The Amazon Prime Day strike shows how to take on Amazon – and win
On 15 July 2019 Amazon fulfillment workers outside Minneapolis in the suburb of Shakopee walked off the job for six hours, joining workers across Europe in an Amazon Prime Day strike. This was the first major strike action by Amazon workers in the United States. They were demanding a less punishing pace of work and the elimination of temporary jobs. This action, although small, holds momentous importance. In a period where union membership is less than 10% in the United States – by far the lowest in the developed world – this strike by non-union Amazon workers demonstrates that workers want a union and are willing to fight for one.
The worker demands relate to the way Amazon has radically transformed retail work. Rather than retail workers distributed across the city – say a worker folding clothes in a mall or stocking books in a local bookstore – Amazon has reorganized the retail process into retail factories with thousands of workers in each fulfillment center. Resembling the factory line, the pace of work is dictated by the complex algorithms, robots and surveillance systems that discipline worker movements down to the second.
Related: Prime Day: activists protest against Amazon in cities across US
The “rate” of work is set for each job at a pace that only 75% of workers are able to meet. This rate is constantly pushed higher as new rounds of workers are hired and fired. During my year in an Amazon sortation center outside of Seattle, the rate increased by more than 50%. Managers received productivity bonuses, while we got injured or fired. Amazon profits from having the highest rate of exploitation in the industry, paying average retail industry wages to workers who are far more productive. Wages are not keeping up. This exploitation is a daily indignity.
Workers resist, albeit by often pursuing individual solutions to collective problems. Most workers quit. They bounce from one job to another in search of something better. The turnover in an Amazon warehouse ranges from 2-3% a week, or over 106% a year in a ‘normal’ facility. If one doesn’t move out, one might try to make the best of things and move up. Support and site lead jobs pay a few dollars more and get you off the floor, but few workers are able to climb up the hierarchy. The vast majority have never experienced their own collective power.
Yet things are different in Minneapolis. Starting three years ago, a small cohort of workers in conjunction with union organizers started to fight back. At first they picked a fight about the removal of a bus line that connected the East African residential area to the warehouse. Another petition followed for stolen wages for drivers. These were followed by Muslim workers demanding better rights during Ramadan, when fasting workers struggled to make rate. Demands bridged better conditions on the shop floor to broader demands around faith, transit and housing.
They held workplace socials to get to know each other better. They organized across ethnic groups, age gaps, gender and racial divisions. They started to trust in each other, and recognized that their fight was just and morally right. Workers who might have been suspicious of the organized workers in the beginning started to see alternative ways to deal with their problems, and more have started to join and lead workplace actions. These actions forged unity and solidarity on the shop floor; people looked out for each other.
So why did this happen in Minneapolis? It happened because Minneapolis is one of the only locations where unions have dedicated resources to help Amazon workers organize – and they are demonstrating how to do it right. Instead of pushing immediately towards an election that depends on the majority of workers – an often flawed strategy – they have put in the time and commitment to build a durable worker-led institution where workers build their union.
This strategy is called minority or solidarity unionism. Minority unionism is when a group of workers act like a union despite not having a majority in the workplace or a contract with an employer. They take action on the shop floor with petitions, slow downs, walk-outs, and protests. Having a minority union in the workplace changes the calculus for workers. Workers realize that collective problems require collective action.
Things are changing; 2018 saw the most strike activity since 1986. Amazon workers are joining this fight. Workers looking to better their own lives and the lives of their coworkers, family and community must work together to build their own union in every fulfillment, sortation and delivery center. Organize!
Unions have the moral responsibility and economic interest to ignite this process through a mass organizing drive, not only to organize the unorganized working class but to protect their own members. Amazon weakens bargaining power for workers within a union, in particular workers at UPS and USPS. Union members must call on their unions to organize the unorganized. As Hector Figueroa, the now deceased president of SEIU 32BJ argued, unions today must pool together their resources and launch an offensive, with Amazon as the target.
Instead of organizing workers into different unions based on job roles, Amazon’s reorganization of the retail industry requires a new organization that builds solidarity on an industrial basis: warehouse workers are tech workers. With HQ engineers and UX designers from the organization Amazon Employees for Climate Justice joining in solidarity with warehouse workers and drivers this week, workers are already realizing they are more powerful together. This movement must also be international: solidarity must stretch from Poland to Portland, connecting workers engaged in the same fight.
If united, what demands could we imagine in this age of miraculous machines? A radically reduced work week for all workers, industrial democracy, affordable worker housing, free and accessible healthcare and a decarbonized economy? What are we willing to fight for? If the brave workers on strike this Prime Day have shown us anything, it is that ordinary people, when given a chance to fight for a better, more dignified world, are willing. There is power in a union.
