Amazon Strike Takeaways: Walk-Outs Slowed Packages, Boosted Union Power

But just as crucial is whether the strikes help build momentum for a national movement to organize Amazon. The Teamsters say the union represents 10,000 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 their 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 2 million-square-foot fulfillment center RDU1 in Garner, N.C. 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, says the union went public with the campaign once they determined they had reached a majority of their coworkers and to ensure they 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,” says Brown. ​“This election filing, it puts it on the conscience of the American people.”

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,” says 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 says 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 says 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 says that managers routinely penalize workers with secret write-ups and disregard the accommodations she was granted after sustaining an injury on the job. 

“We were all out here picketing, and we just noticed a wild stream of water hit the pavement,” says 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 waterpark, when they’re like spraying water down the slide. It’s a disgusting display of aggression.”

The flooding comes after the NYPD 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.

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,” says 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 says out of 60 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 says of 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 co – workers 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,” says 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 14 days to either recognize the union or file for an election. Amazon warehouse worker Leah Pensler says the company didn’t file for an election, so it’s legally obligated to come to the bargaining table.

Instead, says 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, says 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 says. ​“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 says, 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’ 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 U.S., according to the latest figures from the logistics supply-chain firm MWPVL International.

Sociologist Nantina Vgontzas, drawing on their research on Amazon warehouses in the U.S. 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 re-plans 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,” says 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, says 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 8 fulfillment centers, half of which went on strike with about 30% to 40% participation,” they say. 

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 members of 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 says. 

Like the United Auto Workers’ Stand-Up Strike, the Teamsters and Starbucks Workers United, which expanded its strike to 300 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,” says 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 & 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,” says 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.”

This story was a collaboration with Jacobin magazine.