October, 13 2020, 12:00am EDT
Ahead of Prime Day, Amazon Must Respect Workers' Right to Unionize
As consumers prepare for Amazon Prime Day - a massive global sale event for Prime customers starting on Tuesday, October 13 - Amnesty International calls on the e-commerce company to respect workers' rights, in particular, the right to join and form trade unions.
WASHINGTON
As consumers prepare for Amazon Prime Day - a massive global sale event for Prime customers starting on Tuesday, October 13 - Amnesty International calls on the e-commerce company to respect workers' rights, in particular, the right to join and form trade unions.
"Amnesty International is alarmed by the growing evidence in recent months that Amazon is interfering with workers' rights to organize, and investing significant resources in monitoring workers and the perceived 'threat' of potential trade union activity," said Michael Kleinman, the Director of Amnesty International's Silicon Valley Initiative. "Amazon's own annual reports have identified the existence of labour unions as a risk factor in their international operations."
On October 6, Recode reported that a leaked internal memo obtained included plans by Amazon to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor union 'threats' through a new technology system called "geoSPatial Operating Console". While Amazon did not comment on whether the memo was genuine, its spokesperson told Recode that the company respects "employees' right to join, form or not to join a labor union or other lawful organization of their own selection, without fear of retaliation, intimidation or harassment."
In September, Amazon put out job advertisements for intelligence analysts responsible for tracking risks including "labor organizing threats against the company". Amazon has since removed the job advertisements and stated that their posting was an error.
Also in September, internal Amazon documents obtained by Vice News show that the company has been secretly monitoring and analyzing workers' private Facebook groups, including for the purpose of tracking plans for strike action or protests.
While Amazon claims that they respect workers' right to join and form trade unions, it has not publicly disavowed the claims about surveillance and tracking of worker organizing and labour union activity. In a letter on September 21, 2020, Amnesty International asked Amazon for further information on this issue. On October 5, Amnesty International sent further correspondence to Amazon but has not received a reply yet.
Amazon's efforts to discourage workers from organizing are not new, and the company's own annual reports have identified the existence of works councils or labour unions as a risk factor in their international operations. For example, in the UK, Amazon has repeatedly in the past years issued legal notices for alleged trespassing and threats of injunctions to GMB union organizers who have attempted to approach and talk to workers outside of Amazon facilities. Furthermore, GMB organizers told Amnesty International that staff from Amazon human resources have confiscated and ripped up their pro-union leaflets handed out to workers once the worker was onsite.
In the U.S., warehouse workers who spoke out for their rights and raised concerns about working conditions during COVID-19, appear to have faced disciplinary action or have been subsequently fired.
International human rights law is clear that everyone has the right to form and join the trade union of their choice, and that trade unions play a fundamental role in ensuring respect for the right to work, including the right to just and favorable conditions of work. Under International Labour Organization (ILO) standards, union membership or participation in union activities must not be a cause of a dismissal or otherwise prejudice against a worker.
Amazon also has a responsibility to respect human rights, as articulated in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The UNGPs make clear that the responsibility to respect human rights "...is a global standard of expected conduct for all business enterprises wherever they operate... and it exists over and above compliance with national laws and regulations protecting human rights." This includes the responsibility to respect the rights to freedom of association, assembly and expression.
The importance of respecting the role of unions at workplaces became even more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been numerous examples demonstrating how unions and workers organizations were critical in protecting the human rights of Amazon's workforce and obtaining better health and safety measures and other protections from the company. These experiences show the close link between the right to organize, collective bargaining and the health and safety of workers.
For example, in France, unions helped to secure "health guarantees, a voluntary return to work for workers, adjusted schedules to help with distancing, and increased pay of EUR 2 per hour through the end of May." In Italy, unions helped to secure in an agreement "constant cleaning processes and programmed and traced sanitizations; scheduling of work activities and organization of workstations with the guarantee that there is always at least two meters of distance between workers".
Despite Amazon's public expressions of appreciation and gratitude to the company's workers, these sentiments do not seem to extend to the right to unionize. Amnesty International has communicated these concerns to Amazon in letters in April and September 2020. In its response to Amnesty International letter in April 2020 it stated "(o)ur approach on human rights is informed by international standards; we respect and support the Core Conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights".
Amnesty International calls on Amazon to genuinely respect the rights of workers to join and form trade unions and to protect the rights of workers who speak out on human rights issues within their workplace.
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
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DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," one lawyer said.
May 02, 2024
Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.
"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."
"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.
"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.
Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.
The Interceptrevealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.
OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according toThe Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."
CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."
The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.
After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses," Mitchell added, "he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests."
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"At every turn, companies are cutting corners on the path to record profits, and American consumers are paying the price," one expert testified.
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Progressive policy experts took aim at corporate greed and profiteering during a Thursday U.S. Senate hearing on "shrinkflation," the process of reducing the size or quantity of a product while selling it at the same price.
At the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing—entitled "Higher Prices: How Shrinkflation and Technology Can Impact Consumers' Finances"—Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) began by acknowledging that "prices today are far too high, and families are having a harder time finding a fair price, seeing more of their paycheck vanish into thin air."
"All of this is happening while corporate profits hit record highs," the senator continued. "Let's be clear: The fact that prices and corporate profits are going up at the same time is no coincidence. A study by the Kansas City Fed found that corporate profits drove half of the price increases in 2021."
Bilal Baydoun, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, testified that "in America today, a fair price, let alone a sweet deal, is harder and harder to come by. In the age of corporate concentration and high-powered algorithms, pricing is in the midst of a troubling transformation, and the price tag as we know it may become a relic of the past."
"At every turn, companies are cutting corners on the path to record profits, and American consumers are paying the price," he continued. "In a practice known as 'shrinkflation,' companies discreetly reduce the size or volume of common household items—everything from jars of peanut butter to bars of soap—to charge consumers more for less."
"For some essential goods like household paper towels, shrinkflation accounted for roughly 10% of the price increase consumers experienced over the last four years," Baydoun added. "Indeed, big profits increasingly come in smaller packages."
Accountable.US president Caroline Ciccone and other executive members of the group submitted a statement for the record asserting that "the American people are fed up with corporate greed and price gouging."
The statement continues:
Even as inflation has gone down, prices remain too high. Americans understand that corporate greed is a major driver of costs that make it difficult for their families to make ends meet.
Corporate profits have exploded since 2020, and a recent study by our partners at the Groundwork Collaborative found that for much of 2023, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. Comparatively, over the 40 years before the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth. In the final three months of 2023, corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion, according to Commerce Department data.
"From Big Food to corporate landlords to Big Pharma, CEOs across industries keep raising prices despite bragging of bigger and bigger profits and stock rewards for wealthy investors," said Liz Zelnick, director of Accountable.US' Economic Security & Corporate Power program. "These executives clearly didn't need to raise prices so high, but they did it anyway because they could."
"Yet one by one," she added, "conservative Senate Banking Committee members today gave a free pass to their corporate megadonors and instead disingenuously blamed the Biden administration's actions against junk fees and price gouging that are actually working to lower costs for everyday families. They should get their priorities in check."
Earlier this year, Brown and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) introduced a bill "to crack down on companies shrinking their products and raising their prices."
The Shrinkflation Prevention Act would:
- Direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to promulgate regulations to establish shrinkflation as an unfair or deceptive act or practice, prohibiting manufacturers from engaging in shrinkflation;
- Authorize the FTC to pursue civil actions against corporations who engage in shrinkflation; and
- Authorize state attorneys general to bring civil actions against corporations engaging in shrinkflation.
"We need members of Congress to grow spines and stand up to more of these corporate lobbyists," Brown said during Thursday's hearing. "We need our colleagues to join us in efforts like this, to lower prices and stop these tactics that distort the market, stifle competition, and make it harder for Americans to afford the cost of living."
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"What President Shafik did at Columbia moved the whole world a step closer to universally criminalizing direct action, and direct action is the ONLY thing that is going to help the world halt global heating," said one climate scientist as she canceled a planned speech at the school.
May 02, 2024
Repercussions of American universities' crackdowns on student protesters are becoming increasingly evident this week as faculty members, public speakers, and others who collaborate with higher education institutions announced they would cut ties with schools that have repressed students' constitutional right to protest against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza.
On Thursday, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, a former Columbia University professor who is still affiliated with the school's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, announced on social media that she had written to Columbia President Minouche Shafik to ask that her "current affiliation with the university be removed."
"I have watched with horror as your administration has responded with breathtaking incompetence and inhumanity to peaceful student protest against genocidal violence ongoing in Gaza," wrote Mukhopadhyay. "As a teacher and a scholar, I can no longer justify my association with this institution so long as you are at the helm."
Mukhopadhyay's letter to the prestigious Ivy League school came two days after the New York Police Department forcibly removed student protesters from Hamilton Hall, which they had occupied to demand that Columbia divest from companies that contract with the Israeli government. The officers entered the building—which the students had renamed Hind's Hall in honor of a six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in January—with guns drawn, and reportedly used tear gas to disperse demonstrators outside.
On Wednesday, End Climate Silence founder Genevieve Guenther announced she was canceling her scheduled keynote address at Columbia's symposium on climate and language, which she was supposed to give Friday.
Guenther expressed sorrow that she would not move forward with the talk, but said that being associated with Columbia "at this political moment" was equivalent to ignoring the school's "authoritarian response to protest."
"Climate protest is being systematically criminalized in the U.S. and even in Europe and the U.K.," said Guenther. "And these authoritarian, anti-First Amendment tactics are not only deployed by the right. Yes, the right wing is targeting climate protests. But Democrats are deploying the same tactics to prevent direct action in support of the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza."
Guenther added that she was "deeply ashamed to be associated with this university" as a Columbia graduate, and that she "would FEAR to send [her] son to a place that turns the NYPD in full riot gear on students occupying a building that has been occupied many times before and survived just fine."
Also in New York, Deborah Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said this week that she would no longer be speaking at the City University of New York School of Law's (CUNY Law) commencement ceremony due to the school's decision not to allow students to give speeches at the event.
The law school quietly made its decision last September, weeks before Israel began bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on October 7, in response to last year's commencement speech by Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who spoke about Israel "murdering" Palestinian civilians. The school publicly disavowed Mohammed's comments under pressure.
As the school community learned of the prohibition on student commencement speakers, eight students filed a lawsuit last week, and on Monday, Archer said she was withdrawing from her speaking engagement.
"I cannot, as a leader of the nation's oldest guardian of free expression, participate in an event in which students believe that their voices are being excluded," said Archer. "I feel compelled to decline the invitation under the circumstances."
Two renowned authors also informed University of Southern California (USC) on Sunday that they will not speak at upcoming events due to the school's deployment of armed officers to arrest 93 student protesters in recent weeks and its decision to keep 2024 valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a Muslim supporter of Palestinian rights, from delivering a commencement address.
"To speak at USC in this moment would betray not only our own values, but USC's too," wrote C Pam Zhang and Safiya Noble. "We cannot overlook the link between recent developments and the ongoing genocide in Palestine."
"Our withdrawal is in no way a condemnation of USC's graduating class, who deserve to be celebrated; nor do we condemn the countless USC faculty, staff, students, and administrators whose views are not represented by university leadership's authoritarian decision-making," the authors added.
Zhang and Noble, who had been scheduled to speak at USC's doctoral and master's degree commencement ceremonies, called on speakers at the graduations of 38 USC satellite campuses "to join us by signing this letter; withdrawing from USC events; and supporting USC students, as well as thousands of students nationwide who deserve respect, not arrest and punishment by their own universities, for courageously speaking truth to power."
Last week, more than 2,100 academics from across the globe signed a statement expressing solidarity with student and faculty protesters and supporting an "academic and cultural boycott" of the school.
Former New Yorker editor Erin Overbey on Wednesday called on "all journalists of conscience" to boycott the Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered by Columbia and are set to be awarded next week. The NYPD threatened student journalists and Columbia School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb with arrest during its raid of Hamilton Hall this week.
"Can't wait for the president of Columbia University to tell my industry what's good journalism at the Pulitzers next week," said Matt Pearce, president of the Media Guild of the West. "Try not to trip over any hogtied student journalists while collecting your award."
While the Pulitzer Prize Board on Thursday put out a statement praising "the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation's college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk," it faced criticism for using passive voice when noting that the NYPD "was called onto campus" at Columbia.
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