The Background Info – And What Comes Next:
Over the past year Amazon has faced a steady and growing drumbeat of resistance from workers standing up against the company’s relentless production quotas, dangerous working conditions, and constant monitoring of their every move. Workers in Chicago and Staten Island have staged walkouts; in New York and Alabama, workers are holding elections to form a union; and workers at six warehouses in Germany held a two-day strike calling for pay equity.
With reports of alarming worker injury rates at Amazon warehouses during the pandemic, the death of six workers during a tornado at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, a ruling by the federal government finding that Amazon showed “flagrant disregard” for workers’ rights and federal labor law during a union election in Alabama, all eyes will be on Amazon’s treatment of workers when Andy Jassy leads his first annual general meeting of shareholders as the company’s new CEO.
This year’s annual meeting will be a referendum on Amazon’s employment practices and its constant and pervasive surveillance of workers and communities. Concerned investors have filed shareholder resolutions challenging the company’s surveillance of workers, its sale of surveillance equipment to the Israeli apartheid government, and its gender and racial pay gaps. One investor filed a resolution to put an hourly worker on Amazon’s board of directors and a warehouse worker is even bringing forward a resolution calling on the company to stop using surveillance and unrealistic production quotas to force workers to work at unsafe rates.
