This week in the War on Workers: Amazon and Bed Bath & Beyond face warehouse fights

(Coolcaesar)

Online shopping and in-store big box shopping alike are made possible by legions of warehouse workers, typically paid around $10 an hour or less, often working not for the big-name retailers they supply but for a complex web of subcontractors and temp agencies, and facing high turnover, low job security and injuries. But warehouse workers around the country are organizing and fighting back. Organizing doesn't always, or even usually, mean organizing into a union'the barriers to that are often too high. But workers are filing lawsuits and pushing the government to investigate unsafe working conditions, wage theft and more, and using protest and the media to draw attention to problems at well-known companies.

For instance, after months of scrutiny and protest drawing attention to reports of Amazon warehouses at which ambulances were kept stationed outside to treat workers inevitably collapsing from the summer heat, Amazon announced it is spending $52 million to air-condition its warehouses. Workers in those warehouses will still be worked unreasonably hard for unreasonably little money with poor job security, but air-conditioning should substantially reduce one hazard.

One set of warehouse workers is trying to join a union, though, strengthened by the fact that they are actually employed by a retailer and not by temp agencies. The overwhelmingly Latino workforce at a New Jersey Bed Bath & Beyond distribution center is moving toward a union representation vote:

Betania Valdez, who started work in the warehouse in 2008, a year after it opened, said workers sought out the UFCW to address low wages, favoritism in raises, rampant safety issues, and unaffordable and unattainable health care. [...]

In the New Jersey warehouse, Bed Bath and Beyond new hires start a quarter above minimum wage, at $7.50 an hour. After four years Valdez has seen her wage creep up to $8.87. She's angry that she has no health insurance and just three paid sick days a year, as she and others struggle with respiratory problems she links to the perpetually dusty warehouse.

If the workers are successful, this would be the first unionized Bed Bath & Beyond facility as well as being a high-profile victory for workers in the warehousing industry more generally. Bed Bath & Beyond is carrying out an aggressive anti-union campaign within the warehouse.