Failing to unionize Amazon would hasten the US labor movement’s decline. But that doesn’t have to happen. We have a fleeting opportunity to organize Amazon — if labor and the Left make it an urgent priority.
Yesterday, staff at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse did something no British workers at the company had previously done: they walked off the job.
Today, Amazon warehouse workers in Shakopee, Minnesota are launching a six-hour strike on Prime Day, the company’s biggest shopping event of the year. If successful, they could ignite similar actions across the country — and make Jeff Bezos really start to worry about worker power.
The cameras and news trucks may be leaving town. But at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where the company won a closely watched unionization vote last week, the fight isn’t over. And at Amazon’s other warehouses, it’s just getting started.
Amazon represents the pinnacle challenge to union organizers and socialists throughout the country. Are we in a 1919 moment, still a generation of failures away from breakthrough success? Or closer to 1935, approaching the tipping point of winning real worker power?
Amazon and Jeff Bezos have made a killing from the pandemic while underpaid warehouse employees have to work in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. On Prime Day, the most lucrative date on the company calendar, workers are organizing to challenge “Amazon capitalism.”
Critics are blasting leftists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for chasing Amazon away from New York City. But we have nothing to apologize for — it's the Left that is fighting for unionized, well-paying jobs.
The New York City left won an astonishing victory over Amazon. The triumph holds lessons for leftists everywhere.
Two joint-employer rulings by the NLRB challenge Amazon’s strategy for dodging unionization among DSP delivery drivers. If scaled up, the recent worker organizing spurred by the rulings could present serious disruptive threats to Amazon's entire operation.
Amazon has released a laughable statement denying what’s been obvious since the company’s founding: that it, like many other US companies, actively and systematically violates international labor standards prohibiting anti-union interference in workers’ business.
German workers fighting for a fair contract with Amazon could transform the service sector on a global scale.
Yesterday, Amazon workers in Italy held the first nationwide strike in the company’s history. Jeff Bezos’s firm has long used subcontracting, temporary hiring, and a maze of contracts to divide its workforce — but unionizing warehouse staff have made common cause with outsourced delivery drivers.
The New York Times’ Amazon union election coverage is a tale as old as time: When workers vote to back a union, employers blame outside agitators. When workers reject a union after a massive anti-union campaign by the boss, it was the workers’ own free choice.
Amazon wants to be both “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company” and “Earth’s Best Employer.” But it can’t have both. In fact, its customer-dazzling business model is predicated on worker exploitation and endangerment.
Amazon workers in Staten Island have achieved the most important labor victory in the United States since the 1930s. Here’s an inside account of how they did it.
In response to a successful unionization effort at a warehouse in Quebec, Amazon is shuttering its operations in the entire province. Its punitive behavior demonstrates that traditional organizing methods won’t work on the corporate behemoth.
Yesterday was the final voting day for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama. We don't know the results yet — but we do know that if the PRO Act was already law, Amazon wouldn't have been able to resort to its dirty anti-union tricks.
Climate change means workers have to labor in increasingly dangerous heat during the summer months. Corporations are happy to put workers’ lives on the line — and the federal government isn’t doing enough to stop it.
Since the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in New York, interest in organizing has surged nationwide. In North Carolina, worker-organizers are building solidarity by helping coworkers struggling with starvation wages and an increasingly punitive management.
In an interview, the lead organizer for the Amazon union campaign in Bessemer says that the drive has built momentum to unionize Amazon despite the defeat — and that “Bezos had better not get too cocky, because them folks are pretty fired up.”