To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
April 27, 2022
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers' Voice
Amazon workers succeeded in organizing a warehouse of 8300 workers in Staten Island, NY, into a union! This is a big victory for the working class!
This a victory for the rank-and-file workers, for the unorganized, for the young, for the oppressed Black and brown workers who led the fight! It is not a victory for the big labor union bureaucrats who head the major unions. They did not do it. Those big shots did not organize Amazon, the workers themselves did! As the workers' leader at Staten Island, Christian Smalls, said, “Amazon's been around for 28 years. You know, that's it. These established unions had 28 years to try. We did it in 11 months.” (1)
For the unorganized workers of Amazon (and elsewhere), for the
young, low-paid, super-exploited workers of all backgrounds, this
means, DON'T WAIT! ORGANIZE YOURSELF! As the ALU says, if we could do
it with no resources and no experience, you can too!
Smalls and the ALU called for Amazon to immediately recognize the union, begin bargaining on a contract on May 1, and that ALU stewards be admitted to all disciplinary hearings in the building beginning immediately. The ALU comes out of the starting gate fighting, an assuring and inspiring example for the workers. (2)
This victory is a call, a lesson, for the young workers on how to start beating back the greedy capitalist employers.
The ALU will be facing the bitter opposition of the Amazon management to establishing a contract and worker rights at Staten Island. And the big labor leaders will try with all their might to undermine the Amazon rank-and-file and absorb the militancy and creativity of this movement into their bureaucratic structure to make it harmless to the capitalist bosses. (Last fall and this spring, Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice has carried several articles exposing how the labor bureaucrats have tried to undermine the strikes in what was called “Striketober” and after. See www.communistvoice,org, under “What's New” and go to “Some thoughts on the strike wave”.)
The ALU victory comes at a time when the most exploited workers are beginning to feel their own strength. And at a time when the bosses are trying to suck even more of their blood.
Workers have been told they are “essential” as they have worked through two years of a continuing, deadly pandemic. And they have seen “Striketober” and other strikes across the country, fight-backs against the rich employers. At the same time, they have felt the arrogant bosses squeeze them harder than ever before, even as the bosses' profits have skyrocketed, Amazon's by as much as 220% during the pandemic. (3)
Why? Why let this happen?
This is capitalism – a whole system – but now you suddenly see that it can be defeated at one of its strong points by you, the ordinary workers.
Smalls and Derrick Palmer, his best friend, started their activism
in early 2020. Working at a facility in Staten island, they rode to
work together every day from Newark. They noticed workers all around
them coming down with covid and management doing nothing to help them.
Amazon would not provide them with personal protective equipment or
even inform them of cases so they could protect themselves. Smalls and
Palmer organized a small strike and picketed in protest. Smalls was
fired for “violating covid protocols” – the very thing they were
fighting for.
Smalls, though fired, and co-worker Derrick Palmer and a few other
workers, decided to organize a union at the Staten Island warehouse,
JFK8. Palmer was working, so he was the inside man, Smalls was on the
outside. They had a table, two chairs and a tent, so they set up at the
bus stop in front of the JFK8 facility, which has 8300 workers. Palmer
would be inside talking to the workers, Smalls outside at the tent,
often sleeping in his Chevy Suburban nearby. (4)
Nearby also was a memorial to an Amazon woman worker killed in an
auto accident there a few years previously. The memorial read “forever
remembered, forever missed.” It was made of empty propane cans
(used to heat the tent in winter) and bore memorial candles. (5)
The organizers attracted support gradually. They stressed forging relationships with facility workers. They brought food and refreshments to the tent. Smalls lived there, in his car, most of the time. Workers would stop as they went in or came out, for a break and conversation and for something to eat after a long, hard shift. Smalls always had something on hand.
These organizers decided to act as a union, but that it must be worker-led. Smalls and Palmer made a trip to Bessemer, Alabama, to see how the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was organizing in the Amazon warehouse there. They felt they were not received very well. And they were not pleased with what they saw. They thought that the union was too much of an outside force in the facility, and did not have enough impetus from the workers themselves. This fortified their resolution to make their union clearly worker-led. (6)
Though not Marxists, Smalls, Palmer and the others were intuitively acting on the basis of Marx's fundamental statement: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves....” (7)
As pandemic time went by, these organizers formed the Amazon Labor
Union, elected a temporary leadership with Smalls as interim president,
created a constitution (which states that the president will not be
paid more than the average worker), and launched a newsletter. They
overwhelmingly emphasized personal contact with the workers and
inspired other favorable workers to become organizers themselves. A
phone bank was established and eventually it reached the entire
8300-member workforce. A web site was created, a Facebook account. A
labor lawyer was found on Twitter, who agreed to work pro bono.
The newsletter was extremely well-written. It bitingly answered many of the lies issued by Amazon, Tik-Tok videos were made that reached 43,000 viewers. Money was raised by crowdfunding, eventually reaching a total of $140,000 for the entire campaign, a miniscule amount compared to what the established unions spend on their failed campaigns. It mainly paid for the food continually distributed at the tent. It also financed the red ALU t-shirts that began to be worn defiantly by union activists in the building, and four thousand ALU lanyards that were distributed and worn in the last weeks just before the election.
Chats with workers were held on Telegram. Organizers focused on
personal conversations with other workers and on creating
relationships. One, Angelika Maldonaldo, tells of coming to the job on
her off-days. With one young child, she worked a 12 hour and 30 minute
shift but was at the warehouse every minute she could, as were other
members of the organizing committee.
She tells of breaking down mistrust among the workforce, There was distrust from the older workers who feared that these young organizers did not have enough experience and knowledge to organize a union. She says that the ALU activists had to seriously educate themselves on labor law and organizing strategies to build trust on this. She also says that when the older workers saw her there with her child on her off-days they took her more seriously. Management stressed that the ALU was a “third party,” allegedly a band of outsiders come in to control the workers, but when the workers found out that all the organizers actually worked in the facility, and saw their badges, they realized they had been lied to.
There was also the matter of many different ethnicities. The ALU
organizers broke that down with personal relationships and by having
potlucks at the tent with foods of different cuisines – zitis,
empanadas, African fried rice – and this was popular and drew in
workers from a variety of backgrounds. They got several African
organizers that way. Over 20 barbecues were held at the tent. Smalls'
aunt even contributed some food.
Maldonaldo says that in every contact the organizers sought to get a
phone number or to get the worker to fill out a survey, come to a chat
or a meeting, or just to know them. She gave out her number and told
workers to call her any time. She told everybody that they could be an
organizer if they wished, and some did.
She says that the organizers would go in a group to the captive meetings that management held and expose management's lies. Amazon would tell them to leave or they would be written up as “insubordinate,” but they defied the order and stayed, continuing to expose the bosses, taking a big risk but showing the workers that they could stand up to Amazon. (8) As another organizer, Justine Medina, put it, the ALU built from below; we “flipped orthodoxy on its head.” (9)
In March 2021, after the ALU had made frequent complaints of
harassment by management to the National Labor Relations Board, the
NLRB issued a decision allowing the ALU to organize inside the
facility, just not on the clock. The ALU immediately brought food,
literature and signs into the building and began to agitate openly
there for the union.
But a short time later, management had Smalls and a few others arrested for bringing food inside. A disabled worker was injured by the police in the incident. The ALU protested but continued its activism inside. A Tik-Tok video brought this arrest to wide attention. (10)
At Christmas 2021 the ALU organized small walkouts at Staten Island and elsewhere in New York, culminating in a rally at Times Square. At the same time, at two Chicago Amazon warehouses an organization called Amazonians United held two small walkouts and a common rally in Chicago, as well as a walkout in Sacramento. And the Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers won the right to a new union election after their 2020 loss. (11)
The spirit of Amazon workers was rising!
In the spring of 2021 the ALU submitted 2000 signatures of Amazon workers demanding a union election, but immediately withdrew them, then not long later submitted a larger number. Established unions usually wait till they have signatures of a larger portion of the workforce, but the ALU had confidence in its organizers and in the workers and merely submitted enough signatures to guarantee having the election. The NLRB accepted them and declared an election for late March of 2022. Another election was set for a few weeks later at the other facility across the street, called LDJ5, with 1500 workers. (12)
During 2021 and into 2022 the ALU organizers intensified their activities. They expanded their outreach, by phone and inside and outside the warehouse.
The ALU put forward several demands that it is fighting for – $30 an hour pay, paid time off for injured workers, paid sick leave, job security, longer breaks, healthcare. (13)
In the warehouse the struggle against management's anti-union
pressure and propaganda got hot. Management was holding over 20
captive-worker meetings a day, in which supervision would spew out
pro-management, anti-union lies and threats. Increasingly Palmer and a
growing number of ALU activists would oppose these lies within the
meetings. They would interrupt and harass the speakers, refute the lies
and sometimes even disrupt the meetings to the point that they would be
called off. Management began throwing the ALU people out of the
meetings, but this backfired as it only enraged the workers.
As these fights got hotter, ALU organizer Connor Spence spearheaded an attack on Amazon's other union-suppression tactic – paid anti-union agitators who would circulate in the building, spouting endless company propaganda to individual workers. These agents wore suits but tried to keep their identities unknown as they conspicuously lurked around the warehouse, cornering individual workers to tell them management's lies. Unfortunately for them, Spence and others pieced together their identities from various clues and then exposed these shameless tools in leaflets displaying their pictures, names, addresses and even their pay stubs proving that these low-lifes were getting at least $3200 a week to sell out the workers. They were “getting rich convincing poor people to stay poor,” said the organizers. With leaflets carrying images of these paychecks, the workers destroyed this in-house stoolie program. In one case there was an attractive woman stool pigeon whom a few workers could not believe was an agent – until they saw her paycheck. They abandoned her quickly. (14)
The ALU, a worker-led union, was born in the midst of struggle, not only firm but intelligent struggle.
The ballots were in, they were counted and the ALU got a clear victory, no recounts or contested ballots needing to be checked. The ballot count concluded with 2,654 in favor of unionizing and 2,131 voting against – a big margin. (15) When the news reached the JFK8 Amazon Warehouse in Staten Island, the shout went up: “WE DID IT! WE WON!!” (16)
The capitalist class, including Amazon, was stunned, as were the
labor traitors. How could they do this, these ordinary workers, their
interim president Chris Smalls looking like the rapper that he had
been, the rest just looking like – workers?
How?
Smalls honored the victory by giving out a call to all workers to
organize: “We proved it is possible, no matter what industry you work
in, what corporation you work for. We just unionized Amazon. If we can
do that we can unionize anywhere.” (17) “We went for the top dog,
because we wanted every other industry, every other business, to know
that things have changed. We gonna unionize...this is a prime example
of the power people have when they come together.” (18)
At a celebration in Brooklyn, Smalls said, “We want to thank Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up.” (19)
CNN, a mainstream capitalist news outlet, had been giving the election massive coverage. Now that the workers had won, five minutes. Only. Amazon is gearing up its apparatus to challenge the victory legally. It will be a long struggle to actually negotiate a contract. Amazon has spent huge amounts of money to stop this union, and it was not going to quit now.
The union is demanding that Amazon immediately recognize it and begin bargaining May 1st. It has also demanded that all disciplinary actions be a subject of bargaining. (20) At the same time, the ALU is getting many requests for help from workers at other Amazon warehouses. Calls have come from across the U.S. and from as far away as India. (21)
But in the meantime, let us say boo-hoo for the poor, poor employers!
And bravo to the Amazon workers and the Amazon Labor Union!
Follow their example!
1) NPR, April 6, 2022, Alina Selyukh, “Chris Smalls Started Amazon's First Union”.
2 ) Twitter, April 2, 2022, Mike Elk, “Amazon Union Demands Union Reps in Discipline” .
3) The New York Times, April 28, 2921, Karen Weise, “Amazon’s Profit Tripled in First Quarter:
Amazon’s profit soars 220 percent as pandemic drives shopping online.” .
4) The New York Times via Yahoo, Jodi Kantor and Karen Weise, “How Two Best Friends Beat Amazon,” April 3, 2022.
5) The City, April 1, 2022, Josefa Velasquez, “A Cinderella Story: How Staten Island Amazon Workers Won Against the Multi-Billion-Dollar Company”.
6) See fn 1.
7) The International Workingmen's Association 1864, General Rules, October 1864.
8) Jacobin, April 2, 2022, “Here’s How We Beat Amazon, An interview with Angelika Maldonaldo,”
April 2, 2022.
(9) See fn 4.
(10) See fn 4 and 8.
11) Walkouts in New York and Chicago: The U.S. SUN, Dec. 23, 2021, Israel Salas-Rodriguez, “Dozens of Amazon warehouse workers walk out in protest to demand better treatment and higher wages during holiday rush”, and Sacramento: Labor Notes, Jan. 3, 2022, Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Deliver Christmas Walkout”.
.
12) See fn. 4.
13) See fn. 4.
14) Huff Post, April 4, 2022, Dave Jamieson, “How Amazon Workers Beat The Union Busters At Their Own Game”.
15) Wikipedia, Amazon Labor Union.
16) See fn 4.
17) Democracy Now, April 4, 2022, “'We Just Unionized Amazon': How Two Best Friends Beat the Retail Giant’s Union-Busting Campaign”.
18) SI Live, April 1, 2022, Paul Liotta, “New York Amazon workers vote to unionize; Staten Island warehouse makes history as first in U.S. ”.
19) Business Insider, April 2, 2022, Gabrielle Bienasz, “Amazon labor organizer popped champagne and thanked Jeff Bezos for going to space: 'When he was up there, we was signing people up'”.
20) Payday Report, Mike Elk, April 2, 2022, https://twitter.com/MikeElk/status/1510436772387430400.
21) See fn 18. <>
Picture: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/4/workers_organize_first_amazon_labor_union.
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