Posted on 10/14/2022 9:28:25 PM PDT by fluorescence
Scores of Amazon employees walked out of the Amazon Air Regional Air Hub in San Bernardino Friday, Oct. 14, to protest what they have called unfair labor practices and retaliation in response to their demands for better, safer jobs and a $5 hourly pay raise.
Crowds gathered on the corner of a street leading to the 659,000-square-foot warehouse, known as KSBD, where roughly 1,400 employees work.
Jane Chung, a spokesperson for the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, wrote in an email that 100 employees, or half the shift, went on strike Friday afternoon.
Night shift workers also were expected to walk out, Chung said.
Workers aired their grievances about their pay and working conditions to those in attendance and watching a livestream on social media.
The Inland Empire Amazon Workers United Twitter and Facebook accounts rallied around the hashtags “AmazonStrike” and “PayUpAmazon.”
“Workers at KSBD and across the country are standing up for what we deserve,” Rex Evans, an employee at the San Bernardino warehouse, said in a news release. “We have been targeted, threatened, and intimidated by Amazon managers and Amazon consultants and today we are on strike.
“Amazon has the resources and the power to improve the quality of jobs of the people who make them profitable, but they choose to spend millions on consultants instead of warehouse workers.”
In a statement Friday, Amazon wrote: “We value employee feedback and provide a number of ways for employees and managers to communicate directly with each other. While we are always listening and working on ways to improve the experience, we’re proud to offer compensation packages that not only include great pay, but also provide comprehensive benefits for regular full-time employees.”
Friday’s strike at KSBD was the second such demonstration in as many months.
On Aug. 15, dozens of employees walked out of the Third Street warehouse at the former Norton Air Force Base with the same demands. Six weeks later, Amazon announced a $1 pay increase for hourly workers as part of a $1 billion investment in front-line employees.
The Amazon employee group in San Bernardino denounced the $1 raise and subsequently gave the e-commerce giant until Oct. 10 to meet its demands.
With no response, the workers announced they would strike Friday.
“Amazon is bringing in outside consultants and managers who have tried to undermine what we are doing,” Alfonso Rodriguez, who works at KSBD, said in the release. “We are awake and we want to fix what is going on in this building. We want to make Amazon a better and safer place to work.”
It is not just the 5 dollar raise, their worker comp insurance would go through the roof it is according to payroll, their payroll taxes that they have to match also another huge increase so the 5 dollar an hour becomes a 10 dollar an hour for Amazon you can bet that more than half of that staff are NOT WORTH any raise you can bet that the productivity sucks for more than half of them!!
Supply and demand.
Because the USA supply of low skill workers is abnormally high, wages go down. Business owners and executives hire more labor instead of automating and modernizing their systems and product line.
A normal supply of low skill labor, or a below average supply, would incentivize owners and executives to purchase labor saving devices and expert software.
The economic future has NEVER belonged to countries with the cheapest human labor.
It has always belonged to the countries with the best goods and services and the highest productivity.
Smarter negotiators would have noticed that Amazon has been scaling back operations and closing fulfillment centers all over the Country, while putting up a few new ones at the same time...
Exactly. Comp and all the rest is the real world cost. The straight dollar per hour cost over 1400 employees per year is 14.5 million. But we all know we live in the “real world”.
YOU want a $5 RAISE?
Get an education & perform a job WELL that pays more.
When critics of wages for low skill employees get to sign the FRONT of the paychecks, then I might listen to their whining.
Spot on some never get where inflation comes in it’s why Bill Gates made everyone hired at Microsoft temp employees.
KSBD - built on and around the former Norton Air Force Base.
San Bernardino and surrounding Indland Empire towns and cities have become major hosts to shipping and distribution hubs. KSBD itself is only a few miles from either the major east/west bound Interestate 10 and the north/south bound Interstate 15 but - to the good - removed from the higher traffic density of Los Angeles/Long Beach area. What does not arrive/leave the KSBD facilities by air comes/gets there by trucks.
What is hard to figure is how the city of San Bernardino touted the remake of Norton Air Force Base into a civilian transportation hub - which it has become - San Bernardino itself has no way near moved up economically, inspite of the growth of KSBD. San Bernardino has lagged in population growth, growing below the county average in the last twenty years, while growth in towns west and north of it (and south of it in Riversde County) have grown more. The same has been true for real estate values. Its like in spite of itself, San Bernardino never got its act together after Norton AFB closed.
And they’ll vote Democrat, who will create inflation, so they’ll demand another raise, and then they’ll vote Democrat, who will...
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