Date: 2025-01-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021224
Company
Amazon workplace conditions
Amazon has just agreed to pay $60 million in an FTC settlement to more than 140,000 delivery drivers for unpaid tips.1
Original article:
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Dear Peter,
Amazon has just agreed to pay $60 million in an FTC settlement to more than 140,000 delivery drivers for unpaid tips.1
For two and a half years, Amazon kept tips paid by customers to Amazon Flex drivers. One driver was owed more than $28,000.
It’s just another one of Amazon’s underhanded business practices, made possible by the megacorporation using its vast wealth and monopoly power to crush any effort by employees to fight back. Congress must break up Amazon if there is any hope at stopping Jeff Bezos’ empire from abusing its workers.
Will you chip in $10 to Demand Progress and help break up Amazon and the Big Tech companies?
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
As Amazon founder Bezos tries to overcome his bad image with headlines about trips to space, the corporation is ending up in the news more and more for its mistreatment of employees, and not just about stealing from its delivery drivers.
In Oregon, Amazon drivers are suing over unsafe driving conditions they are forced to endure.2 A recent exposé found that tens of thousands of Amazon employees on medical leave across the country were often underpaid what they were promised and were sometimes even fired before they could return.3
And in warehouses, Amazon employees are injured at double the rate of the industry average.4
Instead of addressing these horrors, Amazon is resisting workers’ attempts to fight back. The National Labor Relations Board cited the tech giant for its unfair anti-union tactics it used against the Alabama warehouse organizing effort, and now Amazon is back to using the very same tactics—forcing employees to attend anti-union meetings, posting signs in bathrooms, and flying in staff from other warehouses.5
Because Amazon has used its giant platform, web services, and content control to put so many other stores out of business, our options to avoid the mega retailer become fewer every day. The only way to rein in Amazon is to break it up.
Demand Progress has mobilized more than 75,000 people to contact the Biden administration and Congress this year, urging them to use their power to break up Amazon and protect workers and our democracy from Amazon’s monopoly power. Now we need your help to keep the pressure on into 2022.
Will you chip in $10 to Demand Progress and help break up Amazon and the Big Tech companies?
Thanks for standing with us.
Robert Cruickshank, Demand Progress
PS: Your contributions are what keep us nimble and prepared to take on important fights like these as they happen. Will you become a monthly donor to keep our work going?
DONATE
Sources:
- 1. Reuters, 'Amazon drivers get $60 million in withheld tips back, FTC says,' November 2, 2021
- 2. Oregon Live, 'Amazon delivery contractors in Oregon sue, seek $15 million over ‘unsafe,’ ‘unreasonable’ driving conditions,' October 27, 2021
- 3. The New York Times, 'Inside Amazon’s Worst Human Resources Problem,' October 24,2021
- 4. NPR, 'California Bill Passes, Giving Amazon Warehouse Workers Power To Fight Speed Quotas,' September 8, 2021
- 5. Reuters, 'Amazon takes another swipe at union as Alabama rematch looms,' November 4, 2021