Thousands of Amazon workers at seven warehouses are striking on Thursday, just days before Christmas and the start of the holiday season.
The strike, which was organized by unions affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, comes at an extremely busy time for the company. Last year, 29 percent of all online orders in the two weeks before Christmas were placed through Amazon.
Workers say the strikes come after the company missed a deadline of December 15 to begin negotiating their union contracts. Workers have been demanding union contracts that, among other things, increase their wages, improve their benefits, and address concerns over their working conditions and safety measures. A recent Senate report said that Amazon’s obsession with “speed and productivity” produced working environments with “systemic safety failures and high rates of injury,” charges that the company disputes.
In the days since the December 15 deadline passed, nine of the 10 Amazon warehouses that are unionized through the Teamsters voted to authorize a strike. These warehouses include two in New York City, one in Illinois, four in Southern California, one in Atlanta, and one in San Francisco. Of these, all but two are currently on strike. About 10,000 Amazon workers across the country have unionized through the Teamsters, collectively representing about 1 percent of Amazon’s hourly workers.
“These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible,” Teamsters general president Sean M. O’Brien said in a public statement. “Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”
This has been a record-breaking year for Amazon. According to the company’s Q3 earnings report, the profit from July through September rose 55 percent in 2024 compared to the same period last year. In a press release published with the earnings report, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said the company was “excited about what we have in store for customers” for the holiday season. The report anticipated net sales to be between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion in Q4.
“We haven’t seen any impact on our operations” from the strikes, says Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel. “We appreciate all our team’s great work to serve their customers and communities, and are continuing to focus on getting customers their holiday orders.” Nantel also accused the Teamsters of harassing and intimidating Amazon employees.
At DBK4, located in Queens, New York, hundreds of Amazon workers marched on the sidewalk in front of the exit to a parking garage, at times verbally confronting exiting delivery drivers who were crossing the picket line. Many delivery vans blared their horns in unison as they waited in line to get out of the parking garage. Some protesting workers held signs saying “Amazon obey the law.” The marchers included people who came out in solidarity, carrying signs representing the New York State Nurses Association and City University of New York (CUNY) students.
Meanwhile, New York Police Department officers stood in the street, sometimes shouting at and shoving workers who stepped off the sidewalk. Just after 9 am ET, NYPD arrested a delivery driver who attempted to exit his delivery van just outside the parking garage and join the strikers. At around 9:50 am, NYPD announced via loudspeaker that any workers who stood in the road would be arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Shortly after, the NYPD placed a Teamsters organizer under arrest, though it’s unclear if they were in the street. Eventually, police set up barricades outside the garage and began personally organizing the delivery vans with non-striking Amazon loss-prevention workers.
Alongside a Teamsters truck parked nearby, there was a giant inflatable pig holding a giant bag of money in one hand and choking an Amazon employee in the other.
Luc Albert Rene, a union member who has been an Amazon delivery driver for two years, tells WIRED that the December 15 deadline came after the union had two marches—one in September, and one in October—asking the company to negotiate. Rene says the company did not respond to the union—however, it sent representatives to have one-on-one meetings with workers and ride-alongs with drivers to discourage union membership.
Rene says the union is asking for better pay, better benefits, and improved safety and “respect” for workers. While making deliveries, he says he’s often had to drive in dirty vans or vans with dangerous braking issues. But he says he’s in good spirits about the Thursday strike.
“Coming out today, I feel the joy to be honest,” Rene says. “It’s very powerful, people actually understand what we are fighting for.”
This is not the first Amazon worker action of the 2024 holiday season. In November, workers in more than 20 countries, including the United States, protested or went on strike between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The labor federation UNI Global Union, which organized the action, said in a press release that their goal was to “hold Amazon accountable for labor abuses, environmental degradation, and threats to democracy.”
Workers at Amazon warehouses in the US have gone on strike before, but never so close to the holidays. However, in 2018, Amazon workers in Germany and Spain walked off the job the week before Christmas.
The JFK8 union in Staten Island—which became the first Amazon warehouse in the country to unionize in 2022, and became affiliated with the Teamsters in June of this year—started an online fundraiser to compensate the striking workers for lost wages, food, and possible legal or medical expenses. The fundraiser has raised more than $25,000 as of Thursday morning. However, that union is not currently on strike.
After JFK8 unionized in 2022, several other Amazon warehouses attempted to unionize, but most failed to win enough votes to ratify the unions. At one of these warehouses, in Birmingham, Alabama, an administrative judge with the National Labor Relations Board ruled last month that Amazon had illegally removed pro-union literature, falsely said pro-union workers were harassing others, and threatened to shut down the facility if it unionized. The judge ordered a third union vote.
Amazon has been widely accused of using aggressive tactics to push back against unions or prevent them from forming. The company has still not recognized the JFK8 union, and filed a complaint in September with the NLRB arguing that the union’s structure is unconstitutional. Amazon also often posts anti-union literature at warehouses attempting to unionize, and has been accused of retaliating against or firing union leaders at specific warehouses. A recent Instagram reel posted on the Amazon Teamsters account shows displays in the Queens DBK4 break rooms claiming that Teamsters may “trade away your work flex and free benefits.”
The company has made improvements to worker pay in recent years. Amazon’s hourly wage was raised to $18 per hour in 2018, and in the years since, it has raised this wage to about $29 per hour. According to the company’s internal recordable incident rate, work-related injuries have decreased by 30 percent since 2020.
Source : Wired
