As more Amazon employees join Workers Essential a growing theme emerges. While some like their DSP companies, they almost universally despise Amazon. The daily frustration of dysfunctional apps monitoring their every move, computer-generated discipline, and other workers paid to spy or bark orders at them over bullhorns, has created what most describe as a hostile work environment.
Asked where they see themselves in five years, no one says at Amazon. Its general knowledge among the workforce that even if you wanted to make it a career, it is not a real option, because eventually, you will be off boarded (Amazon speak for fired) for something beyond your control.
In fact, the entire Amazon employment setting seems designed to create turnover, pushing workers beyond their physical and psychological limits for as long as possible, then dumping them out with the popped bubble wrap and returned sex toys.
Some workers believe that $15 or $16 is a good wage for delivery drivers because it’s more than some other entry-level jobs. Still, most are actively seeking anything else at any wage within days of starting for an Amazon DSP company.
Those in the know, get that UPS is a good union job that pays two to three times what they currently earn, and they talk about applying there. But for now, its just a dream, and some fail to comprehend that inaction threatens to kill that very dream.
UPS and the USPS have, for generations, provided solid middle-class incomes to blue-collar workers. In a nation devoid of its former manufacturing base, package delivery has long remained a bastion of unionism, relatively high
wages, better than average working conditions, and good benefits.
Today, due to Amazon’s unprecedented growth, analysts project it will decimate the rest of the industry by as much as 50%. As the industry struggles to merely survive, it will certainly mean a race to the bottom, with wage and benefit cuts and more attacks on the unions that protect them.
If we do not join together and make a stand today, right where we are, and unionize, and demand better wages and conditions, then there will be nowhere to go tomorrow that isn’t more of the same. If we fail to do it, then whoever will? Or should we leave that to our children to deal with as well?
If no one wants to work for an Amazon, then it’s time to change it. The time is now. The task is ours. Do not quit. Organize. Unionize. Rise up and make a difference.