Brandi Diaz was at a customer’s door in Palmdale, California, delivering stuff for Amazon, when the customer asked her, “What’s the difference between you and UPS drivers?”
“He said the difference is UPS is union, Amazon is not. He referred to us as ‘Jeff’s Bozos.’”
“I am no longer Bezos’s Bozo!” Diaz said over honks and chants from two hundred Teamsters from six different locals and some labor allies at a picket line outside an Amazon warehouse in northern New Jersey on July 6.
Diaz and her coworkers voted to join Teamsters Local 396 in April. They are Amazon delivery drivers, but they were nominally employed by an Amazon contractor, the Southern California company Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS).
BTS, with eight-four drivers, is one of Amazon’s 2,500 delivery service partners (DSPs) — contractors who carry out the package deliveries, even while Amazon retains full control.
Amazon sets workers’ hours, wage floors, routes, and the number of packages they must deliver. It decrees from what vendor a DSP must lease the Amazon-branded vans, and even dictates the drivers’ uniforms.
Amazon controls how many water bottles workers can take with them, and monitors to ensure that they make the required four hundred stops per day.
BTS voluntarily recognized the union and agreed to a contract that would hike wages to $30 an hour by September, compared to the $19.75 drivers were earning before.
That’s when things got complicated. Since Amazon sets the pay for DSPs, BTS...
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