Amazon sales on Prime Day in 2022 hit nearly $12 billion. To keep up with this annual profit bonanza, Amazon workers are pushed into mandatory overtime with grueling 11-hour days and 55-hour weeks. This pushes Amazon’s already disproportionately high warehouse injury rate into hyperdrive.
The high-profile Amazon Prime Day captures the attention of the 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide. If Prime subscribers made up the population of a country, it would be the 8th largest in the world. In this context, it’s a huge opportunity to speak to the 75% of Americans who agree that Amazon workers need a union.
That’s why Workers Strike Back activists are organizing rallies, tables, and speak-outs nationwide to build support for the fight to unionize Amazon during our Prime Week of Action July 11th-18th. We’ve especially highlighted the campaign at the largest Amazon Air Hub in the country, KCVG – pledging to raise $10,000 to support their work! Find an event in your area here!
Workers Strike Back, which was launched earlier this year by Socialist Alternative and Socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, has in a couple key areas become a place to discuss through what strategies and tactics are necessary to bring the labor movement forward–something that’s sorely needed all over the country! The key task of the labor movement, when unionization is in a long decline, is to organize the unorganized. The bosses won’t make it easy, so it’s essential to overcome vicious union busting from massive corporations like Amazon and Starbucks.
The workers at KCVG have been fighting back against a slew of attacks from management. Amazon executives, while refusing to meet the KCVG workers’ reasonable demand of $30 an hour starting wage, are spending millions on union-busting law firms to intimidate workers.
It’s not enough to depend on the NLRB, which can’t be reliably counted to stand with workers, to resolve attacks against unionizing workers. It’s necessary, as workers at KCVG have been doing, to take an organized stand against attacks from the bosses. Shop floor actions, like coordinated confrontations demanding pro-union workers not face retaliation for protected organizing need to also be paired with community support. Through a community call-in campaign organized by Workers Strike Back, in just 48 hours hundreds of calls were made to a union-busing manager at KCVG, and over $1,500 was raised for the unionization campaign.
Instinctually, working class people understand that a union for Amazon workers is in their interest too. Workers Strike Back organizers are rallying outside the opulent “Spheres” headquarters of Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives in Seattle to show them the groundswell of public support behind the fight to unionize. We’ll also set up tables in communities that have been impacted by Amazon’s low wages to spread the word. Join the fight!