Teamsters begin ‘largest strike’ against Amazon, accusing company of ‘insatiable greed’
Amazon workers in New York striking Thursday morning. Image via WABC.
(NEW YORK) — The Teamsters said workers will begin striking at Amazon facilities across the country Thursday morning — in what the union calls the largest strike against the online shopping giant less than a week before Christmas.
The Teamsters said the strike will begin early Thursday at several facilities, including in New York City, Atlanta, three locations in Southern California, one in San Francisco and one in Skokie, Illinois.
In addition, the Teamsters said local unions would also put up primary picket lines at hundreds of Amazon Fulfillment Centers nationwide.
In a news release, the union calls it the “largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history” and says it comes after Amazon has refused to bargain with workers organized with the Teamsters.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien in a statement. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
In a statement to ABC News, an Amazon spokesperson said the Teamsters have illegally coerced workers to join the union.
“For more than a year now, the Teamsters have continued to intentionally mislead the public – claiming that they represent ‘thousands of Amazon employees and drivers’. They don’t, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said. “The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union.”
The spokesperson said the company has increased the starting minimum wage for workers in fulfillment centers and transportation employees by 20% and in September increased average base wage to $22 per hour.
The announced strike by the Teamsters comes after workers at several Amazon facilities authorized the walkout.
The Teamsters said nearly 10,000 Amazon workers across the country have joined the union.
The facility in New York City’s Staten Island was Amazon’s first-ever unionized warehouse. Workers there have said the company has refused to recognize the union and negotiate a contract after workers there voted to unionize in 2022.
The National Labor Relations Board officially certified the union representing workers at the facility, but Amazon has appealed that ruling.
(New York) — Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accused The Onion and Sandy Hook Elementary School families of “collusive bidding” and asked a bankruptcy court judge to halt the sale of his Infowars platform.
Jones, who defamed the Sandy Hook families by calling the 2012 massacre a hoax and the parents of the 20 first graders actors, called The Onion’s winning $1.75 million bid “sheer nonsense” because it’s half of what the losing bidder offered.
The Onion began a “systematic effort to confuse Mr. Jones’s personal public following with messages espousing gun control in a manner such that Mr Jones’s personal public following would be utterly confused and misled,” Jones said in an overnight court filing.
His request follows a similar push for an injunction by First United American Companies, which is affiliated with Jones through the sale of dietary supplements.
The plaintiffs nor the trustee immediately responded to Jones but the trustee has previously called the auction result legitimate and asked the court for approval.
(SEATTLE) — Boeing machinists overwhelmingly rejected a contract proposal this week, opting to extend a weekslong strike and send negotiators back to the bargaining table.
Sixty-four percent of workers voted against the new contract, according to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union representing 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington, Oregon and California.
The outcome follows the resounding defeat of a previous proposal last month, which drew rebuke from more than 90% of union members.
The consecutive “no” votes set the stage for a standoff between Boeing and its workers that will strain the finances of both sides over the coming days and weeks, experts told ABC News. That financial pressure will push the dispute toward resolution but workers appear unlikely to budge without major concessions, they added.
“The union has sent a very clear message to Boeing that it will take significantly more to get a settlement,” Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on labor history, told ABC News.
The proposed contract would have delivered a 35% raise over the four-year duration of the contract, upping the 25% cumulative raise provided in a previous offer overwhelmingly rejected by workers in a vote last month. Workers had initially sought a 40% cumulative pay increase.
The proposal also called for hiking Boeing’s contribution to a 401(k) plan, but it declined to fulfill workers’ call for a reinstatement of the company’s defined pension. The contract would have included a $7,000 ratification bonus for each worker, as well as a performance bonus that Boeing had sought to jettison.
But union leaders said the concessions offered in the proposal were not enough to meet the demands of rank-and-file union members.
“This contract struggle began over ten years ago when the company overreached and created a wound that may never heal for many members,” said Jon Holden, president of IAM District 751 in Seattle, in a statement after the vote. “I don’t have to tell you all how challenging it has been for our membership through the pandemic, the crashes, massive inflation, and the need to address the losses stemming from the 2014 contract.”
Boeing did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Experts who spoke to ABC News forecasted a willingness on the part of Boeing to reenter talks and even revisit key parts of the offer.
Hours before workers cast ballots on Wednesday, Boeing released an earnings report showing the company had lost a staggering $6.1 billion over the most recent quarter, even though most of that period took place before the strike began.
The strike is expected to deepen that financial hole. A 50-day work stoppage would cost Boeing $5.5 billion, investment bank TD Cowen said in a report reviewed by ABC News at the outset of the dispute. So far, the strike has lasted 41 days.
“This rejection adds further uncertainty, costs, and recovery delays,” Bank of America Global Research said in a note to clients on Thursday. “We anticipate further concessions of wages will be required for a deal to pass.”
Financial stress will mount for workers as well, experts said.
Union members have received $250 per week from a strike fund, beginning in the third week of the work stoppage. That compensation marks a major pay cut for many of the employees.
“When strikes go longer than five or six weeks, the financial pressures really start to work on the union rank and file,” Robert Forrant, a professor of U.S. history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told ABC News.
While union members remain widely opposed to the latest contract offer, it drew greater support than the first one. That incremental progress may prompt Boeing to continue the strategy of upping worker pay while standing firm in its refusal to reinstate a defined pension, Ryan Stygar, a labor lawyer at San Diego, California-based Centurion Trial Attorneys, told ABC News.
Workers lost a traditional pension plan in a contract ratified by the union in 2014. The union’s demand for reinstatement of the pension may appeal more to longtime employees who feel they’ve lost retirement benefits than younger ones who’ve joined the company since its shift to a 401(k), Stygar said.
“Boeing’s strategy will be to try to exploit that generational divide,” Stygar said, noting that increased pay and a larger ratification bonus may entice younger workers to support a future proposal even if it omits pension reinstatement.
“As the strike goes on and Boeing’s losses accumulate, I think we will see more aggressive negotiation,” Stygar added, saying the standoff could stretch on for another two to four weeks.
“But I don’t have a crystal ball,” Stygar said.
ABC News’ Jack Moore and Ayesha Ali contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Tariff threats voiced by President-elect Donald Trump this week rippled through global stocks and triggered warnings from U.S. retail executives about the risk of higher prices.
Former President George W. Bush, who congratulated Trump a day after the election, has not commented on Trump’s remarks, in keeping with a low public profile. As recently as 2021, however, Bush criticized trade barriers, lamenting the GOP under Trump as “isolationist, protectionist.”
Trump’s support for tariffs and skepticism toward global trade departs from previous Republican presidents spanning the past four decades.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and his father, George H.W. Bush, each venerated free trade, though in some cases they put forward policies similar to Trump’s protectionist proposals.
“Trump is not talking about free trade,” John Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan. “Trump’s rhetoric is completely different.”
In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the Trump transition team said his tariff plans would boost the U.S. economy.
“In his first term, President Trump instituted tariffs against China that created jobs, spurred investment, and resulted in no inflation. President Trump will work quickly to fix and restore an economy that puts American workers by re-shoring American jobs, lowering inflation, raising real wages, lowering taxes, cutting regulations, and unshackling American energy,” Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.
Trump late Monday said he would charge Mexico and Canada with a 25% tariff on all products coming into the United States until action is taken by those countries to stem illegal immigration and the overflow of drugs across the border.
For China, Trump said that he’d impose an additional 10% tariff on products coming to the U.S.
The declarations of trade hostility echoed vows made by Trump on the campaign trail.
Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago in October, Trump called “tariff” the “most most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
Tariffs as high as 2,000% would safeguard key U.S. industries, such as auto manufacturing, Trump said. In the absence of tariffs, Trump added, it’s “going to be the end of Michigan.”
The favorable tone toward protectionist policies contrasts with rhetoric voiced by Trump’s Republican predecessors.
Reagan, who served in the latter years of the Cold War in the 1980s, invoked free trade as a weapon in the fight against authoritarian adversaries abroad and perceived demagogues at home.
“Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies; they are our allies,” then-President Ronald Reagan said in 1988, after signing a free trade agreement with Canada.
“We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag,” Reagan added.
The elder Bush, who had served as Reagan’s vice president, adopted a similar posture toward trade.
As president, George H.W. Bush sought to improve trade ties with China, and he helped establish the World Trade Organization, an international body that aims to facilitate global trade through a shared set of regulations.
In the early 1990s, Bush negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, a trade pact between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
“Free trade throughout the Americas is an idea whose time has come,” Bush said at a ceremony promoting NAFTA in December 1992.
“This century’s epic struggle between totalitarianism and democracy is over. It’s dead. Democracy has prevailed,” he added. “Today, we see unfolding around the world a revolution of hope and courage, propelled by the aspiration of ordinary people for freedom and a better life.”
The deal was ratified under Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
During his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump sharply criticized NAFTA, which had drawn criticism for allowing manufacturers to relocate plants abroad and lay off U.S. workers.
Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Trump described NAFTA as “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”
Like Reagan and his father, George W. Bush voiced support for free trade while in office. Since then, he has continued to back global commerce and oppose trade barriers.
“Since World War II, America has encouraged and benefited from the global advance of free markets, from the strength of democratic alliances, and from the advance of free societies,” George W. Bush said in 2017.
“Free nations are less likely to threaten and fight each other. And free trade helped make America into a global economic power,” George W. Bush added.
Despite their rhetoric, Trump’s predecessors within the Republican Party put forward some policies that resembled his proposals this week.
Reagan slapped 45% tariffs on Japanese motorcycles, and 100% tariffs on some Japanese electronics, seeking to counter that nation’s economic rise and bolster domestic industry. Reagan also placed an annual quota on the allowable number of imported Japanese cars.
“There was a huge gap between rhetoric and reality,” Hanke, the former Reagan administration economist, told ABC News.
For his part, George W. Bush attempted to protect the U.S. steel industry by placing tariffs on some steel imports. Facing pushback from the World Trade Organization and threats of retaliation from other countries, he removed the tariffs after 18 months.
