#amazon labor union

[phobic-human]

Chris Smalls, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, in front of a giant portrait of Vladimir Lenin, at the 50th Festival of the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) 2024.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss

Today (Oct 20), I'm in Charleston, WV at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

For a brief time this year, the bestselling "bitter lemon drink" on Amazon was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by Catfish UK prankster Oobah Butler in a stunt for a new Channel 4 doc, "The Great Amazon Heist":

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-amazon-heist

Collecting driver piss is surprisingly easy. Amazon, you see, puts its drivers on a quota that makes it impossible for them to drive safely, park conscientiously, or, indeed, fulfill their basic human biological needs. Amazon has long waged war on its employees' kidneys, marking down warehouse workers for "time off task" when they visit the toilets.

As tales of drivers pissing – and shitting! – in their vans multiplied, Amazon took decisive action. The company enacted a strict zero tolerance policy for drivers returning to the depot with bottles of piss in their vans.

That's where Butler comes in: the roads leading to Amazon delivery depots are lined with bottles of piss thrown out of delivery vans by drivers who don't want to lose their jobs, which made harvesting the raw material for "Release Energy" a straightforward matter.

Butler was worried that he wouldn't be able to list his product on Amazon because he didn't have the requisite "food and drinks licensing" certificates, so he listed his drink in Amazon's refillable pump dispenser category. But Amazon's systems detected the mismatch and automatically shifted the product into the drinks section.

Butler enlisted some confederates to place orders for his drink, and it quickly rocketed to the top of Amazon's listings for the category, which led to Amazon's recommendation engine pushing the item on people who weren't in on the gag. When these orders came in, Butler pulled the plug, but not before an Amazon rep telephoned him to pitch him turning packaging, shipping and fulfillment over to Amazon:

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-let-its-drivers-urine-be-sold-as-an-energy-drink/

The Release Energy prank was just one stunt Butler pulled for his doc; he also went undercover at an Amazon warehouse, during a period when Amazon hired an extra 1,000 workers for its warehouses in Coventry, UK, in a successful bid to dilute pro-union sentiment in his workforce in advance of a key union vote:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/the-great-amazon-heist-oobah-butler-review

Butler's stint as an Amazon warehouse worker only lasted a couple of days, ending when Amazon recognized him and fired him.

The contrast between Amazon's ability to detect an undercover reporter and its inability to spot bottles of piss being marketed as bitter lemon energy drink says it all, really. Corporations like Amazon hire vast armies of "threat intelligence" creeps who LARP at being CIA superspies, subjecting employees and activists to intense and often illegal surveillance.

But while Amazon's defensive might is laser-focused on the threat of labor organizers and documentarians, the company can't figure out that one of its bestselling products is bottles of its tormented drivers' own urine.

In the USA, the FTC is suing Amazon for its monopolistic tactics, arguing that the company has found ways to raise prices and reduce quality by trapping manufacturers and sellers with its logistics operation, taking $0.45-$0.51 out of every dollar they earn and forcing them to raise prices at all retailers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The Release Energy stunt shows where Amazon's priorities are. Not only did Release Energy get listed on Amazon without any quality checks, the company actually nudged it into a category where it was more likely to be consumed by a person. The only notice the company took of Release Energy was in its logistics and manufacturing department – the part of the business that extracts the monopoly rents at issue in the FTC case – which tracked Butler down in order to sell him these services.

The drivers whose piss Butler collected don't work directly for Amazon, they work for a Delivery Service Partner. These DSPs are victims of a pyramid scheme that Amazon set up. DSP operators lease vans and pay to have them skinned in Amazon livery and studded with Amazon sensors. They take out long-term leases on depots, and hire drivers who dress in Amazon uniforms. Their drivers are minutely monitored by Amazon, down to the movements of their eyeballs.

But none of this is "Amazon" – it's all run by an "entrepreneur," whom Amazon can cut loose without notice, leaving them with unfairly terminated employees, outstanding workers' comp claims, a fleet of Amazon-skinned vehicles and unbreakable facilities leases:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Speaking to Wired, Amazon denied that it forces its drivers to piss in bottles, but Butler clearly catches a DSP dispatcher telling drivers "If you pee in a bottle and leave it [in the vehicle], you will get a point for that" – that is, the part you get punished for isn't the peeing, it's the leaving.

Amazon's defense against the FTC is that it spares no effort to keep its marketplace safe. As Amazon spokesperson James Drummond says, they use "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed." But the only industry-leading tools in evidence are tools to bust unions and screw suppliers.

In her landmark Yale Law Review paper, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," FTC Chair Lina Khan makes a brilliant argument that Amazon's alleged benefits to "consumers" are temporary at best, illusory at worst:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

In Butler's documentary, Khan's hypothesis is thoroughly validated: here's a company extracting hundreds of billions from merchants who raise prices to compensate, and those monopoly rents are "invested" in union-busting and countermeasures against investigative journalists, while the tools to keep you from accidentally getting a bottle of piss in the mail are laughably primitive.

Truly, Amazon is the apex predator of the platform era:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[onlytiktoks]

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[redditreceipts]

amazon telling their workers to not join a union because they are concerned about *checks notes* privacy

[goblincow]

The first ever AMAZON STRIKE in the UK is one week away - and they need your support!

Respectfully asking if I can get a bunch of notes on this so I can show my phone when I go to the rally and let them see how much support they have! ✊

And here are the Amazon strike fund details to donate if you're able:

Name - GMB Midland & East Coast

Bank - Unity Trust

Sort Code - 60-83-01

A/c No - 33010410

Ref - Amazon

I'm pretty sure I know how this works:

Like to charge, reblog to cast!

Update:

Thanks everyone who has responded to show your support, here's a link to an interview with one of the GMB union officials earlier this morning after Amazon workers walked out at 00:00.

I will update again later today when I visit the picket, but as this is doing numbers here's a link to the official donation page: stick it to Amazon and show your support for the workers! Solidarity ✊

GMB are Standing with Amazon Workers.

Amazon workers in a Coventry warehouse have announced an initial strike date. The GMB Union are asking that you support our Colleagues.

Update 2:

Some great fighting talk from union speakers willing to take on Amazon.

Strikers told me that amazon managers and bosses have been intimidating staff & taking advantage of the fact that many workers are on zero hour contracts & many are immigrants and they speak a lot of different languages, so they've been lining the hallways to watch them as they leave shifts and lying about the union by saying the union is threatening people and beating them up, all to pressure them to stay silent and be too afraid to communicate so they don't go on strike with their colleagues. But they wont win - the strike was national news, from Philip Schofield talking about Jeff Bezos only offering a 50p raise from his billions on This Morning to major news coverage throughout the day. At one point we were live on Channel 4!

I told workers and union officials that over a thousand people from tumblr who are mostly queer/trans/nonbinary/otherwise lgbtq+ wanted them to know that they support the Amazon strikers.

One striker seemed surprised by this and I got to talk to him about how lgbtq+ people are working class too, how lgbtq+ rights are working class rights, how none of us are free from exploitation until we all are, so no wonder the gay website supports you, and he seemed to really take that on board.

All the workers were grateful for everyone who showed up and thank you all for your support - this is just the start.

Fuck Jeff Bezos

[the-girl-so-communist]

full interview with Chris Smalls Amazon Labor Union

[reasonandempathy]

First Amazon Labor Union is Official

Amazon Labor Union Website