“When he was up there, we was signing people up”

“When he was up there, we was signing people up”, was one of the comments made by Chris Smalls, one of the main leaders of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) following the union’s surprise victory in the April 1 union recognition election at the huge Staten Island JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center. Smalls was obviously referring to Jeff Bezos’s extraterrestrial jaunt. The self-confident and defiant tone of the organizer’s quip captures the feel and dynamism of the organizing drive. The purpose of this article is to attempt to answer three questions: where does the situation stand today, why is Amazon so important, and what are the challenges facing the new union?

Where does the situation stand today?

The results of the April National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election were 2,654 for the ALU and 2,131 against. There are about 8,000 workers in the facility. Amazon has already legally challenged the results claiming intimidation by the union and, bizarrely, a pro-worker bias by the NLRB! Amazon is going to try every legal trick in the book to obstruct and draw out the formal recognition of the ALU as the exclusive bargaining agent at the fulfillment center. They have been joined in this by two important pro-employer organizations: the National Retail Federation and the US Chamber of Commerce. The company has until April 22 to file its charges.

The next big event for the ALU is the April 25 union recognition election at the large LDJ5 facility also on Staten Island. The situation at the Bessemer, Alabama, plant is complicated. The NLRB ordered a second union election, having found improprieties in the first one. The rerun was on March 31 and the results were 993 against the union and 875 for. However, there are 416 challenged ballots, more than the margin of defeat. While management is in the lead now, the final results will only be known when the Board has ruled on the challenged ballots. Whatever the final tally, the union has already done considerably better than most observers predicted.

Against this legal background, the Staten Island victory has received a great deal of publicity. This David vs. Goliath victory against the second largest employer in the country has certainly found a sympathetic echo. Smalls and the ALU core have been swamped with requests for help and advice in new organizing. The comments section on the ALU Facebook page and the chat facility at the recent Jacobin online forum with Bernie Sanders and the ALU are both swamped with workers who want to follow the ALU’s example.

Why is Amazon so important?

There are four main reasons why this election is so important. The first is the scale of the organizing drive. This is the largest real organizing victory in an NLRB election in years. There have only been six NLRB elections at plants with more than 5,000 workers in the past forty years. Only Disneyland, Fieldcrest Cannon, and Bath Iron Works were victories.

The expectation of a strike wave in October, dubbed “Striketober”, was greatly exaggerated by both the mainstream and left press. Amazon, however, is the real thing. The sheer numbers involved show this is a real victory.

The second point is to situate Amazon in a broader context. The ALU victory has been accompanied by an organizing drive at another one of America’s most recognizable corporate giants, Starbucks. Here again the numbers tell the story. At the time of writing, workers at between 180-190 Starbucks stores have filed formal union recognition papers. The number goes up every day. Workers United, a component of the Service Employees International Union is running this drive.

Starbucks workers face different challenges in their union organizing. Starbucks is obviously divided into hundreds of small stores. This is quite unlike the industrial behemoths at Amazon. It makes it harder to feel a sense of collective unity and strength in numbers. It also makes individual workers more prey to management pressure.

This pressure can take an unusual form at Starbucks. The company wants to project a “hip”, progressive image. They therefore try to attack unionization using a “caring” terminology. One incident in New Jersey captures this perfectly. Workers at a unionized Starbucks would obviously be paid more than those at an un-unionized one. Now, from time to time, Starbucks needs to temporarily move workers to assist at another location. At a captive audience anti-union meeting, a supervisor asked workers how they thought the temp would “feel” working alongside a higher paid union member.

A quick-thinking union supporter was able to turn this touchy- feely nonsense on its head. Without missing a beat, the worker replied, “Well, I’d think that would just spark interest in them unionizing their store too.” The meeting obviously didn’t go according to the script!

NLRB Chief Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has proposed that the Board forbid such “captive audience” (mandatory attendance) meetings. These meetings have been a standard part of management’s response to union organizing drives for some time.

The ALU’s organizing style is the third factor making this election so important. The ALU is not a traditional labor union, part of the AFL-CIO. There are none of the apparatus and resources of a traditional union, no army of staffers, no veteran organizers, little financial or legal resources. This is the first election contested by the ALU.

However, the ALU has developed a very definite organizing style of their own. With a core of about fifteen organizers, working over almost exactly two years, they developed an approach that was fashioned to their workplace. JFK8 is about two-thirds Black and Latino. The work force is very young. Turnover is extraordinarily high, about 150% per year. Like the rest of the New York working class, there is a high number of immigrant workers.

The ALU developed a deep social network. They held a never-ending series of potlucks, get-togethers, bonfires, and barbecues. Every culture’s cuisine was on offer. The organizers had thousands of conversations with the workers and returned again and again to win over reluctant workers to the union. ALU maintained a systematic presence, of their worker-organizers, at the gates of the plant. This emphasis on creating a collective consciousness in the workplace paid off in a big way when the election came around.

Amazon’s economic location is the final reason for the importance of this vote. Amazon is obviously the embodiment of the logistics industry. A host of factors from long term globalization to the surge of delivery during the pandemic, to the current supply bottleneck make the logistics sector one of the fastest growing and most important sectors of the economy. The ALU victory places a new union in the center of this crucial part of US capitalism.

What’s next for the ALU?

The union has its work cut out for it. We’ve already seen how Amazon is going to obstruct the recognition process every inch of the way. Once the union has won that battle, it will be immediately faced with the fight for a first contract. First contract fights are hard enough at the best of times and this one’s bound to raise the bar.

A new force will have to be built to win these battles. That new force can come from the fusion of two forces. First, the strengths of the new ALU: its vitality, its ability to connect with young people, its unflinching solidarity with Black and Latino workers, its use of new methods of communication, and its method of developing a real class base. Secondly, the strengths of the traditional labor movement: its seasoned organizers with a lifetime of experience and technical knowledge, its financial capability, its skilled legal and research staffs, and its organizational resources.

This combination of strengths has the capacity to defeat Amazon’s anti-union offensive. The young activists of the ALU have set the pace, now’s the time for the rest of the working-class movement to put its shoulder to the Amazon wheel.