In New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Belgium's Minister of Development Cooperation Meryame Kitir (Vooruit) also found time to visit Amazon's first-ever trade union on Tuesday.
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the United States but had managed to avoid having its American employees forming trade unions, despite various complaints arising over harsh working conditions at the multinational company's warehouses.
However, that all came to a head in March 2020, when a strike was organised at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, following which, a campaign was launched for workers to unionise.
Two years later, in April of 2022, these workers narrowly voted to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which came as surprise to many.
Amazon has refused to recognise the ALU and filed a series of objections to the vote, which has prompted the union to lead strike campaigns at other depots.
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This seemed to have struck a cord with Kitir of the Flemish centre-left party Vooruit, as she herself was a former trade union representative for Ford factory workers in Genk.
Furthermore, she decided to use her visit to New York, as part of the Belgian delegation for the 77th session of the UN's General Assembly, to meet with the ALU.
"Today I am here in a multinational company where the working conditions are totally different," Kitir deplored of the Amazon warehouse, "and there has been no organisation (on Amazon's end) to even start a social dialogue to improve the living conditions of these workers."
Meryame Kitir's hope, as long as many others on the political left, is that ALU forces Amazon to start negotiations on higher wages and better working conditions for their workers.
