Amazon Workers Launch Largest Strike Yet: ‘It Doesn’t Feel Like a Job That Should Be Legal’

At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, cops swarmed and arrested an Amazon driver who stopped his van in support of the strike. Photo: Luis Feliz Leon

By Natascha Elena Uhlmann / Labor Notes

Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers at seven facilities in the metro areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Southern California, and New York City are out on strike today, in what the union says is the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history. Unionized workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 fulfillment center have also authorized a strike and could soon follow.

Workers in all these locations—five delivery stations and two fulfillment centers—have already shown majority support and demanded union recognition. The Teamsters set Amazon an ultimatum: recognize the unions and agree to bargaining by December 15, or face strikes. Amazon hasn’t moved.

“They are skirting their responsibility as our employer to bargain with us on higher pay and safer working conditions,” said Riley Holzworth, a driver who makes deliveries from the DIL7 delivery station in Skokie, Illinois.

At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, cops swarmed and arrested an Amazon driver who stopped his van in support of the strike. In anticipation of a possible strike at JFK8, police had camped out by the facility in advance. Nonetheless, for six hours picketers slowed the flow of traffic out of the facility to a trickle, letting only one truck through every two minutes.

The Teamsters have made organizing Amazon a priority; the New York Times reported that the union has committed $8 million to the project, plus access to its $300 million strike fund.

‘ALL YOU CAN THINK OF IS SLEEP’

The strike’s timing is strategic: package volumes balloon around the holidays, known as “peak season,” so it’s no easy feat for Amazon to cope with disruption. During the 2023 holiday season, Amazon netted 29 percent of all global online orders.

To keep up with the surge in demand, many workers are forced to work mandatory overtime—childcare and other obligations be damned. “They give us one day extra, plus one hour extra a day,” said Wajdy Bzezi, a shift lead steward who has worked at JFK8 since 2018. “I barely see my son.”

“Whan you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,” said Ken Coates, a packer who has worked at JFK8 for five years. “And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.”

To help meet the increased demand the company has hired 250,000 seasonal workers across the country. This influx could also dilute strike power, though seasonal workers face the same stressors and often support the union push.

PEAK SEASON, INJURY SEASON

Rushed training for the seasonal hires has knock-on effects that leaves everyone less safe.

“Just this past month I think I ran into half a dozen new employees that didn’t know how to do the job,” Coates said. “Not due to any fault of their own, due entirely to the fault of their trainer not giving them adequate time.”

For instance, Coates says, new workers assigned to rebin duties (moving items from the conveyor belt to a designated shelf so packers can package and ship them) can unintentionally push items too far across the shelf, where they fall off the other side and hit packers.

Peak season at Amazon means peak injuries for workers. A July interim report from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that injury rates skyrocket during Prime Day and the holiday season.

During the week of Prime Day 2019, the report found, Amazon’s rate of recordable injuries would correspond to more than 10 annual injuries per 100 workers—more than double the industry average. During that same period, Amazon’s total rate of injuries (including those that do not need to be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA) would correspond to almost 45 injuries per 100 full-time workers. That is to say, if they kept up the Prime Day pace, nearly half the workers would be injured in a year.

“There hasn’t been a year that I’ve worked at Amazon where we haven’t broken a record in the number of packages we’ve handled,” said Coates.

‘IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE A JOB THAT SHOULD BE LEGAL’

Even outside the busy season, the work is grueling. Amazon’s relentless productivity quotas are nearly impossible to meet safely, forcing workers to barter their backs and knees for $18 an hour.

A new report from the same Senate committee has found that Amazon’s injury rate is having a “significant and growing impact on the average injury rate for the entire warehouse sector.”

Amazon is a corporation that transports goods and breaks down bodies. And why wouldn’t it, when this level of exploitation is incentivized at every turn? Reporting requirements are easily bypassed; the company appears to be using its on-site health facilities to obscure the true number of injuries sustained by workers on the job, or to shift the blame to workers for using improper technique.

“I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been injured on the job,” said Coates. “In our bathroom there’s a mirror that says, ‘You’re looking at the person who is most responsible for your safety.’ It pisses me off every time I have to see it. That’s just them passing off the buck.”

The OSHA penalties for instances that do get reported are capped at around $16,000 for each serious violation, the report notes. For a company making $70,000 in profits per minute, that’s just the cost of doing business.

“It doesn’t feel like a job that should be legal,” Holzworth said. “I’ve had a lot of different jobs in this industry, and this one by far feels like my employer is really getting away with a lot.”

A GLOBAL FIGHT

Workers organizing at key chokepoints in the supply chain have managed to extract a few concessions from Amazon, including increased pay for Chicago-area delivery station workers and the reinstatement of a suspended air hub employee in San Bernardino and another in Queens.

But Amazon has made significant investments that reduce its vulnerability. The expansion of its fulfillment network allows the company to reroute orders within its network of warehouses and reduces its reliance on any one location in the event of strikes or disruptions. Building sufficient power to tip the scales will require organizing across the global supply chain.

Around the world, the company has fiercely opposed organizing efforts, leaning on anti-union tactics like delaying elections, holding captive-audience meetings, and going on a hiring spree ahead of a union election to dilute the vote.

Between 2022 and 2023, Amazon spent more than $17 million on union avoidance consultants. And where other companies are content to bring in these swindlers to train management, Amazon is sometimes cutting out the middleman and hiring them directly as managers.

‘TAKE SOME ACCOUNTABILITY’

For delivery drivers, there’s another wrinkle: The drivers officially work for third-party contractors known as delivery service partners (DSPs), allowing Amazon to skirt responsibility.

When drivers unionized last year at a DSP in California called Battle-Tested Strategies, Amazon ended its contract and cut ties with the contractor, effectively firing the 84 drivers (Amazon was the company’s only client, and the company hasn’t operated since.)

This year, Amazon pulled the same stunt when drivers organized at a DSP in Illinois, Four Star Express Delivery.

Amazon maintains that since drivers are employed by DSPs, it has no duty to bargain with the workers. But drivers call bullshit, insisting that Amazon meets the legal standard for a joint employer: “We drive your branded van, we wear your uniform,” said Rubie Wiggins, a delivery driver at Amazon’s DAX5 facility in Southern California. “Take some accountability.”

‘WE CAN BRING THEIR STANDARDS HERE’

Safety is a central concern—and a key organizing issue. Delivery vans are packed to the brim, forcing some drivers to jam packages behind seats and behind any available crevice.

“It looks like a crypt in your van,” said Andrew Wiggins, Rubie’s husband, who works for the same DSP. “A lot of drivers put packages on the dash, wherever they can. It’s very unsafe, but people are just doing what they have to do.”

Rubie and Andrew talk regularly with UPS delivery drivers about the benefits of a strong union contract. “It’s amazing what you hear that they have,” Rubie said. “They have mechanics on site, they can watch their vehicles on site, we don’t have any of that. When you see that UPS is less profitable than Amazon and they’re able to do that for their drivers, you really want to tell Amazon, ‘Please take care of me like that.’”

“At Amazon it’s like, in order to perform, you have to think in your head a complete system of exact steps,” Holzworth said. “I’m gonna organize my packages in this way and as soon as I stop, I’m gonna engage the brake, pull out the keys, take off my seatbelt, in this order every single time so that you’re wasting as few seconds as possible.”

“If Amazon can have this as their business model, what’s the future working conditions gonna look like for other corporations?” Rubie Wiggins said. “We have nieces and nephews, I have younger brothers. What’s the workforce gonna look like for them in a couple years?

“You get a lot of ‘Why don’t you work for UPS?’” she said. “We’re drivers already. We can bring their standards here. We can start making the working conditions better here.”

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Natascha Elena Uhlmann

Natascha Elena Uhlmann is a staff writer at Labor Notes.

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