Exclusive: Inside Amazon’s plan to “neutralize” powerful unions by hiring ex-inmates and “vulnerable students” – By Jason Del Rey (VOX) / July 29, 2022
Leaked memo reveals the tech giant’s plans to combat the Teamsters in California.
In June 2021, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the most powerful unions in the world, published a “special resolution” about Amazon, labeling the tech giant “an existential threat” and vowing that “building worker power at Amazon and helping those workers achieve a union contract is a top priority.”
But inside Amazon, company officials were already preparing for battle, according to a leaked internal memo viewed by Recode and reported on here for the first time. The document, from May 2021, offers rare insights into the anti-union strategies of one of the world’s most powerful companies. The memo laid out two crucial goals for Amazon: establish and deepen “relationships with key policymakers and community stakeholders” and improve “Amazon’s overall brand.” The company has faced heightened scrutiny and worker activism in recent years amid reports of harsh working conditions and higher-than-average injury rates, resulting in a series of unionization attempts from Bessemer, Alabama, to Staten Island, New York.
“This engagement strategy is particularly important at this time given the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) attacks against Amazon, and its campaign to unionize our workforce,” the memo warned.
To achieve these goals, the memo proposed strategies to help Amazon boost its reputation and simultaneously “neutralize” company critics by befriending these critics’ own allies and by launching feel-good initiatives to turn the media and local politicians into company boosters. Amazon’s employee relations team was developing a separate “internally-facing strategy,” the memo said.
