred in 2014, when Kristy Milland, an active Turker now turned gig economy researcher, banded with fellow workers in a campaign called "Dear Jeff Bezos".

In a series of letters addressed to Amazon's CEO, Turkers elaborated on many aspects of AMT that they found problematic. There was, of course, the contentious issue of payment – since Amazon exerts no control whatsoever on the value of compensation imposed by requesters. Milland's later research showed that at an average $3.01 per hour, Turkers in the US earn significantly less than the minimum wage.

Another issue that was raised was that of mass rejection. Requesters can reject Turkers' work when they estimate that it is not up to their standards – and when their work is not approved, Turkers don't get paid. The "Dear Jeff Bezos" campaign, therefore, called for a formal grievance process against requesters who might be unfairly rejecting honest work.

There seems to be a persisting dynamic at the heart of many of the problems called out by Milland and her fellow Turkers: a striking imbalance of power between workers and requesters. "Turkers are human beings, not algorithms," said the campaign; "Turkers should not be sold as cheap labor"; and most importantly, "Turkers need to have a method of representing themselves to Requesters and the world via Amazon."
A growing interest in old-school rights

Turkers haven't stopped voicing demands for better working conditions since Milland's 2014 campaign. A name that most workers on the platform are familiar with, for example, is Turkopticon, a website that was founded, in its own terms, to help those "in the crowd of crowdsourcing" watch out for each other.

Turkopticon, which is now also a Facebook page and a blog, adopts at times a markedly confrontational tone. The platform provides a space for workers to vent their grievances against some aspects of AMT in an effort to bring more public attention to the issues. "We are bringing attention to the same issues that seem to have haunted us for 10 years: Mass rejections and account suspensions," reads the opener on Turkopticon's new blog.

The platform is even taking tangible action by speaking up to Amazon on behalf of Turkers whose accounts have been mistakenly shut down. According to the organizers, there have already been several successes in re-instating wrongfully suspended accounts following unfair mass rejections by requesters.

By blurring the usual definitions of employer and employee, the gig economy has transformed the nature of work. But among the estimated 50 million workers who currently make up the gig economy, there seems to be a growing interest in old-school rights-claiming actions.

In a much-publicized example, Uber drivers organized a collective strike in 2019, which spanned 25 cities across five continents, and led to the publication of a manifesto asking, among other things, for the right for all app-based drivers to form unions.

Following these events, Uber recently lost a court battle in the UK over how its drivers are classified, potentially paving the way for workers to claim holiday pay or a minimum wage. Shortly after, in another landmark ruling, Uber went one step further and agreed to recognize that the GMB trade union would have the power to represent UK drivers in discussions over earnings, pensions, benefits and so on.

Such organization is harder for purely online workers, but they are trying to improve their situation in other ways. Turkopticon, for example, has started setting up international discussions, bringing Turkers together to come up with "action plans" to make turking work better for the workers. And in a recent move that seems to reflect the desire to organize even more formally, the platform united with labor rights group Tech Workers Coalition to launch its first fundraiser.

It's still the case, of course, that the power that online communities of Turkers have when it comes to influencing the policies of a tech behemoth such as Amazon remains very limited. In other words, when negotiating working conditions, the terms of the debate are still very much out of the hands of the workers.

One Turker, who goes by the name Tjololo, spent years making "beer money" as a Turker on the platform, before he started liaising with requesters to help them make a better use of AMT – a side-hustle that he does for fun more than anything else, in parallel to working a nine-to-five job.

Tjololo regularly participates in online communities of Turkers like Turkopticon; in his opinion, however, going so far as to call those groups a new form of unionizing might be pushing it.

"I agree that the various communities are helpful but I don't think they're quite as powerful as a 'union 2.0' might imply," Tjololo tells ZDNet. "We have very little say when it comes to actually changing Amazon's policies."

Upgrading the wages recommended by default on AMT, for instance, or creating better channels to dispute rejections, are all actions that are out of Turkers' hands. Despite the tips, tricks, and tactics shared online, therefore, workers still have little bargaining power when it comes to generating real change.

"We are constantly advocating for higher wages, but the platform is still looked at as a place where you can get work done for less than the minimum wage," says Tjololo. "A union, I believe, would have direct access to the platform and would be able to make positive change."
Being part of a much bigger community

MTurkForum, TurkerNation, MTurkCrowd, Turkerhub, TurkerView: alongside Turkopticon, explains Tjololo, there is a huge number of online groups and forums where Turkers communicate on a daily basis, whether to exchange professional advice, complain about the job, or simply to hang out.

From Reddit to Slack channels through WhatsApp groups, Turkers have gathered all over the web and social media, in groups often marked by a strong sense of belonging to the same community.

To communicate, they use everything from Slack to Discord to Facebook to forums, says Tjololo, and even some IRC channels that are still floating around.

Michael (not his real name) who has been turking for a couple of years now, describes a similar experience.

He quickly turned to online forums and communities dedicated to AMT, initially hunting for advice about turking, but soon found that the groups were also about banding together and encouraging each other. Office-based small talk, it would seem, would pale in comparison to AMT's most popular discussion platforms.

"It's totally a way to socialize," Michael tells ZDNet. "If you go to the TurkerView forum, for example, you'll find people talking about fantasy football, discussing their medical conditions or personal relationships. Someone will disappear for a while and it'll be like: 'Hey, what happened to this guy, I hope they come back?'"

Ultimately, despite having another job where he associates with physical people, Michael still finds himself seeking social contact from the community of Turkers because of what he refers to as a sense of "camaraderie".

At their core, therefore, the Facebook groups, Slack channels, sub-Reddits and blogs dedicated to Amazon's Mechanical Turkers are all about a basic drive: that of communicating between "co-workers", for want of a word, better suited to the modern-day economy.

"Socializing at work is something that we all do in our professions. It's known to improve the quality of life at work," Paola Tubaro, economist turned sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, tells ZDNet.

For Mechanical Turks, however, socializing at work isn't a given. Just as the Mechanical Turk chess master hid behind the cover of an automated machine back in the 18th century, so AMT workers are often referred to as "invisible". With virtually all of the work occurring at home and behind a screen, online work leaves little room for casual chats at the coffee machine or after-work drinks.

This is why digital platforms and social media tools have come to prominence among Turkers – to respond to the plain and simple need to socialize at work.

© Provided by ZDNet With virtually all of the work occurring at home and behind a screen, online work leaves little room for casual chats at the coffee machine. Image: Bloomberg / Getty Images

For Tubaro, this is an important first step, in the context of a system that makes it difficult to come together as a traditional union: even by only talking to each other, Turkers open the door to creating a collective of workers, and potentially mobilizing to increase their negotiating power.

The theory has already been proven to be true. In Brazil, for example, researchers found that Turkers use online platforms like WhatsApp for much more than exchanging memes and jokes about their work; rather, they are using social media as a means to organize themselves to advocate for better working conditions.

Outside of the US, turking comes with the particularity that workers don't get paid in dollars, but instead are granted credits to use on Amazon's website. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Brazilian Turkers have long been asking for a more adequate form of payment – and much of the groundwork for protesting is carried out through online discussion groups.

For example, the researchers found that Brazilian Turkers had mobilized via a WhatsApp group, to send daily emails to Amazon asking for payments to their bank accounts.

For Rafael Grohmann, a researcher specialized in digital labor from Unisinos University in Brazil, who has spent years investigating the behavior of Brazilian Turkers, it is evident that online communities and social media tools allow Turkers to communicate. This, in turn, is sowing the seeds of a new form of collective mobilization – one that is better suited to the digital age.

"Informal channels are the beginning of collective formation. Communication between workers is the primary form of organization, like the germ of radical possibilities for struggles," Grohmann tells ZDNet.

"New methods of control and organization of work by companies require new methods and strategies of resistance and alternatives on the part of workers," he continues. "It is through WhatsApp, Facebook, Discord, that Mechanical Turk workers communicate and try to organize themselves collectively."
Finding fresh ways to make turking pay

Some of the most popular platforms dedicated to turking have adopted another approach, to create the tools to improve their working conditions.

Chris runs a popular website called TurkerView, and he is a well-known figure among the most adept Turkers. Launched in 2016 as a forum, TurkerView now reaches over half of workers on the platform, he says – and the numbers are growing almost faster than he can manage.

"Find requesters worth working with": the welcoming banner on TurkerView's website sets the tone. The platform, in effect, promises to help Turkers reliably fast-forward their way to lucrative and rewarding HITs.

TurkerView gathers data from Turkers themselves, who can submit feedback about the HITs they have completed to provide fellow workers with insights on requesters that pay well and are safe to work with. Workers are encouraged to give their opinion on whether the pay was up to the task – the idea being that getting $8 to rate pictures of puppies isn't exactly the same deal as a similar pay for grim content moderation, for example.

The platform also keeps track of how well requesters communicate with Turkers and how long they take to approve a completed HIT. A wage aggregate tool calculates the average hourly rate for any given task, based on the completion time and the reward amount, with a red-orange-green color code indicating how the HIT compares to minimum wage standards in the US.

According to the statistics shared by the platform, TurkerView is used by over 20,000 workers, who have submitted around 750,000 reviews about more than 30,000 requesters.

Chris started as a Turker himself in 2015, and his experience of AMT has been unambiguously positive. "I fell in love with AMT," he tells ZDNet.

Of course, some HITs are worse than others, but the platform is all about adaptability, argues Chris. Turkers can be very successful, but it requires resourcefulness to understand AMT's workings and eventually succeed in beating the competition to tasks that are both interesting and highly paid.

Using a few coding skills he had picked up while turking, Chris found himself staying up until late at night to build some "random tools" that he thought might help Turkers find their way to success on AMT. The project morphed into TurkerView – and it didn't take long for the platform to start growing at pace.

© Provided by ZDNet Chris found himself staying up until late at night to build some tools that he thought might help Turkers find their way to success on AMT. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

And TurkerView is not the only worker-based platform that provides the means to make turking work better for those who are completing HITs.

Another service is provided by Turkopticon, with a focus on avoiding mass rejections and the ensuing account suspensions that can hit the work of Turkers. Turkopticon lets workers identify the requesters who have previously been given a review, providing reports about requesters at the click of a button, and this way letting workers avoid shady HITs to privilege those who will better reward their work.

"HITs worth turking for" on Reddit is dedicated to posting links to good-paying tasks; Our HIT Stop, meanwhile, describes itself as a community of Turkers who have come together to share tips to make work more profitable; the Turker Nation Slack channel includes groups named "daily HIT threads" and "rejection alerts". And those are only a few out of a long list of online groups dedicated to making AMT a platform that can benefit its workers.

All of these platforms seem to be built on the same premise: that in the age of the digital gig economy, the onus is on the workers to make the most of their jobs.
Advocating for better working conditions in the digital age

For some, the system works out well – even though it may take some time to learn how to crack the code to success. Michael, for example, remembers his early days on AMT: "It's a steep learning curve," he says. "You come on board, there's all these different jobs, they pay anything from a cent to 15 dollars, and you just don't know what's what.

"Over time, I managed to figure it out. I engrained myself into some of the social networks as I went looking for information on whether there were tools I could have to make this easier and more efficient."

All in all, Michael succeeded in making AMT a lucrative and pleasant job, largely thanks to the advice he found on online Turker groups. Despite the steep learning curve, he eventually figured out how to catch the good HITs that would let him grow some savings. He has just finished re-paying his car loan – with his turking revenue, rather than his teaching salary.

What's more: tinkering with some aspects of turking, for example by imposing a minimum wage, might bring in a host of changes to the platform, and not necessarily in people's best interests – and even if the move is prompted by the desire to improve working conditions.

This is why Brittany is wary of the possibility of unionizing. "I hope there won't be a union," she says. "As we start getting more rights, more will be expected of us, and I feel there would be more downsides. I don't want to trade off what I have."

As a self-employed worker, Brittany's current nine-to-five is punctuated by hours that she can spend looking after her newborn, reading to him and teaching him colors. The option of switching off from work at any point to do something else is a freedom that she doesn't believe she could ever find in a "normal" job.

In other words, the flexibility of the platform economy might be the root cause of extreme job insecurity for some workers, but for others, it is a high-risk, high-reward system – and one they are keen to embrace fully.

The debate about the future of online work is bound to be polarizing. On one end of the spectrum, some will always defend stricter regulations to protect the most vulnerable on platforms often described as akin to the "Wild West"; while others will remain staunch defenders of the flexibility of gig working.

And with workers coming to the platform with vastly different stories and backgrounds, stronger regulation will inevitably impact some in different ways to others.

In this context, one size will never fit all. But one thing is certain: as national employment rates lower in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital gig economy is growing at pace. More vulnerable workers are joining digital platforms – not exactly out of choice, but rather out of need.

For them, having a greater say over their working conditions might seem an appealing prospect.

Back in the US, after only a few months spent on AMT, Sarah has now managed to get a student loan to start a new master's degree. Keen to put her experience of the platform behind her, she won't be found fighting for greater turking conditions any time soon – and in any case, she has resolved herself to the fact that "they're not going to change their ways".

But if anything, AMT has given her a heightened sense of urgency when it comes to advocating for better working conditions in the modern economy. "I thought this was pretty bleak, and it got me interested in poverty as a whole," she says. "Now, I've got into school and I'm getting my master's in social work."

Silicon Valley workers vote down union at SoftBank-backed Mapbox

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Workers of location data startup Mapbox said on Thursday that they had lost their bid to form a union to represent the company's U.S.-based employees, in a setback for a unionization movement in Silicon Valley that has made recent progress.

About two-thirds of Mapbox's eligible U.S. workers signed cards with the Mapbox Workers Union (MWU), but after the startup declined to voluntarily recognize the union, an election was held. In voting that concluded on Wednesday, 123 employees cast ballots against unionization, with 81 workers in favor, the Mapbox Workers Union wrote on Twitter https://twitter.com/MapboxUnion/status/1423326885967142916.

"Despite this, MWU remains committed to its purpose: to unify worker voices to promote solidarity, sustainability, responsibility, diversity, and transparency," the Mapbox Workers Union wrote.

The Mapbox employees sought to organize with the Communications Workers of America, which has notched recent wins in organizing software startup Glitch as well as more than 200 workers at Google-parent Alphabet Inc who formed a so-called "minority union" that will not be able to force the company to collectively bargain over wages or other issues.

Mapbox Chief Executive Peter Sirota said in a statement the company had respected employees' rights to decide on union representation.

"Today's vote - rejecting the union - will allow us to recommit to our values and ensure that we continue to be a business that succeeds because of our diverse and innovative global team," Sirota said.

The tech workforce was long considered out of reach for organized labor, but unions have made inroads in recent months. Workers at technology firms like Alphabet Inc and crowdfunding platform Kickstarter have formed unions to grapple with working conditions and business practices of big internet companies.

The CWA has other campaigns underway in Silicon Valley, said Wes McEnany, a CWA campaign lead.

"There's a lot of energy in organizing in tech," he said, adding that labor reform was needed to stop companies from influencing the unionization process in ways he believed were unfair.

He said Mapbox management held meetings in opposition to the union and crashed a Zoom meeting in which workers were discussing their efforts.

In a separate statement responding to those comments, Mapbox said, "We understand why disappointed union supporters might want a do-over in the press, but we ask that they respect their colleagues' decision. The election is over."

Asked whether the CWA would challenge the Mapbox result, McEnany said the union would "pursue options to hold them accountable."

(Reporting by Julia Love; Editing by Karishma Singh and Christian Schmollinger)

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/08/anatomy-of-anti-union-meeting-how-no.html

How No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company, squashed a union drive

Amazon delivery drivers say there's a 'giant war' between them and the company as they struggle to meet package quotas

amayo@businessinsider.com (Aleeya Mayo) 

Parcels are stored in a truck in a logistics centre of the mail order company Amazon. 

Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images

Drivers for Amazon delivery partners usually have 170-350 packages to deliver per shift.

Insider interviewed three drivers who expanded on the difficulties of such a fast-paced job.

The drivers confirmed many things that have been reported before, included peeing in water bottles.

Before stepping down as CEO this year, Jeff Bezos built the Amazon empire around being customer-obsessed. But there's a lot that goes into getting packages delivered in two days.

Sometimes, it comes at the expense of human dignity, three workers told Insider in new interviews, expanding on themes workers have previously detailed in recent years. The three workers drive for various Amazon Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs, around the country. Insider has verified their identities and jobs but is withholding full names at their request over fear of retaliation by the company.

The drivers say usual package loads can be anywhere from 170 to 375 packages a day on a regular shift, not just during Prime week. At times, their scheduled stops can come out to more than 190. For busy shifts, the drivers confirmed what others have said before: that peeing in water bottles is sometimes just a part of the job - not unlike many other drivers have complained about over the years to stay on pace and meet high delivery quotas.

"I resort to peeing in bottles, and women urinate through funnels into bottles, just so I'm able to get done with my deliveries," Valerie G, a driver for one of Amazon's Delivery Service Partners (DSP), told Insider. "Those conditions are extremely unsanitary, and we are there with all those packages and our own urine and bodily fluids. That's unsanitary for the customers receiving the packages."

Another driver previously told Insider's Kate Taylor and Avery Hartmans earlier this year that having her period at work was a "nightmare," and she had no choice but to change her pad in the back of the delivery van.

"It just seems like a giant war between us and Amazon that Amazon started," Ryan, another driver for a DSP, told Insider. "Ultimately, Amazon will win because they have the power to let go of and control anyone: Driver's, DSP's, anyone."

Amazon has long denied the water bottle claims, at times finding itself in tussles with activists and politicians. "You don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us," the company's PR account tweeted to Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan in March.

The company later walked back the comments, saying: "We owe an apology to Representative Pocan ... The tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers."

Reached for this story, an Amazon spokesperson told Insider that Amazon supports delivery drivers taking breaks as needed, and the company is working with its delivery partners to "find solutions to these issues."

"We support drivers taking the time they need to take breaks in between stops and drivers can use the Amazon Delivery app to see nearby restroom facilities and gas stations," a spokesperson for Amazon told Insider." Our routes are scheduled to include break and lunch times, which still allows over 90% of routes to finish earlier than the planned shift length. Our drivers, like others across the industry, do face the challenge of finding available public restroom facilities and we continue to work closely with our delivery partners to find solutions to these issues."

Still, the issues persist even as different drivers take over vans between shifts, the drivers said.

"I have driven vans that smelled so bad of urine and have found bottles full of urine in the vans before," Valerie said. "The worst part is being forced to eat in the same van due to the time constraints."

© Valerie G, Amazon delivery driver A bottle of pee that Valerie G, an Amazon delivery driver found in a delivery truck. 

Drivers say it's 'impossible' to take breaks for food and water

Another driver told Insider that taking proper breaks and staying on time for deliveries has become such a struggle that he has to eat and drive with one hand.

"Managing proper breaks is impossible because of the extremely high package count and stops, it makes it impossible to pull over to eat, so often times I drive and eat with one hand - it feels very dangerous, especially driving the huge box trucks," Ryan said. "I'm extremely fed up and mentally broken from my time here. It changed my personality."

Such high pressure appears to be having an impact on Amazon's worker turnover rate. The New York Times reported earlier this year that Amazon's turnover rate was nearly double the industry average. That may not be a surprise for some experts, who say the effects of hard physical labor with little to no reward can be extremely detrimental for someone's mental and physical health.

"If you work really long hours and you're not really getting fulfilled, and you're not getting the kind of rewards that helps you sustain a really busy lifestyle, you get physically tired," Michael Leiter, a psychology professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, told Insider. "Stomach problems, cardiac problems, all that kind of stuff, starts building on people, then they're stuck in that state. So physically and mentally, it's very hard on people."

Drivers say they've voiced their concerns, but no action is ever taken

"I've voiced a ton of concerns to my managers, but it's basically venting," Ryan said. "I know they don't technically have the power to make my concerns, Amazon's problem because like driver's, DSP's are expendable and replaceable as well."

Ryan said he's tried to figure out ways to make the job better for him and his coworkers but thinks Amazon and his DSP don't mind high churn rates.

"They don't mind a fast turnover because when people stick around, they start to learn too much about it. They start to acquire injuries," he said. "They start to get frustrated and talk."

An Amazon driver for a different DSP previously told Insider's Hayley Peterson he was given no sympathy from his supervisor when he cut his finder during his delivery route. The manager "advised him to drop them [packages] all off before returning to the station or seeking care."

The sources for this story agree: "DSPs have become careless. We are disposable to them," Valerie said. "They treat us without any dignity and very inhumanely.

BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT LIBERALS DO

Northwest B.C. MLA calls on province to intervene in Rio Tinto Kitimat strike

Skeena BC Liberal MLA Ellis Ross is asking the provincial government to intervene into the strike between Rio Tinto and its 950 unionized workers at its Kitimat aluminum smelter, now in its second week.

Ross, who is also one of the BC Liberal leadership candidates, wants the province to “encourage” both parties – Unifor Local 2301 representing the workers and Rio Tinto – to get back to the table and continue negotiations.

“I don’t want to see Kitimat going into decline and I don’t want to see people suffering to make mortgage payments,” said Ross pointing toward the economic impact the strike has not just on Rio Tinto employees but for northwestern businesses and communities.

“The whole supply chain is affected by the strike,” said Ross about the ripple effects of the strike on the local businesses in Kitimat, Terrace and Prince Rupert.

Calling the strike a “significant one” since no resolutions have been reached yet, Ross also said that the sooner the dispute can be resolved it’s better for the communities in northwest B.C.

Ross, who hails from Kitamaat Village, reached back to a previous smelter strike in 1976, saying that labour disputes have significant impacts on families because of lost wages.

He also said that though the provincial government keeps away from local strikes – like it did when Vancouver Island forestry workers went on strike in 2019 – this is different as the province has a stake in what happens in Kitimat because of the interconnections between Rio Tinto’s hydro-electric generating capacity and BC Hydro.

The smelter’s operations has a direct impact on managing the water levels in the Nechako reservoir.

In an email statement, a Rio Tinto spokesperson said the company is focused on ensuring the BC Works (Kitimat) aluminium smelter continues to operate safely and on maintaining stable water management through their Kemano hydroelectric power station, with a reduced workforce.

The provincial government is aware of the dispute and said that it is monitoring its progress but has not indicated that it will intervene in the matter.

"Our government fully supports the collective bargaining process... We are hopeful the parties can resolve their collective bargaining dispute by getting back to the bargaining table as soon as possible," said the ministry," said B.C.'s Ministry of Labour in an email statement.

Rio Tinto employs approximately 1,050 people at the BC Works smelter and Kemano powerhouse, including around 900 employees represented by Unifor Local 2301. The company contributed C$780 million to the economy of British Columbia in 2020.

The July 25 strike commenced after negotiations failed between both parties to reach a collective agreement on the matters of employee benefits.

On July 26, Rio Tinto confirmed it began reducing production of aluminum at its Kitimat smelter to 25 per cent of its normal 432,000 tonne annual capacity and will be working with 265 non-union staff until the labour dispute between it and Unifor Local 2301, is resolved.

Out of the 400 pots, the company had announced earlier that they will only be running roughly around 140 pots (35 per cent capacity) until a new collective agreement is finalized. However, earlier this week Rio Tinto reduced production further down to 96 pots, said a spokesperson in an email statement.

No details have been provided as to what’s involved in contract talks save for the union which published information stating the company was proposing a series of benefits reductions.

Rio Tinto has denied that allegation but has not provided details on what it did propose.

Union members, provided they carry out picketing, are entitled to $300 per week through a national Unifor strike fund and an additional $100 a week through a Local 2301 fund.

-With files from Jacob Lubberts

Binny Paul, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Terrace Standard