Amazon gets its first defeat from fledgling union

How are Amazon workers taking back their power

An Amazon union victory.
(Image credit: ANDREA RENAULT/AFP via Getty Images)

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"Executives across corporate America may be beginning to doubt their carefully constructed anti-union defenses" after Amazon workers voted to organize in New York last week, said Steven Greenhouse in The Atlantic. "If any workplace was considered impossible to unionize, it was an Amazon warehouse," especially given the "ferocious, full-court presses" that Amazon has mounted against such efforts. But a stand-alone campaign at a fulfillment center in Staten Island "managed to pierce Amazon's Maginot Line" last week. The grassroots effort, whose two leaders, Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, "relied on GoFundMe for money" and rejected affiliation with a larger union, is not easily replicated. But with the Amazon win and a string of victories at Starbucks cafés, there is welling "pro-union excitement among many workers, especially young workers."

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The victory has broad implications, said Annie Palmer at CNBC. The Amazon Labor Union "has called for the company to increase hourly wages for all workers to a minimum $30 an hour"; Amazon's current starting wage at fulfillment centers averages $18 an hour. The prospect of that kind of increase could motivate additional attempts to organize the company's workers. A second vote is set for another Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, said Josh Eidelson in Bloomberg, "and the ALU is trying to sign up workers at two other facilities." Smalls has emerged "as a folk hero" to other "frontline workers who toiled through a dangerous pandemic" and are looking to "redress the power imbalance."

The rate of union membership is now about half where it was in 1983, said Jarrett Skorup in The Hill. President Biden has proclaimed he wants to be "the most pro-union president in American history." But given their druthers, most workers "overwhelmingly reject unions." The New York tally was close, said Jeffrey Dastin in Reuters, and a revote at an Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama, which voted overwhelmingly against a union last year, has also come down to the wire. Amazon is likely to file objections, and having organized the workers, the ALU must still negotiate with Amazon to gain a contract. Yet an "invigorated purpose was palpable among union leaders this week" after the fledgling ALU showed how David could take down Goliath.

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