To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
May 23, 2022
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers’
Voice
The other shoe did not drop; the expected win did not happen. The young-worker-led Amazon Labor Union, having won the stunning victory at the bigger Staten Island warehouse JFK8, lost the unionization election at the other, smaller facility, LDJ5 by a substantial margin, 618 votes against unionizing and 380 in favor. (1)
Therein lie some important lessons for worker activists.
The victory at JFK8 brought a well-deserved excitement, David had defeated Goliath. It was a great victory for the poorer mass of the working class. But it caused people to expect a second victory in the second election scheduled only a few weeks later, at LDJ5. When the hoped-for win did not happen, the capitalist mass media lost some of its enthusiasm for the young Amazon workers. Lo! they were suddenly not the miracle workers of a few weeks earlier! There might not be an immediate wave of union victories at Amazon facilities! Amazon is not Starbucks! Bezos is no longer embarrassed!
But we are still in the real world, and in the real world it seems
to
take a considerable amount of organizing, carried out by a worker group
with clear plans and tactics, over a period of at least a year, to
organize a giant Amazon facility. The Amazon Labor Union carried this
out at the JFK8 facility. That is what organized Staten Island JFK; it
was not fully present at Staten island LDJ5. Therefore, the ALU lost at
LDJ5, right in the wake of the great victory at JFK.
Confronted with the loss, what did the ALU leaders do?
To their credit, they persisted. Interim President Christian Smalls, said, “What do we do when we lose? We wipe our shoulders off and we get back up and what’s what we’re gonna do! I’m a fighter. Y’all know that I’m not going anywhere.” Vice-President for Organization, Derrick Palmer, also stood firm. “This is war,” he said. (2) They have been stalwart, and they know pain from long experience working at Amazon.
But what were the reasons for the loss? We do not have access to the
ALU's internal discussions. But as far as the external record is
concerned, for some answers we have to take what statements are out
there and make our own analysis.
To start with, we have a few statements from other ALU activists.
“Me
and other LSJ5 organizers spent all our time taking time off to focus
on the JFK campaign,” Maddie Wesley, the ALU's treasurer and an LDJ5
worker, said shortly before the LDJ election. “We definitely felt
ourselves losing support in the building,“ she said, “because we simply
weren't there – but we figured that the best thing that we could do for
the campaign was to win at JFK8.” (3) Conor Spence, editor of the ALU
Newsletter, backed this up: “While we were so busy campaigning at
JFK8 we lost a lot of ground on LDJ5,” he said. (4)
The choice they made was quite correct and understandable, because without the win at JFK the ALU would have been struggling. But it indicates how serious a problem it was that the second election was scheduled so soon after the first. We do not know if the ALU had any choice in this or if the date was imposed by the National Labor Relations Board. But it put very difficult demands on the ALU, to follow up their big victory so soon afterwards.
Just as serious a problem existed in the nature of the ALU organization at the second facility. There does not emerge from ALU literature or from media coverage evidence for a strong organizing group in LDJ. Had there been one, the ALU, which is open about these things, would likely have publicized it to encourage the struggle.
Lacking a strong leading group, a number of the positive methods and tactics employed at JFK8 by the ALU seem hardly to have been used. There is no mention of a similar intense use of a greeting space at the entrance to the facility as was done at JFK8; intense amounts of telephone calls and personal conversations, meals and barbecues and the use of international cuisines to attract wide varieties of workers seem not to have happened. There was no parallel to Christian Smalls living outside the entrance in his car. (5) Those were important elements of the success at JFK.
At the same time, Amazon stepped up its repressive, anti-union tactics at LDJ5. They tore down ALU literature that last March's NLRB decision had given the ALU the right to post in the workplace. They threatened workers for speaking about the union. Amazon upped its number of repressive anti-union stool pigeons in the workplace, reaching a ratio of one “buster,” as the workers called them, to 20 workers, The thorough exposure of these busters that the ALU carried out in JFK did not occur at LDJ, though there was opposition by the ALU in the captive meetings, which reached a high of three a week for each group of workers. (6)
Then, in the last weeks before the election, Amazon management intensified its repression and lies. Instead of many captive meetings, management shut down the whole building for the last hour of the shift and called large, single meetings, which they dominated with both sentimental and forceful oratory. Toward the very end of the week, one worker said, management shifted from suggesting a no vote to outright telling the workers that they should vote no. (7) And during this final push, apparently the ALU activists were not able to mount a strong counter-challenge to battle it out openly in words with the gross lies spouted by the bosses from their bully pulpit.
So the workers at LDJ did not see a strong body of their own co-workers standing up to the main verbal assaults and threats that management threw at them at the last moment before the election.
At the same time, there were large differences in the workforce and working conditions at LDJ compared to JFK. The workforce at LDJ is part-timers, and one of their main demands is more work-time. The working conditions at JFK are more severe, with more surveillance and repression. These are serious differences. (8.) We don't know how the ALU members in LDJ dealt with these issues, but it must have been difficult.
The scheduling of the second election right after the first one left
little time to deal with these complex problems. The ALU activists are
heroes, but not super-heroes..
A rally held just before the election drew Bernie Sanders, Sara Nelson (president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA), Elizabeth Shuler (president of the AFL-CIO), Randi Weingarten (president of the American Federation of Teachers) and even Mark Dimondstein (president of the American Postal Workers Union). In other words, the leaders of the very kinds of unions that have failed to organize Amazon for 28 years, as ALU leader Chris Smalls pointed out, were there in force.
This crowd of worthies heated up their rhetoric. Bernie orated that “we got one building and we're coming for another, bro!” referring the Bezos as the “bro.” Nelson excitedly claimed that the working people are “taking over.” (That might have sounded ironic to friends of a young LDJ worker, who committed suicide in April, were they present.) (9) The rhetoric did not stir the LDJ5 workforce enough to produce an election win.
In response to the ALU victory at JFK8 and other organizing, Amazon
aims not only to deny progress to the union but to take away the JFK
win altogether. Amazon has filed charges with the NLRB to void the
election, citing a number of complaints against the union. (10) The
NLRB has ruled in the ALU's favor before, but the agency is made up of
Democrats, a major capitalist party, and cannot be relied on to
consistently to defend the union. There will be trouble ahead.
Biden just gave another example of Democratic Party betrayal of the workers. He had pledged not to give federal money to any corporation that used illegal tactics against a union campaign. Fine words! But he recently allowed Amazon to get $400 million in tax credits that had been on hold. In other words, the “pro-union” President Biden stabbed the ALU in the back. Amazon must have been delighted. A May 5 photograph shows Biden greeting Christian Smalls. They are smiling. The knife is invisible. (11)
Not satisfied with the workers' loss at LDJ5, Amazon management went on the warpath against its own, firing all of its top managers at JFK8 for the sin of losing to the workers. (12)
At any rate, despite the loss at LDJ5, the great victory at JFK8 remains a beacon for young workers organizing today. Its organizers are determined to fight on.
They deserve the support of all militant and progressive workers and other sympathetic people.
1) CNN, May 2, 2022, “Amazon
workers vote against New York union drive
led by grassroots organization behind last month's win,” by Sara
Ashley
O'Brien,.
2) The City, May 2, 2022, “Amazon Workers Fall Short on Second Staten Island Union Vote,” by Josefa Velasquez .
3) The Hill, April 23,2022. “Amazon Labor Union Aims for Second Big Win,” by Chris Mills Rodrigo, .
4) The City, ibid.
5) Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice, April 27, 2022, “Amazon Workers' Victory: A Call to Young Workers to Organize,” by Tim Hall. A description of the ALU's tactics in JFK8 leading up to its election.
6) VICE, April 12, 2022, “Amazon Cracks Down on Organizing After Historic Union Win,” by Lauren Kaori Gurley.
7) Observer, April 22, 2022, “After losing a union vote, Amazon is changing its tactics for round two,” by Talia Jane.
8.) The City, ibid.
9) Jacobin, April 27, 2022, “The Class War Is Raging at Amazon's Staten Island Complex,” by Alex N. Press/Jacobin.
10) CNN Business, April 8, 2022, “Amazon files its appeal of historic union vote at New York City warehouse,” by Sara Ashley O'Brien.
11) The Lever, May 5, 2022, “Amazon Gets Huge Contract Despite Biden’s Union Pledge” by Matthew Cunningham-Cook and David Sirota.
12) The New York Times, “Amazon
Abruptly Fires Senior Managers Tied to
Unionized Warehouse,” by Karen Weise and Noam Scheiber, May 6, 2022.
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