“We can talk to the whole country in a year,” says Randy Korgan, national director of Amazon at the Teamsters union, which is beginning to mobilize its 1.4 million members in a campaign against the e-commerce giant.
Bloomberg
Donnell Jefferson has become used to seeing Amazon’s blue delivery vans zip through his Memphis neighborhood, often dropping packages at his neighbors’ doorsteps multiple times a day. In the last few months, he has started striking up conversations with drivers as they whisk boxes to the front stoop. His mission? To find out how much they like the job — and plant the seeds of someday making it a union job.
In one recent conversation, a driver told him he had been getting a raise every few weeks — 15 cents here, 35 cents there, bringing his total hourly wage to $17.35 after two years on the job. Jefferson told him UPS drivers make twice as much. “He dropped his head and shook it. He didn’t realize it,” says Jefferson, 59, a forklift operator who used to work for UPS and has been part of the Teamsters union for 15 years.
This type of local outreach is beginning to unfold across the nation as part of a push by the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, one of the biggest and most powerful unions in the nation, to unionize Amazon after it voted overwhelmingly to go after the e-commerce giant in a resolution this summer.
It’s quite the fight to pick. But the century-old union thinks the stakes are that high, calling the $1.7 trillion (market cap) company an “existential threat” to industry standards around pay and working conditions it has long fought for. It’s starting to mobilize its 1.4 million members — who work across the logistics industry, from trucking to warehouse operations — to have conversations with friends, family members and neighbors about Amazon.
“We can talk to the whole country in a year,” says Randy Korgan, a union leader who was tapped for a new position — national director for Amazon — last year. “Our members are working right alongside these workers. They are living right alongside these workers. They are related to these workers. They are friends with these workers.”
Union members are starting to show up at city council meetings and school board meetings, voicing opposition to new Amazon warehouses or tax breaks. They’re talking to elected officials. They’re testifying in front of Congress about antitrust reform. It’s all part of an ambitious strategy to effect change through organizing, legislation and public pressure.
The union is starting to provide more robust training to members as they engage with workers and others in their community, walking people through the dos (ask open-ended questions) and don’ts (don’t be forceful or aggressive). “People don’t normally have these conversations,” says Korgan.
UPS driver Stephen Robertson, 38, has started spending his weekends going door to door in Southern California, asking people what they think about the impact Amazon it is having on public safety, pollution and jobs in the community. A common complaint is about the company’s semi-trucks that race down residential streets and by the schools. Or how the city gave Amazon a sweetheart tax deal, but can’t fix the potholes that dot their streets.
When he meets an Amazon employee, he asks how long they’ve been working for the company, and if they hope to buy a home soon. He says the answer he usually gets is that they’ll never be able to afford that. “When you talk to some of their drivers and workers inside their warehouses, and hear their stories, you want to help them,” says Robertson, a big-rig truck driver who makes $41 an hour, plus has a pension.
Amazon doesn’t pay a living wage that can support a middle-class lifestyle, says Korgan, plus rapidly churns through workers. Turnover rates are estimated at 150% a year, according to an investigation by the New York Times. Many Amazon employees haven’t previously worked in the industry, so they don’t know what they should make or what conditions should be, says Korgan.
“When I see Amazon workers now, I see a glimpse of myself back in 1997,” says Dan Gross, 49, a UPS driver in New Jersey. “I was a future Teamster and I didn’t know it.”
Amazon has been bulking up its pay and benefits, with the average starting rate for warehouse workers now more than double the federal minimum wage at $18 an hour and benefits that include health insurance, a 401(k) match, up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave and free college tuition. Delivery drivers are compensated by third-party contractors hired by Amazon, with hourly pay in some places over $20. Amazon regularly audits what it is paying contractors, and this year has spent $700 million in rate increases to support bonuses and recruiting expenses, says Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait.
The company says it is proud of the pay and benefits it provides its workers, and that it creates both short-term and long-term jobs for people. “Some employees stay with us throughout the year and others choose to only work with us for a few months to make some extra income when they need it,” says Agrait. A large percentage of its hires are people who have previously worked at the company, she says.
Amazon easily defeated the first major unionization attempt at a U.S. warehouse earlier this year, when workers in Alabama voted overwhelmingly against representation from the much smaller Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The effort centered on workplace conditions — with employees complaining of high productivity quotas, constant monitoring and limited time to rest — but also sought higher pay and benefits.
Amazon says employees always have the choice to join a union, but that it doesn’t believe that is the best answer. “Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes—quickly,” says Agait. “That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle.”
The Alabama result is currently being challenged after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that Amazon illegally discouraged organizing at the warehouse.
While the Teamsters’ ultimate goal is to unionize Amazon workers, they have indicated that they will not likely seek representation through traditional workplace elections overseen by the NLRB, the approach utilized in Alabama. Instead, they will seek to pressure the company through strikes, boycotts and other acts of “shop-floor militancy,” according to the resolution. The approach will be further determined by new union leadership elected this month.
Regardless, it will be a long slog. Amazon’s high turnover rates make it difficult to court employees. Not everybody is receptive to the union’s full-court press, either. Some don’t understand why the Teamsters are getting involved. “I’ve had employees say you don’t have a dog in this fight,” says Jefferson, the forklift operator. “I say I feel like we do. We’ve had better and I want you all to have better.”
Even Jefferson’s 22-year-old cousin, who works at an Amazon warehouse in Memphis, says she feels like she has a good job — despite still living with her parents and asking him to borrow money on several occasions.
Ultimately, it will be up to Amazon workers, Jefferson acknowledges. But in the meantime, he’s going to keep talking. “There’s an old saying: Each one, teach one,” he says. “If we just reach out and talk to them, let them know there is better out there for them, that’s the first step.”
