Is there a more familiar sign of corporate dominance than the Amazon delivery van?

As recently as four years ago, the blue-gray vehicle with the smiley arrow was a relative novelty among fleets of brown and blue-and-white delivery trucks clogging the streets. Today, the Amazon vans are almost inescapable. Between 2020 and 2022, their numbers more than doubled, to roughly 100,000.

But this symbol of Amazon’s strength may hint at something else: an underappreciated vulnerability.

The vans are just the most visible piece of the company’s vast delivery network. When you place an order for cat toys or razor blades or vacuum bags, Amazon employees typically pluck them off a shelf in a warehouse, then ship them to a succession of buildings, known as sort centers and delivery stations, where they are grouped by destination and loaded onto vans.

The system, which also includes planes and air hubs, has enabled ever-faster delivery, according to data from NIQ. It has also made Amazon susceptible to a potent form of labor organizing — chokepoint organizing — in which workers threaten to hobble a company’s operations by shutting down key sites, known as chokepoints.

In September 2019, workers at an Amazon delivery station in Sacramento, Calif., began campaigning for paid personal time off, which many part-time employees in such buildings lacked. With no progress on their demands, the workers walked off their shifts just before Christmas, and the campaign gained momentum at delivery stations in Chicago and New York. In March 2020, Amazon announced that it was providing a paid-time-off benefit that affected more than 10,000 part-time employees at buildings nationwide.

Although it is rare for employees to pry loose costly concessions from Amazon, workers who threaten chokepoints within its delivery network appear to have won concessions multiple times.

After walkouts over pay and working conditions at two Chicago delivery stations just before Christmas 2021, hundreds of Chicago-area workers received raises of about $2 an hour. After about half of the roughly 1,500 employees at an air hub in San Bernardino, Calif., submitted a petition seeking higher pay last summer, Amazon raised hourly wages for night workers by nearly a dollar. The workers had discussed striking, and dozens later walked out.

Amazon said it made changes to wages, paid time off and other policies on its own, unrelated to the activities of small groups of workers. “Nothing is more important than the safety and well-being of our teams,” said Lisa Levandowski, an Amazon spokesperson.

Amazon began transporting many of its own packages after the 2013 holiday season, when a surge of orders backed up UPS and other carriers. Later, during the pandemic, Amazon significantly increased its transportation footprint to handle a boom in orders while seeking to drive down delivery times. Hence all those new vans.

The problem is that shipping networks are fragile.

If workers walk off the job at one of Amazon’s traditional warehouses — the fulfillment center — the business impact is likely to be minimal because the sheer number of warehouses means orders can be easily redirected to another one.

But a shipping network has far less redundancy. If one site goes down, typically either the packages don’t arrive on time or the site must be bypassed, often at considerable expense. All the more so if the site handles a huge volume of packages.

“That’s truly a position of vulnerability,” said Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International, a supply-chain consulting firm, referring to Amazon’s largest air hub, in Kentucky.

And as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy seeks to drive down shipping times further, the disruptive potential of this kind of organizing may be growing.

“Part of the opportunity here to organize has to do with their airfreight operation being a real chokepoint,” said Griffin Ritze, a driver at the Kentucky hub, where workers have started a union campaign.

Heirs to the “sit-down” strike

On the evening of Dec. 30, 1936, a local leader of the fledgling United Automobile Workers flashed a red light outside the union’s office, across from a massive General Motors plant in Flint, Mich., summoning the plant’s shop stewards. As plant conditions had deteriorated — not least, the grueling “speedup” that required some workers to make thousands of hand motions per hour — the union decided it was time to strike for recognition. When the stewards returned to the plant, employees stopped working and refused to leave.

The so-called sit-down strike at the Flint plant and another in Cleveland nearly paralyzed the company because they were known as mother plants: the sole producers of many parts for GM assembly plants. After several tense weeks, GM, which had been hostile to unions, recognized the UAW.

But it would not soon forget its vulnerability to strikes. As sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz observed in their book “Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete,” GM and other U.S. automakers spent the next few decades dispersing production across a much wider number of plants. Thereafter, Murray and Schwartz wrote, “even if the union mobilized enough workers to shut an entire plant down, the companies now had the option of ramping up production at one of the parallel plants.”

Amazon has moved in a different direction from the automakers in the past century — in some ways making itself more vulnerable, not less, as its business has ballooned.

According to data from MWPVL International, a small portion of Amazon fulfillment centers ship an extremely high volume of goods — more than 1 million items a day during last year’s peak period — including JFK8, the warehouse on New York City’s Staten Island where workers voted to join the Amazon Labor Union last spring.

If a union strikes and shuts down one of those buildings, “there will be penalties to pay” for Amazon even with its redundant capacity, said Wulfraat. He cited higher transportation costs and possible shipping delays. Amazon said the operational impact would be minimal.

More precarious is the company’s delivery infrastructure, where such extensive redundancy is impractical.

A trend in Kentucky

The company’s facility at the Cincinnati airport in northern Kentucky, which is known as KCVG, is the largest of the air hubs. At its 2019 groundbreaking, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declared, “We’re going to move Prime from two-day to one-day, and this hub is a big part of that.” Then he exhorted, “Let’s move some earth!,” and mounted a John Deere front loader.

The number of employees at the Kentucky hub (now well over 2,000) and the number of flights has grown substantially since the facility opened almost two years ago. The Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University estimates that the number of Amazon Air flights in or out of KCVG on a typical day more than doubled between early 2022 and early 2023, to more than 50.

Amazon said the institute’s reports, which rely on public data, drew inaccurate conclusions but did not dispute the trend in Kentucky. The company said it also continued to ship some packages through UPS and the Postal Service.

Labor organizing has accompanied the increased activity. In September, managers at KCVG told workers that they would receive a small raise — ranging from 50 cents to about $1 an hour, depending on seniority.

Several employees said they had been expecting a “peak” season bonus of at least $2 an hour, which they received the previous year. Some who work on the ramp, where planes are loaded and unloaded, left in frustration after the announcement.

“There are usually around 50 tug drivers,” said Ritze, a driver involved in the organizing, referring to the trucks that move large containers across the facility. “It went down to 20. Everyone else left, took PTO.”

The company clearly understands the stakes: Workers say managers frequently urge employees who aren’t tug drivers to become “tug-trained” so they can operate tugs in the event of a driver shortage. Amazon said that it was common to cross-train workers and that managers provided support and coaching to employees if the tugs got backed up.

The drivers are aware of their power, too. And many support the union effort.

“Any time there’s a delay, it’s always blamed on the tug drivers — management doesn’t take any responsibility for it,” said Steven Kelley, another worker active in the campaign. “That’s honestly why most of them are in favor.”

If enough tug drivers got fed up and simply refused to move, Kelley added, “it would shut the whole operation down.”