New York City Amazon Workers Threaten Holiday Strike

Amazon’s unionized workers at the company’s two facilities in New York City are threatening to strike, which could cause severe disruption to deliveries during the busy holiday season.

Employees from the JFK8 and DBK4 facilities affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters labor union “voted overwhelmingly to authorize strikes following Amazon’s illegal refusal to recognize their union and negotiate a contract addressing the company’s low wages and dangerous working conditions,” said a Dec. 14 statement from the group. The deadline for negotiating the contract was Dec. 15.

In the statement, the union suggested that workers would be forced to carry out a strike “that will disrupt key operations for customers nationwide” if the deadline were to pass without a decision. With the deadline now passed, Teamsters has yet to release a statement.

A workers group at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island had affiliated with Teamsters in June and authorized the strike to secure “fair wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions.” At the DBK4 facility in Queens, which is the biggest Amazon delivery station in New York City, employees “nearly unanimously” voted to approve the strike.

Earlier, the union said that its Amazon National Negotiating Committee was in the process of finalizing an employee contract, with the proposal being developed by the union’s Amazon drivers and warehouse employees.

The threat to disrupt work coincides with a busy holiday season. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), more than 157 million people are estimated to shop on the last Saturday before Christmas. NRF expects holiday spending between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 this year to reach “record levels” of nearly $1 trillion.

The Epoch Times reached out to Amazon for comment on Teamsters’ statements but received no response by publication time.

Amazon and Teamsters have had conflicts in the past. In October, the National Labor Relations Board asked Amazon to respond to a complaint filed by Teamsters accusing the company of breaching the National Labor Relations Act.

The union, representing some of the company’s delivery drivers, said Amazon declined to bargain with them. There were also accusations that the company threatened to fire unionized workers and sought to intimidate them, which the board asked Amazon to address.

Amazon argued that it only hired drivers as independent contractors and did not classify them as company workers. At the time, a company spokesperson said there was “no merit” in any of the claims made in the complaint.

Dangerous Working Practices

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Dec. 16 “exposing how Amazon’s obsession with speed injures workers at unprecedented rates.”

The report accuses the company of manipulating data regarding workplace injuries in a bid to characterize its warehouses as “safer than they actually are.”

“In each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in warehouses operated by the rest of the warehousing industry. Alarmingly, this problem is common across the company’s facilities: more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.”

Amazon’s speed and productivity requirements force employees to move at an “extremely fast and often dangerous pace,” the report said. The company tracks workers’ movements throughout their shifts, using automated systems to implement disciplinary actions against employees who cannot keep up, it said.

Workers repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times in each of their shifts, resulting in musculoskeletal disorders, the report said. While Amazon is aware of this issue, “the company refuses to take action to protect workers,” according to the report.

Amazon dismissed the report’s claims in a Dec. 16 post, accusing Sanders of continuing to “mislead the American public on workplace safety” at the company.

It called the premise that Amazon was obsessed with speed and that it creates dangerous circumstances “fundamentally flawed.”

“If that were accurate, what you’d see is that as our productivity and speed goes up, injuries go up. But what’s actually happened over the past five years is exactly the opposite—we’ve increased our delivery speeds, while decreasing the injury rates across our network,” the company said.

Claims that the company’s safety record last year was “far more dangerous” than the overall industry is wrong, Amazon said.

The company’s recordable incident rate—frequency of injury or illness at work—in the courier and express delivery category last year was 6.3, which it said was “significantly less” than the industry average of 9.7 as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the company said.

“And we reduced our lost time incident rate (which only includes more significant injuries that require an employee to miss at least one day of work) by 75 percent,” it said.

“Contrary to the narrative in this report, these large safety gains occurred alongside surging demand, unprecedented organizational growth, and during a global pandemic.”