Somali women packers for the giant Amazon distribution center in Minneapolis are fired up and refusing to speed up the production line, becoming the first known group to defy Amazon management and bring them to the bargaining table.
“Nobody would assume a Muslim worker with limited language skills in the middle of Minnesota could be a leader in a viable fight against one of the biggest employers in the world and bring them to the table,” said Abdirahman Muse, executive director of Wood, the Somali word for “power.”
But when a worker lost her job, unable to meet crushing demands to pack more and faster when she had just finished 18 days of fasting over Ramadan, frustration was shared throughout the plant.
“The new managers are like military—they don’t give you respect,” said Amazon worker Sofia Ahmed Ibrahim, who once worked for the U.S. and U.N. aid groups before fleeing from Somalia to a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
“I worked hard and I was employee of the month,” she said with pride. But after returning from breast cancer treatment, a new manager scolded her for working slowly, seeing her only as a worker who, on one particular day, was slow.
Hibachi Mohamed said Amazon let her take paid breaks to pray, as required by state law, but her managers made her keep up with the quota.
Sixty percent of Amazon’s 3,000 workers in the region are East African, Wood estimates, but only one manager speaks Somali. Amazon disputes that number, saying there are a lot fewer East Africans, and four area managers who speak Somali.
Amazon has now agreed to require a general manager and a Somali-speaking manager to agree on any firings related to productivity, to respond to individual complaints within five days and meet with workers quarterly, according to The New York Times.
But a group of approximately 40 workers say that isn’t enough. Their main concern—the pace at which they are expected to work, from 160 items an hour to 230, wasn’t addressed. They voted to stage a large protest and walkout Dec. 14, in the middle of the holiday season.
“We are not asking them to cater to East African workers,” said Muse. “We are just asking them to treat workers humanely.”
A petition to Amazon to restore Sofia Barrow’s job can be found on www.awoodcenter.org.
OIL TRIAL FORCES NEW SCRUTINY OF NIGERIAN BILLIONS SWIPED IN MASSIVE FRAUD
(GIN)—It’s been called one of the biggest corruption cases in corporate history. It has escaped the attention of much of the media and few have even heard about it.
In the drama, playing out in an Italian court, two middlemen have been convicted for their role in the scheme involving one of Africa’s most promising oil fields and its sale—allegedly engineered by oil giants Italian-owned Eni and Royal Dutch Shell—that deprived the people of Nigeria of an estimated $6 billion in future revenues.
The deal making began when Dan Teeter, an ex-oil minister, awarded Malibu, a company he controlled with the son of ex-President Sani Abacha, the license to a major oil field (OPL 245) for $20 million. Royal Dutch Shell and Eni were contacted to buy the field and the sale went through for $1.1 billion with the money winding up in the account of Malibu and not in the government’s account that should have controlled the field for the Nigerian people.
“Shell executives knew the deal they were asking for was not a ‘production sharing contract,’ which would have given the Nigerian government a share of the oil from their OPL 245 block,” charged the rights group Global Witness. “But Shell and Eni continued to call it that—despite having removed the Nigerian government’s share of oil entirely.”
Nigeria’s civil servants called the deal “highly prejudicial to the interests of the federal government,” but Nigerian ministers appear to have ignored or overruled their concerns.
JPMorgan Chase, which ran the $1.1 billion escrow account, ultimately released the money to Teeter, a convicted money launderer, with the consent of the U.K.’s anti-money laundering enforcement agency, causing a huge scandal in the U.K.
“This amount of money would be enough to educate 6 million teachers in Nigeria,” said Global Witness activist Ava Lee. “It really can’t be underestimated just how big a deal this could be for a country that right now has the highest rates of extreme poverty in the world.”
Ex-Minister Esthete’s purchases with the illicit funds included a speed boat, a chateau, a private jet and armored Cadillacs in the U.S, fine art and luxury shotguns in London.
If the two oil giants are found guilty of knowingly paying off the ex-minister, they could potentially be forced to pay huge damages in the case.
Both Eni and Shell deny the charges.
