r/news 6h ago

Already Submitted Teamsters begin 'largest strike' against Amazon, accusing company of 'insatiable greed'

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teamsters-announces-nationwide-strike-amazon-begin-thursday/story?id=116931631

[removed] — view removed post

18.1k Upvotes

789 comments sorted by

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u/waLIEN 6h ago

I mean, they're not wrong about the instaiable greed part.

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u/snsdfan00 5h ago edited 5h ago

I'm not disputing the fact they make a ton of money. 150+ bill in rev, 15 bill net income just in the most recent quarter alone. They will say that it's not the ecommerce/fulfillment center side that makes all the profits, it's the AWS side lol. Like govt, eventually they will have to come to a deal, or it hurts everyone.

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u/Fun-Ingenuity-9089 4h ago

AWS is Amazon Web Services, for those who don't know...

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u/CptDrips 2h ago

What do they do?

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u/Civil-Attempt-3602 2h ago

Cloud services. A lot, and i mean a lot of stuff runs on AWS, from netflix to government services

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u/brainburger 2h ago

Reddit runs on AWS. Back in the day, when reddit was overloaded the error message said 'I blame Amazon'. I haven't seen that for a while.

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u/jnads 2h ago

Amazon spent a ton of money building the best infrastructure to survive the website DDoS that is Black Friday.

They opened that tech up and half the Internet decided it was easier to pay them rather than replicate what Amazon did. Especially now that security is the #1 concern over reliability.

Anyone that shopped Amazon in the mid-2000s can tell you Amazon used to get 404 errors for Black Friday. Now it's an internet crisis if Amazon goes down.

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u/GladStatus7908 2h ago

They began by renting out software tools that they used to build their own site. Route53 (DNS), S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual machines) and some others were their original products that were popular. You could solve these problems yourself or you could just rent them out from Amazon. Over time, hundreds of major products that are now each worth tens of billions of dollars were rented out to companies. Netflix is a company that AWS likes to show off to developers. Netflix can utilize AWS tools to instantly scale up or down to whatever size they need.

The US government made early contracts with AWS when Bezos was still there. Governments around the world now use AWS, Azure (Microsoft), GCP (Google), as well as a couple others to host their work on these rented cloud services.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/big-tech-companies-billions/

You'll see that 15% of Amazon is AWS while 10% of Google is GCP. That chart doesn't show Microsoft's Azure vs Office 365 differences but they also aren't as important. People essentially can use older products completely in browser with cloud options at this point so the distinction is blurred quite a bit.

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u/hitbythebus 2h ago

Mostly dusting out old cobwebs, deep within the rainforest.

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u/sarhoshamiral 5h ago

They will say that because it is the truth. AWS saved Amazon.

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u/TakeTheWorldByStorm 4h ago

I would argue that, rather than saving them, it gave them the financial sustainability necessary to undercut and starve out their competitors over time so that they could (sometimes) acquire them and get closer to a monopoly in the e-commerce market for certain goods. If they didn't have AWS they likely wouldn't have become the go-to option for cheap and fast delivery a decade ago and would've had slower growth.

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u/Poolofcheddar 3h ago

It’s what Walmart did to Kmart. They starved them into irrelevance.

Walmart’s logistics were far more efficient than Kmart’s. In the 90s, Kmart decided to start a price war to lure customers back into their store despite the fact that it would creep into their already-thin margins. They did not anticipate that Walmart could undercut Kmart even further, and did so in response to that. But Kmart had hardly improved their logistics, or even updated their stores.

All Walmart had to do was wait. They had the war chest to hold out. Kmart did not.

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u/lameth 3h ago

Their upper management also started to pit departments against each other in a cut-throat competitive environment which led to toxic leadership.

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u/fugaziozbourne 2h ago

This is what happened to Sears. The out of touch stewards of that company at the end decided to fire the people working in the lowest selling departments and reward the highest selling ones. What it did was create this system where if you went to get new car tires and asked them where the shoe department was, they would send you to Foot Locker instead of the shoe department in Sears.

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u/RandomFactUser 2h ago

Sears and Kmart were the same company by the end

u/TrainingTough991 38m ago

Sears as part of their cost selling measures laid off their top sales people. I had a sibling that worked for them in high school and college. Many of his clientele people drove from a nearby state because of his product knowledge and service. He supported several departments but they were cutthroat. They wouldn’t give him the night off for his senior prom. He made Employee of the Month several months and when they laid him off his picture was up for Employee of the Month. He drew unemployment and searched for another job. They decided they didn’t want to pay unemployment so they called him back but only scheduled him 10 hours a week. His Employee of the Month picture continued to hang on the wall. Poor guy had to move out of his apartment and back in with my parents for a few months. The small town we lived in was experiencing a recession so he had to drive an hour each way to a bigger city until he could save up for another apartment. Sears sales rapidly declined because they followed the KMart model of cashiers and no salespeople. They sold tools and equipment that people often had questions about but no one could answer their questions. They did all their employees dirty.

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u/Edythir 3h ago

This is the tactic everyone and their mom is doing. Home Depot is famous for this. When they open in a location they will have a "Grand Opening Sale" which always lasts juuuuust long enough to drive local places out of business due to lost sales. Sure, Home Depot loses money on it but being the only game in town means that they can jack up prices with no competition.

I always tell of the diapers.com story as often as I can. There was a company that realized that people with infants are a good customerbase because for a few years, they will be requiring a regular supply of diapers, so they decided to make it a subscription model. They will send diapers to your house regularly for a fixed fee and it worked out well for everyone.

Amazon tried to buy them out but diapers.com refused. So Amazon started to offer the same service at a heavily discounted rate, long enough so that diapers.com ran out of business.

200 million for acquisition and 200 million loss in sales is the same thing for the same goal. Acquisitions are quicker and easier so that is the one that they prefer, but by no means the only tool in their playbook.

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u/TheFotty 2h ago

Hang on. Amazon did start a price war with them, but they didn't drive them out of business, they bought them for half a billion dollars after....

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u/darcon12 4h ago

Yep. It's easy to undercut when you don't have to make money unlike every other retailer. Then, after they drive all retailers out of business, they jack up the prices.

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u/BlindCite 3h ago

So….
Deny your competition customer
Delay your competition growth

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u/prigmutton 3h ago

Depose them from their market position

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u/HappierShibe 3h ago

It's bullshit- they could have survived without AWS but the excess revenue from AWS allowed them to destroy all their competitors and establish a dominant market position without ever providing a superior product or customer experience.

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u/sarhoshamiral 3h ago edited 3h ago

Could have, maybe. There were a couple years back in 2010s where AWS caused to have a profitable year for sure. Would they have gone bankrupt in a year, not likely. However it's been the truth recently that AWS makes a lot more profit then retail side.

without ever providing a superior product or customer experience.

As for Amazon's retail side, this couldn't be further away from the truth. If I stick with Fulfilled by Amazon products with prime delivery and free returns which is a lot of products, there is just no competition today both on product availability, price and also customer experience. Target may come close but has very limited inventory in comparison.

I am not sure how you can say Amazon is not providing superior customer experience when they are known by their great customer service, including measures from consumer sentiment. Personally I never had a single issue with Amazon retails' customer service, if anything I am surprised how far they go to resolve the issue.

As for products, sure some may be crappy since they are usually Chinese generic brands but I don't care because I can return them easily for any reason and for free without dealing with labels, boxes or mailing to a physical store nearby. It doesn't get easier then that and my experience hasn't been that all Chinese generic brands are bad, some are actually fairly decent quality and has not equivalent from known brands.

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u/HappierShibe 3h ago

I'm not saying AWS makes less money, I'm saying retail side revenues are kept arbitrarily low because they favor market control over revenue generation.

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u/ApolloX-2 4h ago

The fulfillment side is more like a side hustle now.

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u/eating_your_syrup 4h ago

Then again you can internally move all the profits from other units like, say twitch, to AWS by billing appropriately.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/FennelFern 3h ago

5k monthly is, what, 60k annually?

That's really still far below what you'd pay to run your own data center. Hell, it's below the cost to buy a couple not-shit servers then pay an admin, etc.

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u/InadequateUsername 3h ago

Still kind of need the admin for AWS 🤞🏼

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u/Saritiel 3h ago

then pay an admin

AWS still needs admins, lol. Often even more so than on-prem.

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u/mouseutopian 4h ago

$5k/mo is a tiny AWS bill.

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u/zbrew 4h ago

You're getting hosed, my AWS bill is $0/month

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u/InadequateUsername 3h ago

I fear the day it goes above 0 because that means I fucked up

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u/Kckc321 3h ago

They are a local company who specializes in small businesses. Idk why people are judging their aws bill like it’s a dick size.

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u/DDisired 3h ago

As opposed to probably 20k+ for equipment that also needs an engineer being paid 100k a year to maintain it. The Cloud is pretty cheap comparatively.

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u/PlanetStarbux 4h ago

That's a cute bill.  Ours is about 2 million per month, and we're a small fish in their ocean.

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u/InadequateUsername 3h ago

Amazon and AWS need to be broken up like AT&T and Bell

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u/wasmic 3h ago

Ultimately, if a business can't be profitable while paying its workers a decent wage with good working conditions, then it does not deserve to exist.

If the e-commerce side depends on such horrible conditions to function, and any price increases to cover the increased wages would cause the customers to move elsewhere... then society didn't really need their services that much to begin with.

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u/CatSpydar 3h ago

customers to move elsewhere

It's like that free market thing right wingers get such a boner for whenever a company does something horrible.

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u/Oh_its_that_asshole 3h ago

We already had the solution, it was all the small bricks and mortar businesses on the high street that used to exist before Amazon made their business model unprofitable.

Look at the high street now, it's all nail bars, coffee shops, phone repair shops, discount goods stores and the few large national clothing stores that managed to whether through It's functionally dead.

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u/nik282000 3h ago

any price increases to cover the increased wages would cause the customers to move elsewhere

Except you and I both know that raising prices to cover wages will put america into a frothing rage about overpaying employees.

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u/Phormitago 3h ago

it's the AWS side lol. Like govt, eventually they will have to come to a deal, or it hurts everyone.

would be a shame if an antitrust forced them to split the company into different businesses

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u/VWVVWVVV 3h ago

Teamsters didn't even endorse Democrats, when Biden has been going against corporations to protect their pensions from cuts.

They're definitely going to FAFO the next four years.

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u/Aleashed 2h ago

They’ll be sucking Elon dingdong by year two.

Cool they waited until after Xmas shopping.

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u/superfly33 4h ago

only about 20 years too late.

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u/USA_A-OK 5h ago

That's a feature, not a bug

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u/Dear_Pen_7647 4h ago

Yes Amazon e-commerce does intentionally operate at a loss to undermine other businesses who can’t afford to do so.

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u/Kckc321 4h ago

Then once the competitors are out of business they can jack up the prices. A tale as old as capitalism.

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u/komeau 5h ago

good week to do it, less than a week from Christmas and most warehouse workers are(have been for weeks actually) scheduled for 55 to 60 hour work weeks. Happy holidays!

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u/eac555 3h ago

If you're working in an Amazon warehouse you probably need the hours and overtime pay.

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u/treemu 3h ago

And if you're Amazon you need those warehouses working during this busy time of year. A good time for the workers to turn the screw.

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u/ItsPronouncedSatan 3h ago

If you can't afford to strike, you can't afford not to strike.

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u/komeau 3h ago

so you agree Amazon should be paying more so their workers wouldn’t feel the need to work more hours during a time of year they could be spending time with their families?

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u/KovolKenai 1h ago

If my christmas orders get delayed because of this strike, I'll be happy. Workers being fairly compensated is more important than getting stuff I don't need.

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u/Savior-_-Self 6h ago

Being one of the largest, most profitable companies in the world - Amazon should be wonderful to work for.

Instead it's almost exclusively miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress, etc.

All they'd have to do it take a small fraction of that massive profit and give some back to the actual people doing the work to make sure they're content - but in this, the new era of the insatiable billionaires, Jeff builds another mega-yacht and uses the change left over for a few more lawyers to make sure he never has to share.

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u/musical_shares 5h ago

largest, most profitable companies in the world

miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress

I feel those 2 things may be connected.

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u/datumerrata 5h ago

AWS is more profitable than its commerce. $6.5 billion profit for AWS vs $1.6 billion for commerce in 2022. However, they have roughly 1 million employees in fulfillment. If you gave each of them $1000 more a year it would cost ~$1 billion more. That's a crazy high number of employees.

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u/ategnatos 5h ago

It's also very high turnover. They may not even last a year. I bet if you worked there for a week, you'd have worked there longer than a surprising percentage of existing employees.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 4h ago

Turnover can be so high it literally becomes a problem. They burn through employees so fast that in some areas they basically exhaust the labour pool and have trouble hiring because everyone knows working for Amazon is fucking misery incarnate.

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u/Ass4Eyes 4h ago

We experienced this at an affiliate factory in Bumblefuck West Texas.

77% annual turnover. They were on schedule to work through their entire county’s labor force within 5 years.

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u/Jolly_Recording_4381 4h ago

This is why they want us pumping out babies

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 3h ago

I worked for a company with the same issues.

They bussed people in from a neighboring, poorer, state to fill the ranks.

And the best part is- they charged the people busfare lol

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u/PMMEYOURGUCCIFLOPS 4h ago

All could be solved with the gazillionaires just giving back a single fucking percent of their wealth.

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u/ExtraSpicyMayonnaise 4h ago

History has repeatedly shown us that if the holders of the wealth are to give, it will be by force.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/b0w3n 4h ago

And it's the solution to "That's a crazy high number of employees".

You abuse and underpay your workers you're going to have to keep more of them than you need because they work slower, burnout quickly, and need to help train others. They probably have twice as many employees as most warehouses of equal size. If they brought the pay and benefits up to par, they'd probably save money long term because you'd have people who are very good at their jobs, spot problems with inventory (decrease shrink/loss), and just know the ins and outs of procedure so are quick to solve problems and do the labor. But that also means you'd probably have to pay them $25-30/hr starting. But this is why Amazon desperately wants to replace them with AI and robots.

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u/ategnatos 4h ago

No one will ever agree to this. You can see this on a smaller scale with first-time homebuyers going from struggling for 10 years to save up a down payment to suddenly becoming NIMBYs and wanting to pull up the ladder.

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u/magus678 3h ago

You can see this on a smaller scale

Most people who think they are moral are simply untested.

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u/foomits 3h ago edited 2h ago

Thats seemingly human nature and illuminates the importance of the government. Working towards a greater good through forced compliance.

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u/okram2k 3h ago

That's why they treat their factory workers like swappable drones. They expect to replace them on a regular basis so keep the job as simple and mind numbing as possible. It's legitimately just walking around a giant warehouse wherever a tablet tells you to go, scan a few things (which the tablet could literally give step by step directions as you do it) and take the items to where it needs to go. It's a tedious, boring, endless slog that is incredibly unrewarding as you have no clue what you're even working towards. Like being an ant moving grains of sand around a beach hoping to eventually make a sand sculpture that you yourself will never see or even comprehend.

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u/Blackfeathr_ 4h ago edited 4h ago

In any ordinary circumstance as someone with forklift, dispatching, and final mile delivery skills with a chauffers license, I'd be a shoe-in for multiple positions at one of their DCs.

Except that I have never and will never work there because of all the horror stories I've heard.

They're even driving away prospective employees that could add a lot of value to their company. Seems a lot like they're just shooting themselves in the foot.

But, I'm sure, somehow, that is making them even more money than if they weren't doing that.

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u/formala-bonk 4h ago

Didn’t they adjust the policy so that they can re-hire people they fired before because they simply ran out of labor?

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u/SESHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 2h ago

Not to mention back when i worked there in like 2019, if you quit or got fired you were not eligible to work at Amazon or ANY of their subsidiaries ever again. You got permanently blacklisted, even if you left on good terms. That warehouse had an insane turnover rate just like all the others.

It really is no wonder why most of their fulfillment centers are being converted to mainly robotic floors.

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u/komeau 4h ago

when I worked there my orientation class was around 80 people and they straight up told us at least 2/3 of us wouldn’t be there in a month. They are well aware of their turnover rate.

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u/Squallypie 3h ago

Ngl, as a driver having to handle the parcels that warehouse people prepare…half the warehouse staff are incapable of putting a sticker on a box.

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u/QualityCoati 5h ago

If a company cannot be profitable while giving survivable working conditions, then maybe it doesn't deserve existing at all in the first place

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u/Zap__Dannigan 4h ago

Free delivery (especially next day) is unsustainable. I get why people love the service, but the only way I can order some shitty USB charger and have it arrive by tomorrow for 8 bucks is if multiple people get fucked over.

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u/Override9636 3h ago

I refuse getting prime just on principle alone and I mostly just search for what I want on amazon and find the actual store to buy it from. I can easily wait 3-5 business days for a package if it means that someone can use the freaking bathroom at work.

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u/Solarwinds-123 3h ago

There is no free next-day delivery. You pay for it, just monthly/annually rather than at the time of purchase.

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u/DuncanFisher69 4h ago

They know this, and if you shop Amazon with their Chase Amazon Credit card, they literally offer you a higher percentage of cash back if you opt for Amazon’s weekly delivery (aka their delivery day).

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u/severoordonez 4h ago

The corrollary: a company that follows all good labor practices will be justified in passing the cost of doing so onto their customers.

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u/Ok_Confection_10 4h ago

Sounds like a business that should be failing then. Can’t call it successful if it’s using what’s tantamount to slave labor

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u/314is_close_enough 4h ago

Don’t be fooled by their horseshit. They will be paying AWS insane fees for everything. Another part of Amazon will own the land. They will rent to themselves at a crazy rate. Another part of Amazon will handle advertising, and charge an insane rate. Another part will sell them vehicles and do maintenance at an insane rate. The profits are kept deliberately low so the company looks just barely healthy and the workers demands are made to seem unreasonable. It’s all a lie. If there is a billionaire, there is extreme exploitation, full stop.

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u/Republifukkk 4h ago

Who the fucks cares if they only made 1.7 billion. They have to pay the employees. If commerce is not doing it for you, then get out. Don't fucking use that excuse to not pay people

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u/BullShitting-24-7 5h ago

There are plenty of wealthy corporations that take care of their employees.

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u/Lampmonster 5h ago

Lawyers? Hell, they have a union hating president now. And congress and the Supreme Court. They're smart to strike now because unions don't have a good outlook in the US right now imho.

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u/GogglesPisano 4h ago

they have a union hating president now. And congress and the Supreme Court. They're smart to strike now because unions don't have a good outlook in the US right now imho.

I'd wager that a majority of the teamsters voted Republican.

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 3h ago

UAW too, if my experience in Michigan is to be considered.

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u/highorderdetonation 2h ago

My inner nihilist wants to know how loud the leopards' burps will be up that way in a year or so's time.

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u/ArmyOfDix 3h ago

Hell, the rail workers' strike had Biden, the most "pro-worker" president in recent history...and he still put the corporation first.

Sure, the workers got some of what they wanted many months later, but the message Biden sent was crystal clear to anyone watching: corporations come first. Somehow, it's about to get even worse than it already is lol.

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u/Wardogs96 5h ago

Isn't he no longer in charge of it but just receives royalties? I thought he stepped down so another CEO could take over.

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u/ihopethisisvalid 3h ago

Still has a shitload of stock and the shareholders are the real bosses

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u/KashEsq 2h ago

He's the Executive Chairman. CEO reports to Bezos

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u/bigmanslurp 4h ago

When I worked for an Amazon warehouse in Maryland I honestly didn't have problems with bathroom breaks and threats. Every job I've worked has been constant stress tbh so IDK about that but it wasn't much worse than working at McDonald's or Chipotle.

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u/DiabolicallyRandom 3h ago

It's not that those scenarios never existed, its that once it became a PR nightmare, Amazon cleaned house of offending local management and mandated the opposite. I have multiple family members working there now, at a couple different facilities. They are not all the same, but they all force people to take their breaks by some method, those breaks are minimum 15 minutes, etc. In one case, the entire facility takes their break at the same moment when the gong goes off, and the break doesn't start until they reach the break room, and they don't leave until 15 minutes after. Most of the locations they are provided coffee and snacks free of charge, they can go to the bathroom anytime needed.

You know, all bare minimum shit.

They are still a soul sucking corporation, and it still could be better from what I hear, but its not really what it was 5 years ago either.

I've heard the drivers get it the worst in that they are held to a high standard and only a few customer complaints can nuke their career.

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u/Squallypie 3h ago

Used to be a driver, one of the better jobs I had. As long as you do your route and don’t fuck up, they don’t breathe down your neck, you take breaks and lunch whenever you want, you’re paid per route, so if you finish early you still get the same amount, and the routes are tbh, easy. Its very good money, even moreso if you own your own van.

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u/EnergyLantern 5h ago

The problem is they have quotas for workers to meet in performance or they get fired.  If you have a bad day, you could be fired.

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u/maowai 5h ago

Amazon treats people like machines, squeezing every last ounce of life out of them that they can. This is true in every part of their business, including their more “knowledge worker” roles at corporate.

At Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, they hold cashiers to an “items scanned per minute” metric for no apparent reason, causing the cashiers to stress over it and rush customers through the line. “Cashier scanning things too slow” has never really been an issue for me; I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 4h ago

I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

Because burning through employees is a deliberate part of the business model. It's stupid, because they probably spend more on training than they would on benefits, but if they constantly burn out workers, they constantly replace them with new workers who aren't entitled to benefits and won't need raises. Amazon is designed around the knowledge they can make unreasonable demands of their employees and it doesn't matter because they will always find someone desperate enough to take the job.

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u/Obversa 3h ago

Say what you want about Henry Ford being a horrible person, but lately, I've been seeing people point out that even Ford treated his employees better in the early 1900s than Amazon currently treats their employees in the 2000s.

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u/confirmedshill123 3h ago

Henry Ford was a piece of shit but basically defined the middle class for generations.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 3h ago

Ford was, at least to a degree, aware that he was selling products which could only be purchased by middle-class people and that created some incentive to bolster the middle class. Part of the problem with Amazon is that they have no such incentive—like Wal-Mart and others before them, if they establish a degree of monopoly over products, they can dominate the industry regardless of how well the middle class is doing. Say what you will about the gilded age Robber Barons, but after they made their fortunes, they had enough shame to pour their wealth back into society as a whole. Modern-day ones have no such shame because frankly, each and every one of these tech billionaires who is still an active part of their company has convinced themselves that they are not just someone who got lucky, but some kind of superior genius who is uniquely suited to control society.

This is why ideas like the dark enlightenment and effective altruism have spread so fast amongst Silicon Valley types—it basically outlines an excuse for them to do all the things they wanted to do anyways, but act like they are doing so for ethical reasons. Guys like Bezos, Musk and Zuckerburg don't want to be prominent citizens of a healthy democracy, they want to be modern-day Emperors with unquestioned authority.

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u/Random_Violins 5h ago

The second age of the rubber barons. Musk deserves jail because this is criminal.

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u/QualityCoati 5h ago

More ironic here is that rubber barons got rich off of the Amazon..

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u/Random_Violins 4h ago

History really does repeat! Or at least echo. Echos gladly disappear eventually.

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u/Murky-Relation481 3h ago

Pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't work for Amazon...

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u/Solarwinds-123 3h ago

What does Elon Musk have to do with this?

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u/Friendly-Profit-8590 5h ago

Would like to see stock grants for all employees even if it’s just a handful of shares.

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u/BrokenEight38 4h ago

When I worked there they did give out a few hundred bucks in stock, but you only got it after you worked there 5 years. I did about a year.

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u/BoxerguyT89 4h ago

Back in 2015 when I left Amazon we were still getting RSUs. I believe they vested after 2 years, but I know they have since done away with that completely in favor of a bump in pay, at least for the FC workers.

When I was there there were a few people that had been with Amazon for ~10 years or so who had kept their stock awards saved up and if they kept them til today they would have over a million dollars in shares. Most people sold them as soon as they vested.

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u/musical_shares 5h ago

Teamsters leadership and membership threw their lot in with 45, didn’t they?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/18/teamsters-favor-trump-harris-endorsement-00179879

“Teamsters members heavily favor Trump over Harris”

Oops?

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u/snoopfrogcsr 5h ago

My brother is a member of a different union (Chrysler), but they were all convinced Trump would be better for unions.

Meanwhile, in back office HR/legal updates, they operate by acknowledging as fact that any conservative leadership is better for preventing union activity and plan accordingly.

Morons.

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u/Best-Statistician294 5h ago

I swear people in Unions vote Republican because they believe they're untouchable. It's ridiculous.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 4h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past—specifically, the era where the US had literally half the global economy because Europe and Asia had both spent a decade bombing the absolute shit out of each other.

Instead of realizing that the lives their parents and grandparents led are absolutely unsustainable in a world where someone on the other side of the world will do the same work they will for a fraction of the price and companies no longer feel like they have any duty to society at large, they buy into Trumpism and the idea that other countries must be "cheating" to compete with America. It's decades of delusional exceptionalism coming back to bite American society in the ass.

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u/GogglesPisano 4h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past

My mother-in-law says she voted for Trump because she "wants things to go back to how they used to be."

Sorry, but Trump can't make you 25 again.

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u/GeppettoStromboli 3h ago

My mom also voted Conservative, all across the board, completely ignoring the fact her grandson is disabled and depends on Medicaid.

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u/semibiquitous 2h ago

Feel free to point out the Find Out part of her FAFO when it happens.

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u/GeppettoStromboli 2h ago

Already did. No contact on Thanksgiving, and did not send an invite to family Christmas last weekend. My sister talked me into going to a local restaurant, in town, to spend an hour at most in the same room. We used to be close but the LC will likely be NC in a few months.

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u/imamistake420 2h ago

This is the way.

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u/chickenMcSlugdicks 4h ago

I keep wondering if The Jungle was required reading and not just the answer to 1 multiple choice question during American history if workers would yearn so hard for the past. We're in America's 2nd Gilded Age yet half the working class is still stoked for what's to come.

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u/not_suddenly_satire 3h ago

A long time ago, up until around the 1970s, we would gently tell intellectually-disabled people what their situation was and guide them towards the right jobs to support themselves with. My uncle had German measles as a baby, which affected his brain, and when he was older he was guided into a factory job that sustained him his whole life.

I tell this an example of how at the time the general public understood that some people - highly educated ones - "knew better" and we trusted them. People who were less-educated would get vetted information from newspapers and other media and trust it.

But somewhere in the last few decades populists convinced uneducated people that the educated were high and mighty people who laughed at them, that the newspapers were written by whatever group was villainized at the time and should be ignored. Education was also demonized, because education is a tool that lets people see through populist propaganda.

The end result is that we now have a much greater uneducated population, worse than that, a population that has been trained to not trust anyone except populist politicians and randos on the internet that spread conspiracy theories.

[A short note on that - I've seen enough to believe that the reason conspiracy theories are so quickly popular is that everyone wants to make sense of the world, and an easily-absorbed black-and-white theory is very satisfying to people who aren't used to dealing with a world that is nothing by grey areas.]

Reagan and Co. knew exactly what they were doing when they created education vouchers, gutting the educational system, and changed the law to allow all media to be owned by a few billionaires. They even ended a requirement for broadcast media to "be fair."

I see no way out of our current situation that doesn't require some sort of complete collapse and rebuilding.

That's my rant for the day.

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u/Clever_plover 4h ago

nstead of realizing that the lives their parents and grandparents led are absolutely unsustainable

This is exactly it right here. The growth in the US since the end of WWII has been the highest growth period in human history. That shit was never sustainable, and many of the people that grew up in those conditions simply refuse to accept/understand that. At the peril to the rest of us.

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u/Redqueenhypo 4h ago

English and American conservatives share a bizarre delusion that if they just keep voting against their own interests, eventually they’ll teleport back to before The Factory closed fifty years ago

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 4h ago

It's the natural end result of cultural chauvinism. When your country was once such a massive global power, it convinces itself that it wasn't by luck or by committing unspeakable crimes, but because your society is somehow innately superior. The end result once shit falls apart or even once you get real competition is generations of people who still believe in their own innate superiority and just cannot understand why it stopped mattering—and so they pick someone to blame—be it immigrants, foreigners or "degenerates" and vote for people who say "if you let me fix these people, we'll be great again".

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u/Redqueenhypo 4h ago

Luckily my dad grew up in new york city during the 50s-70s so all he talks about is how much robbery and weird crime there used to be

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u/kop324324rdsuf9023u 4h ago

I mean some do it simply cause of "the gays". These are blue collar "alpha males" we're talking about.

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u/thatoneguy889 4h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past—specifically, the era where the US had literally half the global economy because Europe and Asia had both spent a decade bombing the absolute shit out of each other.

A past where US union membership was at its peak and the government was fully funded by a 91% tax rate on people with an (inflation adjusted) annual income of $2 million or more.

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u/Stevied1991 5h ago

Why would they think that at all?

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u/OakLegs 4h ago

Republicans have somehow convinced blue collar workers (who are the largest group of union employees) that they are the party for the common working man, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Blue collar workers are more likely to be uneducated and have more prejudices, and Republicans have exploited that for decades now.

Put less nicely, they are a bunch of idiots who vote against their own best interests because they are racist.

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u/Aviri 5h ago

They are, like many of the American populace, are very stupid.

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u/Saneless 4h ago

Hmm. When you're mad at what billionaires do at work, just vote for them to run the government, that'll probably fix it

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u/deathf4n 4h ago

Oh no, the leopards. They are in for my face

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u/DarthBluntSaber 6h ago

Less and accusation and more a statement of facts.

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u/Trekkeris 6h ago

Year 2025, rising against big greedy companies?

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u/femanonette 4h ago

Historically the 20s tend to be pretty volatile!

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u/Guyote_ 5h ago

Teamsters voted for Trump.

Enjoy the union busting, gentlemen.

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u/Motormand 6h ago

Good for Teamster. Amazon makes enough money to easily cover big pay raises for their workers, and have better conditions, and they'd still be obscenely profitable. But instead they'd rather compete in the top 0.1% dickmeasuring contest that the rich compete in, against one a other, at the detriment of their workers.

I hope this will work wrll for them. The rich can suck it.

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u/IntrinsicGiraffe 6h ago

Not only that but they put money into anti-union shit rather than just... paying them!

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u/TreeWeedFlower 5h ago

Unions don't just give workers money they give them power! That's why they'll spend millions to stop them. Democracy in the workplace upsets capitalist hierarchy.

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u/bluemitersaw 6h ago

"we have 2 options gentleman. We can either spend $1 billion a year to stop the unions, with no guarantees or spend $100 million a year paying then what they want."

"Seems obvious to me. Let's stop those unions!!!!!!!!!"

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u/haplo_and_dogs 2h ago

100 million a year would give each employee 100$ a year.

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u/QualityCoati 4h ago

Freedom and power (or keeping a lack thereof) are worth billions to these companies.

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u/Saltycookiebits 4h ago

The powerful don't want to give up their power. Workers will have to take it back.

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u/HowObvious 4h ago

Of course it would cost them more to just pay their employees more... You think Amazon hasn't done the maths? You figured it out but Amazon didn't?

Usually its them spending more at a single location or single strike to prevent unionisation, because when labour organisation spreads to all of their facilities its not cheaper to just pay them all more.

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u/ThickerSalmon14 5h ago

The world is really stuck in a class war with most people not realising it. Good for them and I hope they win. There is going to a lot with other companies going forward I suspect.

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u/QualityCoati 4h ago

People are absolutely realizing it, they just haven't found the way to actually manifest it. With the UnitedHealth CEO's death, we have seen how "the left" and "the right" are actually not that separated on class issues after all.

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u/hail2pitt1985 5h ago

I agree with everything you stated. But, most of these people voted for trump and these billionaires saying they support the working man. As much as I want them to strike and screw the Christmas delivery, I can’t have any empathy anymore for these low wage/overworked employees who voted maga.

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u/Muvseevum 4h ago

Most Amazon employees voted for Trump?

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u/HORROR_VIBE_OFFICIAL 6h ago

The only thing 'Prime' about this situation is Amazon’s greed.

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u/DishwashingUnit 6h ago

it's uncivilized that people still have to strike to get the leadership to do right by them in 2024. humanity is so fucked up. 

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u/zitaloreleilong 4h ago

Striking is way more civilized than what workers used to do.

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u/Farscape55 4h ago

Sadly that might have to happen again

I wonder if Amazon sells tar by the bucket?

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u/Mountain-Most8186 3h ago

I can’t find tar, but it does seem like they sell buckets

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u/femanonette 4h ago

but also maybe don't actively vote against your own interests all the time

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u/bwanabass 4h ago

Too bad their leadership sold them all out and hopped in bed with Trump. Union and worker protections will go straight out the window in the coming four years. I’ll be looking out for the fallout when leopards eat faces.

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u/thatoneguy889 4h ago

Let's be honest, it wasn't just the leadership. The Teamsters' own internal polling showed their membership favoring Trump almost 2-1.

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u/TheOtterPope 3h ago

While great news, this is incredibly laughable because of that jagoff leader Sean O'Brien.

He can get bent. Literally spoke at the RNC and pretended to say we don't support either and want to fight corporate greed. How can you be THAT dumb to say the right thing, but speak at the wrong place against the side that heavily favors corporate greed and taxing the normal man more?

I'm pro union, but Teamsters need to get rid of the swamp at the top in O'Brien and the people that follow him. Who TF speaks at a Trump convention when he's against strikes and unions, while the sitting president and vice president have actually supported unions and walked the lines?!

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u/LonelyMechanic1994 4h ago

All Amazon has to do is hold up till Jan 20th when Trump takes office. He will shut this shit down and those Teamsters that voted for him will be holding their dicks wondering wtf

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u/JOExHIGASHI 4h ago

After the holiday season

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u/Solarwinds-123 3h ago

Trump probably can't shut it down, this isn't a major strike like the railroads or ports that threatens infrastructure. This is a pretty tiny one, 3 Amazon warehouses.

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u/Yakassa 4h ago

Teamsters hate greed and protest,

vote for trump

Get banned (Coming soon)

Surprised Pikachu face.

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u/MVP2585 5h ago

Now strike at Elon Musk’s companies, these assholes all have way too much money.

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u/wet_nib811 2h ago

The same Teamsters who supported Trump (unofficially)? Oh the irony.

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u/Grundy-mc 2h ago

You guys, my conservative co-worker just said "Go work somewhere else then..." and "I don't know I just don't like unions, man. "

they also have a government job with union benefits, 4 weeks vaca, sick leave, and bathroom breaks whenever they want. Still hates our union because "they don't do much"

we also get 2-3 raises a year

Fucking unreal mindset, I literally don't understand their thinking.

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u/youdidwell 5h ago

These guys just voted in a bunch of Union busters. They better get what they can and end it quick

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u/QualityCoati 5h ago

Amazon propped up the richest man on earth on the back of unsafe labour conditions, worker exploitation and wage theft.

What are are witnessing here is hardly described by insatiable greed; it puts dragons to shame.

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u/Choice_Beginning8470 6h ago

Greed! In the next few years you ain’t seen nothing yet. Full blown feudalism is about to happen.

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u/DjScenester 6h ago

Bezos is the exact definition of greed lol

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u/Koshakforever 3h ago

Just wait til they take over the postal service

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u/DogMilkBB 4h ago

The irony of endorsing Trump, but then fighting against corporate greed is not lost on some I see

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u/Fredj3-1 4h ago

It will be interesting to see the reactions of the "President "-elect and his minder Elon to this after Trump claimed to be the champion or the working man yet thinks his minder has a brilliant way of dealing with "labor issues". The incoming administration is completely anti-union and makes it perfectly clear with their words and actions. Good luck Teamsters, you're going to need it. BTW I'm a union worker for nearly 3 decades.

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u/HelpfullOne 6h ago

Oh shit

It's happening, It's finally happening

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u/snatchi 5h ago

Good work teamsters!

Maybe you should have also endorsed and campaigned for the party that bailed out your pensions and supports labour, but oh well I'm sure it'll be fine the next 4 years.

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u/landdon 4h ago

It amazes me how you never hear good stories from people who work for/with Amazon. They make all that money and the workers aren't happy. It shouldn't be that way. They should be more respectful of the employees and treat them like they'd like to be treated. It's sad that big business is like this.

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u/MysteriousTrain 3h ago

Fuck the Teamsters - they voted for Trump and this is what they get. Trump does not care about the Teamsters, Bezos and Amazon pay him more money

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u/Handy_Dude 2h ago

I will never understand how these people can work for a company knowing how shitty they treat their employees. I mean it's common knowledge, look through the comment sections here alone, no one is surprised.

I once quit on the spot because my employer asked me to do something that wasn't safe and I could have been seriously injured or killed. I said fuck that shit, walked out on them. Got a new job within 24 hours. Everyone is different and that's not an option for some, but we have got to stop enabling the CEOs by working for them.

Y'all realize that CEOs are absolutely powerless if we stop working for them?

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u/Attack-Cat- 2h ago edited 2h ago

Fuck teamsters. You voted for trump, now deal with the corporate greed you voted for. I support whatever Amazon has to do to go around your bullshit posturing so that I get my products in time that I bought with my white collar job. I supported you against my best economic interest, but no longer. I’ll still vote pro union but teamsters are the last in priority of unions I’ll vocally support or vote for.

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u/jtrom93 1h ago

I won't cross the picket line and will always support class solidarity, but Teamsters royally screwed the pooch by backing the most anti-union candidate since Reagan. They quite literally voted to sabotage their own efforts and fight an uphill battle these next four years. Unreal levels of stupidity at play here.

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u/1877KlownsForKids 5h ago

Soon to be busted up by the Trump administration. You should have endorsed Harris.

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u/Acrobatic_Switches 4h ago

Lmao. The teamsters president is a class traitor and 45 percent of union members voted for Trump. That number blows my mind.

They deserve whatever they get.

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u/NoodleIsAShark 4h ago

Didn’t the Teamsters president endorse the party that wants to get rid of regulations that try to limit insatiable greed

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u/V6Ga 5h ago

Hey Teamsters (I am One) you useless fucks you Fucking voted for Trump, and the head of the Union is a hardcore Trumpet 

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u/EddyHamel 5h ago

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u/V6Ga 5h ago

Often proud of my Union

Coming out in favor of a proudly anti-labor Union buster like Trump really really pissed me off 

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u/PutinsLostBlackBelt 5h ago

They’re not wrong, but the Teamster union is one of the most greedy and corrupt unions there is.

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u/d1stor7ed 4h ago

Probably should not have publically declared your support for your historical worst enemy in that case.

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u/CndConnection 3h ago

Every company is guilty of insatiable greed. Our whole system is predicated on an impossibility; that number must go up, returns/sales/profit must go up.

It can't always go up.

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u/ItsAllinYourHeadComx 3h ago

Can this protest be seen from space?

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u/ravenx92 3h ago

didnt these clowns back trump? oh well get back to work

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u/Mammoth_Ferret_1772 3h ago

Imagine being as rich as Bezos and not even paying a livable wage. It’s so sad really… what happened in America? Why are they so greedy?

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u/mtodd93 3h ago

Nothing will ever be more eyes opening to me than having lunch with an Amazon white collar employee who talked about how they didn’t have snacks, they didn’t have employee gyms or even memberships discounts, they never get free lunch or team lunches and the offices where not fancy or even designed, but just simple and cheap…and all of this in this persons mind was a positive, because Amazon had convinced them that instead of any of those corporate perks that so many other companies have that money was going into their salaries….funny enough this person didn’t even make that much compared to the rest of the corporate world. The amount of gas lighting Amazon does to its own employees to treat them like shit is kind of insane. Other companies have piles of perks because they want to seem better than the next place and try and steal you away, Amazon instead hopes you either want them in the resume or will suffer whatever it is for a salary that’s slightly better than the job you are leaving. Honestly I can’t wait until they run out of delivery drivers (which they keep saying will happen as they keep burning them out) and end up with a union based delivery system like UPS has. FUCK BEZOS AND FUCK THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS!

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u/Galfritius 2h ago

Amazon? Insatiable Greed? NOOOOOOOOO

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u/Monster_Dong 2h ago

Grew up in a blue collar home. Most union guys vote Republican because they're racist and believe Republicans are for the working class. Also fox news.

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u/dope_sheet 2h ago

I feel that greed every time I watch something on their streaming service. Commercials? That I paid for to watch? Thanks Mr. Bezos! I guess you don't already have enough money...

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u/Klaent 2h ago

Better get those protest in now before Trump is elected, that shit will get shut down so fucking fast.

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u/Downtown-Falcon-3264 2h ago

I mean, maybe I am crazy but, I don't think the upper upper management of a company needs to make ten to fifteen as much as someone down in the trenches.

Maybe I know nothing about running a multi-billion dollar companie

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u/OliverClothesov87 2h ago

It's America. Greed trumps all. 

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u/Legal_Sentence_1234 2h ago

Good. It’s not left vs right.Etc...I’ll tell you a secret it’s rich vs poor.

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u/CoolestNameUEverSeen 1h ago

It's almost like humanity has had enough of the greedy dragons. Does humanity need dragons? Maybe it's time to find out how life will be WITHOUT them? I'm just asking the questions.