The Amazon workers who walked off the job at warehouses across the country at peak season are trying to establish a union beachhead against one of the most important — and most anti-union — employers in the world.
Amazon workers picketed their employer over the weekend through blisteringly frigid weather and, in New York, a flooded sidewalk as part of an escalating series of strikes by a minority of workers across the logistics behemoth’s supply chain. These strikes, waged from coast to coast at nine warehouses, are part of a nationwide movement to consolidate organizing at the logistics giant in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).
In 2022, the Teamsters launched a division to support organizing at Amazon. The union now represents 5,500 workers at the hulking JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island that formed the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU) over two years ago. The ALU voted in June to affiliate with the Teamsters, creating ALU-IBT Local 1. Amazon has refused to recognize the union and bargain a contract.
As the strikes wrap up as peak season ends on Christmas Eve, it’s difficult to know how disruptive the limited-duration walkouts were to Amazon’s operations. Amazon has claimed the strikes have had no effect. Several workers at different facilities, however, have said that the number of packages they moved per day dropped by a third or more.
But just as crucial is whether the strikes help build momentum for a national movement to organize Amazon. The Teamsters say the union represents ten thousand workers across ten facilities. Workers participated in strikes in nine cities. Teamsters also extended picket lines to dozens of Amazon fulfillment centers across the country, leafleting drivers and warehouse workers. In Monroe, Ohio, a group of Amazon workers who were already organizing with the Teamsters saw the picket lines and spontaneously joined the strike.
The independent union Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) went public with its petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on December 23 — synchronizing their timing with peak holiday shopping season and the national mobilization by the Teamsters.
The election filing is the result of nearly three years of organizing at the two-million-square-foot fulfillment center RDU1 in Garner, North Carolina. Those three years have seen multiple arrests and firings of key organizers, the union says.
CAUSE president Reverend Ryan Brown, who was recently fired by the company, said the union went public with the campaign once workers determined they had reached a majority of their coworkers and to ensure it keyed in on the end of peak on Christmas Eve, when Amazon lays off its seasonal employees.
“There’s a lot of eyes now on Amazon thanks to the good work that so many organizations — the Teamsters, Amazonians United, our comrades at JFK8 and ourselves — have been doing,” said Brown. “This election filing, it puts it on the conscience of the American people.”
Amazon Sets the Standard
At midnight on Saturday, Amazon warehouse workers at JFK8 walked off the job, thronged by their cheering off-duty coworkers, into a gusty and snowy night. One of these off-duty workers joining in the strike was Angela Daly, who has worked at Amazon for four years: “My father was a Teamster, so he would turn in his grave if I didn’t join.”
Hauntings from beyond the grave aside, Daly wants longer and more frequent breaks to prevent injuries. The grueling twelve-hour shifts have taken a toll on her body, she says, and the ten-second breaks Amazon allots workers every half hour to do stretches is not enough when “physically carrying stuff up and down ladders.” She has sustained two injuries on her hands.
JFK8 warehouse worker Ken Coates, also from a family of Teamsters, walked out at midnight. “Amazon hasn’t come to the table in a little over two years to negotiate this contract, and it’s illegal,” he said. “Amazon is a huge company, and they will be setting the standard for how the working class is treated in the future. If we allow them to treat us any way, that’s saying any working-class person can get treated any way a company deems fit.”
Workers at Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub in Southern California, who demanded union recognition December 11, walked off the job at noon the same day. “It’s a nationwide movement,” said Anna Ortega, a warehouse worker at the KSBD air hub. “We are supposed to be processing up to 200,000 packages a day. These last couple days, they sliced it in half. For them to say that there is no impact — I think it’s very clear to us here today that absolutely there is.”
Amazon did not respond by publication time to requests for comment on production impacts and other worker allegations in this story.
The Teamsters have made inroads into organizing Amazon drivers in the company’s 4,400 delivery service partners (DSPs) program, who are nominally employed by contractors while Amazon retains full control of their operations. Two big air hubs — KSBD in Southern California and KCVG in northern Kentucky, both previously part of independent union organizing efforts — have now affiliated with the Teamsters. Amazon says 390,000 drivers work at its DSPs. That’s 60,000 more drivers than the Teamsters represent at the United Parcel Service (UPS).
The escalating strike pickets boomeranged on Sunday, December 21, back to Queens, New York, where two dozen delivery station warehouse workers joined more than a hundred drivers who kicked off the strike at 6 a.m. on December 19.
Ira Pollock, a DBK4 warehouse worker, said he and his coworkers similarly walked out last year around the same time. But this was the first time warehouse workers and drivers had struck together. “We were met by a whole lot of drivers who are also picketing,” said Pollock. “The drivers have been leading this struggle. One thing we learned is that it’s a lot more impactful when you include drivers and warehouse workers together. We’re seeing it impact Amazon’s operations.”
Even while Amazon has adapted to pickets outside the facility and has brought in new drivers, Pollock said, “we hit them with a walkout on the inside of the warehouse. Because of the lower head count inside the warehouse, less packages are getting loaded into vans. That’s more money they’re paying on this building to process less volume.”
Before the strike, warehouse worker Dylan Maraj was riled up about Amazon hiring union-busting consultants to dissuade him and his coworkers from building a union. Maraj has participated in walkouts previously and organized petition drives. But he was impressed with the solidarity he saw on the picket line between warehouse workers and drivers across classifications and other divisions.
“The strike has helped people get hyped up about the overall direction of what the organizing is,” said Maraj. “People at the warehouse are really skeptical about whether it’s growing or not. Once they saw the picket and the strike, and they saw that the strike was becoming a national event, it has been growing in support ever since.”
Speaking on the picket line after walking out, Amazon warehouse worker Sean Dennis said managers felt exasperated: “‘Here we go again,’” he characterized their mood. “This is the third day in a row. They’re just fed up.”
Warehouse worker Maria Carnrike has worked at Amazon for four and half years after transferring from Tampa, Florida, to the Queens facility. She said striking was “really empowering, especially when you’re walking out and you see the look on the managers’ faces, like, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To go fight for our rights.’”
Carnrike said one manager alternated from resignation to joviality. “When we went to go clock out, he just had his head down. He looked really upset.” He then tried a different tack. “‘He was like, ‘Hey guys!’ And I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m walking out.’”
The response from management was a small victory. While Carnrike wants her topped-out $24.40 an hour wage to increase to $30 an hour to compensate for the physical toll on her body, the main sticking points are safer working conditions and management accountability. She said that managers routinely penalize workers with secret write-ups and disregard the accommodations she was granted after sustaining an injury on the job.
A Worldwide Strike
Even in the cold weather, the picket lines have grown. On Saturday afternoon, water gushed from the DBK4 delivery station’s fire suppression system, flooding the picket line, damaging union paraphernalia, and soaking the shoes of picketers. Workers waded through water to salvage boxes of T-shirts and hats, their feet drenched as water swooshed out for thirteen minutes, according to time stamps from video reviewed by us. The Teamsters blamed Amazon for flooding the picket. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment. Police onsite dismissed any suggestion that the flood was intentional, according to the Teamsters.
ICYMI: Amazon appears to have flooded striking workers in Queens with raw sewage and freezing water during sub-zero temperatures this afternoon. That’s according to workers and allies on the scene.
Video courtesy of Ryan Bruckenthal. https://t.co/98uhOAKsaW pic.twitter.com/Osg1uErsJJ
— Luis Feliz Leon (@Lfelizleon) December 21, 2024
“We were all out here picketing, and we just noticed a wild stream of water hit the pavement,” said Danny Batista, a DBK4 Amazon driver. “It had to be at least two to three gallons a second. The only way I could describe it to you is, like at a water park, when they’re like spraying water down the slide. It’s a disgusting display of aggression.”
The flooding comes after the New York Police Department arrested and released a worker and a Teamsters organizer on the first day of the strike. For all the talk of the strike’s insignificance, the response from police in the New York metro area has been repressive.
Workers demanded the cops release the arrested Amazon driver, shouting, “Let him Go!” https://t.co/pIMkUOA438 pic.twitter.com/IdmON18dNb
— Luis Feliz Leon (@Lfelizleon) December 19, 2024
But workers also walked off the job across facilities in the metro areas of San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta. “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,’” company spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. The company also denies the strike is having any impact.
“They’re saying they aren’t affected, but they cut our volume,” said Carnrike. “We’re doing 60,000 [packages]. We’re in the middle [of] peak [season]. It’s almost Christmas. We should be doing almost 90,000.”
Amazon driver Tiffany Sanders said out of sixty drivers at her DSP, only two vans were on the road on Sunday, and managers were sending frantic messages to get them to return to work. “The whole DSP is outside,” she said of the delivery service partners, the companies subcontracted by Amazon for delivery. “We’re all supporting the strike.”
Asked about Amazon’s claim that drivers aren’t their workers, she points to her uniform. “Look at our uniform. What does it say?” she asks. It reads “Amazon.” “We’re wearing the name.”
“We’ve been lately seeing some of our coworkers calling out, and our DSP is quickly looking for replacements for them, so we feel like it has at least opened the eyes of our coworkers to choose not to cross that picket line in their own way,” said Amazon driver David Garzon.
On the first day of the strike at DBK4 in Queens, an anti-union warehouse worker who goes by the name “Foreva” told me that the drivers’ strike is undermining his ability to earn money by disrupting Amazon’s operations. “They fucking our bread up,” he said. “Everything is delayed. We already got trucks from across the street that’s trying to get to where they got to go.”
At San Francisco’s DCK6 delivery station, Brian Weston and his coworkers demanded union recognition in October. Amazon had fourteen days to either recognize the union or file for an election. Amazon warehouse worker Leah Pensler said the company didn’t file for an election, so it’s legally obligated to come to the bargaining table.
Instead, said Weston, Amazon tried to appease the union by lowering the volume of work. The company hired sixty additional workers, bumping the workforce from 100 to 160. To impress these new workers, the company, said Weston, put in a mini pool table and a canteen. Weston was wary: “This is not who they really are. They’re just giving [the new workers] a show,” he said. “A year ago, they didn’t do any of this stuff. We were understaffed and overworked.”
These last-minute changes didn’t blunt the organizing push, and workers went on strike on December 19, though they’ve since returned to work. “We politely went out, stopped everything, and said, ‘We’re going out at six o’clock. We’re proud of being a part of this worldwide strike,” he said, referencing Amazon strikes in Germany and solidarity statements by Amazon workers in India, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.
Teamsters Local 804 president Vincent Perrone says Amazon “employs about 1.5 million people, compared to UPS, which is at about 340,000. Fulfillment centers have closed down, over the years, tons of mom-and-pop businesses. Zappos used to be UPS’s biggest shippers, but now they sell Zappos on Amazon.”
Amazon surpassed UPS in the parcel business in April. The company has 593 delivery stations and 577 warehouses, including airport hubs, in the United States, according to the latest figures from the logistics supply chain firm MWPVL International.
Getting Amazon to the Bargaining Table
There’s no question that organizing Amazon is an existential question for the Teamsters and labor as a whole — nowhere more so than on Staten Island, where workers have struggled to reach a first contract. ALU-IBT Local 1 president Connor Spence says in order to take on Amazon, no facility can be an island unto themselves, because the structural power necessary to force the logistics behemoth to bargain demands a national movement.
“There needed to be escalation, given that the alternative is Amazon getting away without going to the bargaining table,” said Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.
“We could go on strike at JFK8 for five years and still not cost Amazon enough money to make it make financial sense to come to the table,” said Spence. “But if we build a national movement and figure out where in the network the strategic choke points are, and we help support and strategically organize those areas, we have a much better chance of creating the kind of pressure necessary to make Amazon start negotiating.”
“Overall, the Teamsters will have a low impact on the business, because it has only penetrated a small number of facilities, and Amazon can work around this issue relatively painlessly,” said Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International. Wulfraat estimates the daily package volume impact “is likely in the 350 to 400,000 range” across delivery stations. Of Amazon’s 593 delivery stations, he said, “Amazon’s supply chain is very resilient in that it can divert these packages to other nonunion delivery stations, third-party carriers, and/or Amazon flex drivers to ensure they get delivered.”
Sociologist Nantina Vgontzas, drawing on their research on Amazon warehouses in the United States and Europe, has argued that the company’s capacity to redirect orders in fulfillment centers diminishes workers’ positional power. Technologies such as Supply Chain Optimization Technology (SCOT) enable Amazon to remove humans from making decisions about what the warehouse should buy, where items ought to be stored, and the process for delivering boxes of goods to customers.
In the event of a work stoppage at a fulfillment center, Vgontzas’s research shows that Amazon managers can switch off facilities “by pressing a ‘little red button,’ which tells the system to not send any new orders to that warehouse. In extreme cases, managers can select the ‘big red button,’ which replans orders within the warehouse and has them fulfilled elsewhere.”
But workers still need to put these theories to the test across a whole region with a mix of facilities. Amazon has expanded and increased its use of automation in the company’s supply chain. “As it has grown, Amazon has faced vulnerabilities in these various nodes of its logistics network, and it has adjusted quickly by adding more network nodes and automating network flows,” said Vgontzas. “Organizers are keenly aware that they, in turn, need to adapt to these redundancies by building power across the supply chain. We see this in the current strike wave and wider union recognition effort, which includes fulfillment centers, delivery stations, and even air hubs.”
“This strike comes at the start of a nationally coordinated effort to unionize Amazon,” said Vgontzas.
Workers taking action are clear that it will take time to build the capacity to significantly disrupt company operations. In this early stage, the primary task is to inspire their coworkers to spread the organizing across facilities and regions so that they can build up that disruptive capacity over the long haul.
The task will be for organizers to expand coverage within facilities by developing the leaders coming out of this strike wave and drawing on their instincts to experiment with various shop-floor tactics, and to continue developing a strategic framework that coordinates Amazon warehouse workers, delivery workers, tech workers, and the communities impacted by its growth — which is just about everyone on this planet. We saw elements of all these components on the line this past week.
Vgontzas compared the experience to efforts by Amazon workers in Germany. “When [the German union] Verdi began striking Amazon in 2013, the company’s German logistics network consisted of eight fulfillment centers, half of which went on strike with about 30 to 40 percent participation,” they said:
In several of these warehouses, Verdi had an extensive steward network that in some cases broke out of the particular mold of routinized German industrial relations and experimented with shop-floor tactics. But Amazon quickly expanded and added several nodes in Poland that exclusively served the German market, where the legal restrictions on striking are stricter. Verdi was not prepared for such a quick response by Amazon, though workers have built ties with their fellow workers across borders in Poland.
By contrast, the Teamsters’ organizing has been knitted together across warehouse types and classifications, including building deep links with impacted communities and workers. Vgontzas, who was on the picket line, pointed to tech workers who joined the pickets on Staten Island, as well as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, whose livelihoods have been threatened by Big Tech. “There is a commitment to grassroots social justice unionism that over the long haul can nurture a nimble approach across nodes and the rank-and-file leadership development needed to build majority participation within nodes,” Vgontzas said.
Like United Auto Workers’ “stand-up” strike, the Teamsters and Starbucks Workers United, which expanded its strike to three hundred stores today, are using a tactic of escalating strikes, first deployed in 1993 when Alaska Airlines flight attendants announced they would be striking random flights.
“Striking at some facilities and not others retains the ability to escalate, and it also gives the employers the opportunity of avoiding escalation,” said Givan, the Rutgers labor scholar. “In a more traditional strike, you are at your maximum. There’s no ability to increase the pain you’re inflicting on the employer.” But selectively hitting specific facilities allows a union to calibrate the pressure to force the employer to the table.
It’s still too early and Amazon is too big to see if these strikes have accomplished any of that. But they are tipping the union’s hand in that direction, signaling to Amazon what may be possible if the organizing spreads, especially to even more strategic warehouses.
One theory in need of testing is the strategic value of sortation centers, where orders go after they are picked and boxed to be sorted by zip code and sent to delivery stations for shipment to the customer.
“Amazon would undoubtedly find ways to circumvent a similar action at a Sortation Center, but it wouldn’t be nearly as easy,” wrote Benjamin Fong, associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, about the company’s ability to reroute order fulfillment to other facilities. “Sortation Centers are generally located on the outskirts of urban areas, and they service a set turf of Delivery Stations nearby. So the actual physical location of Sortation Centers matters more than it does at Fulfillment Centers. Each Sortation Center is where it is because it’s the best possible location Amazon could find to service Delivery Stations in a particular area.”
But besides the impact on logistics, there is also the question of Amazon workers’ class consciousness.
“The Teamsters strike against Amazon demonstrates that the movement is growing,” said Givan:
I think both the Teamsters and Amazon will have their own arguments about how quickly it’s growing, or what the actual size is. But it’s clear that a couple years ago, there wouldn’t have been the ability to mount strikes of any kind at multiple locations. They have workers willing to walk off a job to force Amazon to the table. There are more workers not just wanting union representation, but willing to fight for it by going on strike. That’s how you build: by bringing more workers into the movement.
“Nothing Without the Workers”
These strikes represent a new chapter in efforts to organize one of the country’s largest employers. Amazon’s business model has a massive impact on the country’s entire workforce. As workers build their unions with the Teamsters, a nationally coordinated movement to organize the logistics giant has emerged, knitting together a network of facilities that have just flexed their muscle by striking across the country, backed by one of the largest unions in the logistics industry.
Although the strike will showcase for Teamster leaders and workers the unevenness of organizing strength, the strikes represent a targeted sectoral approach (as opposed to a general workers’ union approach) in the US labor movement, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the United Food and Commercial Workers and Service Employees International Union attempted to organize Walmart in the early 2000s. The path to build workers’ structural power — and jump-start the revival and growth of organized labor — is through increasing sectoral density in key industries.
But setting today’s efforts apart from the Walmart campaign is the bench of shop-floor leaders who are leading these struggles. The test will be whether after the holiday mobilization, organizers can build on the contacts they’ve made to grow their numbers, and Teamsters locals and communities across the country continue to support deeper organizing into Amazon’s vast network of warehouses. The union needs to create the durable organization that can withstand Amazon’s attacks.
Nick Moran is a warehouse worker at Amazon fulfillment center in Montgomery, New York. On Saturday, walking the picket line at DBK4, he explained why he participated:
I think it’s really important for workers to see other workers fighting back and see that this is a big labor movement. Some of my coworkers are homeless. Some of them are living paycheck to paycheck and have trouble affording just to get to work, while one of the richest men in the world goes to space. That’s not acceptable, and it helps them understand that if there’s other people that disagree with it, that they could fight back too.
He thinks the strikes have contributed to building a fighting movement:
We are the ones that do the work, and we don’t really need the bosses. We know that from working in the warehouse day in, day out. People ask themselves all the time, “What does management do? What do the managers do besides look at computer screens and discipline us?” And I think people see that without us, without the trucks going out, without people putting things on the shelf like I do, that Amazon’s nothing without the workers.
This article is copublished with In These Times.