Formation of a labour union at e-commerce behemoth Amazon was assumed to be next to impossible, until the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) pulled off just that at the company’s major warehouse at Staten Island in the U.S. in April 2022, with a majority of the workers voting ‘yes’ for the union.
Justine Medina, an organiser with the ALU at Staten Island, who is in Thiruvananthapuram to take part in the International Labour Conclave, looks at the victory as an inspiring starting point for many such attempts at unionisation.
Ms. Medina got the job at Amazon as a ‘salt’, which in union parlance means someone taking a job aiming at unionising efforts.
In an interview to The Hindu, she says that the victory was secured in the face of intimidating tactics and a well-funded, anti-union propaganda campaign unleashed by the company.
“Workers at Staten Island initially started organising in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, because the company wasn’t providing any safety measures at all in the warehouse which has 8,000 workers at a time. Chris Smalls, the current ALU President, started the protests internally every day. He would talk to workers in the break room, take them to the management and try to demand changes. But, nothing happened even after this. So, after a couple of weeks, he decided to lead a walk out. This was sort of the beginning of the formation of the union. The company threatened the workers who participated and the leaders of the strike were fired,” says Ms. Medina.
Later, Chris and the other workers started travelling across the country to meet other Amazon workers to organise solidarity campaigns. After about a year of doing that, the decision to turn the organisation into a union was taken. She says that the company spent a lot of money to break the union.
“They brought in highly paid consultants to talk to the workforce, in a friendly manner, and spread propaganda against the union. They also used a lot of aggressive tactics, like calling the police on us and getting us arrested and threatening the workers that they would lose their jobs, or that their wages would be lowered or that they would lose existing benefits too. Inside the warehouse, they had 50 feet, four storey-high posters telling workers to vote ‘No’. They were also spying on the workers through audio and video channels. The thing that people forget is that Amazon is a tech company, which has immense surveillance capabilities, especially on its premises,” she says.
Regarding the inability of workers in other warehouses to form a union yet, she says that it need not be seen as a bad sign, because most attempts at union formation fail initially in the U.S. and succeed only after a period of solid work on the ground.
“A lot of workers are eager to start organising, but they aren’t trained in organising. They are learning on the go. Even though there haven’t been union recognition votes, there are still workers who are part of the union and are forcing changes. For instance, the attempts at forming a union at the Amazon facility in Albany failed, but they are still forcing changes on the ground, by getting rid of mandatory overtime. I am sure as workers gain these organising skills, then they will have the skills to win the election and we will see more ‘yes’ votes,” says Ms. Medina.
