Unionization Campaign Launches at Target’s Warehouse Facility in Perth Amboy, New Jersey Amid Growing Concern Over Prison-Like Conditions that Harm Workers

Recent Target employees will go public with details of their mistreatment. They will join Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz and labor leaders to support a worker-led unionization drive.

WHAT: At a 12 p.m. news conference on Thursday, February 20, recent Target warehouse employees in Perth Amboy, New Jersey will go public with details of their mistreatment on the job. They will describe the prison-like conditions they worked under, and offer support for a unionization campaign led by current employees at Target’s Perth Amboy warehouse who want to improve their jobs and workplace conditions.

Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz will join this news conference to discuss Target’s failure to live up to a local Payment-in-Lieu-of-Taxes (PILOT) agreement in which the company is supposed to maintain harmonious labor relations and create good jobs for Perth Amboy residents. Additionally, leaders and members of the Laundry, Distribution and Food Service Joint Board, Workers United/SEIU will condemn Target’s mistreatment of workers at its warehouse facility in Perth Amboy, and discuss the positive benefits of unionization for warehouse workers and their families.

This is the first Target warehouse in the United States to face a public union organizing campaign. If successful, the unionization effort would set an immediate national precedent for e-commerce warehouse workers that other major companies, retailers, and brands would be pressured to follow.

WHO: Recent employees from Target’s Perth Amboy, New Jersey warehouse facility; Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz; members and leaders of Warehouse Workers Stand Up; members and leaders of the Laundry, Distribution, and Food Service Joint Board, Workers United/SEIU, a labor union that organizes and represents warehouse workers in New Jersey.

Please note: the list of speakers and participants is still in formation.

WHERE: Target Flow Center, 980 High Street, Perth Amboy, New Jersey

WHEN: Thursday, February 20, 12 noon.

MORE BACKGROUND: In 2017, Target opened this Perth Amboy facility as a “flow center” – a new kind of warehouse Target designed specifically to provide smaller, more frequent shipments of products to the company’s growing number of small-format stores in New York City and e-commerce customers in the greater New York metro area.

This Target worker unionization campaign in Perth Amboy comes as New Jersey is widely seen as “the warehouse state”- a desirable location for major national retailers and corporations, including Amazon, because of its warehouse facilities that can support large e-commerce operations and fast shipments to retail stores.

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