Amazon employees at two warehouses in New York Metropolis — each of them essential for delivering vacation items all through the Huge Apple — signaled they’re poised to strike if the e-commerce large doesn’t conform to a timetable for contract negotiations.
The Teamsters union represents Amazon employees at a Staten Island success heart generally known as JFK8 that employs 5,500 employees, in addition to a last-mile supply station in Queens generally known as DBK4.
Staff at each services voted on Friday to authorize a strike if a Sunday negotiation deadline handed with out a decision, in accordance a Dec. 14 submit by the Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The Teamsters haven’t launched an announcement for the reason that Sunday deadline handed and didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
“Amazon Teamsters at two New York City facilities — JFK8 and DBK4 — have 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,” Teamsters wrote on X on Friday.
Amazon claims the union doesn’t signify the “thousands” of staff and drivers it says it does.
“The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union,” Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards stated in an announcement.
The Teamsters has been making an attempt to arrange Amazon nationwide and says it has infiltrated 10 services altogether.
Teamsters president Sean O’Brien added, “We’ve been clear: Amazon has until December 15 to come to the table and bargain for a contract. If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight.”
In the meantime, a scathing congressional report into employee questions of safety at Amazon was launched on Sunday.
The congressional investigation — spearheaded by the Senate Well being, Schooling, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — discovered that accidents at Amazon services had been 30% larger in 2023 than the trade common for all such workplaces.
The 160-page report additionally discovered that Amazon allegedly “cherry-picks” and “manipulates” its personal information to make its warehouses seem safer than they’re.
Amazon staff are pressured to work at an “extremely fast and often dangerous pace,” in accordance with the report.
The web large additionally denied the congressional report’s findings in a 2,394-word response insisting that the report and Sanders are “wrong on the facts” and relied on “outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality.”
Amazon says it has elevated supply speeds whereas lowering harm charges, including that it cooperated with the committee members as they performed analysis.
The HELP committee stated it interviewed greater than 130 Amazon employees and met with almost 500 staff who shared 1,400 paperwork with the legislators.
Amazon, in the meantime, solely produced one quarter of the paperwork — or 285 recordsdata — the committee requested over the 18-month investigation, in accordance with the report at the same time as Amazon says it “produced thousands” of paperwork for the committee members.
The report claims Amazon managers bark orders at employees, together with to “keep the line moving at all costs,” in accordance with the report, together with an incident through which a girl “passed out” by the conveyor belt and the supervisor by no means hit the “Stop” button.
The report’s findings echo different state and federal allegations about Amazon’s troublesome work atmosphere, together with one by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration, which filed a grievance in 2022 alleging that pregnant ladies and disabled employees are subjected to harsh bodily work circumstances that make them weak to accidents.
In 2021, Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders as he was stepping down from the helm, promising that Amazon could be “the best employer” and the “safest place to work.”
Bezos’ letter adopted a bruising, high-profile, failed try to arrange an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala.
