The Teamsters’ Amazon “Strikes”: a Critical Assessment

Screen shot from the Teamsters Facebook page.

The Teamsters’ five day long strike against Amazon ended inconclusively, but the union hinted at future actions with “Stay tuned.” Beginning on Thursday, December 19, the Teamsters called strikes in response to the failure of Amazon to meet the union’ s demand to come to the bargaining table four days earlier. The Teamsters declared that it was “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.” The union’s General President Sean O’Brien said in an official statement:

“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it. These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”

The Teamsters called for strike action at eight locations across four states, that included Amazon centers in Queens and Staten Island New York, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and in Skokie, Ill, where they claim to represent the drivers or the warehouse workers through elections or card check.

The Teamsters sent Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) pickets to scores of Amazon locations across the country, mostly made up of local officials and union stewards, with little or no connection to Amazon. The union has not publicly stated how many locations were picketed or what the results were. The Teamsters also called upon community supporters to join the picket lines across the country.

On one level, the Teamsters actions were a bold move, but their sparse presence, possibly representing one percent of the company’s entire U.S. workforce, has raised some serious questions. Among them are whether there was any tangible goal beyond the Teamsters maintaining their franchise at Amazon, and left hanging what the next steps, if any, were in the organizing campaign.

When I spoke to long time labor lawyer and negotiator, Joe Burns, the authorof many important books on strike strategy, about the Teamsters’ actions at Amazon and what his thoughts on it were. He told me:

While it is hard to tell due to the lack of credible reporting. These “strikes” seem very similar to the approaches in fast food, rideshare and at Walmart over the last decade or so, where the union would put out press releases claiming a giant corporation had been struck. This would gather publicity and generate some excitement on the left but it did not impact production or even draw out more than a tiny fraction of the workplace.

The actions are really more informational picketing with a media spin of a strike tacked on to it. The problem is we have over a decade of experience showing such efforts don’t really work. They gather press and at times can help liberal groups or unions pass labor legislation, but have shown little in the way of furthering permanent union organizing.

It’s hard not to agree with Burns’ assessment. But, then why are the Teamsters recycling a failed strategy? Or is there something bigger and better coming down the road?

An existential threat

In 2021 at the thirtieth convention of the Teamsters, delegates overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions to combat what then-General President James P. Hoffa called the “existential threat” that Amazon posed to the union. The Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon, which is worth quoting at length, declared:

Amazon is changing the nature of work in our country and touches many core
Teamster industries and employers such as UPS, parcel delivery, freight, airline, food distribution and motion picture, and presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries;

Leaning on its own history, it said:

Whereas, Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before

a meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;

And it concluded:

Finally, be it resolved, that building worker power at Amazon and helping those

workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union and the Union commits to fully fund and support the Amazon Project, to supply all resources necessary and to ultimately create a special Amazon Division to aid Amazon workers and defend and protect the standards in our industries from the existential threat that is Amazon.

An Amazon division of the Teamsters was created and California Teamster leader Randy Korgan was appointed as its first director by Hoffa, and then reappointed by his successor Sean O’Brien. So, it’s remarkable given that Amazon, which was declared an existential threat three and a half years — and probably a decade late at that point — how little the Teamsters have actually done.

The biggest, initial breakthrough was accomplished by the independent and financially threadbare Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which made international news and made ALU leader Chris Smalls into a celebrity. Despite an initial burst of interest in the ALU from Amazon workers across the country, it couldn’t reproduce its success at JFK8 elsewhere and soon went into crisis.

Meanwhile, small groups of Amazon workers began to form organizing committees in other facilities but faced Amazon’s notorious union-busting operation. However, faced with the prospect of its victory in Staten Island dying through attrition, the ALU negotiated a merger with the Teamsters as an autonomous unit. I took no position on whether they should join the Teamsters, but cautioned that it wasn’t a silver bullet solution to their challenges. I wrote:

Some ALU reformers and supporters argue that for the ALU to succeed at Amazon it needs a “big gun” to back it up. While you can understand the allure of being affiliated to a larger union after a series of defeats, is this a solution to the existential crisis of ALU? Even recent history at Amazon doesn’t suggest this is a silver bullet solution. Way back in April 2021, when the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), affiliated with the mammoth UFCW, lost two to one in a union election at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama, despite having a successful record of organizing in the South.

Now that the big gun has been fired, what were the results?

The big strike?

“Understanding these strikes is made difficult because labor left reporting, including outlets like Labor Notes and Jacobin, does not cover key questions such as level of worker participation in these strikes, which should be a key aspect of labor reporting. However, from accounts online, mainstream sources such as the New York Times, it appears that participation is very low in these strikes,” Joe Burns wrote to me. “For example, at the main Staten Island facility of thousands of workers, the New York Times estimated 100 workers. Other accounts have been a very small percentage of the workplace and mainly outside Teamster officials or supporters picketing. I have not heard of any facility that had a large percentage of Amazon workers on strike. Good independent labor reporting would zero in on such questions and not merely parrot the official union press releases. ”

While the Teamsters made an effort in the major media markets to have a larger number of people protesting at some of Amazon’s facilities, outside of those areas the lack of Amazon workers on the picket lines was more glaring. I asked several rank and file Teamsters and union activists who visited the Amazon picket lines for their observations. Most asked to be quoted anonymously or by a pseudonym. Kat from Florida, who is active with Teamsters Mobilize, reported:

It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process. In the three hours I was there, we let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket. Even short of blocking the road, there were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that; they clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in. Except for myself, the few other workers who showed up basically followed this lead.

Yet, Kat also reported:

At one point, a woman who worked inside the warehouse we were stationed at pulled over and was very excited to hear what was happening and to learn whether there were any ongoing efforts to organize her building. Me and the other rank and file member were the only ones who spoke with her, which seemed like a huge missed opportunity.

Alyx reported from Salem, Oregon on Friday, December 20th:

There were two Teamsters retirees from Local 324 holding the line. From what they said, most shifts were being covered by retirees from their local and another. I don’t know how many current Amazon workers participated. From what I saw, this location didn’t seem to have much impact. The facility is fairly remote, so not a lot of public visibility. The picket spot was set closer to the entrance than the main street, so only drivers and warehouse workers saw us. Since turnout was low, picketers weren’t able to impact access.

Joe from Southern California wrote to me after visiting the City of Industry picket line, his experiences were more positive, though the number of Amazon workers involved was still small. He wrote:

Where I was at, I ‘d say around 45–50 Amazon drivers on the picket line. Some of the striking Amazon workers were well versed on how to talk to their Amazon driving coworkers. I did not see any cards getting signed. The local Teamster union played both a primary and secondary role. Primary role in, they were active in moving striking Amazon workers to the other locations of the picket lines. Some talked to leaving Direct Service Providers (DSP) drivers, but most of the talking was striking Amazon drivers to their fellow DSP Amazon driving coworkers. I have seen many of the striking Amazon workers being interviewed by various online publications, pages and social media accounts. These actions made a difference. It brought publicity to the efforts of the Amazon workers. The public is aware of their efforts. Where I’m at. It was a good start. I would say this was a structure test to really gauge where the IBT Amazon Division is at.

Karl, a long-standing union steward in Oklahoma City, wrote me:

We picketed 2 Amazon facilities next to each other. Approximately 20–30 workers talked with us over the course of 48 hours. This, out of a workforce of 4–6 thousand. None participated directly, though strongly indicated that they would be interested in organizing and participating in further union campaigns if the local ​union were to follow up. Many of these provided contact info and requested information on the local. The local’s role seemed to be restricted to one of an informational picket. Little effort had been expended towards contacting workers or establishing any prior inside organization with which an informational picket could reinforce. It remains to be seen whether the local ​union will squander or follow up with new contacts. I think that the actions can make a difference provided the local and international makes a concerted effort to consolidate organization in the picketed plants and follow up with escalating actions that invite increasing numbers of workers to participate.

Despite Amazon’s insistence that there was no interference with their operations, the Christmas time actions proved to be a public relations black eye for Amazon. The largely favorable media coverage highlighted the poverty wages of drivers, the dangerous and humiliating working conditions. Yet, we have been here before. No amount of public shaming has changed Amazon’s ways. With barely one percent, and that’s being generous, of Amazon’s workers participating in the union’s action, there is certainly a long way to go on to organize a small fraction of Amazon’s workforce.

Missed opportunity

“I certainly would not want to discount the organizing and the efforts of the workers who did go on strike. Hopefully, it will spur some more activity but the history of publicity strikes is not very good. I do think a serious analysis needs to be done of levels of participation. The tendency however, is to simply declare victory and learn nothing. But I also think we need a sober analysis of what kind of labor movement it would take to organize Amazon. I do not think we can talk about organizing giant employers without talking about the structure and ideology of our labor movement. In order to truly take on these giant employers, we would need a labor movement capable of employing picket line militancy and solidarity tactics capable of mobilizing the entire labor movement against corporate giants,” Joe Burns wrote to me.

I do think the Teamsters missed an opportunity last year. The Teamsters raised expectations about last year’s UPS contract, the largest private sector contract in the country. A transformational strike was expected and could have been the lever to organize a behemoth like Amazon. Yet, the contract campaign ended on a flat note. As I wrote last year:

The U.S. Left that repeated continually that we were on the eve of the biggest strike in modern U.S. history. This, of course, did not occur leading to the frustration and demoralization of the hundreds of young radicals — many identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA — who went out and got jobs on some of the worst shifts at UPS to be part of this transformative campaign.

We operate in the wake of failure of a transformational strike at UPS and its consequences at Amazon. We are also facing a much more difficult political environment with the incoming Trump administration that promises a full scale assault on trade union rights, including the Teamsters, despite the union being led by Trump-ally Sean O’Brien. The political terrain can shift quickly, but it will require a clear-eyed assessment of the recent events at Amazon and the creation of new left to take advantage of them.

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