Queens Drivers Joined

A delivery station is a small warehouse, the last stop in Amazon’s logistics chain, where packages are dispatched to the drivers who deliver them.

At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, 200 drivers struck, including 190 who did their full picket-line duty, meaning they walked the picket all five days, and ten who participated only partially, opting to stay home or cross the line. Eight DSPs operate out of the Queens location, with a total workforce of 700 to 800 drivers.

At the same location, two dozen warehouse workers joined the strike the morning of December 21, out of 120 or more. Workers there have been leading walkouts over the past three years, but this one had the strongest participation yet and was the first to include drivers.

“We have stronger, more experienced leaders,” said one of the strikers, who has been at Amazon for five years:

And the people in the warehouse see it. They’re gonna see us come back to work, and they’re gonna see Amazon’s full of shit and that the union is not this outside group — it’s these people who went on strike and are now working next to them on the belt.

On Staten Island, Dues Lies Hurt

At the mammoth JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, estimates of strike participation ranged from 150 to 350. Days earlier, Amazon Labor Union–IBT Local 1 (ALU) president Connor Spence had said in a statement that 700 workers had pledged to strike. The facility had expanded its workforce for the holidays from 5,500 to more than 6,000. Nationwide Amazon hired 250,000 seasonal workers.

At Local 1’s union hall before midnight on December 20, Vice President Brima Sylla was preparing to lead workers out: “We’ll be making sure we get most of the workers from all the departments, from inbound to outbound to shipdock.”

But once he got inside the facility, Sylla said, managers pulled him into a meeting, delaying the walkout. As I stood outside with a gaggle of reporters and supporters, the cops asked people to leave and began checking Amazon IDs. I hid behind a car as the cops marched the other reporters off the property. Once the coast was clear, I recorded the walkout. Fourteen workers walked out a little before 1 a.m., while a dozen more waited outside cheering.

The picket lines swelled to hundreds counting supporters, including many from the Democratic Socialists of America, which rented two buses. Workers per picket shift numbered about thirty to fifty.

With freezing sleet falling, Ken Coates said some of his coworkers were too intimidated to take part. He said Amazon had threatened workers that if their unpaid time off (UPT) ran out, they would be terminated. It is illegal for Amazon to fire workers for striking and likely illegal to threaten to do so.

The company also spread lies about the union deducting dues even without a contract — a misrepresentation of the voluntary dues that the union is encouraging.

“A lot of our coworkers are still scared,” said Coates. “But hopefully with this community support, they’ll be encouraged to come together.”

Amazon’s insistence on docking workers for UPT when they strike has been a big challenge at warehouses because it effectively reduces the duration of strikes and interferes with workers’ federal right to engage in concerted activity. Workers have filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, but the company keeps violating their rights while stalling in the courts.

“When we try to explain to people they have these protections, it’s difficult also to reconcile that with the messaging that in another area of the law, Amazon’s obligation to bargain, they’re breaking it,” said Spence. “And so then we had to pivot the conversation, helping people understand the laws exist, and they do protect us to a certain degree, but the real protection we have when we engage in these kinds of actions is the power of numbers.”

Around the Country

At the Southern California air hub KSBD, one hundred workers struck. The facility employs about one thousand.

In the Atlanta area, an estimated thirty drivers struck, at one of the three DSPs that operate out of the DGT8 delivery station. Amazon caps the workforce of each DSP at eighty to 120 drivers.

At the San Francisco DCK6 delivery station, twenty out of 160 warehouse workers struck.

In Southern California, the Teamsters count the delivery station DAX8 as one of the struck facilities, but these workers had actually been fired in 2023. After workers unionized at the DSP, Battle-Tested Strategies, Amazon canceled its contract, firing all eighty-four drivers; Amazon was the company’s only client, and it hasn’t operated since. (Amazon pulled the same stunt in 2017 when drivers organized at a DSP in Detroit.) Some of the fired workers have since traveled the country spreading picket-line extensions.

In the Chicago area, the delivery station DIL7 had eighty drivers on picket duty, including workers whose DSP contract had been canceled last June as well as workers from the other three active DSP contractors. The workers there extended picket lines to four other facilities.

I wasn’t able to secure numbers for drivers at another delivery station in Southern California, DFX4.

Workers didn’t strike at an air hub in Kentucky, and at locations where the worker committees are only loosely affiliated with the Teamsters, including a fulfillment center in the Hudson Valley of New York and a delivery station in Pontiac, Michigan, where workers previously walked off the job.

Meanwhile on December 23, after three years of organizing, the independent union Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment filed for election at a huge fulfillment center in North Carolina.

A Five-Year Program?

No doubt the Teamsters have inflated the rhetoric in calling these “historic” and the “largest” strikes at Amazon. But the strikes weren’t fake or astroturfed, either.

Many of the facilities that participated in the strike were part of formerly independent organizing efforts led by rank-and-file workers and salts. Besides the ALU at the JFK8 fulfillment center in New York, all of the following have now joined the Teamsters: Amazonians United NYC at DBK4; Amazonians United ATL at DGT8; the Kentucky air hub KCVG, which had been loosely affiliated with ALU; and the air hub KSBD in California, which until recently was an independent organizing effort by the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United and loosely affiliated with Amazonians United.

The Teamsters union has increasingly gotten more serious about taking the fight to Amazon, not just rhetorically but also by investing in the organizing push. One piece of that is using picket-line extensions to get regional councils and locals on board.

In a December 23 appearance on the racist nationalist commentator Tucker Carlson’s YouTube show, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said the fight at Amazon is going to take time. “We’ve put together a program,” he said. “That’s going to be a four- or five-year program. Every single day we are building momentum. We’re building worker power.”

O’Brien’s overtures to far-right figures like Carlson who are stoking nativist nationalism present an obstacle to the organizing at Amazon, where black, Latino, and immigrant workers make up a majority of the multiethnic workforce. O’Brien has been cozying up to Donald Trump and appeared last summer at the Republican National Convention where the crowd waved “Deport Them Now” signs.

Building a Sand Castle

The central challenge at Amazon, for Teamsters and independent unions alike, is how to build a durable organization in a workplace with an annual churn of 150 percent. Organizing there can be like building a sand castle on a beach shore only to watch subsequent waves wash it away.

Amazonians United’s core strategy has been to build power through minority actions, what the late historian Mike Davis called “the ceaseless guerrilla warfare against management’s despotism.”

“We think big but start small, building on wins that grow our confidence in taking greater risks over time,” members of the network wrote in Labor Notes in 2020, after running petition campaigns, marching on the boss, and organizing walkouts in multiple states.

Robotics Is Key

Last summer during Prime Week, almost one hundred Amazon workers at the air hub KCVG in northern Kentucky walked off the job, reportedly forcing the company to reroute planes. One striker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that the airport usually handles between 350,000 to 400,000 packages on a typical day. The day of the strike, he said, packages dropped to 297,000.

Management “did everything they could to make sure that either people didn’t participate or that people didn’t see anything,” he said. “I have never seen that building run as smooth and efficient. [All the packages for the shift] were done by noon. We did impact their production that day as far as what they normally would have done, because they had to pawn it off on somebody else or just cancel it entirely.”

While a majority of the airport’s four thousand workers didn’t participate, the minority strike brought out key personnel in Amazon’s robotics (AR) department. “All the packages come up to AR, and then they go on to a robot, and the robot takes it to a chute, and the chute kicks it down to wherever it is going,” the worker explained. “You don’t need two or three thousand people to walk out:

You need AR, or most of it, and especially your AFMs, your Amnesty Floor Monitors. They’re the ones that go out and fix the robots when they bomb out or whatever. And there’s only about six of those at a given time.

The key groups are tug drivers, maintenance engineers, and robotics, this worker said: “If those three groups leave, that building stops.”

Despite the waves crashing against the sand castle, small committees have begun piecing together intel like this and building tiny beachheads of shop floor power. Knitting them together, and then massively scaling up, will be one of the most formidable labor struggles of the twenty-first century.