Last year, the Teamsters attempted and failed to unionize Amazon in Alberta, Canada. A reporter working for Jacobin and Ricochet went undercover at an Amazon warehouse for almost five months and witnessed firsthand the challenges put to the Teamsters’ union drive.
As Amazon rolls out its millionth robot on the warehouse floor, it is important to recognize that the company is not any closer to ridding itself of the burden of human labor. Amazon can still be unionized.
Jeff Bezos doesn't deserve any praise for the recent raise at Amazon — not least because $15 isn't anywhere near enough.
The 2024 holiday season Amazon strike seemed driven more by a desire for media attention than the development of the deep worker base fundamental to forcing the company to accept a union.
With Bernie Sanders on his way to Bessemer, Alabama to support warehouse workers voting on a union, and the company facing increasingly negative press over working conditions that include drivers being forced to urinate in bottles, Amazon’s PR operation is getting defensive.
Despite recent breakthroughs in Amazon organizing nationally, it’s still a tough slog for workers to get the company to change. But workers at an Inland Empire, California, Amazon facility recently showed that it’s possible.
In a massive victory, Amazon workers recently won a union at a warehouse in New York. So now the company is trying every trick in the union-busting playbook to throttle worker organizing at a second facility.
Market ideologues paint Amazon as a model of a flexible, networked platform capitalism. Yet Amazon’s growth has revitalized parts of the Fordism that Silicon Valley claimed to have overcome — including the rise of an organized blue-collar workforce.
Workers at Amazon’s new Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse have filed for a union election. They’re taking on one of the most virulently anti-union companies in the United States.
Amazon’s very business model is based on ruthless exploitation of workers and methodical plunder of public goods — fueling massive inequality between the places it enriches and those it leaves behind.
Both Amazon and Walmart invest massively in highly invasive technological surveillance of their warehouse workforce — surveillance that then enables the hyperexploitation both companies’ workers are subject to.
Amazon maims its workers and drives wages down, yet the company still attracts job applicants and claims to provide “good jobs.” Those claims were strong enough to play a role in the defeat of a union effort in Bessemer, Alabama — but that says less about Amazon than it does about the miserable state of the labor market.
This spring, Amazon delivery drivers unionized with the Teamsters — but the logistics giant refuses to bargain with them. The workers are now setting up picket lines at Amazon warehouses across the country, joined by fellow Teamsters from other employers.
It’s been a year since Amazon fired Chris Smalls for organizing a rally to protest COVID-19 conditions. Now, he’s trying to unionize his former warehouse, and he won’t stop until there’s worker justice at Amazon.
Amazon Labor Union’s spectacular victory in Staten Island has rightly captured headlines across the country. A key part of this win, however, has not yet been explored: how immigrant workers organized each other to support the union.
In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.
New York’s transit workers have enormous leverage over Amazon. But to use it, they will have to break with Andrew Cuomo.
A year and a half ago, workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England, launched the first formal strike against the retail giant in British history. Today the workers finish voting on whether to unionize.
Amazon is posing as a friend to veterans who need jobs when they return home from military service — while mistreating those veterans just as brutally as any other Amazon worker.
Ever since Amazon arrived in Poland in 2014, the country has been a laboratory for the company's strategy of pitting workers of different nations against one another. We spoke with Polish shop-floor activists who are organizing Amazon workers for a global fightback.