Today, the Amazon vans are almost inescapable. Between 2020 and 2022, their numbers more than doubled, to roughly 100,000. But this symbol of Amazon’s strength may hint at something else: an underappreciated vulnerability.
Amazon delivery trucks line up at an Amazon delivery station in Rosemead, Calif., on Jan 13, 2022. As recently as four years ago, the blue-gray vehicle with the smiley arrow was a relative novelty among fleets of brown and blue-and-white delivery trucks clogging the streets. Today, the Amazon vans are almost inescapable. Between 2020 and 2022, their numbers more than doubled, to roughly 100,000.
Although it is rare for employees to pry loose costly concessions from Amazon, workers who threaten chokepoints within its delivery network appear to have won concessions multiple times. Amazon began transporting many of its own packages after the 2013 holiday season, when a surge of orders backed up UPS and other carriers. Later, during the pandemic, Amazon significantly increased its transportation footprint to handle a boom in orders while seeking to drive down delivery times. Hence all those new vans.
“Part of the opportunity here to organize has to do with their airfreight operation being a real chokepoint,” said Griffin Ritze, a driver at the Kentucky hub, where workers have started a union campaign. But it would not soon forget its vulnerability to strikes. As sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz observed in their book “Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete,” GM and other U.S. automakers spent the next few decades dispersing production across a much wider number of plants.
More precarious is the company’s delivery infrastructure, where such extensive redundancy is impractical. “It’s not enough to get someone to go and vote yes,” said Madeline Wesley, a worker involved in the organizing. “What we’re going for here is a fundamental shift in the power dynamics.” Amazon said that the group was merely claiming credit for Chicago-area pay adjustments the company had begun making on its own, and that it had taken similar steps at locations where there was no organizing.Unlike Amazon’s large fulfillment centers, which typically employ thousands, delivery stations range from a few dozen employees to a few hundred, and the workers tend to be in closer contact.
The next week, workers wore “Hello, my name is” stickers on which they wrote, “Where is Sara?” They discussed plans to strike if Fee was fired. The company asked her to return to work by the end of the week. The company’s facility at the Cincinnati airport in northern Kentucky, which is known as KCVG, is the largest of the air hubs. At its 2019 groundbreaking, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declared, “We’re going to move Prime from two-day to one-day, and this hub is a big part of that.” Then he exhorted, “Let’s move some earth!,” and mounted a John Deere front loader.
Several employees said they had been expecting a “peak” season bonus of at least $2 an hour, which they received the previous year. Some who work on the ramp, where planes are loaded and unloaded, left in frustration after the announcement. The site’s director of operations, Adrian Melendez, said that Amazon had opted for a smaller pay increase that was permanent rather than a larger increase that was temporary, and that most workers understood the rationale. The company said it had canceled a week of mandatory overtime because enough workers had volunteered.
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