Amazon continues to abuse its warehouse workers, both in its day-to-day treatment of them and in its thuggish, law-breaking campaign to prevent unionization in the US.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations and a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has just ruled that a historic union vote held earlier this year among Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was not valid. The highly publicized vote, which took place over several weeks in February and March 2021, resulted in a resounding defeat for the union, with more than 70 percent of those voting choosing against union membership.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU, accused Amazon of engaging in “efforts to gaslight its own employees,” and filed a petition in April to nullify the vote. After investigating the union’s assertion, the NLRB decided that Amazon interfered so blatantly in its workers’ ability to vote that a second election is now in order.
The ruling detailed how, in spite of the NLRB denying Amazon’s request to install a mail collection box right outside the warehouse entrance, the company did so anyway, giving workers the impression that it was involved in the vote counting. Additionally, the company distributed “vote no” paraphernalia to workers in the presence of managers, forcing them to declare their support of or opposition to the union. And, Amazon held what the NLRB called “captive audience meetings” with small groups of workers, “six days a week, 18 hours a day,” in order to blast the approximately 6,000 employees who were eligible to vote with anti-union messaging over the course of the voting period.
An NLRB regional director, Lisa Henderson, who made the decision for a second vote, denounced Amazon’s “flagrant disregard” for ensuring a free and fair election and said the company “essentially hijacked the process and gave a strong impression that it controlled the process.”
It’s no wonder that the election turnout was low and that ultimately only about 12 percent of eligible voters cast ballots choosing to unionize.
Anticipating the NLRB decision to allow a second vote, the company has already begun paving the way for interference once more. According to a Reuters report in early November, “Amazon has ramped up its campaign at the warehouse, forcing thousands of employees to attend meetings, posting signs critical of labor groups in bathrooms, and flying in staff from the West Coast.”
This aggressive and repeated pushback by one of the world’s largest employers against a unionizing effort at a single warehouse in the United States is an indication of Amazon’s absolute determination to deny workers a say in their labor conditions. Kelly Nantel, a company spokesperson, said that workers don’t need a union because they benefit from a “direct relationship” with their employer—a laughable notion considering the unbalanced power dynamic between the behemoth retailer and any one of its nearly 1 million U.S. employees.
So invested is the company in maintaining a union-free workplace that the NLRB in a separate decision determined that Amazon illegally fired two employees last year who were agitating against its unfair labor practices.
There is an obvious reason why Amazon has opted to respond so aggressively to unionization efforts in the United States. Its European workers are unionized and are actively demanding better wages and working conditions. For example, in Germany, unionized Amazon workers walked off their jobs for higher pay in November during the peak holiday shopping season. Last year, Italian workers went on strike for 11 days to win an extra five-minute break to ensure good hygiene in light of the pandemic. And, in the spring of 2020, French unions demanded that Amazon suspend all activity at its warehouses in the interest of worker safety during the early months of the pandemic. A French court ruled favorably, saying that the company had to suspend deliveries of all nonessential items.
Further, union leaders and unionized workers from various European nations began collaborating with one another last year in what Business Insider called an effort to “swap notes… on how to pressure the retail giant to improve their working conditions.”
This sort of European union activity and cross-border worker solidarity is exactly the type of scenario that Amazon does not want to see replicated in the United States.
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to the Bessemer vote in April saying that he would ensure his company became “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the RWDSU took it as an admission that Amazon has indeed been mistreating its workers.
Indeed, there have been numerous studies detailing mistreatment. One investigation by the New York Times earlier this year at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, warehouse found that the company churned through workers with an extremely high employee turnover rate. The paper also found that although managers keep careful track of nearly every conceivable aspect of how quickly employees work, their efficiency and productivity, there were apparently few records, if any, of worker health including COVID-19 infections.
At the same time that the Bessemer warehouse workers were being bombarded with anti-union propaganda, the company was practically minting money with record profits from a greater dependence on online shopping during the pandemic. Profits jumped 220 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period a year earlier.
The NLRB ruling for a do-over vote at the Bessemer warehouse comes at a time when American workers are increasingly intolerant of poor labor conditions and low wages. A wave of strikes this fall and mass resignationshave also impacted Amazon’s ability to hire more workers. Now, in addition to the RWDSU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has vowed to engage in organizing efforts aimed at Amazon and passed a historic resolution this summer in response to how “Amazon poses an existential threat to the rights and standards our members have fought for and won.”
Still, Amazon’s aggressive efforts at maintaining union-free operations in the United States have continued to bear fruit. In addition to rolling out more anti-union efforts ahead of the second vote at its Bessemer warehouse, Amazon appears to have prevailed against another unionization effort—at the Staten Island warehouse that the New York Times investigated. Just two weeks ahead of an NLRB hearing on whether there was sufficient interest to form a union there, workers mysteriously withdrew their petition.
A Reuters study of 20 years of wage data for the retail industry found a clear and growing advantage for unionized workers compared to non-union workers, with the weekly wage gap between the two groups increasing from $20 in 2013 to $50 in 2019. The outlet explained that “unionized workers tend to work more hours per week and on a predictable schedule, while non-union workers often have a ‘variable schedule’ that depends on how busy management thinks the store might be.” In other words, the rights of non-union workers are subservient to the company’s well-being.
Perhaps this is what Nantel meant by the benefits of having a “direct relationship” with workers. Except, she claimed such a relationship was in the interest of workers, when in truth it is in the interest of employers like Amazon to have no collective power to wrestle against.
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Michael Hudson has told us how different classical economics is to current thinking.
“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.” Adam Smith, classical economist
Exactly the opposite of today’s thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalising itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services
Today’s problems with growth and demand.
Amazon didn’t suck its profits out as dividends and look how big it’s grown (not so good on the wages).
The benefits of the system can be passed upwards in dividends or downwards in wages.
Both actually detract from the money available for re-investment as Jeff Bezos knows only too well.
He didn’t pay dividends, and paid really low wages, to maximise the amount that he could re-invest in Amazon and look how big it’s grown.
The shareholders gains are made through the value of the shares.
Jeff Bezos hopes other people are paying high enough wages to buy lots of stuff from Amazon; his own workers don’t have much purchasing power.
Jeff has found the ideal for growth at Amazon.
Unions could put a spanner in the works.
Holding up Amazon as some form of corporate ideal is evidence that you don’t understand what is actually happening.
https://ilsr.org/amazons-toll-road/
In the full report, available as a PDF the “flywheel” effect is explained, and that Amazon’s stupendous recent expansion tracks very closely the fees of abuse heaped on third party sellers, extracting greater and greater portions of the price third party sellers charge, forcing those sellers to raise their prices. If that weren’t bad enough Amazon bots constantly check to see if that seller is selling on another platform and punishes them by disappearing them if they charge lower price on that platform. Hell we don’t really know but Amazon probably dissapears them just for daring to sell on another platform, even were the price higher there.
Got that? Amazon pushes up prices everywhere else, so shopping with a seller on Ebay that also sells on Amazon garantees you are paying the highest price possible. Amazon sellers are prohibited by the agreement when they sign up from selling at a lower price elsewhere. Ebay has the same provision in thier agreement
What is the flywheel effect?
Amazon sucks in whip cracking sadists by selling Prime membership at a steep loss. There are 142 million Prime members. The report indicates that Amazon loses about nine hundred bucks for every Prime membership sold. When I do the math it comes out to roughly $125 billion.
From the report
Amazon grossly overcharges for AWS and governments willingly overpay for Jeff to store their zeros and ones when they could save billions by rolling their own data centers. One buck out of three is profit for AWS and it is also used as a misdirection in that we are supposed to beleive that is what allows Amazon to sell for losses elsewhere.
As it treats it’s exploitees, with a 150% annual churnover rate and a mountain of broken people in a trash heap behind every warehouse, it steals from third party sellers at an accelerating rate, forcing prices up and hiding it’s monopoly power by paying the venal MSM to not look. It is clearly an unexamined criminal enterprise at this point in time. Download the report and educate yourself.
Sort’ve what all the unreported poison pills hidden in the “For the People Act” sought to emulate, franchising sufficiently avaricious kleptocrats while CRUSHING each and every alternative party, candidate, policy or voice? “Fuck You, PAY Me” act was already taken?
Thank you for synopsizing!
https://readsludge.com/2021/11/29/health-insurance-and-pharma-lobbyists-max-out-to-the-dem-party/
https://mronline.org/2021/12/02/profiting-from-the-carbon-offset-distraction/
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-11-21/can-the-green-new-deal-save-us-no-it-cant/
https://truthout.org/articles/controversial-alzheimers-drug-behind-about-half-of-medicares-yearly-price-bump/
Amazon bots constantly check to see if that seller is selling on another platform and punishes them by disappearing them if they charge lower price on that platform.
That’s one thing that the Chinese government just fined a number of online retailers for, and believe me, they got the message and opened up their platforms real quick.
Must be nice to have a government that governs for and supports the majority of its people than one that serves the interests of only a select few.
damn, Lawn…turkeys are all upset, i laughed so hard.
Eastasia actually does what we spend thousands of words pontificating about, but never actually do anything?
everything i said in the comments for this morning’s Links really belongs here.
it’s the Giantism.
gubmit was shrunk and drowned in the bathtub, but not killed outright…merely left braindead(so, simple assault?)
when the perps are the ones who need/deserve liquid lobotomy.
and…riffing one something i said over there, and liquid lobotomy…a bunch of the current master race(silicon valley) does hallucinogenics a lot, according to widespread reports, including anecdotal reports, collected by me.
acid, mdma, even dmt(ayahuasca cultism a few years ago..”reset me”)
i guess they did it wrong,lol.
This opaquely enforced rule that because you set a price on my platform, I will punish you for setting a lower price elsewhere is as anti competitive as you can get.
but,per the slouching to gommorrah guy, it’s the price you pay at wallywhirled that really matters most.
yer neighbor being laid off is of no consequence.
and with no evidence, whatsoever, the PTB accepted this interpretation/burning bush.
too bad bork is dead…reckon he’d be interesting as a meal.
hafta marinate him for a week in vinegar, olive oil and a bunch of herbs.
slow cook, with a pan of water in the chamber…so he don’t dry out too much….
Or sometimes by buying its every own Flagship venal MSM outlet, the Washington Post.
Every political and union-organizing effort and avenue should be pursued to domesticate and housebreak Amazon.
But in the meantime, is third party seller discontent rising so much that third party sellers might decide to sell through a kinder gentler platform, perhaps to be called Nomazon, if creative business engineers were to create such a thing? And if it had to charge customers more in order to make up for exploiting third party sellers and workers less, would customers pay? Could it run little experiments in trying Nomazon platformlets just big enough to serve those customers who would pay more?
And also, in the meantime, could politically motivated customers buy from brick and mortar housed real business people in the analog reality space? To keep the Antimazon sector alive until better days?
I think you missed the point.
I am just understanding the reality of the system, I didn’t say I liked it.
This shows how the idea of siphoning money off to shareholders is not the ideal.
This also shows how Amazon needs other companies to pay high wages to buy it’s products.
If everyone was like Amazon there would be little demand for anything much.
I got your point. The reality of the system is that Amazon is a criminal enterprise.
I’d never consider becoming a Prime member but I buy things from Amazon.
Cnchal says: “Amazon sellers are prohibited by the agreement when they sign up from selling at a lower price elsewhere. Ebay has the same provision in thier agreement”. But it doesn’t lead to Amazon charging higher prices that the compitition; often Amazon’s prices are lower than Walmart’s. And delivery? I am trading-off a delivery charge for orders costing less than $25 at Amazon for the cost of driving to Walmart- and maybe finding the item is out of stock.
Price and convenience are both important to me. And often Amazon delivers both.
This is entirely separate from the question of working conditions. I know only a few people who have worked at Amazon. The trade-off is very hard work for higher wages and better benefits that they would get at Burger King.
By the way, I’ve been in five unions during my life; some were good (the Machinists Union) and some were just excuses for entrenched elites to live well (The Maritime Union). And one was a government-issued monopoly of public employees (The RI Teachers’ Union).
> . . . But it doesn’t lead to Amazon charging higher prices that the compitition; often Amazon’s prices are lower than Walmart’s.
I bet. There is a reason for that. It’s in the second section that I quoted from the report.
Amazon is an unexaimed and unpunished criminal enterprise, how convenient for whip cracking sadists.
That’s before the direct subsidies extracted from state and municipal governments to put their brightly lit satanic mills there, in a perverse competition for the most wretched jawbs available. All else have to be even moar wretched just to keep up, lest Amazon eat them alive. Ain’t competition grand?
Thank you for posting this. It’s no wonder then that the USPS which has always been a cheaper way for small businesses to reach customers has been under attack for decades.
There’s one other thing Bezos didn’t pay besides dividends and wages that allowed them to become the behemoth they are today – taxes.
I saw this short commentary recently (here) and I loved the end…
“[The move away from bricks and morter stores] may be all to the advantage of online retail, with its reliance on relatively lower labor and fixed costs.
It may also be to the advantage of those who are against wage slavery, as well: it is far easier to disrupt wage slavery at an Amazon warehouse site than it is to shut it down at a retail mall.”
As the tech bros are want to do, they have once again reinvented something… Factories where mass organising is possible!
I’ve wondered if anyone has crunched the numbers to work out just how dependent online sales are on very low wages for their competitive advantage over bricks and mortar retail. A number of large fast fashion retailers (including one of the most efficient, Penneys/Primark) have said that there is no way they can sell their products at shop price online without a separate layer of cheaper workers. From what I’ve seen, the online fast fashion companies can only do it by selling extremely low quality products.
I think the resistance to unionisation among tech workers is a huge issue. I’ve talked about this to 20-somethings who worked for big tech and they look at me as if I had Shrek ears if I suggest that just maybe they’d be better off if they formed a union. I don’t see Amazon warehouse workers really making big products unless all the other Amazon workers back them up, and I’ve seen no evidence whatever that this is happening. I’ve known tech people who worked in Amazon and their response to bad conditions was to just quit and join one of the other big names.
I don’t think this is an Amazon issue though. Other places, maybe. I’m not sure Amazon pays “very low” wages relative to brick and mortar retail. In the big distribution center in Kenosha, WI they have been very successful hiring people away from nearby brick and mortar retail. In fact, relatively better wages, benefits and advancement possibilities are right at the heart of their high employee turnover style of managing: the compensation keeps people applying to work there regardless of the reputation. My view is they have aggregated their labor demand in a manner that they really do have 8 hours of work for their employees to do on an 8 hour shift and can set the idea of 8 hours work darn high. Many jobs in traditional retail can only add value while a customer is in the store. Amazon is open 24/7 and customers don’t care if the warehouse system finds their product in 3 minutes or 11 hours, so long as it ships when expected. Not saying Amazon warehouse jobs are great jobs, but that would not be for lousy pay relative to traditional retail.
Here in the US before the pandemic Amazon’s wage rates were higher than store retail although not by a huge amount. Now stores are having to raise their wages to attract employees.
I believe the issue at Amazon is not so much wages as the ridiculous working conditions. They push productivity to human physical limits in order to compensate for understaffing. Supposedly their retail side wasn’t making a profit at all until relatively recently and most of the profits came from web services. The problem for Bezos was that by trying to become the “everything store” instead of simply a book store he is taking on retail behemoths like Walmart and not simply the weak retailers that Walmart had already damaged. In the old days of factory strikes a union win would result in price increases and things would continue on as usual. But by being on the profit edge Amazon’s mail order business has always been vulnerable to any disturbance to the “algorithm.”
Along the lines of the interesting comments from @Eric377 and @Carolinian above, this post below from Tim Bray last year has long been in my mind. Still thinking about it, even.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient
lift that one to watercooler.
FTA:”Efficiency and weakness · Let’s hand the mike over to Bruce Schneier. In The Security Value of Inefficiency he makes one of those points that isn’t obvious until you hear it. Quoting briefly:
“All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.”
Bruce is pointing out that overoptimizing efficiency doesn’t just burn people out, it also too often requires cutting into what you later realize were prudent safety margins.”
i grow awesome eggs and tomatoes(and, and and and)…but aren’t allowed to sell my produce to the one grocer…let alone the now 2 dollar stores.
no warehouses full of parts: efficient.
no redundancy: efficient.
no alternative(TINA)(TM): efficient.
add spanner: not so efficient.
but if we can jess measure everything and crunch the data, we can predict the future like Henri Seldon, but without a moral center, and get rich…(world without end)
like some Cartesian Heat Death.
Assuming that hundreds of thousands of unionized American workers shop at Amazon, has anyone suggested that all the Union leaderships suggest to all their members that all their members figure out how much money they spend at Amazon, do without any Amazon carried objects ( lets assume it is too much of an imposition to suggest any Union member Amazon Prime members cancel their membership) . and send all that money to Amazon wannahave Union-seeking groups instead?
It is indeed too bad that Sanders did not flip right over to Union organizing support and ask his small donor base to do likewise. He and they could have targeted all those small donor funding streams to Amazon worker unionizing support. Oh well …
It was really a missed opportunity not making sure that Bezos stayed in space.
Unionization would prevent the ultimate all robotic warehouse and delivery system.
Or accelerate it.
Why? Isn’t there plenty of automation at unionized auto plants, UPS and the postal service (sorting machines replacing hand sorting)? Isn’t that practically where that kind of automation was born?
How many sorting machines did DeJoy destroy in order to try forcing the Postal System back to hand sorting in order to degrade its service? In order to fake the case for privatising it?
I’m about to go to the lobby to retrieve a package of hippy-dippy snake-oil, we’d taken during COVID 101. This requires 15-25 minutes of picking through the Amazon boxes, resembling the closing scene of “Raiders of The Lost Ark.” It’s largely, work from home folks, haunting lefty blog-aggregators, who believed Nomadland’s depiction of happy, older, white Amazon workers, chatting in the lunchroom; who’ve sentenced us uppity essentials to 1099 serfdom? So, when Amy has Stu tell us how AFL-CIA is out to rescue “working folks” from disruptive virtual share-cropping gigs… well, even WSWS has a difficult time exaggerating how smarmy this “peeing in a Gatorade bottle” BS is?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/10/appe-o08.html
I’ve found white plastic pee bags on the street – a product I didn’t know existed before finding them in the gutter, complete with how-to-use- instructions printed in black ink. Clearly used by delivery drivers who deliver packages on my street from early morning until around 10 at night. Not BS at all. A fact of working life for some. Every minute, every second, counts.
It’s not remotely bullshit, which you would know had you ever talked to an Amazon driver. The US doesn’t do public restrooms anymore; where else are the drivers supposed to go?
Amazon, DoorDash, Los Deliveristas Unidos… are the ONLY folks worth talking to, up here! Co-opting their attempts at organization, into PRO-Act style virtue-signalling, is the only BS?
https://www.thecity.nyc/platform/amp/2021/9/23/22690318/nyc-landmark-law-food-delivery-workers-deliveristas
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22667600/delivery-workers-seamless-uber-relay-new-york-electric-bikes-apps
https://www.thecity.nyc/platform/amp/work/2020/12/6/22157730/nyc-food-delivery-workers-demand-better-treatment
the side of the fucking road/street if necessary…like i do, without their time constraints(SOLIDARNOSC!).
the lumpen of san fran has the right idea, but the actual message hasn’t gotten across where it matters(humanure in the street)
no public bano?
open season.
let the gestapo deal with that,lol.
another version of a general strike….overwhelm them.
pee everywhere.
https://www.shewee.com/
> . . . where else are the drivers supposed to go?
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Health-Personal-Care-Male-Urinals/zgbs/hpc/3775251
One would think that with Bezos’ fifth of a trillion he could afford to buck up for a few portable urinals at least for the male drivers, but noooo, he is too greedy for that. So Gatorade bottles it is.
So the union vote has been ruled invalid, on top of illegally firing workers for organizing, and the only penalty seems to be holding another vote that Amazon will also interfere with. That’ll fix ’em!
Wake me up when someone decides to actually enforce the law on these clowns. It’s high time some C-Suiters were frog marched to the pokey.
In the meantime, has the Union movement and its supporters tried organizing a boycott of Amazon until its warehouses are unionized?
” Don’t shop where you can’t organize.”
this is increasingly difficult, due to the very monopoly/monopsony we’re lamenting.
happened a long time ago way out here, with brick and mortar/mom and pop.
walmart ate everything, and there was nowhere else to obtain a boxfan or a window unit…and may as well get TP and celery while i’m here(with awesome application of psyops).
there’s more competition out my way recently…still mostly big national chains(ACE Hardware)…but a few of the locals have stepped up, at unknown cost(both bottom line as well as soul)
If there is a hierarchy of badness among the big players, then if one has a choice of a less bad player or players versus a more bad player( Amazon), then one can at least deny Amazon a little revenue by getting something from Home Depot instead of over the Amazon.
There are many places where the Union movement could at least inspire its members to do that.
” Ace is the place . . . . a NOmazon space.”
barring evidence to the contrary, ACE is a good one…as is HEB(regional grocer).
by all accounts(collected by me over 20 or so years), treat their people well.
so i give them my business.
i try not to spend money at places that are assholes.
…and hope that the assholes notice.
because fuck them anyway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iTnWtc9ZcA&list=PLeWl4fEewGdbXN5gkNMW8wW4Tnc2gIdAl&index=7
Agreed. The advice from employees at my local ACE has been invaluable over the years as I fixed up my starter home over nearly 34 years of ownership. Paid it off in 13 years though. The interest rate on my loan was IIRC around 10.75 probably more. I put as little as possible in the crappy 401K which I had at the time and put what would have been savings towards the principal. There was no sense putting that money into even my credit union. Still here. It’s a starter home that it looks like I will finish in.