Exploited Amazon workers need a union. When will they get one? | Michael Sainato

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

‘With a net worth of around $140bn, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is now the richest person in the world. That distinction has come at the expense
of Amazon’s workers. In order for those workers to begin sharing in the
vast wealth their labor has afforded Bezos and other Amazon executives,
they need a union.

Since Amazon’s founding
in 1994, the company has successfully suppressed all efforts by its
employees to unionize and improve working conditions. A few years ago,
maintenance and repair technicians at Amazon filed a petition with the
National Labor Relations Board announcing their intention to form what
would have been Amazon’s first union. Amazon immediately hired a law firm to suppress the organizing effort.

In 2000, after an arm of the Communication Workers of America attempted to organize
customer service employees, Amazon responded by shutting down the call
center where they worked. (The company claimed, unpersuasively, that the
firings weren’t related.)

The same year, the New York Times reported
that Amazon’s internal website for managers included instructions on
detecting and busting unionizing efforts. In 2016, the Times exposed
a manager at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware who made up an anti-union
story to scare employees off organizing. According to the Times, several
employees appeared to have been fired for advocating a union.

While Amazon has been diligently working to shut down any prospect of
its workers unionizing, investigative journalists and activists have
uncovered widespread abuses of workers. Ambulances were called to
British Amazon warehouses 600 times in three years. James Bloodworth, a
writer who went undercover at an Amazon warehouse in Staffordshire,
England, discovered that workers there routinely urinated in water bottles to avoid being punished for taking breaks from work.

Similar conditions have been reported in the United States. In a 2011 essay
for the Atlantic, writer Vanessa Veselka shared her experiences working
at an Amazon warehouse outside Seattle. She described how employees
were forced to work in robotic, fast-paced conditions. Veselka was
eventually fired from her temp position at the warehouse after she
attempted to organize a union.

More recently, warehouse workers told
Business Insider about time-crunched employees using trash bins to go to
the bathroom. Employees also described a work atmosphere predicated on
fear of missing productivity targets, and said that employees spent most
of their lunch breaks waiting in line for onerous security screenings.
Former Amazon workers have also said they are pressured to under-report warehouse injuries.

Amazon workers are not paid wages that reflect these strenuous
working conditions. In at least four states, the company is one of the top 20 employers of people dependent on food stamps. In a 2017 corporate filing, Amazon reported
that the median salary of its employees is $28,446, or roughly $13.68
an hour for full-time employees. Jeff Bezos makes more than that every nine seconds.

…Amazon’s tendency to locate its warehouses in rural areas
also makes it more difficult for workers to leave Amazon to find higher
paying work – though Amazon still has one of the highest employee
turnover rates in corporate America. According to PayScale,
Amazon’s employee-turnover rates are the second worst of all Fortune
500 companies. In addition, a large portion of the company’s employees
are temporary; the company regularly hires 120,000 seasonal employees to handle extra workloads during the holidays.

Those who do stay on as full-time employees are pushed to their
physical limits – making it all the more difficult for workers to find
time and energy to organize for collective rights.

In Europe, Amazon workers have found more success. In March, Amazon
workers at a warehouse in San Fernando de Henares, Spain, received union
support as they organized their first strike, joining similar strikes in Germany and Italy. In Italy, after strikes and protests, Amazon recently agreed to end unfair scheduling practices.

Though Amazon has suppressed union efforts in the US, campaigners in
Seattle recently made a heroic effort to push back on the campaign’s
bullying. Last month, local leaders and activists there successfully
lobbied the Seattle city council to pass a
“head tax” on Seattle corporations grossing more than $20m in revenue.

Advocates in favor of the tax argued that Amazon, which paid no federal taxes
in 2017, should contribute to funding city services; such tax revenue
could be used for affordable housing and homeless services. Amazon responded
to the tax by threatening to scale back its business in Seattle. As a
testament to the political power Amazon wields, the Seattle city council
repealed the tax with no replacement just a month after the same council members unanimously passed it.

The lesson from that episode seems to be that only unions, not local legislation, can really hold Amazon accountable to its workers…

The
reality is that the decline of America’s traditional retail industry has
left a void that corporate titans like Amazon will continue to exploit –
unless employees, unions and Amazon customers work together to raise
wages and improve working conditions.

Exploited Amazon workers need a union. When will they get one? | Michael Sainato