2022 Annual Convention Keynote Speaker: Derrick Palmer

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

2022 NELA Annual Convention Keynote Speaker: Derrick Palmer

NELA is honored to welcome Derrick Palmer as our keynote speaker.

Derrick Palmer is the Vice President of the Amazon Labor Union, the first union representing Amazon workers in the United States. He started working at Amazon’s EWR4 facility in Robbinsville, NJ in 2015. He’s worked as an Amazon ambassador and trained over 1,000 new associates from two different Amazon facilities. In September of 2018 Derrick was selected by Amazon to train new hires at the newly built facility JFK8 in Staten Island, NY. He relocated an hour away from Plainsboro, NJ to Elizabeth, NJ to be closer to the Staten Island warehouse. As Derrick trained more associates, he quickly became very popular around the building and has consistently been one of the top performers in his department.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Derrick began raising concerns about Amazon’s poor response to the crisis. He and his co-workers began to organize and protest when Amazon did not take steps to protect the workers at JFK8. In the summer of 2020, Derrick was a named plaintiff in a public nuisance lawsuit against Amazon, Palmer, et al. v. Amazon.com Services LLC, which helped bring more attention to the working conditions of Amazon’s warehouse workers. Over a period of two years, he and his colleagues have built a powerful movement and won a momentous victory that has electrified the nation and spurred worker organizing around the globe.