Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse location won union recognition by hundreds of votes on Friday, making it the very first warehouse location in the country to secure a union. During two days of counting, the final tally came to 2,654-2,131, in the union’s favor.
The union drive victory was widely acknowledged as more than an uphill battle, as veteran labor organizers, journalists, and scholars noted on Twitter. The campaign at the Staten Island location was co-led by a former Amazon employee, Christian Smalls, who had been fired by the company last year during a labor dispute at his former warehouse. In response, Smalls started an independent union called Amazon Labor Union (ALU), and restarted the fight in Staten Island. Up against Amazon’s aggressive union-busting reputation and vast funds, the prospects seemed slim for the ALU, which is about a year old, to win its first union campaign with thousands of workers.
But as the count continued Friday morning, former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse tweeted, “In my 25 years writing about labor, the unionization victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island is by far the biggest, beating-the-odds David versus Goliath unionization win I’ve seen.”
The unexpected victory seems to have sent a welcome shock through the labor movement, with some suggesting that this moment warrants a contemporary refresh for how unions think about, strategize around, and carry out campaigns. It’s important to remember the lessons from the U.S. labor movement’s heyday and its decline, but the needs of today’s workers, as they build power in the current fraught economic and political landscape, might call for some inventive tweaks.
“I think we’re likely to see a lot more ‘unconventional’ organizing campaigns, some independent unions like ALU, and some more focused on ‘direct action’ to improve working conditions, like Amazon Workers United at Amazon Fresh and Amazonians United,” John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, tells Teen Vogue via email. “[We’ll likely see] many more campaigns that are based on ‘worker-led self-organization’ — such as the campaigns at Starbucks and REI, at which traditional unions have been involved, but the campaigns have really taken off because courageous young workers have taken the lead and organized their coworkers.”
A second Amazon warehouse union drive also took place on Thursday of this week, but the outcome is currently in limbo. Amazon’s warehouse location in Bessemer, Alabama, took another swing at union recognition after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered a second vote in the wake of Amazon’s election violations. At present, Bessemer’s vote count is 993-875, in Amazon’s favor, with more than 400 contested ballots to be the deciding factor. The NLRB is expected to make its ruling in a few weeks.
The current condition of U.S. labor laws, says Logan, means that these kinds of labor fights will remain incredibly difficult to win without the support of more progressive legislation. “Campaigns like Amazon and Starbucks are vitally important here,” he says, noting that labor fights like this could use updated labor laws to back them up.
“People have a direct relationship with these companies and they are engaged in what's happening and paying attention to labor issues in a way that hasn't been true for decades. We're unlikely ever to get meaningful labor law reform unless people are paying attention and feel they have a stake in the outcome," Logan continues. "The Amazon and Starbucks campaign have at least created the possibility of having a meaningful national debate about the pitiful state of labor rights in the United States.”
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