An Amazon warehouse on Staten Island has voted to unionize:
2654 yes, 2131 no. It's over.#Amazonlabor
— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 1, 2022
This is great news for the Amazon Labor Union, a new union founded only last year. An Amazon warehouse in Alabama, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, lost its vote yesterday, but the tally was close enough that it might yet succeed after contested votes are counted.
What's especially impressive is this was led by organizers with no connection to an established unions. They were lone newbies, doing this by themselves.
They still have to get a contract, and that will be utterly brutal. They really need to get help by experienced players now. But Amazon lost big, big here.
That's why I'm hoping a bunch of other warehouses launch their own organizing campaigns. If it's just one or two, then Amazon will probably either shut them down on dodgy grounds (even if it gets litigated) or drag out negotiations forever while selectively firing pro-union employees. But if there's a bunch of them, it makes it more likely they'll eventually get a contract.
Staten Island. Shocked.
It really is fantastic that they won this. A lot of the labor commentators on Twitter thought the independent campaign at the Staten Island warehouse was quixotic and likely to fail, but it worked out great. Hopefully the Alabama situation works out in their favor as well.
Amazon will aggressively litigate both, but they're up against a labor-friendly NLRB. They also might try to just shut down the warehouses on dubious grounds, and that's where the follow-up really needs to come from - if a bunch of other Amazon warehouses start their own unionizing campaigns, then that will be harder for them to fight off.
Good for them both. Working conditions in those warehouses have sucked for years, and Amazon deliberately does a churn-and-burn policy with warehouse stackers to try and get them to leave after two years.
Or Amazon will further accelerate automation efforts.
I don't think they're at the point where they could replace all their non-supervisory workers in warehouses with robots in the next 3 years.
This is or should be the biggest news of the day in the U.S. If people see union drives succeeding then it can lead to more and more of private, not just the public, labor market becoming unionized and the labor movement more sustainable across a broad class of workers.
A union local in/near NY/NJ? That should fun to watch evolve.
Per MoJo’s covers:
Doesn’t say if that is over eight hours or not.
spatrick:
I sometimes have the sinking feeling the 40+ years of Reaganism was a direct result of the workers having too much bargaining power vis a vis Management. The Owners, you see, are bound and determined to realize their right to five (Seven? Ten?) percent ROI year in and year out, decade after decade. With the collapse of Bretton Woods System, that was no longer possible without cutting into the prole's share of the post-war prosperity. And, unfortunately, the proles had too much bargaining power, hence the inflation-on-top-of-oil-push-inflation.
The untermenschen eating _our_ wealth (which is precisely how these vampires thought of it)? Can't have than now, can we?
If I'm Jeff Bezos I negotiate with this one union for all my warehouses, not fight hundreds of unionization battles again and again.
After all efficiency. And I can't imagine paying for lawyers is cheap either.
Unions, at least in my mind, are generally useless in the short term. Long term is where it counts. I have worked in both union and non-union facilities and both have their pluses and minuses.
Unions tend to get belligerent, especially when there's TV TV lights and microphones in your face. It's when you are face to face with the company THAT's where the work gets done. For the most part striking doesn't do much good. The pennies per hour that you might get from striking take years to make up if you have lost 2 weeks of pay walking a picket line. Unions promise strike pay but that varies and it much less than weekly pay.
But as spatrick pointed out its about efficiency - and I would add Just in Time and lean Six Sigma doctrines of having just enough parts to get by for the next day or two. That morphs into "timed" bathroom breaks and measuring outputs as x per second/minute. In Amazons case the ONLY people that would get hurt by a strike would be John Q Public. Whereas a parts supplier strike for a subcontractor of General Motors would shut down multiple auto factories.
This is an interesting situation. Liberals are claiming victory. Bezos is probably planning on using another facility to ship into Staten Island.
So, just who has the leverage here?