By John Pickard
The ballot result from the Staten Island, New York facility of Amazon, in favour of organising in a union, is an important victory for Amazon workers and for all US workers. It was won against one of the most anti-union companies in the world and labour activists everywhere are hoping it is the beginning of a large scale organisation within Amazon.
Amazon has a well-deserved reputation for treating its employees like dirt. At the time of a recent, failed, unionisation attempt in Alabama, it was alleged that workers were under so much stress that they were unable to take proper breaks and were obliged to urinate into bottles.
Amazon’s business plan is based on the greatest-possible exploitation of its workforce, with workers monitored every second, causing extremely high levels of stress and ill-health. Whenever there are threats of unionisation, Amazon always plays hardball: threatening, intimidating and harassing union organisers and would-be union members, and employing battalions of lawyers, consultants, publicity staff and security guards to enforce their views.
US law means that labour relations are governed by the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees ballots on unionisation and which supposedly enforces the rights of both employers and employees, although it is usually the rights of the former upheld at the expense of the latter. This was the context in which the campaign and ballot took place.
Christian Smalls sacked for raising security concerns
The organisation of the Staten Island facility, also known as JFK8, was led by an employee of Amazon and a former employee, Christian Smalls, who had been sacked early in the Covid pandemic for having raised concerns about safety and the lack of information about the rate of infections in the warehouse facility.
At that time there was a more or less spontaneous walk-out, and immediately the company swung into action, setting up a large-scale campaign team organised with military precisions. According to the New York Times, (April 4), which cited court documents, “Amazon formed a reaction team involving 10 departments, including its Global Intelligence Program, a security group staffed by many military veterans…In the end, there were more executives — including 11 vice presidents — who were alerted about the protest than workers who attended it.”
Following this episode, the NYT said, “the company quietly mobilized”. The problem for Amazon was that Smalls also began to organise. Using GoFundMe crowd-funding to raise over $100,00 to fund the long 11-month campaign, Smalls and his main ally, Derrick Palmer (who remained an employee), began to work hard to win over the employees. Their methods of organisation were completely different to what we would expect in the UK and they have set a new standard for union organising in the USA.
They effectively set up a picket outside the Amazon plant, with braziers near the bus stop to keep people warm, with free food on offer and other things. One sign is reported to have said “Free Weed and Food” – which Amazon is now using to appeal against the final vote. “We started this with nothing, with two tables, two chairs and a tent,” Smalls told the NYT.
A very different kind of organising campaign
They made TikTok videos; they brought along home-made baking and they worked to win workers around. They started their own union – the Amazon Labor Union – with no connections to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy or the ‘mainstream’ unions which had failed in their previous organisation drives.
When workers faced family crises, the ALU helped them. One employee was fired and became homeless and the union raised funds for him. In short, the union became a part of the fabric of the lives of the workers in Amazon, from the outside facing inwards. At a later stage in the campaign, Amazon was obliged by the NLRB to allow union organisation drives inside the plant, so long as those involved were ‘off the clock’, although even that was not without incident.
Nonetheless, as Seth Goldstein, a lawyer working for free for the ALU, told the NYT, “What you do is you create a community that Amazon never really had for workers.” It was through these methods that the ALU completely out-performed the ‘normal’ labour unions.
There were many issues that the new union could get its teeth into. An earlier New York Times investigation (last June) revealed that the Amazon warehouse was “burning through employees”. Even before the pandemic, the NYT found, “Amazon warehouses had an astonishing annual turnover rate of 150 percent.” They also found from an internal document that Black employees were almost 50 percent more likely to be fired than their white peers.
Millions spent on anti-union consultants alone
Amazon, true to form, fought hard against the unionisation drive. Amazon as a whole spends massively on anti-union campaigns. Last year, in the whole of the US, it was more than $4.3 million just on anti-union consultants, according to federal filings seen by the NYT. At Staten Island, Amazon organised ‘training sessions’ for employees, which were basically anti-union rallies. One anti-union consultant referred to the union organisers as “thugs”.
The company monitored organizers’ social media, it bombarded employees with text messages and covered the warehouse with signs saying, “Vote NO”. Bosses held one-to-one meetings with employees. They claimed the organisers were “outsiders” neglecting to mention that the key organiser was previously sacked.
But despite Amazon’s campaign, of intimidation and threats, in the final ballot, the union won a clear majority, with 2,654 for the union and 2,131 against.
There is a long way to go, especially for a brand-new union. No one knows for sure how it will develop and progress in the coming months and years. Nonetheless, the vote in Staten Island could prove to be a significant breakthrough. Amazon is a major employer, with a million employees in the USA and 1.3m across the world. It is no accident that the NYT described the union victory as one of the most significant “in a generation”.
Part 2: Victory also brings dangers, from the US socialist website, Facts for Working People, will be published next.
