Workers at seven Amazon facilities went on strike Thursday morning, hoping to force negotiations for a labor contract after the delivery and retail giant ignored union requests to begin talks by a Dec. 15 deadline.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents around 10,000 Amazon workers and contractors, hopes to apply maximum pressure by timing the strike during the holiday delivery rush. Amazon, which employs around 1 million hourly workers and reported $39 billion in net income for the first nine months of this year, insists that operations will continue as normal.
The strikes are taking place in facilities across the four states of California, New York, Illinois and Georgia. Police in Maspeth, Queens have already started making arrests, with Hell Gate, a local publication, posting a video of NYPD officers physically confronting workers and moving to block off their path. Another video posted half an hour later shows the NYPD setting up barricades, apparently to clear a path for non-striking Amazon contractors to break the picket line by entering and leaving the facility.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement posted on X. “These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them."
Workers in other areas of the company are also ready to join the strike should Amazon refuse to bargain, according to the union announcement.
Amazon, seemingly confident that the price will be small, has shown no signs of relenting. The company claims that the delivery drivers represented by the Teamsters are not Amazon employees at all because they work through a third-party contractor; the union says that, under a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling, the workers should be considered to have joint employers — both Amazon and Delivery Service Partners — and all of the attendant rights to bargain for higher wages and benefits with the company that controls their working conditions.
Amazon and other business groups have issued legal challenges against that NLRB rule and others, as well as the watchdog's constitutionality.
“For more than a year now, the Teamsters have continued to intentionally mislead the public — claiming that they represent ‘thousands of Amazon employees and drivers.' They don’t, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative," Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. The Teamsters, the company claimed, "threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce" workers into joining the strike.
Labor advocates say that Amazon is the one using its heavy hand against union activity. The company has been the subject of several investigative reports and NLRB complaints that highlighted alleged attempts to surveil, harass and fire workers who stepped out of line. Just last month, the NLRB ruled against Amazon over forcing workers to attend "captive audience" meetings where management delivered lectures about the ills of joining a union.
Those tactics have not dissuaded the employees of several Amazon facilities from voting for union representation. The largest group at Amazon represented by the Teamsters works at JFK8, a Staten Island warehouse that employs more than 5,000 people. Although warehouse employees voted to unionize in an election in 2022, Amazon has refused to bargain with them and, alleging bias by the NLRB officials charged with overseeing the process, unsuccessfully challenged the election outcome.
Amazon has also tried to ward off union drives by sometimes offering concessions, as they did for delivery drivers in September, raising their average national pay from $20.50 to $22 an hour. At least publicly, the company maintains that is enough.
