Arthur Neslen – As workers swelter in Amazon warehouses in India, the push for a binding global treaty to dismantle corporate power is also heating up

Over the next three months there is an opportunity to change the rules governing global corporations

Arthur Neslen writes about the environment for The Guardian. He has previously worked as a correspondent for Thomson ReutersPoliticoAl-Jazeera and others.

Cross-posted from Equal Times

Image: Post of India

As temperatures around the Amazon fulfilment centre in Manesar, northern India nudged 45 degrees earlier this summer, Priyanka (not her real name) remembers how company managers lined up workers and made them swear an oath not to take toilet breaks or drink water, in order to meet a production target.

“No one refused to take the oath,” she tells Equal Times over a phone line from Manesar. “The workers were scared that if they didn’t listen to the managers, they’d lose their jobs. They’re under a lot of financial pressure and don’t understand that the company hasn’t got the right to do this.”Priyanka says she typically has to move and stow 150 items an hour, for 10 hours a day, under pain of being sacked if she slacks. As some of the items are very heavy, the work is not only backbreaking, it is also exhausting.That day, on 16 May 2024, local temperatures were so high that birds were literally falling from the sky. Yet “managers were following us, monitoring the list [of goods that had to be sorted], so we only concentrated on the work,” she says. “They were shouting at us, pushing us to do more and more but the temperature was so hot that it was hard for us to do anything.”

Sunniye, a worker at the plant’s loading bay said that the heat was “so bad that you had to cover your skin with clothes because otherwise the sun burned you, but that meant that workers were sweating, dehydrating and getting burned out”.

Priyanka says that in her two years at the warehouse, around 20 workers had collapsed and been sent to hospital due to working in such heat. They – and any friends that accompany them to the hospital – are routinely deducted wages.A spokesperson for Amazon India, who asked not to be named, told Equal Times that the company complied with all relevant laws and regulations and offered its employees “competitive pay, comfortable working conditions and specially designed infrastructure”.They said that Amazon had cooling and heat monitoring measures in all its buildings, and that it also ensured “more than sufficient supply of cold water and hydrating drinks, as well as regularly scheduled rest breaks in a cooler environment”.When asked about the events of 16 May, the company representative said that Amazon had “conducted a detailed investigation, found an isolated incident of poor judgement by an individual that was totally unacceptable and against our policies, and took disciplinary action”.However, the official did not respond to specific inquiries about the Manesar plant – such as the oath workers say they were forced to take or the 20 workers who have allegedly been hospitalised there since 2022 – and they also declined to answer questions about company policy such as short-term work contracts, evasion of minimum wage boundary limits or whether the company blacklists trade unionists.Amazon: failing to play by the bookThe two workers, both in their twenties, spoke to Equal Times anonymously due to fears of victimisation. Their labour has helped to make Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, the second wealthiest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of more than US$200 billion.But the situation at the Manesar plant is not the first time that the tech behemoth has been at odds with India’s labour laws using a highly criticised, extractive and exploitative labour model that it duplicates around the world.

Amazon workers in India are routinely employed on short-term contracts – of one, three or eleven months – less than the one-year necessary to qualify for statutory benefits, according to Dharmendra Kumar, the president of the Amazon Workers Association of India, which is part of UNI Global Union. At the end of an 11-month contract, “they will fire you and then hire you again,” he says.

Amazon also exploits legal “grey areas” to make employees work 50-hour shifts – rather than 48 – by counting lunch breaks as time not worked, he says.Equally, “to avoid paying more than poverty wages, they pick [warehouse] locations where the minimum wage is very low,” he says. “The minimum wage for workers in Delhi is about €200 a month. But if you go a 10-minute drive outside Delhi, it is merely €100-110, so that is where they set up. Average workers cannot afford to live in Delhi.”Almost all Amazon employees are hired through what Kumar calls “third party vendors,” in a manoeuvre that out-sources compliance costs and legal liabilities. And if the company discovers that a worker has joined a union, “they always find a way to blacklist them so they can’t continue to work there,” Kumar tells Equal Times.Even so, Priyanka claims that around 200 workers at the Manesar plant – out of a workforce of between 1300 and 1800 – have now joined the union.Corporate underminers of democracyTheir struggle was highlighted last month with the launch of a new research project headed by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) on the ‘corporate underminers of democracy’, which analyses the undemocratic practices employed by Amazon and six other transnational corporations: Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore.“Their fight is a fight for money and power,” says Atle Høie, general secretary of IndustriAll Global Union. “Many of the biggest multinationals are now financially stronger than many governments and they use their influence to get legislation that favours their quest for control. Practically no country has put in place policies that will change this trajectory, and the response from unions and civil society is so far insufficient.”As well as traditional union-busting tactics that deny workers the right to organise and collectively bargain, the seven companies are “spending a tremendous amount of money and exerting a tremendous pressure on governments through lobbying to enact policies that are unpopular with the majority of voters,” says Todd Brogan, the ITUC’s director of campaigns.

Their corporate influence efforts go beyond backchannel contacts with officials and even stray into funding for far-right political movements and groups trying to slow or avert climate action, the report finds.

As such, the plight of India’s Amazon workers was “the heart of the issue,” Brogan says. “Much of what politicians and global institutions do is to pay lip service to people like those Amazon workers, while giving power to transnational corporations. We think that those roles should be reversed.”An opportunity to change the rules governing global corporationsOver the next three months, a window of opportunity for rewriting those roles will open, with a chain of high-level institutional meetings and global conferences taking place across the world.The actors will vary from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan and, perhaps most importantly, negotiations in mid-December within the UN’s intergovernmental working group for a binding treaty obliging transnational corporations to respect human rightsUntil now, the talks have “dragged on since 2014, with states not prioritising them or taking them seriously,” according to Brogan. But pressure is building, as the imminent US election focuses minds.

Høie tells Equal Times: “We need an awakening from important governments at a global level. If Donald Trump is elected in the US, this is a clear signal that corporate power will increase, and the spiral will continue. Trade unions will need to figure out how they can inspire workers to join and recreate a force of good that is powerful enough to turn the tide.”

He continues: “There are some signs that this is happening even in the US, but it is far from enough. Unions will have to focus on organising, to have legally binding agreements with corporations and to have enforceable trade union rights included in international trade agreements.”New legislative initiatives by the European Commission on corporate sustainability and due diligence and platform workers could, if used constructively, “pave the way for better enforcement of fundamental trade union rights,” Høie says. But if not, “it will just be another wave of corporate reporting to no effect.”The EU’s corporate due diligence directive forces companies to check their supply chains for human rights and environmental abuses, while the platform workers directive prohibits such workers being classified as “self-employed,” or being sacked by computer algorithms.Brogan describes such laws as “a step in the right direction” but says that they were insufficient for the global transformation that was needed and which currently has “no real champion.” He identifies the reason for this – at the global scale – as being “undue and undemocratic corporate influence.”

The EU did not immediately respond to requests for comment on its positioning in the UN negotiations for an enforceable agreement to tackle corporate injustice. But the thirst for a legally binding treaty was clear at a webinar that accompanied the release of the ITUC report last month, where speaker after speaker demanded action.

Beyond pushing for a treaty, David Adler, the coordinator of the Progressive International, and a former advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders of the Democrats in the US and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, called for strategic thinking to turn news stories about corporate malfeasance into campaigns.“Don’t blame policymakers,” he told the webinar. “They fail and fail again and all they can do is disappoint us, but we have to make sure that we are being tactical and clear minded about specific [corporate human rights] violations from a legal starting point and saying that this has to be the basis for a common coordinated fightback from our members.”

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