Drivers’ conditions in focus as battle to organise Amazon workers moves on

The resounding defeat of a unionisation effort at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this month may not have been as bad a setback as the US labour movement first feared.

That is the claim of the Teamsters union, which has represented transport and logistics workers for more than a century, and which says the spotlight on working conditions across America’s largest ecommerce company had given a boost to its own effort to organise Amazon drivers.

“[The Bessemer vote] brought awareness on a level that at least more people are talking about it,” said Randy Korgan, Amazon director at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “And from that perspective, regardless of the vote outcome, these workers have already won.”

Bessemer warehouse workers voted against unionisation by more than two-to-one in a vote in a ballot that is being challenged by the organising union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The RWDSU alleges illegal interference by Amazon — something the company has denied.

The union had focused its campaign on claims that Bessemer workers were poorly treated, including not being given enough time for bathroom breaks. That helped to unleash a torrent of stories from Amazon’s broader logistics network, which has grown by more than 500,000 employees since the beginning of the pandemic.

In particular, several recent reports have detailed how Amazon’s drivers, estimated to number about 100,000 in the US, have resorted to extreme measures when unable to use a bathroom while out on delivery routes. Organising the driver network has become the next front in the labour movement’s escalating battle to break into Amazon.

More unpleasant stories keep emerging.

80%


of around 500 Amazon drivers informally surveyed said they favoured unionisation

In one incident earlier this month, previously unreported, an Amazon driver in Austin, Texas, accidentally dropped a large container containing faeces on to a customer’s driveway, before driving off.

Amazon said it was “deeply disturbed” by the incident and had “reached out to the customer to apologise and make it right”. 

So far it has offered the customer, who asked not to be named, a refund on the two items he had delivered that day — a value of about $25 — which he said he turned down “on principle”, saying he was concerned about the conditions that had evidently led to a driver needing to defecate in a plastic container while at work.

The customer said: “What Amazon told me on the phone was: ‘We take good care of them, we give them a ton of breaks, this should never happen.’ But the point is, it is happening. I had shit sitting on my driveway — that tells me it’s happening.”

Amazon insists the hygiene issues drivers face are a result of Covid-19 related closures of public toilets. Drivers say their routes are too long and too tight for time.

“These anecdotes don’t represent the experience of the vast majority of our drivers, where more than 90 per cent of drivers finish their routes before their scheduled time,” Amazon said in a statement to the Financial Times. “We’ve invested heavily to make that possible, and are always listening to their feedback to continue investing in future improvements.”

An informal survey set up by two drivers, and first reported by the technology magazine Wired, gathered views from about 500 Amazon delivery workers, 80 per cent of which said they were in favour of unionisation. The primary concern — more than pay or benefits — was the length of routes. More than 60 per cent said they had been driving for Amazon for less than a year.

“You’re clearly seeing high turnover in an industry that shouldn’t be high turnover,” Korgan said. 

It’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success

Unionising will be made potentially more difficult due to Amazon’s practice of hiring its drivers through fleet management companies — known as delivery service providers, or DSPs — rather than employing them directly, fragmenting what would be large fleets into smaller local companies.

In 2017 a group of Michigan-based Amazon drivers voted to join the Teamsters, only for the DSP that hired them to shut down soon after. A complaint lodged to the National Labor Relations Board alleging unlawful retaliation was dropped over what the NLRB said was a lack of evidence.

As labour groups insist the Bessemer vote has pushed workers’ rights up the political and social agenda, their argument seemed to be acknowledged by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos in his annual letter to shareholders last week.

“While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong,” he wrote, “it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success.”

Supporters of the labour movement say the “lopsided” vote can be explained by lopsided legislation — rules that favour companies seeking to use union-busting techniques such as mandatory meetings where employees are served anti-union propaganda.

“I don’t think the loss for the workers who wanted a union was unpredictable, because of how badly broken the system is,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It provides employers with so much greater ease of running an anti-union campaign than the workers and organisers who wanted the union. They don’t have the same advantages.”

One outcome of the Bessemer vote will be a renewed push for legislative change. The Protecting the Right To Organize Act, backed by the Biden administration and passed by the House of Representatives, seeks to make illegal many of the union-busting tactics used by Amazon and other companies. However, its passage through the Senate will be more difficult.

Frustrated at what they see as odds stacked against them in winning formal recognition under state and federal labour laws, the Teamsters union said it was looking at alternative ways to allow workers to find collective power.

“We get concerned when everyone wants to hype up the NLRB process as the only method for organising,” Korgan said. “Matter of fact, it’s just one of many platforms in which you can organise workers.”

In Iowa, the Teamsters said it had been approaching drivers and warehouse workers at Amazon facilities since last year, and might seek to use strike action, rather than a formal union election, to pressure the company over working conditions.

A website for the effort, WorkersEssential.org, said its primary issues were “safety on the job, affordable housing, and to bring fair treatment, dignity and respect for every Amazon worker”.

Another option might be to emulate the Alphabet Workers Union, which was launched by employees at the Google-parent earlier this year to operate across the company as a whole rather than locally. It is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America union, and now has more than 800 members.

The group, made up mostly of Google’s corporate employees, was able to help a data centre worker reach a settlement with Google and a third-party contractor after she was suspended by managers over a pay dispute. The group holds frequent online events for workers to discuss their rights within the company.

Unlike a NLRB-sanctioned union, the AWU does not have the ability to negotiate workers’ contracts. Instead, it provides a platform for employee activism over corporate decision-making. In Amazon’s case, it could enlist corporate employees to push for change on issues that could include the degree to which drivers are surveilled as they work.

When asked about the AWU model being used at Amazon, Korgan said it was one of several possible approaches it was considering, adding: “Nothing is off the table.”