There are significant wins, and then there are earthquakes. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent union, just caused an earthquake, decisively winning a union representation election at JFK8, a massive Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. This is the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to unionize, and the organizing was done not by an established union with resources, but by a worker fired by Amazon for his activism early in the COVID-19 pandemic and backed by a GoFundMe account.
The vote wasn’t even particularly close, coming in at 2654 to 2131, a margin of 523 votes. There are no words for how impressive this is.
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I’m not going to lie, when Chris Smalls and the ALU filed for a union representation election with signatures from just 30% of the eligible workers—enough to get the election, but obviously far less than a majority—I was one of the many observers who saw it as a doomed effort, especially in the wake of the big loss in an Alabama warehouse in 2021 (keep reading for more on that). I’m not sure I’ve ever been so thrilled to be proven absolutely wrong.
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Unions usually don’t file for elections unless they have signatures from more like 70% of workers, to account for the people who will be intimidated away from union support by a management anti-union campaign. You might think that by coming in with what looked like a weak showing, Smalls and the ALU lulled Amazon into complacency. But in fact, Amazon spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year, Dave Jamieson reports. That’s a lot of money.
Amazon’s union-busting campaign didn’t only target JFK8 and another Staten Island warehouse where workers will vote on union representation later this month. It also focused on Bessemer, Alabama, where a union vote ended in a major loss last April, with workers going two to one against unionizing. That campaign was backed by an established union: the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union.
But on the same day that the JFK8 votes started being counted, votes on a do-over election in Bessemer were also counted, with that vote coming after the union filed charges over Amazon’s dirty anti-union tactics. The union ended Thursday’s count behind, but with enough challenged ballots outstanding that it could conceivably pull out a win. Either way, the Bessemer union effort saw a major advance over its result last year.
Between Staten Island—especially with the second upcoming vote—and Bessemer, it’s a guarantee that there are some Amazon executives freaking out right about now. For labor and for worker power in the United States, it’s a historic day. The entire labor movement needs to understand what happened here, but let’s let Smalls have the last word right now:
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Amazon defeats Alabama union effort after dirty, but predictable, campaign
