Awood Center’s Prime Day Action Keeps the Pressure on Amazon

Amazon workers in Minnesota put the spotlight on the company’s low wages and murky HR policies with a protest on June 24th (which Amazon promotes as Prime Day). The action was led by Awood Center, with Teamsters Local 120 and Workers Confluence providing support around media, security, and strategy.  

Several dozen workers held signs outside Amazon’s Shakopee fulfillment center calling for raises in response to the skyrocketing cost of living, as well as checks on overzealous use of employee write-ups by some managers. Write-ups are issued inconsistently, workers say, and they contribute to the widespread pressure to maintain an unsafe and unhealthy pace of work. 

In recent months, workers organizing through Awood Center have made progress in addressing the lack of consistency and transparency in the system Amazon uses to move workers between temporary and permanent status, and they kept up the pressure on this issue at the Prime Day protest. Amazon initially hires workers on a temporary basis and issues them white badges. Permanent workers are given blue badges, and access to various benefits temporary workers are excluded from. But rather than the standard 90-day probationary period common in many workplaces, Amazon uses its own obscure criteria for when to move workers from white to blue. Some get their blue badges within days, while others wait six months or more. 

After the action, Amazon agreed to transfer several workers from white to blue badges, which Awood Center hailed as a victory.

Awood Center, a Workers Confluence grantee, is a worker center based in Minnesota’s East African immigrant and refugee community. They say Amazon intentionally recruits the newest arrivals from their community, then takes advantage of their unfamiliarity with US labor laws. But Awood is building deep leadership among Amazon workers, winning real workplace changes, and laying the groundwork for even more powerful organizing to come.

Read more in this Sahan Journal article, and this Awood Center press release.