[Home-office climate activists and warehouse employees across the
nation find common cause mobilizing against Amazon’s policies]
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ACROSS CLASS LINES: AMAZON TECH WORKERS JOIN WAREHOUSE WORKERS IN
PROTESTS   [[link removed]]

 

Bryce Covert
May 1, 2020
The American Prospect
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_ Home-office climate activists and warehouse employees across the
nation find common cause mobilizing against Amazon’s policies _

A family member of an employee protests outside an Amazon fulfillment
center in Romulus, Michigan, last month, PAUL SANCYA/AP PHOTO

 

At first, Gerald Bryson didn’t take the coronavirus all that
seriously. But then, people he knew started dying. “People I’ve
known all my life, big healthy men three times my size, are dead,”
he said. “This thing is real.”

He assumed that Amazon, his employer, would take the necessary
measures to keep him and his fellow Staten Island warehouse workers
safe. Instead, safety precautions “were almost nonexistent,”
Bryson said. “When the virus first hit, Amazon didn’t move into
gear. We were still doing the same things we were doing on a normal
day, crowded.”

Eventually, Amazon informed his warehouse that a number of employees
had tested positive. The company didn’t release any of the names,
however, so it was impossible for Bryson to know whether he’d been
exposed to the people who were sick. It scared him. “I’m not even
worried about myself,” he noted. He lives with his son and a
two-month-old grandson. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Should I bring it home to my son and his family?”

“They just didn’t handle this whole thing right at all,” he
said.

There have now been at least 500 coronavirus cases in at least 125
Amazon warehouses across the country, according to an employee tally
[[link removed]].
At least one employee has died
[[link removed]].
In reaction to what they say is the company’s lack of response,
Bryson and his co-workers have organized two strikes at his warehouse,
part of nationwide
[[link removed]] unrest
among Amazon warehouse employees over what they say are inadequate
protective policies, a lack of paid leave and health care benefits,
and quotas that make hand-washing and sanitizing difficult. “Right
is right and wrong is wrong, and this is wrong in so many ways,”
Bryson said.

Warehouse workers’ organizing has now been bolstered by some new and
significant supporters: the white-collar tech employees who work at
Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

(In response to the strikes, Rachael Lighty, Amazon spokesperson, said
in an email, “While we respect people’s right to express
themselves, we object to the irresponsible actions of labor groups in
spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon during
this unprecedented health and economic crisis. The statements made are
not supported by facts or representative of the majority of the
500,000 Amazon operations employees in the U.S. who are showing up to
work to support their communities. What’s true is that masks,
temperature checks, hand sanitizer, increased time off, increased pay,
and more are standard across our Amazon and Whole Food Market networks
already.”)

In a breakthrough development, the warehouse workers’ organizing has
now been bolstered by some new and significant supporters: the
white-collar tech employees who work at Amazon’s Seattle
headquarters and other offices around the country. More than 500 tech
workers called in sick last Friday to protest the working conditions
faced by their fellow employees in warehouses across the country.
It’s a powerful act of cross-class solidarity that could finally get
the company’s attention—and more actions are in the works.

When warehouse workers and delivery drivers reached out to Amazon
Employees for Climate Justice, a group of tech employees who have been
agitating for Amazon to take steps to reduce its carbon footprint,
their tech co-workers were eager to step up. “We knew right away
just as fellow human beings, of course we’ll stand with you. Not
only as co-workers at the same company, but as fellow human beings,”
said Emily Cunningham, who was a user-experience designer. “It’s
imperative that we stand up for one another.”

“It’s very intentional that ‘justice’ is part of our name,”
she continued. “We’ve always been about centering on the fact that
the climate crisis is not a fair crisis; it’s disproportionately
harming and killing vulnerable populations.” When the warehouse
workers reached out, “We immediately saw the parallels between the
climate crisis and the coronavirus pandemic: what we value, who we
value, who we decide to protect.” Her group first responded by
marshaling 580 signatures
[[link removed]] from
corporate and tech employees to the warehouse workers’ open letter
demanding better protections and conditions.

Then they organized an event at which warehouse workers would speak
via video about the conditions they’re facing, with special guest
speakers including writer and activist Naomi Klein. The response was
overwhelming, Cunningham said: Within a couple of hours, more than
1,550 people had accepted or tentatively accepted a calendar
invitation. The company then began deleting the invite
[[link removed]],
however, from all of their calendars.

The protesters countered by planning a sick-out, calling on
[[link removed]] tech
workers to “pressure for better conditions for our warehouse
coworkers, including paid leave for all,” in the words of their
public call to action. Dubbing it a sick-out, not just a strike, was
intentional. “It was a more visceral term than just a
‘walkout,’” Cunningham explained. “COVID is an illness, and
warehouse workers in the United States don’t have the sick time that
they need in order to keep themselves and the public safe.” She
pointed out that at Amazon headquarters in Seattle, when one case was
reported in a particular building, everyone else was mandated to work
from home immediately. But many warehouse workers didn’t have that
option, and until the company offered unlimited paid time off in
response to the pandemic, they couldn’t even opt to stay home from
work. “It’s a huge, huge difference between what tech workers and
warehouse workers were facing,” she said.

_MORE FROM BRYCE COVERT_ [[link removed]]

Throughout Friday, she and her fellow organizers held a video event
featuring tech employees, warehouse workers, and climate activists
from around the globe. They treated warehouse workers “with respect
and admiration, true admiration, rather than calling them heroes and
not treating them as if they’re heroes,” she said.

“It was an incredible day of togetherness,” she added. “It was a
really transformative time and moment.”

Tech employees have been organizing since long before the pandemic.
Under the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice banner, Cunningham and
a large group of fellow tech employees had been demanding for a year
and a half that Amazon release a measurement of its carbon footprint
and commit to a number of actions
[[link removed]] to
reduce those emissions and move away from fossil fuels. They even
staged their own strike last year, with over 1,700
[[link removed]] employees
pledging to walk out as part of the global climate strike last
September 20.

The tech employees “were fighting this fight, I must say, before we
were,” Bryson said. But as with the tech workers, warehouse workers
were already “fed up,” as he put it, before the pandemic hit. More
than 100 workers at his facility had protested
[[link removed]] working
conditions back in November. He was part of a tight-knit,
high-performing team of black men, but their manager broke the team up
despite their high productivity. “That’s when we start really
noticing that we’re just getting it every way in this building from
these people, they don’t give a crap about us even when we break our
neck to do the right thing,” Bryson said. Then, he continued,
“this virus walks in the door.” It was the match that lit the
conflagration of worker outrage. Amazon denies that the incident
happened; Lighty said, “This accusation is absolutely not true.”

The two groups have now joined forces, fusing their fights into one.
“I’m sorry to say it takes a pandemic for this to happen,”
Bryson said, “but we are stronger, so to speak, together. We are
united across the country. We’re more united than ever and it’s
growing.”

“Amazon has no choice but to take notice,” he said.

Amazon has indeed taken notice. In mid-April, Cunningham and another
tech employee, Maren Costa, were fired
[[link removed]] for
violating its communications policy that bars employees from speaking
publicly about company policies and conduct. “They decided to go
after the two of us, not everybody,” Cunningham noted, “because
we’ve been some of the most visible faces at Amazon Employees for
Climate Justice.”

Asked about Cunningham and Costa's firings, an Amazon spokesperson
said, “We support every employee’s right to criticize their
employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket
immunity against any and all internal policies. We terminated these
employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”

The company has also terminated a number of warehouse workers. At the
end of March, it fired Christian Smalls, a Staten Island warehouse
worker who had led
[[link removed]] the
protests at his facility. In mid-April, it fired
[[link removed]] Bashir
Mohamed, a warehouse worker in Minnesota who had also been involved in
organizing.

The company disputes that the two were fired for organizing. Smalls
was fired “for putting the health and safety of others at risk” by
“violating social distancing guidelines,” Lighty said. Mohamed was
fired “as a result of progressive disciplinary action for
inappropriate language, behavior, and violating social distancing
guidelines.”

It’s a powerful act of cross-class solidarity that could finally get
the company’s attention.

Gerald Bryson was fired
[[link removed]] on
April 17. Bryson says he was fired for using profanity while legally
protesting on his day off, even though he wasn’t on the clock. Even
so, he thinks his word choice wasn’t the issue. “It’s because I
was protesting,” he said.

“If you’re in the way of Amazon, you’ll be fired,” Bryson
added. “You try to do the right thing and they’ll make you out to
be a scoundrel.”

Of Bryson’s termination, Lighty said, “We respect the rights of
employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so, but
these rights do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions,
including those that harass, discriminate against or intimidate
another employee.”

Still, the workers’ demands seem to have resonated, at least in
part. After employees organized for paid time off for all employees,
the company announced
[[link removed]] it
would make it available to part-time and seasonal workers
retroactively to March 1. Two weeks ago, after the two warehouse
strikes, the company started giving out masks and gloves, Bryson said.

But other battles loom. Although Amazon had extended unlimited paid
time off in the face of the coronavirus so that warehouse workers
could choose to stay home for their own safety, it informed them
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the policy wouldn’t extend past the end of April.

Amazon warehouse workers are far from done with their protests. The
next action planned is a walkout
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May 1, International Workers’ Day, in which they are to be joined by
workers at Instacart, Shipt, Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods—an
action that workers are calling a “May Day General Strike.”
Strikers will demand basic protections for frontline employees, health
care and paid-leave benefits, and hazard pay.

Bryson may have been fired, but he’s not done yet. “I am still
part of the fight,” he said. “You punch me in the face, you knock
me out, but I’m not down for the count.”

And tech workers will be standing with their frontline colleagues.
“COVID isn’t going anywhere, the climate crisis isn’t going
anywhere, and neither are we,” Cunningham said. “I really feel
like we’re at an important moment in history, and we’re going to
be seeing more and more people speaking up and standing up.”

_Bryce Covert  [[link removed]]is an
independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a
contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times and a contributing
writer at The Nation._

_Used with permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2020. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article
[[link removed]]
at Prospect.org. _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

_Click here [[link removed]] to support the Prospect's
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