December 19th, 2024
At 6:00 AM this morning the Teamsters Amazon National Negotiating Committee (TANNC) began an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Strike against Amazon for refusal to bargain with nearly 9,000 Amazon employees who have lawfully organized with the Teamsters, and for countless blatant violations of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
The ULP Strike is taking place at a number of Amazon facilities, such as DAX8, DAX5, DGT8, DFX4, DIL7, DBK4 and DCK6, where workers have secured a legal right to bargain. These picket lines are also being extended to countless Amazon locations across the country.
Local 89 joined this national effort with picket line extensions at half a dozen Amazon facilities in Shepherdsville, Campbellsville, and Northern Kentucky. Joint Council 94 Locals 783, 215, 236 and 651 are also covering Amazon locations in Jeffersonville and Lexington.
Amazon’s anti-worker business model is the greatest threat the American working class has faced in our lifetimes. In just thirty years Amazon has gone from a small online bookstore to one of the largest and richest corporations in the world. This growth hasn’t been fueled purely by innovation as people like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy would have the public believe, but by exploiting their workforce through substandard pay, benefits and anti-worker policies.
Every year Amazon expands the type of work they perform as they build monopolies on top of monopolies, giving them the ability to drive down worker standards in an unprecedented number of industries. If left unchecked, Amazon’s anti-worker philosophy will set back the standards and rights of American Workers by decades, if not worse.
The only answer to unchecked corporate greed is a powerful and militant union. Amazon workers know that they need the might of the Teamsters union to win a union contract that gives them a fair share of the massive profits their backbreaking labor creates. That’s why more Amazon workers are reaching out to our union every single day, and that’s why Local 89 and other Teamsters across the country are engaged in picket lines at Amazon facilities today.
For their own benefit and the future of the entire American working class, Amazon workers deserve to have a strong Teamsters contract that fairly rewards them for the massive profits their work creates.
Amazon better get used to dealing with the Teamsters, because we’re in this fight to win.
