Efforts to Organize Amazon Are Advancing Across the US

The Teamsters are spinning off momentum from recent organizing fights to new battle fronts across Amazon’s logistics chain.

A group of one hundred warehouse workers at DCK6, an Amazon delivery station in San Francisco, marched on company managers October 2 demanding voluntary recognition rather than filing for a National Labor Relations Board–supervised election.

In the Teamsters’ strategy to organize the logistics behemoth by a thousand cuts, this is the first time that warehouse workers — rather than delivery drivers nominally employed by a subcontractor — have demanded recognition.

“I think that they suspected that something was up, because we were gathering in the parking lot, and one of the regional managers came out to suss us out and then went back inside,” said Dori Goldberg, who sorts packages and loads them onto trucks from 3:20 a.m. to 12 p.m.

“So I went inside, and he was trying to make small talk with me as I was leading him into the break room, where we had all assembled. When he came in, his face — he was shocked to see so many of our coworkers standing shoulder to shoulder.

“I could sense that he was scared. And it felt great to, for once, have our voices be heard by management and take that power back.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has described the company’s strategy as a “flywheel,” meaning that momentum in each area of the business spurs fresh momentum in others, accelerating the whole machine. It exploits its power in one business market after another — for example, retail — to consolidate its overall monopoly in logistics and make inroads against competitors like UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

Teamsters are engaged in a similar strategy to challenge Amazon’s power — building…