Delivery workers continued to picket Amazon facilities in New York, Illinois, California and Atlanta after going on strike on Thursday after the company refused to engage in labor contract negotiations.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters organized the workers, although Amazon does not recognize those efforts and says the workers are not Amazon employees. (The federal labor watchdog, the National Labor Review Board, or NLRB, disagrees.)
The striking workers, who are mainly delivery drivers, are agitating for a contract that offers better pay and working conditions. The Teamsters gave Amazon until Dec. 15 to begin contract negotiations. They didn’t break a sweat, leading to a strike timed the week before Christmas as part of an effort to bring the company to the bargaining table. It’s one of the largest strikes in Amazon’s history, and it’s unclear how long it will last. And it already has legal consequences; an Amazon delivery driver and a Teamsters organizer were arrested Thursday at a Queens facility for allegedly disrupting traffic.
“If your package is delayed during the holiday season, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement Thursday. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
The delivery workers’ strike is part of a larger effort to unionize workers, including delivery drivers and warehouse workers who perform Amazon’s shipping and distribution services. The fight for unionization has been going on for years. In 2022, labor organizers had their first major victory when an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize and created the Amazon Union. Since then, the Amazon union has joined the Teamsters, which bills itself as the largest union in North America and represents workers in a variety of industries, including transportation and health care. The Teamsters say 10,000 Amazon employees are represented by the union.
There is no indication that this week’s strike will lead to the kind of victory Staten Island workers saw in 2022; Amazon argued that the strike would not harm its operations and denied its validity. And while workers trying to organize at Amazon have scored some victories in cases before the NLRB, the body is expected to undergo major, pro-business changes under the incoming Donald Trump administration. All of this calls into question the success of striking workers and the way the federal government will treat workers in the years to come.
Workers strike to make a statement
It’s unclear how many workers are on strike, but they represent just a fraction of the roughly 800,000 people who make up Amazon’s delivery workforce.
The poor working conditions of Amazon warehouse workers, including injuries and lack of access to medical care, have been well documented, including in a new Senate report. This inspired the first effort to unionize in a Staten Island warehouse.
Drivers and delivery drivers say they are also struggling.
“The pay should be better. Health insurance needs to be better,” Thomas Hickman, a delivery driver from Georgia, told CNN. “We need better working conditions. If we have more than 400 packages, we need someone to help us and drive with us.”
This strike isn’t exactly focused on working conditions or pay and benefits, although that’s part of it; this is called an unfair labor practice strike because Amazon refused to negotiate with the workers by the deadline the Teamsters gave Amazon management. The workers are striking to force the company to negotiate a labor contract that sets out acceptable working conditions, pay, benefits and more. Employees hope that their rights and benefits will be enshrined so that the company cannot arbitrarily remove them.
The Teamsters say the company is violating labor law by refusing to negotiate a contract.
“In some ways, it’s not that unique,” said Eric Blanc, a professor of labor relations at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. “In many cases, employers will ignore labor laws and refuse to bargain. Sometimes there is a striking way to get them to the table.’
However, Amazon claims that the striking workers are not even Amazon employees.
“There are many nuances here, but I want to be clear that the Teamsters do not represent any Amazon employees, despite their claims to the contrary,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, told CNN. “This whole story is a PR game and the behavior of the Teamsters last year and this week is illegal.” Vox reached out to Nantel to clarify which actions Amazon considers illegal, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
According to Amazon, these drivers and delivery workers work for a third-party vendor – what they call a delivery service partner (DSP). But Amazon does not name DSPs and advertises those who provide jobs on Amazon’s website. Delivery drivers drive Amazon-branded deliveries and wear Amazon uniforms; they deliver packages to Amazon, and Amazon “totally dictates the way the third-party company operates,” Rebecca Givan, professor of labor relations at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, told Vox. “Amazon sets the terms.
The Teamsters filed unfair labor practice charges in 2023 against Amazon and one of its California-based DSPs, Battle Tested Strategies, alleging that Amazon and DSP are joint employers of dozens of delivery workers the Teamsters have organized there. In August of this year, the NLRB ruled that Amazon and Battle Tested Strategies were joint employers, and in September, the NLRB’s regional director filed a formal complaint against Amazon.
Amazon isn’t likely to back down anytime soon—and the stakes are high
Amazon has made it “very clear that it has no intention of negotiating” with workers, Seth Harris, a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change and a former top adviser on labor policy in the Biden administration, told Vox.
First, Amazon’s business model relies on cheap labor, and that can be easily replaced during periods of high turnover, according to all labor experts Vox spoke with. The introduction of a contract that guarantees workers a certain level of pay, benefits and workplace safety runs counter to this model.
Amazon has not recognized the original Amazon Labor Union, although it is recognized by the NLRB. And they’ve also spent “tens of millions” of dollars over the years on illegal anti-union activities, Blanc said, including threatening pay and benefits to employees if they unionize, removing information about union efforts from a digital bulletin board and firing employees. for a trade union.
There are federal laws governing how companies must cooperate with unions and collective actions. But there’s no real penalty for failing to negotiate with workers, Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told Vox.
The NLRB is tasked with adjudicating labor disputes, but Amazon (as well as Elon Musk’s SpaceX) have filed lawsuits that claim the NLRB and the current dispute resolution system are unconstitutional. If the courts rule in favor of Amazon and SpaceX, it could significantly change the way the federal government handles labor disputes.
That’s why Amazon can only “delay, delay, delay” contract negotiations with striking workers, Wheaton said, hoping they’ll win their case or soon have a far more labor-hostile Trump administration and the NLRB. this is much more corporate friendly. President-elect Donald Trump will fill at least two seats on the NRLB and is expected to select pro-business candidates; however, his choice for Labor Secretary is seen as more pro-Labour than expected.
No matter what stance the incoming administration takes, the pressure on unions at Amazon, which has grown in only a relatively short period of time, is likely to continue.
“This strike is a way to make it clear to the company — and the public — that (the pressure on unions and contract negotiations) is not going away,” Blanc said.