Skokie, Ill.—The drivers at the Amazon warehouse decided to become a union. We invited Amazon to sit down with us and negotiate a contract, but they haven’t paid attention to us. We voted to strike yesterday (Dec. 19). That’s why we’re here on the picket line today. Amazon is basically ignoring us. There are many demands we want them to address and they are not paying attention to them. We want better pay and we want better insurance.

OUT THE DOOR IN TWO YEARS

The way Amazon designs our jobs, they have an expiration date for each driver. We know it and it is two years. That’s how they assign the jobs. They also have a system where they have Delivery Service Partners who are contractors. The drivers that you see on the street, they are not Amazon employees according to Amazon. They hire a company—a contractor—that they themselves approve, to deliver their packages.

All those drivers are trained by Amazon, wear the Amazon uniform, are evaluated by Amazon. All the metrics, all the performances and all that, Amazon knows how you move, how you perform and they still say you’re not their employee! They say how much you get paid. They decide everything! They basically dictate what you have to do, when and how you have to do it and where you have to do it. They are trying to get away from their responsibility to their workers. That has to stop.

They monitor us with technology. They have you put an app on your phone to track your performance. It tracks everything you do. It’s complemented by everything that happens in the warehouse to track your performance, to track the weather—everything. They have a lot of money to invest in that kind of software. It’s like they have an eye in the sky.

AMAZON DEGRADES WHAT IS HUMAN

I don’t know if this article is going to reach people before Christmas but if it does and people are worried about getting their Christmas presents, not all the warehouses are on strike. But they have a problem. I saw it today: they are not moving as much volume as they do on a normal day. Most likely everything is going to be fine for you. But we’re making a stand, and we’re shouting loud to the world. The message we want people to know is that Amazon is cheap, they ignore us, they don’t want to pay us. Isn’t that degrading for a human being? We deserve respect, we deserve to be seen at the table with them and negotiate. People need to know these things before they make a decision to deal with a company like that. They need to know how they treat their employees, how they deny their employees.

Amazon delivery drivers arrive in the morning and they check in. They get the key to the truck that they know they are going to drive. They are supposed to go to their trucks and do an inspection. The software tells us what to pay attention to, stuff like that. We need to know the truck is drivable. When they do, the drivers load the trucks themselves. When everybody’s done loading the trucks, they start driving. The phone is telling them where to go, what to deliver. When they do make that delivery, then they go to the next one and then the next one and the next one until they’re done with everything.

You have a window of 10 hours to complete the job they give you. Sometimes it could be 300 packages, sometimes 150, sometimes 400 packages. You are supposed to finish. Sometimes it might not take 10 hours, a lot of the time it takes you longer. If you want to make it home on time to see your children at least for half an hour before they go to bed, you better skip your lunches and breaks. Otherwise, you’re going to be home late. We do get overtime pay, but they do everything they can to keep you from getting to that point. They try to squeeze the most use they can from you and then say, All right, that’s enough use for today, you can rest for a couple of minutes. So you need to rush to complete your job.

RUSHING = CARELESSNESS

The amount of work, many times it’s a lot, and you need to rush to complete your job. When you rush, you have to be careless. On top of that, at this station in particular, they haven’t changed the fleet in a quite a while, so we’re driving trucks that are very damaged and not supposed to be on the road. On this picket line today I saw four trucks and I thought: how are these trucks even on the road? Do we have to sign to say it’s safe to drive? That’s a safety hazard. They go over the training but they need to enforce it more. They may say, Hey guys, you need to do this and that. But maybe it’s not enforced, not as much as I’d like it to be. If a driver has a problem on the job, gets sick, what happens all depends on the dispatcher in charge at the time. Some of them don’t get training. Some keep an eye on you, some leave you alone; and sometimes when someone gets sick, they ask, Are you OK? And the driver will say, Yes. And they say, keep on working. Some dispatchers know what they’re doing, some don’t. They should have training for dispatchers as well.

We are asking them to regulate the workload so we can complete the job in eight hours like everybody does. We want to be able to have a decent check when we work 40 hours a week and don’t have to take another job. We don’t make enough. Whatever they say, oh you’re going to do really well. Not really. Think about it: if you have a family, what they pay won’t pay the rent and then you have to add gas and food, all those factor in. Some workers from UPS came here, they’re making something like $45/hr. Here the average is $20 something an hour, no more than $22/hr. Unacceptable. If I was the owner, I would be embarrassed.

–Amazon driver