'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize
Shortly after Amazon opened its first New York-based fulfillment in December, workers at the Staten Island location are urging unionization, saying that the retail giant has been unresponsive to poor working conditions. Workers have teamed up with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to protest long hours, overtime, unpaid hours, shortened breaks, and pressured conditions to produce hourly quotas - such as picking 400 items an hour, roughly one item every seven seconds - that, if not met, would justify job termination. The push to unionize follows protests during the summer at a Minnesota fulfillment center that forced management to the bargaining table; rallies there have continued as recently as December. Amazon continues to maintain that it has an open-door policy to problems brought by employees and that the complaints at the Staten Island site do not represent the majority of workers.
See "'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize", Michael Sainato, The Guardian, January 4, 2019