Supporting Amazon Organizing Efforts
Amazon currently has over a million employees in the United States, which means that 1 out of every 153 working people is employed at Amazon.This number does not even include the ever-growing number of workers who are technically employed by outside staffing firms, but in reality do the exact same work alongside the workers who are employed by Amazon.
The abuses of workers at Amazon are well documented and undisputed. Workers are routinely called in on their days off with no ability to refuse the request to come in to work an overtime shift. Ever increasing productivity quotas force workers to skip breaks to the point where workers urinate in bottles on the warehouse floor.Amazon vehemently denied this until multiple photographic examples surfaced to validate the claims of workers.When Amazon made the highly publicized move to raise hourly rates to $15 an hour, they simultaneously eliminated bonuses for hourly employees.
President and CEO Andrew Jassy made over $212 million total compensation in 2021, the equivalent of about $102,000 an hour.An Amazon worker making $15 an hour earns less than 1/100th of a percent of that.Workers have taken notice and are standing up to the corporate greed at Amazon and are organizing with their co-workers for a better future and more equitable workplace where they will have a voice. Pride at Work is proud to support their efforts.
The recent organizing efforts in NewYork City and Bessemer,Alabama have been an inspiration to countless warehouse workers across the country. In the face of relentless union busting attempts by Amazon management, workers at Amazon have been resolute in standing up for their right to organize a union.
In NewYork,Amazon wrongfully accused the union of bribing workers at the same time they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a corporate union-busting firm. In Alabama, workers were subjected to constant closed-door, anti-union meetings with management and corporate union-busting attorneys.Amazon even carried out a surveillance operation on the voter mailbox, which led to an unfair labor practice charge.
We congratulate the Amazon Workers Union on their victory in New York City, and we continue to support the ongoing efforts of other Amazon workers to form a union.
Because we recognize that a union contract is the best way to secure equality in the workplace, Pride at Work commits to the following:
- Continue to vocally support the rights of Amazon workers to form a union
- Denounce the unsafe policies and procedures at Amazon that endanger workers on the job
- Demand that Amazon immediately halt their illegal anti-union activities against their workers
- Support new organizing efforts at every Amazon location, especially where there are existing Pride at Work chapters
Submitted by Pride at Work National