Amazon drivers are keeping up the pressure on the e-commerce giant after a majority of three of the company’s delivery contractors in Queens signed authorization cards to join the Amazon Teamsters union last month.
The drivers gathered over half a dozen elected officials from Congress to local government on October 16 outside an Amazon facility in Maspeth known as the DBK4 warehouse to demand Amazon voluntarily recognize their union and start negotiating contract. Since the drivers announced the successful results of their union card drive on Sept. 16, Amazon has refused to respond to the union at all, ignoring federal deadlines to do so, the union said.
“We just want Amazon to step up and recognize our union, recognize us as Teamsters and do what’s right, come to the table and negotiate with us,” said Lamont Hopewell, an Amazon-affiliated driver at the facility.
The union has filed unfair labor practice charges against Amazon at the warehouse for federal labor law violations, including retaliating against two workers who were let go shortly after the union announced that it had won majority support.
“They’re already up to their old tricks, retaliating, firing people, doing all the rogue’s gallery list of things that bad employers do when they don’t want to recognize the rights of their workers,” said state Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris. “We are not gonna let them get away with it. Not on our turf, not on our home ground.”
The rally took place on the sidewalk crowded by an inflatable pig, Amazon drivers, Teamsters leaders and representatives from various levels of government including Congressmember Grace Meng, state Senate Labor Chair Jessica Ramos, Senator John Liu, City Councilmember Sandra Ung and Assemblymembers Stephen Raga, Emily Gallagher, Zohran Mamdani and Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas.
The drivers who spoke at the rally work for three contracted delivery firms out of DBK4, where they have been organizing for better working conditions and fair pay for the hundreds of drivers who work there for over a year. They are demanding for consistent schedules, properly maintained trucks and reasonable workloads as well as a contract that provides quality healthcare and raises.
“There’s no job security,” said Hopewell. “If we get packages and we’re not finished at Amazon’s time, they don’t give us a route the next day or we don’t have a route for the next two days and our bills can’t wait.”
Amazon has denied that they should be responsible for negotiating with the drivers because they are part of its network of subcontracted delivery companies, which provide last-delivery from Amazon warehouses to customers. So far this argument has not held up with the National Labor Relations Board, which has issued two regional determinations since August finding that Amazon should be deemed a “joint employer” of employees at subcontracted delivery companies in California and Georgia.
Those cases will continue through the NLRB process to go before an Administrative Law Judge for a decision. Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards accused the Teamsters of misrepresenting the situation and maintained that “the truth is that there are multiple independent small businesses that deliver for us from this building, and none of them are Amazon employees.”
Drivers said that Amazon and the contractors, called delivery service partners or DSPs, let go two of their co-workers citing past poor performance reviews, but they did so immediately after the union had announced its authorization results as a means of retaliation and intimidation.
Both workers were part of the union effort, workers said. As in the cases in Georgia and California, the union lists the DSPs and Amazon jointly in the unfair labor practice they filed on behalf of these workers.
“I just want for every single worker to come together. What we’re fighting for is more important than just wages and everything. We’re talking about job security, we’re talking about benefits,” Amazon driver Luc Albert Rene said.
