with Amazon under the headline “Somali
Workers in Minnesota Force Amazon to
Negotiate.” The story underscored how
rare the Minneapolis workers’ successes
seemed to be: “Labor organizers and
researchers said they were not aware of
Amazon coming to the table previously
in the United States amid pressure from
workers.”
Amazon’s response to the story, mean-
while, showed how ambiguous labor orga-
nizing without a union can be. In comments
to the press, the company has repeatedly
classified its meetings with Awood as mere
community engagement, analogous to its
outreach with veterans groups and LGBT
advocates: “We were never ‘coming to the
table’ in the sense that’s described,” says
an Amazon spokeswoman. The purpose of
the meetings with Awood, she says, was to
“deepen our understanding of the East Afri-
can community and deepen their under-
standing of Amazon.”
Nonetheless, for Awood, it was a
moment of triumph. The scrappy Somali
workers had created a classic David ver-
sus Goliath tale, and as soon as the Times
posted its story, calls of support started
rolling in from around the country. Seiz-
ing the momentum, Awood announced
on Facebook that it was planning its big-
gest event ever: a protest at the Shakopee
warehouse on December 14. Everyone was
invited.
With the Awood Center suddenly com-
manding national attention, Amazon pro-
jected a measure of seemingly strategic
benevolence during the week before the
protest. The company held a job fair in the
heart of Cedar-Riverside on December 10,
advertising it with a video in English and
Somali. On December 13, Bezos pledged
$2.5 million to Simpson Housing Services,
a Minneapolis nonprofit that serves the
homeless. Awood organizers decided to
escalate their plan further: They would
stage a walkout in the thick of the pre-
holiday rush.
On December 14, as Stolz watched the
minutes tick down to 4 pm, Awood mem-
bers, supporters, and reporters gathered
on the far side of MSP1’s parking lot, hug-
ging themselves against the cold. It was a
moment of euphoria. But in the days and
weeks after the protest, some workers
would come to feel less secure than they
had before.
VT.AMAZON
has fended off unions ever since it was
young. In 2000, when the company was still
largely a bookstore, the Communications
Workers of America tried to organize the
company’s customer-service employees.
Amazon ultimately closed the call center
that had been the focal point of the orga-
nizing drive, calling the move a reorgani-
zation that “had absolutely nothing to do”
with the unionization effort. In 2013 and
2014 the company repelled an organizing
push in Delaware, reportedly with the help
of an anti-union law firm. And in Septem-
ber 2018, when whispers of a union drive
began passing through the workforce at
Whole Foods, Amazon sent out a roughly
45-minute training video to the grocery
chain’s managers about how to snuff out
organizing campaigns while steering clear
of US labor law violations.
The video, which later leaked to the press,
crystallizes the company’s attitude toward
organized labor, which Amazon regards
as incompatible with its core principles of
speed, innovation, and customer obsession.
“We are not anti-union, but we are not neu-
tral either,” the video’s narrator says. “We
will boldly defend our direct relationship
with associates.”
In one sense, Awood doesn’t threaten
that direct relationship the way a union
would. Omar and Muse take pains to clar-
ify that Awood does not represent workers
as a bargaining agent, it only helps them
organize themselves—which perhaps also
helps explain why Amazon doesn’t clas-
sify its meetings at the African Devel-
opment Center as “coming to the table.”
But that hardly means that coordination
between even small groups of workers
is exactly welcome. Amazon prefers to
deal with workers not only directly, but as
individuals—to resolve issues one on one.
And as the leaked training video makes
clear, the company trains managers to
keep tabs on “warning signs” of workers
organizing in numbers.
In animations vaguely reminiscent of
South Park, the video instructs managers
to stay alert for workers who suddenly start
to linger in break rooms after their shifts
are over, or clumps of workers who scat-
ter when managers approach, or the use of
terms like “living wage” or “grievance.” The
video tells supervisors what they must notdo, according to labor law—threaten work-
ers, interrogate them, spy on them, or prom-
ise rewards if they reject a union—but then
coaches managers through lawful ways of
achieving many of the same ends. (“To avoid
your comments being an unlawful threat,”
the video says, “avoid absolutes. Speak in
possibilities instead.”) In general, says Jan-
ice Fine, a professor of labor studies at Rut-
gers University, the workplace at Amazon
“is one that makes it really clear to workers
that they’d better not engage in any kind of
collective action.”
Within days of the rally in Shakopee,
several workers say they began to feel dis-
tinctly uncomfortable in the warehouse.
One Somali night-shift worker, who asked
to remain anonymous for fear of retalia-
tion, says that as she approached one of her
supervisors, she realized he was reading
news about the walkout on a warehouse
computer. She says he zoomed in on a photo
of her face and then told her that he was
very interested to see who was at the pro-
test. She felt shaken; his look suggested that
it wasn’t idle interest. Then, in May, three
East African workers filed a complaint with
the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission, saying that, almost immediately
after their participation in the December
14 protest, they “began experiencing a cam-
paign of retaliatory harassment from Ama-
zon management.” Amazon, for its part,
says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward
harassment and retaliation.
Meanwhile, some workers in Shakopee
noticed that, for the first time, the warehouse
appeared to be hiring only temporary work-
ers. So on March 8, 2019, nearly 30 stowers
at Shakopee—about a third of the depart-
ment working that shift, by Stolz’s esti-
mate—walked off the job around midnight.
(Amazon puts the number at less than 15.)
Together with Stolz and Nimo Omar, most
of them decamped to a Perkins restaurant.
Three hours later, they returned with a list
of demands, handwritten on a sheet of note-
book paper. They included “stop temp hir-
ing” and “end unfair firings.” (At one point
during the night, Omar and one of the men
who had walked off the job recognized each
other. He was one of the workers who had
initially been rude and dismissive to her
back when she was hanging around shuttle
stops in the wee hours of the morning, ask-
ing about what it was like to work at MSP1.)
Amazon is a nearly $1 trillion com-