Two years ago, e-commerce giant Amazon devised a strategy to make fired Staten Island, New York, warehouse worker Chris Smalls the face of the union organizing movement at the company, as its general counsel wrote in an internal memo that the former employee was “not smart or articulate.”
Over a weeklong vote beginning March 25, on the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the labor leader they so arrogantly dismissed for organizing a walkout and thousands of his former colleagues delivered a powerful rebuke to what may be the world’s most powerful corporation, winning the right to collectively bargain with management for better salaries, benefits and working conditions.
With a final tally of 2,654 ballots in favor and 2,131 against, the 8,000-plus workers at the Staten Island facility now become the first among Amazon’s million-person workforce to be represented by a union. Through nontraditional means like social media outreach and old-fashioned on-the-ground organizing, and in the face of fierce and well-funded resistance from the business, the Amazon Labor Union has created a blueprint for organizing efforts elsewhere. That should send a charge up the spine of anyone who cares about genuine worker power in a nation where management increasingly holds the cards.
Though the union had an uphill battle in many respects, it did not have to contend with an overtly hostile landscape for labor, owing to the fact that this fight, unlike an earlier one in Bessemer, Alabama, happened in one of the most pro-union states in the nation. That should serve as a valuable lesson for ostensibly labor-friendly politicians who chose to torpedo the Amazon HQ2 deal to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, which would’ve delivered thousands of good jobs and billions in tax revenue: In the end, for all the ways Amazon has changed New York, New York also has the power to change Amazon.
As the late 32BJ President Hector Figueroa wrote in the pages of the Daily News then, the company was going to be antagonistic to labor anywhere it went. Here, they were destined to meet their match.
