With 80 more stops to be made on Saturday night a stressed Amazon driver in Massachusetts decided to pull off and dump the packages in the woods instead of getting them to their intended destinations.
The driver, who confessed to their transgressions the following Monday, reported dumping the packages at around 7 p.m. on Saturday night. It isn’t clear how much time each package takes to deliver, but if a driver can theoretically manage to deliver one package every three minutes, they’d have been out past 11 p.m. Even without knowing their pay structure or how long they’d been on shift already, it’s still pretty easy to understand why they were stressed delivering for the online retail giant during the busiest week of the year.
The police chief for the town of Lakeville said in a statement that around 2 a.m. on Sunday a sergeant was on patrol when “he noticed items unattended in a wooded area.” An investigation of the area, apparently nearby a local Amazon fulfillment center, uncovered three large totes of Amazon packages, some 80 undelivered pieces. Officers then loaded all of the totes into a pickup truck and brought them back to the police station, where the packages were inventoried and Amazon notified.
The packages were returned to the distribution center and the driver was not charged criminally. The police are wisely leaving this issue between the driver and Amazon’s human resources department.
It is not clear if this package ditching was an act of desperation or solidarity on behalf of the Amazon driver. Currently the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is in the middle of what it is calling the largest strike against Amazon in American history, launched last week Thursday. Strikes are being organized at Amazon warehouses in New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Skokie, Illinois. The union is striking to deliver a contract for higher wages, improved benefits, and safer working conditions for Amazon workers.
All Amazon workers, even those without collective bargaining agreements in place, have the right to honor the union’s picket line. If an Amazon worker wishes to withhold their labor in solidarity with their striking co-workers, it is their protected right. It is also your right as a consumer to honor the union’s picket line and just not buy anything from Amazon.
