The Fight Against Amazon: State of Play, 2025

May 21, 2025 | Press Releases

Amazon warehouse and delivery workers are organizing to win safer jobs, despite Trump appointing a former Amazon executive to lead OSHA.

• Four years after Amazon pledged to make the company “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” by cutting its total injury rate in half by 2025, a new analysis from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) shows that Amazon’s management has failed to deliver the safety improvements that it promised, and is nowhere near meeting its own injury reduction goals. In 2024, Amazon’s total injury rate was 80% higher than its target rate for 2025.

• After an 18-month investigation into Amazon’s “abysmal workplace safety practices,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee released a report titled, “The ‘Injury-Productivity Trade-off’: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses.” In the report, the Committee finds:

  • Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to make its warehouses seem safer than they actually are. Amazon warehouses internally recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023. In each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in other warehouses. More than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.
  • Contrary to its public claims, Amazon imposes speed and productivity requirements on workers, commonly called “rates.”
  • Amazon has studied the connection between speed requirements and worker injuries for years, but refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity.
  • Amazon actively discourages injured workers from receiving outside medical care, putting injured workers further at risk.
  • The company makes it extremely difficult for workers who need short-term or permanent workplace accommodations for work-related injuries and disabilities to access those accommodations.

“These findings are both infuriating and validating. It’s infuriating that we have sounded the alarm for so long and seen Amazon respond by denying our reality and minimizing our pain — all while growing an already serious injury crisis for the sake of their profits. Some people can go back to work after their injuries and some of them, like me, will never be able to work again because of this company’s mistreatment,” said Christine Manno, an Amazon STL8 worker and Missouri Workers Center member. “These findings getting published is the result of our organizing at STL8. My story would have never gotten this far had I not joined together with other Amazon employees, and none of us are backing down until we win the fight for safer work, higher pay, and a union.”

• In order to combat Amazon’s injury crisis, workers have won state-level legislation in:

  • California
  • New York
  • Minnesota
  • Washington

• Last December, the Teamsters launched a national strike against Amazon. The nationwide action followed Amazon’s repeated refusal to follow the law and bargain with the thousands of Amazon workers who organized with the Teamsters.

• On May Day, Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1, based at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island, New York, launched a campaign to make the warehouse safe for workers. You can learn more about the campaign, titled, “We Are Not Robots,” here.

• For #WorkerSafetyWeek2025, ALIGN NY and Amazon Teamsters and others called on state legislators to protect workers from heat, prevent workplace violence, and a strong implementation of the Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Act.

• This summer, a coalition of worker organizations including Make the Road New Jersey, is organizing to pass a heat standard bill in New Jersey, which would require employers to provide cool drinking water, give paid breaks in shade or air conditioning, and monitor workers for signs of heat illness. The coalition was inspired to fight for this bill after three Amazon workers died in New Jersey over the course of three weeks during the summer of 2022. In the absence of a federal heat standard, workers are fighting for heat protections for this summer and beyond.

Amazon tech workers are organizing to protect our climate and human rights

• Last year, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) released a report titled, “Burns Trust: The Amazon Unsustainability Report.” In it, Amazon workers find:

  • Amazon is moving in the wrong direction on its most important goal: net-zero emissions by 2040.
  • Amazon dramatically undercounts its carbon pollution.
  • Instead of practicing transparency, Amazon quietly deleted a goal it wasn’t on track to hit.
  • Despite claims that the company has reached 100% renewable energy, the reality on the ground is that its data centers are driving up demand for fossil fuels.
  • Amazon makes billions from selling tailored AI services to fossil fuel companies, helping them extract more oil and gas. By next year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) could be making as much as $9.6 billion annually from the oil and gas industry alone — which would be about 10% of AWS revenue.

• Ahead of Amazon’s Annual shareholder meeting this year, three former Amazon workers filed a shareholder resolution calling for transparency on Amazon executives’ plans for powering AI data centers with renewable energy. These former workers fear that Amazon’s history of misleading the public may worsen with Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos’ public embrace of the Trump administration, which has exited the Paris Agreement, the basis for Amazon’s voluntary “Climate Pledge.” Amazon fought and failed to have the resolution excluded from the proxy ballot, asking the SEC not to allow it.

“It’s deeply troubling that Amazon would want to hide this from shareholders and the public,” said Emily Cunningham, one of the resolution’s co-filers. “Our ask is very, very simple: we want to know how Amazon plans to keep its public climate commitments given its investment in AI and the massive amount of energy that will take. Google and Microsoft have admitted that their emissions will rise with AI, and we’re hearing crickets from Amazon. Talking with other tech workers, I also know many are worried that Bezos is publicly falling in line behind Trump and that his new loyalty will mean Amazon’s climate goals get squashed under its AI growth goals.”

• In 2021, Google and Amazon tech workers began to work together to end a 1.2 billion dollar tech contract with the Israeli government. Tech workers feared the contract, and their labor, would facilitate human rights abuses being committed by the Israeli government against Palestineans. Those fears have since been validated, and reporting has revealed Amazon’s role in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Statement from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft workers organizing with the No Tech For Apartheid and No Azure For Apartheid campaigns: “This weekend’s reporting from +972 Magazine breaks new ground in our understanding of Big Tech’s role in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and confirms what their own workers have long protested: Amazon Web Services enables the Israeli military to search for and store information about almost every single Palestinian in Gaza––giving Israel ongoing access to unprecedented amounts of information to power its genocide. In fact, Israeli military intelligence used data stored on Amazon Web Services ‘to provide ‘supplementary information’ ahead of airstrikes against suspected military operatives, some of which killed many civilians.’ The ease with which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft allow Israeli military intelligence access to data storage services to store and retrieve vast troves of intelligence data has been compared to the ease with which consumers around the world can “order from Amazon.”

• This year, Amazon’s board is fighting off a shareholder proposal, which would require an “independent, third-party assessment of the Board of Directors oversight of human rights risks associated with AI” in response to the human rights risks posed by military and police uses of artificial intelligence. Last year, the board advocated against a similar proposal that would require an audit of Amazon’s customer due diligence process, in light of contracts with entities that have a history of human rights abuses.

Amazon’s monopoly power is being challenged in the courts and in state houses

• There is growing momentum in states to address corporate consolidation in order to protect consumers and workers, revive local economies, and reduce the dominance of multinational corporations like Amazon.

  • New York
  • Minnesota
  • California

• Regardless of whether Trump’s FTC capitulates to corporate interests, 18 State Attorneys General are using their power to challenge Amazon’s through their ongoing joint lawsuit with the FTC against Amazon, which, if successful, would empower sellers and small businesses to do business with whom they choose, putting more money back in the pockets of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Just last year, the Attorney General in Arizona brought a separate suit accusing Amazon of unfair and deceptive practices. And, in January, the FTC published findings from an investigation into cloud partnerships, which scrutinizes Amazon’s “partnership” with AI firm Anthropic.

“Today’s action to break Amazon’s monopoly control over online commerce is great news for Americans. For too long Amazon has been allowed to maintain a stranglehold on the online market. It’s used its power to thwart competition, bleed small businesses dry, exploit workers, and take advantage of consumers. At the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we’ve long warned of the threat Amazon’s monopoly poses. Today, we applaud the FTC and its dedicated and valiant staff for taking action to end Amazon’s monopolization. The filing of this lawsuit is a victory for freedom and self-governance; it marks a crucial rekindling of public authority to check unaccountable private power,” stated Stacy Mitchell, Executive Director of Institute for Local Self-Reliance and founding member of the Athena Coalition.

• A new zine from Institute for Local Self Reliance, titled, “Resist Monopolies!: How to Fight Corporate Control and Support an Economy That Matters,” examines the expansive movement to reject monopoly control of our economy and democracy. In the zine, ILSR Senior Researcher Ron Knox details how workers, farmers, small businesses, and citizens are winning battles to reassert the collective power of people and local communities to write their own destinies. The zine highlights community organizing in New Jersey that stopped Amazon from building an air cargo hub in 2021, when the company refused to agree to labor and environmental standards.

Communities are pushing back on Big Tech’s AI-driven data center expansion, an area where Amazon is investing over $100 billion.

• Good Jobs First has developed two resources to help shed light on public subsidies going to Amazon from cities and states across the country:
  • First, Good Jobs First has documented over a decade of public subsidies Amazon.com and its subsidiaries have received. You can find the money Amazon has extracted from U.S. communities at their database, Amazon Tracker. As of this writing, GJF has documented $11.6 Billion and counting.
  • Second, in a new study titled, “Cloudy With A Loss of Spending Control: How Data Centers Are Endangering State Budgets,” Good Jobs First finds that ten states already lose more than $100 million per year to data center tax abatements. Texas loses more than $1 billion annually and Virginia loses almost as much. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of these tax breaks are Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet.
• Last year, in response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) request for comments on the country’s data center expansion strategy, 20+ groups, including the Athena Coalition, Piedmont Environmental Council, Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR), Public Citizen, Free Press, Good Jobs First, Kairos Action, People’s Action Institute, 350.org, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), submitted a comment highlighting the need for a new trajectory for energy and technology investments in order to serve the public interest. The groups urge the government to reject big tech’s bids for unchecked data center expansion, and instead take action to prioritize affordable, renewable energy for the public.

“The federal government should pump the brakes on the reckless expansion of AI data centers and demand more transparency,” said Ben Inskeep, Program Director at Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. “Secretive data centers owned by multi-trillion-dollar corporations are causing a massive build out of new gas plants in Indiana, undermining our clean energy transition and putting utility ratepayers and state taxpayers at enormous risk.”

• Around the country, people are pushing back against big tech’s data center expansion:

  • More than 25 organizations across Virginia, including Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), formed the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition to urge state lawmakers to study the cumulative effects of data center development across Virginia, and to institute several reforms for the industry. In 2024, several bills were introduced to the Virginia General Assembly thanks to direct legislative and community mobilization action from the VA Data Center Reform Coalition.
  • Citizens Action Coalition (CAC) called on the Indiana General Assembly to enact a moratorium on new “hyperscaler” data centers used to power artificial intelligence and commence a task force to study what policies should be adopted prior to lifting the moratorium. The coalition also organized against an unbalanced settlement agreement in NIPSCO’s pending rate case at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission that would target Hoosier families with larger rate increases so large and politically connected commercial and industrial customers can get smaller rate increases.
  • Policy Matters Ohio produced a report analyzing how indefensible tax breaks for data centers will cost Ohio. The group claims, “The state of Ohio has been especially generous with a tax break for companies operating data centers, the vast facilities that enable the internet services we all use. If the investments announced by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the past two years are all covered by the tax break, the state and localities could lose out on almost $1.6 billion in sales-tax revenue, with only modest job-creation to show for it.”

• A new resource from Kairos and MediaJustice, a community organizing guide against data centers, provides an overview of data centers’ costs to our communities, and an analysis of who data centers benefit––as well as a guide on how we can fight back.

“Through our data center work, we can build the power to take on the largest corporations, and win things like affordable, renewable energy, a just transition economy with high quality union jobs, where Big Tech pays for its own infrastructure, we break up large corporations as they monopolize industries, and put an end to corporations profiting from surveillance and military contracts,” stated Vincent Acuña, Campaign Coordinator for Worker Power and Corporate Accountability at PowerSwitch Action.

The Athena coalition is made up of 50+ organizations working together to break the dangerous stranglehold that corporations like Amazon have over our democracy, economy, and planet. If you are interested in learning more about any of these efforts, or in speaking to those involved, please reach out to Jane Chung at press@athenaforall.org.