On a rainy day in August of this year, 105 Amazon delivery drivers employed by Cornucopia Logistics, one of the 4,400 delivery service partners (DSPs) with which the e-commerce company contracts, were told that they had worked their final shift. As Cornucopia Logistics representatives explained this to the workers as they returned from their routes, Amazon had decided to cancel its contract with the company.
Drivers at the DSP, one of eight contractors operating out of DBK4, an Amazon facility in Maspeth, Queens, unionized with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) a year earlier. In response to Amazon’s failure to voluntarily recognize their union, they went on a multiday strike beginning on December 14, the height of the company’s busy holiday season.
“I believe because of the strike we had last year, that was part of it,” Lamont Hopewell, one of the fired drivers, said at a September rally for the fired drivers as explanation for the firings. “We’re coming into peak season right now, and I believe they wanted to stop any momentum we had.”
This isn’t the first time Amazon allegedly responded to worker organizing by parting ways with a DSP. The company has been doing so since 2017, when forty-six Silver Star drivers unionized with the IBT; the union claimed that Silver Star and Amazon responded by illegally firing the workers. Shortly after the campaign, Amazon held a meeting in Chicago with the management of some of the city’s DSPs. As one attendee told Buzzfeed News, “The whole purpose of the meeting was to say to you, ‘Here’s how to not get unionized. Because if you do, we pretty much don’t want anything to do with a union.’”
But as organizing efforts are ramping up nationwide with support from the IBT, so too are contract cancellations. Amazon claims nonrenewal of a DSP’s contract is not retaliation against workers’ legally protected activities but rather is based on poor performance. It is sheer coincidence that…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
