“It’s considered to be one of the largest companies in the world, and their employees are getting treated like crap—so, we have to speak out, we have to reach forward,” said George Davis, a Missouri-based Amazon warehouse worker, in an interview.
He’s one of many who have decried the unfair treatment Amazon workers said they’ve faced which includes long hours, low pay and marginal benefits.
Now, it looks like the retail giant has been listening.
According to multiple reports, Amazon will be allocating nearly $1 billion to raise the wages of its warehouse and transportation employees from about $18 to $19/hour. The retailer will also launch Anytime Pay, a platform that will enable employees to get 70% of their paychecks paid to them sooner than their biweekly pay period. Additional, the Amazon Intelligence Initiative was launched, a program that offers a 12- to 14-month course to support employees in learning technical skills to pipeline them into AWS-related engineering roles if they desire.
It should be noted these changes are being implemented after the establishment of a workers’ union earlier this year, led by leader Chris Smalls.
Smalls was fired from his Amazon warehouse position in 2020 after organizing an employee walkout in response to unfair treatment, and on April 1, 2022 Amazon workers made history by voting to unionize.
“After I was terminated, they had a meeting about me,” Smalls said in an ABC News interview. In fact, leaked meeting notes shed light on Amazon’s efforts to undermine their workers efforts to unionize. “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent that the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel.
“Amazon spends millions of dollars on union busting; they put these workers into captive audiences 24/7,” Smalls told ABC News. “Workers go to these trainings where there’s drilled anti-union propaganda all day and all night.”