Amazon workers strike new Prime Day sales event

Hi Data Sheet readers! Fortune technology reporter Kylie Robison here, filling in for Jacob.

Tuesday marked the start of Amazon’s second Prime Day of the year as the company gears up for the holiday shopping season. It also marked a crucial day for unionization efforts for its fulfillment employees around the country. This week, Amazon workers at five facilities in Georgia, California, and Illinois planned to strike the sales event, according to the More Perfect Union.

This is the first time the e-commerce giant has held two Prime Day sales in a year, an interesting choice as it faces rising unionization efforts and a depleting labor supply. Amazon’s labor issues have been a well-known public battle since last year when it was revealed that drivers were peeing in bottles because fulfillment demand was too high. After initially refuting the claims, Amazon later apologized for denying its workers sometimes have to pee in bottles.

Denying employees bathroom breaks isn’t the only issue organizers have raised. There have been concerns about overheating warehouses, issues with COVID-19 compliance, and being treated like robots rather than humans. The increased frequency of Prime Day sales events seems only to exacerbate these problems—so why do it? As Jacob put it in June, the company needs to juice revenue after its slowest quarter of revenue growth in 21 years.

Amazon tried to quell some of the outrage around shoddy work conditions by raising hourly pay for warehouse and transportation workers to a minimum of $15 an hour. The company said that adding nickels and dimes to employees’ wages, for an average of $19 an hour, would cost the company nearly $1 billion over the next year, Bloomberg reported. The increase in wages has done little to subdue union efforts, perhaps as the company had hoped.

The company’s traditional union-busting tactics are suddenly in the spotlight, too. Amazon recruited consultants, implemented required seminars that dissuade organizing, and even threatened to jail union leaders for trespassing, according to the Washington Post. Company filings showed that Amazon even spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021 alone. Not to mention that the National Labor Relations Board has issued multiple citations to the firm for interfering with employee labor organization.

If the company continues to double down on union-busting efforts, its sales could wind up taking a big hit. Prime Days are often boycotted by some consumers who support the union efforts, and this week’s sale was no different.

Some of the public scrutiny seems to already be playing out. For instance, Business Insider obtained leaked internal documents that show Amazon projected a smaller order volume for this week’s Prime Day than for its July event. They found that Amazon expects a peak of 50,000 orders a minute in North America, compared to roughly 61,000 orders a minute during its July event. Typically, the company sees 35,000 orders a minute in this region.

It’s yet to be seen if Amazon’s union-busting efforts will throw a wrench in the company’s grand holiday plans, but as for now, this new Prime Day event seems to have fallen flat.

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Kylie Robison

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