Critics generally acknowledge that the campaigns helped boost support for higher wages, even if they failed to recruit union members. Defenders say the goal is to make an impact on a company or industry-wide scale rather than a few individual stores. They point to certain developments, such as a pending California law that would regulate wages and working conditions in fast food, as signs of progress.
In other cases, workers themselves have realized the limitations of established unions and the benefits of going it alone. Joseph Fink, who works at an Amazon Fresh grocery store in Seattle with about 150 employees, said the workers there had approached a few unions when they wanted to organize over the summer but decided the unions would focus on gaining recognition by National Labor Relations Board elections would delay the resolution of their complaints, including sexual harassment and threats to health and safety.
When the workers suggested the idea of organizing protests or strikes as an alternative, union officials reacted cautiously. “We got the response that if we spoke out, asserted our rights in public, we would be fired,” said Mr Fink. “It was a self-defeating story.”
The workers decided to unionize on their own without the formal blessing of the NLRB, a model known as a “solidarity union,” whose roots predate the modern labor movement.
For employees who do want NLRB certification, being independent from an established union also has benefits, such as confusing the talking points of employers and advisers, who often portray unions as “third parties” seeking to hoard employees’ dues.
At Amazon, the strategy was similar to sending a conventional army to fight guerrillas: organizers said the topics of discussion had dropped when employees realized the union was made up of colleagues rather than outsiders.
“When an employee comes up to me, they look at me, see that I have a badge on and say, ‘Do you work here?’ They ask in the most surprising way,” said Angelika Maldonado, an Amazon employee on Staten Island who heads the union workers’ committee. “‘I’m like, ‘Yeah, I work here.’ It makes us recognizable from the start.”
