After Staten Island Success, Amazon Labor Union Gets Requests by Workers From 100 Facilities

Workers outside of traditional union industries, such as in restaurants, cafes and mega-corporations like Walmart and Amazon, have discovered renewed organizing vigor in recent years, and victories in Starbucks and Amazon have renewed hope that a decades-long slide in US union membership can be reversed.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance on Friday, Amazon Labor Union (ALU) President Christian Smalls said the organization has gotten calls from workers at more than 100 US-based Amazon facilities since the union won its first organizing victory a week prior.

Smalls told the outlet he would soon be hosting a “national call” with those who reached out in the coming weeks.

A two-year-long effort to organize the Staten Island warehouse where Smalls was formerly employed came to fruition on April 1, when workers at the Amazon facility voted for ALU to represent them in collective bargaining with the eCommerce and web services giant.

Amazon has roughly 1,000 facilities in the US, including at least 110 warehouses, which it calls fulfillment centers. In other words, roughly 10% of Amazon’s US facilities have expressed interest in what the ALU can offer them.

The company’s roughly 1 million workers have brought a litany of complaints against Amazon, such as long work shifts without bathroom breaks, a high degree of surveillance of their work, and inadequate attention given to safety. Suicide is a shockingly common concern: the Daily Beast found that 189 emergency calls relating to suicide were made between 2003 and 2018.

Many of these dynamics only accelerated when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, sending billions of people home for safety and creating a massive demand for product deliveries. In the first six months of the pandemic, Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos’ wealth ballooned by $48 billion, and in 2020, Amazon’s profits increased by 84% over the previous year. In 2021, the company added another 22% growth, bringing in $469 billion in revenue, according to company earnings reports.

Bezos has long tried to prevent his workers from unionizing, employing a variety of tactics including high-octane strategy experts and introducing sudden changes to internal communications networks to frustrate workers’ ability to communicate with each other.

On Saturday, the day after Smalls’ announcement, Amazon filed a brief with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency that enforces fairness in union organizing and their relations with their employers.The company presented 25 objections to the results of the vote, accusing organizers of intimidating workers to vote in favor of a union, among other complaints.

Another union seeking to organize Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, has accused the company of illegally interfering in a union vote there for a second time. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) told the NLRB last week in a filing that Amazon had “created an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals and thus interfered with the employees’ freedom of choice” to join or reject a union.