Striking Amazon for the Holidays
The signs that something unusual was afoot in Maspeth, Queens, on Thursday morning could be seen even before reaching the hulking structure that is DBK4, Amazon’s delivery stations, where drivers load up their vans with packages for the New York metro area. As the sun rose over the industrial area, workers could be seen streaming toward the facility’s entrance, identifiable in blue Amazon-branded apparel and black-and-gold International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) bomber jackets, signs reading “Amazon is unfair” in hand.
The company has refused to bargain with the union, so the 1.3-million-strong IBT set a deadline: agree to bargain by December 15 or face an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike. When that date passed without movement on the company’s side, the Teamsters followed through on their promise. Additional Teamsters-affiliated Amazon workers — most notably those at the gigantic JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, which was the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to unionize as the Amazon Labor Union and whose workers have since voted to affiliate with the IBT — are expected to join the strike in the coming days. JFK8 in particular is set to join the strike at midnight.
The striking facilities represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of Amazon facilities dotting the country, but worker organizing must start somewhere. The smaller, more centrally located delivery stations are strategic targets for a movement that ultimately will need to organize many more Amazon facilities to overcome the company’s ability to reroute packages away from warehouses where workers are engaged in collective action.
Amazon has reshaped the United States, not only economically but socially, culturally, and politically. Some of those changes have followed from trapping millions of Americans — not only their own workers — in the bottom rungs of the labor market. It’s hard to organize a company that operates on such a scale, but recent years have seen walkouts and union drives and work stoppages at Amazon, all of which are kindling in the fire now raging in the hearts of some of the company’s workers, including those who are now on strike. This week’s escalation will no doubt serve as similar inspiration for other Amazon workers who are watching, weighing the viability of the union movement as a means of improving the conditions of the place where they spend much of their waking lives.
Disputed Status
Amazon has said that it views the current strike as “illegal.” The issue turns upon a disagreement over the status of its hundreds of thousands of drivers. These workers are currently employed by delivery service partners (DSPs), small companies that operate as contractors for Amazon. Many exist solely to service the company. Workers argue that this is misclassification and that Amazon should be considered their joint employer alongside the DSPs, and that Amazon thus has the duty to bargain with them. Many of these drivers wear Amazon-branded clothing, drive Amazon-branded vans, and have their schedules, their appearance, and their pay ultimately determined by Amazon. Bargaining with a DSP that simply answers to Amazon would be fruitless.
Amazon has been fighting this argument in the courts, hoping to avoid joint-employer status. Thus far, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has shown signs of siding with the drivers, tending to rule that large companies like Amazon have an obligation to bargain with employees of contractor firms over which they exert control. Yet with conservatives set to gain majority control of the board when Donald Trump takes office, workers aren’t waiting for the courts. As the old labor movement adage goes, you win a union by acting like one.
It’s worth noting too that Amazon hasn’t agreed to bargain with the workers at JFK8 either, even though their status as direct employees is not in dispute. Those workers unionized on May 1, 2022, yet the company has refused to recognize their union, much less negotiate with it. Regardless of legal status, Amazon is defending its right to pursue sky-high profits without limitation, regulation, or rule of law; it certainly isn’t interested in giving workers a say in the matter.
For members of the DBK4 union, Amazon’s refusal to bargain with them is yet another example of its disrespect for the workers who power its operations. As several DBK4 drivers pointed out to me, many workers on the picket lines wore Amazon windbreakers rather than the company’s warmer winter coats; that’s because the company didn’t issue winter coats this year.
“It’s penny pinching,” explained Lamont Hopewell, who has worked at one of DBK4’s eight DSPs for eight months. “They say they’re out of stock, but by the time they’re in stock, it’s summer.”
Unions are not new to Hopewell. He previously worked as a United Parcel Service (UPS) driver, where he saw the union difference when it came to pay and benefits. The roughly 340,000 Teamsters who work at UPS enjoy far higher wages than their counterparts at Amazon, and not only good benefits but more rights on the job in matters of safety and security. At Amazon, Hopewell said he does similar work but with none of the security.
Those concerns were echoed by other DBK4 union members. Latrice Johnson, who has worked out of DBK4 for a year, listed not only poor pay and benefits at the top of her priorities, but also safety as a concern, recounting being given a broken hand truck to assist her on her route. It’s no surprise at a company whose injury rate is double that of comparable operations, with even higher rates during the current peak season.
“They say safety is the number-one priority, but that’s not true,” Johnson said.
On the DBK4 picket line yesterday, the only threat to workers’ safety came from the NYPD. Dozens of officers pushed workers, journalists, and elected officials alike to clear the exits, using their bodies (in an undeniably goofy fashion) and threats of arrest to clear space for vans to exit the warehouse, using barricades to break what had been a strong picket line by around 11 a.m. In the process, they arrested Teamsters Local 804 organizer Antonio Rosario, a leader during the 1997 UPS strike.
Many of DBK4’s drivers have yet to join the union and, as at the other striking locations, reported to work as usual despite the strike. When a van approached the picket, strikers would speak with the driver, asking them to, as the chant went, “put it in park.”
When Jogernsyn Cardenas, a DBK4 driver, decided to do precisely that, the police first tried to force him to get back in the van. When he refused, they arrested him too. A minor melee ensued, with workers demanding the police let him go, while the officers pushed their way out of the crowd.
It was a brazen display of the police doing the bidding of an employer, breaking the law themselves by violating workers’ First Amendment rights. Perhaps the NYPD should be considered a third-party contractor for Amazon as well.
Upon their release, both Rosario and Cardenas returned to the picket line, receiving raucous welcomes from fellow picketers. As Cardenas told labor journalist Luis Feliz Leon of his decision to join the strike, “I feel like a hero because I had the courage to stop my van.”
As for Jeff Bezos, the oligarch at the center of these workers’ woes, several picketers noted that their boss had spent the prior evening dining with fellow billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. Bezos had been quick to congratulate Trump on his election night victory and no doubt looks forward to the lower tax rate the incoming president has promised his confreres.
Far from Trump’s estate, under the clear blue sky outside of DBK4, I asked Hopewell what he would say to Bezos. He brought up the holidays.
“I’d ask him to think about his own family,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want your child to have Christmas off work with pay? Wouldn’t you want your mother or sister or brother to have health insurance?”
When I later put the question to Johnson, she grinned.
“Oh, we’ve got a lot to talk about,” she said. “Jeff Bezos, I have a lot of things I can put you onto to make you a better person. All these people making this money for you? Respect us.”
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Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
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