Amazon built an internal system called “Atlas” that assigns every warehouse a score between 100 and 900. A hundred means workers are organizing. Nine hundred means they’re not. Machine learning models crunch daily sentiment data to predict which buildings will unionize next, sort them into tiers, and deploy what the company calls “empathetic listening” before anyone can get to a card signing. Your break room conversations are a signal. Your desire for a living wage is a risk metric on a dashboard in Seattle.
Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility voted to form a union in April 2022. Four years later, Amazon still refuses to sit down and negotiate. The NLRB ordered them to bargain this past April. Amazon’s legal response was to argue that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional. A trillion-dollar company’s strategy against five thousand warehouse workers is to claim the federal agency protecting labor rights shouldn’t exist. That’s not a legal position. That’s a confession.