Backlash over Amazon’s return to office comes as workers demand higher wages

Amazon currently faces disgruntled workers in every direction.

Office workers are raging against CEO Andy Jassy's return to office mandate, Fortune reported—which came just as a leaked document reportedly showed that Amazon is also planning to gut management, Business Insider reported. Drivers by the hundreds are flocking to join a union to negotiate even better work conditions, CNBC reported, despite some of the biggest concessions in Amazon's history. And hundreds more unionized warehouse workers are increasingly banding together nationwide to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage. On Wednesday, workers everywhere were encouraged to leave Jassy a voicemail elevating workers' demands for a $25 minimum wage.

Putting on the pressure

This momentum has been building for years after drivers unionized in 2021. And all this collective fury increasingly appears to be finally pressuring Amazon into negotiating better conditions for some workers.

Just last week, Amazon ponied up $2.1 billion—its "biggest investment yet"—to improve driver safety and increase drivers' wages.

Unionizing warehouse workers told Ars that they're seeking a similar investment from Amazon, which currently pays on average a $20.50 minimum wage.

"We work at a breakneck pace," Christine Manno, an Amazon Fulfillment Center worker at Amazon site STL8 in St. Louis, Missouri, who was injured and never expects to work again, told Ars. "We put smiles on the billionaire's faces, and we feel it's prime time for a real raise for the employees. There's too many of us struggling with food and housing, yet Andy Jassy took home over $14,000 an hour last year and Amazon is making billions in profit."

On Wednesday, Amazon seemed to finally bend to the warehouse workers' pressure, announcing a compromise on wage increases. The company said it was investing $2.2 billion to raise the base salaries of hourly fulfillment workers to "more than $22 an hour, and more than $29 an hour including benefits," Reuters reported. Amazon's spokesperson told Ars that STL8 workers' starting wage "increased to $19 per hour coupled with our industry-leading benefits" and claimed that the company's "biggest ever investment" in fulfillment workers was simply "part of an annual process where we review wages and benefits to ensure they stay competitive—and in many cases industry-leading."

But while workers claimed the victory, they're not going to sit back and take the pay bump. An STL8 worker on the organizing committee with Manno, Ash Judd, told Ars that workers "made this $1.50 raise happen through our tireless organizing, and we'll keep fighting until we reach $25."

Because of recent gains and the increasingly dire economic plight of workers, Amazon workers likely won't be easing off the e-commerce giant any time soon. Some office workers told Fortune they are seeking other remote work to avoid returning to the office, threatening to "soft quit" and claiming that Amazon is going "backwards" with a stricter office policy than pre-COVID times. “This is a layoff in disguise,” one apparent worker complained on Reddit. “Return to the office or you’re fired and we don’t have to pay any severance or unemployment.”

With so many workers upset, it could now be a question of when Amazon will cave to their growing demands—not if—according to Beth Gutelius, the research director of the University of Illinois Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development.

"Research shows that the presence of collective bargaining agreements creates upward pressure on wages and working conditions, both in facilities that are unionized and those that are not," Gutelius told Ars. "Based on that evidence, I would expect working conditions at Amazon to improve."

Gutelius co-authored a May report documenting the financial insecurity of Amazon warehouse workers by surveying more than 1,400 across 42 states.

Amazon disputes the survey results as "deeply flawed," CBS News reported, but Gutelius found that more than half of Amazon warehouse workers can't pay their bills, and approximately half reported experiencing food and housing insecurity. And for warehouse workers like Manno, who frequently must take time off to deal with health issues or injuries, there's even greater economic insecurity, her survey found.

To fight for living wages, warehouse workers nationwide have been organizing since this summer, protesting through "marches on the boss" and demanding $25 an hour and better safety conditions. Most recently, Manno joined a crowd of other STL8 warehouse workers Wednesday to march on the boss and deliver a petition on worker demands with more than 800 signatures, following in the footsteps of hundreds of California workers last September and hundreds in New York in July.

Manno told Ars that STL8 workers are banding together in "significantly higher numbers" since 2022—growth sparked the year after Amazon drivers initially unionized. Workers elsewhere in California, Minnesota, Chicago, and Atlanta supported the STL8 march Wednesday by wearing stickers and circulating petitions in their own regions. Additionally, civil rights, faith, and labor organizations have piled on, supporting workers with their own letter to Amazon on Wednesday.

"We're not the only ones fighting," Manno told Ars. "People are struggling to eat and pay rent and pay their bills."

Amazon workers: $25 an hour is the floor

In 2022, Jassy said that a minimum wage of $25 per hour at Amazon was "unreasonable," Fortune reported, claiming that "there is a limit to the economics you can pay and have a business that can be profitable."

But Amazon recently became the fifth company to ever reach a $2 trillion stock market valuation, NPR reported, while Gutelius told Ars that "warehouse workers have experienced wage stagnation for decades." Things are so bad that Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggests that real wages in 2023 "were 12 percent lower than they were in 1990—despite explosive growth in employment," Gutelius said. Amazon workers demanding $25 per hour today is perhaps exactly what they are owed, the data suggests.

"A $25 an hour wage would place workers in the range of what they would be making had wages kept pace with inflation, which is not an unreasonable expectation," Gutelius told Ars.

Beyond simply keeping pace with inflation, Amazon should consider warehouse workers' demands, Gutelius' report suggested, because Amazon workers face more financial hurdles than other warehouse workers at other companies.

In her report, Gutelius noted that Amazon is "by far the single largest employer of warehouse workers" in the US, with an injury rate "higher than that of other employers in the warehousing industry" (which the Department of Justice suspects may be even higher).

The modest wage increases that Amazon awards these workers, Gutelius' report said, tend to only come through longer tenure at the company, which is harder to attain for the 69 percent of workers like Manno who must take time off when they're injured on or exhausted by the job.

"Modest increases still leave many far short of achieving genuine economic security," Gutelius' report warned.

Injury claims going nowhere

Manno started working at Amazon about five years ago, agreeing to hang by a harness from a truck and sling packages into the back. Within her first two years, the repetitive task of lifting heavy boxes caused carpal tunnel syndrome in her hands that eventually required surgery. But her worst injuries came in 2022 when she hurt her back and neck after she said she repeatedly warned management about the very safety issues that caused those injuries.

"I had told them multiple times about safety issues I was concerned with, and it went ignored multiple times, and ultimately, I was the one that got injured with the same things I was reporting to them as being a safety hazard," Manno told Ars.

Manno has been unable to return to work since the 2022 injuries and said she had "a lot of trouble dealing with worker's comp." She is currently in limbo, waiting on unpaid medical leave until December without health insurance, while Amazon makes a long-term disability decision that she does not necessarily expect to go her way. Because Amazon already denied her claim once, Manno told Ars that she has "learned not to expect anything positive."

Currently, Manno is on food stamps, just like 23 percent of Amazon workers that Gutelius surveyed. Taking unpaid time off, Gutelius said, "correlated with different forms of economic insecurity" for Amazon workers, which carries "a far higher toll than previously recognized." And financial insecurity among Amazon workers, Gutelius found, disproportionately impacts female and minority workers, as well as households with kids.

"I’ve lost out on thousands of dollars of income," Manno said. "I haven’t gotten a paycheck since my short-term disability—which only covered 60 percent of my regular pay—ended in January. I’m awaiting approval for long-term disability, which I applied for back in January. I’ve maxed out my credit cards and drained my 401k. I’m on food stamps. I just got approved for Medicaid. At one point I started a GoFundMe just to make rent. I’ve never been in the position of having to ask for money, but the alternative was homelessness. When you’re forced into that position, you do what it takes to survive.”

A wage increase would make a tangible difference

For warehouse workers, an approximately 25 percent wage hike could be a game changer, Brian Phillips, a warehouse worker in Illinois, told Ars. He currently makes less than the average warehouse worker pay of $20.50 after working at Amazon since 2021, and his family struggles to afford basic things like school supplies while living paycheck to paycheck.

Phillips and Manno told Ars that it was encouraging to see subcontracted drivers win a 7 percent wage increase to start earning $22 per hour this year. But warehouse workers want more. An Atlanta warehouse worker, Karen Tucker, told Ars that increases to a $22 wage were a "step forward" but "far from sufficient."

"While it shows that Amazon is responding to pressure and making adjustments, this change alone doesn’t address the broader need for fair and equitable compensation across all roles within the company," Tucker told Ars. "Our goal of $25/hr for all workers remains crucial, as it’s not just about meeting a specific wage target but ensuring that every worker receives fair pay for their essential contributions."

Phillips agreed that workers deserve more.

"$25 an hour is really the floor of what we're asking," Phillips told Ars, confirming that many workers at his facility have been inspired by recent action and, like Manno's facility, "we're getting bigger every day, gathering our strength in numbers."

Gutelius said she cannot predict how Amazon will respond to workers' demands for a $25 minimum wage. But as more workers join the fight, the demand list just gets longer.

"Amazon treats us like numbers, but we’ve made it a point to get to know each other as co-workers and friends," Amazon workers said in July.

Phillips told Ars that organizing is also happening online in forums like Reddit, attracting even more workers to join.

On top of higher wages, workers also want Amazon to end a wage cap that workers marching Wednesday said "is designed by Amazon to push workers out of the job, and create an unstable, high-turnover workforce" when "tied with arduous working conditions on the job." Manno said that workers are also fighting for better safety on the job, while Phillips said he wants Amazon to pay a larger portion of worker health benefits.

Gutelius' report suggested that "the relationship between work-related pain and injury and workers’ economic challenges" showed "for the first time, a hidden cost of working at Amazon."

Nearly half of workers "are being injured during peak times, like Prime Days," Manno told Ars. "That's just way too high."

Tucker told Ars that Amazon needs a “more comprehensive approach to improving conditions and compensation for everyone.” The most recent wage boost for fulfillment employees “highlights the progress we’ve made but also underscores the need for continued advocacy and action to achieve true equity.”