Portside

Thousands of workers at Amazon are threatening to strike at the company after giving the company a deadline of 15 December to agree to begin negotiating a first contract with the union representing employees.

The strike threats, which started in New York, have now spread to Chicago and Atlanta. They come during Amazon’s peak holiday season and after the company experienced record sales during its 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday events.

The workers at the company’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island became the first Amazon warehouse in the US to win a union election in March 2022. But the company has yet to begin negotiating a first contract with Amazon Labor Union (ALU-IBT Local 1). Workers are pushing for improvements to pay, safety and job security.

Amazon workers at another New York City site, the delivery station DBK4 in Queens, also voted to strike in solidarity with the contract fight and their push for union recognition from the company.

The Teamsters have been organizing workers at 10 Amazon facilities around the US in California, Illinois, Georgia and New York.

Workers at two Amazon facilities near Atlanta, Georgia, and a delivery facility in Skokie, Illinois, outside of Chicago, also voted to authorize strikes and walked out on strike along with New York City workers.

“Driving for Amazon is tough,” said Luc Rene, a worker at DBK4, in a statement. “What’s even tougher is fighting a mega-corporation that constantly breaks the law and games the system. But we won’t give up.”

The strike comes in the wake of the US Senate health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee report released on 16 December into high injury rates at Amazon. According to the report senior Amazon executives rejected internal recommendations that would have relaxed productivity quotas because of concerns about how it would impact the company’s performance.

The report also backed up union-sponsored research that claimed injury rates at Amazon were far higher than those of its peers.

“It’s beyond unacceptable that Amazon, the 2nd largest corporation in America, owned by Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest person on Earth, continues to put their huge profits ahead of the health & safety of their workers,” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Help committee chair, wrote on X.

Amazon disputed the report’s findings, calling it “fundamentally flawed”.