SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
teamsters
Teamsters Rally in NYC After Amazon's 'Illegal' Firing of 150 Unionized Drivers
"Amazon would be nothing without its workers," said one worker. "We're the ones who power their profits. We're the ones who put our health and safety on the line every single day."
Sep 09, 2025
Teamsters and their supporters rallied outside a New York Amazon facility Monday in protest of what they said was an "illegal" firing of over 150 unionized drivers.
According to the union, the fired workers were employed by the delivery service provider Cornucopia, one of thousands of providers the company contracts with to deliver packages. These workers joined the Teamsters last year as the union went on strike in nine cities across the US.
Amazon claims these workers are not employees, but "contractors," and that firing them does not constitute illegal union busting.
The union, however, described this as "a phony shell game," saying that the contractors "wear Amazon uniforms, follow Amazon rules, and work off Amazon's routing software."
"Amazon calls the shots," read a statement from the union. "They are the employer and everyone knows it."
Last year, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) official in Los Angeles agreed that the company had engaged in unfair labor practices when it fired other unionized contractors in California, and determined that they did, in fact, count as employees of Amazon.
At the time, this ruling seemed to provide some clarity as Amazon workers fought to have their union recognized by the company, which has refused to recognize them for years.
This remained the case even after 2024, when more than 10,000 Amazon workers joined the Teamsters and the union launched the largest strike ever against the company right before the holidays, during which they demanded the company negotiate a fair contract that included wage increases and addressed workplace safety issues and illegal union busting.
Outside Amazon's DBK4 facility, which joined the strike last year, the Teamsters and their allies renewed calls for negotiation Monday.
"Amazon is breaking the law and we let the public know it," said Antonio Rosario, a Local 804 member and Teamster organizer.
Latrice Shadae Johnson, a Teamster who works at DBK4, added that "Amazon would be nothing without its workers."
"We're the ones who power their profits. We're the ones who put our health and safety on the line every single day. We're the ones who made them a $2 trillion corporation," said Johnson. "If Amazon thinks we're going to take this lying down, they have another thing coming. Our solidarity is only growing stronger."
That solidarity has come from many corners across New York City, with members of the City Central Labor Council, part of the AFL-CIO, taking part in the rally.
The Teamsters were also joined by democratic socialist state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez (D-59), who defeated the industry-backed cousin of former Queens US Rep. Joe Crowley in 2022.
"I've been in office three years, and every single year I've been right here in this spot because every single year Amazon has done union-busting," Gonzalez said to cheers from the crowd, "It's because they think they are above the law."
In 2024, Amazon joined a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, arguing that the NLRB, which is responsible for adjudicating labor rights violations, is unconstitutional because its members cannot be fired at will by the US President.
Just one week into his term, President Donald Trump fired NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, effectively crippling the board's ability to rule on union-busting cases.
According to LaborLab, which publishes reports on corporate union busting, "Without a functioning board, companies like Amazon and Tesla can engage in union-busting tactics with impunity, facing no legal consequences for violating workers' rights."
The progressive state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, currently the frontrunner to be New York City's next mayor, brought national attention to the Teamsters' plight on Monday.
"One of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world is firing unionized drivers in Queens," Mamdani wrote on X. "Solidarity with the Teamsters who rallied today against these unjust layoffs and to demand good faith negotiations."
Several Democratic members of the House of Representatives from New York, including Jerry Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, issued their own statements of solidarity, as did Republican Mike Lawler.
"Any company that denies workers the right to choose [collective] bargaining rights, including Amazon, should be confronted," Lawler said. "Unions are the backbone of this country. They helped build this country. And they damn well will ensure we have a strong and secure country moving forward."
Nadler added that he stood "with Amazon Teamsters as they rally in Queens today to hold Amazon accountable for its unlawful anti-union activity."
"Amazon," he said, "stop union busting and start bargaining a fair contract now!"
Keep ReadingShow Less
'He's Selling Out': Teamsters President Faces Backlash for Cozying Up to GOP
One labor journalist called his comments regarding right-to-work "shameful" and "embarrassing."
Feb 20, 2025
International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O'Brien faced backlash from labor movement voices on Wednesday for expressing his support for U.S. President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Labor and for appearing to take a softer stance on so-called "right-to-work" laws—policies generally decried by organized labor because they allow employees to opt out of union expenses while working at a unionized establishment.
Labor journalist Alex Press called his comments regarding right-to-work "shameful" and "embarrassing."
Over the summer, Press spoke with rank-and-file Teamsters members about recent actions from O'Brien that signal a rightward shift, such as his decision to headline the first night of the 2024 Republican National Convention. "Some are undoubtedly thrilled," wrote Press, though "a growing number of members believe their president is offering a straightforward, if not always explicit, endorsement of a political party that wants to destroy them."
On Wednesday, O'Brien attended the Senate confirmation hearing of Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump's labor pick, during which Chavez-DeRemer said she would support Trump's agenda, according to The New York Times. Chavez-DeRemer also told senators that she no longer supports a section of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—sweeping Democratic labor legislation that was introduced in Congress but never passed—which would have weakened state right-to-work laws.
Speaking later Wednesday on Fox News, O'Brien said of Chavez-DeRemer, "Not only do we support her appointment, we are going to the mat to make sure that she gets confirmed."
When asked about Chavez-DeRemer's stance on the right-to-work section of the PRO Act, O'Brien said that he is working with senators such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to come up with a version of the PRO Act that "may not include that."
"That's the beauty of having conversations with people from the other side, where you can collaborate and actually find out what works for that state, what doesn't work for it—but more importantly, what's going to work for the American worker," O'Brien said.
A clip of these comments was reposted by the National Right to Work Committee, a group dedicated to "combating the evils of compulsory unionism," according to its website.
"The Teamsters union is as decentralized as the country. Like the median voter, most Teamsters aren't closely following what Sean O'Brien is saying," wrote labor journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response. "The press should ensure they know how he's selling out members to cozy up to anti-worker politicos and bolstering the power of bosses."
In the same Fox News interview, O'Brien also said the Teamsters do not want to see anyone losing their job, but that "[Trump] thinks he's within his right," when asked about the personnel-slashing Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration's widely decried deferred resignation program for nearly all federal employees. Multiple federal employees unions are currently battling the Trump administration in court over its actions targeting federal workers and federal agencies.
"What a shame. Teamsters deserve better than this," wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in response on Bluesky.
Another labor journalist, Kim Kelly, denounced a video posted Wednesday by Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.)—whom O'Brien nearly physically fought during a Senate hearing last year—in which Mullin and O'Brien chum it up and both express support for Chavez-DeRemer.
Also in response to the video, an observer on X with username katy, who indicates they are a part UFCW Local 371, wrote, "class traitor."
"I was raised in a Teamsters household, survived because of union benefits, and still do. I'd rather starve than lick a boot," katy wrote. "We're the union."
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Workers Won Key Victories in 2024, But They’ll Have to Fight Even Harder in 2025
When Trump takes office, expect attacks on immigrant workers, public employee unions, safety regulations, climate protection, and the very idea of labor law.
Dec 29, 2024
Union workers broke open the cookie jar in 2024, after years of stagnant wages and rising prices. With strikes and the threat of strikes, workers did more than forestall concessions: They gained ground. Union workers in the private sector saw 6% real wage rises for the year.
Just the fear that workers would organize drove up wages at non-union employers like Delta Airlines, Amazon, and Mercedes.
Meanwhile, unemployment rates of around 4% made strikes easier to maintain. For instance, many Boeing workers were able to get side jobs during their 53-day strike this fall. Relatively plentiful jobs have also made it easier for workers to organize new unions, since the threat of getting fired is less daunting.
Workers’ demands for union democracy have fueled more fights, more wins, higher expectations, and more new organizing. It’s obvious that workers want and need unions that can match and defeat the billionaires.
Nearly 28,000 school employees in Virginia and 10,000 nurses in Michigan joined unions in the two biggest organizing victories of the year. At the first Southern auto plant to organize in decades, Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 5,000 workers won a union in April by a decisive 73%.
But even with a union, working conditions are often abominable. Speed-up and long hours make work risky and wear us out.
And storm clouds are on the horizon. Even our current weak labor laws and safety enforcement are on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s chopping block. Expect attacks on immigrant workers, public employee unions, safety regulations, climate protection, and the very idea of labor law.
Wage Gains—Finally
After a strike that shut down production in the Pacific Northwest, Boeing Machinists bagged a 38% general wage increase over four years. A three-day port strike netted 20,000 Longshore (ILA) workers 61% over six years. It was the first East Coast-wide longshore strike since 1977.
Continuing the uptick in strikes since the onset of Covid-19, 2024 is on track for as many strikes as 2022, though it didn’t match the huge walkouts of 2023 in Hollywood, at Kaiser, and at the Big 3. Johnnie Kallas of the Cornell Labor Action Tracker reported 34 strikes in manufacturing through November.
Workers gained just by threatening a strike. At Daimler Truck in North Carolina, 7,400 workers chanted “Tick tock” as the contract deadline approached. They defeated tiers and won a 25% increase, with more for lower-paid workers.
After a vigorous contract campaign and 99.5% strike vote, American Airlines flight attendants (APFA) secured an immediate 20% pay increase, back pay from their 2019 contract expiration, and boarding pay for the first time. (Most flight attendants aren’t paid till the aircraft door closes.) Southwest flight attendants (TWU) won big wage gains; United flight attendants (AFA) voted 99.9% to strike, and may still do so. Airline workers have to navigate a lengthy obstacle course sanctioned by the Railway Labor Act, if they want to strike.
Teacher strikes yielded gains for teachers and students. In Massachusetts, where reformers lead the statewide union, but strikes are illegal, teachers in several districts struck anyway. They won more student services, time to plan classes, and raises for the lowest-paid aides—60% in 10 schools in Andover in January.
Gains from 2023’s strikes raised expectations for 2024. Unions that pushed sub-par contracts on their members faced revolts. Machinists leaders at Boeing backpedaled furiously when a contract they recommended was voted down by 95% in September. Letter Carriers are organizing a vigorous “vote no” campaign after union leaders submitted a contract with 1.3% annual wage increases.
Employers often coughed up pay but fought union demands on overtime, staffing, automation, and the moving of work. Longshore workers, for example, suspended their strike with a big pay promise, but job-killing automation issues remained unresolved, with negotiations ongoing.
The strike threat at Daimler Truck, and the strike at Boeing, did extract contractual promises on where work would be done. But enforcement may require additional job action. Stellantis has so far broken its promise to the Auto Workers to reopen its Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant—a condition of ending the UAW’s 2023 Stand-Up Strike. Auto workers are debating how to enforce that demand, and many Stellantis locals have taken strike votes.
In the Daimler contract, workers won a renewed promise of a guaranteed daily truck output, to dispel fears that the work would be moved to Mexico—a threat the company deployed regularly in negotiations.
At Boeing, the new contract promises to locate production of the next passenger jet in the Puget Sound area. But the work will likely start after the contract expires, and union leaders expect it may require another strike to enforce the agreement.
Despite big strike leverage, Boeing workers didn’t get a ban on mandatory overtime, though they can no longer be forced to work two weekends in a row. “I don’t think that people should be required to work more than 40 hours a week to keep their jobs,” said Boeing Machinist Mylo Lang.
Continuing 2023’s trend of defeating solidarity-crushing tiers at UPS and the Big 3 automakers, tiers were eliminated at Allison Transmission and Daimler Truck, while solar Ironworkers in California were able to end tiers in a multi-year effort to make commercial solar installation a union job.
Reformers Spur Organizing
Reform movements and new leadership in the Auto Workers and Teamsters led to big investments in new organizing. In February, the UAW announced it would spend $40 million to organize non-union auto and battery plants through 2026.
In October, the Teamsters announced they had added 50,000 members in the two years since new leaders took office. The Teamsters have made organizing Amazon a priority, and the Staten Island Amazon Labor Union voted to affiliate in June, as ALU-IBT Local 1. The New York Times reported that the Teamsters have committed $8 million toward organizing Amazon as well as access to their $300 million strike fund.
Amazon warehouse workers in California and New York have been marching on their bosses, demanding recognition. Newly organized Teamster drivers at Amazon have been setting up roving picket lines to disrupt operations until the company recognizes the union.
In these two unions, effective strike threats and dedication to organizing are no accident. They started with reform movements: Unite All Workers for Democracy in the Auto Workers and Teamsters for a Democratic Union in the Teamsters. More victories are coming down the pike: Rail Machinists (IAM District 19) elected reform leadership in 2024, as did New York City teacher retirees (UFT), a 70,000-person chapter. Up next are reformers in the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and maybe soon the Letter Carriers (NALC), thanks to an insulting contract offer pushed by the leadership.
The troublemaking wing of the movement continues to grow, as evidenced by the 4,700 workers who showed up at the April Labor Notes Conference, and the thousands more who wanted to attend. (There just wasn’t space!)
Most Elections in a Decade
Unions continue to be more popular than at any time since the 1960s, with 70% public approval. Private sector union elections this year involved 107,000 workers, the highest in a decade, up from 63,000 in 2022 and 93,000 in 2023.
More than 20,000 new graduate student workers won unions since last December.
After changing state law to allow bargaining, 27,000 Virginia school employees won wall-to-wall representation in Fairfax County, creating one of the largest K-12 unions on the East Coast.
In November, 10,000 nurses at the Corewell hospital chain in southern Michigan won the biggest unionization election in recent memory, organizing with the Teamsters.
However, the pace of organizing “is not enough to keep up with employment growth, let alone meaningfully increase [private sector] union density,” wrote union researcher Chris Bohner.
Starbucks is a case in point. In February, Starbucks Workers United forced management to negotiate after two years of organizing. Ten months later, they’re still in contract talks, and 130 more stores have voted union. That adds up to 522 union stores, with 11,000 workers. But Starbucks operates 10,000 stores in the U.S.
Plant-Building Boom
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act stimulated a building boom for electric vehicle and battery plants—many in the South—opening the possibility of organizing drives at dozens of facilities as they ramp up production. The UAW extracted a promise during its 2023 Stand-Up Strike to include in the master contract 6,000 new General Motors jobs at four planned battery plants.
Workers at the first of these, Ultium Cells in Lordstown, Ohio, signed a contract in June. The union announced a majority at BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky in November.
New Flyer electric bus manufacturing workers in Anniston, Alabama won their first contract in May, scoring raises up to 38%, through the Electrical Workers (IUE), a division of the Communications Workers.
After the big win at Volkswagen, the UAW hit a speed bump in its drive to organize German, Korean, and Japanese-owned plants when workers at Mercedes in Alabama voted down the union 2,642 to 2,045. Companies have been pulling out all the stops on the propaganda Wurlitzer, enlisting hostile politicians (and even preachers!) to stop workers from uniting.
Cease-Fire Switch
Unions opposed a Democratic presidential administration on a military issue for the first time in memory. Advocating “cease-fire in Gaza” had been something staffers faced discipline for. But it came to be viewed as common sense by most of the labor movement.
Support for a cease-fire started with unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), whose members had long studied and debated the situation. It spread as dissenters—from teachers to painters—began speaking up, insisting that it was the place of unions to oppose mass death supported by our government. “The main question that came up was, ‘What does this have to do with us?’” said Texas IBEW member Dave Pinkham. “We made an appeal to humanity: ‘U.S. military support to Israel is supporting violence there. Let’s stop.’”
In October 2023, Postal Workers (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein was alone in calling for a cease-fire at the AFL-CIO executive council, and was denounced by others. By February, the AFL-CIO was calling for a cease-fire. By July, seven unions representing nearly half the union members in the U.S. were calling for a stop to military aid to Israel.
At some colleges, workers struck to defend members who had faced discipline and even attacks by campus police for protesting U.S. support for Israel.
Israel is still raining U.S.-made bombs and missiles on Gaza and Lebanon, showing the limits of union resolutions. But a Cold War-era taboo has broken. Perhaps unions can go one step further and figure out how to block the manufacture and transport of weapons destined for wars of aggression and genocide.
Storm Clouds
Federal workers and immigrants are likely to be the first targets of the incoming Trump administration and Republican-dominated Congress. Trump and his lackeys plan to slash federal spending, install a corporate-friendly National Labor Relations Board, stop subsidies for the electric vehicle transition, and dismantle public education.
Tools to protect immigrant workers from labor law violations, like the Department of Homeland Security's Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program, are likely to be shelved, along with speedy elections and other efforts at labor law enforcement that we have become used to from the NLRB. Mass deportations are unlikely, given that Trump’s corporate sponsors rely on the labor of immigrants for their profits. But some showy raids are likely, and the terror of arrests will make it even harder to stop abusive bosses—which is the main point of the policy, as Magaly Licolli writes. Solidarity will be needed from all of us.
But even an NLRB determined to enforce labor law has been unable to force big corporations like Amazon to comply, so it’s not clear that organizing these companies will be significantly harder with a hostile board. As Chris Bohner and Eric Blanc point out, it was during Trump’s first term that the “Red for Ed” illegal teacher strike wave swept the country.
Workers’ demands for union democracy have fueled more fights, more wins, higher expectations, and more new organizing. It’s obvious that workers want and need unions that can match and defeat the billionaires.
If there are enough of us, and our bonds are strong enough, bosses, politicians, and even the law will give way. As strikers proved, the power is in our hands.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular