Black Friday strikes and protests target Amazon in 20 countries

This Black Friday, a coalition of unions, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups united under the name Make Amazon Pay is organizing a day of strikes and protests targeting Amazon in twenty countries, demanding that the company pay a living wage , taxes and compensation for its environmental impact.

The action takes place at the level of Amazon’s operations: the planet. Although the technology and logistics company is headquartered in the United States, it operates worldwide and employs some 1.3 million people worldwide, a number that does not include its many workers employed by sub- treating people. Likewise, resistance to Amazon must cross borders.

The Make Amazon Pay coalition was launched last year with a Black Friday day of action, but this year the coalition’s reach will be broader, with protests and strikes planned in twenty countries. The coalition says the day of action will go from “oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centers, to corporate offices,” highlighting Amazon’s far-reaching and less visible arms.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, generates the bulk of the company’s profits and works with both the fossil fuel industry and the military, but its data centers are much less visible than its operations. warehouse and delivery. With its protests outside of oil refineries, Make Amazon Pay hopes to start changing that. As Kelly Nantel, director of national media relations at Amazon, said Motherboard, who first reported on Black Friday actions, “These groups represent a variety of interests.” Indeed, that is the point.

“The Make Amazon Pay coalition is a very diverse group of workers and their allies in many different militant silos,” says Casper Gelderblom, Make Amazon Pay coordinator for Progressive International, a transnational left-wing activist organization that helps coordinate the day of action with UNI Global Union, a trade union federation affiliated with some 150 unions representing 20 million workers. “The way the campaign came about was to recognize that Amazon is both a transnational and cross-cutting entity. If you want to take a stand against a huge entity like Amazon, you have to reflect its own structure. “

“On global days of action like Black Friday, we see how the movement to change the rules of our economy and challenge corporate power is getting bolder and stronger,” said Christy Hoffman, Secretary General of UNI Global Union. “More and more people are asking more and more questions about Amazon’s brutal anti-union behavior, anti-social tax evasion practices and obsession with control.”

The shares cross Amazon’s supply chain, from textile workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia to delivery drivers in Italy at the River Club development site in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon hopes to build the headquarters. Amazon social network in Africa. In addition to workers’ actions, Make Amazon Pay highlights eight locations “to represent the depth of Amazon’s abuses and the breadth and unity of resistance to them.” It is an oil refinery in Latin America, a factory in Asia, a container ship in Latin America, a warehouse in North America, a truck depot in Europe, ‘a regional office in Africa and a Ministry of Finance in Europe.

The problem in Bangladesh and Cambodia is the mistreatment of workers by companies that produce clothing for Amazon’s consumer lines. Garment workers in the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong will stage protests against the dismantling of unions by Global Garments, and in Cambodia, workers at the now-closed Hulu Garment factory will continue their campaign to demand that Amazon and other factory-supplied companies pay them the $ 3.6 million. they are due in severance pay.

“There have been anti-union campaigns in Bangladesh that Amazon has at least turned a blind eye to, which in their form are reminiscent of the struggles we see, for example, in Bessemer, Alabama,” says Gelderblom. “The destinies of the working class are intertwined – in general, but also specifically in this struggle. “

Amazon workers in Italy have turned out to be among the most organized members of the company’s workforce: last month, warehouse workers engaged in a one-day strike that led to the company to accept a certain level of recognition from workers’ unions on issues of job offers and training. This Black Friday, thousands of delivery drivers will engage in their own one-day strike, demanding reduced workloads and a faster pace. While these drivers don’t work directly for Amazon – like in the United States, they work for third-party contractors – they are nonetheless a key part of the company’s operations.

The day of action comes as the organization against Amazon continues in the United States, where the company is set to soon become the country’s largest employer. US-based groups involved in the Black Friday protests include the Athena Coalition, Oxfam, and the Sunrise Movement. While the road to mastering the business is strewn with obstacles, there are even signs of hope here. Earlier this month in California, Amazon was fined $ 500,000 for hiding cases of COVID-19 from its warehouse workers. Organizing efforts by the independent Amazon Labor Union continue in Staten Island (as does the company’s anti-union struggle, both in New York and Bessemer, Alabama, where a repeat of recent union elections is looming) .

Perhaps more importantly, a list of reforms just won the Teamsters leadership election on a platform to organize Amazon workers and support United Parcel Service (UPS) when the contract union, which covers around a quarter of a million workers, is being negotiated. The two things are linked: it will take a fight at UPS, up to and including a strike that would be the biggest private sector work stoppage of my life, to win a better-than-weak contract than the Teamsters leadership. imposed undemocratically in 2018, and it’s by strengthening the position of UPS employees that Teamsters can take on Amazon as well.

“This movement is increasingly successful in internationalizing in its perspectives,” says Gelderblom:

Many of the defining issues of our time, from income inequality to climate destruction, are inherently international in nature. If you want to challenge power on a fundamental level, you have to find yourself, coordinate, and effect large-scale transformative change at that transnational level. We have to meet capital at its level, which is global.

If the boss is the best organizer, as they sometimes say in the labor movement, then Jeff Bezos can end up being a big part of the story of rebuilding the international labor movement.