 Hello, hello, hello. I'm Meroen Kalili and this is Frontline, a show on DMTV about people who confront power to figure out how they do it. And in today's interview, which was recorded on November 18th, 2022, I speak with Agnieszka Mroz. She's a worker in an Amazon factory in Poland, and she's also a union organizer. And Agnieszka and I had a wide-ranging chat about the difficult working conditions in Amazon that led to the creation of the union, about tactics on the shop floor that the union uses, what works, what doesn't, and the dirty tricks that Amazon uses to push them back. And why the struggle against Amazon is really the place for any activist citizen to fight against the brutalities of capitalism more generally. I hope you'll enjoy this interview. I certainly learned a lot from it. Here's Agnieszka. So my name is Agnieszka Mroz. I'm connecting with you from Poland, actually West Poland. Amazon came to Poland in 2014, and I'm inside the warehouse since then. What exactly are you doing there? What's your role? Right now I'm working in a packing department, but Amazon shifts and rotates, and workers a lot. So I did working in docking. I did dry forklift. So we started in 2014 with austerity workers. Some of them actually worked in Amazon warehouses in France and Germany, were trained there. And when they came back, they quickly realized the working conditions are worse in Poland. And because they saw unions in actions in France and Germany, they understood that that's the value, that this is our weakness workers. So they said, yes, let's start organizing together in Poland. Could I ask you to describe what is it that's worse about the working conditions exactly in Poland compared to the other countries where Amazon is present? If you go inside the warehouse, most of the warehouses in Europe look exactly the same. So what is worse? It's not really the type of work we're doing, because we're doing exactly the same work like in other countries. But it's about legal frame, which is making our organizing different. So first of all, we have much lower wages than Western European wages, of course. Secondly, we work 24 hours, seven days a week, and we are not paid overtime for working Sunday and Saturday. We work 10 hours shifts also at night. And that's the difference. And then the very important difference, which is making our organizing more difficult is a very restricted strike laws in Poland, because in order to organize a legal strike in Poland, the law says that you need to vote like a ballot of 50% of workers who are going to vote on strike. But it's counted in the legal entity of Amazon Fulfillment Poland, which is 30,000 workers. So in order to organize a legal strike, we would need 15,000 votes. That's a bit unrealistic, but that's an absurd law we have in Poland. When you started working at Amazon, what were the existing unions, retail unions, etc, that you could join? And why the decision to make your own union rather than connect your struggle to that of workers from other retail companies? Amazon is anti-union in general. So they don't want to play this social dialogue. They haven't played that model of social dialogue unionism with the big unions, because they just don't want to have unions in the shop floor. They call us third parties, but we are not third parties. We are workers in this shop floor, so they cannot tell us that we have our own interests, that we don't work in the interests of workers. This is the strategy Amazon was really exploring against big business unions in the Western Europe, but also in the US. I interviewed Chris Malls on this same program actually about two years ago, and he was describing some of the tactics and the protests, the war counts, the strikes they were organizing in Staten Island and New York. Tell me about some of the tactics that you've used in your struggle against Amazon. What works, what didn't work, why didn't it work, etc? I tried to explain before that the strike in Poland is very restrictive, but it doesn't mean we don't want to use law as a tool. Right now we are in the process of collecting votes and a strike referendum, but we use it more strategically. We would have to collect 15,000 votes to have a right to strike in Poland, but what laws allows us is right now traveling around all 11 warehouses in Poland and be present in the canteens, in front of the warehouse, talk to workers. We also use it as a strategy of permanent, really permanent pickets that we are there in the canteen. We talk to the workers during the breaks and not only with before work, after work, so we have access to the warehouse. This is very important, and we hope we can get as many votes as possible, but what is the value itself is just having access to our colleagues, which Amazon usually is very strict. That's one from one site, one warehouse to another warehouse, usually you don't have access. This strike that you're now collecting votes for, this is the strike, the international action for Make Amazon Pay action for Black Friday, on the 25th of November. This is the, we have one demand right now. It's just about higher wages. So we demand six Polish swathes more. And of course, it is a part of the Make Amazon Pay campaign, because we want Amazon Pay, we want them to pay us higher wages. But of course, it's also refers to the wage difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. So we believe which we deserve more. We believe also that the wages Amazon offered this year from three to seven percent in different countries in Europe are totally not answering the inflation, growing inflation and our needs as workers to pay for our families. So we believe that wages should be higher. And this is the first free condition. And in this way, yes, Amazon, we have to make Amazon pay that as well. Within last eight years, we experimented with different forms of organizing and struggling. The most powerful actions were taken by workers on the shop floor level, which were response like a direct response to some restrictions or some new measurements introduced by Amazon. Just example, Amazon once came to the workers in the ship department. This is the guys who load trucks on the gates. And they said that if you violate some regulations, you will be punished and you will not allowed to drive a forklift anymore. But they were very not objective. So it actually, it was a manager who could decide who was going to pick punish or not. So what workers did they collectively refused? So they kind of gave back the driving license for a forklift collectively or workers said, okay, so I'm not going to drive forklift if you're going to punish me on this non objective grant. So actually, the answer of the company was immediate. There was a top manager coming, they started to negotiate negotiate about this and they won. Another example of this kind of actions on the shop floor were action by pickers when the pickers were forced to do obligatory overtime. Can you explain what a picker does? Picker in the in the old school warehouses, when there when there's no robotics, they actually walk around all this little corridors when items are stocked on the shelves and then using by scanner, they find the item and put it on the trolley and send items to the parking department. So actually, they are those who collect items from the shelves. And usually they collect 12 or 15 items to a box and send the box to parking department. And because pickers were forced to do obligatory overtime, which meant shift 12 hours shift on the night shift, they said, this is too much, we not agree with it. And they started to send one or two or three items to the box and send it to the parking department. And if you do if you do it collectively, it's just paralyzing the conveyor belts just doesn't provide puckers with enough items. So this is kind of the most powerful actions that comes from understanding that working collectively in the different departments in the time when there's anger and people understand that it's too much, they directly affect the production inside the warehouse. Did you ever get to the point where you were doing things that actually affected the customer and would create a customer services problem for Amazon? Like I don't know, like a package that has half of what they bought in it when they received it. Has it ever escalated to that point? It escalated to the point that they were not able to send trucks on that shift, you know, on that on time. It's difficult for us to say how it affects individual company by individual clients, but it definitely affects the operation of the warehouse. And so on other forms of actions we supported, we've been part of was a blockage where spectacular blockage during Black Friday and the peak of 2020. When the supporters, they just blocked the zebra, we're walking around zebra crossing in front of the one warehouse and blocked the gate for trucks to coming in and out of the warehouse for at least three hours, which was coordinated with leafletting inside the warehouse, inside the canteen, talking about their demands and talking about that again, we make Amazon paid this way. And then we do a lot of leafletting actions. So just there, we have a workers newspaper, we circulate leaflets regularly. So we organize the smaller picket lines quite regularly, just inform workers about their rights or give example of that there's a strike in Italy, for example, and we should all know about this, we should learn from this inspiration. So there were other forms, there were also an action called safe package, which was about providing a particular tips to workers in different department, how they can work slowly according to the health and safety rules. And that leaflet was part of Amazon workers international campaign was translated into German, French, Polish, and distributed on Black Friday at the same time in different countries. Work slowly, in other words, I'm trying to understand, what do you mean exactly by work slowly? You mean not overexert yourself to create people who are exhausted on the job? Amazon is putting a lot of pressure on workers to make a particular target of items per hour. So they would say you have to make 200 or 300 boxes per hour, depending on the department you work. So there we have a lot of targets, and you have to really know what if it's small items, big items, how many per hour you have to do, but you have to do that, they expect you to do that. If you don't do that, you the manager would come and would give you a negative feedback for productivity. So this is the reality we're facing on daily basis. But on the other hand, they have a lot of rules that contradict with this pressure on the targets, because they would, for example, tell you that you have to look on every item from six sides to make sure that the customer is not getting an object, which is a destroyed in a way, or something wrong with that. Or they would say you also have to follow a lot of health and safety rules, especially in COVID, you know, that was very visible because they expected us to not approach each other for two meters and still putting pressure on their productivity. But we wanted to use it as during the struggles says, okay, if they tell us drink water to not be dehydrated, it means that you have a right to go to get your bottle during work, or you have a right to go to the toilet without being harassed by managers, you have a right to clean your station, you have a right exactly to carefully look on every item from six sides to make sure we deliver for the clients what they want in a health way. So if you organize this kind of actions collectively, not individually, it does affect companies. And this is what's kind of form of resistance saying, yes, we should be treated better. What you've just described, I'm sure it will sound to many ears like almost insane that in 2022, it sounds like modern slavery in this situation, I mean, rattling the how often you can go to the bathroom, trying to have it both ways by telling you that you've got to check the item thoroughly, but you've got to meet the target, otherwise you get penalized. Tell me how that feels for you, the situation that you're in? Actually, organizing with our colleagues help us to survive this reality of work. So because the company wants you to work on your individual productivity, to not approach, not talk to other workers, to just focus on work, work, work. And they say, make history. And what we say, we don't want to be treated like this because you are a human being. So we have a right to, for example, talk to our colleagues at work as well. And we are not robots. This is, of course, the many years slogans of the labor movement at Amazon. But we are not robots, but we are also not slaves. Workers don't like to be called like this. There's a lot of this patronizing approach also in the mainstream media, when they present us, or it's a digital slavery, it's like algorithmic hell, all the descriptions that's quite sexy in the media. But they don't call to workers because the workers inside, we have our dignity. And we don't want to be called slaves because if you call yourself slaves, it actually cuts you from the perspective that you can organize and fight for improvement. And it dehumanizes you, which I take your point. We rather to focus on this that by making this connection, organizing at the warehouse is all about making connections to others, to break this isolation and just to think together what we can do about it. And actually, that makes our 10 hour shifts possible to survive. Because if you don't want to be another algorithm or appendix to the algorithm, and you are a human being, then you have to find your community, your group, that when manager is coming to you on one-on-one talks, they love this one-on-one talks, and we say, no, we are not one-on-one. We have our friend who is a picker working next to me, or we have a shop steward from the union who can come, you can, or after work, you'll call the union phone that you can complain. You just can share your story, you know, what that is, you are not alone. So one-on-one talks are great for isolating the problem rather than letting other people in on what's wrong. Yes, exactly. That's why Amazon is so open and union because they know that in the union, we are not one against them, that we are building this collective force. And of course, they do respond. That's why they do repress our us. We had two shops steward of our union fired last year. They, as I said before, they put us in different departments. They make our life harder and harder. Every time when a shop steward, it's like, we got a lot of disciplinary letters as well, you know, so they let us know they watch us, you know. But it also means that they are afraid of what we are doing and that we are kind of doing our job good. Help me understand this. You've talked up to now in terms of us and them, the management and the workers. I presume you've got good, respectful relationships with some people in the management in terms of that there is like a bit of give and take. Or is it just antagonistic every day that you're coming in like what the hell's going to happen today? I mean, take me through like what's the psychology of it in a typical working day for you? I would say it's very antagonistic to the extent that a lot of my colleagues, when you go by bus and you see the warehouse in a plow jink, a lot of my colleagues would say, oh my god, I have a stomach pain. I don't want to go there. Like again, I'm here. Like people just feel this pressure on their bodies from the very beginning. And also most of the workers would not work longer than three or four years because your body is so much that you look for any kind of alternative. If you find an alternative, you just go. But I want to add that the structure at Amazon is very flat. So most of the people, it's a warehouse workers and leaders and managers and very few of them. So you don't have this strong hierarchy between regular workers. We're all making the same wage. We are working the same hours. So in the warehouse, when there is like 5,000 workers, 80, 90% would be on the same job in the contract. So it's very flat the structure. But also if you were working inside you also, we call it exploitation with smile because the managers would not shout at you. They would come to you and with smile, they will tell you, how can I help you? You're not making right. Like you are slowing down today. So they are not antagonistic in your face. But actually, you know all the tools kind of the way they measure our work through scanners and computers, it just means total control of our speed. And if you slow down, they would smile, come to you and say, oh, here is a disciplinary letter because we noticed that you didn't work for eight minutes here, seven minutes there, 20 minutes, not even 20, like five minutes here. And then they take your day off and accuse you that you made additional 40 minutes break in your time because they add up times when they see that you didn't scan at that time. And it's all made by computers and programs. So actually, you can maybe talk nicely to your manager, but you know that manager will come to you and give you this disciplinary letters because the system print them out. And this is his job, right, to discipline you when you slow down. So this is, as I said, wage is a problem, low wages, not totally compatible with the huge profits we're making, but also the second demand is about not treating class like robots and not controlling us through robots because we don't want to be controlled by this algorithmous way because this makes our work hell. But there may be some people watching this that say, well, this sounds awful. It's wonderful that Amishka is pushing for better conditions for her and her colleagues. But if it's so terrible, she's been there since 2014, why does she stay? Surely there are other things that she can do. I mean, perhaps you can shed a little light on your own, if you're willing. You're in a personal situation that makes this your choice of work. Okay. So I want to say that we talked to our colleagues. We know our stories. You have a lot of time at work to ask, where did you work before? What would you like to work? And a lot of my colleagues say that we worked in a smaller warehouse or smaller factory and the conditions were even worse. So they have this experience, but it doesn't mean they don't like the conditions we are working in now. They say we have to stay here, not quit and look for alternatives because we have a saying in Polish that you can from a little rain end up under the pipe with a strong water coming on your head. I'm not sure if that's clear in English, but actually we say it's better to stay here and improve. And we hope that because Amazon is so big and so influential, that the important struggle for improving the conditions of all workers is in this hubs and logistics points. It's not only Amazon, there are a few more companies that actually try to set up conditions in the whole sectors. So if we are there and we want to learn how they discipline workers, what kind of tools they use and how they improve the improvements, we also would understand what's happening in the whole sector. And we can of course organize, try to organize with workers from different other warehouses, other companies. So this is this kind of liberal approach. If you don't like it, find a better place. But some of my colleagues work, 15 workplaces like this. There's like special economic designs in Poland I explained before. So when most of the workplaces look like this and we are millions of Polish people working in this condition. So I believe as that the challenge for labor movement and for us as labor activists is not to look for individual solutions, individual careers, but to go back to these places, even find a job, if you can, even like for a shorter time. I think that's also an exciting task for newcomers and the labor movement, especially young people, because you really, it's good to read about how capitalism is working. It's really good to know theory, but it's really life changing experience. If you go into factories, if you go to warehouses and try to yourself break this isolation alienation, you can read about in very important books for us as labor movement. But you really have to experience this to really take and take this challenge of changing the world, fighting capitalist exploitation for real. So that's the storm. Yeah. And Amazon being such a such a big company and such an important company and such a prominent company. I mean, that's where the fight really is. And you get first hand knowledge of all these mechanisms of exploitation or control, whichever way you look at it, the digital, the digital surveillance and so on. You start to understand how they control the workers, because probably other places are much further behind in terms of other manufacturing companies or retail companies, further behind in terms of how they manage these. And from that experience, actually, you can join the movement because the movement is growing, right? You can really see like, if you look at the longer perspective, you know, Amazon is operating since the 90s in Europe, 98 was the first warehouse. It took really time for us to for the labor movement to start doing things. But there's so many exciting new initiatives that happening in the last years. Look at the situation in the US, but not on the multiles. There's grassroots movements. They're actually in every country in Europe, when the Amazon is, you can find people trying to different strategies. We are different, right? So there's some bigger unions, smaller unions, direct action people, like more social movements, people who would try to build coalition between labor movements and environmental movements and all this. So there's so many things you can, so many points where you can became a member of this movement. Of course, we say as workers, that the most powerful is this position to be inside and talk to other workers and build this movement from the inside. But I would say for those who starting in the labor movement, I think it's really exciting also challenge, right? Because you can get in and also easily connect right now with this networks. We are connected. You can find our unions, different unions in social media. You can read about us. Media is willing to ask us for interview, because Amazon is a big player. So there is a space. We can talk about our struggles. And I think this movement can make a difference and it's growing. It's growing and make Amazon play and these actions at Black Fridays. They're also one leg we stand on. Well, I would like to speak about those actions in a second, just quickly, but just help me understand one thing. How many people, you've got 10,000 people in the warehouse in Poland. Is that right? About 10,000, 10,000 permanent? It's changing, of course, depending on the peak time, let's say 7,000, 8,000, altogether 30,000 workers in Poland in 11. How many of those people are active in the union that's specific to Amazon? In my union, there's 1,000 member right now. But because of the high turnover, people come and go. Actually, we had three times more who went through this experience of doing things together. Sometimes they were temp workers. They joined us. They took part in the actions. They distributed leaflets. And also the hope is that when they meet us, like when we do things together and we have this experience of breaking this alienation and isolation, they go to other workplaces. It's all about circulating the struggle, right? There's also a good starting point. So we don't see this is our defeat, that this 4,000 who went through our ranks are gone. We try to track. We try to follow them. And those who are active, they are now track drivers. They work in delivery sectors. They work in other factories. They call us for advice. And this is the way we're networking with other people from other workplaces. You talked earlier about how Amazon uses digital tools to monitor its workers and how long they're working, et cetera. But you guys have also got digital tools of your own to be able to organize. Can you speak a little bit about that? What are the applications or services that you use to organize your efforts? I said before that nearly every warehouse in Europe and Amazon warehouse looks the same, right? So it's for workers coming from different countries who don't speak the same language. And usually, you know, when you're a warehouse worker, most of people don't speak any foreign language. So when we meet as a part of Amazon workers international, sometimes we need six, seven translators because we speak different languages. But actually, there's Amazon slang, you know, each worker knows speaker, packers, and all these surveillance tools. They use this in English and all warehouse there. So it's easy to talk to us and understand each other what we are talking about with a slight help of either translators or some tools. Yeah, of course, we do use social media to organize meetings online to talk to each other, automatic translations. There's no one platform, but definitely, I would say we are well connected. And it's the information about that in one warehouse in Italy, there's something happening or there was a continuous occupations this summer in the UK. So we very soon knew about this and not through their media, but we, because we knew where to ask and then understand how workers organize, how they organize these continuous occupations this summer, what was the results, what were kind of repression and so on. So I think also because Amazon is really a global company, right? Most of the decisions are not made on the national levels and most of the policies are the same. So when they introduce some policy that, for example, we are allowed to have mobile phones right now after tornado in the US, so actually they changed the policy after this disaster there where workers didn't have phones and were not informed about conditions. That law was introduced in Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Italy at around the same time. So that also helped us to build international development because we have the same problems and the companies answering to our demands also at one level. Okay. I'm conscious of time here, but I would just like to talk a little bit about Make Amazon Pay, which is the worldwide action with many unions and Amazon affiliated unions across the world, organized by our sister organization, the Progressive International. And that's for Black Friday, which is the first day basically of the Christmas shopping season, the very important moment for Amazon, the company, they're calling for a strike on that day. If I recall correctly, there were initiatives like this in the past, which also related to consumer boycotts, etc., asking people not to buy anything from Amazon from a certain day. How did that go? Did that make an impact at all? I personally believe that it's much better to support organized labor movement than to go on the individualistic consumer boycott. But as long as this form of networking and campaigning is going along with what we do in warehouses, that also helps us, because that brings attention, that gives us space to talk about our problems of us as workers. So I see that Make Amazon Pay campaign is just this space. Now it's not one campaign, it's a space where people coming from different traditions, from different unions can use the one slogan that we all agree were on, the Amazon should pay for the higher wages, for climate destruction, for taxes, and so on, so on. So I think as long as in different countries, workers who organize can kind of include the campaign in their regular ongoing organizing, which is happening, as I said, that is happening in the last years in different countries. It's additional space that we can tell about these struggles in public and then make these connections. But we also have to be careful only about pure symbolic actions, because they do not, I believe they do not affect. And also I said before that some, this symbolic action could talk about workers as this digital slaves, this scandalization of the working condition. We as Amazon workers in the nation, we want to make clear that this is not the best way of talking about describing the situation, and it's not helpful. So I think if these kinds of campaigns have connection, and I think Make Amazon managed to establish these connections in different countries and gave us also a space to see it as one of our campaigns we're involved in, they're great. We need support, but we also understand, we have to understand where the strands of this movement come from. And we would say, always say that it comes from workers organizing, but these workers, of course, they need support, they need support in very different ways, also in symbolic ways, but we have to always build this connection. So what in your view is the best way to communicate this, you know, communicate the struggle of Amazon workers worldwide in a way that isn't dehumanizing and demoralizing for workers and victimizing? The best ways to talk about struggles that are happening, they do, they're exciting cases, campaigns every year. So it's all about making a small research, you know, but to collect these experiences, to show that workers are able, you know, to make demands, they are able to make actions and different actions, could be legal strike or could be direct action, you know, but it's not as I said, it's not difficult to find these examples, you know, it's not difficult to find us workers organizing. So I think if you, as long as you focus on struggle, if you say that the demands of these workers in different countries are important, and that's why as outside activists, you can say, let's create a space that these demands are heard. And this is for me, what my Amazon campaign is about. So, yeah, support if I can make a appeal here, to everyone listening to us, yes, support this action, but also try to not stay on this symbolic level. If you can go in front of the warehouse, Amazon warehouse on that day, because you might be surprised, but because on that day, workers could distribute leaflet, they make hand burners, so there are, there's hundreds of Amazon warehouses all over. Just read if there's a strike around or action, maybe workers there need to support financial support, to the strike funds, maybe they need people to come at four o'clock in the morning before the morning shift to just how to distribute leaflets, come to the pick up lines, try to be involved. And if you can, just go start working on Amazon. It's not difficult. And you can have this experience yourself. You can connect with us. You can connect with local unions and make this movement growing. Is there a place where people can go in order to see what's needed, to see if they can, if they're sitting at home, for example, and they don't have the ability to join the protests, to be able to send some money, as you said, to the strike fund, to support them? Amazon workers is international, has its blog, we are also on social media. I maybe can share here in the chat or later we can put the link. We are network, so which means we have a committee, in this committee there are workers from different countries, so even though we don't have people from your town or a direct warehouse, we will know how to put, how to connect with local organizing in your region. So get in touch, Amazon workers international, Facebook, Twitter, and we have our blog as well. Amazon works international. We'll have all those links down there in the description. That's fantastic. And Yeshka, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really educational and our full support and solidarity and thank you for sharing the details of your struggle. It's really, really an honor to listen to you. Thank you. Make Amazon pay and we all deserve better. Thank you. Something separate before we sign off, I was just thinking of something, it's just a random idea that now you're here, I want to throw on you just one minute. You know in the way that whenever you buy something from Amazon, you get the option, it's just a PR thing, but it's like, oh, would you like to donate to this charity? Have you seen that? Amazon Smile? It would be amazing if there was a way of saying, hey, would you like to donate to Amazon Workers Union for every purchase? If there was a technical like a plug-in or something that people could install with that with every Amazon purchase, 5% goes to an Amazon Workers Union or an additional 5%. I think, I don't know, it's just a thought. To get out, we need some tech workers to help with that, but we do have their tech workers coalition. There are also people in Seattle working at Amazon headquarters who are in favor. We are trying to build our better world together. That's a great idea, but also just find in your local language, if there's a union, maybe they do crowdfunding, they tell, you know, that what are their needs. I think it's easy to find that, and if not, we will help you. We'll put the links in the description. Thank you. Thank you again.