FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Protecting Warehouse Workers, Unemployment for Striking Workers Top the List
HARTFORD – State Senate leadership today announced their intent to protect warehouse workers and allow longtime striking workers to collect unemployment benefits as part of their 2025 legislative agenda to support working people in Connecticut.
Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney (D-New Haven), Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk), and state Senator Julie Kushner (D-Danbury), who is Senate Chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, announced their support today for these two concepts as incorporated in Senate Bill 8 – one of the Top 12 public policy priorities for Senate Democrats in 2025.
“There’s an insidious nature to modern fulfillment centers where employee safety often takes a back seat to corporate greed. Nowhere have we seen this exemplified more clearly than in the business practices of online retailers like Amazon, whose workplace rules and expectations seem straight out of the Gilded Age. We’ll address that this session,” Sen. Looney said. “At the same time, despite years of trying to adjust the scale, labor law in America continues to be weighted in favor of corporations over their employees. That’s where the concept of unemployment benefits for workers who are forced into extended strikes by the intransigence of their employer comes into play. Connecticut will be a leader on this issue as well.”
“So much of our modern economy is built on speed and convenience, but I wonder how often we stop and ask ourselves, at what cost?” Sen. Duff said. “The cost is in the draconian working conditions so many people experience in retail fulfillment centers, or on the increasingly frequent strike lines we see where people are advocating for better pay and working conditions. That’s who these bills are intended to benefit – average working folks in Connecticut, working for a living, just trying to get by, but who need a more level playing field to make ends meet.”
“The number one rule for Amazon and other online retailers is to maximize speed and profits at any cost, including worker health and safety. We’ve received evidence that there is a very high incidence of injuries at Amazon, and we have an obligation as a state to ensure that we are protecting workers at these jobs,” Sen. Kushner said. “What we’re doing with the striking workers bill is we’re providing them with the opportunity – through the extension of unemployment benefits – to exercise their rights under federal law, without the fear of being starved out. Other states have already done this, and it’s working.”
The concepts in Senate Bill 8 are not new.
Last year, Senate Bill 412 sought to protect warehouse workers (like those at Amazon) by requiring employers to give their employees a written description of the quotas they must meet, and any possible adverse employment actions they may face for failing to do so. The bill passed out of the Labor and Judiciary Committees on party-line votes but was never raised in the Senate for a vote.
Amazon has 16 warehouse facilities in Connecticut and is planning to build another 650,000-square-foot distribution warehouse on 183 acres at the Waterbury/Naugatuck Industrial Park. The corporation employs about 17,000 people in Connecticut.
The issue of warehouse worker safety in America was recently highlighted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders launched an 18-month investigation into Amazon’s “abysmal workplace safety practices” that resulted in a 300-page report which found that in each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in other warehouses, and that more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.
The Sanders report concludes that Amazon knows its productivity standards are the reason why workers are frequently injured, and that while Amazon developed proposals to lower worker injuries, they chose not to implement them due to financial considerations.
Senate Bill 8 also addresses the issue of striking workers that was raised last year in House Bill 5164, and in Substitute House Bill 5431, which sought to create a $3 million fund in the state comptroller’s office which could be used to assist low-income families and workers, including those who had been out on strike for at least 14 days (New York and New Jersey already have such laws). HB 5431 passed the House and Senate but was vetoed by Governor Lamont.
Under current state law, striking workers are only entitled to unemployment benefits if a company locks them out of the worksite – but not if a company negotiates in bad faith to cause a strike, or negotiates in bad faith to prolong a strike.
Many Connecticut resident remember the 11-day Stop & Shop union strike in April 2019 that involved more than 31,000 workers at 240 Stop & Shop stores in New England, including 92 in Connecticut. The striking workers received just $100 a week from their strike fund and had to resort to GoFundMe pages and food donations to eat and pay their bills. At the same time, Stop & Shop shareholders gave themselves an $880 million raise in stock dividends and were asking employees to contribute hundreds of dollars more a year to their health care premiums. It’s estimated that Stop & Shop lost $20 million a day in revenue during that 11-day strike.
Share this page: