European Amazon Workers Fight Back
Aga, a Polish Amazon warehouse worker will speak about the cross-border organizing
Sunday, May 5, 2019, 7:00 -- 9:00 p.m.
Niebyl-Proctor Library, upstairs
6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland
Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, walked off the night shift for three hours on March 7, their second job action in 3 months (photo by Labor Notes)
Amazon workers in Europe have been communicating across-borders for several years. They took various collective actions (see amworkers.wordpress.com): spontaneous slow-downs and simultaneous work-to-rule (called Safe Package) actions, solidarity campaigns with strikes in other countries, rally in Berlin during Bezos visit, pickets in front of temp agency office, etc. Workers are learning how to act against divide-and-conquer policies of the corporation which rely on divisions between temp/permanent, direct/indirect tasks, West/East, urban/rural.
Cross-border communications are not a formal organization, they area worker-to-worker exchanges across borders and union tendencies. We invite you to enhance our network of rank-and-file workers and supporters expanding it to the U.S. The invitation comes from the grassroots Worker’s Initiative whose member, Aga, who works at an Amazon warehouse in Poland, will share stories of working conditions and organizing.
Sponsored by Global Supply Chains Study/Research Group and Bay Area News and Letters Committees (newsandletters.org)
Anyone in the U.S. or Canada
Anyone in the U.S. or Canada who's interested in solidarity with Amazon workers in the fulfillment, sorting and distribution centers should sign up and take one of the free tours offered at 23 locations:
Amazon warehouse tours
And ask hard questions about the conditions of workers.
I went on a tour of a fulfillment center in Northern California yesterday and one of my comrades got the dorky tour guide to ask one of the dozens of "pickers" we walked past "how she liked her job?" Her facial expression said it all: she hated it. Against protocol, the tour guide let her speak and she said -- unconvincingly -- that it was "O.K.," saying she could do it in her "sleep." But she went on to call it "hard work," especially during seasonal "peaks" -- which we knew meant the times when rushes cause speed-ups beyond the already breakneck pace.
As anti-capitalists, we all know that work sucks, but Amazon's form of continuous flow warehouse work has taken the misery of capitalist wage labor to brutal new extremes.