YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Amazon Ordered To Cease And Desist

Friends:

Good things are happening! A federal judge is turning up the heat on Amazon over its labor practices. Meanwhile, Los Angelenos deal a blow to corporate landlords, food delivery workers will see a much-anticipated raise, and the country’s electric bus fleet is about to quadruple.

All this and much more in this week’s edition of You Love To See It below, a weekly feature reviewing good news, progress, and action steps that’s one of the many features available only to Lever supporting subscribers.

Amazon Workers Score Needed Win

Last Friday, a federal judge filed a cease-and-desist order against Amazon, demanding that the country’s second largest employer stop firing employees for union organizing.

The court order was a response to a petition filed by Gerald Bryson, a former Amazon employee who was illegally fired for protesting how Amazon endangered workers during the pandemic in 2020. The court order demands that Amazon immediately stop “discharging employees because they engaged in protected concerted activity” and “in any like or related manner interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed to them by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.”

Bryson has not yet been reinstated.

“This decision is a massive victory for Amazon workers nationwide — protection from retaliation is especially important as those workers enter the grueling peak season in Amazon’s warehouses,” said Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper, co-executive directors of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, in a statement. “Nonetheless, continuing to keep Gerald Bryson out of work at this point is a travesty of justice.”

Food Delivery Workers Get Pay Boost