Breaking: Amazon Actually Employs Its Delivery Drivers [View all]

While Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos seek to nullify worker rights, a Los Angeles court last week forced Bezos’s company to document the truth.

by Harold Meyerson October 6, 2025


Even as Republicans claim majority support from working-class voters, the pattern of their furloughs during the current government shutdown makes clear that this support is in no way reciprocated. While almost all the employees at the Treasury Department are still on the job (albeit working without pay), a bare 17 of the 1,270 employees in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division have been kept at work, which means that nonpayment and underpayment of workers’ wages is now the de jure, rather than merely de facto, order of the day. Just 179 of the 1,664 employees of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are reporting to work, which tells you how essential this president considers workplace safety.

These numbers are imperfect metrics, I readily admit, of the Trump administration’s view of the importance of capital over labor, but they’ll do for starters.

SNIP*
America’s two wealthiest individuals have taken action to ensure that the NLRB can never disrupt their overwhelming power.

But the neutering of the Board, now well into its sixth month, has prompted some blue states to attempt to fill that gap. New York recently enacted a law that gives the state the power to step in where the NLRB normally would but hasn’t. And last Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law an even stronger version of that innovation. That new law gave the state’s Public Employment Relations Board the power to handle a private-sector case when the NLRB “has expressly or impliedly ceded jurisdiction,” including when charges filed with the agency or a union election certification languishes for more than six months, or when the Board is without a quorum. New York’s law has been challenged in federal court by the Trump administration; a similar challenge to California’s law is sure to follow.
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-10-06-breaking-amazon-actually-employs-its-delivery-drivers/

Cheers to NY and Cali.