“After a raging fire on ship dock 500 plus workers sat in the break room demanding to be sent home with pay for safety due to the smoke,” he wrote on Twitter early on Tuesday.
“@amazonlabor Lead organizers are now Marching on the Boss with hundreds of workers!”
Smalls also shared a video on Twitter showing the fire at the facility, in which a worker can be heard yelling “evacuate.”
“Yesterday afternoon there was a small fire in a cardboard compactor outside of JFK8, one of our facilities in Staten Island, New York,” Flaningan said in a statement to Newsweek.
“All employees were safely evacuated, and day shift employees were sent home with pay. The FDNY certified the building is safe and at that point we asked all night shift employees to report to their regularly scheduled shift. While the vast majority of employees reported to their workstations, a small group refused to return to work and remained in the building without permission.”
Palmer said a manager threatened workers with write-ups if they didn’t return to work, according to Noam Scheiber, a labor reporter for The New York Times.
“A lot of workers have been saying they need to send us home and with pay; some are saying that now is the time to strike,” a night shift worker told journalist Jordan Chariton.
The action comes after workers at the Staten Island warehouse made history by voting to unionize on April 1, establishing the retailer’s first organized facility in the U.S.
