Amazon

Alabama Amazon Employees Pushing For Union

February 8, 2021 William Thornton, AL.com. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, Labor Unions, Worker Rights

Looking at employees at Amazon’s fulfillment center on breaks outside the building last summer, Jennifer Bates said the sight reminded her of a football sideline. Employees with bad knees, aching feet, limping around after making the trek around the company’s four-story, 855,000-square-foot center, looking for a few minutes rest before heading back in to resume their shifts. “On our breaks outside, there was a lot of complaining,” Bates remembered. She works as a Blue Badge Learning Ambassador, who prepares and trains employees. “You would hear people talking about mistreatment. They were saying, ‘They need to change.’”

Amazon Is Using AI-Equipped Cameras In Delivery Vans

February 4, 2021 Annie Palmer, CNBC. Educate! Amazon, Surveillance, Worker Rights

Amazon drivers at some U.S. facilities will soon have an extra set of eyes watching them when they hit the road to make their daily deliveries. The company recently began testing AI-equipped cameras in vehicles to monitor contracted delivery drivers while they’re on the job, with the aim of improving safety. Amazon has deployed the cameras in Amazon-branded cargo vans used by a handful of companies that are part of its delivery service partner program, which are largely responsible for last-mile deliveries. The cameras could be rolled out to additional DSPs over time, and Amazon has already distributed an instructional video to DSPs, informing them of how the cameras work.

Amazon Will Pay $61.7 Million To Delivery Drivers After Withholding Tips

February 3, 2021 Johana Bhuiyan, Los Angeles Times. Educate! Amazon, Gig Workers, Wage Theft, Wages

Amazon will pay more than $61.7 million to Flex drivers from whom it withheld the full amount of customer tips to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation. The settlement comes nearly two years after the Los Angeles Times first exposed that Amazon was dipping into customer tips to cover the base pay guaranteed to Flex drivers, who deliver Amazon Fresh, Prime Now and other orders. The money will reimburse Flex drivers whose tips Amazon withheld over the last 2½ years, according to the FTC. Until August 2019, Amazon promised Flex drivers a guaranteed minimum base pay for each order, which the e-commerce company said included 100% of customer tips.

Alabama Workers Fight To Form First US Amazon Union

February 1, 2021 Brandon Stout, Liberation News. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, Labor Unions, Worker Rights

Some 5,800 workers from an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, will vote in February on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The workers are upset with algorithms that track productivity as well as unfair disciplinary processes. According to the union drive’s website, “Amazon warehouse workers face outrageous work quotas that have left many with illnesses and lifetime injuries.” Despite the warehouse only opening in March 2020, these conditions have caused the workers to rapidly move toward unionizing. By the end of last summer, the workers met with RWDSU representatives at a hotel to discuss joining the union.

How Amazon Destroys The Intellectual Justifications For Capitalism

December 28, 2020 Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Educate! Amazon, Corporate Power, Monopoly, Neo-feudalism

Amazon doesn't fit comfortably within the free-market fable of how capitalism is supposed to operate. We are, in theory, supposed to get freedom, competition, the reward of innovation, the elimination of all-powerful centralized bureaucracy. But consider this recent Wall Street Journal report on how Amazon destroys its competitors. Essentially, because Amazon is gigantic and has vast sums of money at its disposal, it does not need to “innovate” the same way smaller companies do. It can simply lift the innovations of others, and because it can undercut their prices, it can put them out of business. The Journal cites a number of examples.

Resisting Amazon Is Not Futile

December 14, 2020 Jonathan Rosenblum, The Bullet. Strategize! Amazon, Corporatism, Monopolization, Worker Rights

It seems eons ago, the youth-led climate strike of September 20, 2019 that brought four million people onto the streets worldwide. I was on the sidewalk outside Seattle City Hall, watching thousands of school-skippers march by. And then behind the teens came waves of exuberant people, no more than a decade or two older, their homemade signs held aloft: tech workers, including hundreds of Amazon workers who had stepped out of their comfortable cubicles and palatial glass towers to join the global walkout. They had every right to step lightly. Just a day earlier, the budding Amazon Employees for Climate Justice had forced CEO Jeff Bezos into an extraordinary concession, pledging to move the company to 100 per cent renewable energy and net-zero carbon emissions.

How Do We Solve A Problem Like Amazon?

December 2, 2020 Craig Gent, Novara Media. Strategize! Amazon, Left Politics, Union Organizing, Worker Rights

Progressive International has launched a global campaign to #MakeAmazonPay. Yet for two decades numerous unions and campaigns across the globe have scratched their heads wondering how to curb the ever-expanding might of what has become one of the world’s most valuable companies. At Bad Hersfeld and (eventually) internationally, Amazon has become far more accustomed to strikes, yet the company’s power shows no signs of being tempered. Indeed in Germany, despite more than 300 days lost to strike action, Amazon has consistently been able to resist workers’ demand for a collective agreement.

International Coalition Of Activists Launches Protest Against Amazon

November 27, 2020 Loren Grush, The Verge. Resist! Amazon, COVID-19, International Solidarity, Worker Rights

An international group of climate activists and Amazon warehouse workers have launched an online campaign called “Make Amazon Pay,” calling on the tech giant to provide better working conditions for its employees and to reduce its expanding carbon footprint. The protests come just as the New York Times reports that the Seattle-based company has been on a hiring spree this year, expanding its global workforce. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with CEO Jeff Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth,” the campaign states on its website.

CIA Partners With Google, Amazon And IBM

November 25, 2020 Raul Diego, Mintpress News. Educate! Amazon, CIA, Google, Military Industrial Complex

AWS currently holds the sole contract to provide cloud computing services to a number of intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the NSA. That contract is set to expire in 2023 and this new award – managed by the CIA – will further weaken Amazon’s once privileged position in the federal money sweepstakes, which had already taken a hard hit when Microsoft was unexpectedly chosen over Bezos’ company for the Department of Defense’s own cloud services contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program.

Amazon Bans Book Exposing US COVID-19 Chaos

November 4, 2020 Sara Flounders, Workers.org. Educate! Amazon, Book ban, Censorship, COVID-19

A decision by the Amazon company to block a book focused on a scientific and cooperative approach to COVID-19 amounts to corporate information control operating at a new intensity. This censorship occurs while almost every form of U.S. media permits and promotes racist, unscientific and thoroughly confusing information. The censored book is “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China & the U.S.” This anthology of 55 articles by a broad range of social justice authors discuss the importance of free health care, social distancing, testing, protective equipment, education and social mobilizations during the pandemic.

End Worker Surveillance

October 16, 2020 Athena. Resist! Amazon, Surveillnc, Systemic Racism, Worker Rights

Today, workers are subjected to an unprecedented level of workplace surveillance and control. From voice monitoring to tracking applications, these systems are being introduced into workplaces that are already stacked against low-wage workers, creating an environment ripe for exploitation. Surveillance gives corporations more power over workers. When combined with automation that dictates the pace and type of work, it results in a more dangerous, punishing, and precarious workplace.

Amazon Expects Employees To Operate Like Fast-Moving Machines

October 9, 2020 Michelle Chen and Molly Crabapple, In These Times. Resist! Amazon, Worker Rights, worker safety

For Sean Carlisle (a pseudonym) a 32-year-old graduate student and native of California’s Inland Empire, the last three years at his local Amazon fulfillment center have been an education. As a student of urban planning, he studies how built environments shape a community’s behavior. As a picker, he packs items at a breakneck pace amid stacks of inventory and snaking conveyor belts while delicately practicing strategies to raise his coworkers’ political consciousness. Amazon’s logistical infrastructure is designed to make humans perform with machine-like efficiency, but Sean is trying to make the workplace a bit more human, advocating for stronger worker protections and corporate accountability in his community.

Workers At Amazon Center In Minnesota Walk Out

October 4, 2020 Joey Peters, Sahan Journal. Resist! Amazon, Workers Rights and Jobs, Workers Walkout

Minnesota - About two dozen Amazon employees in Shakopee walked off their jobs Thursday night to support a colleague whom they said was unjustly fired earlier this week. The former employee, Farhiyo Warsame, also showed up at the walkout as her colleagues chanted her name. The employees chanted, clapped, and confronted a manager about Farhiyo’s termination for two hours, through chilly temperatures and darkness. As Farhiyo spoke to the crowd in front of the building, an operations manager with the company, flanked by a pair of other employees wearing neon vests, came out the front door.

Amazon Posted Job To Monitor Employee’s Efforts To Unionize

September 3, 2020 Aaron Holmes, Business Insider. Educate! Amazon, Labor Unions, Surveillance, Worker Rights

In a now-deleted job listing posted this week, Amazon advertised that it's looking to hire an "intelligence analyst" tasked with duties including snooping on workers' unionization efforts and reporting back to executives about their findings. It's a sign of Amazon's escalating fight to stop its workers from organizing. The company has previously turned to unorthodox methods to quash unionization — its subsidiary Whole Foods built a heat map tool specifically for tracking unionization threats, Business Insider reported in April.

Amazon Workers Blocked Delivery Trucks For Hours

August 5, 2020 Lauren Kaori Gurley, Vice. Resist! Amazon, COVID-19, Essential worker, PPE

Amazon warehouse workers shut down deliveries at an Amazon Distribution Center in the San Francisco Bay Area for several hours on Saturday, demanding the company implement more safety measures to protect workers against COVID-19 and increased pay to reflect the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas. Early Saturday, a caravan of cars, organized by Bay Area Amazonians, an Amazon warehouse worker and delivery-driver led group, drove into the warehouse parking lot, blocking Amazon delivery vans from leaving the facility for roughly three hours and disrupting the flow of business, according to the protest’s organizers.

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