In early April, Amazon workers were able to successfully score a major win in their battle to form a union- the first ever in the U.S. Amazon, which is the country’s second largest employer, has been fighting against the unionization of their workers, as it would require them to offer higher wages, better working conditions, longer breaks, paid sick leave and paid time off for injuries.
The group, known as Amazon Labor Union (ALU), won their first election in early April. It was led by activist Chris Smalls, who was fired from Amazon in 2020 after protesting Amazon’s poor working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After I was terminated, they had a meeting about me- Jeff Bezos, and the general counsel- calling me not smart or articulate,” Smalls said in an interview after the win. “And, ironically, they also said to make me the face of the whole unionization efforts.”
Smalls said after he was fired he made it his new mission to travel and educate Amazon workers across the country on the benefits of unionizing. He says the vote, which was 55% in favor of unionizing, was so little because Amazon spends so much on “union busting.”
“Amazon spends millions of dollars on union busting; they put these workers into captive audiences 24/7. Workers go to these trainings where there's drilled anti-union propaganda all day and all night,” Smalls said.
ALU was able to secure a win at their warehouse on Staten Island known as JFK8, though during that same time the company was able to scare off activists in Alabama who have also been making unionizing efforts.
On Monday, workers at an Amazon sorting facility at Staten Island’s LDJ5 facility will begin voting, barely a month after their first win at the JFK8 warehouse.
If ALU continues to secure these small battles, they may win the war. Starbucks, for example, saw more than 200 locations petition for elections to unionize just five months after their first union win.
“A second victory would be more damaging to Amazon than a loss would be damaging to the Amazon Labor Union,” said John Logan, director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University’s College of Business.
Amazon is now taking ALU more seriously. They are ramping up union-busting efforts by blasting their own employees with posters, videos, and text messages telling their workers not to unionize.
They also held meetings during work hours in an effort to drill their employees with anti-union information, a tactic called “captive audience meetings” which the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has moved to ban, because they say it violates the National Labor Relations Act.
Documents filed with the Department of Labor also suggest that Amazon pays at least $20,000 a week towards anti-union consultants. Amazon is also challenging the results of the JFK8 election, and are saying and doing anything they can to reverse the results of that election before it snowballs.
“Big anti-union corporations are often able to exploit the weakness of the law to delay and to even prevent unions from negotiating first contracts,” explains John Logan, director of the Labor and Employment Studies Program at San Francisco State University. “But there’s nothing that’s normal about this case.”
“The genie is already out of the bottle,” Logan continued. “We are going to see more unconventional campaigns like Amazon at other employers regardless. A second victory would be massive in terms of the inspiration and momentum, but even if they lose – the Staten Island victory wasn’t in isolation, it was in the context of union victories at Starbucks, now you have Apple workers [organizing].”