"From Ballots to Bargaining: The Struggle to Unionize at Amazon's Warehouses", 14 August 2025

Three years after workers at Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse made history by voting to form the company’s first U.S. union, they’re still fighting for a first contract. Despite the workers' decisive victory and their recently-formed alliance with the Teamsters, Amazon has refused to come to the bargaining table, prolonging a standoff that has become a test case for the future of organized labor at the retail giant.

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Although union campaigns at Amazon's warehouses date back more than a decade, the bulk of those efforts have taken place after the pandemic, which put a spotlight on conditions inside the company's fulfillment centers. That culminated in a 2024 U.S. Senate probe, which accused the company of manipulating workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they actually are, and found that Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured on the job, compared to facilities operated by the rest of the warehousing industry.

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The Senate's investigation focused on an internal study conducted by Amazon, known as Project Soteria. After the project identified a direct link between speed and injuries in the company's warehouses, senior leaders reportedly denied requests from researchers to pause disciplinary measures for workers who failed to meet speed requirements. Project Soteria then recommended slowing down the pace for workers, which leadership was said to have rejected. A separate team was tasked by Amazon to audit the project's findings, and asserted that workplace injuries were actually due to the "frailty" of certain employees. 

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Amazon has made it a priority to stamp out union activity across its warehouses and distribution centers, even going so far as to spend more than $14 million on anti-union consultants in 2022, according to financial disclosures published by the Huffington Post in 2023. And as union efforts have ramped up, allegations of illegal union busting have followed the company in the wake of nearly every vote. In 2022, a federal court ruled that Amazon had illegally fired JFK8 worker Gerald Bryson in retaliation for his role as a union organizer, with the court ordering the company to reinstate him with back pay. That same year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had violated federal laws by suggesting that unions leave workers "less empowered."

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In a statement issued to SupplyChainBrain, Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards said that the company's employees "have the choice of whether or not to join a union."

"They always have," she added. "We favor opportunities for each person to be respected and valued as an individual, and to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team. The fact is, Amazon already offers what many unions are requesting: competitive pay, health benefits on day one, and opportunities for career growth. We look forward to working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work."