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Prime Week Walkouts Hit Amazon, From Air Hub To Delivery Station

October 19, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
Amazon’s vast distribution network is staggering. There’s the invisible lacework of surveillance algorithms and artificial intelligence. There are the visible footprints: trucks, robots, hulking warehouses. And then there are the workers. It takes more than a million people, most of them low-paid and grindingly exploited, to pick, sort, unload, ship, and deliver packages to customers’ doors within days of an order. Last week workers took aim at disrupting this symphony of human capital with walkouts at four distinct warehouse types in the company’s logistics chain—a cross-dock near Chicago, a delivery station and a fulfillment center near Atlanta, and in Southern California, one of the company’s large air hubs. The walkouts weren’t centrally coordinated. But they were all timed to coincide with the company’s Prime Day promotional sales rush, which ran October 10 to 12.

Amazon Wants Surveillance Robots In Every Home

October 11, 2022 Lee Camp, Mintpress News. , ,
Exciting news guys! Amazon has created a new robot, the Astro, to spy on people in their homes – and this one is smarter and sneakier than the Alexa. Tanya Basu of MIT Technology Review reports, “Amazon has a new plan for its home robot Astro: to guard your life  … The cute home assistant could be the most powerful, invasive home robot we’ve seen thus far.” It might be cute, but you have to ignore the fact that it’s watching you while you’re on the toilet and zapping your dog for getting in the way. “Amazon announced Wednesday that its home robot, Astro, will be getting a slew of major updates aimed at further embedding it in homes – and in our daily lives,” Basu continues. That’s not cute, it’s terrifying! Why does it have its own drones? Nothing that comes with drones is your friend. I don’t care if it’s a Dunkin’ Donuts Rainbow Cupcake. It shouldn’t have drones!

Three Amazon Warehouses Catch Fire; Workers Protest Unsafe Conditions

October 11, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
Amazon warehouses caught fire in New York and Alabama this past week, endangering hundreds of workers. In the unionized Staten Island facility, workers marched on managers and staged a sit-down in protest over Amazon’s disregard for their safety—and the company lashed back with mass suspensions. The HSV1 fulfillment center in Madison, a suburb of Huntsville in northern Alabama, caught fire Monday evening, October 3, for a second time in two weeks. “Our plant caught on fire again,” an Amazon worker at the HSV1 told WAFF. “This time it was in the same area, but it was a couple aisles over. You could still smell smoke in there. Half the warehouse was off limits.” That same day, another fire broke out, this one in a cardboard compactor on a shipping dock at the Staten Island fulfillment center JFK8—the same one where, in April, workers won the first-ever unionized Amazon warehouse in the country.

Boxed Out: How Predatory Buying Is Killing Off Small Businesses

October 8, 2022 Stacy Mitchell and Ron Knox, Institute for Local Self Reliance. , , ,
Walmart, Amazon, and other powerful, well-financed companies have captured control over much of retailing. These giants maintain their extraordinary market position not by competing on the merits of their service. Instead, they exert their power as dominant buyers of food and goods to bully suppliers, extracting discounts for themselves while forcing independent retailers to pay more. This is threatening those small businesses, wounding competition, and hollowing out communities large and small. It’s a monopoly tactic we call “predatory buying.” In this report, we examine the history of these abuses, the law Congress passed in 1936 to protect independent businesses’ right to compete on fair terms, and the pro-bigness coup that stopped enforcement of the law in the 1970s.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Stage Work Stoppage After Fire At Warehouse

October 4, 2022 Gwynne Hogan, Gothamist. , , ,
At least 100 unionized employees at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island refused to return to work for several hours on Monday evening after a fire broke out at the facility. Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, said 500 workers refused to return to work, after a fire blazed on a shipping dock beside the warehouse. “Amazon refuses to let night shift be excused with pay,” Smalls said. “Amazon management is threatening time deductions and written warnings for not returning back to the floor. The dock smells like burnt chemicals.”

No Tech For Apartheid Israel

September 17, 2022 Lowkey, Mintpress News. , , , ,
In this episode of The Watchdog, former Google employee Ariel Koren joins Lowkey and articulates her experience at the big tech giant, claiming it has gradually developed an institutionalised pro-Israeli bias. She also reveals ways in which employees attempting to hold the company accountable for unethical contracts, such as that of Project Nimbus, are being targeted and intentionally silenced. Google, alongside Amazon, has signed a contract worth $1.2 billion, titled “Project Nimbus”, which will provide a cloud system service for both the Israeli military and the Israeli government. Disturbingly, the project was announced May in 2021, the same month Israel killed at least 260 Palestinians in Gaza. Adding insult to injury, it was during this period that Amnesty International found Israel guilty of practising Apartheid against the Palestinian people.

No Tech For Apartheid

September 14, 2022 Mackenzie Dolan and Dave Welsh, Workers World. , , , ,
Tech workers held actions in multiple cities Sept. 8, demanding Big Tech drop its Project Nimbus contract with the apartheid police state of Israel. Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion-dollar contract Amazon and Google have with the Israeli government and military for “cloud computing” that aids in surveillance and persecution of the Palestinian people through artificial intelligence. Actions were held in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco and Durham, North Carolina. In Seattle, activists spoke about reasons why workers will not support the Zionist project and oppose the cooperation of Israeli forces with the Seattle Police Department. The Palestinian people face untold horrors of oppression by the Israeli government.

Companies Are Required To Report Their Union Busting, But Many Don’t

September 6, 2022 Rachel Phua, The American Prospect. , , ,
$4.3 million in one year spent on anti-union activities at Amazon. $2,625 a day to stop UPS drivers from fighting for their survival amid heat waves and a lack of air-conditioning in their trucks. Over $1 million spent on the union-busting firm Labor Relations Institute to stop stressed-out truck drivers at concrete distributor Cemex from unionizing. Without the mandatory filings with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959, few of us would know about the extent of companies’ union busting or the consultants they engage to lurk in warehouses and on worksites to undermine workers’ union sympathies.

Albany Amazon Warehouse Workers File For Union Election

August 18, 2022 Gwynne Hogan, Gothamist. , , ,
New York - Workers at an Amazon fulfillment center just outside of Albany filed petitions requesting a union election, the National Labor Relations Board confirmed this week. The Amazon Labor Union, the group of former and current employees that formed Amazon’s first union at a warehouse on Staten Island, filed to represent roughly 400 workers at the facility in Schodack, according to Kayla Blado, a spokesperson for the NLRB. The NLRB will tally up the union cards in the coming days to verify the union surpassed the 30 percent threshold required to hold an official vote, Blado said. “We are incredibly excited and proud,” said Cassio Mendoza, a spokesperson for the ALU, in a statement. The group planned to address the public outside the NLRB offices in Albany on Wednesday afternoon.

Amazon Employees Hold First-Ever Work Stoppage In Air Freight Division

August 17, 2022 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , ,
After months of working in what they say are unsafe weather conditions for wages that leave them struggling to afford basic necessities, more than 150 workers at Amazon's air freight hub in Southern California walked out mid-shift on Monday to demand fair treatment by the trillion-dollar company. As The Washington Post reported, the walkout at the San Bernardino facility, KSBD, was the first-ever work stoppage in Amazon's crucial air freight division, which keeps millions of packages moving throughout the U.S. each day. Managers at the warehouse were forced to slow down operations Monday in anticipation of the action. The employees are demanding a $5-per-hour raise, which would bring their starting wage to $22 per hour and make it easier for them to pay for housing in an area where the average rent is $1,650 per month.

Urgent Appeal For Unity And Mass Action Against Union Busting

August 11, 2022 Amazon Workers, Popular Resistance. , , ,
The national wave of union organizing and militancy spearheaded by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers is the biggest upsurge in worker organizing since the 1930s and 1940s. The organizing wave has spread to Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, Apple, REI and a growing list of chain stores and industries. However, this uprising of workers, which holds the potential of not only saving the labor movement, but transforming it, is under life-threatening attack. We must unite in defense of the brave young workers that are the vanguard of this transformative workers struggle. From their corporate boardrooms down to their worksite managers, Starbucks and Amazon are engaged in an outright war to crush the organizing wave. Starbucks is firing union organizers, closing stores, cutting workers hours, and denying pro-union workers wage increases and benefits.

Strikes Spread Across Amazon UK Warehouses

August 7, 2022 Tanupriya Singh, People's Dispatch. , , ,
On August 3, over 700 workers at the Amazon facility in Tilbury, Essex downed tools and launched a protest in the warehouse cafeteria against a pay offer of a mere 0.35 ($0.42) increase per hour. The offer would amount to an increase of 3%, at a time when inflation in the UK is projected to rise to 13%, amounting to a real-terms pay cut for workers. The strike action soon spread to another Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire. Over a 100 workers walked out to protest a 0.50 pay increase offer, with one worker telling Birmingham Mail that it was an “embarrassment of [an] announcement that comes as a mockery towards current employees”. The action is being supported by the GMB Union, which has been organizing workers at Amazon facilities in the UK for years. Amazon does not recognize any unions at its warehouses in the country.

US Labor Fights Back Against Amazon’s Expansion Into Healthcare

July 28, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On July 21, Amazon announced that the corporation would buy One Medical, a national chain of healthcare clinics and services based in San Francisco, for $3.9 million. In response, unions and labor organizations marched in San Francisco’s Financial District against the deal on July 26. The march was attended by the newly-formed Amazon Labor Union (ALU), with ALU president Chris Smalls leading chants at the helm of the protest, as well as the California Labor Federation, San Francisco Labor Council, ALU, California Nurses Association, Teamsters Local 665, and Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW). “We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” said Neil Lindsay, SVP of Amazon Health Services, in a July 21 statement.

Amazon Joins The Medicare Privatization Spree

July 24, 2022 Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Lever. , , , ,
Amazon, the $1.25 trillion company founded and led by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, has announced that it is acquiring One Medical, a private equity-backed primary care provider that generates over half of its revenue from Medicare. While Amazon’s profits from its core consumer retail business are dwindling, in part because of heightened competition from brick-and-mortar retailers that were shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the corporation’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, continues to enjoy robust profits thanks in part to generous government contracts. Now Amazon could be attempting to build on that federal largesse by seeking to milk revenue from Medicare, the national health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities.

How Bezos And His Company Wrap Themselves In The Flag

July 2, 2022 Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early and Jasper Craven, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Corporate America loves to proclaim its love and support for "our veterans." The persistent problem of veteran suicide has provided big firms with an opportunity to demonstrate their concern about the health and well-being of former military personnel, including those they employ. Unfortunately, at companies like Amazon, this performative patriotism does not involve improving working conditions or changing any management practices that might actually make them better employers, even while they pledge to hire more employees with military backgrounds.
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