Jeff Bezos Wants Amazon Employees to “Reflect” on Juneteenth. Warehouse Workers Are Organizing Instead.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos encouraged his white-collar workers to cancel meetings for Juneteenth and “reflect and support each other.” An Amazon warehouse worker fired after organizing for workplace protections thinks that’s “a bunch of bullshit.”
Amazon employees held a protest and walkout over conditions at the company’s Staten Island distribution facility on March 30, 2020 in New York City. Spencer Platt / Getty
Earlier this week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos emailed white-collar Amazon workers encouraging them to cancel meetings today in celebration of Juneteenth. “Please take some time to learn, reflect, and support each other,” he wrote. “Slavery ended a long time ago, but racism didn’t.”
Unaddressed was the issue of Bezos’s warehouse workers, who continue to toil in the company’s facilities in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Christian Smalls, the Amazon worker who was fired after organizing a walkout at the company’s Staten Island, New York, warehouse, and John Hopkins, an Amazon worker at the company’s San Leandros, California, facility who was suspended after passing out union flyers on May 1, about their Juneteenth plans. Smalls will be speaking at the ILWU’s port shutdown in Oakland, California, while Hopkins is organizing a vigil in Richmond, California.
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