Teamsters picket Amazon’s Richmond warehouses

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters are striking today at seven metropolitan hubs and picketing at “hundreds” more of the $2.37-trillion firm’s warehouses across the country. Some of those are right here in Richmond.

On Friday morning, The Lookout visited the picket line at RIC 4, Amazon’s 2.7-million square-foot facility just past city limits in Henrico County, which handles some of the innumerable Amazon packages that wind up on so many stoops here in Church Hill. Since 6am yesterday, members of Teamsters Local 322, along with the Richmond chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, Richmond for All, and other pro-labor orgs have been demonstrating on Henrico Turnpike, calling on Amazon to recognize and bargain in good faith with some 10,000 unionized employees across the country, which it has been illegally refusing to do for two years.

(Naturally, the company insists the union’s complaints before the National Labor Relations Board is meritless, and has argued that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.)

Amazon has at least four other fulfillment centers in the Richmond area, and nine total locations here, according to a gauzy March 2024 item from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It employs some 7,000 workers in the region, none of which are currently organized. Local 322’s director of organizing Dwayne Johnson hopes the picket will help to change that.

Between Amazon’s broad River City footprint and the standard holiday chaos, “we’ve got a lot to cover,” he told me this morning. But they’re holding the line even so: he and a DSA member named David (didn’t catch his last name) had union troubadour Billy Bragg blasting from hip-high speaker towers beneath a Teamsters-branded pop-up tent when I arrived at the fulfillment center’s southerly gate on Henrico Turnpike around 8:40am.

A block north, Fredericksburg’s vice-mayor Charlie Frye, a longtime Teamster who works at United Parcel Service, picketed the facility’s main gate; in a black Toyota Tundra parked near Johnson’s tent, another UPS Teamster who’d been picketing since the action began yesterday morning caught a nap. Johnson told The Lookout that similar pickets are underway at Amazon’s other fulfillment centers across the city.

The Teamsters are not currently calling for a shopper boycott on Amazon, and to my eye, RIC 4 was operating smooth enough on Friday morning. (Less so at the strikes elsewhere: in NYC, police acting as Amazon’s agents locked arms to help scabs cross Teamster picket lines and arrested several striking workers.) Johnson, who I first met covering the Local 322 drive at Stone Brewing Company’s Fulton Hill plant this summer—which the company successfully busted in October 2024 with help from expensive outside consultants—says the Richmond pickets are less about disrupting the flow of Amazon packages and more about laying groundwork for a future drive by raising the union’s profile with rank-and-file workers coming in and out of the facilities.

Not to mention drivers on Henrico Turnpike. Every few minutes I was there, the picketers got honks and fist-pumps of support from a passing vehicle. “This is the best [location] to be at,” Johnson told me, waving to a pick-up truck driver as he beeped past. “The others are all dead-ends.”

🪧 More photos from the Amazon picket lines

All courtesy of Local 322’s Dwayne Johnson.