Amazon

Amazon? There Has To Be A Better Way

August 14, 2021 Wade Rathke, Stansbury Forum. Organize! Amazon, Monopoly, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

This is an old problem, not a new one, but somehow, we continue to try the same things over and over again, no matter how poorly they are working. This new problem may be Amazon since they have now grown to more than one million workers and rising globally. In the USA, Amazon is the second largest private sector employer behind Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart is a prime example of the old problem. The old problem, simply put, is that unions have not successfully organized a single mass employer with more than 100,000 workers in the US in the last fifty years. Or, 50,000 workers. Or, 30,000 workers. Think about any of the tech conglomerates. Think about any of the massive fast-food chains from McDonalds or Starbucks on down.

Amazon Interfered With Election; Workers May Have A Second Chance

August 5, 2021 Mike Spector, Reuters. Organize! Amazon, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) interfered with a union election by installing a mailbox to collect ballots and by distributing paraphernalia encouraging employees to vote against organizing, according to a report by a U.S. National Labor Relations Board hearing officer. The NLRB official on Monday recommended a rerun of the landmark Amazon union election in Alabama where employees overwhelmingly voted against making their warehouse the online retailer's first to organize in the United States. In the coming weeks, a regional director for the NLRB will decide whether to order the rerun based on the recommendation, said an official on Monday with the board, who asked not to be named.

Polish Amazon Workers Are Organizing

July 27, 2021 Alex N. Press, Jacobin. Resist! Amazon, Poland, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Although Amazon is based in the United States, its workforce now extends around the world. This has been used by the company to suppress wages and increase productivity through greater competition. But there are efforts to counter that strategy, with some workers across Europe building connections and the capacity to organize together. It is still an uphill battle as Amazon creates individual contracts for its locations, doing its best to pit workers against one another not only from country to country, but from warehouse to warehouse. Yet the efforts remain, pointing toward possibilities for the future of international organizing. In a recent episode of Jacobin’s new podcast, Primer, Alex N. Press spoke with two workers from Poland who organize with Amazon Workers International (AWI): Magda Malinovska and Agnieszka Mroz.

Animal Extinction Protesters Blockade McDonalds Factory

July 17, 2021 Charlene Rodrigues, The Independent. Resist! Amazon, Biodiversity, Deforestation, McDonald's

Animal Rebellion protesters have barricaded a McDonald's factory in Scunthorpe in a move to get the burger chain to switch to an entirely "plant-based food menu by 2025." The ‘animal and climate justice’ movement said that around 100 protestors set up a blockade using trucks, tents, bamboo structures in the early hours of Thursday morning to stop the facility from distributing burgers. Trucks with the sign “McMurder” stood outside the factory while police vans encircled the area. The campaigners, urging others to join in, said they will stay as long as it takes until McDonald’s commits to changing towards a plant-based menu. Accusing the global fast-food chain of poor labour conditions and wreaking havoc on the environment, the activists said that they would end the blockade if McDonald’s makes the first step towards this goal by committing to becoming 20 per cent plant-based within one year.

Chicago Amazon Workers Help Win Megacycle Pay Nationwide

June 22, 2021 Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes. Organize! Amazon, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

In January, the company hit workers in Chicago’s DCH1 delivery station with a devastating one-two punch. First, Amazon was shutting down their workplace, so they would have to transfer to other facilities across the city. Second, workers at delivery stations nationwide were going to be forced onto a new shift called the “Megacycle,” where they would work four times a week from 1:20 to 11:50 a.m. Delivery stations facilitate the “last mile” of delivery, sorting and handing off packages to delivery drivers. The Megacycle is designed to speed up the delivery process, allowing customers to order even later and still get their packages within one to two days. DCH1 had been the base of the Chicago chapter of Amazonians United—the first chapter in the country. This network of worker committees at Amazon warehouses now reaches across the U.S., with ties with similar groups in other countries.

Hiding The Union Busters

June 10, 2021 Julia Rock, The Daily Poster. Educate! Amazon, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

When Amazon busted a union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse earlier this year, it ran a sophisticated campaign which involved sending text messages and mailers to employees warning them of the downfalls of a union, offering bonuses to employees who quit before the union election, and even allegedly accessing the dropbox that employees used to mail their ballots. But the size and scope of Amazon’s efforts — and who was coordinating them — wasn’t fully visible to the public or to employees partaking in the election, because the Trump administration scrapped a rule that would have required disclosure of certain union-busting expenditures by corporations. The so-called “persuader” rule was designed to spotlight an industry that rakes in nearly $340 million a year advising corporations on how to prevent their employees from unionizing.

Amazon Is Inundating Workers With Anti-Union Messages

June 6, 2021 Jordan Chariton, Status Coup. Educate! Amazon, Labor Unions, New York City (NYC), union busting

New York City - On the heels of Amazon’s scorched earth, and likely illegal, union-busting campaign in Bessemer, Alabama that defeated workers’ attempt to unionize, Status Coup has obtained photos from inside Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, that show the company’s aggressive union-busting in the face of efforts by current and former workers trying to form a union. The union drive organizers, who have formed Amazon Labor Union [ALU], recently filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board after Amazon erected a chain-link fence around the warehouse parking lot in order to force the ALU organizers to a location with less foot traffic–seemingly to prevent them from getting workers to sign a union card. At one point, the fence had a “Beware of Dog” sign up (not clear what dogs folks needed to be aware of).

Outside Amazon Fulfillment Center, Workers Demand Tax Fairness

June 4, 2021 Michael Moore, Workday Minnesota. Create! Amazon, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, Worker Rights and Jobs

Minnesota workers unfurled a “Tax the Rich” banner outside Amazon’s MSP1 fulfillment center here today. It was a not-so-subtle suggestion to state lawmakers about how they might pay for investments in child care, paid family leave, education, infrastructure and other supports for working families. Tyler Hamilton, in his fourth year working at MSP1, said he and others inside the facility could use a little support right now. “Honestly, I’m tired,” the Maplewood resident said during a press conference organized by local unions. “And I’m not just tired from working night shift, even though I’m a night-shift guy. “I’m tired from working in this building behind me for over a year during the coronavirus pandemic and having to deal with all the stupid stuff Amazon does all the time – and they get away with.”

Staten Island Amazon Workers Begin Union Drive

April 26, 2021 Candice Bernd, Truthout. Organize! Amazon, Labor Unions, New York City (NYC), Worker Rights

In some ways, Amazon workers’ more than yearlong struggle for adequate COVID-19 protections and against corporate retaliation at the company’s Staten Island facility in New York City helped pave the way for this month’s unionization attempt at the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse. Now, as the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) seeks a second election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filing official objections Friday charging Amazon with engaging in illegal interference to defeat the union, Staten Island “JFK8” warehouse workers with The Congress of Essential Workers (TCOEW) tell Truthout they aren’t deterred by the outcome. Rather, their on-the-ground experiences in Alabama, where the unionization effort gained national attention but ultimately failed...

Worker Centers: Where Causes Cohere, And Forge Power

April 22, 2021 Sarah Jaffe, The American Prospect. Organize! Amazon, Labor Unions, Worker Centers, Worker Rights

In October 2020, on what Amazon calls “Prime Day,” Fadumo Mohamed and her co-workers at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Minneapolis stood in the whipping wind alongside a handmade banner that read “Amazon: Hear Our Voice.” As the wind howled, Mohamed, bundled in hijab, a face mask, a long black skirt, and track jacket, approached a microphone and shouted to be heard over the storm, “We are human, we are not robots! We have to speak up! We have a voice! We are risking our health!” In February, Mohamed’s two-and-a-half-year-old son took sick, and she had to take him to the hospital for emergency surgery. She’s a single mother, an immigrant with no family in the area—so caring for her son was all on her.

There Is No Substitute For The Rank And File

April 18, 2021 Tatiana Cozzarelli, Left Voice. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, Labor Unions, Rank and File

The Bessemer Amazon unionization effort was full of potential. It held the promise of a union bringing together the Black Lives Matter movement and a struggle for labor rights in order to take on one of the biggest, most odious corporations in the country. Maybe a Southern state would set off a movement again, like West Virginia and Oklahoma kicked off the teachers’ spring. Alongside Left Voice comrades, I decided to go to Bessemer, Alabama the week before voting ended. As I prepared to go, I had a weird feeling. I kept looking at interviews and I saw just two Amazon workers, over and over and over. They were great spokespeople, no doubt. But where were the other 5,698 workers?

A Worldwide Workers’ Revolt Against Amazon Has Begun

April 17, 2021 Luis Feliz Leon, In These Times. Resist! Amazon, Globalization, Labor Union, Worker Rights

The union drive at Amazon’s 885,000-square-foot warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed. But the historic campaign nabbed global headlines and added fuel to ongoing workers’ revolts across the world. Strikes by Amazon workers in Italy, Germany and India are coalescing into an international struggle against the world’s fourth-most valuable company and its grueling working conditions and intensive surveillance. Since the dawn of capitalism, bosses have found innovations to oversee and extract more work from the overstressed bodies of their labor force. But Amazon’s minute surveillance of workers — who, at the Bessemer facility, are mostly Black and women — would make the Stasi blush. At the company’s warehouses, workers use hand-held devices that track their every move and assess their speed and accuracy.

Organizing In The South

April 15, 2021 Joseph B. Atkins, Portside. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, The South, Worker Rights

Oxford, MI - The woman’s face still haunts me. Lined from many years of work on the farm and then in the cotton mills, she is nameless in my memory, just another “linthead” in the eyes of the mill owners, “white trash” others might say, someone off the cow patch and now in a factory in some Southern backwater working 12-hour days. In her eyes, however, was a spark of something, a flicker of hope, and it came from the union she and countless other cotton mill workers were desperate to join back in the 1930s. “We began to feel we could be a part of a great movement,” she said in filmmakers George Stoney, Judith Helfland, and Susanne Rostock’s landmark 1995 documentary The Uprising of ’34.

Message From The Amazon Union Defeat In Alabama Is Clear

April 15, 2021 Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, In These Times. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, Labor Unions, Worker Rights

On April 9, the National Labor Relations Board announced the results of a mail ballot certification election that concluded on March 29 for workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. With 3,215 votes cast, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was defeated with at least 1,608 votes against the union, enough to crush the drive. The result was not shocking given the millions of dollars that Amazon spent and its power inside the facility to pressure workers to vote against forming a union. No matter how you spin it, the defeat is a significant blow to the multitude of organizing efforts occurring at Amazon. The election showed the clear limitations of pursuing union certification through a broken NLRB election process.

The BAmazon Loss And The Road Ahead

April 14, 2021 Joe DeManuelle-Clark, Labor Notes. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, Labor Unions, Worker Rights

Hopes were high. The drive had garnered enormous favorable press coverage and even support from the White House. Nevertheless, the loss was no surprise to many in labor. Amazon is one of the world’s most powerful corporations, and organizing is notoriously difficult under U.S. labor law. Some aspects of the campaign gave observers pause, like the shortage of workplace leaders who were willing to speak up publicly. From years of won and lost union drives, there is some accumulated wisdom about what it takes to overcome employer tactics. At the same time, we should be wary of anyone who claims that a win is guaranteed if you just follow all the right steps. This was always going to be a tough fight.

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