Warehouse employees last month staged a walkout in Michigan to demand safer working conditions at their facility. So did workers in New York, Illinois and Minnesota.
These and other Amazon.com employees across the US are seizing on the COVID-19 pandemic to demand the world’s largest online retailer offer more paid sick leave and temporarily shut warehouses with infections for deep cleaning.
Employees in at least 11 US states this year have voiced their concerns and staged actions to highlight a variety of purported workplace deficiencies, allegations the company has denied.
Illustration: Mountain People
Supporting these Amazon workers are labor groups and unions eager to penetrate the Seattle-based behemoth after years of failed attempts to unionize its operations.
Reuters spoke with 16 unions and labor groups targeting Amazon. They included established organizations — such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) — as well as newer worker advocacy groups such as Warehouse Workers for Justice and Athena, a coalition of labor and social justice groups that have criticized Amazon’s business practices.
Most unions acknowledged their long odds at organizing Amazon using traditional tactics such as holding meetings and gauging interest. Legal hurdles to unionizing the company’s workplaces and mounting elections are steep.
For now, many groups said, they are showing workers how to harness public opinion to shame Amazon into granting concessions.
The strategy proved effective in the national “Fight for US$15” campaign to raise the minimum wage. Labor organizations helped retail and fast-food workers stage highly publicized protests and social media campaigns to draw attention to their modest pay at a time when the US economy was booming.
Cities and states including Seattle, San Francisco, California, Arkansas and Missouri raised their minimum wages, as did some large US employers, including Amazon, which attributed its pay increases to a tight labor market, as well as pressure from lawmakers and labor groups.
In the latest efforts targeting Amazon, organizations are helping workers create online petitions, connect with elected officials, contact media and file labor complaints with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The initiative puts public pressure on Amazon to respond, several groups said, while laying the groundwork for unions to recruit card-carrying members in the future.
“We expect that there will be more push for unionization when we get to the other side of this,” RWDSU president Stuart Applebaum said.
Amazon spokeswoman Rachael Lighty said that the company already offers what these groups are requesting: US$15 per hour or more to start, health benefits and opportunities for career growth.
“We encourage anyone interested in the facts to compare our overall pay and benefits, as well as our speed in managing this crisis, to other retailers and major employers across the country,” she said.
Central to the organizing effort is fear among some front-line Amazon workers over the spread of COVID-19 in the company’s warehouses, union officials said.
At least 800 workers in Amazon’s 519 US distribution facilities have tested positive for COVID-19, based on internal company figures compiled by Jana Jumpp, an Amazon warehouse employee in Indiana, who shared the numbers with Reuters.
Amazon sends text messages and automated calls to employees alerting them to positive cases in its facilities. Jumpp aggregates cases mentioned in messages sent to her by Amazon workers around the US.
The informal process she has developed likely misses cases, Jumpp said, but she and other employees said that Amazon does not share a running tally of cases at each facility or provide a nationwide count.
“We have no idea how many people are actually sick, not tested or out on quarantine,” Jumpp said on a media call organized by Athena.
At least six Amazon workers have died of COVID-19, which the company confirmed publicly after each incident.
Lighty would not disclose the total number of Amazon employees who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the US.
The company’s efforts to quarantine infected workers are helping to slow the spread and rates of infection “are at or below the communities we’re operating in at almost all of our facilities,” she said.
Lighty did not provide data to support that claim.
A majority of Amazon employees are showing up at work and the company “objects to the irresponsible actions of labor groups and others in spreading misinformation, and making false claims about Amazon,” she added.
Employee health and safety is the company’s top priority, Lighty said, adding that it would spend more than US$800 million in the first half of this year on COVID-19 safety measures.
Amazon over the past decade has eviscerated brick-and-mortar retail competitors, some of them unionized, while successfully fending off several attempts by its own employees to organize.
With lockdowns now battering Main Street, Amazon is poised to emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
The company reported record first-quarter sales of US$75.5 billion, up 26 percent from the same period a year earlier, as customers in lockdown have relied on its services. Its share price has risen 35 percent since the start of the year.
Amazon had nearly 600,000 US employees last year, according to its latest annual report, making it one of the largest employers in the US.
Only 10.3 percent of US workers were union members last year, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, US Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed.
More than 33 million US workers have filed for unemployment benefits since the pandemic began, strengthening the hand of employers at a time of mass unemployment, but some labor experts say that the pandemic presents unions with their best shot in decades to make inroads at Amazon.
“Justice issues and safety at work tend to be the most powerful arguments in organizing,” Cornell University labor relations professor Alex Colvin said. “They’re the strongest reason for workers to want representation.”
Unions have resorted to public relations as a tool to pressure companies as worker protections such as “collective bargaining and employment rights enforcement have weakened,” he said.
Amazon has resisted unionization within its workforce since its founding in 1994. It defeated unionizing efforts in Seattle in 2000 and in Delaware in 2014 by a wide margin.
It has in the past month fired at least four workers in three states who had publicly criticized the company and were involved in organizing.
Amazon has “zero tolerance” for retaliation, Lighty said, adding that the workers were not fired for talking publicly about working conditions or safety, but for breaching company policies such as social distancing.
Among those sacked was Emily Cunningham, a Seattle-based activist with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who gained prominence for pushing the company to do more to fight global warming.
She had circulated a petition calling for measures such as improved sick leave and urged all employees to agree on a day last month to call in sick to protest warehouse working conditions.
“There is a lot of frustration on how Amazon is handling the issue of workplace safety,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham has been in touch with the AFL-CIO about the sickout and a local affiliate of the union called MLK Labor has offered support to continue the fight on working conditions, she said.
MLK Labor confirmed it is working with employees that Amazon fired in Seattle.
AFL-CIO secretary treasurer Elizabeth Shuler said that the union is using the pandemic to galvanize Amazon workers at company headquarters and enlist support from elected officials.
Amazon had more than 53,000 employees in Seattle last year.
“Amazon’s backyard is Seattle, and that’s a major focus for us in terms of how to take the energy, the courage, the activism that we are already seeing there and build that into a real movement,” Shuler said.
Amazon has listened to complaints and implemented more than 150 measures to keep workers safe, Lighty said.
The company is also running TV advertisements thanking warehouse workers.
Amazon founder, chief executive and president Jeff Bezos last month traveled to a Texas distribution center and met workers to show his support, but a steady rise in the number of COVID-19 infections at warehouses has spurred more protests.
Amazon worker Mario Crippen led an April 1 walkout at a Michigan warehouse to protest what he said was a lack of transparency from the company about the number of infections.
About 40 workers participated in that action at the facility in Romulus, southwest of Detroit, he said.
Amazon disputed that figure, saying fewer than 15 people participated.
Helping Crippen was labor nonprofit United for Respect, which coached him on how to gain media attention without getting fired and use social media to gather more supporters.
The group also offered legal help from attorneys if he was laid off.
Crippen, 26, whose job is to stow products at the warehouse, said that he felt as if “somebody had my back.”
He said at least 25 workers at the Romulus warehouse have tested positive for COVID-19, according to figures compiled by employees at the site.
Some workers want the facility shut down for cleaning and plan to continue protesting working conditions, while exploring the idea of working closely with labor groups and unions in the future, Crippen said.
Lighty did not comment about the Romulus protest, the number of cases at the site or the company’s decision not to shut down the facility.
A decision to handle the closure of a building for deep cleaning depends on several factors, including consulting with health authorities and medical experts, she said.
A Michigan Department of Labor spokeswoman said that the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration had received employee complaints about the Romulus site and sent a letter to Amazon listing steps the company “could take to correct the hazards.”
She would not provide more information. Lighty did not comment on the details in the letter.
Some labor organizers are instructing workers on how to file such safety complaints. They are also using Facebook Live, Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp to share other tactics with Amazon employees.
At Whole Foods, an upscale supermarket chain owned by Amazon, several current and former employees have been using Telegram to rally coworkers across the US to agitate for expanded paid sick leave and a temporary shutdown of stores with confirmed COVID-19 cases.
“First step is to ask what will you do if our store is tested positive? Then form a committee. Plan actions. Document. Call the government,” wrote one of the workers, who confirmed sending the message and discussed the strategy on condition of anonymity.
The group has doubled to 400 members since the pandemic began, the employee said.
Reuters could not independently confirm the growth in membership.
The worker and fellow organizers are collaborating with the UFCW, and are working under the name “Whole Worker’s National Organizing Committee.”
UFCW president Marc Perrone said that the union is not focusing on the traditional playbook of getting employees to sign cards and become members.
“Right now ... it is about showing workers value and what we can do for them,” Perrone said.
Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin
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