An Amazon conveyance truck passes people holding signs and marching during a strike by Teamsters union members at an Amazon buildings in Alpharetta, Georgia, Dec. 19, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage | Reuters
Amazon workers across seven facilities in New York, Georgia, California and Illinois traveled on strike Thursday to lobby for better benefits, higher wages and safer working conditions.
The strike, organized by fellows of the Teamsters union, is intended to pressure Amazon to come to the negotiating table and avoid disruptions during the peak of the gala shopping season. The union had previously given Amazon until Sunday to agree to bargaining dates for a contract.
“If your include is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a utterance. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
In a statement to CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson guessed the Teamsters have been on a yearlong campaign to “intentionally mislead the public.” While the union says it represents thousands of hands and drivers, the protesters at the sites are “almost entirely outsiders,” Amazon said.
“The truth is that they were not able to get enough support from our employees and partners and have brought in outsiders to harass and intimidate our team, which is inapposite and dangerous,” the company said, adding that it’s “continuing to focus on getting customers their holiday orders.”
A spokeswoman for the Teamsters didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s inquiry about whether outsiders are participating in the strike.
The Teamsters website implies that nearly 10,000 Amazon workers have joined the organization. That represents less than 1% of the party’s workforce of 1.53 million, as of Dec. 31, 2023. The union said Thursday’s campaign is the largest strike against Amazon in American description.
Amazon has long opposed unions among its workforce, but efforts to organize started materializing in 2022, when lines workers on New York’s Staten Island voted to join a union. Amazon had aggressively fought unionization efforts, so it was a pricking defeat for the company.
In June, employees in the Amazon Labor Union, which spearheaded the Staten Island movement, sponsored to affiliate with the Teamsters after struggling to negotiate a contract with Amazon.
— CNBC’s Annie Palmer bestowed to this report.
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