Amazon’s Pay to Play
By 
For Amazon, this “Who’s the boss?” arrangement offers a liability shield against complaints both involving workers (auto accidents) and brought by them (wage theft). It’s also made it much simpler for the company to avoid negotiating with drivers who want to organize — or at least that was the case until it parted ways with Battle-Tested Strategies. In 2023, while Amazon was winding down its business with the company, Ervin’s staff signed up to unionize with the Teamsters, setting off a yearslong legal battle to prove that Amazon was legally their boss along with Ervin (what’s known as a joint employer). The eventual goal: becoming Amazon’s first US contract drivers to be deemed its employees, and the nation’s first workers to force the company to bargain with them collectively.
The drivers’ odds were always long. Four years after employees at an Amazon warehouse in New York City voted to organize, no negotiations have taken place, and Amazon is asking a federal court to override a series of rulings requiring the company to come to the table. But until this spring, the Palmdale drivers were making landmark progress. Even after President Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term last year, the US government kept arguing that Amazon was the boss of Ervin’s workers, and that it was obligated to negotiate with them. Then in April, the government moved to end the case on terms favorable to Amazon, under orders from Trump’s newly appointed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, previously an outside attorney for the company. The NLRB declined to comment on the settlement.
Whatever happens next, the trial has gone on long enough to open an unprecedented window into the extent of Amazon’s control over its supposed subcontractors. Businessweek used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain thousands of pages of confidential company records secured by the US government via the case. They lay bare Amazon’s intimate and intensive regulation of workers it insists aren’t its employees, including governing which drivers DSPs can hire, when they work, where they drive, what they say, how they smell and much more. Among the new details the records reveal are the extent to which Amazon emphasizes that drivers are expected to act as ambassadors to its customers; the plethora of ways it tracks drivers’ progress and performance, marking in red places where it believes they’ve lingered too long and showing each DSP owner which of their employees it rates the worst; and the scripts and gag rules it gives DSPs about talking to drivers, customers, vendors and the public.
“They’re control freaks, because it’s central to their business model,” says David Weil, the US Department of Labor’s head of wage and hour enforcement during the Obama administration. “If you are that deeply involved, congratulations, you have responsibility for the employment relationship.” Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work under the law, says Weil, who’s now a professor of social policy and economics at Brandeis University. He says he worries that Amazon’s apparent victory in the NLRB case, in spite of evidence demonstrating that its control over the operations of its subcontractors is historically extreme, will open the door to other companies micromanaging workers to a similar degree even as they abdicate the responsibilities of an employer. “It will become more and more of a model, to the extent that companies like Amazon are allowed to create this illusion,” Weil says.
Now, the idea that Bezos can’t pay his workers or treat them like human beings is laughable. But this is like telling Jay Gould to pay his workers a wage they can live on. Sure, he could. But why would he because fuck the workers. Trump’s NLRB will let Bezos do whatever he wants. The least he could do is to do his part to kill American democracy in return.