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.
