Amazon recently opened its a West Humboldt Park warehouse, and workers’ rights advocates and labor organizers, are rightfully concerned that the corporation’s frightful employee safety record in Illinois will spread to yet another location. Amazon workers at some Chicago-area warehouses face a serious injury rate almost twice that of the statewide average, according to a recent analysis by Block Club Chicago
Collective bargaining and community organizing have a big role to play in ensuring that Amazon workers receive the full protection they are entitled to. But Amazon’s ability to churn through employees, leaving them bruised and broken, is also connected to its outsize power across the economy and in local labor markets.
That power allows Amazon to push down wages, take advantage of local businesses that sell on its platform and ultimately employ a host of anticompetitive tactics to maintain a monopoly in the e-retail industry, as alleged in a recent lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general.
Illinois lawmakers must step up alongside their allies in the labor movement and elsewhere to check Amazon’s power and ensure that both workers and local businesses can receive a fair shake in the Illinois economy. They certainly have the tools to do so.
Illinois legislators, for example, could adopt the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which passed the House last year, and strengthen whistleblower and anti-retaliation laws. They could...
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