Friend,

This headline is amazing: “Amazon faces biggest union push in its history.”(1)

The mega corporation is on the verge of facing a vote to unionize in its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, and if the workers are successful, it could set off a domino effect in warehouses across the country.

But Amazon isn’t going down quietly -- it’s leveraging its billions of dollars to fight union efforts in the courts and in its facilities. Courage California is joining the effort for Amazon’s workers’ rights -- are you in?

Will you donate to Courage California and help protect the rights of Amazon’s warehouse workers?

In Amazon’s warehouses, people work ten-hour shifts, with closely monitored bathroom breaks and lunch breaks that aren’t long enough to actually eat warm food.(2)

And that’s just the beginning of Amazon’s worker abuses. The Federal Trade Commission just ordered the company to pay more than $60 million in restitution for pocketing delivery drivers’ tips.(3) The company just started pushing some workers into "mega-cycle" shifts from 1:30am to 11:50am. And Amazon relies on hiring short-term, fixed-contract employees so it can skirt worker protection laws and to prevent workers from unionizing.(4)

We realize that Amazon is a major convenience for people, with its two-day shipping and the fact that the retailer sells everything from tires to organic oranges. But that doesn’t mean the corporation gets to abuse the people who make this convenience possible.

The average person spends $600 a year on Amazon, and Prime members spend an average of $1,400 -- that’s a ton of purchasing power that can be turned into a lot of needed grassroots pressure.(5)

Here’s what we want to do next:

• Join with workers' rights organizations to leverage our Amazon work with theirs and increase our grassroots power
• Hold a town hall on Amazon’s worker abuses to raise public awareness of where their dollars are going
• Work with state and municipal legislators to hold Amazon accountable for its worker abuses

The corporate giant owns 23 warehouses in California, more than anywhere else in the country, so we are in a unique position to get the corporation to change its practices. But we can’t do it without you, our supporters.

Will you donate to Courage California today?

Yours in the fight against corporate abuses,

Irene, along with Angela, Annie, Caitlin, Deepthi, Jay, Lindsay, LisaMarie, Molly, Raquel, and Scottie (the Courage team)

Footnotes:
1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/amazon-faces-biggest-union-push-in-its-history
2. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/amazon-faces-biggest-union-push-in-its-history
3. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/blog/message-in-a-word-cloud
4. https://theintercept.com/2020/12/03/amazon-workers-union-international-strike/
5. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-members-spend-more-money-sneaky-ways-2019-9