Posts tagged Jeff Bezos
The Washington Post’s Tech Workers Have Formed a Union
April 8, 2025 // Many employees in the Post‘s newsroom and business operations are eligible to unions, but the tech workers—product managers, system engineers, people who work on the company’s Arc XP content management system—are not, a quirky legacy from the days when the Post located its WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive business in the management-friendly commonwealth of Virginia. The Post began to integrate tech employees with its news operations in 2009, but the divide remains. The group organized with the Washington Baltimore News Guild as the Washington Post Tech Guild. In their announcement, they say their organization comprises more than 300 people, the majority of people who work on tech for the Post.
Commentary: The tough fight to unionize Amazon
March 18, 2025 // Unionizing a gigantic 21st century warehouse with more than 4,000 workers is daunting. What economists call “the churn” of high worker turnover complicates solidarity-building. So does the heterogeneity of the work force at a place like RDU1 between its hip-hop princes, queer young Latinas and tractor-cap Trumpies along with migrants from more than thirty countries. The job’s grind makes mustering energy to raise labor’s flag tough too.
Opinion: Major US corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’
March 11, 2024 // Roger King, a longtime management-side lawyer who is senior labor counsel for the HR Policy Association, said “it will be a lose-lose” if the federal courts overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act, which has governed labor relations since Franklin Roosevelt was president. “We’ll have the law of the jungle, the law of the streets,” King said. “It will be who has the most power. It’s potential for chaos.”
‘Washington Post’ journalists stage daylong strike under threat of job cuts
December 7, 2023 // It is not alone in that regard. Cuts have plagued the industry, encompassing legacy media outlets including NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Gannett's newspapers and New York Public Radio, as well as Vox, Vice Media and BuzzFeed. Spotify announced this week that it would lay off 17% of its staff.
What to know about the ‘Make Amazon Pay’ strike campaign
November 27, 2023 // An organizer with GMB Union, a U.K.-based labor union, described the effort as “the largest day of industrial disruption in Amazon’s thirty-year history.” The effort garnered support from more than 400 lawmakers from 38 countries for a protest in 2020, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and former U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Supporters also planned protests at Amazon facilities in Massachusetts, Georgia and Illinois. Outside the U.S., organizers planned protest action in Japan, India and throughout Europe, including Germany, France, Spain and the U.K. Hundreds of workers were striking Friday at warehouses in Coventry, U.K., and in multiple German cities, Reuters reported.
Sean O’Brien’s summer of the strike
June 26, 2023 // It’s the spark for the combative spirit that permeates Teamsters headquarters, where a whiteboard charts a long-term battle plan on a timeline — “practice picketing,” “CAT trainings” (for “contract action teams”), “identify strike teams” … and finally, on the July 31 spot that marks the end of the current contract: “STRIKE.” Why strike now? As O’Brien himself acknowledged in his Senate testimony, UPS already offers the most plum jobs in the logistics industry, with driver salaries starting at $93,000. But O’Brien argues that the pandemic gave UPS workers the greatest leverage they’ve had in decades. In 2020, union members risked their health to keep packages moving. UPS’s profits surged and have remained high, with customers still hooked on the online shopping habits they adopted during the lockdowns. “Our members are fed up” and remain convinced, he said, that “the only concern that was being addressed was UPS’s bottom line and their balance sheet.” No better time, O’Brien reasons, for workers to go to the mat to demand wages beginning at $20 an hour, tighter safety provisions and an end to the two-tier employment system ushered in by the last contract.
Amazon workers walk out in protest of company climate policies, return to office, job cuts
June 2, 2023 // Organizers said on their website that Amazon has put mandates in place requiring workers to return to the office. The company has also laid off employees and failed to fulfill the Climate Pledge the company made in 2019.
BERNIE SANDERS WANTS DEMOCRATS TO MAKE UNIONS THEIR BIGGEST MESSAGE
May 4, 2022 // He said his team has maintained “a nucleus of the campaign,” roughly 10 staffers, who are heavily focused on supporting labor efforts, connecting with workers at a variety of the flash points of unionization, including at companies like John Deere and Kellogg’s and universities across the country where poorly paid adjunct faculty are organizing.
The resurgence of unions and the fight against Amazon
April 25, 2022 // "The pandemic also created a labor shortage, which gave people more leverage, and made them less fearful of organizing," she said. "Unions are cool again for this generation."