Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Riverside walked out early Tuesday morning, launching their unionization drive with the Teamsters and calling on the company to improve working conditions and increase pay.
“They’re working for, arguably, one of the wealthiest companies on the face of the planet,” Randy Korgan, director of the Teamsters’ Amazon Division and secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 1932, said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “And it’s pretty incredible the working conditions they got to work under, and the company’s not even paying people enough to buy a home in the region.”
The demonstration, supported by the Teamsters, started at about 2 a.m. Tuesday when employees at the DJT6 facility at March Air Reserve Base walked off the job during the overnight shift change. Others, including warehouse workers from Palmdale, joined a picket line later in the morning outside the facility that lasted about five hours. The group also prevented delivery trucks from leaving the facility for about an hour.
“It was to show our coworkers who haven’t heard anything about [the unionization effort] how big the support is and for them to join us as well,” Mechelle Perez, who works at the facility, said in an interview with The Record. “It was also to show the company that we’re united, that our coworkers think the same and that we want to make some changes in the warehouse and they need to listen to us.”
Amazon said fewer than 1% of the facility’s employees participated in the demonstration, which it said did not have a huge impact on the delivery center’s daily operations.
“Today’s demonstration by the Teamsters is another example of their continuing illegal efforts to intimidate workers, block entry and exit to our facilities and interfere with our operations,” Eileen Hards, Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement to The Riverside Record. “Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union. They always have.”
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According to the company, the average base hourly wage is more than $23 for its U.S. fulfillment and transportation employees with total compensation, which includes benefits, of $30 per hour. The company also said that it would be reducing entry-level healthcare costs and copays in 2026, making healthcare more affordable for its employees and their families.
“The fact is we already provide much of what the Teamsters are requesting including safe and inclusive workplaces, competitive pay, health benefits on day one, and opportunities for career growth,” Hards said. “While the Teamsters continue to violate the law and mislead the public, our teams remain focused on doing what they do best: delivering for customers.”
Korgan, who has spent more than three decades organizing workers in the Inland Empire, said it was a “disappointing dynamic” when the employees of a company valued at more than $2 trillion cannot afford to live where they work.
“I’ve watched this area go from a very working class area to now being a very exploited working class area,” he said. “Workers just want to come to work, do their job every single day and these corporations are just trying to exploit the living daylights out of them, and then they try to prevent them from exercising the rights that they have in this country.”
According to the Teamsters, those who participated in the action would spend the rest of the week educating their coworkers about the unionization effort and getting them to sign union cards.
“It’s absolutely amazing to watch the courage of these workers today walk off the job, look at one of the biggest corporations on the planet and say, ‘We’re not going to be afraid of you. We’re going to take control,’” Korgan said.
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