Two recent rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in California and in Georgia have affirmed that Amazon must bargain with package drivers who are legally employed by subcontracted delivery service partners (DSPs). In the past several months, Amazon DSP drivers in Queens, San Francisco, Skokie, and Los Angeles have also sought unionization with the Teamsters. The joint-employer rulings are significant because they challenge Amazon’s original strategy to avoid the threat of unionization as they built out their own last mile network.

Just ten years ago, Amazon had a network of fulfillment centers, but no last mile facilities. (For a summary of Amazon’s facility types, check out On the Seams’s primer on Amazon’s distribution network.) Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Amazon was content to rely on third parties — primarily the United Parcel Service and the United States Postal Service — for home delivery. In 2014, driven by ambitious goals for Prime delivery speeds, Amazon rolled out Amazon Logistics, a proprietary delivery network.

Amazon Logistics experimented with a mix of independent contracts, “Flex” drivers, and small subcontracted service providers before landing on a uniform standard with the Delivery Service Partner program in 2018. When the DSP program began, Amazon was delivering about 20 percent of their own packages: 800 million in 2018. In 2023, Amazon delivered 5.9 billion packages via their own network, estimated around 80 percent of their total package volume.