By Vahid Razavi

Sometimes the problem is much worse than heat exhaustion. At least seven workers have died while working in Amazon warehouses since 2013, landing the company on the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen” list. Of the seven people who died, two were crushed by forklifts, two were struck or run over by trucks, one suffered a fatal heart-related incident while working an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was crushed to death by a pallet loader. After one of the two forklift deaths (that of 59-year-old Phillip Terry, who worked in a Plainfield, Indiana fulfillment center), the state labor department proposed fines totaling a whopping $28,000 — or about as much money as Bezos earns in around 12 minutes. That’s not even a slap on the wrist; it’s more like a not-so-strongly-worded lip service reprimand at best. This despite a nine-page letter from the Indiana Department of Labor accusing Amazon of four violations, including failure to provide adequate training to employees and failure to follow safety procedures.

It’s not just in the United States where Amazon workers are being used and abused. In fact, the company’s employees in Europe, where labor rights and protections are much stronger than in the US, have staged numerous high-profile protests in recent years. In Germany, Poland, and Spain, workers went on strike or launched protest movements against Amazon in the summer of 2018. German workers demanded healthier working conditions. In Spain, protesters were attacked by National Police officers — this under a new “socialist” government. What kind of socialists sic thugs on workers peacefully fighting for their rights?

Despite the police brutality and threats of reprisals, Amazon workers are increasingly demanding to be treated with fairness, dignity, and respect. In Britain, investigative journalist James Bloodworth went undercover for six months to expose horrid working conditions in which super-rushed employees were forced to urinate in bottles or forego bathroom breaks entirely in order to keep up. The British worker advocacy group Organise surveyed Amazon employees and found that three quarters avoid using the restroom for fear of missing quotas, with more than half of the workers reporting suffering from job-related depression. Fully 80 percent said they would not apply for a job at Amazon again given their experience there. Bloodworth painted a vivid picture of an underpaid, overworked workforce living in fear of discipline or dismissal for failing to keep up with the breakneck pace of customer orders. In this case, “break-neck” isn’t just a figure of speech — a July 2018 Guardian investigation found numerous cases of Amazon workers left to suffer after warehouse injuries that sometimes even drove some to homelessness. The median Amazon employee’s salary was $28,446 in 2017. Bezos earns that much every nine seconds. With a net worth now exceeding $150 billion, he is the richest person in the history of people. Yet Vickie Shannon Allen, a 49-year-old Amazon warehouse worker in Haslet, Texas, is, as of time of writing, living in her car after she injured her back while counting goods on a workstation that was missing a key piece of safety equipment. Allen was offered a paltry $3,500 buyout which came with a nondisclosure agreement. She refused because she did not want to lose her right to speak out publicly against Amazon. “They cost me my home, they screwed me over and over, and I go days without eating,” Allen lamented.

The abuse continues. Ill workers, including those with doctor’s notes, have been ignored and disciplined, or terminated for “no call, no show.” In its bid for total worker control, Amazon has even patented a wristband that tracks warehouse workers’ arm movements and can vibrate to point hands in the “right” direction, adding yet another layer of surveillance to an already over-monitored and over-stressed workplace. Amazon says the wristbands are but the latest innovation in service of ever-faster customer fulfillment. That is, of course, until robotic hands replace human ones in Amazon’s 140-plus warehouses and, eventually, pretty much everywhere else too. It’s not just in the warehouses, either. The company’s office workers are subjected to management data and psychological tools designed to spur Amazonians to produce more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” a former Kindle marketer told the New York Times. The problem extends even beyond Amazon itself to the companies it has acquired, most notably Whole Foods and the Washington Post.

Like many big businesses, Amazon is no fan of labor unions — but many Whole Foods employees are. Recently a group of calling themselves the Whole Foods Cross Regional Committee has spearheaded an effort to unionize company workers. They sent an email to employees at most of the 490 Whole Foods stores decrying a workforce in crisis, with workers living in fear of imminent layoffs in the wake of Amazon’s acquisition. Echoing other workers’ movements, including the successful #FightFor15 campaign, the email called for improvements, including a $15 hourly minimum wage, more affordable health insurance, paid parental leave, 401k matching, and more. Amazon responded to the email by almost immediately producing and circulating an anti-union training video among Whole Foods team leaders. In typical anti-union language heard countless times over the past century and a half of labor struggle and management repression, the video posits

that:

We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates. Our business model is built upon speed, innovation, and customer obsession—things that are generally not associated with union. When we lose sight of those critical focus areas we jeopardize everyone’s job security: yours, mine, and the associates’…

You would never threaten to close your building just because associates joined a union. But you might need to talk about how having a union could hurt innovation, which could hurt customer obsession, which could ultimately threaten the building’s continued existence.

The video goes on to identify “warning signs… that can indicate associate disengagement, vulnerability to organizing, or early organizing activity.” These red flags include using words like “living wage” and “steward,” distribution of pamphlets or fliers, employees discussing their concerns with co-workers, wearing pro-union clothing or accessories, increased workplace negativity, behavior that’s “out of character,” workers “who normally aren’t connected to each other suddenly hanging out together,” and employees showing an “unusual interest in policies, benefits, employee lists, or other company information.”

These anti-union efforts do work. In 2014, a small group of maintenance and repair technicians at Amazon’s Middletown, Delaware warehouse voted 21-6 against unionizing after intense pressure from managers and anti-union consultants hired by Amazon to suppress the unionization effort. Sometimes the repression is anything but subtle. In 2000 the Communications Workers of America launched a campaign to unionize 400 Amazon customer service employees. Amazon retaliated by simply closing the call center where they worked as part of wider cuts during the dot-com bust shortly after the turn of the century.

In 2013 Amazon purchased the venerable Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos’ management team then proceeded to freeze defined-benefit pensions for non-union employees and attempt to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time workers. Frederick Kunkle, a Post staff reporter and co-chair of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s collective bargaining arm, wrote an op-ed criticizing Bezos for contemplating future philanthropic endeavors more than the welfare of his workers. “As with other multi-billionaires, Bezos should remember that his vast wealth came in part from labor, and he should do more to share that wealth with workers,” Kunkle wrote. “Instead, Bezos has shown that he views his employees as parts in a high-tech machine, that income inequality is someone else’s problem, and that modern corporations owe little more to their employees than a paycheck.” The Post, of course, declined to publish Kunkle’s critique, so he published it for free on Huffington Post. He was subsequently warned in writing about “freelancing for a competing publication without permission.” According to the Office of General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), this discipline broke the law because Kunkle received no payment for his article. NLRB also stated that since nothing in the piece was untrue or disparaging it could not be kept from the public, nor should its author face retribution. As both Kunkle and I learned the hard way, challenging or even criticizing Jeff Bezos, one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet, is fraught with peril. But Kunkle remained undaunted, telling In These Times that he held hope that “Jeff Bezos might wake up to the idea one of these days that he owes more to society and his employees than the minimum he can get away with.”

I was aware of many of AWS’s problems, but hey, a man’s gotta eat. In the end I chose the rather substantial paycheck AWS was offering me. I may have chosen to dance with the demi-devil but that was then, this is now, and now is the time for me to turn the tables on Amazon. vulnerability to organizing, or early organizing activity.” These red flags include using words like “living wage” and “steward,” distribution of pamphlets or fliers, employees discussing their concerns with co-workers, wearing pro-union clothing or accessories, increased workplace negativity, behavior that’s “out of character,” workers “who normally aren’t connected to each other suddenly hanging out together,” and employees showing an “unusual interest in policies, benefits, employee lists, or other company information.”

These anti-union efforts do work. In 2014, a small group of maintenance and repair technicians at Amazon’s Middletown, Delaware warehouse voted 21-6 against unionizing after intense pressure from managers and anti-union consultants hired by Amazon to suppress the unionization effort. Sometimes the repression is anything but subtle. In 2000 the Communications Workers of America launched a campaign to unionize 400 Amazon customer service employees. Amazon retaliated by simply closing the call center where they worked as part of wider cuts during the dot-com bust shortly after the turn of the century.

In 2013 Amazon purchased the venerable Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos’ management team then proceeded to freeze defined-benefit pensions for non-union employees and attempt to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time workers. Frederick Kunkle, a Post staff reporter and co-chair of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s collective bargaining arm, wrote an op-ed criticizing Bezos for contemplating future philanthropic endeavors more than the welfare of his workers. “As with other multi-billionaires, Bezos should remember that his vast wealth came in part from labor, and he should do more to share that wealth with workers,” Kunkle wrote. “Instead, Bezos has shown that he views his employees as parts in a high-tech machine, that income inequality is someone else’s problem, and that modern corporations owe little more to their employees than a paycheck.” The Post, of course, declined to publish Kunkle’s critique, so he published it for free on Huffington Post. He was subsequently warned in writing about “freelancing for a competing publication without permission.” According to the Office of General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), this discipline broke the law because Kunkle received no payment for his article. NLRB also stated that since nothing in the piece was untrue or disparaging it could not be kept from the public, nor should its author face retribution. As both Kunkle and I learned the hard way, challenging or even criticizing Jeff Bezos, one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet, is fraught with peril. But Kunkle remained undaunted, telling In These Times that he held hope that “Jeff Bezos might wake up to the idea one of these days that he owes more to society and his employees than the minimum he can get away with.”

I was aware of many of AWS’s problems, but hey, a man’s gotta eat. In the end I chose the rather substantial paycheck AWS was offering me. I may have chosen to dance with the demi-devil but that was then, this is now, and now is the time for me to turn the tables on Amazon.