Amazon drivers strike in Illinois, demand collective agreement

On June 26, Amazon drivers at the DIL7 delivery station in Skokie, Illinois, went on strike because the company was violating federal labor laws.

One hundred drivers have organized into Teamsters Local 705 and are demanding that Amazon recognize and negotiate with their union after presenting cards signed by the majority of the workforce.

They are nominally employed by a contractor, Four Star Express Delivery. But “every Amazon driver knows who our real employer is,” driver Luke Cianciotto said in a union statement. “We wear their uniforms and drive their trucks.”

Four Star Express is one of 2,500 “delivery service partners” that deliver packages while Amazon retains full control. Amazon terminated its contract with the DSP on June 25 after giving workers two weeks’ notice.

The Teamsters claim the termination was an illegal retaliation against workers who had already achieved a majority of union membership. On June 20, workers marched to company headquarters to demand recognition.

Last year, Amazon terminated its contract with another DSP, Battle-Tested Strategies in Palmdale, California, after 84 drivers organized with the Teamsters. BTS voluntarily recognized the union and agreed to a contract that raised pay to $30 an hour, up from the $19.75 drivers previously earned.

Since then, Amazon team workers have expanded their picket lines outside 30 Amazon warehouses across the country and filed numerous unfair labor practice lawsuits that are still pending.

“Amazon wants it both ways: complete operational control but no accountability for workers,” labor lawyer David Weil told Labor Notes last year. “Can they benefit from a contractor working as an extension of Amazon but not be held accountable?”

“UNPREDICTABLE MEASURES”

Jerry Maros, the owner of Four Star Express Delivery, told Ebony Echevarria and her colleagues on June 11 that he would be closing his store and retiring due to health reasons.

“That was a lie,” Echevarria said. In her role as “executive,” in addition to driving for Amazon, she would attend meetings with the DSP owner, even though she had no control over anything.

“They just say executive manager to keep it extremely vague,” she said, “so they can ask you to do more than what’s in your job description. But they don’t want any power behind that executive position.”

The power lay with their joint employers: Amazon and Maros. “I was in management meetings at the end of May last year where we talked about how we needed to hire 10 people a week,” she said, “how Amazon would double our production in July, how we could upgrade between 10 and 20 new rental vans.”

In a June 11 letter to workers, obtained by Labor Notes, Maros gave a different reason for the permanent closure. “We only learned of the need for this action from our primary customer in the last three business days,” he wrote. “This was unforeseeable – it was simply not possible for us to announce this action earlier.”

The unforeseeable reaction that prompted Amazon to retaliate was the organized unionization of workers in the Teamsters.

“REAL DRIVERS DON’T LOOK HAPPY”

Michael Daddio started working at DSP two years ago, starting as a driver earning $17.50, then moving up to fleet manager earning $23.

Daddio has a knack for auto repairs and began raising safety concerns about the fleet of 2019 Ram ProMaster vans. “I actually crawled under the van and saw that this bracket that holds these side skirts should really have six bolts, while they only use two,” he said, “and not even directly into the subframe of the vehicle.”

Another problem was the heat. “On summer days, when it’s 95 degrees outside and you’re looking through 18 containers and 30 spill bags in the back of the truck, any other time of day it could be 110 degrees,” Daddio said.

“I think it’s important for the public to understand that the faces they see in these Amazon ads are all models,” Echevarria said. “It’s not a company that uses its real drivers, because the real drivers don’t look happy.”

“We deliver hundreds of packages out here every day, whether it’s below freezing or in extreme heat, in vehicles that aren’t safe. They don’t want to be on the road next to us.”

She began talking to union postal workers, UPS Teamsters and bus drivers about their working conditions. “I’m out there all day, talking to other drivers on the road,” she said. “I ask, ‘You work as a delivery driver, what’s it like for you?’ I ride the bus every day and talk to the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority).”

What she found: “They can do their jobs safely,” she said. “And if there’s a problem, there’s actually someone to turn to.”

FAST MANAGEMENT

“It started at my kitchen table,” Daddio said. He and Cianciotto were hanging out one day and started talking about the concerns other drivers were expressing in social media posts and YouTube videos.

“So I started to realize that we’re all going through the same things here at this company,” he said. “You know, even though we’ve never met these people or our paths have never crossed, they’re going through the same things.”

Daddio had been promoted to fleet manager because he was good at his job. He carried out “rescue missions,” that is, he drove to other drivers when their vans broke down on the route or they were behind on deliveries. Using his engineering skills, he began to repair the battered vans.

All of these qualities could have helped him ingratiate himself with management, but the humiliations that came with the job forced him to side with his colleagues instead.

In Amazon’s warehouses, a similar dynamic exists for process assistants, a training role alongside management where workers have access to their coworkers and engage in peer-to-peer training. Workers can use these roles to get into management, but if they are passed over for promotions and resent them, they can become key organizers of union drives, especially if they are long-time employees.

“I was very close to the owner of DSP. But at the end of the day, I’m there for the people,” Daddio said. “What really sold me was that I was there for so long and got to the point where I was almost part of management. I was able to see a lot more of what goes on behind closed doors and I was able to see how many people are being fired for basically nothing – people who are being fired unfairly, whereas that would be a lot harder to do if we were unionized.”

He took notice when Amazon delivery workers in California organized and when UPS team members negotiated a record contract that raised drivers’ top pay to $49 an hour.

Meanwhile, workers at DIL7 could not make a living because they were barely working 40 hours a day.

“When you’re hired, you think you’re going to be working 10-hour days, four days a week,” Daddio said. “Then you find out you’re working five days a week. And if you’re a fast driver, you’re working five, six hours every day. You don’t even get to 40.”

MULTIPLE ORGANIZATIONAL FRONTS

Pressure is mounting on Amazon. According to a letter signed by 34 senators, the company lied to lawmakers about its labor practices at DSPs. The senators pointed to investigations by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division that indicated a clear joint employer relationship.

This is due to the control Amazon exercises over its drivers. The American perspective Among other things, the reports covered hiring practices, on-site conditions, non-poaching clauses, the installation of surveillance cameras in delivery vans and the requirement for drivers to undergo biometric monitoring.

Until recently, the closest the Teamsters came to establishing a beachhead at Amazon was in 2017, when 46 workers at Silverstar Delivery, a delivery service in Downriver Detroit, joined union Local 337.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. After the union election, the DSP began illegally firing workers, and Amazon later canceled its contract with Silverstar in Michigan.

But now the Teamsters run the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States. Workers at the massive JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York, who won the election to form the independent Amazon union two years ago, voted to join the Teamsters on June 18.

Five thousand workers there will be members of the newly formed Amazon union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1. A vote on the new union leadership will soon take place.

More than 4,000 workers at the KCVG air cargo hub in northern Kentucky, who had launched a fundraising campaign with the ALU, voted to join the Teamsters in April, but they have not yet recognized themselves as a union.

As Amazon workers join the Teamsters union, they coordinate their work across locations. At four locations in Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens and the Hudson Valley, workers demonstrated against management and demanded $25 an hour and Juneteenth as a paid holiday. They collected over 600 signatures for their petition.

“We all have the opportunity to live the same lifestyle as UPS and USPS drivers,” Echevarria said. “We can send our kids to college, buy a house and be comfortable. But the problem is we’re doing the same work without the same respect. And the reason for that is Amazon.”