Teamsters say Amazon workers will strike at multiple facilities as union seeks labor contract

The Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters stated employees at seven Amazon amenities will start a strike on Thursday morning, an effort by the union to pressure the e-commerce company for a labor agreement throughout a key purchasing interval.

The Teamsters say the employees, who approved strikes previously few days, are becoming a member of the picket line after Amazon ignored a Dec. 15 deadline the union set for contract negotiations. Amazon says it doesn’t anticipate an impression on its operations throughout what the union calls the most important strike in opposition to the corporate in U.S. historical past.

The Teamsters say they characterize practically 10,000 employees at 10 Amazon amenities, a small portion of the 1.5 million individuals Amazon employs in its warehouses and company places of work.

At one warehouse, positioned in New York Metropolis’s Staten Island borough, hundreds of employees who voted for the Amazon Labor Union in 2022 and have since affiliated with the Teamsters. On the different amenities, workers – together with many supply drivers – have unionized with them by demonstrating majority help however with out holding government-administered elections.

The strikes taking place Thursday are going down at one Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, California, and 6 supply stations in southern California, New York Metropolis; Atlanta, Georgia, and Skokie, Illinois, in accordance with the union’s announcement. Amazon employees on the different amenities are “ready to hitch,” the union stated.

“Amazon is pushing its employees nearer to the picket line by failing to indicate them the respect they’ve earned,” Teamsters Common President Sean M. O’Brien stated in a press release.

The Seattle-based on-line retailer has been looking for to re-do the election that led to the union victory on the warehouse on Staten Island, which the Teamsters now characterize. Within the course of, the corporate has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Nationwide Labor Relations Board.

In the meantime, Amazon says the supply drivers, which the Teamsters have organized for greater than a 12 months, will not be its workers. Beneath its enterprise mannequin, the drivers work for third-party enterprise, known as Supply Service Companions, who drop off thousands and thousands of packages to clients on a regular basis.

“For greater than a 12 months now, the Teamsters have continued to deliberately mislead the general public – claiming that they characterize ‘hundreds of Amazon workers and drivers’. They don’t, and that is one other try to push a false narrative,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel stated in a press release.

The Teamsters have argued Amazon primarily controls every thing the drivers do and ought to be categorised as an employer. Some U.S. labor regulators have sided with the union in filings made earlier than the NLRB. In September, Amazon boosted pay for the drivers amid the rising strain.