NEW YORK CITY — On December 19 more than a hundred Amazon workers organizing with the Teamsters launched a cascade of unfair practice strikes from coast to coast at the logistics giant.
At the picket line in Queens, New York, police arrested and released Anthony Rosario, a Teamsters organizer, and Jogernsyn Cardenas, one of the striking workers, and then threatened mass arrests before breaking the line in two to allow vans through.
Six other facilities in California, Illinois and Georgia are also on strike and the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y. will soon follow suit.
The Teamsters are striking Amazon because the company refuses to recognize the unions at its delivery stations and fulfillment center and bargain with its workers. The union has argued that under the new joint-employer standard the delivery drivers are also legally employees of Amazon, which Amazon disputes.
In response, the Teamsters put Amazon bosses on the clock to provide bargaining dates by December 15 or face nationwide strikes before the holiday shopping bonanza.
The strike began at 6 a.m at delivery station DBK4 in Maspeth, New York, where workers transport orders to customers’ doorsteps in the NYC metro area. Hours into the strike, the New York Police Department responded to the planned disruption to the company’s operations with two arrests.
The first was of Amazon driver Jogernsyn Cardenas, who says he joined the union push at the urging of his nephew but didn’t realize the strike had begun when he showed up to work today.
He stopped his van as striking co-workers shouted for him to join them. “We were surrounding the van, and we told him to get out. Come join us!” says Latrice Johnson, a driver at one of Amazon’s eight subcontractors at DBK4 (whom I interviewed about the union campaign in September). “He was listening, and he wanted to know more. And the police stopped that, and they kept telling him to keep it moving. He was saying, ‘How am I gonna go anywhere? The people are here. I can’t hit people.’”
NYPD officers swarmed Cardenas, blocking him in the cab of his van and ultimately arresting him after he attempted to leave his vehicle, over shouts of “Let him go!” from fellow workers and allies.
“To see that man wrongfully snatched out of the van while he’s at work on the clock” reminded Johnson of her brothers’ encounters with police. “And I stood up for him like I would do for any one of these people out here, like we all family.”
Johnson joined others demanding Cardenas’s release and trailed the police as they marched Cardenas down the street to a patrol car. An officer grabbed her by the waist and flung her back, then shoved her.
The second arrest was of Anthony Rosario, Teamsters organizer and former UPS driver who was a leader in the 1997 UPS strike.
Rosario says he and the workers were complying with police officers’ demand to let one truck through every two to three minutes. When police began trying to let more trucks through, he says, he “continued to walk, using my right … and you know, they just decided to arrest me. So at the end of the day, they’re violating not only our First Amendment rights, but they’re violating all the workers rights on this picket line.”
Workers stood strong on picket lines, disrupting deliveries. Police threatened mass arrests with zip ties in hand, though they did not follow through as workers united to defend each other.
Eventually, police barricaded the picket line and cleared a path for trucks to leave the delivery station unimpeded.
Amazon directed comment requests to the NYPD, saying it was the police who “chose to detain the individuals.” The NYPD did not respond by publication time. In a previous statement, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told In These Times the strike is illegal and the Teamsters do not represent thousands of Amazon workers.
Rosario and Cardenas were released with support from the Teamsters legal team.
“We are all together in this. That’s the only way we’re gonna get what we want,” said Cardenas afterward, alternating between speaking in Spanish and English. “We gotta keep fighting. If we don’t fight, we’re not gonna get more money and more benefits. Because, believe it or not, we deliver more packages than UPS and FedEx.”
Teamsters Local 804 President Vincent Perrone views the fight at Amazon as a do-or-die moment to uphold industry standards across the logistics industry. “When you look at these Amazon drivers and warehouse workers, they have to pay for their own medical,” says Perrone. “They have no pensions. They’re making half the hourly wage of UPS employees. UPS and FedEx used to dominate the industry. Now this shithole company comes up that’s worth a trillion dollars, and they’re sending people off into space. But they want to pay people like shit. We have to change that, and we are going to change it right now.”
Asked how he felt upon his release, Cardenas said, “I feel like a hero because I had the courage to stop my van.”
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Luis Feliz Leon is an associate editor and organizer at Labor Notes.
