by A Holiday Letter of Working Class Solidarity
By Harris L, first published on the kickstarter page of “The Day The Elves Saved Christmas for Themselves”, a picture book about revolution at the North Pole
I worked in Amazon warehouses for years, and I can’t stop thinking about the horrific tornadoes that bulldozed through Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, and Kentucky just a few days ago killing over 80 people, with many still missing. I’m reading articles and few of them seem to be reporting on what’s on the forefront of my mind: Were these deaths and injuries preventable? As heart-wrenching evidence starts pouring in, like Larry Virden’s texts to his girlfriend that “Amazon won’t let us leave,” and bosses at the Kentucky candle factory threatening to fire workers fleeing the tornado, the answer is a resounding “yes”.
Tornado warnings were issued in each of these areas as early as a day before. How could these companies ask their workers to come in knowing a tornado was even a possibility? If they prioritized human life over profit, this would never be a question.
My heart breaks even more hearing that the workers who survived the tornado, who lost coworkers and friends, whose workplace and security were destroyed the day before, were coming into the Amazon facility across the street the next day to report for work. Why aren’t they being given paid time off?!?! Of course we all know why.
“It’s a reminder of the trauma that I just endured but I will be returning to work at Amazon,” said one worker who lost their friend the day before, “This is my livelihood.”
I am reminded of when I used to work at an Amazon delivery center, the same kind of facility, that was hit by the tornado. It was winter and half my coworkers and I had just been forced to move to night shift from day shift. On the second night of my new shift, a big snow storm happened. I remember expecting Amazon to cancel work; it would have been impossible for most people to get there. But they didn’t. So we dug out my car, and I headed off to work.
I started my shift, with only about twenty of my hundred-person shift there plus another 30 or so from the previous shift working extra to earn a few extra bucks, or perhaps not wanting to try their luck in the snow. Soon I watched my new manager walking down the belt line talking quietly to every few workers, whose face would fall and then they’d leave the line and walk out. I remember watching it happen while I continued doing my work, thinking, “What is going on?” And then all of a sudden the manager was in front of me. What could he want with me? Maybe he wanted to thank me for coming in in dangerous conditions (not that I really had a choice — although I had worked at Amazon for over a year I was kept as a seasonal worker and time off was unpaid).
Silly me. Of course he was there for the same reason he was talking to my coworkers: to lay me off. It had nothing to do with our performance. HR had hired too many workers for the season, and they needed to make cuts. So despite 60,000 backed-up packages, he was forced to lay off those of us who were there. We were fired for braving a blizzard to come into work. I cried the whole way home. The roads were icy and I was scared, but I made it fine. I’m lucky. While Amazon’s disregard for us workers cost us our jobs, we at least left with our lives.
The National Labor Relations Board recently found that when workers at Amazon tried to unionize in Bessemer, Alabama, they cheated the election to stop them. But does Amazon pay for breaking the law? No. Now they kill their workers by not letting them leave during a tornado. Will they pay? I don’t know, but what I do know is that if you can put a price on human life, Amazon will see it as the cost of doing business, but if the workers had a union, they would have protections against this reckless endangerment.
Amazon is a global marketplace and distribution network. It should be run as a public utility and have working conditions controlled by its workers: people who know the feeling of working on the line, staring at package labels until you feel so dizzy you think you’ll faint. It doesn’t need to run people into the ground to be efficient. Firing all of us for coming in during a blizzard while we had backed up packages wasn’t efficient. A committee of workers should decide workplace safety. If, for example, Amazon had shut down, either in the tornado or the snow storm, compensating workers who lost hours, I think they’d have no problem getting more workers to come onsite the next day and work a little extra for overtime to get those backlogged packages out and delivery back on schedule. But we are not expendable.
Amazon management should be prosecuted for making decisions that led to the deaths of their workers. They and the company should be immediately investigated at all sites. But until we have the collective voice of a union, Amazon workers will likely stay just as vulnerable as we have been. I cannot wait until we can donate to an Amazon worker strike fund. When that day comes, and it is coming, we should all be on the line supporting them in the struggle for our lives.
One final note — it’s a mistake to think that Amazon is some evil exception: we can see from the lives that were lost at the candle factory, from Kellogg’s hiring permanent scabs to replace unionized workers, from how healthcare workers and teachers are kept understaffed while on the front lines of the pandemic, and thousands of other examples. Amazon didn’t invent these practices, they just perfected them. We must take on the practices of each of these companies, and that means taking on the capitalist system as a whole.
My heart is with my coworkers across the country, with the candle factory workers, and with everyone who’s lost someone or felt the indignity of being treated as expendable. We won’t stop fighting until we live in a world where people’s lives and the planet we live on are what come first.
Harris L
Harris served as Seattle DSA's co-chair in 2020.
