“Collective Action has to involve people, and must be consistently done in public

If you don't put in that work, if people can’t see or witness this kind of action, 

nothing in people’s lives will tell them they have collective power” -GPaul, Abbreviated

In the summer of 2021, our already short staffed warehouse, DEW8, instituted a new sorting method that meant more bending and twisting for workers - the most risky actions likely to result in back and other injuries. Our understaffed stowers already had a hard time keeping up with the unreasonable amount of packages they were expected to sort, especially since the roles meant to help manage the flow of packages were always deliberately short staffed. How was instituting a newer, more unintuitive method of work going to help with the already backbreaking pace of labor? 

DEW8 workers had had enough. 

After weeks of discussion, we settled on three fixable issues to work on demanding solutions to. First, something had to be done about the understaffing issue. The pace of work would be much more manageable if Amazon wasn’t too cheap to reasonably staff every position. Second, if the sheer amount of packages ever became a genuine safety hazard, workers should be able to hit an emergency button. This would temporarily halt the unending flow of packages and allow us to handle much of the backlog. And finally, the stowers should be allowed to use whatever stowing method worked best for them, instead of risking injury with the new method. 

These demands were written on a petition and then shared around the warehouse for a few days. After winning the support of over 75% of their fellow workers, ten of us delivered the signed petition to our bosses, detailing the demands and why there was such popular support for them. Management, unsurprisingly, refused to listen. But us workers, in turn, refused to be cowed.  

After relentlessly sharing these demands over the course of a few weeks, management finally caved. We could now use the emergency button. Certain positions were being reasonably staffed. And stowers were finally allowed to modify their methods to whatever worked best for them. 

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