Amazon workers union wins second win

Workers at Amazon’s sorting facility in Staten Island, New York, will begin voting on unions Monday, less than a month after a warehouse in the town became the first US e-commerce giant’s site to join a union.

After an unprecedented victory in the company’s first Staten Island union election, at the warehouse known as JFK8, the Amazon Workers’ Union (ALU) is hoping to achieve a similar result at the LDJ5 facility.

Winning the LDJ5 can demonstrate the viability of a worker-led union and secure key protections for the facility’s workers.

In the meantime, the e-commerce giant could lose more than just a vote: Back-to-back campaign victories that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into its defeat could diminish its perception as a very powerful employer and spark more regulation.

The nascent campaign to unite Starbucks stores showed just how quickly union victories can mount — even before the first contract is signed. Nearly five months after the first union victory at a US coffee shop chain location, more than 200 other stores have petitioned for the election.

“A second victory would be more detrimental to Amazon than a loss to the Amazon union,” said John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University School of Business.

One of the biggest differences between the facility where the ALU won its first victory and where this election will take place is the size of their workforce.

The LDJ5 facility has approximately 1,500 workers, far fewer than the more than 8,000 who work across the street at JFK8.

The difference in size means that both the union and Amazon have been able to adapt their approaches more narrowly to individual workers, with the company relying on more one-on-one conversations rather than larger meetings.

Employees also consider tasks in the LDJ5 to be less physically demanding than in the achievement center, which has led the ALU to focus on other issues, including part-time status concerns, when persuading workers to support the union.

The most impactful difference may simply be due to the sequence of the two sounds.

Momentum appears to be on the union’s side, which took a win by more than 500 votes in JFK8 at the start of the month. Amazon competes in the election results.

Achieving this first victory gave regulators new impetus and may have eased fears workers at LDJ5 might have felt about retaliation for forming the first Amazon consortium in the US.

But timing may work in Amazon’s favour. The unexpected loss on the first vote likely served as a wake-up call for the company about the potential for labor regulation at its facilities.

“I think they’re taking the ALU a little more seriously,” Eric Milner, a labor attorney who represented the union in both votes, told The Hill. “They have stepped up… the union has broken.”

Amazon deploys many of the same anti-union tactics it used at both JFK8 and a facility in Bessemer, Ala. She has her own organizing campaign.

The e-commerce giant has racked up workers with messages in the form of stickers, videos, and text messages on those sites.

It also relied heavily on anti-union meetings during working hours, a tactic called captive audience meetings that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel has moved to ban.

ALU regulators say Amazon has hired anti-union advisors as full-time employees at the LDJ5 facility, Motherboard reports.

Documents submitted to the Department of Labor indicate that Amazon paid up to $20,000 a week for union avoidance consultants to be at the facility that handles workers.

The ALU also had less time to organize a vote on the facility this week because its resources were very focused on JFK8 until this month.

“The other LDJ5 organizers and I spent all of our time taking the time to focus on the JFK8 campaign,” Maddie Wesley, ALU treasurer and LDJ5 worker, told The Hill shortly after the first ALU win. “We definitely felt like we were losing support in the building because we simply weren’t there – but we figured the best thing we could do for the campaign was to win the JFK8.”

The ongoing legal battle over the outcome of JFK’s eighth election is pending over this vote.

Amazon filed objections to the finding earlier this month accusing the NLRB of inappropriately engaging in voting and the union of engaging in illegal activity and harassing colleagues.

Milner says the union vehemently denies the allegations against it, describing the arguments about the NLRB as “nonsense or fluff”.

“People see that Amazon is still just a bully, and now they are also very losers,” he added.

Regardless of the validity of the objections, it had the effect of delaying the start of negotiating a contract with the ALU.

While delaying is a common tactic for companies seeking to undo labor regulation, it may not be effective in this case.

“Big anti-union companies are often able to exploit weaknesses in the law to delay and even prevent unions from negotiating early contracts,” Logan explained. “But there is nothing natural about this situation. Usually they get away with it because it happens in the shadows, and no one is paying attention. Everything that Amazon does will come under intense scrutiny by the National Labor Relations Board, by local and federal politicians.”

The outcome of the legal battle over the JFK8 election and the vote in the LDJ5 may be relatively inconsequential in the overall effort to unite Amazon unions and revitalize labor campaigns nationwide.

“The genie is already out of the bottle,” Logan said. “We’ll see more unconventional campaigns like Amazon at other employers regardless. The second victory would be massive in terms of inspiration and momentum, but even if they lost — the Staten Island victory wasn’t isolated, it was in the context of union wins at Starbucks, and now you have Apple workers [organizing]. “