Courage Campaign announcement:

While Amazon is raking in billions of dollars off the backs of its employees, Courage California will be leading a conversation with representatives from grassroots and labor organizations across the state about how we are making gains in stopping the mega retailer’s exploitive worker practices.

Will you join us on November 29 at 12 noon PST to help Deliver Us From Amazon?

Amazon is decimating the workforce it employs as well as small businesses.

More than 160,000 businesses have closed during covid, while Amazon uses algorithms to push small retailers down in search results and replicates their products to sell itself.

The warehouses that Amazon builds are environmentally hazardous, and the employees are held to unreasonable quotas that cause injuries at twice the rate of the industry average. And average worker wages sink where Amazon warehouses take hold.

That’s why we’ve joined a coalition of workers’ rights groups to stand up to Amazon. Our town hall attendees will hear from speakers from organizations including:

• The Warehouse Worker Resource Center
• Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability
• United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5
• Center on Policy Initiatives
• Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy

On Cyber Monday, you can join our Amazon boycott and get involved with a statewide movement to stop the mega retailer’s terrible practices. We hope to see you there!

Click here to register for the town hall on November 29 at 12 pm!

6109481ae4b0552883e5928e.pdf (huffingtonpost.com)

Excerpt:

“On April 9, 2021, a tally of ballots issued in a mail ballot election that had commenced on February 8, 2021. That tally reflected that a majority of employees who had cast ballots in the election voted against representation by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (Petitioner or Union). However, the Petitioner contests the results of the election claiming that Amazon.Com Services, LLC (Employer or Amazon) engaged in objectionable conduct. As a
result of this objectionable conduct, Petitioner asks that the election be set aside and that a new election be directed. Specifically, the Petitioner contends that the Employer interfered with the …conditions necessary to conduct a fair election by causing a mailbox to be installed on
its premises, by polling employees, by threatening employees, by hiring additional police, and by interfering with the Union’s access to voters by causing the county to alter the timing of certain traffic lights.
After conducting the hearing and carefully reviewing the evidence and the arguments made by the parties, I recommend that Petitioner’s objections be sustained in part because the evidence demonstrates that the Employer’s conduct interfered with the laboratory conditions
necessary to conduct a fair election.”

With Amazon Accused of Cheating, NLRB Official Says Workers Should Get Another Union Vote | Common Dreams News

Excerpt:

An official at the National Labor Relations Board on Monday formally recommended tossing out the results of a closely watched union election at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, potentially giving workers there a chance to hold another vote as the e-commerce giant faces accusations of unlawful misconduct.

https://blackagendareport.com/how-amazon-exploited-weakened-america

Excerpt:

Amazon will not stop squeezing every drop from workers until those workers have more power.

“The book is less an examination of the company than an examination of America through its lens.”

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Alec MacGillis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374159276

During the Covid-19 pandemic, one in four Americans has struggled to pay their bills, and as of mid-January, unemployment claims surpassed those of the Great Recession for the forty-third straight week. As of February, more than 24 million people reported that their households sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. Many lower-income Americans continued to report for in-person jobs without proper protective equipment in dangerously crowded environments like meatpacking plants, warehouses, and hospitals.

For those who could work from home, it became “our patriotic duty” to buy online, wrote ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis in a November New York Times op-ed. Flattening the curve put the nail in the coffin of in-person retail, which had already endured record closures in 2019. Amazon, meanwhile, hired 250,000 people, taking the total to over a million employees globally. Most of those jobs sucked: They were largely in warehouse and delivery, which have become notoriously brutal jobs at Amazon both physically and mentally (but we’ll get to that). Nine months into 2020, and six months into the pandemic, Amazon had already surpassed its 2019 earnings.

Last week, we saw billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos engage in a massively wasteful ‘space race’ while the entire Western United States suffered from a record-breaking heat wave. Then, after landing, Jeff Bezos had the audacity to thank Amazon workers for paying for his public mid-life crisis.

Back on Earth, the rest of us are paying for billionaire greed too as record temperatures threaten human life and infrastructure in a climate crisis driven by the top 100 companies in the world. Renters have nowhere to go as the eviction moratorium is about to end, and the median price of a house in California has risen by $300,000.

Lack of housing, climate destruction, and poor working conditions all have the same cause: the hoarding and exploitation committed by the billionaire class.

To fight against Bezos, Amazon, and Big Business, we’ll need a mass movement committed to fighting first-hand for what we need. Will you commit to joining our volunteer campaign to tax Amazon in Burbank?

Take a stand!

Raise $100 million from tax on companies with the largest square footageBefore they do that, we need to show public support for the terms as passed by the Action Conference:The TAB campaign has officially sent our resolutions from the last Action Conference to the Burbank City Council. Once they add it to the agenda, they’ll debate on whether or not to craft a law that meets our terms. The council will likely attempt to water down the resolutions in an attempt to cater to Big Business in Burbank!

Fund rent and utilities relief due to COVID

Build social housing by union labor with living wages

Fund public schools

Fund a Green New Deal in Burbank

And more!

When the council schedules the discussion of the Burbank Amazon Tax, we need Burbankers to show up online to speak up in support! Are you willing to show City Council that Burbank needs a strong tax on Amazon and Big Business?

Stay tuned, and add “Tax Amazon Burbank” to your address book so you won’t miss any updates. We’re heading into a crucial part of the campaign, and it’s going to take all of us to beat Bezos.

Primed for Pain: – Strategic Organizing Center (thesoc.org)

Excerpt: