Workers at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island are picketing today in front of their workplace, after the Teamsters announced that they would be on strike as of 12:00am on Saturday. Dozens of Amazon employees and members of the Amazon Labor Union (which is part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as of last June) are braving cold and windy conditions throughout the day, with plans to continue into the night.
The union had set a deadline last Sunday for management to negotiate a contract. Amazon’s employees at the Staten Island fulfillment center have been working without one since their union was certified in 2022, and the company is legally obligated to negotiate in good faith according to the National Labor Relations Act. With the deadline passed, strikes began on Thursday after a vote from workers days prior. At least eight delivery hubs are taking part in California, Georgia, Illinois, and New York, including Amazon’s other facility in Maspeth, Queens. It is the largest strike in the company’s history.
Both the original leader of the ALU and the current union president, Chris Smalls and Connor Spence, respectively, have been fired from the company. In 2023, an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon had unlawfully retaliated against workers for their union activities. In response, Amazon has filed suit, claiming that the government agency is unconstitutional and that complaints against the company should be dismissed.
One of the organizers here today is in the same boat as Smalls and Spence. “I started working at JFK8 as a picker,” says Sultana Hossein, a former employee who says she was singled out as a “troublemaker” from management when she joined the unionization effort. Sultana started in 2020, getting a promotion in her first year that placed her as a learning trainer, onboarding new hires. “I trained thousands of workers in the three years that I was a learning trainer,” she says. “I probably onboarded about a hundred people a week on average.”
Even in a company that is growing at an exceptional pace, a single employee training thousands of others for a single location is unheard of if those workers are staying on. A New York Times investigation from 2021 found that Amazon had a turnover rate of 150% a year for its hourly workers, meaning that the equivalent of its entire workforce – about 650,000 people at the beginning of that year – was being replaced once or twice a year. “I saw that in real time,” Sultana says.
Another organizer who’s still with the company, Justine Medina, recalls the tactics employed to prevent unionization. “Literally 24/7 Amazon would have hundreds of workers in these forced meetings,” Justine says, explaining that a combination of management and consultants would take workers off the floor to drill in anti-union talking points, even during graveyard shifts. “They’d say, you know, ‘we value our direct relationship and open-door policy,’” she says. “They would rather slow down their profits so that they can put the fear of god into people and try to trick them out of their rights and out of unionizing.” The NLRB ruled against Amazon last month on this as well, finding that these “captive-audience meetings” were unlawful.
While the upcoming Trump administration is expected to roll back gains in the labor movement made under President Biden, Medina remains optimistic nonetheless. “Whoever’s in office, it’s always the case that the way that workers win their right is by coming together and taking collective action together, and we’re going to win this fight no matter who’s in charge.”
