Amazon workers in New Jersey called for better labor conditions as 2018 ended. Meanwhile, Amazon workers across Europe struck for similar reasons at the same time.
Back in the Garden State, Amazon warehouse workers and their supporters rallied at a company warehouse in Robbinsville. They called for more safety protections and just production quotas for workers whose jobs are to process e-commerce orders.
Marcy Goldstein Gelb is co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a nationwide training and advocacy organization for workers and families. “Amazon workers desperately need a real pay increase,” she said in a statement. “But a pay increase is worth a lot more if you come home in one piece at the end of your shift.” Seven workers have died in Amazon facilities since 2013.
We know that e-commerce is booming. Online shopping is all the rage. There is one more thing that gets less press but should.
Shopping online tends to make invisible the workers boxing and distributing commodities. Amazon is notorious for speeding up its workforce. Why? Increasing the intensity of labor spurs more output per worker.
At the same time, speed sacrifices workers safety. We turn to a new report from Warehouse Workers Stand Up. It “reveals that New Jersey warehouse workers face intense pressure to meet the increasing demands of faster delivery for e-commerce customers and many of these warehouses have had serious work-related injuries and even deaths,” the WWSA said in a statement. “At this same facility, a federal OSHA investigation conducted in 2015 found that management had failed to properly record 26 work-related injuries and illnesses during the period July 2015 through November 2015.” (See warehouseworkersstandup.org)
Amazon disputes such allegations.
Amazon workers in Europe are also demanding better treatment from the global company. “Distribution workers in Europe and the United Kingdom recently staged demonstrations and strikes against “robot”-like labor practices and low wages,” according to Michelle Chen in The Nation.
The GMB, a general trade union in the United Kingdom with over 631,000 members, did not reply to a request for comment from The Progressive Populist.
Amazon’s investment capital is global, scouring the world for opportunities to increase profits and market share. Just ask the head of the company, Jeff Bezos, the planet’s richest human with a net worth of $112.20 billion.
What does all this mean? Well, an answer is that labor, working folks who must rent themselves to employers to earn the necessities of life, should join forces with workers abroad to raise work standards.
To say that labor should ally internationally is easy. To do so is quite a challenge, given the rise of right-wing politics that searches for scapegoats.
Still, developing such a class-conscious view among the working class is crucial to ending a global race to the bottom in which the 0.01% grab a bigger slice of the economic pie. Consider the so-called yellow vests movement in France in 2018. They rallied against the economics and politics of shifting income and wealth upward away from the poor and working class. This is the way forward.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019
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