By: New Day at Amazon Editorial Board
[To read the full and original version of the June 2025 Edition of New Day at Amazon click here]
For a young organization like ours, we will face many hurdles when it comes to organizing; both strategically and tactically we have a long way to go. To ensure the best chance at success, we must stick to our principles. As we mainly organize at Delivery Stations as of now, we find it helpful to give our readership an update of our progress thus far. As Prime Week approaches, it is important to draw lessons and ask for feedback and criticism in our style of work so far. It has been six months since we started organizing consistently and seriously, but we still face many of the same issues we started out with. These obstacles must be overcome if we want to start developing a concrete program of action. Again, we ask the readers to reach out to their New Day distributor and express your opinions on our articles and the problems we face. It is only through the organization of our thought that we can find out our readers’ opinions and forge better organizing abilities.
Three main issues we are facing at our Delivery Stations is the lack of unorganized drivers, strong relationships with immigrant groups, and the inability to overcome the hardship of organizing around third shift workers. Firstly, likely the main issue, is the total lack of organized drivers. The drivers are structured in two ways: Delivery Station Partners (DSPs) and Flex Drivers. DSPs are the drivers that work a regular shift. They face a lot of their own unique problems in the course of their day; they are surveilled as they drive all day, they lack a livable wage, they are stuck working long hours, and they have to work in all types of weather conditions. They are also incredibly expendable to their respective DSPs.
The issue with organizing them is the fact that they are not directly employed by Amazon. While they are assigned all their routes, told what to do everyday, and given equipment by Amazon, Amazon does not directly pay them and is not usually liable for their actions. Because there could be up to 10+ third party companies hired by Amazon, it makes it very difficult to organize them.
This is especially true as there is little to no interaction between sort workers and DSP workers. On the other hand, flex drivers have a very precarious job. They are only given shifts when they can pick them up and must use their personal vehicles. This severely limits our ability to organize this class of workers.
It is no secret that immigrant groups face a lot of repression and discrimination from management every day, and this is coupled with them living in a country that is actively seeking to deport every last one of them. The main barrier to organizing with them at DCM6 is a large language gap, which also serves to cause problems where management will discipline them or discriminate against them, simply due to the language gap. Immigrant groups do not just sit on their hands, they are down to fight as well! Haitian immigrants make up a sizable chunk of the workforce in the buildings we organize, and they have spontaneously fought back themselves. There are stories of them clocking out en masse due to targeted write-ups from management. Sadly, as of now, we are not very connected, so if we want to be successful, we must make every effort to get to know them and work together for a common cause. We must be one big organization!
As for the issue of third shift, it’s apparent the work schedule is a massive barrier to any organizing. At Delivery Stations, a typical shift is 1:20am to 11:50am. This leaves most workers little to no time to live their lives, let alone organize! People have families and responsibilities outside of
work, and not to mention they must sleep! Amazon works their workers as hard as they possibly can. It is very difficult to get people to come out to meetings after being gone from their home for almost 12 hours! People just want to go home, this is very understandable. However, we must still organize. We have to make people want to get organized as well. This means our demands must reflect their aspirations and needs. This means we must make it as easy as possible for people to organize in the right way. We need to be able to make organizing seem like an attractive option in the face of low wages and poor working conditions.
The problems might seem overwhelming but we have had great success as well. We are using shop committees as our main source of organization, directly organizing people on the shop floor and around production. In this way, it gives us the greatest chance possible to control the shop flow and machinery. We have core groups of people who are ready to get to work! In order to build on momentum and the limited success we’ve had, we need to continue to penetrate into groups we do not have connections with. We also have to come up with specific demands and struggle for the rights and needs of each specific social grouping. Immigrants need not to fear their being fired due to their “legal status”. The mass surveillance of drivers has to end, and drivers should not have to “rescue” other drivers. There should be a set shift for drivers, and if packages aren’t delivered in the time frame it should not result in discipline. Sort workers either need day time shifts or should be given a much higher shift differential! We also need to create leaders and committees to organize specific shifts or workers (front or back half sort, RTS, DSPs, and even custodial). When this is finally done, then we can say workers are organized! We have to stick to our principles of class struggle, democracy, independence, working class unity, and anti-opportunism. This means that we see ourselves as who we are: the working class that is in direct opposition to the capitalist class. Workers must have their own organizations where they have full control and get the final say! We must also be united. We cannot be divided by gender, race, or origin. We must learn how to apply these principles and do it well. Lastly, we have to develop programs for ourselves, sticking to them and remaining disciplined in our work. Then we must mobilize workers to confront our class enemy (Amazon leadership and ownership) to win these demands for ourselves.
