Photo by Nico Baum

I am a second-generation employee of Amazon, which means I’ve seen firsthand how badly this giant corporation mistreats workers.

My mom operated a forklift at the company’s MEM6 warehouse in Mississippi. She was a devoted employee and took pride in her work. That didn’t matter to Amazon. They saw her as a number. This was never clearer than when she suffered an aneurysm that began on the job. Amazon offered no support or care. She was pushed aside the instant she became an inconvenience to the corporation — and they shamelessly fired my mom during her recovery.

In my own experience, life at Amazon has only gotten worse. I’ve worked at the DCK6 warehouse in San Francisco for two years. It is exhausting. I label and carry incoming shipments weighing up to 50 pounds across the facility for hours on end. When my shift is over, my body aches horribly from the backbreaking work. My co-workers and I are paid poorly, and Amazon deliberately refuses to schedule enough shifts for us to legally avoid providing benefits.

In so many conversations with my co-workers, we all talk about how fed up we are. We want respect. When I first started at Amazon, we heard about 340,000 Teamsters at UPS who ratified a great contract providing a lot more money and better benefits to workers. It led to serious talks about how we might be able to join the same union and win our own contract at Amazon.

We knew from the beginning we faced an uphill battle. Amazon is notorious for union busting. But we knew the only way we could stop the mistreatment was by unionizing DCK6 and coordinating with workers at other facilities to flex our collective power.