it was 11 days before christmas
in 2018, and an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota, US, was operating at full tilt. Inside the warehouse, within dark, cyclonefenced enclosures, thousands of shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet, ferrying towers of merchandise from one place to another. And throughout the huge space, yellow bins brimming with customers’ orders zipped along conveyor belts.
Negotiating all the distances and tasks that fall between those pieces of machinery were the people. They power-walked (running was forbidden) across roughly 259 000 square metres of polished concrete.
Among them was William Stolz, 24, who’d been at Amazon for a year and a half. As a “picker”, his job was to hover at the perimeter of a cyclone fence and fetch customers’ orders from the robot-borne storage pods that came to his station. He’d stoop, squat, or climb a small ladder to grab items and then rush to place them in one of the yellow bins that sped off to the packaging department. Stolz says pickers were expected to fetch more than 300 items every hour. And, according to workers, Amazon’s inventory-tracking system closely monitored whether they were hitting their marks.
Many of his colleagues endured pain as they strained to hit their hourly rate – which was one of the many reasons Stolz had decided to walk out of his job that afternoon, 14 December, at precisely 4pm.
Stolz and several colleagues of his had been planning the co-ordinated walkout for weeks. He’d been getting to know other workers as they’d discussed the conditions in the warehouse. Unlike him, most of his fellow strikers were Somali-muslim immigrants. Many of their faces were framed by hijabs.
Stolz estimates that about 50 workers assembled at the front doors before they streamed out. (Amazon says the number was around 15.)
Stolz had joined friends at political protests before, but he’d never participated in anything like this. The organisation supervising the event wasn’t a union but a fledgeling organisation called the Awood Center – Awood is the Somali word for power – whose motto was “Building East African Worker Power”. The first speaker received an ecstatic welcome: US representative Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-american politician to serve for US Congress, promptly led the group in singing ‘Aan Isweheshano Walaalayaal’ (‘Let’s Get Together With Our Brothers and Sisters’), a classic Somali solidarity anthem.
The protesters began marching toward the warehouse, back to the glass doors where Stolz and the other strikers had emerged, so that managers could hear them. As if on cue, several police patrol cars rolled up to ambush them, calling for backup. Armed with pepper spray, police formed a human barricade across the glass doors of the foyer.
The crowd started to dissipate when darkness fell. But not all the protesters went home. For several, it was time to start the night shift. Winding their way through the police barricade, they presented their Amazon badges in the foyer and disappeared through the turnstiles. As the protesters cleared away from the police line, they chanted ‘Amazon, we’ll be back,’ and they would soon make good on the promise.
In the 25 years since Amazon was founded, it’s become the second-largest, private-sector employer in the US. During that time, the company has displayed an extraordinary knack for dictating its own terms to suppliers, local governments, and workers. For years, the company has coerced cities to compete to host Amazon facilities. What Amazon offers in turn are jobs with competitive wages and benefits for full-time workers,
and the expectation that workers will do their part to uphold the company’s principles of “speed, innovation, and consumer obsession”. In presiding over that bargain, the company has enjoyed tremendous leverage over its employees, dismissing them if they fail to meet their hourly productivity rates and fending off trade unions.
In recent years, however, Amazon’s leverage has weakened. Though opinion surveys suggest that Amazon remains one of the most highly regarded companies, it’s been caught in public criticism over its treatment of workers.
In many ways, the warehouse in Minnesota is just like the dozens of other Amazon fulfilment centres in the world. But it differs in at least one significant respect: at least 30% of its workers are East African. Many are Somali-muslims who’ve been in the country for only a few years. Some are refugees who survived years of civil war and displacement, only to face anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia in their new home. This relatively small group – bound together by shared neighbourhoods, mosques, cafés, and Somali shopping malls – has staged walkouts, brought management to the negotiating table twice, demanded concessions to accommodate Muslim religious practice, and commanded global attention, all without the clout of a traditional union. But just how did a twoyear-old organisation made up of immigrants become such a thorn in Amazon’s paw?
one
of the most important people at the protest on 14 December 2018 wasn’t a politician or even an Amazon employee. Running operations behind the scenes alongside workers was 23-year-old Nimo Omar. The American-born daughter of East African refugees is a devout Muslim who speaks four languages (English, Somali, Oromo and Amharic).
In the midst of the Somali Civil War, Omar’s parents, who’d fled to Kenya as refugees, emigrated to the US, where Omar ended up living with relatives in Minnesota.
Eventually, some 52 000 people who live in the state would report Somali ancestry, the largest population in the US.
Omar relocated to Las Vegas during her teenage years. There, she was the only girl who wore the hijab in her high school. White boys called her a terrorist. She later enrolled at a university back in Minnesota and began getting involved with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015.
The ensuing year brought a string of disillusioning events for Omar. In Minnesota, the run-up to the 2016 election saw enthusiasm for Donald Trump fused with increasingly virulent anti-somali, anti-muslim and anti-refugee rhetoric.
In late 2016, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was looking for someone who was fluent in Somali to help organise workers, many of whom were East African, at an airport. Omar took the job.
Nearly a decade earlier, SEIU organiser Dan Méndez Moore’s wife, Veronica, had cofounded a workers’ centre – a non-profit focused on training non-union workers to organise themselves around their own goals. Given the success of the campaign to organise East African airport workers, Omar and Méndez Moore thought that a similar kind of effort might work for Somalis.
That year, Amazon had opened a warehouse in Minnesota, and had gone all out to attract East African workers. Recognising that many immigrants lacked cars, the company chartered shuttles for the workers between their neighbourhood and the warehouse. Omar’s brother and uncle had both worked for Amazon, so she knew a little about the productivity quotas and the relentless pace. She wanted to learn more. So she started visiting the Amazon shuttle stop. Gradually, people started saying they’d be willing to meet up.
when
the warehouse opened in 2016, things weren’t so bad. Hibaq Mohamed, a Somali refugee, started that August.
She says she was required to process just 90 items per hour, and Amazon’s shuttle service made for an efficient commute. But in the new year, she says she now had to stow 120 items per hour. And language barriers were making relations between the warehouse’s managers and its
East African workers increasingly testy. Mohamed, who spoke English better than many of her colleagues, often tried to step in and translate.
Working at Amazon already created challenges for devout Muslims. The warehouse had no air conditioning on the work floor at the time, and some days were sweltering. Because the latter part of Ramadan that year coincided with the summer solstice,
Muslim workers’ daily periods of fasting were especially long.
Several Muslim workers reported exhaustion and dehydration, though Amazon disputes those reports.
the
grievance that first made workers truly interested in talking to Omar was a relatively small one. In October, Amazon announced that it would cancel its direct shuttle service from the Muslim community to the warehouse. Now the trip would include a transfer and take an hour and a half – twice as long as the shuttle ride had been.
It didn’t help that the new pickup point was further than the shuttle stops had been from the area where many of the workers lived. Muslim women who wore the hijab worried about their safety walking to and from the bus stop after dark. >>
Eventually, Omar would post herself outside the warehouse itself, greeting workers and bringing up the cancelled shuttle. ‘This is an issue that we all need to talk about,’ she remembers telling them. One night, some 20 people followed her to a nearby café.
They went on to form a new group they called the guddiga xalinta
– Somali for “problem-solving committee”.
In November, the Awood Center launched its website and officially opened its doors, with funding from the SEIU and support from the Council on American-islamic Relations, a major Muslim advocacy group.
that
autumn, Stolz and a few other workers began bringing a petition to work with them at the warehouse; it was addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and it asked him to restore the direct bus service.
In general, the workers shared a deep sense of dread over the pace of Amazon’s hourly rates – which they saw as not only exhausting but unsafe. People were getting hurt in the course of meeting their quotas.
The workers who gathered at Awood were also constantly afraid of being fired or “written up” for falling behind on their quotas amid breaks for prayer.
In early May, Amazon management announced that they’d heard some concerns about Ramadan, so they scheduled two open meetings where workers could discuss the holiday with them inside the warehouse. Workers rattled off a number of desires: lower productivity rates for the holiday, more breaks, some kind of respite from heat, and time off for Eid al-fitr, the festival that concludes the holy month. According to Stolz, the managers’ replies were non-committal. (Amazon says the purpose of these meetings was just to hear from the workers.)
So workers at the warehouse promptly began to hand out leaflets calling for Muslim employees to show up for work on the first day of Ramadan – 15 May – wearing shirts and hijabs that matched the colour of the Somali flag. The show of force, called Blue
Day, was meant to draw media attention to Amazon’s failure to accommodate Muslim workers for the holy month.
Soon after those flyers went out, Awood says, warehouse management agreed to create dedicated prayer rooms and promised to lighten quotas for Ramadan. Blue Day was called off.
On 15 May 2018, Amazon distributed new prayer rugs and agreed to convert a conference room into a quiet prayer room, though it would be available only on Fridays. The company also says it began allowing workers to transfer to the night shift so they wouldn’t have to work during periods of fasting, approving leaves of absence for Ramadan – though workers say these were unpaid – and offering unlimited time off to workers who wished to celebrate Eid.
The promise of a prayer room heartened the activists, and it helped that the warehouse was also now cooled by large fans.
But then Ramadan began, and workers say the quota system didn’t change. Amazon fired one Somali-american who fell behind on her rate while fasting.
Awood upped the ante again, inviting reporters to a protest on 4 June. That day, a handful of Amazon employees stood chanting ‘Yes, we can!’ in Somali (‘Haa waan awoodnaa!’) and English. Stories about the protest appeared on the radio and in local news outlets, and the media blitz put Amazon on the defensive; the company responded by touting its workplace benefits and its plans to build a permanent prayer room for Muslim workers at the facility. But on some points, Amazon wouldn’t budge: workers who prayed, the company made clear, were still expected to meet the same hourly quotas, unless they wanted to dip into their unpaid time off. The principle of speed, it seemed, was not up for negotiation.
Behind the scenes, Amazon agreed to meet with the workers who’d organised under Awood. And on 25 September, after much back and forth, about 12 workers, three Islamic community leaders, executive director of the Awood Centre Abdirahman Muse, Omar, and four Amazon managers met. The group of workers explained their concerns about hourly productivity quotas, the warehouse’s response to workplace injuries, and the lack of African managers, among other things. Amazon’s response felt like more of the same.
On November 20, The New
York Times published a story about Awood’s meetings with Amazon under the headline “Somali Workers in Minnesota Force Amazon to Negotiate”. The story underscored how rare the Minnesota workers’ successes seemed to be.
For Awood, it was a moment of triumph. The scrappy Somali workers had created a classic David versus Goliath tale, and as soon as the Times posted its story, calls of support started rolling in from around the country. Seizing the moment, Awood announced on Facebook that it was planning its biggest event ever: a protest at the Minnesota warehouse on 14 December. Everyone was invited.
With the Awood Center suddenly commanding national attention, Amazon projected a measure of seemingly strategic benevolence during the week before the protest. The company held a job fair in the heart of the Muslim community on 10 December, advertising it with a video in English and Somali. Awood organisers decided to escalate their plan further: they would stage a walkout in the thick of the pre-holiday rush.
On 14 December, as Stolz watched the minutes tick down to 4pm, Awood members, supporters, and reporters gathered on the far side of the warehouse’s car park. It was a moment of euphoria. But after the protest, some workers would come to feel less secure than they had before.
Within days, several workers say they began to feel distinctly uncomfortable in the warehouse. In May, three East African workers filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying that, almost immediately after their participation in the 14 December protest, they
“began experiencing a campaign of retaliatory harassment from Amazon management”.
Amazon, for its part, says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment and retaliation.
So on 8 March 2019, nearly 30 stowers at the Minnesota warehouse walked out of their jobs at around midnight and decamped to a restaurant. Three hours later, they returned with a list of demands, handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper. They included “end unfair firings”.
on
15 July 2019, the Minnesota warehouse was decked out with banners and balloons and free commemorative T-shirts for everyone. Amazon had decided to expand its annual consumer bonanza into a twoday affair, featuring a brand-new service: free one-day shipping for Prime members. Analysts predicted the event would drive record-breaking sales. For the company, the stakes were high. Mandatory overtime was in effect. Managers stood outside the foyer, high-fiving workers as they arrived for 11-hour shifts.
A week earlier, the Awood Center had announced its plans for the strike. European Amazon workers had been doing it for years, but as with a number of things Awood was doing, it had never happened before in the
US. Since then, it had drawn widespread attention. That morning, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren had tweeted: ‘I fully support Amazon workers’ Prime Day strike. Their fight for safe and reliable jobs is another reminder that we must come together to hold big corporations accountable.’
The strike was due to start at 2pm. By 1.30pm, about 50 people were marching in a circle with signs in the warehouse’s truck lane. Meanwhile, Omar was stationed outside the foyer, waiting for people to walk out.
‘My job is to gather workers and make a march,’ she said. As had happened back in December, the protest was taking place on the far side of the car park. On the hot summer day – under the scrutiny of managers – the idea was to give workers a feeling of strength in numbers.
Inside the warehouse, however, things weren’t going as planned.
Stolz, who’d arrived at around 5.30am to hand out strike flyers in the car park, was trying to rally the day shift. He made the rounds of the canteens, where he saw managers handing out snacks and chatting up employees. People were getting nervous. Some told Stolz they didn’t want to lose their unpaid time off.
Only a few people trickled out to strike, and Omar gave up on the idea of leading workers away from the warehouse in a parade. According to Awood, about 35 people took part in the walkout; Amazon would later say, yet again, that only 15 employees participated, and according to a press statement handed to reporters, it didn’t see the event as a strike, either.
By 4pm, a stage had been set up across the car park. Despite the heat and the poor showing of strikers, the protest took on a festive mood. More than 200 people had gathered. There were trays full of food and refreshments, and a performance by a Somali dance troupe; at one point, Hibaq Mohamed jumped into formation with them. Finally an emcee – an Amazon worker named Sahro Sharif – took to the stage.
‘There were a lot of people who were afraid to come out and stand out here today because of the management that’s going on inside,’ Sharif declared. ‘To the people that actually came out tonight, I want to say thank you, and let’s make it great!’
Today, there’s no end in sight to the jousting match between Amazon and Awood. When labour experts characterise what Awood has accomplished overall, they tend to focus not on any specific concessions the group has extracted thus far (which Amazon denies are concessions anyway) but instead on the national attention the group has attracted – and its implications for other workers in warehouses and in tech. Awood bears a certain resemblance not only to worker centres that focus on low-wage industries, but to recent efforts by Google employees and other tech workers to organise themselves and learn labour law without the structure of a union. ‘Tech workers are in this situation where they’re trying to figure out: where is their leverage? Where is their ground to stand on? How do you negotiate with an algorithm?’ says Janice Fine, a labour student. Awood has become one of the prime examples to learn from. Amazon, in other words, is not the only one watching a few Somalis closely.