Amazon suspends 50 employees for staging walkout after a fire at Staten Island warehouse

Amazon suspended 50 workers at a large warehouse on Staten Island, New York, a still-unrecognized labor union for the warehouse has said. The move happened after the workers staged a walkout following a fire that led to unsafe work conditions. About 100 workers staged a march through the warehouse facility Monday night. They demanded to be paid and sent home after the fire in a trash compactor.

Employees told the media that the warehouse was filled with smoke and it wasn't safe to work. In a statement posted to its Twitter page, JFK8's Amazon Labor Union said the management had suspended "over 50 workers who were involved in last night's walkout".

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"Amazon workers made a collective decision last night to demand that workers get sent home while the smoke cleared," the Amazon Labor Union said. The union has also demanded to see a report by the New York Fire Department.

A compactor by a loading dock caught fire on Monday afternoon some time before a shift change was due. The day shift was told they could go home at about 5:15 pm. Night shift employees started to arrive but the managers didn't tell them about the fire.

"There was no message from Amazon whatsoever, so all of us just came to work in an unsafe environment not being told anything," employee Brett Daniels told CBS.

"They didn't show us proof it was safe to work there. They just told us just to work right through it," another person told CBS.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told CBS New York that the fire department had "certified the building is safe and at that point we asked all night shift employees to report to their regularly scheduled shift."

(With inputs from agencies)