Amazon workers strike across seven facilities at peak of holiday shopping season
An Amazon delivery truck passes people holding signs and marching during a strike by Teamsters union members at an Amazon facility in Alpharetta, Georgia, Dec. 19, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage | Reuters
Amazon workers across seven facilities in New York, Georgia, California and Illinois went on strike Thursday to lobby for better benefits, higher wages and safer working conditions.
The strike, organized by members of the Teamsters union, is intended to pressure Amazon to come to the negotiating table and avoid disruptions during the peak of the holiday shopping season. The union had previously given Amazon until Sunday to agree to bargaining dates for a contract.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
In a statement to CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson said the Teamsters have been on a yearlong campaign to “intentionally mislead the public.” While the union says it represents thousands of employees and drivers, the protesters at the sites are “almost entirely outsiders,” Amazon said.
“The truth is that they were unable to get enough support from our employees and partners and have brought in outsiders to harass and intimidate our team, which is inappropriate and dangerous,” the company said, adding that it’s “continuing to focus on getting customers their holiday orders.”
A representative for the Teamsters didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s inquiry about whether outsiders are participating in the strike.
The Teamsters website says that nearly 10,000 Amazon workers have joined the organization. That represents less than 1% of the company’s workforce of 1.53 million, as of Dec. 31, 2023. The union said Thursday’s campaign is the largest strike against Amazon in American history.
Amazon has long opposed unions among its workforce, but efforts to organize started materializing in 2022, when warehouse workers on New York’s Staten Island voted to join a union. Amazon had aggressively fought unionization efforts, so it was a stinging defeat for the company.
In June, employees in the Amazon Labor Union, which spearheaded the Staten Island movement, voted to affiliate with the Teamsters after struggling to negotiate a contract with Amazon.
— CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed to this report.
WATCH: How two friends formed Amazon’s first U.S. union and what’s next
Technology
Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’
Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.
Figure AI
Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”
Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”
The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.
In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”
The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.
Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.
The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.
Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.
Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.
The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.
Read the filing here:
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