Teamsters picket outside Amazon facility in Orlando as part of national solidarity action

It’s been more than two years since Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, became the first in the United States to vote to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots union that has since affiliated with the Teamsters, a union that’s more than 1.3 million workers strong.

In an alleged violation of federal labor law, however, the Seattle-based ecommerce giant has refused to recognize the union, has refused to negotiate a first contract with its unionized employees, and has hired professional union busters at rates of $400-plus an hour to convince Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers that they don’t need a union.

It’s the cold shoulder, however, that has prompted thousands of Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers who have organized with the Teamsters at facilities in California, New York, Illinois and Atlanta, Georgia, to launch the largest U.S. strike against Amazon in history.

The union gave Amazon a deadline of Dec. 15 to begin negotiations with their unionized employees up in Staten Island, to avoid a strike action, which Amazon ignored.

The cold shoulder has also prompted Teamsters in Central Florida — where all Amazon workers, like the majority of Florida’s workforce, are nonunion — to picket outside Amazon facilities in solidarity with their fellow Teamsters elsewhere.

The union says they’ve organized “hundreds” of solidarity picketing actions at fulfillment centers and Amazon air hubs across the U.S., occurring one day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly cozied up to President-elect Donald Trump just hours away at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.

“What we’re doing is historic,” said Leah Pensler, a warehouse worker at Amazon’s DCK6 in San Francisco, in a statement. “We are fighting against a vicious union-busting campaign, and we are going to win.”

Members of the Teamsters in Florida, including members of Local 79 in the Tampa Bay area and Local 385 in Orlando, picketed outside non-union Amazon facilities in Ruskin, Auburndale, Davenport and Orlando beginning early Thursday morning.

About a dozen Teamsters in Orlando lined a large stretch of sidewalk outside Amazon’s 2.3 million-square-foot fulfillment center on Boggy Creek Road Thursday morning, holding up signs that read “Amazon IS UNFAIR” and “INJUSTO.”

A spokesperson for Amazon told Orlando Weekly that the Teamsters are trying to mislead the public.

None of Amazon’s drivers or warehouse workers in Orlando, or in Florida broadly, are represented by a union, nor are they on strike — although one worker driving an Amazon-branded semi-truck began loudly honking as they drove past the picket line Thursday morning.

The Teamsters Local 385 in Orlando, one of several locals in Florida, represents nearly 9,000 workers across Central Florida, including thousands of Disney World and UPS employees. They and others in Florida were called on by their international union to picket outside the Orlando facility, just south of the Orlando International Airport, to show support for their fellow Teamsters.

While Amazon itself is worth an estimated $2 trillion, many of its employees say they earn wages that aren’t enough to support their families, despite the back-breaking work they perform to build Amazon’s profit.

A recent congressional investigation into Amazon’s workplace safety practices — led by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — found that Amazon not only had a higher-than-average injury rate in its warehouses, but also ignored recommendations to improve safety measures.

Their analysis found that Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023, according to their report. Workers at Amazon warehouses, specifically, were almost doubly likely to experience injury each year over the past seven years, compared to workers in other warehouses.

Senate staffers conducted more than 135 interviews and heard from nearly 500 workers who shared their stories, including labor activist Connell Crooms of Florida.

“Living in Florida, we experienced some of the hottest temperatures on record; a lot of people complained about the heat at Amazon,” Crooms told HELP staff, according to the report. “Amazon didn’t adjust their production expectations under those working conditions … if it’s hot they still expect 300 items packaged per hour.”

A worker at an Orlando UPS warehouse that lacks air conditioning told Orlando Weekly last year that he brought frozen water bottles to work during the state’s hottest months. He’d place them in the pockets of his pants and said they’d often be fully defrosted in minutes.

While Amazon does reportedly install AC in some of their warehouses, a number of workers told Senate staffers that the air-conditioning systems are “either broken, not sufficient to cool down the space, or not available throughout the warehouse.”

Neither Florida nor the federal government has a specific workplace standard established to protect workers from extreme heat, and Florida lawmakers this year prohibited local governments in Florida from trying to create their own requirements for employers in the absence of state action.

“Amazon’s executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries at its warehouses,” said HELP committee chair and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, in a statement. “This is precisely the type of outrageous corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of.”

It’s also a contributing factor to the decision by roughly 10,000 Amazon workers in the U.S. to organize and form a union, per the Teamsters, in the hopes of negotiating a contract with Amazon that can address issues such as worker safety, wages, and job benefits.

“If Amazon Teamsters are forced onto the picket line, it’s because the company has failed its workforce,” said Teamsters general president Sean M. O’Brien in a statement, after workers at Amazon’s DGT8 facility in Atlanta voted to authorize a strike earlier this week. “Amazon workers want to earn a good living, have decent health care, and be safe on the job. They are done with the disrespect, and if Amazon keeps pushing them, they will push them to strike.”

Unionized Amazon workers have said that going on strike over unfair labor practices is not the ideal scenario — they don’t want to disrupt or ruin anyone’s holidays, but they also see it as a fight that’s bigger than just themselves.

“A lot of us don’t want to go on strike. You know, we want to work, but we want to work for fair wages,” Justine Medina, an Amazon worker of three years (and former Floridian) at the unionized JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, told More Perfect Union in a recent interview.

“We want to get adequate breaks so that we’re not getting injured all the time,” Medina continued. “We want to be able to go to the bathroom and drink water without getting written up. And if we have to go on strike to make Amazon come to the table and give us the respect that we deserve, then we’re going to do it.”

A spokesperson for Amazon told Orlando Weekly that the Teamsters are trying to mislead the public in claiming that they represent as many employees as they do.

“The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union,” the spokesperson shared over email.

Amazon has repeatedly claimed that their more than 390,000 delivery drivers, employed by third-party DSPs, are not their own employees — and they don’t have to bargain with them if they do unionize.

Even so, disclosure reports filed with the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards show that Amazon has nonetheless hired professional union avoidance consultants (including through a firm based in Satellite Beach, Florida) to specifically dissuade organizing activity among their DSP drivers at some of the same facilities where workers went on strike today.

Amazon spent over $3 million on union avoidance consultants in 2023 alone, dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-union labor consultants who disclosed Florida addresses under threat of perjury for reporting false information.

This post has been updated to clarify that Amazon workers are not on strike at all 10 facilities that have seen organizing activity with the Teamsters in recent months.

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This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2024.