Teamsters launch national push to unionize ALL Amazon workers in bombshell move timed to coincide with Prime Day
- Teamsters are launching a push to unionize Amazon workers nationwide
- Resolution is expected to pass resoundingly at Teamsters convention Thursday
- Powerful union will launch a special division to aid Amazon workers
- Follows failed vote to unionize workers at Amazon warehouse in Alabama
- Amazon will soon be the largest US employer and has resisted efforts to unionize
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is launching an ambitious push to unionize all Amazon workers across the U.S. in a move timed to coincide with the company’s Prime Day.
In a resolution introduced at the powerful union’s national convention on Tuesday, the Teamsters declared that unionizing Amazon workers is a top priority, according to Vice, which first reported the resolution.
‘The Teamsters will build the types of worker and community power necessary to take on one of the most powerful corporations in the world and win,’ said Randy Korgan, the Teamster’s National Amazon Director, in a video address to union delegates.
It follows the critical defeat in April of a union organizing vote at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama — and the Teamsters believe that a national push is the key to victory, rather than a piecemeal approach at each warehouse.
Teamster’s National Amazon Director Randy Korgan speaks to members of Teamsters Local 1932. The Teamsters is making unionizing Amazon workers a top national priority
Labor activists are seen holding signs and marching on a picket line across from a Jeff Bezos-owned Whole Foods Market in Union Square in February
Amazon did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Tuesday.
The company employs roughly 1.3 million workers across the country, and is on pace to surpass Walmart as the largest private employer in the U.S. within a year or two.
The company’s annual Prime Day, being held this year on Monday and Tuesday, is a massive marketing blitz that drives big business for the online marketplace.
The Teamsters, meanwhile, are one of the most powerful unions in the country, with a membership of 1.3 million, mostly representing freight and logistics workers.
The union’s resolution states that the Teamsters plan to create a special Amazon Division that will support Amazon workers in unionizing.
Delegates from the union’s 500 local chapters will vote on the resolution on Thursday, when it is expected to pass overwhelmingly.
It marks the largest ever push to unionize workers at Amazon, which has successfully rebuffed labor organizers since its founding in 1994.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders in April that the company needed ‘a better vision for our employees’ success’
A woman works at a packing station at the 855,000-square-foot JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, in a file photo
In April, a vote by workers in Bessemer on whether to unionize failed by a more than 2-to-1 margin in a major win for the world’s largest online retailer and a blow to organized labor.
Appealing to concerns that Amazon was monitoring their every move and associating themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement, pro-union organizers told the largely black workforce that a union could get more from the company controlled by the world’s richest man.
Amazon responded with an intense weekslong anti-union campaign, plastering the warehouse and even a bathroom stall with anti-union notices, stopping work for mandatory employee meetings on the election, and bombarding workers with text alerts criticizing the RWDSU.
The union push at Bessemer, located just west of Birmingham, was the biggest in the 26-year history of the online seller and only the second time that an organizing move from within the company had come to a vote.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders following the vote that the company needed ‘a better vision for our employees’ success.’