An Amazon delivery driver and a top Teamsters Local 804 organizer were arrested during a picket at the Amazon DB4 Distribution Center in Maspeth, Queens, Thursday morning, hours after the union launched a nationwide strike against the company, according to video and multiple witness accounts.
Video obtained by THE CITY shows NYPD officers placing a zip-tie–cuffed Tony Rosario, the Local 804 organizer, in a police van shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday as the police blared in a recording: “You are unlawfully on the roadway and are obstructing vehicular traffic.”
As he is led into the van, Rosario shouts a call and response: “Who are we? Teamsters!”
It was a chaotic start to the largest strike yet leveled against Amazon’s fulfillment and delivery operations just days before the Christmas holiday. Drivers at seven facilities nationwide walked off the job indefinitely over the company’s alleged refusal to bargain with the union. The participating facilities, which have joined the Teamsters in the past year, include the Queens facility, four facilities in California, and facilities in Atlanta and the Chicago suburbs.
In a statement Wednesday morning announcing the strike, the union said that other Amazon Teamsters “are prepared to join” their striking colleagues.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it,” said Teamsters president Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement Wednesday night. “These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”
THE CITY could not immediately confirm what charges, in any, the NYPD filed against Rosario and the other worker. A spokesperson for the police department did not respond to questions about the fracas.
“Am I scared? Nah,” said Luc Albert Rene, an Amazon driver and organizer at DBK4.
“We’re here to send a message to Amazon: Take care of your workers,” he said.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Subcontractor Shell Game
More than 10,000 Amazon workers have joined the Teamsters since it launched its national campaign to organize the megaretailer’s delivery drivers, according to the union.
The union’s ambitions to organize Amazon received a major boost this summer, when the Amazon Labor Union — the independent Staten Island-based labor organization that established the first-ever unionized Amazon shop in the country — voted to merge with the Teamsters.
Amazon’s delivery fleet is heavily subcontracted, a dynamic that has become central to its dispute with the Teamsters. The company claims that it is the company it subcontracts and not itself that must respond to the workers, who drive Amazon-branded cars, wear Amazon-branded vests, and rely on Amazon for roadside support.
This year, regional directors to the U.S. labor board in Los Angeles and Atlanta issued preliminary rulings that Amazon is a joint employer of its subcontracted drivers, and that it must be held liable for unlawful anti-union activity.
Amazon has been accused of severing ties with subcontractors at a Palmdale, Calif. facility after workers announced their desire to join the Teamsters there.
The workers are seeking higher pay, better safety precautions and job security. Workers walking the picket line on Thursday told THE CITY that the third-party employment model — where they’re at the whims of Amazon hiring and firing the companies it subcontracts — makes them feel like they are disposable.
“It’s like we are nothing to them,” said Mohamed Abbes, a driver at DBK4 for a little more than a year. “This is why we need a union.”
Amazon spokeswoman Eileen Hards told the Washington Post that the base wage for Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers is $22 hourly, and that the company offers health insurance and a 401(k) plan with a company match, among other perks.
Isis Gomez, a DBK4 driver from Marble Hill, recalled an incident earlier this year to highlight what she described as the absurdity of Amazon’s claim that it is not her employer.
Earlier this year, when she was seven months pregnant, she was assaulted on the job by a woman who hit her and hurled a package at her. When she asked for a different route, she said, it was an Amazon HR representative who denied it to her. When she was assigned fewer hours instead, it was Amazon who set her schedule. (On the day she was assaulted, Gomez said she was allowed to leave her shift early, and she was not compensated for the full day. She delivered a healthy child in May.)
Like other workers, she pointed to the name on the truck she drives and the uniform she wears to answer who she believes her employer is: Amazon.
“They say we take on these jobs at our own risk,” Gomez said in Spanish. “Why should I be in harm’s way to begin with, when I have people waiting for me at home?”
“Amazon doesn’t care about anyone’s safety,” piped in Maria Montiel, another DBK4 driver, also in Spanish. “The package’s condition is all that matters to them.”
About 100 NYPD officers were gathered at the picket line as of noon Thursday, though tensions at the picket line had simmered down by then. Some union members, penned behind barricades set up by the police, heckled workers who crossed the picket line as officers looked on.
Supporters picketed with the striking workers, including members of the New York State Nurses Association and the United Auto Workers, and people with Make the Road New York, the immigrant rights advocacy group.
“Everyone here has a family, everyone here has a mom, has a dad, has a kid, has a dog – speaking for myself,” said Renzo Ramirez, a DBK4 driver at the picket line. “At some point you gotta realize, you’re worth more than whatever they’re giving you.”
