And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for the passage of the Pro Act, legislation that would overhaul the country’s labor laws to give workers more leverage when organizing.
The union drive is putting greater pressure on Washington to respond to long-running concerns about working conditions at the e-commerce giant.
The battle at the Bessemer warehouse spotlights the challenges warehouse workers have faced during the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when the wealth of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos has increased tremendously. Labor organizers are hopeful that a Democrat-controlled White House and Congress could increase the odds of passing legislation that would strengthen workers’ ability to organize even within powerful tech companies.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said during a news conference after the vote. “Whether Jeff Bezos likes it or not, this organizing drive is going to open the floodgates to more collective action.”
(Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).
One Amazon warehouse worker testified in front of Congress about the grueling nature of her nine-hour work day and the extensive ways the company monitors its employees. The company sparked a controversy when its corporate Twitter account pushed back against reports its high productivity demands forced workers to pee in bottles because they couldn’t take bathroom breaks. (The company later walked back that tweet with an apology blog post, saying it was working on solutions to what it characterized as an industry-wide problem).
Over the last year, Amazon workers have raised safety concerns about work in the warehouses during the pandemic. While the company went on a hiring spree to keep up with the intense demand for at-home shopping, many workers tested positive while charging the company wasn’t doing enough to sanitize warehouses or ensure they could take off time if they were concerned about virus exposure. Amazon has pushed back on these claims, saying it prioritizes worker safety.
The National Labor Relations Board is also reportedly fielding increasing complaints about retaliation against Amazon workers. The nation’s top labor watchdog has fielded at least 37 charges against Amazon across 20 cities since February 2020, NBC News reported last month. That’s more than triple the number of similar cases alleging interference with workers’ rights to organize filed to the agency in 2019. The NLRB told NBC it was weighing combining the cases into one national complaint. Typically, claims are handled by individual regional offices, but it has previously taken this step with corporate giants like Walmart and McDonald’s.
Yet Amazon has tried to position itself as a leader in providing strong compensation and benefits to workers.
The company frequently touts that it pays a $15 hourly minimum wage to workers, which some Democrats want to make the national standard.
“We hope that with this election now over, there’s an opportunity to move from talk to action across the country,” the company said in a statement Friday. “While our team is more than a million people around the world and we’ve created 500,000 new jobs since Covid began, we’re still a tiny fraction of the workforce. There are 40 million Americans who make less than the starting wage at Amazon, and many more who don’t get health care through their employers, and we think that should be fixed.”
The Alabama union defeat is just the latest in a series of blows to workers’ efforts to gain greater control at tech companies.
Workers across the tech industry have raised similar complaints they’re not enjoying the new wealth generated by the digital economy, my colleagues Nitasha Tiku, Eli Rosenberg, Jay Greene and Craig Timberg report. Yet their efforts to gain more protections and benefits have had little traction so far. California voters last year approved Proposition 22, which allowed Uber and Lyft to keep classifying their drivers as contractors, denying them minimum wage and other benefits. Contractors at Facebook and Google have also fought for better treatment by the tech giants.
Our top tabs
The White House will meet with CEOs about the chip shortage.
More than a dozen CEOs from Google and other companies are expected to participate, as Bloomberg reported. It comes as the White House tries to relieve a shortage that’s vexed automakers and tech companies around the world.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the meeting part of the administration’s “consulting process” on the semiconductor shortage, and said it would inform their ongoing work.
“This is something that there is a great deal of focus on at the highest level across government,” she said Thursday.
China’s competition watchdog is adding staff as it scrutinizes major tech companies.
Beijing’s decision to nearly double the State Administration for Market Regulation’s antitrust staff comes as the regulator ramps up its scrutiny of tech companies such as Alibaba, Reuters’s Cheng Leng, Julie Zhu, Pei Li, Kane Wu and Josh Horwitz report. Last week, the watchdog levied a record $2.8 billion fine on Alibaba for anti-competitive practices.
In recent months, the watchdog has signaled that it plans to renew its scrutiny of major companies. In February, it issued anti-monopoly guidelines, and last month fined 12 companies, including WeChat owner Tencent, for not disclosing previous acquisitions and deals.
Apple will send a top executive to a hearing on app stores after pressure from lawmakers.
The company said it will send Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer to an April 21 Senate Judiciary Committee antitrust subcommittee hearing. The hearing will explore whether Apple and Google are using their control of app stores to charge high fees and suppress competition.
Andeer will appear days after the top Democrat and Republican on the subcommittee wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, criticizing the company for not committing to send a witness.
In a letter to lawmakers, Apple Senior Director for Government Affairs Timothy Powderly denied the company planned to skip the hearing. “We simply sought alternative dates in light of upcoming matters that have been scheduled for some time and that touch on similar issues,” the company’s letter said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the subcommittee chairwoman, said in a statement that both Google and Apple’s participation was necessary.
“The fact that there are just two gatekeepers between consumers and the millions of online applications available for download raises serious competition concerns,” the Minnesota Democrat said in a statement. “These companies have the power to control how and if mobile app developers can reach app users, and ultimately, which apps become successful.”
Google ran a secret program to allegedly give its ad-buying system a leg up over competitors.
The company said in an inadvertently unredacted court filing that its “Project Bernanke” used past data about bids in its advertising exchange to generate an expected $230 million in revenue in 2013, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey report. The online search and advertising giant wrote in the filing, its first response to an antitrust lawsuit by Texas and other states, that “the details of Project Bernanke’s operations are not disclosed to publishers,” although it said the system is “comparable to data maintained by other buying tools.”
In its lawsuit, Texas alleges that Project Bernake gave Google an unfair advantage over competitors.
Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said the complaint “misrepresents many aspects of our ad tech business” and that the company “look[s] forward to making our case in court.” The office of Texas’s attorney general did not respond to a request for comment.
The filing is already increasing pressure on Google in Washington, with Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, tweeting that “Congress must act to address their abuse of power.”
Rant and rave
Journalist Rob Pegoraro’s second question is key:
New York Times senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin needs to know more about the secret program’s name:
Gizmodo’s Shoshana Wodinsky:
Inside the industry
Tech trade groups are pushing the Biden administration to let industry take the lead in addressing security threats.
Nine groups asked Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to let businesses develop standards to address supply-chain security threats rather than letting the government develop its own technical demands. The letter also called the Biden administration to narrow a Trump administration executive order that gave the government the ability to block products or services linked to a “foreign adversary.”
Trending
Daybook
- Senate Finance Committee chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) discusses Section 230, an Internet liability shield law, at a Consumer Technology Association summit on Wednesday at 10 a.m.
- The Senate Commerce Committee holds a hearing on the Endless Frontier Act, a bill that aims to improve technology transfer and U.S. innovation, on Wednesday at 10 a.m.
- Cecilia Muñoz, the director of President Barack Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, speaks at a New America CA event on gig workers on April 19 at 1 p.m.
