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Category: Chris Smalls

  • Want to Win a Union at Work? Here’s What the Amazon Labor Union Can Teach Us.   

    It’s a cinematic David and Goliath story, slightly different versions of which have now been told by The New York Times, Time, NPR and dozens of others: “Two best friends” led a walkout at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, and one of them was fired. They then started an independent union, and to gather the thousands of signatures needed to trigger a union recognition vote, they gave out free food and weed at a bus stop outside the facility. Once the two friends, Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, had the signatures they needed, they had to win the vote. After a favorable federal court decision, they gave out free food inside the facility, too, and even “used TikTok” to garner support. The company tried to shut them down, even sending the NYPD to stop them from — can you guess? — giving out free food. Then, against all odds, they won!

    You could be forgiven for reading this story and wondering, if so many workers (and established unions) have access to many of the same tools — GoFundMe, social media and, yes, chicken and pasta — why did the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) succeed where every other previous Amazon unionization effort failed in the previous 28 years? As Julian Mitchell-Israel, the union’s field director, told The Guardian, “There’s just so much talk about this union in a way that, I think, abstracts it and makes it into a phenomenon that it’s not.”

    Federal laws are stacked against any kind of union election victory, so whenever any group of workers succeeds, it’s due to the elements of luck, good timing and unique circumstances that can’t be precisely replicated.

    But the hidden story of the largest single workplace union election victory in the country since 2008 is the overlooked, and underutilized, methods and tools ALU organizers deployed, far beyond free marijuana and TikTok trolling. As workplace organizing takes off at Starbucks, Apple Stores and at other companies that have long resisted unions, it’s worth understanding what they did that led 2,654 workers at a facility of over 8,000 to vote for a union for the first time in the company’s history. Gaining knowledge of the particulars of the ALU campaign won’t provide a blueprint for future organizing, but it can supply key lessons that inform a range of future efforts.

    Lesson 1: Moving From Spontaneity to Study

    The seeds of ALU started after Chris Smalls led a short-lived, rapid response walkout in March 2020, pushing back against a lack of worker protection measures in the face of the rising pandemic. However, the group really solidified around the goal of turning that moment into a movement nearly a year later on a trip to support the workers organizing in Bessemer, Alabama. After watching that “blowout” in real time, those current and former employees of the Staten Island warehouse saw the opportunity that a union election could bring, as opposed to the other organizing efforts that have avoided seeking union elections in Amazon facilities in Chicago and Minneapolis. They sought out advice from longtime labor organizers who had won similar campaigns or were similarly inclined towards campaigns led by rank-and-file workers rather than staff organizers. They read articles in publications like The Forge, with organizer Justine Medina telling Tech Won’t Save Us that they looked to other moments in history when industrial giants were successfully unionized, like the campaign to organize U.S. steel companies a century ago.

    Lesson 2: Using “Inside” and “Outside” Committees

    One of the ALU’s big takeaways from Bessemer: They had to be as visible inside the workplace as outside. The union in Bessemer didn’t have an active presence inside the workplace, and their outside committee — despite prolific use of catered meals and endorsements by celebrities like Danny Glover — failed to generate necessary support from workers at the facility. Amazon’s union-busting consultants “owned the narrative” with their captive audience meetings and constant misinformation, while union officials, volunteers and politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders staged rallies on the outside. So while ALU deployed a visible recruitment committee centered around the bus stop outside, an even more important organizing committee of a dozen current workers divided up departments on the day shift and the night shift. They used group texts to coordinate their schedules to ensure a few of them were in the facility at all times, and managed a Telegram chat for all current employees to receive updates. (At the LDJ5 Amazon Sort Center — the warehouse in Long Island with a predominantly part-time workforce where ALU lost the recognition vote three weeks later — the union had comparatively fewer longtime workers on their “inside committee” with relationships across departments.)

    Lesson 3: Identifying Workplace “Influencers”

    ALU knew the key to reaching thousands of workers was to first identify a few dozen who had the most trust on their shifts. This included current managers (called “process assistants”), like ALU’s vice president Derrick Palmer, who supervised other workers but didn’t have disciplinary authority, and company veterans who had been around for years, many of whom were still upset about having bonus compensation stripped away in 2018. “I pretty much flipped my whole department” of 100 people, Palmer told Labor Notes, estimating that 70% had become “yes” voters. “What I’ll do is study a group of friends and go to the leader of the pack. Whatever the leader says, the rest of the group is going to do.” Identifying workplace leaders who had earned the trust of their coworkers was key. In Bessemer, as Smalls pointed out in a recent interview, the facility was so new that the workers didn’t have time to develop networks of trust across shifts and departments, and many of them viewed the jobs as temporary. But most of the ALU’s lead organizers had been on staff at JFK8 for more than four years, a significant boost in a facility where employees who lasted more than five months were considered “veterans.”

    ALU organizer Angelika Maldonado credits the trust Chris Smalls built as a supervisor with her own willingness to get involved: “I used to be like, well, my Process Assistant, she sucks. I wish he was my Process Assistant. You could tell he cared about the people he worked with.” Gathering these influencers together on a committee takes time, and the ALU only had three weeks to focus exclusively on integrating and mobilizing those relationships at LDJ5 following their success at JFK8.

    Lesson 4: Exposing Consultants and Battling Amazon’s Disinformation

    Many union elections fail because management effectively pushes their propaganda in mandatory one-in-one and group meetings, pamphlets and videos, with no competing infrastructure from the union. But in a facility where most workers spend ten hours a day alone at their stations, ALU organizers didn’t wait for workers to come to them to dispel disinformation. They followed the nearly two dozen anti-union consultants around the facility, passing out disclosure forms showing their $3,200/day rates for “union avoidance” work. The union tried to ensure an organizer would be present at every group captive audience meeting, at which Amazon’s consultants tried to make workers believe they would immediately be on the hook for paying hundreds of dollars in union dues, among other lies. Organizers coordinated on talking points as they questioned the information being presented publicly. They even recorded many of those meetings, so they could rebut the talking points later in Telegram chats and on TikTok.

    “Once we had an organizer in a meeting, the goal was to completely shut it down,” as the ALU’s Connor Spence told HuffPost. “We’d interrupt them whenever they made inaccurate statements, and ask so many questions that they had no choice but to end the meeting. As time went on, even milder people who were pro-union started speaking out.” And to create a sense of momentum, ALU ramped up its visibility within the facility over time, as Angelika Maldonado explained to Jacobin:

    At about the end of last year, the ALU started passing out union shirts. So when some folks started wearing their shirts in the building, that’s really when a lot of other people started seeing how much support there was. After that, we had to get more and more new shirts for everybody. And as the election was getting closer, we really amped up our game — the last thing we did in the campaign was to get lanyards, about three or four thousand of them. We passed out a lot of lanyards during shift changes, so people could see how much support there was.

    Lesson 5: Seizing on Amazon’s Mistakes to Grow Their Support

    The ALU had to find opportunities to show workers who thought of Amazon as a benevolent employer that there was a hidden agenda at work. They seized on the leaked memo describing Smalls as a “thug” and scrutinized the statements of anti-union consultants, which resulted in more than 40 unfair labor practice charges filed against Amazon. Each one was used like a press release to sway workers who weren’t sure if the company had their best interests at heart. And when the company conspired with the New York Police Department to crack down on their protected rights, the ALU rushed to persuade workers that this was “the last straw” and that it necessitated unionization.

    Lesson 6: Filing Complaints and Pushing the Federal Government to Intervene

    Those charges of illegal behavior filed by ALU and Amazon organizers at other facilities finally resulted in a nationwide settlement, with the National Labor Relations Board creating greater protections, including for the first time giving Amazon organizers the right to host events in the break room inside the facility. (The Biden administration’s personnel changes at the NLRB played a role in facilitating this decision, but the agency would not have acted without aggressive action by ALU’s rank and file organizers and their volunteer attorneys.) The company’s bad behavior continues today — even following the votes at JFK8 and LDJ5, Amazon continues to retaliate against ALU organizers, and the NLRB recently sued the company to seek reinstatement of a fired ALU organizer. (To underline the difference between presidential administrations, in fiscal year 2020, the NLRB helped 978 workers get an offer of reinstatement; in 2021, that number rose to 6,307.) Smalls said he accepted an invitation to visit the White House partly to put pressure on the administration to make more aggressive use of the NLRB’s powers, telling a group days later, “there’s a reason they didn’t air my audio [from the White House].”

    Lesson 7: Crafting Demands to Reach New Groups of Workers

    Many newcomers to labor organizing mistakenly believe that asking for higher pay is the main way to build majority support at a workplace. But ALU’s organizers listened carefully to their coworkers as they built out their recognition campaign, to distill the issues that generated the most righteous indignation across departments, beyond “the choir” that had already signed the group’s petition. As a result, they eventually expanded their list of demands to address transportation and scheduling, in addition to what many described as “brutal” physical conditions. (At LDJ5, which is a different kind of package facility, ALU organizers found less immediate support in part because the physical demands on workers were not as severe, including shorter shifts than those at JFK8.)

    They also looked for opportunities to run mini-campaigns around workplace issues that emerged, as ALU treasurer Maddie Wesley explained, following her unsuccessful attempts to get management to intervene when she was being sexually harassed by a coworker:

    Chris and some of the other union people started protesting outside the building, demanding that Amazon address the multiple sexual harassment cases that we knew were happening in LDJ5. After I started talking to my coworkers and sharing my story, I found out that I was not alone. Other women had gone through the same thing. Two days after the ALU started protesting, the workers carrying out the harassment were suspended. It proves the union has power and that every worker needs a union.

    Lesson 8: Disciplined, Skeptical Vote-Counting

    ALU’s organizers conducted daily phone banks of Amazon workers at the UNITE HERE Local 100 office, to assess their support and reconfirm “yes” votes in the days before the vote, alongside their organizing committee’s work to get commitments to vote “yes” from coworkers in break rooms and in side conversations. At many workplaces, organizers get a false sense of victory from the echo chamber of the most die-hard, pro-union activists. But the ALU team didn’t let their guard down, as the group’s field director Julian Mitchell-Israel told the Oberlin Review:

    Up until a week and a half before the election, I thought we had less than a 50 percent chance of winning. We were seeing numbers from phone banking that were putting us around a 60-to-70-percent “yes” vote, but I was really reticent to take those numbers at face value because, from what we were hearing from the organizers inside of the warehouse and talking to a lot of the workers, there was an incredible amount of union-busting going on. I think the people who were talking to us on the phones were more willing to talk to us, more willing to vote yes, so I was worried that the data we were getting back was false. It took until a couple days before the election for me to start feeling confident that we had a shot. And then it took until the first day of the vote count for me to be like, “oh, s**t, we actually might unionize Amazon.”

    Lesson 9: Learning From Failures

    The ALU was forced to withdraw its first petition for a union election (which would have covered four warehouses) because they hadn’t signed up enough workers to overcome JFK8’s high turnover, which required them to set even higher goals for themselves to resubmit the petition in December. As organizer Cassio Mendoza explained:

    We were losing 80 to 100 workers per week, so every time we didn’t get a minimum of 20 signatures in a day, we were actually moving backwards. It was an uphill battle the entire time to just get 100-plus new signatures per week.” Many similar rank and file-led efforts end there, after the first attempt. But they refiled in December, focusing exclusively on JFK8, and later filed for an additional election at LDJ5. And the group is currently regrouping after that loss, reflecting on having had to lean more on national publicity and their ‘outside strategy’ for a vote that took place only three weeks after the JFK8 win, with Chris telling a crowd of labor activists that they hadn’t engaged enough current employees: “We learned another lesson in our second election. We brought Bernie, we brought AOC, we brought every union in New York State and beyond to our rally in Staten Island, and guess what? We lost 2-1. It didn’t matter.”

    Lesson 10: Small Invitations & Not Giving Up After “The First Ask”

    If there was a “secret recipe” to winning the largest single union recognition vote in fourteen years, it might be the culture the ALU created of quiet, persistent persuasion. Far from the easy decision many reporters have portrayed in their dispatches on the union’s mealtime recruitment tactics, many if not most of the ALU’s “yes” voters didn’t settle on joining after a single short conversation or breakroom meal with an organizer, as Angelika Maldonado explained, using an example of a worker who had initially expressed opposition:

    One time, I was speaking to a guy about my age, twenty-eight, and he was talking about how he was in the military, and he believes a lot of the workers don’t work as hard as him, and that we shouldn’t get a raise, because that would mean everybody would get a raise. He felt he should only get a raise because he’d worked there for four years. I explained to him how everybody’s role is different, and how we’re not only fighting for Tier 1 employees, but we’re also fighting for Tier 3 employees. He was like, ‘I’m not really voting for the union.’ I said, ‘I’m right here whenever you want to speak to me.’ Two weeks later, we were outside giving out lanyards, and he came up with one of the organizers named Casio and said, ‘Guess what? I’m voting yes!’… He said, ‘You softened me up a bit, but then I spoke to Casio, and I’m all in now!’

    Often, the journey to voting “yes” began with an invitation to connect, learn and continue to receive updates, even if they said “no” initially to signing either a petition for union representation or a union card.

    Lesson 11: Leaning on Volunteers, Coalition Partners and Community Groups

    The ALU accepted donations of office space, phone banking resources and legal help from unions like the UFCW, CWA, OPEIU and UNITE HERE, and recruited volunteers to “salt,” or get hired at the facility with the purpose of helping convince more workers to join the union. They also sought out community organizations with connections to groups of workers who hadn’t yet signed up in large numbers. For example, one leader with the African Community Alliance of Staten Island used his connection with local soccer teams to encourage players who work for Amazon to support the union.

    A Method or a Miracle?

    To novice workplace organizers and casual observers, it can be difficult to know what to make of competing headlines trumpeting walkouts and “Striketober” with losses that followed unusual, wall-to-wall national news coverage the days before a workplace election loss. Are the string of Starbucks’ union victories and JFK8 miraculous outliers? In response to that common confusion, teachers’ union activists are fond of saying, “It’s not magic, it’s organizing,” and research backs this up: When workers use multiple methods designed specifically to generate support at their workplace to overcome employer opposition, they win more often than not. These methods aren’t miraculous, but they are effective. A little over half of the union recognition elections held by the NLRB last year resulted in union representation at a workplace without one, and the barriers to success were enormous. The ALU shows that it’s still possible to win historic union elections, even under current federal rules. Let’s go beneath the popular “rags to riches story” and remember the key lessons of this struggle, so we can carry them into other fights.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Leaders Vow United Front Against Amazon Amid New Warehouse Union Election

    Ballots will be counted today at a second, 1,500-worker Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, that began voting last week on whether to unionize with the independent, worker-led Amazon Labor Union (ALU) led by retaliatorily terminated Amazon employee Chris Smalls.

    A win at the warehouse, known as LDJ5, would build on ALU’s stunning April 1 victory at the larger, 8,000-worker JFK8 warehouse just across the street, forming a second unionized workplace at the second-largest private employer in the United States. A victory would cement ALU’s place as a leading force in the U.S. labor movement that could set the path of union organizing for years to come.

    Amazon is seeking to overturn the results of the election at JFK8, accusing ALU of coercing workers to support the union by offering them marijuana in an “impermissible grant of support” for votes, according to filings obtained by The New York Times. The company also alleges ALU “intentionally created hostile confrontations,” among other objections, including that a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regional office overseeing the election “unfairly and inappropriately facilitated the [ALU’s] victory” by forcing the company to rehire a JFK8 employee named Gerald Bryson, who is now an ALU organizer. The NLRB has refuted the allegation.

    Truthout was first to report ALU’s union drive at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island after the outcome of the initial Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) election at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Smalls, who was fired from JFK8 in 2020 after organizing a walkout to protest the company’s lack of COVID-19 protections, told Truthout at the time that an independent union would be more appealing to workers than RWDSU. Smalls said that, rather than a “third party coming in,” ALU — organized by former and current Amazon workers themselves — would be more likely to inspire confidence, and therefore votes.

    In November, the NLRB granted a new election at the Bessemer warehouse after ruling Amazon engaged in illegal interference during the 2021 union drive. A vote in the second election, however, remains too close to call after ballots were counted in late March. The margin of the RWDSU’s apparent loss was smaller than the number of challenged ballots.

    In the event of a loss at LDJ5, ALU is likely to file similar charges of illegal interference in order to seek a new election, says Office and Professional Employees International Union Senior Business Representative Seth Goldstein, who is a pro bono attorney representing ALU. He has helped file multiple unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB after LDJ5 ALU worker-organizers described being subjected to the same kinds of union-busting tactics Amazon utilized in Bessemer and JFK8.

    Goldstein tells Truthout Amazon has violated the National Labor Relations Act by forcing JFK8 and LDJ5 employees to attend anti-union captive-audience meetings, disciplining organizers for protected union activities, and prohibiting the union from displaying its banner in the break rooms. Goldstein alleges Amazon, in an attempt to chill organizing efforts, gave two LDJ5 workers verbal warnings for “removing employer literature” last week.

    “There’s active union-busting going on…. [Amazon is] doing everything they can to try to coerce people to vote against their interests,” Goldstein told Truthout last week, ahead of today’s ballot count. “I think people have to realize that what Amazon is trying to do is analogous to January 6 — that they don’t care about how people voted. They didn’t get the desired results, so they’re going to try to throw it out,” he said, referring to the company’s attempt to overturn election results at JFK8.

    Last week, as voting began in the LDJ5 union election, Goldstein says Amazon put in place a security checkpoint that employees have to pass through in order to reach ALU organizers’ tent outside the sorting facility, making it more difficult to gain access to organizers. The company also has also displayed a video looping anti-union messages near the entrance of the warehouse, he says. An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment, but the company has repeatedly denied accusations of intimidation.

    ALU has joined with the American Federation of Teachers and New York State United Teachers in filing a complaint with New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging that Amazon’s anti-union efforts are in violation of the worker protection provisions of the New York State Excelsior Jobs Program, which provides tax credits for businesses that expand in or relocate to New York. The complaint asks James’s office to seek repayment of nearly $400 million in tax breaks Amazon has received through the program.

    Goldstein argues Attorney General James should be able to make a quick determination against the tech giant based on at least 40 Staten Island-related unfair labor practice charges before the NLRB, which show violations of the company’s national settlement with the Board to allow its workers to freely organize, as well as the administrative law decision in the case of Bryson, the reinstated JFK8 employee.

    Bryson first filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB in June 2020 after Amazon fired him three months earlier for, he alleges, protesting the company’s lack of COVID-19 protections. While Amazon has appealed the decision, an NLRB judge firmly ruled the company had violated labor law. Additionally, the Board’s general counsel recently called for a ban on the employer practice of holding mandatory anti-union meetings, saying they amount to a “license to coerce” employees to reject organizing.

    “I think Amazon will learn a lesson that if you violate people’s rights under the law, and therefore violate the provisions of a law that says you have to follow the labor law, there should be consequences, and the taxpayer should get their money back,” Goldstein says.

    Pressure from the state, regulators and from the Biden administration, he says, alongside worker actions including strikes, could provide the necessary leverage to force Amazon to recognize the union at JFK8, and potentially LDJ5, and get workers to the bargaining table. ALU has asked Amazon to begin contract negotiations at JFK8 this month.

    LDJ5 workers are organizing on many of the same issues that catalyzed the ALU victory at JFK8, including pushing for a $30-an-hour pay, better scheduling and hours for employees, longer breaks, union representation at disciplinary meetings, an end to mandatory overtime, and increased sick and paid time off.

    Amazon recently signaled willingness to make small concessions to workers on some of the ALU and employees’ basic demands when the company announced last week that it will allow its warehouse workers to keep their cellphones while they work. After six workers were killed when a tornado collapsed an Amazon warehouse in Illinois in December, workers demanded permanent access to their phones as a safety precaution. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has declined to levy any fines or other penalties over the tragedy in Illinois.

    “A Multi-Union Crusade”

    A new bargaining unit at LDJ5 would bolster ALU as it seeks to establish its new local, and national labor unions are closely monitoring today’s ballot count and potential results, pledging material support to ALU even as they seek their own unionization drives at Amazon.

    National labor leaders including Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and American Postal Workers Union (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein rallied support for ALU alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last Sunday in Staten Island. The three have pledged financial support to cover ALU’s campaign bills, pro bono legal help, office space and communications advice.

    APWU President Dimondstein told Truthout his union has offered ALU access to legal, communications and negotiations specialists and counsel, as well as monetary support once the union gets fully set up under the Department of Labor. He declined, however, to say how much funding APWU would provide.

    Smalls and other ALU leaders met privately with Teamsters President O’Brien in early April, who, as Truthout has reported, ran for president of the nation’s largest private-sector Teamsters union on promises to unionize Amazon, and has also pledged similar forms of support.

    “We’re advocating that the labor movement take on Amazon in a multi-union crusade,” APWU’s Dimondstein told Truthout. “And that includes the need to support the independent initiatives of ALU.”

    Dimondstein said a second ALU victory — and successful contract negotiations with Amazon — would be especially meaningful to APWU members, who work in similar packing and shipping industries. Organizing Amazon’s 1.1 million U.S. employees would provide a transformational boost to union roll membership that has been steadily declining for the past 40 years.

    “Any group of workers in our industry that can uplift their wages, benefits and working conditions gives us in the APWU better opportunity to continue to improve ours as well, because we’re in the same industry. The more all of us can rise, the more any one group of us can rise,” Dimondstein said.

    Leading labor unions, however, are also pursuing their own avenues to potentially initiate union drives across different sectors of Amazon, and the possibility remains open that ALU could affiliate with a national union down the road if its uphill battle against the corporate behemoth proves too challenging for the small, fledgling union.

    Still, Dimondstein and labor leaders have said they remain steadfastly committed to ALU’s independence. The APWU’s support, Dimondstein emphasized, comes with “no strings attached.”

    “We don’t want jurisdictional arguments to get in the way of taking on this powerful, wealthy company,” he says. “And, you know, maybe those jurisdictional arguments and that narrow view of how to build the union movement, or rebuild it, I should say more precisely — maybe that’s why [unions represent] only 6[.1] of the private-sector workforce in this country.”

    With major unions eyeing their own inroads at the company, and preliminary, worker-led efforts already underway at Amazon facilities in New Jersey, North Carolina, New Mexico and elsewhere to form independent unions, Dimondstein suggested the coming tidal wave of union organizing may necessitate a larger council of locals organized at Amazon — something ALU attorney Goldstein agreed would be necessary to successfully organize and align a patchwork of separate unions.

    Unions can also simply work together on the same union drive within a workplace, Dimondstein says. “And then they work together to get a contract, and then work together on representation and building the union, and so on. We’re wide open to all of those scenarios.”

    “The Rubber Has to Meet the Road”

    Unions must work together in a united front not just in opposition to Amazon, advocates say, but also in order to apply pressure to the Biden administration to take executive action to stop union-busting. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would enable more workers to form a union, remains stalled in the Senate, amplifying the need for the president to act, labor organizers say.

    That’s something Senator Sanders took up on his own last week, sending a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to cut off federal contracts to Amazon until the company stops its “illegal anti-union activity.” Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, is expected to hold a hearing this week dedicated to calculating how many federal contracts go to companies that are fighting unionization efforts.

    Dimondstein supports such a move, saying public money shouldn’t be used to enable union-busting. “We have a president who verbally is quite pro-union, and we’re pleased about that. But the rubber has to meet the road, and certainly Senator Sanders’s idea is worthwhile,” he said.

    ALU’s Goldstein told Truthout that the Biden administration could also take action to boost transparency in employer-mandated filings under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, including employer reports disclosing their work with union-busting consultants. He also called for the NLRB to increase its use of section 10(j) injunctions, which would allow workers to obtain immediate relief in cases of unfair labor practices still under litigation, and more staffing at the NLRB and Department of Labor more widely, saying its press office could be more proactive.

    More than 140 members of Congress recently called on House leaders to increase the NLRB’s budget, arguing the agency isn’t equipped to handle the surge of workplace organizing at large companies like Starbucks and Amazon.

    While Goldstein praised the recent news that Democrats are considering banning its consultants from engaging in anti-union activity after it was revealed that party pollster Global Strategy Group (GSG) aided Amazon’s union-busting activity, he said Democrats must to do more to back up their pro-union rhetoric, or run the risk of alienating workers.

    “The Democrats can’t be saying one thing to unions and still be tied to Big Tech; that’s how Democrats lose elections,” Goldstein says. “If Amazon refuses to bargain [with ALU], will [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi sell her … Amazon stock?”

    Goldstein called out outgoing Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s ties to GSG as its former senior vice president and managing director during the Obama years and President Biden’s cozy relationship with Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs, Jay Carney, who has been sending Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, messages about “perceived slights” against the company. Carney was director of communications for Biden when he was vice president.

    The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the White House is in talks with workers from ALU and Starbucks Workers United, which is behind the unionization of more than 40 Starbucks locations since December, about a potential White House visit. The talks come after Senator Sanders pressed the Biden administration to invite workers at the Staten Island rally last Sunday.

    A victory at LDJ5, Goldstein says, would help build pressure on the administration to follow through on the potential invite and take executive action to help workers fighting to organize their workplaces. But the union drive and push for contract negotiations, he says, is more than just a test for Democrats; it’s a test of “whether or not democracy still exists in the United States.”

    Even if organizers at LDJ5 do not win the union vote, the loss may not slow the tide of union organizing already catalyzed by JFK8’s victory, Goldstein says. “The time has changed regardless of what happens at LDJ5. We hope we win, … but regardless, what was done in JFK8 has changed the world.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Second Amazon Warehouse on Staten Island Will Hold Union Vote on Monday

    The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) victory on Staten Island has transformed the terrain of the U.S. labor movement and has inspired millions of workers. On Monday, a second unionization vote will begin at another Amazon warehouse of 1,500 workers just across the street, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If successful, this second victory at warehouse LDJ5 would further consolidate the power of the ALU and prove that their first win was not a fluke. A second successful unionization vote would also confirm the importance of the ALU’s grassroots organizing model and hasten what seems like an already inevitable wave of organizing efforts at other Amazon warehouses across the country. In response, Amazon is taking every opportunity it can to lie, cheat, and intimidate workers in order to undermine the unionization effort and to overturn the first vote. Working people and unions everywhere must come out in full support of the ALU’s ongoing unionization efforts on Staten Island and beyond.

    Like Cogs in a Machine

    Amazon, which raked in record profits last year, has built its entire business model on the exploitation of an underpaid, overworked, and highly precarious workforce. The starting pay for most full-time warehouse workers is less than $30,000 a year and the turnover rate, as The New York Times reported in June, is 150 percent, meaning that the vast majority of workers never make it past the first year of employment. This is because the company treats its workers like cogs in a machine, monitoring and measuring their every move in order to provide cheap and fast delivery of its products around the world. And it is this exploitative business model that makes Amazon so incredibly hostile to any organizing efforts that might threaten its profits, or its ability to totally control every minute of their employees’ work life. The company has spent millions of dollars to defeat unionization efforts in its warehouses, including filing more than 25 objections to the original vote at the JFK8 warehouse.

    As Labor Notes reported earlier this month, Amazon is using a host of dirty and illegal tactics to convince the employees at the LDJ5 warehouse to reject the union. Managers and company representatives have pitted workers against one another by using racist and sexist language to defame union organizers. They have repeatedly torn down union banners and illegally destroyed union literature in the warehouse break areas. And they have continued to force employees to attend mandatory anti-union meetings where they have smeared the ALU, questioned the union’s ability to manage a budget or negotiate a contract, and lied to workers, claiming that a union could actually lead to lower wages and fewer benefits. While these meetings are, for now, still technically legal, it is illegal to threaten workers with lower wages if they vote for a union.

    The company has also brought in high-cost undercover consultants to pose as workers in order to convince employees to vote no on the union. These independent contractors are reportedly being paid in excess of $3,000 a day to dissuade workers from voting yes, even as the company continues to pay its frontline warehouse workers less than a living wage. Indeed, just one of these consultants could cover the wages of more than 25 workers at LDJ5. And perhaps worst of all, the company is harassing and attempting to intimidate workers who support the union efforts. At least one employee, a member of the ALU, was reprimanded and written up for “soliciting” her fellow employees about the union while on the clock. This kind of harassment and intimidation is clearly illegal. As the NLRB explains: “your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters.”

    While Amazon and other corporations like it have largely been successful in staving off such organizing efforts in the past — the defeat of the RWDSU’s attempts to organize the Bessemer warehouse is perhaps the most salient recent example — the ALU managed to break that pattern. This is in large part because of the ALU’s bottom-up organizing model. For example, at the JFK8 warehouse, workers did not sit idly by while management told them they should vote no. Instead, they used those mandatory captive audience meetings to speak up and organize other workers to vote yes, because they knew their fellow workers had their backs. But ultimately the success of these tactics, which are hardly new or original, is about much more than strategy — it’s about politics.

    “Generation U”

    While it’s tempting for labor activists to focus exclusively on the strategy behind the ALU’s victory, that’s only a part of the story. This struggle is taking place within the broader context of the ongoing political, economic, and social crises of capitalism that have galvanized the working class since the great recession. Many of the workers at Amazon are part of what is now being called “Generation U,” for “Union.” They have spent their entire adult lives living and working under a political and economic regime of austerity and economic precarity that has radicalized them and increased their willingness to organize. Likewise, the rank-and-file activists among the more than 9,500 mostly Black, Brown, and immigrant workers at the two warehouses on Staten Island represent a new generation of worker-organizers. Forged in the crucible of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, these workers have taken that spirit of rebellion into their workplaces, making connections between the exploitation they experience on the job and the oppression they face in the streets. As Chris Smalls told Jacobin in July:

    We already knew that there was racism in the company. Just look at the smear campaign that they wanted to wage against me last year, calling me “not smart or articulate.” This is why I have to continue to fight. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, they’re not going to do it for us. They’re not going to stand in solidarity with the black community. We’re going to have to expose all of these things and hold them accountable. That’s what we’re trying to do as well as unionizing these facilities.

    Thanks in part to the multitude of crises set off by the pandemic, these workers also know more than ever exactly how essential their labor is, and understand the power they hold as employees of one of the biggest and most profitable corporations in the United States. The success of the ALU campaign, where the big unions have failed, also shows the power of grassroots unionism and that there is no substitute for the collective self-organization for the working class.

    And that success has been met with wide support across the country. A recent poll conducted by More Perfect Union found that more than 75 percent of Americans support the Amazon Labor Union and agree that unionization is essential in order to win better pay and safer working conditions for employees. That figure rose to 84 percent among those aged 18 to 34. The overall approval rating for unions, according to Gallup, is the highest it’s been in almost sixty years. A full 68 percent of Americans surveyed said they approve of labor unions, compared to just 28 percent who disapproved. These approval numbers went up even more (77 percent) for 18- to 34-year-olds. Meanwhile, petitions filed with the NLRB for new union elections have increased by 57 percent since January, and the ALU has been contacted by hundreds of Amazon workers at warehouses across the country asking how they, too, can organize a union in their facilities.

    Organize and Strike Everywhere

    The victory on Staten Island, as encouraging as it is, comes after decades of declining unionization levels and strike activity. Despite the many recent examples of high profile labor actions in the United States, including the wave of strikes last October and the massive teachers strikes that swept many red states in 2018 and 2019, the labor movement has struggled to find its groove amid the myriad crises of the last decade.

    But that trend seems to be changing, and the ALU is just one part of a new labor movement that seems poised to overturn those decades of decline. While the workers at JFK8 were still organizing for a vote, Starbucks workers in Buffalo formed the first ever Starbucks union in December. In the less than five months since then, 24 Starbucks locations have held union votes, of which only two voted against forming a union. And, despite a shock and awe anti-union campaign by the company, new stores are holding successful union votes almost every day. While the numbers of workers in these branches is certainly small — sometimes just one or two dozen workers — these victories have shown that workers everywhere can and must organize for the interests of the entire class.

    The ALU and Starbucks Workers United have now put out a call for mass rallies on May 1 to defend the right to organize. They are asking “the whole working class” to “join together in solidarity this May Day 2022 and mobilize against the union busting of Starbucks, Amazon, and every other company engaged in repressing its workers.” This collective action across unions is an extremely positive sign and an important step in building a renewed and fighting labor movement. Left Voice stands in full solidarity with the workers at LDJ5 and the ALU in their struggle to organize themselves and in their fight against union busting. The workers at Amazon and Starbucks are leading the way and we must join them by making 2022 the year that labor strikes back.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Amazon Labor Union’s Historic Breakthrough

    How did a scrappy group of organizers without institutional backing prevail over the second-largest employer in the United States?

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Staten Island Amazon Workers Pause Unionization Battle, But the Fight Isn’t Over

    Supporters of organizing a union at Amazon Staten Island warehouse rally in front of the field office of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) located at Brooklyn. New York, on October 25, 2021.

    Derrick Palmer was at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island when he heard that the petition to form a union he had spent the last six months acquiring signatures for had failed. As a warehouse associate in the packing department, Palmer was working a shift packaging and loading orders onto conveyor belts when the president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), Chris Smalls, broke the news.

    “I was devastated and I felt like it wasn’t fair,” said Palmer, the union’s vice president. “But at the same time, you’ve got to expect the unexpected in Amazon.”

    On November 12, ALU organizers withdrew their petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), as they were alerted that they did not have enough valid signatures for the board to initiate a vote on union representation. They needed to have union-authorization cards signed by at least 30% of workers at the site. The ALU had filed the petition on October 25, believing they had union cards from a third of the warehouse’s 5,500 workers. However, Amazon contacted the NLRB and said there were actually more than 9,600 workers employed in the warehouse. The ALU plans to refile the petition in the coming months.

    The union says its count was not a ballpark estimate, but a concrete number from trusted sources. Whatever accounts for the 4,100-name discrepancy in headcount, Amazon is writing its own rules.

    Chris Smalls also blamed the location’s high turnover rate, more than 150% a year, for invalidating hundreds of the petition’s signatures, as those workers are no longer employed by Amazon. The ALU says many of the workers who signed union cards were fired.

    In organizing a union, the general rule is to sign up at least 70% of a unit before asking for a vote on union representation, because of the inevitable attrition once management cranks up an anti-union campaign. But the ALU plans to go ahead once it reaches the 30% minimum because the turnover rate means it might be impossible to reach 70%, says Smalls.

    “With a higher percentage, of course you have better chances. But when you deal with a company like this, it’s impossible to get. I’ll be here for two years,” the ALU president told The Indypendent. He says the union’s plan is to get the minimum number of cards signed and approach an election campaign in sucker-punch style, quickly bringing the union message to the thousands of workers who would need to be persuaded before a vote.

    “The union has trouble figuring out who is actually in the unit because there’s night shifts, and there’s people who are in the unit but might be working off site or something like that,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California Santa Barbara. “So, A, they keep it sort of secret, they don’t let you know how many are actually in the unit. Then ‘B, they flood the unit. That’s what they did at Bessemer… and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they’re doing right now in Staten Island.”

    The recent developments in Staten Island provide a near “mirror image,” according to Palmer, of the tactics used by Amazon earlier this year to fight unionization at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, exposing parts of the company’s effective — and sometimes illegal — anti-union playbook and providing a valuable learning experience for the ALU.

    Another union-busting tactic is “captive-audience meetings,” where workers are forced to listen to anti-union propaganda. Amazon held them daily in Bessemer, where it also posted anti-union messages on the inside of toilet doors. Vice recently released leaked audio from a captive-audience meeting held in the Staten Island warehouse.

    “We continue to be a target for third parties who do not understand our pro-employee philosophy and seek to disrupt the direct relationship between Amazon and our associates,” said the operations manager at the meeting. An ALU member quickly pointed out that the organizers are not a third-party group, but workers themselves.

    The Bessemer workers voted against joining the RWDSU by a 1,798-738 margin. But on Nov. 29, the NLRB ordered a new election, on the grounds that Amazon had tainted the vote by setting up a mailbox to send in ballots inside a tent emblazoned with the company’s anti- union slogan.

    * * *

    Amazon’s punishing workload and the harsh conditions in its warehouses are well known. Shifts are never shorter than 10 hours, and during the holidays, overtime is mandatory. There is a high rate of injuries and lax COVID-19 safety measures. Chris Smalls was fired in March 2020 after working for the company for five years because he went public with criticisms about people not getting personal protective equipment at the Staten Island facility.

    The pace is fast, with workers’ every move tracked by a computer. Numerous Amazon workers have said that they urinate in bottles to avoid being penalized for five minutes “time off task.” Shifts are spent scanning, packing, moving carts or loading packages onto docks. JFK8, the biggest of the four warehouses in the Staten Island complex, is the size of two football fields.

    “Breaks in this building are a nightmare because by the time it takes to get to the place where you need to be, your break’s already half over, and then by the time the break’s over, you’re already late,” says Josiah Morgan, an ALU organizer who has been working at the warehouse since March. To make things worse, management recently shortened break time from 20 to 15 minutes.

    “There’s definitely a racial issue going on,” says Derrick Palmer, who is also the founder of the Congress of Essential Workers, an organization that supports the rights of the working class throughout New York.

    According to a June New York Times report, 60% of warehouse workers at JFK8 in 2019 were Black or Latino, and Black workers were almost 50% more likely to be fired than their white peers. Management was 70% white or Asian.

    “Race is probably one reason why we don’t get the support that we deserve. But it is what it is, you know, I mean, of course people are not gonna support us because of that,” Smalls told The Indy.

    * * *

    The biggest difference between the Staten Island and Bessemer drives is that while the Bessemer workers were attempting to join the RWDSU, a large national union, the Staten Island work- ers have formed their own.

    After the RWDSU’s defeat in Bessemer, workers at the Staten Island’s four Amazon warehouses saw having their own union as a way to build a more resilient, grass-roots campaign. They founded the ALU last spring.

    It now has around 2,500 workers signed up and an organizing committee with over 150 members. A group of organizers is on the ground at the Staten Island warehouses every day. They say they have had a largely positive response, projecting that the real issue will be beating the turnover rate.

    Setting up a tent outside the JFK8 warehouse, ALU organizers have become a staple there, by bringing pizza to workers at shift change, holding nighttime bonfires and barbecues, offering free weed and hosting gatherings, while passing out union pamphlets and garnering signatures for NLRB petitions.

    On Thanksgiving, the ALU held a potluck dinner outside the facility for workers “trapped in a warehouse.” In late November, when a warehouse worker was hit and killed by a car while leaving the facility, it held a vigil in her honor. A warm plate of food helps after a 10-12-hour shift on your feet, before a three-hour ride back to the Bronx or New Jersey. “Most people take public transportation to get here,” said Josiah Morgan. “I know one girl who travels from White Plains.”

    Every half hour, city buses full of people pull up in front of the warehouses. A line of workers files out, then disperses as they head towards one of the four warehouses. Smalls is often there to greet them, while other workers organize on the inside, or outside during breaks.

    The bottom-up approach, while lacking the financial support of a large union like the RWDSU, has the potential to lead to a stronger core of organized workers, says Ellen Dichner, a labor lawyer and distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies.

    “As a whole, running union campaigns like this requires a lot of money and a lot of expertise, which usually workers who’ve not had experience organizing lack,” she said. “On the other hand, they’re the folks that are in constant contact with their coworkers, and having that inside organizing campaign of the workers is instrumental, absolutely instrumental.” By having a union created by workers themselves, Dichner adds, the ALU will have an easier time refuting Amazon’s casting unions as an outside third party only eager to take workers’ money for dues, something she thinks the Bessemer effort failed at.

    Other attempts to organize Amazon include Amazonians United, founded by six workers in Chicago in 2019 during a shop floor battle to force management to provide clean drinking water at a local warehouse. It has since become a decentralized network active in several cities, including New York. Its organizers emphasize patiently building relationships among workers that yield strong organizing committees. Those focus on leading winnable shop-floor struggles for better working conditions. The long-term goal is to build a network of organizing committees throughout Amazon that will lead the fight for bigger victories.

    In June, the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters announced that they were making organizing Amazon a top national priority. The Teamsters have more than 1.3 million members — 10 times as many as RWDSU — and an annual budget of more than $200 million.

    For the Teamsters, Amazon’s rapid growth presents both an opportunity and a direct threat to their base of workers in the trucking and warehousing industries. They represent 340,000 UPS workers. The union has initiated a nationwide outreach campaign, featuring Teamster members speaking directly with Amazon workers about the benefits of a union job, which often pays at least twice as much as the $15-17 per hour that is the norm at Amazon.

    In November, a left-leaning reform slate won the Teamsters presidency by a 2-1 margin, ousting the union’s old-guard leadership. Incoming President Sean O’Brien has vowed to pull out all the stops to win a strong new contract with UPS when the old one expires in 2023 and hold up that success to show Amazon workers what a strong union can do. Teamsters leaders have also suggested that the union might seek to organize wildcat strikes at Amazon facilities to win union recognition, rather than solely relying on elections, in which the playing field is slanted in favor of management.

    Smalls says he wouldn’t be opposed to collaborating with the Teamsters, but indicated he didn’t have much faith in the large top-down union. He was a member of one of their locals before moving to Amazon in 2015 because he was unhappy with the contract it negotiated.

    “I know a lot of people are like, ‘No, what about the experience?’” he says when asked about organizing a small, completely new union. “But there’s no experience, because if you’ve never worked for this company, you are not going to be able to really understand.”

    “We operate like a union already,” he adds, explaining the ALU’s well-developed organizational structure. “We have everything that a union has already… besides the protections and the resources. For any union to support us, they will have to sit down and meet with us. And, you know, we’ll figure out a way where we can work together.”

    Palmer insists that the road to a union victory at the Staten Island warehouses is still open. “We’re going to continue our efforts and we’re going to file again,” he said.

    Many see the effort to unionize mega-employers like Amazon, Starbucks or Walmart as potentially revolutionary. “It would be the same sort of thing as organizing General Motors or U.S. Steel in 1937, or the Montgomery bus boycott in terms of civil rights,” said Lichtenstein, author of several books on the history of labor unions in 20th century America, about the societal impact if Amazon workers were to unionize.

    These efforts come at a time when polls show the highest level of public support for unions since the 1960s, although less than 11% of U.S. workers now belong to one — and less than 7% at private-sector employers. Despite that public support, the battle against Amazon and its centi-billionaire founder, to overcome the company’s sheer will to destroy any union drive, will be a long, tough one, requiring intense organizing and effective tactics.

    In April, just after the results of the Bessemer vote were announced, labor author and organizer Jane McAlevey wrote an article for The Nation, “Blowout in Bessemer: A Postmortem on the Amazon Campaign.” She had two main criticisms of the RWDSU effort there. Organizers only organized at the workplace gate, under Amazon’s gaze, instead of visiting workers at home (while taking precautions against COVID), and they didn’t go public with workers who promised a yes vote, encouraging others to do the same.

    The exception to the labor-organizing rule that home visits are essential, she wrote, would be “if large numbers of actual Bessemer Amazon workers were the people standing at shift change at the plant gate.” That is indeed the case at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouses, where most workers arrive by bus. And many of the Staten Island workers have clearly gone public with their plans to vote yes for the union.

    Can the ALU’s do-it-yourself organizing model or an alliance with a union such as the RWDSU or the Teamsters reverse the defeat at Bessemer and provide a solution to the challenges posed by Amazon’s union-busting tactics? We’ll learn more in the coming months and years.

    The newspaper Naomi Klein calls “utterly unique,” full of insightful dispatches from around the world, The Indypendent offers a fresh take on today’s events.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.