Consider there to be a digital picket line around Amazon’s upcoming Prime Day. Workers in a Shakopee, Minnesota, warehouse are staging a walkout for six hours of Prime Day to protest harsh working conditions.
Amazon’s answer to the workers’ protest is that it raised wages to a $15 minimum. Which is good. But it’s not what they’re talking about here. The workers are talking about the strict quotas they have to meet to keep their jobs, quotas that lead to physically punishing work. They’re talking about warehouse temperatures and broken sprinkler systems. And they want to push Amazon to turn more temp jobs into permanent jobs.
This will be the first U.S. work stoppage for Amazon, though the company’s European warehouse workers have held strikes. Minnesota Amazon warehouses, though, have been the site of successful organizing by Muslim workers seeking accommodations during Ramadan, when they’re fasting. Pilots who fly for Amazon—and have their own issues with the company—are sending a representative to the strike and said in a statement that “We hope that Amazon takes seriously these striking workers’ calls for change.”
● Tens of thousands of airline catering workers have voted to strike if federal mediation fails. Check out Airport Strike Alert to know what’s going on with the campaign and find out if strikes are coming in your area.
● Your boss might be ripping you off: How to protect yourself from wage theft.
● California’s AB5, which would crack down on misclassification of workers, passed a Senate committee vote.
● Teachers and their union are suing the Department of Education over failures in a student loan forgiveness program:
"The Department of Education just cannot seem to get this right," says Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former top attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "They keep making mistakes and are not appropriately administering this program that Congress has created."
By the department's last count, only 1% of the people who think they've made their 10 years of payments and apply for loan forgiveness are getting approved.
● The media uses coal miners to attack the Green New Deal—then ignores their pension fight.
● Two women are vying to be the next president of the AFL-CIO—and the first woman in that role. Steven Greenhouse reports, and Erik Loomis has thoughts. Attendees of Netroots Nation may well have seen Sara Nelson, who has been everywhere.
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