I’m Unionizing Amazon for My Mom and Other American Families

I am a second-generation employee of Amazon, which means I’ve seen firsthand how badly this giant corporation mistreats workers.

My mom operated a forklift at the company’s MEM6 warehouse in Mississippi. She was a devoted employee and took pride in her work. That didn’t matter to Amazon. They saw her as a number. This was never clearer than when she suffered an aneurysm that began on the job. Amazon offered no support or care. She was pushed aside the instant she became an inconvenience to the corporation — and they shamelessly fired my mom during her recovery.

In my own experience, life at Amazon has only gotten worse. I’ve worked at the DCK6 warehouse in San Francisco for two years. It is exhausting. I label and carry incoming shipments weighing up to 50 pounds across the facility for hours on end. When my shift is over, my body aches horribly from the backbreaking work. My co-workers and I are paid poorly, and Amazon deliberately refuses to schedule enough shifts for us to legally avoid providing benefits.

In so many conversations with my co-workers, we all talk about how fed up we are. We want respect. When I first started at Amazon, we heard about 340,000 Teamsters at UPS who ratified a great contract providing a lot more money and better benefits to workers. It led to serious talks about how we might be able to join the same union and win our own contract at Amazon.

We knew from the beginning we faced an uphill battle. Amazon is notorious for union busting. But we knew the only way we could stop the mistreatment was by unionizing DCK6 and coordinating with workers at other facilities to flex our collective power.

We started small. We tested the waters by starting a petition to reinstate a fired employee — and we won. That started a fire beneath us, and we kept the conversations going, talking to colleagues about how joining the Teamsters could help us win bigger fights, from fair pay to better working conditions.

Last October, after months of hard work, we announced that we were forming a union with the Teamsters. It was exhilarating seeing that we had real power over our futures. In December, we made history by going on the country’s largest-ever strike at Amazon and inspired workers across the company to join the fight.

We are continuing that fight to get Amazon to come to the table and bargain a first contract. It’s daunting going up against a company with so much money, but it’s also been reassuring knowing the law is on our side. 

Last month, we got a big boost when the National Labor Relations Board confirmed what we’ve been arguing. The federal agency filed a complaint against Amazon for refusing to negotiate with us and is now seeking a bargaining order to force Amazon to the table.

This decision isn’t just important for me and my co-workers in San Francisco. It sets a precedent for other Amazon Teamsters who have organized facilities in New York City, Atlanta, and Illinois, and who are currently being illegally denied their right to negotiate a first union contract. 

We are fighting to ensure that Amazon employees like me, my mom, and my co-workers at DCK6 no longer have to worry about how we will provide for our families. We want the wages and benefits that we earn every day by sacrificing our labor. We deserve to retire with dignity. Soon enough, because of the power we share as members of the Teamsters Union, we are going to make working life at Amazon better for all of us.