On Wednesday night, Jeff Bezos dined with Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. The following morning, seven Amazon warehouses saw their delivery drivers, a majority of whom have signed Teamster affiliation cards, go on strike. Those drivers make last-mile deliveries in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and their work stoppage coincides, of course, with the last-minute holiday season rush. There’s likely more to come, most impactfully at Amazon’s massive Inland Empire cargo hub, where imports from Asia are trucked from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, sorted by destination, and loaded onto Amazon planes bound for American cities near and far. (The strike also follows by several days a Senate report documenting Amazon’s refusal to heed the recommendations of its own safety committee to reduce the quotas on its warehouse workers that have led to a high rate of injuries.) Picket lines have also gone up at dozens of other Amazon warehouses where workers are not yet formally affiliated with the Teamsters and not themselves on strike.
This week’s strike is the most significant yet in what is the nation’s most important worker organizing campaign, that of the drivers and warehouse workers at America’s second-largest private-sector employer. (Walmart remains the largest.) One of the problems confronting the Teamsters, of course, is that Amazon has roughly 175 mega-warehouses and at least 800 smaller facilities scattered around the country. In 1937, the UAW was able to win recognition and a contract from General Motors by occupying just a handful of factories in Flint, Michigan. By shutting down the sole GM factory that made a crucial part, the UAW brought what was then the nation’s largest employer to its knees.
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No one Amazon facility occupies a comparable niche, of course; indeed, given the nature of Amazon’s business, striking 100 Amazon facilities won’t necessarily bring the company to its knees, either. That said, the delivery centers in the nation’s largest cities and a key switch point between Asian imports and U.S. distribution certainly punch above their weight.
In a sense, though, the events of the week are also a three-handed poker game between Bezos, Trump, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. The Teamster leader made his play very clear when he made a barely veiled pro-Trump prime-time speech at this summer’s Republican convention and then, over the objections of his executive board, declined to have the Teamsters endorse Kamala Harris for president. O’Brien surely factored in the rift that had grown between Trump and Bezos, whose ownership of The Washington Postwhich Trump detests for accurately covering him, might just prod Trump to not look all that harshly at the Teamsters’ campaign at Amazon. And by nominating the surprisingly pro-union Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his secretary of labor, Trump doubtless raised O’Brien’s hopes.
Problem is, it’s the National Labor Relations Board, far more than the Labor Department, that will set the ground rules in the Teamster-Amazon contest. Joe Biden’s NLRB, and most particularly its general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, have helped the Teamsters through rulings revitalizing the long-decaying National Labor Relations Act. In September, Board attorneys in Los Angeles said that Amazon’s ending its contract with a company of delivery drivers who’d joined the union violated the act. The attorneys were following the Board’s joint-employer ruling, under which drivers driving Amazon trucks, wearing Amazon uniforms, delivering Amazon shipments to Amazon consumers, surveilled by Amazon cameras in the cabs of Amazon’s trucks, were effectively Amazon employees, even if Amazon had sought to disavow all responsibility for them by its nationwide contracting out of those drivers to delivery companies. It was immediately following that action by those NLRB attorneys that the majority of the nominally contracted-out drivers in New York and Chicago who are striking today signed Teamster affiliation cards.
Biden’s NLRB has also sanctioned Amazon for its more than two-year refusal to bargain with its employees at the company’s massive Staten Island warehouse, who’d voted to join the Teamsters in an NLRB election.
As soon as Trump takes office, however, he’ll be able to fill a vacancy on the NLRB’s five-member Board (thanks to Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin recently voting down a Biden nomination), which will give the majority over to Republicans. If Trump’s Board is anything like his Board during his first term, or indeed any Republican-majority Board in the agency’s nearly 90-year history, it will dismiss the charges against Amazon and reverse the Biden Board’s ruling that such contractual arrangements as those Amazon has with its drivers’ nominal employers mean that Amazon has the legal status of their employer as well.
No less than O’Brien, Bezos understands his need to curry favor with Trump so that the unthinkable—Trump nominating people that O’Brien actually likes to the Board—doesn’t happen. That would be a very long shot, of course, since weakening unions and disempowering workers are the very foundations of American business’s DNA. Hence Bezos’s refusal to let the Post editorial board run its endorsement of Harris, hence his donation of $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, hence his dinner Wednesday night with Trump and Musk.
Bezos and Musk are rivals in the space-shot business, but they share a vastly more important bond. Two of their companies—Amazon and SpaceX—are the companies that are currently making the case, before NLRB bodies and federal courts, that the NLRB is unconstitutional; that the body established by Congress in 1935 and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937 is all of a sudden in violation of the Constitution because its rulemaking process vests authority in a governmental agency rather than, say, the courts. Of course, every NLRB ruling can be, and frequently is, challenged in courts, and courts haven’t hesitated over the subsequent 87 years to overturn hundreds of those rulings, in the process cumulatively stripping tens of millions of American workers of their right to collective bargaining, which the NLRA established. Musk has gone on record as opposed even to “the idea of unions,” and while Bezos has made no such pronunciamentos, his actions make clear that he joins with Musk—thereby, a duo of the world’s richest and second-richest persons—in opposing even a modicum of worker power.
Against such belief and, infinitely more important, such wealth, O’Brien’s bet really doesn’t amount to much. Only if the Teamsters, necessarily abetted by every other union, can actually grind Amazon to a halt will worker voice amount to more than some scattered peeps in 21st-century America. The pre-Christmas strike is more symbolic than disabling, but it’s a necessary and very commendable start.
