Hand-painted signs throughout the crowd showed working class solidarity with the Palestinian people, targeting Amazon and Google bosses for the billion dollar contracts that enable mass surveillance by the [neocolonial] apartheid state. Some of the workers’ signs read: “Tech workers united against Israeli apartheid,” “Amazon and Google workers united for Palestinian rights” and “Amazon profits off of Israel’s military occupation.”
The first speakers at the rally were five Amazon tech workers who had just come from inside the Javits Center, where they had stood up, one by one, and disrupted the entire keynote speech. Representatives of the Amazon Labor Union at the Staten Island warehouse – the first Amazon warehouse where workers won a union representation election – were there in solidarity.
They connected the [neocolonial] surveillance of the Palestinian people using Amazon technology with the surveillance of workers in the huge Amazon warehouses, where every second of their time is tracked.
Not gonna lie, it’s a bit depressing to see how willing these people are to fight for a country half a world away, while ignoring the massive privacy and labor right abuses their companies engage in within the United States itself.