Liss-Rior­dan took the fight to Ama­zon in a suit filed Octo­ber 4 in the U.S. Dis­trict Court for the West­ern Dis­trict of Wash­ing­ton. It charges Ama­zon and Ama­zon Logis­tics Inc. with vio­lat­ing the min­i­mum wage law in Seat­tle, state labor law in Wash­ing­ton and the fed­er­al Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA).

The new law­suit against Ama­zon is sim­i­lar to one of Liss-Riordan’s best known cas­es — a suit against FedEx that charged the com­pa­ny was mis­clas­si­fy­ing deliv­ery dri­vers as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors when the work­ers were, as a mat­ter of law, reg­u­lar employ­ees. Liss-Rior­dan won that fight and, this year, FedEx announced that it would give up on a series of relat­ed legal fights and pay $240 mil­lion to some 12,000 dri­vers in 20 states.

With wage and hour law­suits becom­ing increas­ing­ly com­mon across the coun­try, there was lit­tle rea­son for the lawyers at Amazon.com’s Seat­tle head­quar­ters to be sur­prised when one land­ed on their doorstep recent­ly. But they may have been con­cerned to learn that their newest legal adver­sary is ​“Sledge­ham­mer Shan­non” Liss-Rior­dan, a Boston attor­ney who gained legal fame by beat­ing cor­po­rate giants like FedEx and Star­bucks in just these kinds of contests.

Liss-Rior­dan explains that Ama­zon is exper­i­ment­ing with a deliv­ery sys­tem where the com­pa­ny con­tracts with indi­vid­u­als to use their own cars to pick up parcels at Ama­zon ware­hous­es and deliv­er them to local cus­tomers. The dri­vers typ­i­cal­ly sign up for a spe­cif­ic work shift and are paid an hourly wage. They are not com­pen­sat­ed, how­ev­er, for expens­es like gaso­line, car main­te­nance, tele­phone calls, or oth­er inci­den­tals. When sub­tract­ing these expens­es, dri­vers often end up earn­ing less than the min­i­mum wage and are denied over­time pay, she says.

That descrip­tion of deliv­ery meth­ods was echoed by Sta­cy Mitchell, co-direc­tor of the advo­ca­cy group Insti­tute for Local Self-Reliance. Along with co-author Olivia LaVec­chia, Mitchell has just com­plet­ed a major study of Amazon’s busi­ness prac­tices that warns that the giant cor­po­ra­tion is killing good jobs in local economies as it seeks to monop­o­lize dif­fer­ent sec­tors of the retail business.

“Ama­zon has sub­stan­tial­ly expand­ed its ware­hous­es in recent years and is exper­i­ment­ing with the so-called ​‘last mile’ of the deliv­ery sys­tem. They are increas­ing­ly using on-demand dri­vers, and also region­al couri­ers, to move goods,” Mitchell says. ​“In the past, this sort of ​‘last mile’ deliv­ery was typ­i­cal­ly done by the U.S. Postal Ser­vice or Unit­ed Par­cel Ser­vice. USPS and UPS jobs are good-pay­ing union jobs, and Ama­zon is under­min­ing these with its gig econ­o­my model.”

In These Times reached out to Ama­zon to com­ment on the law­suit. Spokesman Jim Bil­limo­ria pro­vid­ed the fol­low­ing response:

“The small and medi­um sized busi­ness­es that part­ner with Ama­zon Logis­tics have their own employ­ees and are required to abide by applic­a­ble laws and Amazon’s Sup­pli­er Code of Con­duct, which focus­es on com­pen­sa­tion, ben­e­fits, and appro­pri­ate work­ing hours. We inves­ti­gate any claim that a provider isn’t com­ply­ing with these obligations.”

Liss-Rior­dan says this sort of a defense is typ­i­cal of large cor­po­ra­tions, many of which have lost wage and hour law­suits in court.

“It’s not what you say that counts, it’s what you do,” she said. ​“We’ve been able to demon­strate, time and time again, that a lot of these cor­po­ra­tions just don’t live up to their stat­ed poli­cies when it comes to real-life employ­ment prac­tices on the ground. That’s why you see more and more of these suits.”

Indeed, a 2015 report from the law firm of Sey­far­th Shaw LLP described an ​“onslaught” of lit­i­ga­tion result­ing in a record high num­ber of fed­er­al­ly-filed wage and hour cas­es in 2015. Accord­ing to the firm, there were 8,781 such cas­es in 2015, com­pared to only 1,935 in 2000.

Asked about her nick­name ​“Sledge­ham­mer Shan­non,” Liss-Rior­dan laughed out loud.

“It’s sort of sil­ly. Moth­er Jones mag­a­zine did an arti­cle last year about a case I have against Uber, and I get a lot of jokes. I don’t care. The fact is, we will take on cas­es like this and fight them for 10 years if we have to.”