84 Amazon Delivery Drivers Just Won a $30 an Hour Union Contract

CNBC reports that 84 Amazon delivery drivers at a California facility "joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union said Monday, in a win for labor organizers that have long sought to gain a foothold at the e-retailer." An anonymous reader shared this follow-up report from Vox:[T]hey unanimously ratified the contract, which will bring their wages from around $20 currently to $30 by September and would allow them to refuse to do deliveries they consider unsafe. But that victory is a bit complicated... They wear Amazon vests and drive Amazon-branded vehicles, have schedules dictated by Amazon, and can even be fired by Amazon. But they're technically employed by Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), one of approximately 3,000 delivery contract companies that make up Amazon's extensive delivery network. BTS voluntarily recognized the union after a majority of workers signed union authorization cards and negotiated the union contract. Amazon has told Vox that its contract with BTS, which exclusively delivers for Amazon, was terminated "well before" workers notified the tech giant Monday, but that the contract hasn't expired yet. The union said that the delivery people are still working for Amazon and that the contract goes through October, when it typically would auto-renew. What happens next depends on Amazon, the workers, and the interpretation of outdated US labor law... At the crux of the delivery driver issue is whether Amazon controls enough of what the workers do to be considered a joint employer. "If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers' decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I'm afraid we'll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law," said Benjamin Sachs, a labor professor at Harvard Law School. "If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important." One element of note: These workers organized in California, which has a lower bar for who is considered an employee, and by extension, who enjoys union protections... Another element that the National Labor Relations Board will likely have to decide is whether Amazon terminated the contract with BTS in order to avoid working with a union, something that would be illegal if they were considered employees. The article also notes that elsewhere, 50 YouTube contractors also voted to unionize this week.

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