Amazon: Recognize the Union Now!
Wednesday, December 22 @ 8pm
Times Square at the Red Steps
Support Staten Island Amazon Workers Who Will be Conducting a Walkout That Day
On Wednesday, Dec 22, at 8 PM at Times Square: come show solidarity with Staten Island Amazon workers who will be walking off the job earlier that day!
The demand of the rally is that Amazon immediately recognize the union. This call has been underscored by the heartbreaking deaths of workers at the tornado-destroyed warehouse in Edwardsville, IL, whom Amazon prevented from using cell phones or even leaving!
"As a matter of public health and a matter of reparations, Amazon should immediately recognize the union without a drawn-out NLRB election," Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls said.
The needless deaths in Edwardsville underscored Amazon's reckless profit-over-people practices, which range from other instances of forcing workers to stay on the job in extreme weather (Hurricane Ida) to having more than double the average rate of warehouse injuries.
This week The Intercept reported that Amazon warehouses barely even have fire drills because the bosses don't want to take time away from production. The same company that drags workers into anti-union captive audience meetings tries to get away with not scheduling life-saving drills.
Other Reasons We Demand That Amazon Immediately Recognize the Union:
SKIP THE VOTE The Amazon Labor Union has already signed up thousands of Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers who want a union. Amazon should recognize the union now. Last year's Bessemer experience shows that long drawn-out voting processes are controlled by the bosses who use that period to lie to, intimidate and threaten the workers into voting no for the union.
AMAZON CAN’T BE TRUSTED NOT TO UNION-BUST Amazon was found by the National Labor Relations Board to have denied a mostly Black workforce in Alabama the right to vote for a union.
AMAZON WORKERS NEED A UNION TO RESIST RACISM & GENDER BIAS Amazon is the target of multiple lawsuits from workers subjected to racist and anti-woman harassment. This includes the racist treatment of Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls after he spoke up about lack of COVID safety. It also includes the placement of hundreds of Amazon's pollution-spewing warehouses in communities of color, who are subjected to the toxic exhaust emitted by massive vehicles coming and going.
GETTING JUSTICE FOR THE WORKERS THROUGH OFFICIAL CHANNELS TAKES FOREVER After the Alabama union vote in which Amazon lied to, cheated and intimidated its workers, it took until August for an NLRB report to be completed finding Amazon guilty – then it took another three months for the decision that a new vote should be held. This is now a full year from the start of the Bessemer campaign, during which time the notorious 150% worker turnover rate has meant the quitting or firing of union supporters. In the meantime, people have suffered more wear and tear on their bodies or were simply fired for not making rate or having too much "time off task" in Amazon’s impossible standards.
“MAKING RATE” INJURES WORKERS Amazon has sky-high rates of injuries, more than double the average of other companies doing the same work. Many of those injuries are musculoskeletal disorders that come from repetitive lifting. These are the kind of injuries that linger, sometimes for the rest of a worker’s life. Ambulance responses to Amazon warehouses increase by almost 50% in the weeks leading to Black Friday because of the punishing demand.
AMAZON DRIVES DOWN PREVAILING WAGES Because the minimum wage is so appallingly low at $7.25 an hour, Amazon claims to pay decent entry wages. But it only pays more than $15/hr after being shamed into doing so by Bernie Sanders in 2018. And the breakneck expansion of Amazon warehouses poses a danger to wages in surrounding areas. One of the worst examples is in Minnesota, where real wages for warehouse workers declined 14 percent from 2015 to 2018, after the Amazon plant opened. A union in Staten Island or anywhere will help keep wages higher for all workers.
AMAZON ISN'T PROTECTING ITS WORKERS FROM COVID Amazon has actually rolled back the few COVID safety protocols it put in place in 2020. This is a company that lied and hid COVID information from OSHA, reporting that of 20,000 infections of its workforce, only 27 occurred on the job.
Workers Assembly Against Racism
Solidarity Center
147 W 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
