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Win For Alabama Amazon Workers

November 30, 2021 Jessica Corbett, Commondreams. , , ,
In a victory for employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, a federal labor official on Monday formally directed a new union election following allegations that the company engaged in illegal misconduct leading up to an unsuccessful vote in April. Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), celebrated the order from National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 10 Director Lisa Henderson, which a spokesperson for the agency confirmed to multiple media outlets. "Today's decision confirms what we were saying all along—that Amazon's intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace—and as the regional director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal," Appelbaum said.

Amazon’s Hunt For Public Contracts Generates Backlash

November 27, 2021 Oliver Roethig, Progressive International. , , ,
In July 2021, the world witnessed Jeff Bezos’ ‘best day ever” as he travelled to space. It was not long after stepping out of his shuttle that the richest man in the world thanked all Amazon employees and customers, adding “because you guys paid for all of this”. The public outrage at this crass and true statement was huge and justified. Amazon is notorious for cutting workers out, be that of a collective say at work, of an employment contract or even of a toilet break. Work pressure is high, workers’ every move is monitored and any hint of discontent is met with fierce repression. What the world didn’t know at that time, was that Bezos forgot to thank another group that paid for this space walk: taxpayers.

Amazon Deals Take A Hit After Depots Disrupted On Black Friday

November 26, 2021 Frankie Leach, Euronews. , , ,
The emissions created by Black Friday sales are “phenomenally’ high”. Research from money.co.uk has found that shoppers could emit over 386,243 tonnes of carbon emissions in 2021. That is the equivalent of 215,778 return flights between London and Sydney, and the same weight as 3,679 blue whales. In the UK, activists from across the country are taking part, with 13 blockades in Doncaster, Darlington, Newcastle, Manchester, Peterborough, Derby, Coventry, Rugeley, Dartford, Bristol, Tilbury, Milton Keynes and Dunfermline. These sites account for just over 50 per cent of Amazon deliveries in the UK. The aim of the protest is to disrupt Amazon's business on what is one of the biggest shopping days of the year in order to force the global giant into changing its "highly climate-destructive corporate practices".

Climate Activists Block Amazon UK Warehouses On Black Friday

November 26, 2021 Associated Press. , , ,
Climate activists are blockading Amazon warehouses across the U.K. on Friday in an attempt to pressure the ecommerce giant on one of its busiest days of the year to improve working conditions and end business practices that hurt the environment. Members of Extinction Rebellion targeted 13 Amazon fulfilment centers in the United Kingdom with the aim of disrupting 50% of the company’s deliveries on Black Friday, which marks the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season. Activists blocked the entrance to Amazon’s warehouse in Tilbury, just east of London, with an effigy of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sitting on top of a rocket. At Amazon’s distribution center in Dunfermline, Scotland, about 20 Extinction Rebellion members strung banners across the entrance road that said “Make Amazon Pay” and locked themselves together, stopping trucks from entering and some from leaving.

The Amazon Army And The 1919-1922 Kansas Coal Strikes

November 22, 2021 Robert Ovetz, Portside. , , ,
The struggle of the miners and the Amazon Army appears in no major labor history book. I decided to leave it out in my first book When Workers Shot Back (Ovetz, 2019) due to the lack of documentary evidence to write an entire chapter on it. This oversight is a mistake. The Amazon Army has much to teach us today about the interconnected struggle between waged and unwaged workers, immigrant and native labor, productive and reproductive labor, industrial unionism and organizing for power on the shopfloor, and the use of labor law and unions as a strategy for managing and suppressing class struggle.

Teamsters United Takes The Wheel

November 20, 2021 Alexandra Bradbury, Labor Notes. , , ,
A new administration will soon take the helm of the 1.3 million-member Teamsters union. The Teamsters United slate swept to victory in this week's vote count, beating out their rivals 2 to 1. It’s the first time in almost a quarter-century that a coalition backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union has taken the driver’s seat in the international union. The incoming president is Sean O’Brien, leader of New England Joint Council 10. He says his top priorities are to unite the rank and file to take on employers, organize Amazon and other competitors in the union’s core industries, and withdraw support from politicians who don’t deliver on union demands. Essential to organizing at Amazon or anyplace else, O’Brien argues, is winning enviable contracts for the existing Teamsters.

Artists, Activists Demand Concert Venues Drop Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Tech

November 19, 2021 Jon Fingas, Engadget. , ,
Concert operators may like Amazon's palm recognition system, but some performers and activists are less than thrilled. A group of 200 artists and 30 rights groups has penned an open letter demanding the Red Rocks amphitheater, its ticketing provider AXS and AEG (AXS' parent company) "immediately cancel" contracts to use Amazon One scanning at any venue. They also want the firms to ban all biometric surveillance at those events.

Support The #MakeAmazonPay Day Of Action

November 18, 2021 Progressive International. , , ,
Amazon’s size and power place the corporation at the very center of the crises of climate breakdown and economic inequality that grip our planet. The growth of CEO Jeff Bezos’s astronomical wealth — up $100 billion since March, now surpassing that of any other human in history — is directly proportional to Amazon’s human and environmental costs: his corporation mistreats its workers, wrecks the climate, and undermines the public institutions underpinning our democracies along the way. Taking on Amazon, therefore, will require more than curbing Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth or calling for corporate social responsibility. It will require a global movement that is organized along every dimension of Amazon’s expanding empire: for workers, for peoples, and for the planet.

Amazon Warehouse Workers In Staten Island File Petition For Union Election

October 27, 2021 Catherine Thorbecke, ABC. , , ,
Kayla Blado, the press secretary for the National Labor Relations Board, confirmed to ABC News on Monday that the union petition was filed in the NLRB's Region 29. The petition must now go through the NLRB's formal representation election process before a vote will be held. The group of workers, which calls themselves the Amazon Labor Union, are being led by a former fulfillment center employee of the e-commerce giant, Chris Smalls. He became the face of the labor movement at Amazon when he was fired under contentious circumstances at the beginning of the pandemic after organizing a demonstration over working conditions amid the health crisis. The milestone comes some six months after a high-profile union bid by Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who sought to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Amazon And Google: Partners In Israeli Apartheid

October 20, 2021 Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada. , , ,
The best-selling Irish novelist Sally Rooney is openly shunning Israel after recent reports from human rights groups warned that Israel practices apartheid, systematically oppressing Palestinians under its rule. But while Israel risks becoming a pariah among some cultural producers, it is being aggressively embraced by globe-spanning corporations like Amazon and Google – among the wealthiest companies in history. The two tech giants are not just lining up to do business with Israel. They are actively working to build and improve the technological infrastructure Israel needs to surveil Palestinians and confine them to the ghettos Israel’s army has created for them. Through their collaboration on Israel’s Project Nimbus, both companies are helping to remove any pressure on Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and are instead becoming partners in Israeli apartheid.

Workers At Amazon And Google Condemn ‘Project Nimbus’

October 14, 2021 Left Voice. , , ,
Google and Amazon workers have published a public letter calling on the two companies to cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli military and government. We know that the Israeli military apparatus will use these services to build weapons and surveillance technology to use against the Palestinian people. Such technology, once tested on Palestinians, is frequently exported back to the United States to be used against marginalized populations and protesters here. This public action by tech workers follows an increasing number of coordinated actions in the tech sector to pressure Big Tech companies to cancel government contracts for surveillance technology, censorship technology, and computing services for foreign states.

Alabama Amazon Workers May Get Another Crack At A Union

September 25, 2021 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. , , ,
Bessemer, AL — Here is what a 1920s city looks like in a 2020s world. Along Bessemer’s broad downtown streets sit an array of small shops that have somehow managed to survive into the age of big box retailers: the rug store, the dusty furniture store, the store that sells sewing machines. They sit alongside empty, peeling husks of all the stores that didn’t make it. On one prime downtown corner a block from the courthouse, you can peer through the window of an abandoned pharmacy to see a four-foot plant growing up through the floor. The old railroad still runs through Bessemer, but most everything else has been sucked out by modern commerce. The town is emblematic of many that have seen their small business districts destroyed, first by Walmart and its imitators, more recently by Amazon.

Amazon’s ‘Factory Towns’ Will Be Satanic Mills For The Working Class

September 20, 2021 Dr. Lisa Mckenzie, RT. , , ,
Amazon and its hyper-neoliberal cheerleaders are polishing turds again. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire spaceman, and his company are about to ‘lift the working class’ by creating new ‘factory towns,’ Bloomberg writes. “Plentiful new jobs at higher wages in places with cheaper housing sounds like a solution to inequality,” investment adviser Conor Sen wrote in a piece for the news agency. Bloomberg and Amazon are putting such a shine on this idea, it reminds me of those Victorian texts where the working class living on the master’s land would bow and doff their caps every time his carriage passed them on their way to a 14-hour shift in his mine or mill. Old books are full of those cheery commoners thanking landlords and industrialists for allowing them to live and work in poverty. Have we really come full circle?

Canadian Amazon Warehouse Could Be First To Unionize In North America

September 19, 2021 Candice Bernd, Truthout. , , ,
The struggle to unionize Amazon is shifting to Canada, where workers in Alberta could soon be the first to unionize an Amazon warehouse in North America. Workers at the “YEG1” facility in Nisku, Alberta, just outside Edmonton, filed for a union election on Monday, September 13. The election could be held in mere weeks, once the Alberta Labour Relations Board approves the application. Workers at the relatively new facility in Nisku, which employs between 600 to 800 Amazon “associates,” have described rampant favoritism and discrimination against marginalized workers of color and immigrants. Job security, the pace of work and wages are also among Nisku workers’ top concerns, according to Christopher Monette, director of public affairs at Teamsters Canada.

Amazon And The Destruction Of Competition And Livelihoods

September 5, 2021 Colin Todhunter, Counter Punch. , ,
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods. Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
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