Amazon recently opened its a West Humboldt Park warehouse, and workers’ rights advocates and labor organizers, are rightfully concerned that the corporation’s frightful employee safety record in Illinois will spread to yet another location. Amazon workers at some Chicago-area warehouses face a serious injury rate almost twice that of the statewide average, according to a recent analysis by Block Club Chicago
Collective bargaining and community organizing have a big role to play in ensuring that Amazon workers receive the full protection they are entitled to. But Amazon’s ability to churn through employees, leaving them bruised and broken, is also connected to its outsize power across the economy and in local labor markets.
That power allows Amazon to push down wages, take advantage of local businesses that sell on its platform and ultimately employ a host of anticompetitive tactics to maintain a monopoly in the e-retail industry, as alleged in a recent lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general.
Illinois lawmakers must step up alongside their allies in the labor movement and elsewhere to check Amazon’s power and ensure that both workers and local businesses can receive a fair shake in the Illinois economy. They certainly have the tools to do so.
Illinois legislators, for example, could adopt the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which passed the House last year, and strengthen whistleblower and anti-retaliation laws. They could also — as was discussed when six workers died after a tornado hit the Edwardsville Amazon warehouse in 2021 — adopt a “just cause” standard for employment, which prevents retaliation against workers protesting unsafe working conditions. The “just cause” standard exists in Montana, Philadelphia and New York City for certain industries in which workers are especially vulnerable to being fired without a clear reason.
But the safety conditions of warehouse workers aren’t all that Amazon undermines in the labor space. For example, studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research, New Yorkers for a Fair Economy, and the National Employment Law Project have shown that Amazon’s dominance drives down local wages for warehouse workers, general retail workers and delivery drivers, costing them hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year.
As a major employer, Amazon can dictate lower wages not just for those it hires, but for workers across the labor market, as other businesses scramble to cut costs in order to compete.
To combat this, state legislators can reform antitrust law to more explicitly protect workers, including by lowering the threshold for showing a firm has monopoly power and adopting a broader standard for the harms that should be captured by the state’s antitrust statute. This would be an explicit rebuke to the “consumer welfare standard,” which limits antitrust scrutiny to only consumer price issues, missing other harms across the economy.
Finally, state legislators can take the very simple step of preventing Amazon from using public resources to build out its business infrastructure. Since 2016, Amazon has received more than $731 million in taxpayer subsidies from state and municipal economic development authorities in Illinois, to build out its distribution and warehousing network. Illinoisans are not only subsidizing those dangerous jobs we noted, but actively undermining any other business that competes with Amazon by making them pay to subsidize their dominant competitor.
Many of these deals were draped in secrecy, undisclosed to the public until it was too late to stop them. And those warehouses are a key linchpin in Amazon’s monopoly play, as it leverages them to extract fees and concessions from local sellers. As a remedy, state lawmakers can simply ban e-commerce facilities, such as Amazon warehouses, from being eligible for state or local subsidies, or at the very least, ban the nondisclosure agreements that grease the skids for such deals.
It would, of course, have been far better if state antitrust enforcers and regulators had been empowered to rein in Amazon’s monopoly powers before it turned into the behemoth it is today. But there’s still time to ensure workers and local businesses aren’t harmed by Amazon’s dangerous working conditions and anti-competitive tactics.
Legislators should act now. They have all the power and the policy they need.
Pat Garofalo is the director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project.
The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.
The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.
