Volunteers with The Worker spoke with Amazon workers on the picket line at the DBK4 facility in Queens and JFK8 in Staten Island, as well as workers at the DCK6 facility in San Francisco, whose two-day strike has ended. The interviews have been shortened and formatted for publication.
Pay and working conditions
JFK8: There is a three-year cap on the pay, so after three years you get no more raises. No pension plan, short breaks, excruciating conditions as far as the heat in the summertime, and it’s cold in the winter. Every station is dusty. I got allergies. It’s a safety hazard. I’ve hurt myself several times at this job, I fractured my wrist bone. They gave me a wrist band, an Advil, and sent me back to work. And they didn’t even fill out no paperwork. And this is why I joined the fight, because they treat you more like a number than a person, because I’m fast, so all they care about is my rates. They don’t care about me as a person. The profits you make for them—that’s what they care about, money. So, that’s the issue I have with Amazon. So, like I said, I walked out last night.
DBK4: You’re doing this solo. You got some days, like, as a driver, I go out for 8 to 10 hours a day. Sometimes I only take a 15-minute break. You got 250 packages to deliver, then you got some addresses that don’t have no doorbells, so you do a lot for Amazon. Not knowing if I’m able to have a job tomorrow, yeah, that’s gonna hurt.
Treatment of workers
DBK4: We’re expendable. They can get rid of us at any time no problem because we got people that want this job, they’ve applied. They just got to call them and say you’re hired. This is why we see new faces every two, three weeks. Since the time I started, I could count with one hand how many people are still here from the people I got accepted with.
DBK4: There’s a system being ran here. It’s not corrupted; it’s rigged for their benefit. It’s rigged for their interest, not for ours.
JFK8: Every peak season they hire new people. Seasonal workers. They have them running like robots, making them quit. So that’s why they hire new hires. Now, they’re saving millions of dollars just for this and that. If you look at the statistics of the rollover rate of Amazon, it’s ridiculous. 150% or something like that. I’ve been here three and a half years and I’ve trained thousands of people. Everybody knows my name. A lot of people got sick and hurt and can’t come back to work. Something messed up with their paperwork—they get fired. But Amazon blames them. They try to come back and now they don’t got a job? Like, it’s not right. It’s not right.
DBK4: They overwork us and we’re expendable, they do not care. We’re expendable. I mean I like my staff, I like my supervisors; it’s the system.
Continuing the strike:
Workers at the DCK6 facility in San Francisco told volunteers with The Worker that they have returned to work after having authorized a two-day strike with 93% approval, beginning last Thursday. Following their strike, workers noted increased surveillance as well as retaliation in the form of increasing the difficulty of their jobs. Additionally, Amazon docked the allocated amount of UPT (unpaid time off), which, if surpassed, results in automatic termination. In tandem with their repressive measures, Amazon continues their soft counterinsurgency, pathetically offering a raffle for a PS5 immediately after the strike. Workers report high energy and are learning from the experience to continue their struggle for a contract.
DBK4: I feel like we have to continue and keep going, and get all the workers in there to join us because we got power in numbers. Once we slow things down eventually [Amazon] will come to the bargaining table.
JFK8: The only way [the strike] is going to work is more people coming out. Because we hit them where it hurts the most, their pockets. It may not seem like much, but if he loses a billion dollars, that’s a billion dollars he could have gained. That’s how they look at it. And it accumulates over time. The rich get richer, the poor suffer. So I hope that everybody, not just the seven different cities that are striking now, I want every Amazon building. And not just fulfillment centers, but also delivery stations and sortation centers. Because we all make Amazon. If we could all unify together and say enough is enough, we’ll put a stop to it.
DBK4: Stick together, stay strong, stay patient. United together, we all can get through this.
DBK4: Don’t be intimidated by anybody. We’re staying strong and unified and we’ve built a certain level of camaraderie with our co-workers especially now more than ever because the union and this strike have unified us more than ever.
We encourage our readers to support Amazon workers on the picket line and donate to their fundraiser here.
