Mass Worker Education: Governing From the Shop Floor
In Amazon’s vast logistics empire, warehouse workers and delivery drivers incur frequent injuries amid stringent performance monitoring and evaluation.1 The best data we have indicate that many workers are interested in organizing to improve their conditions, yet the same infrastructure used to relentlessly boost productivity is deployed to suppress collective action.2 Refusing to come to the table even when workers unionize, Amazon is looking to have traditional legal pathways for expressing worker voice abolished altogether—and its algorithmic systems given free rein.3
Still, closer inspection reveals stirrings of dissent. Across Amazon’s global network, workers aware of their strategic position in the distribution process are contesting speedup and discipline.4 Through their mastery of government regulations and the company’s own operating procedures, they are challenging productivity write-ups, refusing unsafe work, and teaching their peers how to navigate Amazon’s increasingly automated managerial systems.5 They are developing a knowledge base that prefigures more democratic forms of shop-floor governance.6
Not only are these emergent practices of peer education crucial for strategies of labor renewal, but they can inform a parallel question that has gained traction in the last year—the question of mass governance.7 Amid a deepening global crisis of liberal democracy, the election of a socialist mayor in New York City (NYC) has generated interest in not only representing the interests of working-class people but, moreover, expanding opportunities for them to govern the city their labor makes run. Thus far, mass governance initiatives have focused on cultivating engagement at the neighborhood and borough levels, such as through rental ripoff hearings and participatory budgeting assemblies.8 Meanwhile, the workplace remains an underexplored site. Though the Mamdani administration has begun expanding state capacities to enforce labor standards, less attention has been placed on the role that workers can play in this process.9
[T]he election of a socialist mayor in New York City has generated interest in not only representing the interests of working-class people but, moreover, expanding opportunities for them to govern the city their labor makes run.
This essay builds a framework of mass governance out of workers’ daily struggles on the shop floor, focusing on peer education as a dual organizing and policy tool. Versed in legal rights, work processes, and relational dynamics, peer educators are uniquely positioned to cultivate shared insights about the harms stemming from employers’ exploitative practices and facilitate tactical experimentation aimed at eradicating these harms together with strategic reflection around transforming the power relations that give rise to them. We term this mode of engagement mass worker education: democratizing the production of knowledge in service of democratizing the production of goods and services. Recognizing the importance of intellectual exchange and political deliberation for worker empowerment, this framework envisions workers as not only enforcing labor standards but shaping them as well.
Following on the Mamdani administration’s expansion of resources for the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), the essay considers leveraging this enhanced capacity to institutionalize a role for peer educators in implementing worker protections and building workplace organization.10 As an exemplary case, we explore the idea of NYC establishing a mass worker education program in parcel shipping operations across the area. Administered in partnership with unions and community groups, the program would build training capacity among a corps of warehouse workers and parcel delivery drivers,11 strengthening their role in enforcing new laws that address harmful industry practices and cultivating broader cultures of workplace safety. We also consider forms of partnership between NYC and New York State that could expand the scope and extend reach of this worker training and legal co-enforcement with increasingly non-union workforces. Last, we discuss how such a program could empower workers to participate in mass assemblies shaping policy development around data collection, deployment of new technologies, and other pressing concerns, helping pave the way toward mass sectoral governance.
Labor Standards Enforcement and the Role of Peer Education
Government agencies around the country are building partnerships with worker organizations to enforce labor standards. Drawing on the knowledge that workers have about their industries and specific worksites, these efforts in co-enforcement have achieved important gains in addressing legal violations.12
At Amazon’s San Bernardino International Airport (KSBD) air hub in Southern California, for instance, workers organizing with Inland Empire Amazon Workers United have collected and shared information about the facility’s weak safety protections during extreme summer temperatures, leading to several government citations.13 This work comes on the heels of over a decade of worker education and organizing that has raised consciousness around heat safety in the Inland Empire’s booming warehousing sector and contributed to the passage of statewide heat illness prevention standards.14
In response to another acute threat faced by workers—the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies—California, New York, and other states have also begun enforcing new quota transparency laws in the warehousing sector. In 2024, the California Labor Commission fined Amazon almost $6 million for violating Assembly Bill 701, which requires warehousing employers to provide written notice of quotas on which they are evaluated.15 Here, too, worker knowledge and organization proved crucial to enforcement, with workers at ONT8 (Optical Network Terminal) and ONT9 fulfillment centers sharing information with the Labor Commissioner’s Office under the auspices of the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership.16
Increasingly, Amazon is challenging these efforts at enforcing quota standards. In California, the company has appealed the Labor Commission’s citations by arguing that it does not use pre-determined quotas to evaluate workers, while in New York, workers report that management has been able to sidestep new quota provisions by evaluating workers on the basis of their relative productivity—a tactic that makes injured and pregnant workers especially vulnerable to heightened work intensity.17
In maintaining its de facto quota system, Amazon insists that the data it collects on workflows and then uses to train computational systems constitutes proprietary information. Even in jurisdictions with strong data protections like Germany, the company refuses to give works councils (elected workplace bodies that represent employees’ interests to management) access to datasets and algorithms managed by engineers often hundreds or thousands of miles away from the worksite—the very measures that would enable frontline workers to intervene more directly in the technical processes that shape their working conditions.18
Government agencies around the country are building partnerships with worker organizations to enforce labor standards.
In challenging the separation that capitalist production engenders between the conception and execution of labor, peer education offers a potential antidote.19 At a recent workshop, workers from different Amazon divisions came together to analyze the impacts of AI and explore strategies for expanding worker voice in its design and deployment.20 As a collective exercise in knowledge production, the gathering showed what may be possible if workers are empowered to disrupt hierarchical information flows in the workplace and policymaking arenas.
Highlighting worker knowledge for policymaking purposes suggests wider implications concerning the intersection of labor renewal and mass governance. For the most part, legislation aimed at supporting efforts to revitalize the labor movement (e.g., the Protecting the Right to Organize [PRO] Act) has been focused on making it easier for workers to organize. As necessary as these measures are for expanding the associational capacities of the working class, they are insufficient for expanding its governing capacities. Unions serve as a potentially politicizing force within the workplace, but they largely operate within legal frameworks that regularize collective bargaining while muting shop-floor contestation.21 These frameworks not only enshrine capitalist control over production but also shift the task of governing away from workers’ daily struggles. Workers can try to influence the policy process either through union representatives appointed to tripartite structures or by lobbying elected officials.
Mass worker education challenges this distinction, emphasizing the agency of workers in more directly shaping and enforcing their rights on the shop floor. We draw inspiration from the factory councils of interwar Europe, experiments with autogestion (self-management) in decolonized Africa and Asia, and the cordones industriales (industrial belts) and comunas (communes) at the heart of socialist projects in Latin America.22 More immediately, we look to occupational health movements that used peer education to expand popular sovereignty under a range of authoritarian politics of early neoliberalism. During the Brazilian military dictatorship, for instance, metalworkers used their firsthand knowledge of the sector’s acute injury crisis to expose the state’s cosmetic fixes, laying the groundwork for a disability rights movement that made key legislative advances after the fall of the junta.23 In the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, mineworkers in the 1980s partnered with health professionals to train “barefoot doctors” and establish a people’s hospital that broke down hierarchies of expertise in the health sector.24 Meanwhile, during the Reaganite offensive in the United States, worker movements within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) used peer education to link health and safety organizing to broader questions of environmental justice.25
Presently, we see this legacy extended by Amazon workers building power across the company’s global network. Through meetings organized by Amazon Workers International and other networks, worker representatives exchange information about hazardous work and bring this knowledge home to share with coworkers on the shop floor.26 Moreover, in refusing unsafe work during the pandemic and other emergencies, Amazon workers have been articulating a common vision of making company operations safer for themselves and their communities.27
These examples illustrate the openings that exist for workers to build shop-floor power and influence policy even in challenging conditions. Through spaces of collective experimentation and reflection, workers can confront the root of the harms they face—power relations embodied in the production process itself.
Instituting Mass Worker Education in NYC
In NYC, the Office of Labor Policy & Standards (OLPS), a division of the DCWP, has undertaken important legal enforcement measures in recent years.28 For example, following the 2010 passage of the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, OLPS convened focus groups with nannies, cleaners, and home health aides across the city to discuss violations and other issues.29 A parallel set of efforts led to the 2017 formation of the We Rise Nanny Training program, through which a coalition of domestic worker organizations have partnered with the Worker Institute at Cornell University in developing a peer education program centering around rights awareness, workforce development, and organizing skills.30 The coalition has since expanded the program to cover other sectors, training hundreds of nannies, cleaners, and home health aides, as well as day laborers and farmworkers. New research shows that NYC, with its strong enforcement of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, has seen major improvements in job quality indicators such as overtime relative to the rest of the state.31
These experiences highlight the importance of not only responding to legal violations after they have occurred but also promoting organizing strategies that shift larger workplace cultures. A mass worker education program could support legal co-enforcement while also equipping workers with resources to exercise greater control over their conditions, addressing shop-floor challenges before they become acute.
To illustrate what such a program could look like, we return to the example of warehousing and parcel delivery. With its rapid expansion amid the ecommerce boom, the industry has attracted growing public concern over its impacts on workers, residents, and the environment. Amazon’s invasive deployments of AI and other digital technologies have received particular scrutiny, spurring wider discussion among consumers and workers across a variety of industries. Building on existing legislation and organizing in New York, a program of mass worker education could strengthen governance of warehousing and parcel delivery and serve as a model for other industries.
[T]he state and city could follow the example of work-sharing agreements between government agencies, establishing co-enforcement powers between NYS Department of Labor (DOL) and NYC DCWP that promote accountability for serial law breakers and discourage harmful employer behaviors.
Legislation passed at the state level over the past five years regulates production quotas and mandates that employers implement injury reduction plans.32 In 2025, worker and advocacy groups in New Yorkers for a Fair Economy (NYFE)—a coalition convened by the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN)—turned attention to the question of how to implement this legislation effectively. Amazon Labor Union-International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1 (ALU-IBT Local 1), representing 5,000 workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, focused on raising awareness of these laws as part of its safety campaign.33 Following several worker summits and stakeholder meetings, ALU-IBT Local 1 partnered with the Athena Coalition and National Employment Law Project (NELP) to pilot a training around laws relevant to advancing health and safety in the workplace, body and hazard mapping, and formation of workplace safety committees.34 With support from the Consortium for Worker Education (CWE), ALU-IBT Local 1 has carried out additional training with shop-floor leaders and is building a training center near JFK8.
At the city level, the NYFE coalition is currently mobilizing in support of the Delivery Protection Act (DPA), introduced by NYC Council Member Tiffany Cabán in September 2025. The legislation would require operators of last-mile delivery facilities to obtain business licenses from DCWP and directly hire delivery drivers (including those who have unionized with Teamsters Local 804 at Amazon delivery facilities DBK4 and DBK1 in Queens) rather than misclassifying them as independent contractors.35 Importantly, the legislation would require employers to grant access to an independent certified organization to conduct safety and rights training with workers and managers. Drawing on a recent study commissioned by the NYC Comptroller’s office that shows an increase in traffic crashes and injuries in areas near last-mile delivery facilities like the ones in Maspeth, Queens, advocates argue that promoting the safety of workers would also help to safeguard residents.36 “The impact goes far beyond us,” according to Luc Rene, an Amazon Teamster based at DBK4. “The endless churn of underpaid drivers creates congestion, pollution, and wear on city streets.”37 If the bill passes, DCWP could partner with members of the NYFE coalition to develop a co-enforcement strategy that builds on work around recent state laws.
[A]n infrastructure of mass worker education could amplify the capacity of frontline workers to meaningfully shape policy.
Focusing on the training provision, we draw on an insight common among many evaluations of union education programs, which shows that workers more readily incorporate lessons received through peer education as opposed to other forms of pedagogy.38 A particularly instructive example comes from a peer education program developed to address sexual harassment and violence in California’s janitorial industry, where a coalition of labor and anti-violence organizations created a framework for anti-sexual harassment training by peer educators, known as promotoras, for janitorial workers across the state.39 The coalition, which included worker leaders, saw that managers and supervisors often enable or enact harmful behaviors themselves, and determined that trained janitors—particularly survivors of sexual violence—were best positioned to educate their peers about relevant rights and strategies. Coalition members went on to support the creation of the Ya Basta Center in Los Angeles, which has trained hundreds of janitor promotoras to provide peer training in workplaces across California. Drawing on trauma-informed methods originally developed by the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, janitor promotoras facilitate spaces where workers can establish the trust needed to share their stories. These healing spaces have given janitors the confidence to stand with each other in the workplace and speak up against harassment, often joining fights around other issues like wage theft as well.40
In New York, collaborating with DCWP and with support from organizations such as CWE, members of the NYFE coalition could set up a training program akin to the promotora program in California. Focusing initially on enforcement of the DPA, the program could prepare a core of last-mile delivery drivers and warehouse workers—including those engaging with local unions—to deliver training around issues of misclassification and safety addressed by the legislation. Like the promotora model, employers across this industry would be required to grant access to peer educators, enabling the program to cover non-union workforces as well. Through program evaluation, the city could develop an evidence base showing whether and how peer training impacts worker awareness of legal rights and the sense of efficacy workers have in exercising these rights. Drawing on the city’s increasing agency capacities as well as its growing movement of labor and community groups targeting Amazon’s abuses,41 such work could evolve into the development of a training center like the Ya Basta Center.
Over time, building on emergent city-state partnerships around childcare and other issues, a peer education program could train a corps of warehouse workers and parcel delivery drivers in promoting awareness and enforcement of the right to organize as well as health and safety laws that Amazon and other employers have been known to violate. Given employers’ use of tech-enabled worker surveillance strategies to enforce unsustainable work rates and impede worker responses, peer educators could draw connections between these individual and collective forms of disempowerment. By bringing together workers from different parts of the logistics sector, a mass worker education program could generate broader knowledge about the infrastructures undergirding harmful practices and foster dialogue about strategies for building worker voice across the supply chain. Moreover, linking worker and community safety, the program could also generate support for other legislative efforts.42
As big tech and other corporate actors seek greater control over nearly every aspect of economic, social, and political life, the Mamdani administration has an historic opportunity to create agile policy mechanisms that can respond to this rapidly shifting terrain—moving from the shop floor up.
A partnership between the city and state could assist with the development of this program in multiple respects. First, Albany could generate revenue for the peer education training center by imposing a “robot tax” on Amazon and other corporations investing in high levels of automation.43 Second, implementing and refining a peer education program at the city level would serve as a test case before expanding its reach across New York State. In California, labor and anti-violence groups leveraged a rich movement ecosystem in Los Angeles, the historic birthplace of the Justice for Janitors campaign, toward establishing the Ya Basta Center as a base for strengthening statewide rights enforcement. A peer education training center based in NYC could serve a similar function.44 Last, and most ambitiously, the state and city could follow the example of work-sharing agreements between government agencies,45 establishing co-enforcement powers between NYS Department of Labor (DOL) and NYC DCWP that promote accountability for serial law breakers and discourage harmful employer behaviors. For instance, current state law mandates annual worksite evaluations by state-appointed industrial hygienists (government officials who identify and control workplace hazards to protect public health). Employers are then required to take concrete steps to address whatever ergonomic risk factors are identified in the evaluations, but it has not been specified what steps employers would need to take to comply. Establishing co-enforcement powers between NYS DOL and NYC DCWP would enable the city government to work with unions and other partners in establishing participatory structures.46
From the Shop Floor to the Assembly
Recent years have seen numerous proposals calling for sectoral governance as a labor renewal strategy in New York and other parts of the country, including wage boards and tripartite bargaining structures.47 In their implementation, however, such developments often have been relatively detached from and at times contradictory to grassroots efforts to grow worker power.48 This disconnect weakens legal enforcement, hampers ongoing policy development that could be responsive to evolving worker needs and concerns, and limits possibilities for the kind of consciousness-raising work that can engender positive feedback loops between policy and organizing. This separation also constrains the capacity of workers to build direct associational power vis-à-vis employers, clients, and other holders of economic power.
In institutionalizing channels for workers to promote labor standards enforcement and shift broader workplace cultures, an infrastructure of mass worker education could amplify the capacity of frontline workers to meaningfully shape policy. Specifically, peer education could build on workers’ existing job-related knowledge to deepen understandings of industry dynamics and relevant policy debates; seed the formation of what ALU-IBT Local 1 leaders have called “tech governance councils,” which would combine strategic reflection on shop-floor organizing with proposals for enhancing worker voice in technology deployment; and facilitate recruitment of workers into mass sectoral assemblies. These assemblies could provide a forum for workers from different work sites, occupations, and job titles to convene around developing citywide organizing and policy strategies. Such assemblies could deepen member engagement in areas where unions already have a foothold and provide a space for unions to continue deepening their coalitional relationships with other communities. Critically, amid continued employer attacks on legal rights to free association, mass assemblies could build networks of support for collective action in areas with little or no union density as well.
We end by returning to our opening vignette of Amazon workers resisting acute forms of digital surveillance. Amid growing interest in the regulation of data collection and computational systems, the framework we have proposed would anchor shop-floor governance practices, like the efforts of Amazon workers to teach each other how to navigate the company’s surveillance systems, in the insights of workers who encounter these systems daily. Moreover, in establishing a consistent feedback loop from the point of production to sectoral assemblies and the halls of state power, the policy process would be infused with ongoing experimentation, reflection, and refinement. As big tech and other corporate actors seek greater control over nearly every aspect of economic, social, and political life, the Mamdani administration has an historic opportunity to create agile policy mechanisms that can respond to this rapidly shifting terrain—moving from the shop floor up.
New Labor Forum is a national labor journal from the Murphy Institute, at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, published by SAGE Press three times a year, in January, May, and September. Founded in 1997, the journal provides a place for labor and its allies to consider vital research, debate strategy, and test new ideas.