An Amazon warehouse in New York City made history on Friday when workers said they had won a vote to form the retail behemoth’s first union, a breakthrough that represented another sign that support for labor unions is resurgent in America.
Over 2,000 employees at the fulfillment center known as JFK8 voted to form a union, organizers said, after facing down months of hostile messaging that workers say included daily mandatory meetings with Amazon’s anti-union consultants.
The victory was especially significant because employees not only appeared to unionize a facility controlled by one of the world’s most powerful companies—but also to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). The grassroots group is led by current and former warehouse workers who waged a hard-fought battle frequently billed as Davids battling a $1.6-trillion Goliath.
ADVERTISEMENT
Outside the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) office in Brooklyn, ALU president Chris Smalls and other organizers popped champagne once the win was official.
“It’s not about me,” Smalls told reporters at a press conference. “Amazon tried to make it about me from Day 1. And I never said it was going to be Amazon versus Chris Smalls. It’s always going to be Amazon versus the people, and today the people have spoken, and the people wanted a union.”
During his remarks, the new union president took aim at Amazon’s billionaire founder, saying, “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because when he was up there, we was signing people up.”
Amazon has previously made its stance opposing unionization quite clear. On Friday, a spokesperson said in a statement, “We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. We’re evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the NLRB that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and U.S. Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election.”
As the nation’s second-largest employer behind Walmart, Amazon has fended off union drives before, including at the BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, where a do-over election to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union was too close to call as of Thursday. According to labor officials, there were 993 “no” votes and 875 “yes” votes, but at least 400 contested ballots could be reviewed; in a few weeks, a hearing will determine the fate of the challenged ballots.
Last year, Amazon defeated the Bessemer unionization effort, but the NLRB ordered a re-vote after finding the e-commerce giant had improperly interfered with the first election, in particular by installing an unmarked U.S. Postal Service mailbox in front of the warehouse. Employees there were voting by mail, and some said the tent-covered mailbox gave them the impression the company was monitoring their votes.
Staten Island workers say Amazon deployed plenty of scare tactics up North, including calling police on Smalls when he delivered food for a union event, disciplining multiple employees who are union organizers, and hosting so-called captive-audience meetings where Amazon’s labor consultants warned unionizing could lead to workers’ pay being cut to minimum wage.
A second Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, known as LDJ5, will vote on whether to join ALU next month.
At JFK8, the organizing momentum began to build at the start of the pandemic, when Smalls led a walkout over what employees described as the company’s unsafe working conditions. Amazon fired Smalls soon after the protest over what it said was his own failure to honor pandemic safety protocols. A lawsuit by Smalls over the incident—in which he alleged racial discrimination—was dismissed in February.
But after Amazon terminated Smalls, company executives including billionaire founder Jeff Bezos attended meetings to address the negative publicity surrounding the walkout leader’s firing, COVID-19 measures, and the growing effort to unionize the Staten Island warehouse. Vice revealed executives discussed a plan to discredit Smalls as “not smart or articulate” and make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” Amazon’s alleged smear campaign against Smalls, who is Black, was widely panned as “racist.”
“Ironically, they made me the face of the whole unionizing effort,” Smalls previously told The Daily Beast. “So I said, ‘OK, good idea.’”
“Beyond that, I just thought it was important to share my experience and my story after I was fired, because Amazon gets away with these things, firing people, destroying people’s lives,” Smalls added. “They changed my life forever. I didn’t want to be another statistic, another worker fired and filing a lawsuit.”
The union push at Amazon is part of a larger surge of pandemic-era organizing at corporations across the country. In December, a Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, became the first in the coffee chain’s history to form a union. Since then, eight other shops including one store in Seattle, the company’s hometown, have voted to unionize, even as workers say managers are retaliating against them for organizing with reduced hours, disciplinary write-ups, and, in some cases, termination.
“This is monumental, this is a potential Starbucks situation, where one building gets done, and there’s a tidal wave across the country. That’s what we want,” Smalls told The Daily Beast last month of the Amazon push.
In New York, employees at outdoor retailer REI’s flagship Manhattan store recently voted to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, and tech workers at The New York Times voted to unionize under the NewsGuild of New York. (Daily Beast employees are represented by the NewsGuild.)
Polls suggest public support for unions is increasing, even if their share of the workforce has fluctuated in recent years.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research and a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said discontent among Amazon workers has been stirring for a long time.
“It didn’t start with the pandemic, but wages have been stagnating for a long time, and conditions have been getting worse for a long time,” she told The Daily Beast. Anger surrounding the pandemic, however, spurred the union drive even more.
“Workers were having to risk their lives to do their work and Amazon didn’t care,” Bronfenbrenner said. “The company was making huge profits during COVID and not providing PPE... Jeff Bezos and the other top officers of the corporation seemed more callous than they’d ever been.”
“To the extreme of Jeff Bezos going to the moon at the point where the workers were risking the most,” she added.
Still, Amazon didn’t expect the union in Bessemer to come so close to a win.
“Amazon is in shock, because I can tell you even the Bessemer election, which looks like it was a loss, that’s not final,” Bronfenbrenner said. “It’s a very close loss.”
The landmark victory on Staten Island will inspire a domino effect of unionization across not only Amazon but other large corporations, she said.
“I’d be worried if I were Walmart,” Bronfenbrenner said. “And every other big employer that thought they were going to be non-union forever.”
