Amazon Workers Staged Walkouts at 4 Warehouses for Prime Week
Last week workers at four different Amazon warehouse across the US walked out to protest the company’s low pay and brutal working conditions. The actions were timed to coincide with Amazon’s Prime Day promotional sales rush.
Workers at Amazon’s West Coast Air Freight Fulfillment Center in San Bernardino, California, protest outside the facility on October 14, 2022, over claims of an unsafe work environment and low wages. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
Amazon’s vast distribution network is staggering. There’s the invisible lacework of surveillance algorithms and artificial intelligence. There are the visible footprints: trucks, robots, hulking warehouses.
And then there are the workers. It takes more than a million people, most of them low-paid and grindingly exploited, to pick, sort, unload, ship, and deliver packages to customers’ doors within days of an order.
Last week workers took aim at disrupting this symphony of human capital with walkouts at four distinct warehouse types in the company’s logistics chain — a cross-dock near Chicago, a delivery station and a fulfillment center near Atlanta, and in Southern California, one of the company’s large air hubs.
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