Amazon Labor Union’s Organizing Victory Has Lessons for All of Us
It isn’t easy to organize a union these days. Lots of young people say they like the idea, but the deck is totally stacked against efforts to organize workers. Companies have legions of lawyers, focus-group tested campaign tactics, and laws/regulations protecting unionization have been whittled down to near nothing.
The victory of the Amazon Labor Union in organizing the eight thousand workers at JFK8 distribution center on Staten Island cuts across the historical grain. Many of labor’s gains in recent years have been public employees and health care workers.
Employee churn at distribution warehouses represented a significant logistical problem, as the ALU realized when they withdrew their initial petitions because many of their signers had moved on to other jobs.
The company’s do-little response to COVID, opened the door for a revival of the organizing tactics of a century ago.
Chris Smalls was fired by Amazon in March 2020 for leading a walkout to protest the company’s lack of Covid precautions. He’d worked at the distribution center for five years, had been repeatedly promoted, and was recruited to assist in opening other warehouses.
His crime, as far as the company was concerned, involved publicly asking for masks and social distancing protocols. Vice reported about the company’s general counsel insulting Smalls in a meeting with top brass about potential blowback saying he was “not smart or articulate.”
The organizing started in a parking lot outside the warehouse, where food trucks and family members came to catch workers on their lunch breaks. Smalls and a few others started staging BBQs and other social events, giving them an opening to talk to new people everyday.
This established a precedent for the ALU’s on-the-ground, face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder grassroots organizing strategy. They educated workers about their rights and countered the company propaganda about how they wouldn’t be abandoned once an election was concluded.
The classic argument about outsiders coming in to take over people’s lives didn’t work because the people doing the organizing and the leadership of the union were one and the same.
The company ran a two tiered program to counteract the union. There was an overt program, where managers hosted meetings where company philosophy was discussed. And there was a covert program, where outside consultants pretended to be employees.
From Huffpo::
The below-ground campaign belonged primarily to the consultants. Paid a typical rate of $3,200 a day apiece, the consultants worked the warehouse floor, pulling workers aside for one-on-one conversations. They stood out in their white-collar clothes and were usually white or Latino, with the bilingual ones focusing on Spanish-speaking workers. Some said they were flying back and forth between New York and Bessemer, Alabama, where a separate Amazon union campaign was underway by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union.
Some were nice. Some weren’t. Whatever their dispositions, their goal was to turn workers against the union.
Like an experienced organizer, Spence gathered whatever information he could on them. Consultants who have direct contact with workers in an organizing campaign have to report their arrangements, including fees, to the Labor Department. Although these documents only shed light on past work, Spence and his friends were able to compile unflattering dossiers, to show workers that the consultants get rich “convincing poor people to stay poor.”
“One thing they’d say is when we win, Chris is gonna be a millionaire. He’s gonna go buy a Lamborghini [with our union dues].”
A classic management tactic against unions is divide and conquer. And with a workforce that includes immigrants from all over the world, fostering trust with those employees became a major focus.
Brima Sylla, a Liberian immigrant working the morning shift at JFK8, took the lead in coordinating their ultimately successful efforts to reach and involve immigrants.
From an interview in Jacobin:
I talked to a lot of workers, mostly in the break room but also outside the building. Lots of times, I’d see a group of African workers together, and I’d always go up to them and talk. I’d say, “Look brother, you have to understand: if you want your family to be secure, if you want your job to be secure, you need to vote for the Amazon Labor Union. That’s how we win the American dream.” People working at Amazon are not millionaires; we are working class. I’d ask people, “Do you want to make $30 dollars an hour?” And of course they’d say yes. It’s logical.
I talked with everybody — Africans, Chinese, Polish workers. One Polish guy, I started by asking him about football — it turned out he used to play fullback. We had a conversation, and eventually I asked him what he thought about working at Amazon: he told me the pay was too low and that he had a lot of responsibilities because he had to take care of his elder parents, and it was really hard to do with $18.25 an hour. And when he told me he would vote yes on the union, I realized we really had everybody on board.
Those conversations worked. We had no hidden agenda, and people started to see that. By the time we were close to the vote date, you could see so many people in the building wearing the ALU shirt and our lanyards. And it was workers of every nationality, including the white workers.
[Warning: Scary History Ahead, may not be suitable for cold warriors]
These organizing tactics didn’t come from a textbook or fall from the sky. A story at Labor Notes includes an interview with Justine Medina, whose research on organizing tactics led her to William Z. Foster’s Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry.
My quick-and-dirty analysis of the Amazon Labor Union’s successes so far is pretty simple. We just did the thing you’re supposed to do: we had a worker-led movement.
We studied the history of how the first major unions were built. We learned from the Industrial Workers of the World, and even more from the building of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. We read William Z. Foster’s Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry (a must-read, seriously).
But here’s the basic thing: you have an actual worker-led project—a Black- and Brown-led, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-gender, multi-ability organizing team. You get some salts with some organizing experience, but make sure they’re prepared to put in the work and to follow the lead of workers who have been around the shop longer. You get the Communists involved, you get some socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, you bring together a broad progressive coalition. You bring in sympathetic comrades from other unions, in a supporting role.
Aha! Did you see the word “communist?’ Yes, that was back in the day when there was an actual organization called the Communist Party. Nowadays, the word is primarily used as a slur by reactionaries too lazy to figure out what they are against.
Foster ended up leading that party in later years, but his acumen as an organizer was at its zenith after he’d quit the Industrial Workers of the World. During his time with the Chicago Federation of Labor he encouraged coalitions between competing unions with the express purpose of organizing workers.
Interestingly enough, Foster’s greatest success at organizing which led up to the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers strike of 1919, was in part defeated by the Spanish Flu pandemic of that era, as public gatherings became prohibited.
The question arising from the Amazon Labor Union’s success is “can it scale up?” And the consensus of observers is that it should be viewed as a seed from which a broader unionization movement will grow.
There is another grassroots movement underway which may offer more hope for unionists, namely the organizing going on in Starbucks locations. Unlike the fast food industry, which is difficult to organize because operational ownership is diluted through franchising, the Seattle coffee company has kept its locations under one corporate umbrella.
Ten Starbucks locations on the East Coast have voted to affiliate with Starbucks Workers United, including its largest outlet in Manhattan. While the coffee workers union has been supported by Workers United, an offshoot of the Service Employees International Union, the actual organizing has been led by workers, who have filed for recognition at 181 locations in 28 states.
Nobody has been more on top of what been happening than Jordan Zakarin, editor of the Progress Report, which keeps track of grassroots movements around the country:
Aside from Jaz Brisnack, the young barista who has spearheaded the union drive, just about every role in the metastasizing movement, from outreach and education to bargaining and public relations, is being filled by workers with no prior experience in organized labor. They have created a sort of national network of co-ops within a titan of American capitalism, providing mutual aid and triggering national social media outrage whenever management resumes harassing one of their colleagues.
In my more than seven months of reporting on the Starbucks union movement, I’ve been regularly stunned by the devotion and professionalism of workers who are often balancing a fierce campaign against a multinational, trillion-dollar corporation with schoolwork. Workers as young as 16 have become fluent in labor law and NLRB process, insisting that Starbucks managers have broken “laboratory conditions” and violated their Weingarten rights.
Being a professional union organizer is a noble, often thankless, and regularly impossible job. Under the United State’s current labor law, organizing a union is like leading an expedition up Mount Olympus as Zeus heaves bolts of lightning at your party. That it happens at all is a testament to organizers’ dedication. But labor has also been stymied by a conservative approach taken by older leaders used to operating in an era of outsourcing and mass firings, putting them on survival footing at all times. As a result, they’ve long existed in a parochial bubble, tending to the contractural needs of a dwindling membership.
The young, energetic, and idealistic workers at Amazon and Starbucks are victims of a deeply unequal economy, but have not been burdened by the particular hurdles hampering those established unions. The arrogance of employers writ large and the impossible economic conditions facing young people have turned the specter of harnessing collective power through unionization into a potential panacea.
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Support among younger people for unions is the highest for any age group. Voters from this demographic have now shown the largest drop-off of support for President Joe Biden.
The administration’s strategies for being a friend to organized labor have been thwarted by the same corporate Democrats who’ve opposed other progressive and liberal priorities.
David Weil, who headed the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour division during the Obama administration is now suddenly too outspoken for the role. His criticism of the exploitative models helping gig and tech companies to flourish was apparently a bridge too far.
Add the administration’s lack of substantive action in the labor arena (talk is cheap) to Biden’s refusal to cancel some or all student debt and inaction on the legalization of marijuana together and you have the very real potential of a significant voting bloc not engaged enough to vote in the midterms elections.
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Finally, a shout out to locals of the United Food and Beverage Workers, whose transparency during tough negotiations with grocery chains is a welcome change. You can’t just ask people to support unions if you wait until the last minute to educate and involve them.
As I understand it there are tentative agreements with Stater Bros, Ralphs and Albertsons/Vons/Pavilions to be voted on by members.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com