Workers at Amazon’s huge warehouse on Staten Island voted by a wide margin to form a union, results released Friday show, in a stunning victory for a campaign targeting the country’s second-largest employer and a of the greatest victories for organized labor in a generation.
Workers cast 2,654 votes to be represented by Amazon Labor Union and 2,131 against, giving the union a more than 10 percentage point victory, according to the National Labor Relations Board. More than 8,300 employees in the building, the only Amazon fulfillment center in New York City, were eligible to vote.
The Staten Island victory could usher in a new era for unions in the United States, where the proportion of workers in unions fell to 10.3 percent last year, the lowest rate in decades, despite widespread labor shortages and pockets of successful labor activity.
No union victory is greater than the United States’ first win over Amazon, which many union leaders view as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it affects so many industries and often dominates them.
The Staten Island outcome came on the heels of what is leaning toward a small loss by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at a major Amazon warehouse in Alabama in a campaign. The vote is so close that the results will not be known for several weeks as disputed ballots are litigated.
The surprising strength of unions in both locations most likely means Amazon will face years of labor pressure from independent labor groups, major unions targeting the company, and environmentalists and other progressive activists working with them. As a recent series of union victories at Starbucks has shown, victories in one location can be an encouragement to others.
Amazon has been eager to hire for the past two years and now has 1.6 million employees worldwide. But it was plagued by high staff turnover and the pandemic gave workers a growing sense of power while fueling concerns about workplace safety. The Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, was the subject of a New York Times investigation last year, which found it symbolic of tensions in Amazon’s employment model.
“The pandemic has fundamentally changed the job landscape,” said John Logan, a professor of employment studies at San Francisco State University. “It’s just a matter of whether unions can capitalize on the opportunity that transformation has opened up.”
Amazon did not immediately comment on the outcome. In principle, the company can contest the vote on the grounds of inappropriate trade union behavior.
Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who founded the union, stood outside the NLRB office in Brooklyn, where the ballots were being counted, a bottle of champagne in front of a crowd of supporters and press. “To the first Amazon union in American history,” he cheered.
Derrick Palmer, who packs boxes at the warehouse and co-founder of the union, said he expected other Staten Island facilities to follow. “This will be the first union,” he said, “but if we go further, it will motivate other workers to join us.”
One question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is to what extent they will help the Amazon Labor Union, a fledgling, independent group, to withstand potential challenges to the outcome and negotiate an initial contract, for example through means and legal talent.
“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing battle,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped achieve one of the last labor victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat processing plant. in 2008 and informally informed the Staten Island workers. “The workers’ movement needs to figure out how to support them.”
Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview Thursday that the union was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Amazon’s union organization and partner with several other unions. and progressive groups.
“We have many partners in labor,” said Mr. O’Brien. ‘We have neighborhood groups. It will be a great coalition.”
A culture of fear created by intensive productivity monitoring, documented by The Times on JFK8, was a major motivation for the union action, which began in earnest nearly a year ago. The Amazon facility provided a lifeline to laid-off workers during the pandemic, but burned through the workforce and had such poor communications and technology that workers were accidentally fired or lost benefits.
For some employees, the stress of working in the warehouse during Covid outbreaks has been a radicalizing experience to take action. Mr Smalls, the chairman of the Amazon Labor Union, said he became alarmed in March 2020 after meeting a colleague who was clearly ill. Fearing an outbreak, he begged management to close the facility for two weeks. The company fired him after he helped lead a strike over security conditions in late March of that year.
Amazon said at the time it had taken “extreme measures” to keep employees safe, including thorough cleaning and social distancing. It said it had fired Mr Smalls for violating social distancing guidelines and attending the strike, even though he had been quarantined.
After workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., overwhelmingly rejected the retail workers’ union in the first election last spring, Mr. Smalls and Mr. Palmer, his best friend, decided to form a new union. , called Amazon Labor Union.
While the organization in Alabama included high-profile tactics, with progressive supporters like Senator Bernie Sanders visiting the area, JFK8 organizers took a slightly different approach. Their insider status helped them build support as they wore shirts and masks with the union logo inside the building and posted on internal bulletin boards. (The store employees said they were crippled by Covid during their first election in Alabama and organized a lot more personally this year.)
For months they set up shop at the bus stop outside the warehouse, grilling meat on barbecues and even handing out pot at one point. They were active on social media, with TikTok videos and regular tweets about Amazon’s campaign tactics.
They also filed numerous charges of unfair labor practices with the NLRB when they believed Amazon was infringing on their rights. The job center took credit in a number of the cases, some of which Amazon arranged in a nationwide agreement to give workers greater access to organize on the ground.
Sometimes the Amazon Labor Union stumbled. The labor council determined this fall that the fledgling union, which spent months collecting signatures from workers asking for a vote, had shown insufficient support to justify an election. But the organizers kept trying and by the end of January they had finally collected enough signatures.
Amazon played up its $15-an-hour minimum wage on advertising and other public relations efforts. The company also ran a full-scale campaign against the union, both as it attempted to qualify for the election and once the ballot was established, texting employees and mandating participation in anti-union meetings. It spent $4.3 million last year on anti-union advisers across the country, according to annual disclosures filed Thursday with the Department of Labor.
In February, Mr. Smalls was arrested at the facility after managers said he was trespassing while delivering food to colleagues and calling police. Two current employees were also arrested during the incident, which appeared to spark interest in the union.
In the run-up to the vote, the union predicted multiple images on the front of the Staten Island facility, including the message, “They have arrested your colleagues.”
The difference in results in Bessemer and Staten Island may reflect a difference in union receptivity in the two states — about 6 percent of workers in Alabama are union members, compared to 22 percent in New York — as well as the difference between a mail-in election and one held personally.
But it may also suggest the benefits of organizing through an independent worker-led union rather than a traditional one. In Alabama, union officials and professional organizers continued to be barred from the facility under the labor council settlement. But at the Staten Island location, a higher proportion of union leadership and organizers were current employees, giving them more direct access to colleagues.
“What we’ve been trying to say all along is that having workers on the inside is the most powerful tool,” said Mr. Palmer, who earns $21.50 an hour. “People didn’t believe it, but you can’t beat workers organizing other workers.”
The independence of the Amazon Labor Union also seemed to make Amazon’s anti-union discussions less effective. During hundreds of anti-union rallies with employees, the company suggested that the ALU was an intruder who wanted to get between the company and its employees and use their money for their own ends.
But these criticisms were easier for the union to dispel there. “When an employee comes up to me, they look at me and see that I have a badge on and say, ‘Do you work here?’” said Angelika Maldonado, an employee who was active in the organization campaign. “‘I’m like, ‘I work here.’ It makes us recognizable from the start.”
On March 25, JFK8 workers began queuing in front of a tent in the parking lot to vote. And over five days of voting, they cast their votes to form what may be the first union among Amazon’s operations in the United States.
Another election, also hosted by Amazon Labor Union at a neighboring Staten Island branch, is scheduled for late April.
Jodi Kantor contributed to reporting.
