The day after a group of Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island voted to form a union—potentially one of the biggest labor victories since the nineteen-thirties—their gargantuan gray warehouse, stamped with the company’s yellow arrow swoosh, looked as unremarkable as ever. A nearby creek sparkled in the sun. Prime container trucks growled along Gulf Avenue. The only thing out of the ordinary was in the warehouse parking lot. Large white tents, the kind you might see at a wedding, were being pulled down and carted away by men in fluorescent vests. For five days in late March, the National Labor Relations Board had run a union election underneath those tents. The thousands of men and women who work in fulfillment center JFK8, on day and night shifts, full and part time, had the chance to vote. The ballot was simple:
The count was broadcast live to the public on March 31st and April 1st. The final tally was 2,654 in favor to 2,131 against.
Their win was instantly remarkable: the first Amazon union outside of Europe. More remarkable still, the Amazon Labor Union was new and completely independent. It had none of the money or political connections of traditional organized labor.
I wanted to understand the source of this feat. Workers in JFK8 began to organize at the outset of the pandemic, a time of sickness and death. One man died from the coronavirus in May of 2020; a woman was fatally hit by a car outside the warehouse last November. The union demanded “8 immediate changes from Amazon,” including paid time off for injured workers, pay raises, an end to arbitrary discipline, and a shuttle bus to and from the Staten Island Ferry. For months, the organizing committee handed out flyers in the break room and operated a sort of union hall at the M.T.A. bus shelter across the street from JFK8, where workers catch the S40 or S90 to the ferry terminal. The day I visited, there were no victorious union organizers in sight. There was, however, a tall propane heater labelled “A.L.U.,” and there were several documents taped to the glass wall of the bus shelter. One poster read “we’re not machines / we’re human beings.” Another displayed a grid of sixteen worker portraits under the phrase “unions start with you.” There was also a two-page letter from Chris Smalls, a former rapper and Amazon warehouse worker, who is the interim president of the A.L.U. “We’re asking that you vote yes,” it said. “Vote yes for job security. Vote for friends who were fired. Vote to scrap the system that writes you up. Vote for keeping their hands off our cell phones, for a lack of accommodations, for 1 hour lunches and 20 mins breaks.”
After the first coronavirus cases emerged in JFK8, Smalls and three of his co-workers, Derrick Palmer, Jordan Flowers, and Gerald Bryson—all Black men—had organized protests to demand safety improvements. Smalls and Bryson were fired (for violating social-distancing rules, according to Amazon), Palmer received a final warning but continued to work, and Flowers, who has lupus, sought long-term medical leave. The four friends started the Congress of Essential Workers to coördinate further actions. A year later, as Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, tried to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Smalls, Palmer, Flowers, and Bryson decided that they, too, should form a union, but from scratch. “It made sense that workers like us need to have a union, and we should take it upon ourselves, because other unions don’t know what Amazon facilities look like,” Flowers told me.
Last spring, summer, and fall, they collected signatures to overcome the first major hurdle of forming a union at JFK8: getting at least thirty per cent of workers to sign cards consenting to union representation. In October, the Amazon Labor Union had almost enough, but not quite. By late December, after six Amazon warehouse workers were killed when a tornado struck a warehouse in Illinois, the union succeeded and got the National Labor Relations Board to schedule an election—the second hurdle. They also organized and collected signatures at another Amazon warehouse across the street: a sortation center called LDJ5. Then they went into campaign mode, trying to turn out votes.
The day after the union’s win at JFK8, I spoke with workers near the main entrance to the warehouse. Adam Warsaw and Wade Zephyrine sat at a metal picnic table, on break from their ten-and-a-half-hour shifts building, loading, and carrying pallets. Warsaw munched on a bag of cookies, and both smoked Newports. Zephyrine told me that he had voted no. He hadn’t liked the union he had in a previous job, he said, and felt that the A.L.U. was too new to be trusted. Warsaw, whose sister also works in the facility, had voted yes. He’d almost been fired over a mixup regarding his schedule, and wanted more security. He explained, “A lot of the writeups they generate from the system, it’s just unpredictable.”
All afternoon, I had similar conversations with pickers and re-binners, sorters, water spiders, and packers. Yes voters resented how they’d been treated by Amazon, and felt annoyed by Amazon’s anti-union propaganda. Some had family members—home health aides, construction workers—who said that unions were good. Voters who chose no, on the other hand, were suspicious of the A.L.U. or didn’t want to pay dues. They thought that Amazon was a very good place to work, and feared losing their jobs. Some people I met did not vote at all.
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Count me among those shocked by the final tally. Since the nineteen-nineties, several well-established unions have tried and failed to organize at Amazon: the Communications Workers of America, the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Their failures were understandable. Amazon has created a new type of American workplace, is the second-richest company in the world, and spent $4.3 million last year on anti-union consultants. It was unclear how to successfully organize an automated, highly surveilled warehouse that employs thousands of workers on multiple shifts, with exhausting production quotas and rapid turnover. The same week as the Staten Island vote, a second union election wrapped up at the Bessemer fulfillment center, a do-over based on Amazon’s interference the first time around. Turnout in the over six-thousand-person warehouse was low: 875 workers voted for the union and 993 against; 416 ballots are still in dispute, and will be resolved at an upcoming hearing.
Location matters, and so does the identity of the organizers. As of 2021, in New York, twenty-two per cent of employees belong to a union, compared to just six per cent in Alabama, a “right-to-work” state. A coalition of New York City officials and residents chased out Amazon in 2019, when the company tried to install a secondary headquarters in Queens and avail itself of more than three billion dollars in public subsidies; in 2021, the state’s attorney general sued Amazon over health and safety violations and its termination of Smalls and Palmer. By contrast, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville has expressed his distaste for a Bessemer union—and the out-of-town Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It made all the difference at JFK8 that the union was independent and led by workers from the warehouse, not managed by a large, outside union.
A group similar to A.L.U., called Amazonians United, has also organized in facilities in New York and around the U.S., but not with the goal of forming an official union. It has opted instead for solidarity unionism, where workers use protests, walkouts, and petitions to get what they want. At Starbucks and Uber, too, workers are experimenting with various models, showing a desire for power without bureaucracy. Many of the organizers are young, like the A.L.U. founders, and appear to have absorbed the horizontalism of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and pandemic mutual aid. The risk of a D.I.Y. strategy, though, is burnout. It isn’t easy to wage permanent revolution while packing boxes ten-plus hours a day.
Yet the Amazon Labor Union showed that being an independent union doesn’t necessarily mean working in isolation. It borrowed office space, supplies, and strategy from traditional unions, and welcomed “salts”—people who got jobs in the warehouses for the express purpose of organizing. Community supporters donated thousands of dollars to the A.L.U. and to individual worker-leaders who were fired by Amazon. And a pro-bono labor lawyer and a staff attorney from Make the Road New York, a local social-justice group, have represented fired workers. At a recent administrative hearing, one lawyer appeared on behalf of a member of the A.L.U.; some fifteen lawyers, including from the firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, appeared for Amazon.
The company used many of the same tactics on Staten Island that it did to defeat the organizing effort in Bessemer. Managers inside JFK8 and LDJ5 confiscated union flyers and distributed “Vote No” T-shirts. Clumps of workers were called into “captive-audience” meetings in which warehouse supervisors and private contractors explained why unions were a bad idea. The prominent Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group, was hired to develop materials opposing the union, including the Web site unpackjfk8.com, according to CNBC. (A spokeswoman for G.S.G. told me, “We deeply regret being involved in any way.”) In February, when Smalls tried to deliver food to workers at JFK8, Amazon called the police, who arrested him for trespassing. Hours later, he and his friends resumed their outreach. Smalls, Palmer, Bryson, and Flowers eventually built an organizing committee of about twenty workers, and recruited more than a hundred others to a Telegram chat room. They made frequent appearances in the press, circulated TikTok videos and flyers, and raised money through GoFundMe. As the election at JFK8 approached, they handed out A.L.U. T-shirts and lanyards, did a twelve-day countdown flyering blitz, served free meals, and made thousands of phone calls to eligible workers. Immigrant members of the union organized separate efforts, via WhatsApp, in French, Arabic, and Spanish.
In hindsight, the A.L.U. embraced classic principles of labor organizing but, in critical respects, it did not. “Amazon is designed like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Bryson explained. “People think the way to attack them is head on, but, no, you have to come at them ‘awkward,’ with things they’d never expect.” Conventional wisdom holds that organizers must have a “one-on-one” conversation with each and every worker. And most unions will only request an election after a clear majority of workers has signed cards. The Amazon Labor Union did not, and could not, reach every worker at JFK8. Nor did it collect a majority of signatures: it went to the Labor Board with the minimum to get an election—thirty per cent. “There were times in meetings when I was even, like, ‘Shouldn’t we get forty per cent?’ ” Justine Medina, a former staffer for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who became a salt in JFK8 through the Young Communist League, said. “But, the thing is, the turnover is so fast, you can’t really do that.”
It’s also frowned upon for a union to make one or two workers the face of a campaign. But Smalls, often dressed in an A.L.U. shirt and sunglasses, was the subject of multiple media profiles. In April of 2020, an internal memo was leaked that showed Amazon’s in-house lawyer, David Zapolsky, recommending that the corporation make Smalls “the face of the entire union” because he was “not smart, or articulate.” The memo, which a reporter from Vice obtained and published, became a provocation. After the win at JFK8, Smalls trolled Zapolsky and other executives, tweeting, “@amazon wanted to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against them. … welp there you go! @JeffBezos @DavidZapolsky CONGRATULATIONS.”
Sean O’Brien, a union reformer who became the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in late March, praised the A.L.U.’s tactics. “Chris Smalls did a great job. It’s proof that it can be done and will be done,” O’Brien, whose union represents 1.2 million people, told me. In a speech on Wednesday, President Biden hailed the union’s victory on Staten Island: “And by the way, Amazon, here we come.”
Amazon appears to be sharpening its own national strategy and blaming Biden’s Labor Board. In response to the JFK8 vote, the company stated that it was considering “filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the N.L.R.B.” during the election. Under President Biden, the N.L.R.B. has increased its caseload and responded more assertively to worker retaliation. In fiscal year 2020, the Board helped 978 workers get an offer of reinstatement; in fiscal year 2021, that number rose to 6,307, and the age of pending cases dropped by fifteen per cent. Last month, the Board sued Amazon to seek Bryson’s reinstatement at JFK8—nearly two years after he was fired. Mark Gaston Pearce, the chair of the N.L.R.B. during the Obama Administration, said that the current Board was using the National Labor Relations Act as intended. “The Biden Board has just attempted to return the policies of the act to its rightful place,” he told me.
Smalls and the rest of the A.L.U. organizing committee are now focussed on winning the union vote at LDJ5 and, very soon, negotiating a first collective-bargaining agreement at both warehouses. Getting a contract with Amazon will be difficult: the company is likely to stall and spend millions on lawyers and anti-union consultants. (A representative of Amazon would not say whether the company intends to bargain in good faith with A.L.U.) But, first, over four days at the end of this month, an estimated fifteen hundred workers in LDJ5 will vote on whether to join the A.L.U. Julian Mitchell-Israel, the A.L.U.’s twenty-two-year-old field director, got a job at LDJ5 a few months ago, after reading about Smalls in Jacobin. When he returned to work after the union’s win, “People were excited in a way we hadn’t seen before,” he told me. “We now have a bit of a playbook. We had months seeing what worked and didn’t work at JFK.”
At the bus shelter between LDJ5 and JFK8, I met Christopher Medina, who has been a counter, picker, and scanner at JFK8 for the last two years. He earns about nineteen dollars an hour, but spends six hours each day commuting to Staten Island from the Bronx. Medina voted yes for the union. “Most of the jobs that I’ve worked before have been non-union, and, in a regular non-union job, it’s not a good idea to complain,” Medina told me. “I don’t think people realize how important it is to have a collective voice—to be able to go to your manager and say, ‘I don’t like how this is going down.’ ”
As Medina was talking, a group of older men in work boots, just off their shift, took a seat in the bus shelter. “Is this yours?” one of them asked, handing an Amazon lanyard I.D. to Medina. “No,” Medina replied. “I’m not gonna lie to you, bro. People just leave their badge at the bus stop when they get fired or they quit. So, you’ll find these all the time.” The older man, Brian Hairston, who works at the nearby IKEA warehouse, predicted that Amazon would soon do much less firing: “They got the union now, though. They can’t get away with that.” Like Medina, his commute was a shift in itself: he’d left his home, in Harlem, at 12:45 A.M., four hours and fifteen minutes before he had to clock in. Subway to ferry to bus. Years ago, in Kansas City, Missouri, Hairston had worked at a Ford plant represented by the United Auto Workers. “Now, that’s a good union,” he said. I asked if there was a union at IKEA. There was not. Was he interested in forming one? “Well, it’s just a wait-and-see thing,” he said. “We wanted to see how this union was gonna turn out with Amazon.”
