In the early morning Wednesday morning, employees of three Amazon warehouses walked out of their jobs. More than 60 employees at two delivery stations in Queens, New York, and one in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, coordinated the first multi-state strike at U.S. Amazon warehouses, demanding a $3-an-hour pay raise.
While high-profile union elections in Bessemer, Alabama and Staten Island, New York, have captured the world’s attention, an informal union called Amazonians United (AU) has launched actions in facilities across the country — and won.
The worker-led organization started when a handful of warehouse workers in Chicago gathered in 2019 to protest the company limiting their access to water, according to an interview in Jacobin† “We are not a movement without leaders,” said Ira Pollock, an AU member who left one of Queens’ warehouses on Wednesday. “We are a leadership movement.” The group has public branches in Chicago, New York, Maryland, Sacramento, North Carolina and other locations, while others prefer to operate underground. Rather than seek certification through the National Labor Relations Board, which would require Amazon to negotiate wages and other terms with the group, workers are exercising their rights to participate in protected coordinated activities: they raise issues when they arise and conduct campaigns to improve their working conditions.
In the past few years, AU members say they’ve won pay raises, paid sick time they were previously denied, paid time off for part-timers and Covid-19 safety measures, among other wins. Some are small but powerful, such as the installation of anti-fatigue mats to cover the hard warehouse floor and improve the working conditions of people standing for a long time. Earlier this year, workers in Chicago said they: won a salary increase of between $1.45 and $2.30 an hour after walking away from multiple sites in December and demanding higher pay. Amazon says the pay increases were part of a regular pay review process that impacted employees at more than two dozen Chicago locations. Inspired by their colleagues, workers at six warehouses, including those in Queens and Maryland, petitioned Amazon in December demanding a variety of demands, including a five-minute break, an end to understaffing, a bad weather policy and a $3 raise. . In Maryland, workers say the current minimum wage is $15.90, and in Queens it is $15.75.
“We are proud to offer industry-leading pay, competitive advantages and the opportunity for everyone to grow within the company. While there are many well-established ways to ensure we hear the views of our employees within our company, we also respect the right of some to make their views known externally,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement.
Workers say the company issued a rule in January banning phones from the warehouse floor, and they have filed a petition demanding it reverse that order. “We won that demand almost immediately,” said Linda, who works in package sorting at the DMD9 facility in Maryland. The company had recently come under fire for reintroducing a cell phone ban after six employees in Illinois were killed at the warehouse during a series of tornadoes.
