Tony DeLorio was driving south on Interstate-280 late last month when something out of the ordinary caught his eye: Amazon vans, a whole fleet of them, parked out in the open on a lot in a warehouse district off of Cesar Chavez.
DeLorio is the principal officer with Teamsters Local 665, which organizes UPS drivers as well as parking-lot attendants and a host of other blue-collar workers. The Teamsters have made it extremely clear that Amazon –- with its infamous union-busting practices and its $17.25-an-hour warehouse jobs and $21-an-hour independent contractor delivery driver gigs — is their bête noire.
But until his recent drive-by, DeLorio was under the impression that Amazon was focusing on its new $200 million property on Seventh Street, or its smaller warehouses in Bayview and Potrero. “I go, ‘What the hell is going on? What are all these Amazon vehicles doing here?’” he recalled. “I figured we would have heard something.”
DeLorio took the nearest exit and headed back north. Taking the Chavez off-ramp, he approached the property at 2000 Marin Street, and there they were: about “50 Amazon vans” in a recently repaved parking lot dotted by what looked like newfangled solar-powered streetlights, he said in an interview.
DeLorio asked his union’s research team to do a little digging. As they found out, the problem wasn’t so much that Amazon managed to snap up even more San Francisco real estate without anyone noticing — it was that the real estate Amazon snapped up in...
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