Teamsters Organizing Amazon Delivery Drivers
By 
There’s too much to say about Sean O’Brien’s refusal to endorse Harris and much has already been said, so let me just add one thing–he was the anti-corruption candidate in the Teamsters election and he is acting that way. Say of that what you will.
Several hundred Amazon drivers organizing with the Teamsters have reached the threshold for a union vote at Amazon’s DBK4 warehouse in Queens, New York.
A majority of drivers at three of the site’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) contractors have now signed union authorization cards as of this morning. Amazon will now be forced to either recognize the union or contest the card count and officially hold an election.
The organizing drive in Queens directly follows a recent ruling from the National Labor Relations Board in August deeming Amazon a joint employer of its DSP contractors, with full legal responsibilities for the labor force.
“The NLRB made clear that Amazon has a legal obligation to bargain with its drivers and meet them at the negotiating table to improve wages, working conditions, safety standards, and everything in between,” said Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “Hundreds of Amazon delivery drivers from Queens will now have the full backing of more than 1.3 million Teamsters nationwide.”
he decision by an NLRB regional judge in Los Angeles could deal a significant blow to Amazon’s third-party business model of outsourcing last-mile delivery. The company has long relied on a system of enforcing restrictive contracts with DSPs to officially manage low-paid drivers while evading any culpability for union busting or workplace violations that take place on the job.
The announcement is also a major boost to the Teamsters’ efforts to organize Amazon workers. Teamsters are aggressively moving forward to unionize Amazon’s thousands of DSPs across the country as though these contractors are official arms of the company. At the same time, the union is also actively organizing the Amazon-run warehouses, building off the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in Staten Island in 2022 before affiliating with the Teamsters this summer. That warehouse has yet to complete a first contract.
The joint employer ruling involved an Amazon facility in Palmdale, California. Last year, after the Teamsters organized Battle-Tested Strategies, a DSP contractor, Amazon simply terminated its relationship with the company. The Teamsters filed an unfair labor practice, and a regional director at the NLRB issued a preliminary ruling in their favor in August. If the two parties don’t settle, which is unlikely, then the case will be brought before an NLRB judge.
And yes, feel free to point out that the great irony of all this is that the joint-employer rule would be about the first thing overturned by the Trump NLRB O’Brien personally seems to want.