Amazon Warehouse Workers in Staten Island Go Public With Unionizing Push

December 12, 2018 8:34 AM

Employees at a newly-opened Amazon warehouse in Staten Island went public with a campaign to unionize last night. In the face of the company’s hyper-aggressive, global anti-union campaign, the new push is a pretty huge development for workers in other parts of the country—and other Amazon-owned companies like Whole Foods. The Staten Island employees’ complaints are familiar—mainly, that Amazon treats them like shit for not enough money.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon (41 comments total)

Capitalism: treats them like shit for not enough money.
posted by Fizz at 8:35 AM on December 12, 2018 [22 favorites]

She said she’s insulted by the company’s “power hours” in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets.

Well who wouldn’t be
posted by schadenfrau at 8:44 AM on December 12, 2018 [17 favorites]

Somali workers in Minneapolis have successfully gotten Amazon to negotiate, the first group to do so.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:47 AM on December 12, 2018 [39 favorites]

Good for them.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:50 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well who wouldn’t be

i thought it said waffle tickets and now i am hangry and in the depression stage of grief
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:51 AM on December 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

I like to think the recent South Park episode inspired this.
posted by riruro at 8:52 AM on December 12, 2018

NYC DSA Tech Action is on the ground at the city council hearings

Signs

Banner drop

Live reporting of the hearings by Dave Colon

“The people are shouting NO AMAZON, not "we want 7 months of procedural theater, during which speculators will drive up housing prices in LIC, followed by a bad deal getting rammed through anyway after council members get to pretend they tried"” “Huseman draws boos after saying that Amazon would commit to being neutral in the face of a union drive. "That's not what you're doing!" the gallery calls out”


“The extremly dystopic looking amazon site proposals”
posted by The Whelk at 9:01 AM on December 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

I don't get why they don't just build a giant black ziggurat and save a ton of money on architects.

I suppose it's because Eldon Tyrell Jeff Bezos already has a penthouse and he's gone for the more traditional supervillain move of buying an old mansion he can host denouement parties in.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2018

Since Individual 1 hates Bezos, wouldn't it be funny if he could be baited into tweeting some pro-union support!

This seems like a dangerous game. I prefer that the racist fascist who yells about nationalism not figure out how much support he could get with national socialism.

It kinda sounds like beating back Amazon is going to require breaking the NYS machine.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:17 AM on December 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

Two birds one stone IMHO
posted by The Whelk at 9:30 AM on December 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

This could have tremendous ripple effects throughout the tech world, especially for those holding jobs in places like Google's kitchens. I'm not getting my hopes up -- but, to me, it's the first labor-related thing that's felt kind of like hope in quite awhile.
posted by treepour at 9:31 AM on December 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

I was a warehouse wage slave.

This company has been treating employees shitty for a long time. I'm glad they're organizing.

HEY BEZOS IF YOU'RE LISTENING I'm happy to pay more for my products from you if you can demonstrate how you're giving employees IN YOUR WAREHOUSES healthcare and paid time off and the other shit you deem necessary for your corporate employees. You know, treating them all like humans? You rich arse.
posted by allkindsoftime at 9:34 AM on December 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

How Amazon treats its workers has no place in NYC
posted by The Whelk at 9:42 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

“They talk to you like you’re nothing -- all they care about is their numbers," said Rashad Long, who makes $18.60 an hour and commutes four hours a day to work at the warehouse. "They talk to you like you’re a robot."
posted by The Whelk at 9:48 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

No ethical consumption under capitalism blah blah and all that but--I stopped shopping at Amazon last year and I'm happy with my decision. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things but it's easy to do and costs me nothing.
posted by Automocar at 9:52 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Zephyr Teachout , talking about Amazon's non-answers. " Amazon isn't used to NY press, they don't know the power of the growing @nycDSA organizing, bad labor history won't go away, and the idea that they need it done so quickly that they can't bother with democratic processes doesn't sit right or smell right. We can stop this deal."
posted by The Whelk at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Is there a strike fund yet, or anything else that well-wishers in other parts of the country can do to help? Amazon needs pushback, and this is a union fight I want to see winning. I don't have much, but I could drop a few bucks to support these guys as Amazon tries to crush them.

I see how brave these folks are, and I want to maybe help steady their legs as they crawl atop of the shaking fence to shout at Bezos on his tall horse. It's a risky thing to do, standing up to robber barons, and I want to--I want to help make a shield to protect them from retaliation if I can. Aside from just spreading the news approvingly and teaching folks younger than me about what a union can do if done well, anyway.
posted by sciatrix at 11:19 AM on December 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

Warehouse workers around here get $14-16 an hour (the higher end is for rotating shifts or working in a freezer, not experience, people don’t get points for experience in a warehouse, it’s about targets and if it burns a body out oh well). Typical commute is 1-1.5 hrs each way, COL is outrageous, so is the cost of transit to get there and back (and so is car insurance if they’re going to drive). Long (and workers around here!) should get more, no doubt, but that’s the industry, currently. A lot of people in that and other industries would be very happy to get 18.50 an hour... (not that they should, I guess I’m just surprised that that number is as shocking as it appears to be here!)
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:52 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

. A lot of people in that and other industries would be very happy to get 18.50 an hour... (not that they should, I guess I’m just surprised that that number is as shocking as it appears to be here!)

Did you miss the part where he commutes four hours a day to get to this job? Let's do the simplest possible math on this and assume that he works a nice, predictable, five-day, eight-hour-a-day shift. That means he's working or going to work for 12 hours a day to earn $148.80 per day, which means he's actually earning $12.40 per hour of effort. That's $24,800 per year if gets two weeks of paid vacation (ha), which is just below the federal poverty line for a family of four, and bear in mind that that poverty line is not based on living within two hours of New York City.

The problem here is not that a lot of people make less.
posted by Etrigan at 12:14 PM on December 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

After listening to this episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily" - The Human Toll of Instant Delivery - it was all I could do not to want to burn amazon to the ground.
Just because I love Prime and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, isn't enough to condone this shit.
I hope they unionize and it spreads like wildfire.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 12:53 PM on December 12, 2018

That's $24,800 per year

No, it's still $148.80 per day, even when you recalculate the hourly rate. That means $38,700 per year.

This is in no way meant to contradict your overall point!
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:58 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

That he commutes 4 hours a day is probably more a commentary on the lack of jobs where he lives; I suspect there are probably people who live closer who would do the job. And that he's willing to drive that far for the job might actually be an indicator that Amazon is paying above-market rates for warehouse labor. (Maybe. Might not be, can't really say from just one person.)

Some warehouse/DCs are located out in the middle of nowhere, miles from housing, and that's problematic... but that's actually been improving over time because of stuff like same-day delivery, which means you can't just stick all your Northeast US warehouse operations out in central PA somewhere.

The trend recently has been to put warehouse operations on the outskirts/suburbs of cities, which also tends to make them more accessible to the labor pool.

NYC is a weird animal because, being basically the US's London, its costs of living are pretty much insane until you get hours away, but in many other major cities there's a "warehouse belt" located an hour or less (non-peak driving time) from the urban core, which also tends to be increasingly where the working-class neighborhoods are. In the DC area it's out near Manassas, with another clump around Chantilly, probably some more down 95 and others in MD that I'm not familiar with. That's also where the housing costs start to get reasonable, but there's still bus transportation.

It seems better than having them way the hell out in the exurbs.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:09 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wasn't there something in recent history in the last couple of years about a court ruling where warehouse workers weren't compensated for time waiting in line for a security checkpoint to enter the building. Was that Amazon too?
posted by Catblack at 1:22 PM on December 12, 2018

Jeff Bezos makes $3,182 every fucking second, so it only takes just over 12 seconds for him to "earn" what Rashad Long would earn working at an Amazon warehouse all year.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:26 PM on December 12, 2018 [20 favorites]

Did you miss the part where he commutes four hours a day to get to this job? Let's do the simplest possible math on this and assume that he works a nice, predictable, five-day, eight-hour-a-day shift. That means he's working or going to work for 12 hours a day to earn $148.80 per day, which means he's actually earning $12.40 per hour of effort.

I have gone back and forth on requiring employers to count travel to work as paid time. It /feels/ like a good idea, but I think it might create a reinforcing loop where they simply don't hire you if you don't live in the right neighborhood.
posted by corb at 1:28 PM on December 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

>Did you miss the part where he commutes four hours a day to get to this job?

I did not, I was saying people around here doing those jobs travel 3 hours routinely (I think this is *awful* and the four hours Long does must be gross). It’s not something to suck up or be grateful for. What I was noticing was that the wage flipped people out (like, “how do people live like that!”), which to me seems a bit privileged, honestly. I know lots of people living on less in a city comparable in COL.
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:30 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

but I think it might create a reinforcing loop where they simply don't hire you if you don't live in the right neighborhood.

It would also incentivize people to have ridiculous commutes. I can think of times in my life where I would have absolutely taken an extra 4 or 5 paid hours per day, every day, particularly if it meant without the hassle of actually working a second job. I'd have driven around in circles in the parking lot if that's what it took. (In retrospect this would have been stupid due to the damage to the car and stuff, but it's not like people always make rational decisions. An extra few hundred bucks a week, this week, can often beat a thousand next year.)

A better option might be to require employers to provide subsidized public transit vouchers to anyone making less than the median at the company (meaning, 50% of your employees are always eligible, no fucking around with paying everyone X+$1 for some value of X).
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:44 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

So how long before Jeff Bezos sends out a few boat-loads of Pinkerton agents to quell the movement?
posted by octothorpe at 1:50 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I don’t care if they pay more than market. They don’t treat people like people. Almost none of our corporations treat people like people. (Is there one? I feel like one of the bulk shopping stores? Maybe?) We need organized labor to teach them.

I hope we can break amazon in NYC. Break all of them here. Let it start.

A strike fund is a fucking fantastic idea.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:56 PM on December 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

Browse Amazon to shop, go elsewhere to buy.
posted by tommyD at 1:57 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Cut to the point: nationalize amazon
posted by The Whelk at 2:11 PM on December 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

A better option might be to require employers to provide subsidized public transit vouchers to anyone making less than the median at the company (meaning, 50% of your employees are always eligible, no fucking around with paying everyone X+$1 for some value of X).

Not a bad idea, but even better: appropriately funding, building, and maintaining a convenient, reliable, and safe transportation system for everyone via progressive taxation. That system should include public transit as a primary component instead of as an afterthought for poor people.

Amazon is well aware of the benefits of this concept for its office workers, or the end result of its second headquarters grift wouldn't have been to select cities that have come as close to managing that as any other in the US. They just don't give a shit about it for their warehouse workers.

Warehouse workers in most US cities are hit especially hard by our pathetic lack of transportation options. Enormous warehouses, if we're going to have them, really are probably better located on the outskirts of town. Employers need to take responsibility for getting workers to and from them on schedule and without stealing too much of their time, money, and health.
posted by asperity at 2:19 PM on December 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

I mean, subsidizing transportation costs only helps if there is sufficient public transportation infrastructure, and it still doesn’t do anything about commute times. NYC has the best public transportation of any city in the US (even if it’s a tire fire compared to other major cities), but there is no subsidy that is gonna make it take less time to get to Staten Island. .
posted by schadenfrau at 2:36 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile, on South Park recently...
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:57 PM on December 12, 2018

I mean, subsidizing transportation costs only helps if there is sufficient public transportation infrastructure, and it still doesn’t do anything about commute times.

Absolutely in no way defending Amazon but they do setup private transportation infrastructure if the public infrastructure is either insufficient or non-existent. Case in point, they
run shuttle busses from the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis out to the distribution center in suburban Shakopee. It's a trip that's effectively impossible on public transit.
posted by nathan_teske at 4:35 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

I emailed RWDSU to see if there's a way that the public can donate to a defense/strike fund for the warehouse workers in Staten Island (they're currently collecting for a fund for Ohio workers on their website, but nothing I can see about folks in New York). Will let y'all know if I hear back. Maybe someone with Twitter should try reaching the union that way. RWDSU should really be leveraging the collective disdain for Amazon that's thriving in New York/across the country right now . . .
posted by materialgirl at 6:22 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

which means you can't just stick all your Northeast US warehouse operations out in central PA somewhere

Which is what QVC is doing.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:57 PM on December 12, 2018

I grew up in the NYC suburbs in the 70's/early 80's, and my entire life my father would get up at like 4am, so he could be on the road and at the job-site in the city in an hour rather than 2, and would cut out of work early for the same reason, so for me this was normal.

In 1985, I came up to Albany for SUNY, and when I started working, max commute was maybe 15 and 20 minutes. I never considered returning to the NYC area.

And then 5 years with Bank of America taught me that "Where you are listening to the conference call is irrelevant", and all that "hanging around the office" was cool for socializing ( and frankly, that's a big part of why I never gave up my desk for FT-WFH, I like bounded socialization, and do offices really well.. )

Fast forward to now. You want me to take a contract in the City? No WFH, even if I show up for a day or two a week by train? I need to be paid enough to live within 20 minutes of work. I understand. Thanks for thinking of me anyway.
posted by mikelieman at 7:39 PM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

not that they should, I guess I’m just surprised that that number is as shocking as it appears to be here!)

FYI the minimum wage in NYC for large employers goes to $15/hr. in about two weeks.
posted by praemunire at 7:52 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Good on them, I sincerely hope they succeed. In related news, the striking Marriott workers in Boston went back to work about a month ago. My brother-in-law, who works at one of those hotels, said that the workers are happy with the deal their union got for them and feel that the strike was an unqualified success. So that's good!
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:04 AM on December 13, 2018 [9 favorites]

Which is what QVC is doing.

I'm a little surprised QVC is doing that now, unless they are just expanding existing operations; they're a bit, uh, late to the party. Like by a decade or so. But I don't really get QVC's business model to begin with so... /shrug
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:55 AM on December 13, 2018