SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ These workers model their activity after Staughton Lynd’s “solidarity unionism.” See the section “Our model of unionism” below and Staughton Lynd, Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).

₂ Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (New York: Verso, 2018 [1986]), 62.

₃ Pick and stage is the final phase of the labor process at a delivery station. Filled bags with stowed items are put onto carts and arranged in designated areas to be loaded onto delivery trucks.

₄ Buffering is a key intermediary part of the labor process in a delivery station. After packages are unloaded from trucks on the dock, they are sorted through conveyor belts to be placed into bags that are put onto the DSP (delivery service partner) trucks. Pick to buffer is the phase where packages come down the conveyor belt into a particular area of the delivery station and are placed on categorized “buffer racks” to be stowed into bags, which are the big cube containers you see workers lugging around when delivering packages.

₅ “Solidarity unionism,” a term coined by Staughton Lynd, refers to a tradition of workers engaging in direct action over workplace issues without mediation from the state, staff bureaucracies, or recourse to the law. “Pre-majority unionism” is of more recent vintage and comes from the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC). It refers to a union that acts like a union even prior to official recognition ratified by a majority of the would-be bargaining unit.

₆ Cemex refers to a decision issued in August 2023 by Jennifer Abruzzo’s National Labor Relations Board. It outlines an alternative means through which a union must be legally recognized: if a majority of a workplace has signed a petition saying they would like to join a union, the employer either promptly begins bargaining or calls for an election; but if the company commits an unfair labor practice or a violation of federal labor law before the election is held, the requirement to hold an election is waived and the company must recognize the union.

₇ This is a reference to the victorious 15-day 1997 UPS strike launched under the leadership of Ron Carey, a reformer supported by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU).

₈ Amazon’s unpaid personal time (UPT) system is based on accrual of hours at the start of each quarter, amounting to 80 hours per year for full-time employees. When a worker uses up all of their UPT and their balance dips into the negative, they are at risk of discipline or termination.

₉ This incident was written up in the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/01/amazon-teamsters-staten-island-union.

For five days in December 2024, hundreds of Amazon workers struck eight warehouse locations. These included the JFK8 Fulfillment Center, where the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) was launched, and the prized KSDB air hub in California’s Inland Empire – one of the most important logistical chokepoints in Amazon’s US operations. The strikes were not the terminus of a campaign, nor the beginning. Rather, they reflect a new, more public phase of a protracted skirmish between workers and their managers: sometimes exploding into public actions garnering media attention, but more often waged in the obscurity of cavernous warehouses and solo delivery routes.

The strike was that of an extreme minority, not only with respect to Amazon’s millions of employees, but also within each of the eight facilities that were struck. Still, each picket could claim confidence in the strength of its organization, bolstered by social movement allies and in most locations, not inconsequentially, local Teamster organizations. Whatever the effect on Amazon’s operations, the strikers sent a signal flare to their coworkers. One worker spoke with feeling about “how it felt to be supported by a real national movement.” In some locations, the groundwork for the Teamster campaign was laid by an independent nucleus of rank-and-file workers under the banner of Amazonians United. Over the years, these workers developed a reputation for winning concessions around pay and sick leave while resisting everything from prohibitions on the use of headphones on the job to unfair discipline.¹ These workers remind us of what Mike Davis described as the “advanced detachments” of radical shop stewards and red unionists who built small but fighting organizations that, with the aid of resources from established industrial unions, successfully linked up with the “informal workgroups and ethnic networks” of the larger industrial working class.²

For many Amazon workers, analogies to those heroic and highly mythologized organizing drives are hard to avoid. When workers in longshore logistics or in industrial company towns organized, their prime concerns were power and democracy in the face of petty tyranny of managers. Jordan, a driver in Queens, spoke on the picket line about the “shape-up,” a practice that was common in docks until it was broken by unions in the middle decades of the 20th century. He said that working at Amazon was like “watching that old movie On the Waterfront: everyone shows up to work, but not everyone gets a shift.” The same concern with the untrammeled power of the supervisor and manager energizes Amazon organizing today.

Nowhere was this winter’s strike larger than in Maspeth, Queens, a neighborhood on the southern edge of the borough at delivery station DBK4, the delivery station that boasted at least one-third of all the workers on strike at Amazon in December. Organizers have been steadily building at DBK4 and amongst its drivers for years, even launching a strike of their own a year before the Teamster strike. The divisions that cut across the workforce here are typical of Amazon. Workers are divided into informal workgroups along lines of ethnicity, race, and language: they speak English, Spanish, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Russian, and French. Drivers’ assignments are organized by a number of Potemkin private contractors, who encourage their workers to race against others in the garage. In the warehouse, organizers are poached into managerial roles, and those who stay in the rank and file are never sure if they’re about to be fired or forced out by calamitous injury.

Long-Haul talked with five drivers and warehouse workers about the structure of their work and its connection to union organizing. They describe how Amazon tries to dissolve relationships between workers by producing relentless turnover. They detail how the company encourages workers to see themselves as part of a larger mission, even while it atomizes them by stoking competition on the line. The work stoppages breached these divisions. This leap over the segregation that has typically prevailed, prepared by the concreteness of their prior campaigns, has landed into a new phase of struggle. The heightened possibilities are lost on no one: the existing organizers, the wider layers of the rank and file, and even Amazon are all cognizant of it. This interview with those who may prove to be “advanced detachments” of Amazon Teamsters provides a detailed image of this pivotal moment from the perspective of those who have been at it awhile and who were deeply involved in the strike. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

IRA: I’ve been at Amazon for almost five and a half years now. Before that I worked at UPS for about two and a half. Both times I did night shift. So I’ve been doing it overnight in a warehouse for about eight years now.

When I was at UPS, I worked on a tarmac at an airport. We were loading air shipping containers onto airplanes, but the actual work itself is fairly similar. You’re moving packages around. The night shift sucks.

The thing about Amazon is that it feels fluorescently bright, really sterile. It’s a little dystopian and more like you’re run by an algorithm rather than a person. Managers will intervene if things are not going the way the algorithm wants. They come with a big old smile on their face as they threaten to write you up. That’s the streamlined algorithmic process at Amazon.

DYLAN: I’ve been working at Amazon for three and a half years. I worked at two sites before this warehouse, one in Bethpage and another in Holbrook. I transferred to this site because it’s closer to my place. Before this job, I worked at a restaurant and at a laundromat. Here, we’re only a number on their computer screen. There’s very little personality in how managers speak to us. It’s always, “All right, what’s wrong? Oh, that’s too bad. Please speed up your work to meet our metrics. I don’t care if you’re hurt or anything like that.”

Let me tell you, this job is a lot more backbreaking kind of labor than any other job I’ve ever had. It’s the amount of repetitive actions you have to do constantly. How it works is you’re continuously carrying 30- to 40-pound boxes. Let’s say you pull a muscle or something, then you have to go through their entire medical process, and then they probably just put you back on the floor to do the same thing over and over and over again.

ALVIN: I’ve been at Amazon since I turned 19. So it’s been almost three years. Previously, I mostly worked at a deli with my family. This is my first actual job.

I didn’t really enjoy the deli so much. I kind of looked to Amazon as a nice change, you know. They treat it like a system. It’s something that you just go into, and you go out of, right? It seemed a lot less personal – less dealing with people.

So I got into Amazon knowing that about it, that it would kill that part of human work, the interaction. For two years, until I joined up with the union, I kind of enjoyed that type of lifestyle. After a while, though, the feeling creeps up: we’re not really humans there; we’re pretty much biological robots that these people can do whatever they want to. When they’re tired of us, they throw us out, get a new one. But when you get worn down, you look to the union.

IRA: One thing that people actually do like about Amazon, and that I also enjoy, is you do not have to deal with customers. Maybe drivers do, but inside the warehouse, the only people you deal with are your coworkers. You don’t have to talk, but when you talk it makes it a lot better.

I’d like to think of talking as the most base form of rebellion that an Amazon employee has against management. They really don’t like you talking, because that means you’re not working. But we all still talk, we all still make bonds. And that is the basis of the union.

BRENDAN: I first got a job at Amazon in 2020 in Michigan. It was just for a few months over the summer, while I was in college. I got the job intending to organize and try my best, but I realized that I was in way over my head. I was all by myself, and then I decided to come out to New York to join the Amazonians United effort after I graduated. I’ve been here in New York since the fall of 2021. I started in the warehouse, working in a small delivery station overnight for a year. We were doing some organizing there. We did a petition, did a walkout, and then they shut the warehouse down a couple months later. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get off the night shift, so I decided to become a driver.

LUC: My first job in this country was in a supermarket. To be honest, the supermarket was way better than Amazon in terms of treatment. In terms of money, it’s six or seven dollars less. Besides pay, working at the supermarket was way better. In less than a year, I got a promotion where I wasn’t a cashier anymore. I moved a step up. Working at Amazon is upside down. The pay is good, but the treatment is so bad.

L-H: What gets people fired up? What are the main issues that people are organizing around?

DYLAN: What really gets people ready to fight aren’t just the injuries or the hours and schedule. The big thing is changing how management writes people up. There’ve been so many subjective write-ups. Most of the time you don’t even know that you’ve been written up. But they use the write-ups as a way to justify firing you. They’ll pull out your rap sheet and pick a reason to fire you off that rap sheet. They have all this power and discretion in how they wanna use it – everyone has a rap sheet, so they’ve got an excuse to fire anyone that they want.

There will be some people who can get away with wearing their personal earbuds, but others immediately get written up. You can get disciplined for having your hood up in the warehouse too. It’s stuff like that that people want to see changed.

There has to be some kind of penalty system when managers go way outside their fucking limit and just want to write someone up to make them feel bad. That kind of unlimited power of management is what we’re really fighting against.

Also, management pushes us beyond our bodily limits. I injured my knee, but before it became a full-blown injury, I was complaining about knee soreness. I was just standing up on the dock pushing. My knee was sore from not really moving that much. They still made me go through pick and stage.³ The moment I had to lift a 45-pound bag to the top line of picking, like 35 or 40 feet, my knee gave out. Since then, it has not been fully functional. They’re saying, “We’ll help you get an accommodation so you can keep working.” But here’s the thing: I had to go through so many exercises, physical therapy, doctor’s appointments throughout the year. It’s still not a hundred percent.

ALVIN: I’m in the prime of my life. But this job will eventually break down even the fittest person. I haven’t started feeling anything yet, but I feel like if I stay here for two more years, it’ll definitely cause something. It’s the nature of the job. I see that this “injury accommodation” thing – the runaround they give us when we’re busted up – is pretty much a mirage because management can give or take it away at any point they want.

IRA: I feel like the default at Amazon is you have to prove that you’re not fired. You feel like there’s this sword of Damocles hanging over your neck and you constantly have to justify why it shouldn’t come down and chop your head off.

The whole thing’s like you’re in a fucking Kafka novel. You’re constantly having to advocate for why you shouldn’t be fired. I’m constantly having to go to have my badge reactivated because it gets randomly deactivated by glitches and shit.

BRENDAN: A problem related to the power of management is that if a customer reports an issue with the way you delivered the package or whatever, there’s no recourse. The contractor who employs us can contest it if they decide to, but as a driver, you have no idea what’s going on. You find out that a customer said something, and Amazon suspends you, cuts your days. Especially this time of year, days are getting cut because customers report infractions. It’s really arbitrary.

And then one month you’re getting fired for the same thing you were doing the month before. Certain people get fired out of nowhere. It really pisses people off because those are their friends.

IRA: A few years ago, I wanted to start trying to better understand how companies and firms operate. You hear about Amazon trying to bring the Japanese production system into logistics, trying to be lean and agile, including with deliveries.

You do see that in bits and pieces. At one end of the warehouse, where people are bringing the packages in, you see them working in teams. You have the people who are unloading packages onto the belt, who are making sure they’re lined up for the people who are inducting them with a little scan gun and marking them with the sticker that tells them where to go, who are then working with the people who push the packages onto the right belt. Each of those teams gets metrics on how fast they’re moving. Amazon pits those teams against each other. There’re like eight different belts that bring stuff into the warehouse, and each belt has a team of people who are loading and unloading, who will get a callout after their shift if they’re the fastest team.

They don’t do it as much anymore, but they used to put these big screens up where everybody in that area could see the overall metrics for the building. They could see what the overall flow into the building was. They could see what the target flow is. It’s what’s called “whip work,” a comparison of how quickly the stuff is coming into the building and flowing through it with how much time it’s going to take to get it out of the building. Everybody in that intake area could see those metrics on a big screen.

So people would be adjusting themselves to it. It actually worked pretty well. That area would move pretty efficiently. But then in the back area, everyone has these individualized metrics. How quickly are you personally storing those packages into bins? Then people have their pick rates, which is, how quickly are you personally taking those bags, putting them on carts, and bringing them to the stage area? It’s all monitored individually. And then the next day individuals get called out for being top performers. What’s the result? Usually, a pretty smooth-functioning intake area, but then a complete clusterfuck, total destruction in the back. Because when you’re in competition with each other, who cares about fucking over the guy next to them?

You’ll see lanes that are full of packages that have to be stowed in bags. These can be anywhere from bins of plastic envelopes called Jiffies to big 50-pound packages. You’ll see people running lane to lane going just for the bins with small envelopes to stow those as quickly as they can and throw them in the bags and then do that in the next lane.

Now that lane is completely messed up, and nobody can stow anything. They have to spend time cleaning it up before they can fit in the big packages. It pulls the overall rate of the building down. Amazon probably knows it’s inefficient and cuts against the agile lean shit, but they want this competitive atmosphere between people. They want people to be competing.

DYLAN: When there’s this level of competition, most people start getting really pissed off at the coworker next to them. If they start falling behind, it’s often because their lanes are blown up due to a bad buffer or because the buffer rack can’t push packages in because the stower is bad.⁴

Management has been able to do this through two simple means: replacing the worker and then saying, “Oh, see, this random fresher person we brought into this role who’s not tired is the solution.” And, “Clearly it was the previous worker’s fault, not keeping up with the unattainable metric that we’re pushing on the workforce.”

This is also what fosters that competitiveness between coworkers. It creates a culture where we’re not fighting against management. We’re just blaming each other for not meeting the rate.

ALVIN: For a large part of my first few days at Amazon, I was actively under that spell. I was very good at stowing. I could hit a very high number. I was kind of the guy who would go fix it up when somebody was falling behind.

I would always get the recognition for the work they had been doing because I’m the one who fixed it. That’s who the manager is most likely to remember. I’m from a smaller Amazon site in East New York, where it’s marginally better than DBK4. At that warehouse, they gave me a vest that said “Stow Champ,” and I still wear the vest cause it kind of looks cool. It was just the first of what they gave me. They ended up giving me a fucking 75-inch Fire TV.

When I got to DBK4, it was way worse. They do none of these things, and I realized there’s a clear difference in how these smaller warehouses that border a bigger warehouse operate.

It seems like it’s one of their union-busting tactics. If there’s union activity at one of these big spots, they’ll just transfer things over to smaller ones, where the company actively tries to keep its employees really happy so they never want to unionize. Even if a site gets a union, they’ll just close down the whole place, like at ZY01 in Long Island City.

But at these bigger sites like DBK4, you see that Amazon doesn’t care about even the hard workers. They’re just a puzzle piece on their board. Because guess what? There’ll probably be another one, because there’s always turnover.

Everybody who comes to Amazon falls into that trap at first. You want to believe that you know all about the system before you come in, but most people feel they should participate in it, be a team player. I know people even to this day who’ve been here longer than me who still believe that if they keep working really, really hard they’ll progress in some way. It kind of breaks my heart because they don’t get anything from Amazon at all. At least I got something. I got like a few tangible items, but they don’t get anything. All they get is a little pat on the back and better conversations with the managers.

BRENDAN: For drivers, the competition thing is most apparent after the end of peak season. There are fewer routes then, and they are assigned based on performance. The packages and also our routes are algorithmically generated based on how quickly we work. There are times where our routes are getting longer and longer because everyone is basically pushing themselves to go faster so they will get work.

IRA: Each delivery station warehouse has these shell companies – contractor front companies. They’ll have anywhere between three and eight of them. They’re called DSPs, delivery service partners. Each of them is also in competition with one another for the most favorable routes. Amazon will assign the most favorable routes to DSPs based on their performance.

It creates this race to the bottom in each of those DSPs, where they are pushing to maximize their drivers’ performance. The pressure trickles down to us: we get pushed as much as possible so the DSP gets a favorable route. Managers will say, if you don’t do well enough, or if you get into accidents, our DSP might shut down. At the end of the year the lowest performing DSP is in danger of being cut and replaced by a different DSP Amazon conjures out of thin air. When that happens, we mostly just lose our jobs. These private contractor DSPs divide workers more than anything else. They always have different benefits, so there’s always this illusion of, “Maybe things improve if I go to a better DSP.” That’s a way they keep you on the hamster wheel: separate from other drivers and pitted against each other.

IRA: People form groups around the language they’re most comfortable speaking, the religion they practice, or their national background. Amazon wants to win the loyalty of these groups, especially when the organizing starts happening.

L-H: How is your organizing addressing management’s cultivation of these work groups?

ALVIN: We’re trying to make sure the union is more integrated into these informal groups across the warehouse. We have a Latin organizing committee, for example, and Creole and Bengali committees too. We’re combating them the way they combat us: by burrowing into these groups. Every group in the warehouse has someone who’s been broken down by the company or somebody open to better ideas, ready to face up to the reality of things.

That’s your first leader in that group. If they have enough influence, and we can get this person on board, we can turn that into a committee. When a new hire comes in who identifies with a group, they immediately go to that group. That’s how we’re building the union.

But there’s a new dynamic recently, where there is a manager for every single linguistic, ethnic, and racial group in the warehouse. We didn’t used to have a Creole-speaking manager, but suddenly we do. There is a pretty big Bengali group that has come in, about five people, and there is a Bengali manager, AJ, who also has influence with a number of West African Muslims in the warehouse. He was actively union busting. We heard from an employee that he was discouraging people from joining the union, and so these workers didn’t want to sign a union card.

He probably thinks he’s doing them a favor, but we rolled up on him. I can speak Bengali. We were like, listen, do you want to be under federal investigation? Because if you keep doing this, we’re going to file unfair labor practice charges against you. He’s since stopped the union busting.

DYLAN: Aside from managers and union busters, the company hires consultants to come in to spread fear. They are more bold with people who are not very comfortable with English. For example, there’s this guy, Greco Romero. He specifically goes around to the Spanish speakers, especially the ones who are not super bilingual. Management assumes that they’re not going to then come tell us what they’re hearing. Sometimes they get away with saying things that they couldn’t otherwise. But stuff eventually gets back to the union.

Greco really targeted the Hispanics. He helped management create this big anti-union bloc of Hispanics through crazy disinformation. It took a lot of time to defuse that. We started to win over some strong leaders. We printed out information on this union buster, what his job is, and how much Amazon is paying him. Our coworkers helped translate those flyers into Spanish. That popped the bubble of his authority.

LUC: Because we came from another country, Haiti, many of us were afraid of being suspended or fired if we joined the union. Over time, Haitians at the facility saw that I was active with the union; they saw the union TikToks I’m making. I showed them the videos and they were then willing to join us. As long as there’s one of us doing it, a few others will begin to follow. And then more.

They joined the union because they understand exactly how bad the situation is. One thing I always tell them is, “Hey, just because you came from another country or you don’t speak English very well, that shouldn’t stop you from fighting for your rights. As long as you’re here, you have the same voice as everybody.” Based on that, they were willing to join the movement.

For the warehouse workers, I started speaking Creole. We just started speaking our own language. Some Haitians felt more comfortable speaking Creole, so that was one of the easy steps we took. We had an event that was multilingual. I have helped with the translating. We got a Creole WhatsApp going. We started educating ourselves about our rights as immigrant workers. We even read our union literature together in Creole and in French.

DYLAN: The actions that stick with me are when we get more people stepping up into uncomfortable leadership roles and pushing their own boundaries. We pulled off one action that was universally loved by all the different informal groups at work. We marched on the boss to put a certain manager on notice. We gathered in the break room, different people went around and exchanged some words, and then we took off in the direction of the boss. Our frustrations were with this manager named Tee who was writing people up for commonplace things in the warehouse. But when the union organizing started to take effect, she began going off the wall with write-ups and enforcement. Even the people she favors weren’t accepting her at that point.

IRA: Another thing we started doing about particularly abusive managers was printing out “Wanted” posters with a brief description of their behavior and their faces on it. The tactic is exciting, fun, and makes you feel powerful, but it’s also very risky. When we first tried it at DBK4, it was in the lead-up to the 2023 strike. A lot of people were just very scared of the prospect of a walkout because they were scared of management. So we picked what we knew would be the most provocative tactic that didn’t take many people to pull off. We put the faces of the most universally hated managers on “Wanted” posters and gave a big speech where, without cursing, we called out these managers by name. We basically got as close as you could get to walking up and spitting in their eye.

We did it in front of everyone. We knew this would piss these managers off, and we knew that they wanted to come at us hard. We purposely did something we knew workers would think was going to get us fired, but we knew wasn’t going to because it’s “protected activity” and everyone’s watching. People responded really well to it because it feels so provocative. It’s touching the people who come at you everyday who pretend they’re untouchable.

ALVIN: I’m not as worldly as these other guys, but this is my boots-on-the-ground perspective for the first strike. People were calling me an organizer, but it was that first day of the strike for me where I began to accept it, where I actually felt it.

A few dozen of us walked out of the warehouse for the last three and a half hours of the night shift. To me, that day was really the first showing of what a union is supposed to be. It wasn’t just the war of information that we were waging for a long time. It wasn’t just flyering at the margins or marching on the bosses.

After the strike, I started talking more about the union with people who weren’t on strike. They had agreed with the movement – they just weren’t seeing much traction until that point. They couldn’t see it as a thing with real momentum. That strike emboldened me to not give a shit about what management thinks. Everything they do feels like part of this systemic oppression they have on us. Now everything just seemed to fall into place. It only makes me want to fight them more.

BRENDAN: Drivers didn’t really participate in that first strike in 2023. It was basically me and one other driver that struck. Still, we did organize towards the strike. We had a few hundred people sign up and give us their contact information, but our organization was not very deep – just names on pages. We weren’t able to pull off a walkout or anything. There wasn’t a network to activate that support.

After the warehouse strike in 2023, we went back underground, basically. We took those numbers and names we had. We called everyone, all 200 plus, and set a meeting where we basically explained what an organizing committee was. We made it clear that our priority was not to try and push for a raise in the short term. Our priority was to build this union underground and to build up its strength. We had 16 people show up to that meeting, but no one committed to joining the organizing committee. We went back through and called all 16 and got into the details with everyone, making sure they had a complete understanding of what we were asking them to commit to: all our meetings, their conversations with coworkers, standing up on the job.

Then it was just nine months straight of meeting weekly. We drilled organizing conversations and role-plays. And that was pretty much what we did week by week for nine months straight. We’d go over what conversations we had this past week and who we talked to. We’d ask, “How did those conversations go?” We were mapping out the DSPs, mapping out our support, and trying to slowly but surely build up majority support until it reached a tipping point and when we could pull the trigger. We launched with the cards we had. Right after, we were able to snap up majority cards in a week in three DSPs because we had already laid all the basic groundwork.

L-H: You have been really building shop-floor organization for a long time, much longer than you’ve been affiliated with the Teamsters. And the basic heart of your union, it seems, was forged independently. Can you talk to us about your strategy for unionizing and how it’s developed and evolved over the years?

IRA: For us in Queens, we’ve been practicing solidarity unionism and pre-majority unionism for years.⁵ That drove our earlier strike. We are not abandoning those principles, but we are now fighting for union recognition too. These are not mutually exclusive.

We’re not gunning for an election currently. We’re still leaning on the Cemex ruling and doing card checks.⁶ We’re learning from the ALU’s experience in Staten Island. That was very impressive, winning an election in such a huge warehouse. But Amazon still pretends that the election never happened. They don’t recognize the union, and the NLRB even issued a bargaining order that Amazon is dragging through court. So, do we do an election, or do we rely on an even weaker precedent: do a card check and if Amazon doesn’t respond, claim that we’re a union regardless? In the meantime, you look at what’s happening with the drivers in our facility: the card check is rolling on, and it’s legitimizing our union in the eyes of the drivers.

I believe a lot of the practices that we developed as a pre-majority “solidarity union” were important for the foundation we’ve built now. It’s like a muscle: we need to train some of the actions we will need to win a contract or to win a fight. If we only strike when it’s necessary, it’s going to be weak.

BRENDAN: We had these issues because of clandestine leftism in our organizing spaces. It accidentally became like a private club. We weren’t really trying to branch out to create more leaders. We weren’t building committees for different groups of workers. These were never part of the earlier model. Now, we’re combatting this kind of isolation. The Teamsters bring a lot more legitimacy and a lot more diversity. A lot of the tabling we did outside with the Teamsters had a lot of people from UPS there. When I came outside, I could see a bunch of Amazon workers talking to these rank-and-file UPS workers. These were the kind of people who went from being regular workers to people with leadership within the union over the course of years of class struggle at UPS. It definitely helped with getting the cards.

ALVIN: The strike was filled with people genuinely having fun. There was a shift system, so it wasn’t the same people walking around the picket. There was a truck with Bezos’s face on the jumbotron, the big Teamster truck. They even got the inflatable pig out. They had food. It seemed like this real human event. It felt like this bonfire of dreams of people who want to fight Amazon and they’re doing it in the least Amazon way possible.

I felt so good talking shit to our senior station manager that day. It felt like a really, really big thing that actually might work. It might bring Amazon to heel now that we have this many people willing to fight, and not just in Amazon, but with workers all across logistics. It felt like the big UPS strike that older Teamster stewards talk about.⁷ It felt like something that’ll stay in my memory as a battle against Amazon, not just as a show of force, not just as a public stunt, but something very clear: we want these demands to be heard now.

IRA: In the warehouse, we decided that we were not going to do a strike of our own – we didn’t have the numbers yet – but that we were going to walk out to honor the driver’s picket line. Our strategy was to strike for a short enough time that people wouldn’t be going crazy negative on their UPT in a way that might get us fired.⁸ There were days at a time during which the drivers were striking, and our whole committee inside the warehouse was essentially scabbing until the fourth day when we joined the strike itself.

Amongst our organized core we had a debate about what to do before the Sunday where the warehouse workers would join the strike: should we leave and honor the picket line as a minority, or should we be organizing on the inside? We decided to keep organizing inside. We knew if we were out there with them, Amazon would have free rein to shape the narrative for the warehouse. We knew we also needed to be on the inside talking to people about the strike, helping them to understand the strike. One thing we uncovered in these conversations was that people think a strike is just a protest. I don’t think people fully understand yet that our power as workers is not just our strength in numbers. It’s also that Amazon can’t make their money if we’re out there. We had to get across what was key about a strike with “mass participation,” why our “structural leverage” in the strike really mattered – why we couldn’t just have outsiders come picket for us.

DYLAN: The strike really raised morale in the warehouse. In our previous strike, I remember people saying in 2023 that “this isn’t my thing,” and they would walk out but not join the picket line. This time they stayed for hours. Some new members stayed for the entire thing. They loved it. They were repping the Teamsters, repping our union.

LUC: This is my first strike ever. It was really beautiful because we had time to share something big with one another. The strike taught me that, as a worker, the government was not there to help us keep or maintain our rights. The cops and Amazon were working together.

We knew that we weren’t going to get everybody on the picket, but we’re gonna get there. I just can’t wait for another one.

ALVIN: It was a crazy scene. Day one of the strike, the police linked arms and made a chain around the picket line – holding hands to make it easier for vans to get through. The chain was made to stop the picket and forcefully let in drivers who were delivering packages across the picket, even if they preferred not to cross.

They also made arrests on the first day: a driver and an organizer. The arrests were illegal because, if you looked at the footage, one driver was just coming out in his van, and a police officer came out and started yelling at him to hurry up, which really pushed him over the edge and demonstrated to the driver that what the strikers were doing was legitimate. The driver wanted to join the picket line. He put his brakes on, and all the vans lined up behind him. But the police instantly arrested him before he even left his van.

BRENDAN: The first day – I’m not going to lie – was pretty chaotic.

It was many people’s first real picket line. Honestly, it was the first time I’d been on a picket line that serious. Pretty much all of us Amazon workers were in way over our heads. We’re just following directions, walking in the line, but we didn’t know how this thing was being run. We were letting trucks out every two minutes, doing one truck every four minutes, really slowing down the rate of vans and deliveries. Amazon and the police were colluding for months in advance. As soon as the strike was underway, they put up barricades around our picket. They had been sitting in front of the building for a while, ready for any strike action.

They brought in the Strategic Response Group (SRG), and they made a very targeted arrest against Tony Rosario – the veteran Teamster, leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), and now the lead organizer of the Amazon drive in New York City. The cops took Tony because they saw that he was the main person orchestrating the picket line. With Tony gone and most of our people either completely unprepared or unequipped to take control of the picket line, the cops were able to break it more easily. 

But, by the end of the week, Tony wasn’t even running the picket line. We had multiple drivers, at least five to ten, who learned over the course of the week how to do what Tony had been doing on day one – a deeper bench of people who can step up next time.

IRA: I saw the police come in and talk to managers and plan shit out with them throughout the strike. But even before they erected the barricades during the strike, those barricades were stored on Amazon premises, in place for the cops to show up and do Amazon’s bidding.

We proved their cooperation early on. Alvin had the brilliant idea of leaking the walkout to some known snitches, giving them a false date and time. Sure enough, the police showed up.

Telling management anything means telling the cops. If you snitch to management, you snitch to the cops. At some of the actions on Staten Island in the months leading up to the strike, there was very clear police collusion. Even when protests were happening on public property, following every law, the police detained and brought seven Teamster organizers and a handful of workers to the station and illegally confiscated their phones. There were no charges, but they kept their phones for almost two weeks! Amazon’s loss prevention people, their in-house union busters, were all at the precinct on Staten Island too, chumming it up with the police.⁹ The police also showed up and tried to intimidate our people while we were tabling in the months leading up to the strike.

How many laws does Amazon break? How many unfair labor practices do we have stacked up against them? Do the police ever show up to enforce the law against Amazon?

DYLAN: My family member works in loss prevention for another company. When I told her what was going on with the police, she said it’s because loss prevention is given a direct line to the cops at her business. So they get there right away. If they went through 9-1-1 it would take 20 minutes for the cops to arrive. If you look at what was going on with the picket, they sent the entire precinct there in record time. She put two and two together and concluded they’re using a direct line.

LUC: It’s not only about Amazon. When you see this as bigger than Amazon itself, you learn that signing a union card is way bigger than this job alone, and it’s about backing working-class people everywhere.

We’re going to keep building. One thing I always say is Amazon is always making it easier for us to organize because they can’t stop themselves from doing those unfair practices. They can’t stop themselves from breaking the law. People will start realizing what we are fighting for.

ALVIN: I think that the strike itself is the most transformative thing. Joining a picket line is the best way to develop yourself politically.

Doing that means seeing the culmination of what the worker movement actually is. For the person who has never struck before, who doesn’t know the first thing about picketing, doesn’t even know what a union is, the picket shows, in physical form, a movement led by the people they work with every day. It allows them to see that it is possible not to be scared of the boss, of their job getting cut, or the cops.

We are all fighting forces that seem so fucking confident. The strike shows that there’s something more to this job than just earning a paycheck. It’s not just coming in here every day, doing what the boss tells you to do, and following this damn pathway they’ve laid out for you. It’s about waking everybody up to this idea that maybe we deserve more from this system that exploits us every day. I think the strikes that we are planning are the best way to introduce people to these ideas.

Collective action is lighting that basic spark. If you can light it, it’ll be the most important force against Amazon and any other company in the capitalist world.