Workers who deliver packages from seven Amazon facilities across the country went on strike Thursday morning, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents them.
The Teamsters said thousands of workers had struck, but it was unclear how many people were participating in the action. Amazon said it expected the seven delivery hubs to operate normally.
The drivers are employees of companies that Amazon uses to deliver packages to customers. Amazon has said it has no obligation to bargain with the drivers, because they are not its employees. But the union and the workers said that Amazon ultimately controls their working conditions and was therefore obligated to bargain with them.
The National Labor Relations Board has investigated some of the cases and issued at least one complaint finding the drivers to be Amazon employees and accusing the company of breaking the law by failing to bargain with them.
The Teamsters said in a statement that workers at other Amazon warehouses were prepared to join the strike. The largest group at Amazon represented by the union work at a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8, which employs more than 5,000 people. Employees at the warehouse voted to unionize in 2022, but the company has yet to bargain with them and is challenging the election outcome.
At the delivery hubs, Amazon generally hires multiple contracting firms to take packages to customers. The Teamsters has organized the drivers who work there by asking them to sign authorization cards. The union typically proceeds by trying to organize individual contracting firms rather than an entire complex at once. In most cases, the owners of the contracting firms have yet to recognize the union and there have not been elections.
“What you see here are almost entirely outsiders — not Amazon employees or partners — and the suggestion otherwise is just another lie from the Teamsters,” Amazon said in a statement, referring to people picketing outside the delivery hubs. “The truth is that they were unable to get enough support from our employees and partners and have brought in outsiders to come and harass and intimidate our team.”
The Teamsters had set a deadline of Dec. 15 for Amazon to begin negotiating with the drivers and warehouse employees. It initiated the strike after Amazon failed to do so.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, said in a statement. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
Three of the seven hubs are in Southern California and the other four are in Queens, New York; Atlanta; San Francisco; and Skokie, Ill., near Chicago.
Looming over the conflict between the Teamsters and the company is the upcoming change in the federal government. Under President Biden, the National Labor Relations Board aggressively enforced labor laws and brought many cases against employers.
The board pursued large financial remedies from employers that fired workers seeking to unionize and cracked down on mandatory meetings held by employers to discourage workers from organizing. And it has tended to conclude that large companies like Amazon have an obligation to bargain with employees of contractor firms over which the bigger companies exert control.
But the labor board was far less sympathetic to unions’ claims on these issues during the first administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. And most union leaders expect Mr. Trump’s labor board appointees to be relatively unsympathetic to their claims during his second administration as well. That may be prompting some unions to pressure employers and seek concessions before Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Mr. O’Brien, the Teamsters leader, spoke at the Republican convention this summer, and the union remained neutral in the presidential election — a break from recent campaign cycles. This appeared to give him some influence with Mr. Trump, who has tapped a more union-friendly candidate to run his Labor Department than most Republican presidents have in recent memory.
But the labor board, not the department, has much more direct influence over workers’ ability to organize into unions, and it is unclear how much input Mr. O’Brien or the Teamsters will have on appointments to the board.
Amazon and SpaceX, which is founded and led by Elon Musk, a close Trump adviser, have both challenged the constitutionality of the labor board in federal court. The cases are active.
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