Amazon Powers ICE. Its Workers Aren’t Happy.

Matt Multari has been driving for Amazon—and organizing with the Teamsters—for about a year and a half. His days are mostly spent delivering packages. But he thinks of his role as a worker-organizer as something much more historically significant than just maximizing delivery efficiency.  “After the Assyrians lost their state, they survived in their homeland of Iraq for thousands of years. After facing a genocide that forced them to flee that homeland, they went to Russia, and then to Iran, and then some of them went to New York. Now I’m here,” he said. “And I’d like to tell Amazon: fuck you!” Early on the morning of May 1, Multari took the megaphone in front of a hundred or so sign-toting Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and software engineers, who had traveled in from Queens and Staten Island to march on an Amazon office building for International Workers’ Day.  “Each of us here has a story of generational struggle,” Multari, 25, said. But to him, working for Amazon means the obliteration of identity. “Amazon is trying to erase that.” Every day, as he puts on his blue vest and delivers packages from Amazon’s DBK-1 warehouse in Queens, the company surveills him: “You have an app that tells you the exact stop order you’re supposed to go in. You’re under a time quota, basically.”  If you take too long, or take too many stops, Multari said, the app tells you to go faster. “You get a scorecard every week that says how you’re performing.” Five months ago, Multari and his DBK-1 coworkers unionized with the Teamsters, joining thousands of unionized Amazon workers nationwide. They’ve been able to extract some concessions from the e-commerce giant, though Amazon has refused to bargain with their unionized workers. Nonetheless, during this year’s record-breaking winter storms, they were paid for days they weren’t able to work; and when they needed new hand-trucks, Amazon paid up.  Amazon holds millions of dollars in ICE contracts.Sophie Hurwitz Nonetheless, Multari and his coworkers are aware that they’ll have to do much more to win real job security in an age of automation. “Amazon, at its core, is a tech company,” Multari said. “Our main asset to them is our data from our routes, so that it can train its algorithm, so it can make us more and more replaceable.”  Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platform is more profitable than all… [TheTopNews] Read More.