The Socialist Equality Party is launching an online newsletter, the International Amazon Workers Voice, to provide coverage of the struggle of 300,000 Amazon workers around the world. The International Amazon Workers Voice will link Amazon workers in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, and Africa in a common fight against one of the world’s most powerful and exploitative corporations.
In the more advanced countries, Amazon workers are forced to walk up to 15 miles per shift and are not paid for the time it takes them to go through humiliating security scanning at the end of their shifts. In the UK, Amazon workers are so poorly paid that some sleep in tents outside their plants. The corporation fires workers on the slightest of pretenses. Conditions in poorer countries are even worse.
This key section of the working class occupies a strategically important place in an economy that is more internationally interconnected than ever before. Massive Amazon facilities are spread out across the US, Germany, France, the UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Jamaica, and elsewhere. In the coming year, Amazon plans to hire tens of thousands more warehouse workers at low wages, all while posting record high stock prices and profits.
The International Amazon Workers Voice will be a platform of opposition for Amazon workers, aimed at developing committees in workplaces that can link workers in each plant with their brothers and sisters in a worldwide fight for social equality. The newsletter will expose dictatorial working conditions, introducing workers to socialism, and providing regular news and analysis of world politics from the World Socialist Web Site. The newsletter will be international both in form and political content—it will link the struggles of workers in countries across the world and will be made available in many different languages.
Amazon workers are encouraged to write in to the International Amazon Workers Voice to share their stories and to expose injustice at their workplaces. The newsletter will respect the anonymity of all workers and will take steps to ensure they are not subject to retribution by the company. For regular updates, subscribe to the newsletter here, like our page on Facebook, and share with your co-workers.