OPINION
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>
GUEST ESSAY
Amazon Transformed Seattle. Now, Its Workers Are Poised to Take It Back.
NYT, July 5, 2021
Credit...Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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E. Tammy Kim
ByE. Tammy Kim
Ms. Kim is a contributing writer for Opinion.
SEATTLE — Prime Day, Amazon’s annual summer shopping bonanza, lasted not
one but two days this June. The company advertised it incessantly on
social media and especially to subscribers of Amazon Prime, a group that
includesclose to half
<https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-prime-member-total-reaches-142-million-in-u-s-with-more-shoppers-opting-in-for-a-full-year-data-shows-11611073132>of
the U.S. population. In the many warehouses in and around the company’s
hometown, thousands of workers showed up to their packing and sorting
stations for a mandatory, extra-long shift.
Among them was Andy, who began working at his fulfillment center last
year. He had never expected to sign on with Amazon, least of all as a
blue-collar worker. His first job out of college was as a support
engineer for a company in downtown Seattle. He had hoped to challenge
himself in a programming role, but the work was rote, and the office
environment cold and dominated by “talk about market shares,” he said.
In the Trump years, Andy began to wonder why the city he lived in was so
unequal and how the biggest, heaviest forces tended to squash everything
small. He sought out the Tech Workers Coalition, a group of industry
employees with a conscience, in search of answers.
One techie told him that she’d quit programming to work and organize in
an Amazon warehouse. She was doing so with a group called Amazonians
United, which believed that anyone who cared about poverty or workers’
rights or curbing corporate power should focus their energies on Amazon
and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who steps down from his role as C.E.O. this
week. Would Andy want to apply for a job and try to organize inside?
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Andy applied through the online portal, submitted to a saliva-based drug
test and got his photo taken for an ID. Within 48 hours, he was
approved; a week and a half later, he was being trained as a packer on
the vast, noisy floor of a fulfillment center. His goal was to do his
job fast and well (currently, the expected packing rate is at least 200
scanned items per hour at his station) while getting to know his fellow
workers. In time, perhaps, they could form an organizing committee and
agitate for safer conditions and an increase in starting hourly wages to
the $25 to $30 that unionized warehouse workers can earn, from $15 to $17.
Andy has had some success. While he and his co-workers do not have a
legally recognized union, hundreds of them signed petitions for a
reinstatement of hazard pay and an increase in paid time off. On smoke
breaks and after work, they talk about wrist pain, nasty managers and
their reasons for staying in the job: to buy a house, provide for their
families or pay for college. “I can’t really do anything else,” one told
him.
This year, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., once a
thriving steel town, voted against unionizing with the Retail, Wholesale
and Department Store Union. The loss in Bessemer led some employees to
feel powerless. “The result of that, for some of my co-workers, was,
‘You can’t fight Amazon. It’s impossible,’” an Amazonians United member
in the New York area said.
The Bessemer defeat has led many major unions to grapple with the role
of Amazon in the economy and their members’ lives. In June, members of
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has organized the
logistics industry since the early 20th century, voted to target
Amazon’s operations. And a growing segment of the general population now
recognizes the threat of “Amazon capitalism”: what scholars Jake
Alimahomed-Wilson, Juliann Allison and Ellen Reese describe as
reflecting “the larger global trend of the increasing influence of
finance capitalism, neoliberal politics and policies, and corporate power.”
The challenge of organizing Amazon is “bigger than anything this country
has ever faced,” Peter Olney, a former organizing director of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union, told me. He compared
Amazon’s close to one million U.S. employees to the several hundred
thousand organized by the United Auto Workers at Ford, Chrysler and
General Motors in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Part of the strategy will have to be shop-by-shop organizing, but no one
knows how best to unionize a 5,000-person warehouse with extreme
turnover and “union avoidance
<https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-union-vote-bessemer-alabama-labor-law-experts-takeaways-2021-4>”
consultants. Or how to prevent Amazon from simply closing a unionized
fulfillment center or transferring its workers to another, nonunion
facility.
What’s important now, Mr. Olney said, is that everyone in the labor
movement recognize the threat and pitch in.
Image
Credit...David Ryder/Getty Images
*In the coming years,*Amazon will most likely become the largest private
employer in the United States, maybe even the world. In addition to its
U.S. workers, it indirectly commands many more thousands of contracted
drivers. This isn’t uncommon knowledge, but few Americans have
confronted the stakes of Amazon’s economic and political dominance —
except, perhaps, in the company’s hometown.
Workers in the fulfillment and sorting centers dotting Interstate 5 have
pushed for improved conditions, especially during the pandemic. This is
true in other parts of the country as well, especially where Amazonians
United is active, but the Seattle area is also the site of activism at
headquarters, which employs more than 75,000 tech workers and other
employees who possess significant bargaining power but are still
vulnerable to retaliation and replacement.
In recent years, white-collar workers have condemned the company’s
environmental policies, alleged maltreatment of warehouse workers and
business relationships withlaw enforcement agencies
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/dealbook/amazon-staff-facial-recognition-protest.html>.
In 2019, an estimated 3,000 Seattle tech workers staged a walkout in
solidarity with the Global Climate Strike. Last year, Amazon fired two
outspoken designers — a move the National Labor Relations Board found to
be unlawful. (Amazonsaid
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/technology/amazon-nlrb-activist-workers.html>it
terminated these employees for “repeatedly violating internal policies.”)
Amazon’s home turf has also been the site of precedent-setting policy
fights. In 2013, the national movement for a $15 minimum hourly wage —
now the company’s starting wage — won its firstcitywide victory
<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/us/voters-in-seatac-wash-back-15-minimum-wage.html>in
SeaTac, Wash. Last year, Seattle passed a payroll tax that is expected
to raise $214 million per year, though after the repeal of a more
stringent measure. And this year, Washington State passed a 7 percent
capital-gains tax on some profits earned from selling stocks and other
investments. (Washington, home to two of the wealthiest men in the
world, has no income tax and relies instead on a regressive sales tax.)
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These organizing efforts, while spotty and provisional, offer two
lessons. First, that small-scale efforts can have an effect; second,
that it’s important to pursue both regulatory and shop-floor campaigns.
Though Amazon is highly centralized, pay, hours and other conditions
vary from warehouse to warehouse, and managers are known to respond to
regional pressure. In 2019, activists angered by the lavish government
incentives thrown at Amazon successfully campaigned against the
construction of its secondary headquarters in New York City. And
community and labor organizers in San Bernardino, Calif., an area choked
by diesel truck emissions, continue to pressure local politicians to
limit the expansion of warehouses and airports used by Amazon and other
logistics companies.
The current alignment of late-pandemic, social-justice-oriented,
early-Biden administration politics could help create the conditions for
an empowered, well-organized work force capable of challenging Amazon.
Democrats and some Republicans in Congress have backed the Protecting
the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to form a union,
and several pieces of ambitious antitrust legislation. President Biden
has installed Lina Khan, an Amazon skeptic, to lead the Federal Trade
Commission. The Department of Labor has promised to investigate
employers that retaliate against workers for raising safety concerns and
is expected to scrutinize the misclassification of independent contractors.
The new Teamsters campaign, which promises to establish a department to
specifically “aid Amazon workers and defend” industry standards, will
include a mix of workplace organizing and local, state and federal
advocacy. “I talked to thousands of Amazon workers in 2020. We haven’t
filed for a union election, have we? There’s a reason for that,” Randy
Korgan, the Teamsters’ national director for Amazon, told me. “We have
to break Amazon down into fulfillment center, supply chain, their
[contracted drivers] and delivery model.” (This fall, the Teamsters will
hold an internal election, and both slates of candidates have promised
to prioritize Amazon.) Staff members from the United Electrical, Radio
and Machine Workers of America, the Service Employees International
Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union
(whose affiliated Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union led the
Bessemer campaign) are also supporting various Amazon-related efforts.
“The labor movement still has 14 million workers. It’s going to take a
mass mobilization of union workers to engage Amazon workers,” Todd
Crosby, the U.F.C.W.’s organizing director, told me. “What if at least 5
percent, 700,000 people, were mobilized to go out and be organizers to
contact people in their community?”
Image
An Amazon office building in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle.
An Amazon office building in the South Lake Union neighborhood of
Seattle.Credit...Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times
*In May, Dan, a*former programmer at Amazon, took me on a long walk
through Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, also known as Amazonia.
Those of us with history in the region all say the same thing about the
area — still shocked to see its transformation from a low-rent,
industrial scar to a manicured stretch of lakefront paths and high-rise
buildings.
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Dan grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in the South and
moved to Seattle to put his computer science degree to lucrative use. He
worked at Amazon for several years but never quite took to the culture
of competition and merciless evaluation or the oft-cited14 Amazon
leadership principles
<https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-leadership-principles-steps-down-andy-jassy-2021-2>,
which read like a party oath. During one round of what he described as
“leveling,” in which each supervisor ranks his employees, he found
himself marked down. He quit and joined a friendlier database start-up.
Like Andy, the coder-turned-warehouse worker, Dan is ambivalent about
the role of tech in the region and the world. He explained that he
arrived in a Seattle already fractured by widespread gentrification and
displacement and saw the city continue to split along class lines. His
politics slowly veered left — he was roused by Black Lives Matter and
was furious about Amazon’s increased use of gig economy labor in
logistics — but it felt nearly impossible to talk about any of this with
his co-workers, let alone sign a petition or attend a protest. “I think
a lot of tech workers have this aspirational, ‘I want to be Elon Musk’
kind of thing,” he said. Others feared getting fired or blacklisted in
what can be an insular industry.
The week we spoke,640 tech workers
<https://secure.everyaction.com/Xsul4-F6BUuVi_MofTP5YA2>employed by
Amazon signed a petition calling on the company to “commit to zero
emissions by 2030” and prioritize stopping polluting in the Black and
brown communities near its warehouses. It was the latest action by
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice to address the downstream effects
of the tech-retail behemoth. As Andrea Vidaurre of the People’s
Collective for Environmental Justice told me, it seems nearly all
working-age people in San Bernardino have “cycled through the Amazon
warehouse complex.” Their families, meanwhile, have suffered high rates
of asthma and cancer.
In more and more areas of the United States, Amazon structures the life
of entire communities. The geographer and organizer Spencer Cox argues
that Amazon’s warehouse zones are now “the major working-class space of
suburban and exurban socialization. So even if you’re building a tenant
union or a political party, this is a major social space. It has a
broader importance.” Or, put more pointedly: “If you look at the
consciousness of Amazon workers, it’s a guide to where the working class
is as a whole,” Kshama Sawant, a socialist member of the Seattle City
Council, said.
On the second Prime Day in June, I met Andy and one of his co-workers at
the end of an 11-hour shift outside their gargantuan warehouse. Workers
of every race, gender, age and body shape streamed out of the main
entrance. The hourly associates wore athletic clothes or fluorescent
yellow vests and carried their belongings in see-through bags the
texture of a clear shower curtain. The managers were distinguished by
dark-blue vests and the privacy of opaque backpacks. (Amazon said there
was no special bag policy for managers.)
Over Chinese food, Andy’s friend later told me that she liked the work
but that “there are things that should be improved.” She found the
warehouse sweltering and the equipment dangerously worn out. The manager
of their department was quick to penalize workers for packing or
rebinning too slowly. They heard that another manager in the region had
been flown out to Bessemer, just before the union vote, in an emergency
effort to quell employee discontent.
The prospect of organizing workers in any significant number felt
daunting to Andy’s friend, but “if we want to make a change as a group,
in a warehouse, Washington would be very ideal,” she said. “If
headquarters was like, ‘Oh, God, if we can’t even keep our warehouse
workers in control, how do you think we’ll look in front of the rest of
the country?’ ”
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“We can make a strong impact to show that it is possible. Just because
headquarters is here, that doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t take
power away from us.”
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