Jason Vazquez is a staff attorney at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2023. His writing on this blog reflects his personal views and should not be attributed to the Teamsters.
In an article published yesterday, the New York Times aims to expose “the human cost of Amazon’s employment machine.” Based on interviews with hundreds of current and former Amazon warehouse workers, the piece describes the company’s intense fixation on productivity and efficiency and spotlights its dystopian reliance on robotics, metrics, and algorithmic systems to carefully monitor and track nearly every facet of its employees’ work lives.
The piece details that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos devised a business model that relies systematically on employee churn — while Amazon has hired hundreds of thousands of employees in recent years, most have been cycled out of its warehouses nearly as quickly as their replacements can be supplied. In fact, the article reveals that Amazon depletes labor markets with such intensity that its management team has begun expressing concern that it may struggle to secure enough labor to continue to sustain its sprawling operations in wide swaths of the country.
In more uplifting news, the organizing surge spurred by the precarity and dislocation the pandemic unleashed continues to metastasize across a wide range of industries. Hundreds of staffers at Oxford University Press in New York City announced this morning that they have joined the NewsGuild. Dozens of workers at software firm Mapbox announced yesterday that nearly two-thirds of the company’s U.S. employees have signed cards to join the CWA. And the country’s first Black-owned distillery, located in Minneapolis, voluntarily recognized its employees’ independent union on Monday.
Daily News & Commentary
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November 25
In today’s news and commentary, OSHA fines Taylor Foods, Santa Fe raises their living wage, and a date is set for a Senate committee to consider Trump’s NLRB nominee. OSHA has issued an approximately $1.1 million dollar fine to Taylor Farms New Jersey, a subsidiary of Taylor Fresh Foods, after identifying repeated and serious safety […]
November 24
Labor leaders criticize tariffs; White House cancels jobs report; and student organizers launch chaperone program for noncitizens.
November 23
Workers at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority vote to authorize a strike; Washington State legislators consider a bill empowering public employees to bargain over workplace AI implementation; and University of California workers engage in a two-day strike.
November 21
The “Big Three” record labels make a deal with an AI music streaming startup; 30 stores join the now week-old Starbucks Workers United strike; and the Mine Safety and Health Administration draws scrutiny over a recent worker death.
November 20
Law professors file brief in Slaughter; New York appeals court hears arguments about blog post firing; Senate committee delays consideration of NLRB nominee.
November 19
A federal judge blocks the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel the collective bargaining rights of workers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media; Representative Jared Golden secures 218 signatures for a bill that would repeal a Trump administration executive order stripping federal workers of their collective bargaining rights; and Dallas residents sue the City of Dallas in hopes of declaring hundreds of ordinances that ban bias against LGBTQ+ individuals void.