Staten Island Amazon workers chart their own path in union drive

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Employees of Amazon’s main Staten Island, N.Y., facility had been organizing for safer working conditions for more than a year when they decided to form a union last April.

When it came to picking what nationwide organization to join, the leaders of what is now the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) decided to stick with what had worked for them thus far and forgo affiliation in favor of staying independent.

“We looked at the way Amazon attacks organizing efforts and we wanted to construct something completely from scratch that we thought would be very, very difficult for them to combat,” Connor Spence, vice president of membership at the ALU, told The Hill Tuesday.

Workers at the facility, JFK8, are voting this week on whether they want to be represented by the ALU, an organization helmed by current and former employees of the site not tied to any larger labor group.

Several of the country’s now most prominent unions were formed in this way — winning small elections at local sites and then slowly expanding and affiliating with like-minded movements.

Whether that approach will work in an era of labor organizing defined by the power of employers is an open question.

The primary reason that the ALU has chosen to remain independent is to be able to counter Amazon painting the union as an outside force.

“When you bring in an established unit, Amazon attacks them as greedy outsiders who are just here to take your money, but we said ‘okay, what if we organized a union that was literally just a committee of Amazon workers internally?’ How can they attack their own workers?” Spence, who currently works at JFK8, explained.

Being run by workers has not dissuaded Amazon from arguing the ALU are outsiders, but according to supporters of the union, it has made that argument less persuasive to many employees at the facility.

Workers told The Hill that Amazon officials met resistance after making the outsider argument during the numerous forums they have held in the run-up to the election, called “captive audience meetings” by some because workers have little choice over participation.

“We essentially are able to have a lot of control over what kind of union we build here,” Spence noted. “People like that a lot.”

The ALU has been very committed to being a Staten Island-based organization, as opposed to national body with a branch in the area. The group has in turn enjoyed support from several local unions, legal organizations and community members on the island during the campaign.

That initial local focus harkens back to the start of the United Auto Workers union, which began as small independent groups of workers in the Detroit, Mich., area in the 1920s and 30s.

“They were taking on the largest corporations on the planet,” said Catherine Fisk, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work. “General Motors in 1933 was what Amazon is today.”

“The Amazon union can be seen in that tradition,” she added.

Other labor organizations have chosen to strike out on the independent path because they feel no existing organizations align with their particular kind of work or ultimate objectives. Warehouse Workers United, for a more recent example, formed in Southern California in 2009 even though the International Longshore and Warehouse Union already had a strong presence on the West Coast.

“It was a different union with very different politics,” Fisk told The Hill in an interview. “Any particular group of workers might have an impression that they’re ‘not our people’ and choose to form their own organization because that’s how they feel they’re going to build strength.”

The independent path presents both advantages and disadvantages.

As mentioned earlier, forming as an independent local group can be an effective counterpoint to employer efforts to drive a wedge between workers and a union.

Organizations helmed by workers can also have better understandings about what their own colleagues desire and tailor outreach accordingly.

On the flip side, independent unions can suffer from a lack of resources. Especially when matched up against a behemoth like Amazon, having only a handful of organizers that don’t also work 40 hours a week can be a major weakness.

Amazon has flexed its financial muscle in the election, plastering the interior of JFK8 with ‘vote no’ flyers, continuously playing anti-union videos on facility TVs and bringing in high priced consultants to convince individual workers.

“With all that that they’re up against it’s going to be really challenging,” Janice Fine, professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University, told The Hill. “It does seem puzzling to me why an organization would choose to meet that kind of power with such a kind of asymmetric response.”

The decision to take Amazon on independently could ultimately be irrelevant given the might of the e-commerce giant, which has already shown its ability to defeat an organizing campaign led by an established union, albeit with tactics that were ultimately determined to be unlawful interference.

Having the capacity of an organization like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which would represent the workers of Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., facility if they vote for unionizing in an election also being tabulated this week, can only make the task easier, though.

Forming an independent union likely means that most organizers on the campaign are going to be inexperienced with the often byzantine union election process.

That inexperience may have manifested itself in the ALU’s decision to file for an election shortly after having its initial petition rejected for not having met the 30 percent support threshold maintained by the National Labor Relations Board.

Unions tend to hold out on requesting an election until they have crested 70 percent support among the proposed bargaining unit, assuming that support is only likely to drop once management catches word of an impending election.

The ALU defends the decision to file without complete certainty about its level of support, noting that Amazon’s high level of turnover made it difficult to know what union cards were accepted by the National Labor Relations Board from the first petition.

Regardless of the result at JFK8, the ALU will have at least one another crack at organizing an Amazon facility when workers at the neighboring LDJ5 vote next month. The decision to take on that task on as an independent organization could be the difference between a major labor win or a frustrating setback.