Courtesy International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Drivers for Amazon who are organizing with the Teamsters deliver their demands this morning in Queens, New York.
Several hundred Amazon drivers organizing with the Teamsters have reached the threshold for a union vote at Amazon’s DBK4 warehouse in Queens, New York.
A majority of drivers at three of the site’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) contractors have now signed union authorization cards as of this morning. Amazon will now be forced to either recognize the union or contest the card count and officially hold an election.
The organizing drive in Queens directly follows a recent ruling from the National Labor Relations Board in August deeming Amazon a joint employer of its DSP contractors, with full legal responsibilities for the labor force.
“The NLRB made clear that Amazon has a legal obligation to bargain with its drivers and meet them at the negotiating table to improve wages, working conditions, safety standards, and everything in between,” said Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “Hundreds of Amazon delivery drivers from Queens will now have the full backing of more than 1.3 million Teamsters nationwide.”
The decision by an NLRB regional judge in Los Angeles could deal a significant blow to Amazon’s third-party business model of outsourcing last-mile delivery. The company has long relied on a system of enforcing restrictive contracts with DSPs to officially manage low-paid drivers while evading any culpability for union busting or workplace violations that take place on the job.
The announcement is also a major boost to the Teamsters’ efforts to organize Amazon workers. Teamsters are aggressively moving forward to unionize Amazon’s thousands of DSPs across the country as though these contractors are official arms of the company. At the same time, the union is also actively organizing the Amazon-run warehouses, building off the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in Staten Island in 2022 before affiliating with the Teamsters this summer. That warehouse has yet to complete a first contract.
The joint employer ruling involved an Amazon facility in Palmdale, California. Last year, after the Teamsters organized Battle-Tested Strategies, a DSP contractor, Amazon simply terminated its relationship with the company. The Teamsters filed an unfair labor practice, and a regional director at the NLRB issued a preliminary ruling in their favor in August. If the two parties don’t settle, which is unlikely, then the case will be brought before an NLRB judge.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
In a related case this month, the NLRB reaffirmed Amazon as a joint employer by holding the company liable for illegal union-busting tactics carried out by one of its DSPs at an Atlanta warehouse.
Both decisions by the board set up a clash with Amazon, which still holds publicly that DSPs are wholly independent contractors that oversee their own workforce and other business decisions. That’s in spite of the fact that drivers wear Amazon gear, operate vans bearing the company logo, use equipment proprietary to Amazon, and receive delivery route schedules dictated by Amazon. It’s just the pay stub that has the DSP’s name on it.
Stefan Jeremiah/AP Photo
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, right, speaks to Amazon workers outside a Staten Island Amazon warehouse facility, June 19, 2024, in New York.
“Any Amazon driver knows the truth: we wear Amazon uniforms, we drive Amazon’s trucks, we live by Amazon’s workplace standards—we are Amazon employees,” said Latrice Shadae Johnson, an Amazon driver from DBK4 in Queens, in a press release. “Amazon has no choice but to meet us at the negotiating table to hear our demands.”
“Whenever we have to make changes, however small, like switching to a larger van for our delivery volume, our direct managers need to get approval from Amazon,” Luc Rene, a delivery driver in Queens organizing with the Teamsters, told the Prospect.
Amazon has repeatedly alleged that its DSPs have full independence, ignoring the testimony of the workers at these companies. Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of senators even called Amazon’s bluff, after it submitted written answers that lawmakers called misleading and “self-contradictory.”
The way the company responds to the union drive at DBK4 in Queens will indicate how it plans to proceed under the NLRB’s new legal designation. Amazon is still suing to challenge the constitutionality of the NLRB.
Two weeks ago, following the NLRB ruling, the Teamsters also announced that a majority of drivers at all four DSPs at Amazon’s Skokie facility in Illinois signed cards. Amazon has not yet responded to the card check.
When workers at the first DSP in Skokie to organize with the Teamsters, Four Star Express Delivery, turned in union cards back in June, Amazon once again terminated the contract, just as it did in Palmdale last year. Over 100 drivers subsequently went on strike and filed unfair labor practice charges for the contract termination and failure to bargain in good faith.
DSP drivers are unionizing because of persistent and nearly identical conditions at worksites across the country. They’re primarily asking for more reliable schedules, reasonable workloads, and adequate staffing totals, among other benefits like fair compensation. As organizing pressure mounted, Amazon did announce last week that it was awarding 7 percent raises to delivery workers across its DSPs.
At the Queens facility, so-called efficiency protocols have put enormous pressure on drivers to meet quotas for package deliveries.
Because of these worsening conditions without pay bumps, driver Carl Hooks became an outspoken union proponent last year and started organizing with a labor group called Amazonians United, which formed prior to the Teamsters’ efforts. Shortly after, Hooks was fired by his DSP for minor infractions, leading AU to file charges for what they believed was retaliation, along with other practices such as “captive audience” meetings inside the warehouse facility.
Cases such as Hooks’s have pushed more workers to organize with the Teamsters, leading to the card count today.
“For too long, we have been demanding better pay and working conditions from Amazon while they have tried to dodge responsibility for us,” said David Colon, another Amazon driver from DBK4 in Queens, in a press release. “Those days are over, and we’re ready to fight like hell with the Teamsters to get what we deserve. What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.”
