It's a Prime Time for Workers to Form Unions
An Amazon warehouse on Staten Island has unionized. Could this mark the beginning of a new era for the labor movement in the United States?
There’s a lot of news to digest these days, but an event with potentially major implications for life in the United States went by largely unnoticed just a few days ago on Staten Island in New York City, where workers at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse voted to unionize their workplace. This is the first time workers employed by Amazon (the United States’ second-largest private employer with 1.1 million people on its payroll) successfully unionized a company facility. Few outside observers believed the result would turn in the union’s favor, but 55% of the workers who voted supported unionization.
The massive JFK8 warehouse, which employees over 8,300 workers, is one of the main warehouses serving the New York City area. When NYC was hammered by the coronavirus during the first months of the pandemic, JFK8 remained open to fulfill the orders of the metro area’s locked-down residents. Its continual operation during the most severe public health crisis of the past one hundred years provided the impetus for the union’s birth. While Amazon offered workers unlimited unpaid time-off, boosted their hourly wage by $2, and gave them double their pay for working overtime during the pandemic, many who reported to work did not feel Amazon was providing them with safe working conditions. As the health crisis deepened in New York City, more and more workers at JFK8 grew to believe Amazon was not listening to their concerns.
One such worker was 31-year-old Chris Smalls, a five-year employee who, after noticing a worker with COVID-like symptoms struggling during her shift, organized a small walkout in March 2020. Amazon responded by firing Smalls on the grounds he had violated COVID protocols. That (and a leaked company email that characterized Smalls as “not articulate”) prompted Smalls and his friend and co-worker Derrick Palmer to attempt to unionize the warehouse. The two men have much in common: Both are the same age, both are Black, both are community college dropouts, both had worked with Amazon since 2015, and both were productive workers. While Smalls organized from the outside, Palmer (who remained employed) led efforts within JFK8.
Smalls and Palmer had no prior experience with a union and did not affiliate their drive with a national labor organization. Instead, they relied on a grassroots strategy many professional organizers assumed was doomed to fail. Now that strategy is being credited for their success. Smalls and Palmer held recruitment rallies manned by warehouse workers at nearby bus stops. Organizers lured workers to union events with the promise of free food and, in some cases, free pot. Crucially, organizers made it a point to connect with the warehouse’s diverse pool of workers. Nationally, 33% of Amazon’s warehouse workers are Black and 22% are Latino. (In contrast, 2% of Amazon’s executives/senior-level employees are Black and 3% are Latino.) At JFK8, 50% of the workers are immigrants, many of whom hail from Africa or primarily speak Spanish. Organizers reached out to these employees in their first languages and appealed to them with events that featured food and music drawn from their cultural traditions. Those efforts would never have materialized if organizers had not drafted a diverse base of lead volunteers, such as the 27-year-old chair of the union’s Workers Committee, single mom Angelika Maldonado.
Inside the warehouse, pro-union workers used their breaks to discuss and field questions about the union in the break room. On their days off, they would return to the warehouse to talk to workers as they arrived or left their shifts. It soon became clear to Amazon employees that, unlike the company’s claims, those advocating on behalf of the union were their fellow co-workers, and that they were using their precious time off work—time they could have spent with their families or simply relaxing after overtime shifts at the warehouse—to support a cause devoted to improving the well-being of everyone who worked at JFK8.
Pro-union arguments extended beyond grievances related to the pandemic. While Amazon offers a $15 minimum wage and an $18 minimum wage with health benefits at JFK8 to full-time workers, it’s still hard to get by in the New York City area on a salary that low. Additionally, Amazon offers few avenues for promotion or to earn raises; in fact, Amazon churns through employees by design so the company doesn’t build up a stable of long-term workers who come to expect better working conditions. (Approximately 150% of Amazon’s workforce is turned-over every year.) By far, however, the biggest complaints about working at Amazon are the demands the company makes on its workers’ productivity. Amazon monitors each worker’s speed and efficiency, taking note if they pause too long while completing a task. Bathroom breaks are discouraged (Amazon recently apologized after it came to light warehouse workers and delivery personnel sometimes resorted to urinating in bottles while on the job.) Workers are often on their feet and moving for much of their 10-12 hour shifts, leaving them completely exhausted at the end of the day. It is not uncommon to hear warehouse workers say Amazon treats them more like robots or machines than human beings. (This lengthy New York Times article by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford provides an in-depth look at what it was like to be employed by Amazon—and specifically at JFK8—during the first year of the pandemic.)
Unsurprisingly, Amazon—whose management repeatedly insists that a “direct relationship” with the company is best for its workers—strove to bust the unionization effort on Staten Island. While workers are prohibited from engaging in union organizing activities while on the job, employees were required to attend meetings where presenters hired by Amazon criticized the union drive and argued union fees would take a massive bite out of workers’ paychecks. Amazon hung signs up throughout the warehouse encouraging workers to vote no. In response to Amazon’s tactics, union organizers filed numerous complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming Amazon had unfairly denied workers the right to organize. Their efforts proved successful and opened the door to a settlement this past December that permitted workers to organize within the warehouse. When Smalls was arrested for trespassing while bringing lunch to workers in a break room, video of the incident spread on social media and galvanized support for the union cause. Ultimately, a company that spends $4.1 million annually on union busting activities was defeated at the ballot box by a unionization effort that had raised $120,000 through GoFundMe. (John Oliver did a segment on his show last year about union busting; it is embedded below.)
An outburst of labor activism has spread through the United States since the beginning of the pandemic. When the country shut down in March 2020, many Americans classified as essential workers still had to report to their jobs despite the risk of catching the virus. One of the earliest flashpoints involved outbreaks among meatpackers (many of whom were members of minority communities) at midwestern food processing facilities. The shocking number of deaths among workers there (49 meatpackers died in May 2020) drew attention to problems that have persisted in meatpacking facilities for decades, including the tendency for supervisors to deny workers breaks (which results in many workers soiling themselves while working on the line) and the high risk of serious personal injury.
Yet the pandemic has also provided workers with unprecedented leverage. After many workers quit to either care for children at home or avoid catching COVID, employers found themselves facing a worker shortage. Many positions went unfilled while new hires lacked valuable on-the-job experience. Workers also took advantage of the large number of job openings to seek higher-paying positions at other firms, compelling many employers to raise wages to remain competitive in a tight labor market. Workers found they could be choosy when deciding whether to accept a job and in some instances had the power to negotiate higher pay.
In 2021, workers at Volvo, Frontier Communication, various hospitals, and Alabama’s Warrior Met Coal coalmine went on strike. So did workers at food plants owned by Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Kellogg. Workers at Kellogg took to the picket lines after the company announced plans to cut and outsource American jobs to Mexico despite having pushed employees to work seven-day weeks for weeks on end; one worker there noted supervisors were more likely to give machines breaks than their human workers. A similar story played out at Nabisco, which turned $5.5 billion in profits in 2021 but only paid the median employee $31,000 while closing American factories in order to move them south of the border. A strike at a Frito-Lay factory in Topeka, Kansas, earned workers who had been turning-in 84-hour weeks with forced overtime and sometimes less than eight hours between shifts a minimum of one day off a week and a 4% raise. That’s a win for workers, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. (Workers at the Frito-Lay plant described being made at one point to work in dense smoke. One another occasion, when one worker died on the line, workers were instructed to move the body and resume operations with another worker stepping in to assume the deceased’s place.)
Workers at John Deere facilities in five states also went on strike in 2021 over the terms of a new labor contract. Employees initially rejected a contract that would have boosted wages by 5-6% as they felt the company could afford to pay their workers more per hour (John Deere reported $4.7 billion in profits in 2021 and spent $1.7 billion in stock buybacks to enrich their shareholders) and had proposed a retirement benefit plan that disadvantaged new hires. Workers also felt they were owed more after the imposition of 10-12 hour shifts during the pandemic and expressed dissatisfaction with the way some managers harassed employees. Disappointed with concessions made during contract negotiations in years past, the UAW-affiliated union felt they could hold-out for a better deal, leading to a strike that lasted for a little over a month. The work stoppage ended after workers agreed to a new contract that boosted pay by 10% in the first year followed by 5% increases in the third and fifth years. As one union leader in Milan, Illinois, said, “We sacrificed, and we want that back now. Workers in this country need to understand that we have a considerable amount of power in this country, if we choose to utilize it, and there’s no reason why we should stand back and let these companies just completely exploit our labor for billions of dollars and fight tooth and nail not to give us anything.”
It is well-known that unions in the United States are long past their mid-twentieth century heyday. Union membership peaked in 1954 at roughly 35% of all American workers. Today it’s estimated only about 10.3% of all American workers—about 14 million people—belong to a union, with that number split evenly between public- and private-sector unions. Yet only about 6% of private-sector workers are union members today while about 34% of public-sector workers are, which is pretty much the inverse of what the situation was in the 1940s and 1950s. That leaves a lot of workers without the benefits (higher pay, health care, decent work hours, etc.) and protections (safe and humane working conditions, job security, etc.) that come with union membership. In fact, in 2021, full-time non-union members earned 17% less per week ($975) than full-time union members ($1,169).
Unions help make the American economy work for working-class Americans. Many are probably familiar with this chart, which graphs changes in union membership and income inequality over time.
Correlation is not causation, of course, and there are certainly other factors that explain why income inequality in the United States over the past one hundred years declined when union membership rose and increased when union membership dropped. But strengthening union membership (and with it the ability to collectively bargain with employers for better pay) is often regarded as an essential step toward lifting more Americans into the middle class, providing them with a large measure of economic stability, and checking the power wielded by the wealthy, corporations, and big business in the United States.
Furthermore, revitalizing unions can go a long way toward restoring the dignity of work in this country. Unions support and celebrate workers whom employers (and even the public) too often denigrate as unskilled and easily replaceable with fleeting concern for their well-being. Unions remind us workers perform essential tasks for their employer and the public, work that fills a demand and keeps this country running. Without their contributions—so often physically-demanding, time-consuming, and skill-dependent—their companies would fail. Additionally, union advocacy emphasizes workers should be regarded as more than instruments of their employers but as people whose labor provides food, housing, health care, and economic security for themselves and their families. American workers want to work and take pride in their work, but they also don’t want to be exploited by their employers or looked down upon by the public for doing supposedly menial labor. Unions counter that mindset.
There are many things the government could do to strengthen unions and labor. The Biden administration—mentioned by some as the most pro-union presidency since that of Harry S. Truman—has bolstered the pro-labor composition of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) an independent regulatory agency whose rulings under the Trump administration typically favored employers. Biden hadn’t even left the inaugural dais when the NLRB’s Trump-appointed general counsel received an email telling him to clear out his office by the end of the workday. Since then, the NLRB’s new general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has moved in an aggressively pro-labor direction. Abruzzo’s focus has been on increasing the number of contractors in the gig economy who qualify as company employees eligible for benefits, better protecting workers who call their employers out for mistreatment, guaranteeing the rights of immigrants to organize regardless their status, and making employer-mandated anti-union meetings like those held at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse illegal. The NLRB has been receptive to these challenges.
For its part, Congress could pass the PRO Act, which would generally expand protections to union employees and employees looking to form unions. The bill would weaken “right to work” laws, make it illegal for companies to require employees to attend mandatory anti-union meetings, allow unions to encourage secondary strikes and protect union employees who participate in such strikes, prohibit companies from firing workers who seek to organize a union, extend protections to immigrant employees and gig workers, and allow the NLRB to levy greater financial penalties—including compensation for mistreated workers—against firms found in violation of labor laws. The PRO Act has passed the House but is going nowhere in a 50-50 Senate where three Democrats (Sinema [AZ], Kelly [AZ], Warner [VA]) have yet to sign-on as co-sponsors. Much of the PRO Act’s contents have been incorporated into the Build Back Better plan, while the NLRB is working to enact what it can of the bill through its own regulatory authority.
The government can do a lot to build the legal architecture necessary for unions to flourish, but the hard work of union organizing is still done by employees in their own communities. Hopefully what happened in Staten Island this month is the beginning of a revitalized union movement in the United States. There are over 1,000 other Amazon fulfillment centers (of which 305 are considered large fulfillment centers) in the United States that could be unionized. A high-profile attempt to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed last year (Smalls visited Bessemer during the drive and concluded the employees’ reliance on professional union organizers hindered its advocacy) but the NLRB threw out the results of that election after it found Amazon had used unfair practices to sway employees to their side. A recently concluded re-vote suggests the “no” votes have the edge, but the outcome is close enough that officials have decided to review about 400 challenged ballots. One has to wonder, however, if JFK8’s success might embolden other workers. Smalls says he has already been contacted by employees interested in forming unions at 50 separate warehouses. And if it’s possible to unionize Amazon, one has to believe it would be possible to unionize employees at big box retailers like Walmart, the nation’s largest employer.
The example of Starbucks suggests unionizing can become contagious. Last year baristas at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize. Since then fifteen other stores—including, just last week, the company’s flagship store in Manhattan—have followed suit. Another 170 outlets will hold votes over the next few months. With its high rate of turnover, workers in the food service industry have found it difficult to unionize (and those 170 stores remain a fraction of Starbucks’ 9,000-store footprint) but at a minimum, it establishes a template and provides inspiration for other food service employees to follow. Hopefully someone at a McDonald’s is paying attention…
In the meantime, Amazon’s newly-unionized employees on Staten Island have a big challenge ahead of them: Negotiating a contract with their employer. Not only are they aiming to improve working conditions in the warehouse and gain a greater say over the facility’s operations and standards, but they’re also eyeing a $30 per hour wage. Negotiations will probably get tough and could involve a strike, which would certainly test the union’s resolve. They currently have a lot of momentum, though, along with economic conditions working in their favor. (Nationwide, the NLRB reported this week that union elections are up 57% in the past six months.) If the workers at JFK8 seize this opportunity and prevail, they could help usher in a new golden era for labor and unions in the United States.
(For a case study on the current state of factory labor in the United States, consider watching the 2019 Academy Award-winning documentary American Factory, available on Netflix.)
Signals and Noise
Let’s start with a flashback photo from 2008:
Remember that? One was a steady presence on the campaign trail. The other rallied her party’s base but exposed herself as a grossly unqualified candidate for federal office, disqualifying her running mate’s presidential campaign in the process. One is now President of the United States. The other is now running for Congress with the blessing of Donald Trump, who essentially kicked Palin’s running mate out of the Republican Party. That picture is basically the choice facing Americans in 2022.
Here’s a clip of Mitch McConnell being asked about his “moral red lines.” (The key section runs from approximately 12:00-15:30, although the question after that is illuminating, too.)
Notice how he shifts from thinking it’s humorous someone would ask him about his moral beliefs to being confused he would be expected to have moral beliefs to angry someone is questioning whether he has moral beliefs. This came to us the same week McConnell said Republican senate candidates’ views on Donald Trump are “irrelevant.”
Republicans have now stooped to smearing their opponents as pedophiles; you can read about these baseless accusations and why Republicans have resorted to this tactic here. A few reminders, however: 1.) The only member of Congress currently under investigation for engaging in both an improper relationship with a minor and sex trafficking is Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida; 2.) The only political figure convicted this past week for possession of child pornography is Ruben Verastigui, a former Trump campaign aide and Republican staffer (I’m not providing a link to the case because the details are horrific); and 3.) The only living former Speaker of the House who is a child molester is Dennis Hastert, also a Republican. And let’s not forget Trump and the RNC endorsed Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama senate race even after he had been accused (with evidence) of sexual misconduct against teenage girls. For more insight, read “What the GOP’s Faux Outrage Over Child Sexual Exploitation is Really About” by conservative columnist Michael Gerson of the Washington Post. (BTW: Gerson deserves a Pulitzer for his work at the Post.)
Arizona congressman and white supremacist Paul Gosar has cancelled an appearance with a white supremacist group that was scheduled for April 20, which is Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Gosar says he doesn’t know how he ended up on the guest list but had earlier promoted it on Instagram.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas this week suggested during a Senate floor speech that future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer. Maybe he should check his own party before smearing someone that way.
Shifting to Ukraine: The news out of Bucha this week is horrifying. In the short term, it also likely dims the prospects for peace.
Russia has deployed a horrific new weapon in Ukraine: Land mines activated when they sense a human is near. From the New York Times: “The POM-3 is typically launched by a rocket and falls back to earth by parachute before sticking into the ground — where it waits, according to CAT-UXO, an online resource for military and civilian bomb technicians. When the mine senses a person, it launches a small explosive warhead that detonates midair, producing fragments that are lethal up to about 50 feet away.” I have no idea how a weapon like this could be deactivated, let alone safely located. (Russia is also using another type of land mine that “roar[s] in like any rocket, but instead of exploding instantly, they eject up to two dozen mines that explode at intervals, parceling out death in the hours afterward.”)
Julia Ioffe reports in Puck that after a month of war and crippling western sanctions, ordinary Russians appear to be rallying around Putin and the war effort. Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times we should expect sanctions to strengthen rather than weaken Putinism in Russia. Meanwhile, the ruble has recovered its pre-war value.
The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC)—perhaps the most prominent conservative organization in the United States—is holding its May meeting in Budapest, where Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will be its keynote speaker. Orban—who just won re-election in a landslide this week—is a proponent of “illiberal democracy,” has stripped the Hungarian judiciary of its independence, replaced independent media with state-controlled outlets, is openly hostile to immigrants and gays, and has rewritten election laws to strengthen his hold on power. Numerous democratic indices have characterized Hungary as a backsliding democracy under Orban, who also has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin. Many conservatives—most prominently Tucker Carlson of FOX News—express a fondness for the autocrat. Last fall, CPAC held a meeting in Brazil to celebrate its strongman Jair Bolsonaro.
So long as we’re on the topic of far right European politicians, polls in France indicate far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has significantly closed the gap between herself and President Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen is an ultranationalist who is strongly opposed to multiculturalism. She has also expressed support for Putin in the past. Le Pen has attempted to soften her image since losing to Macron in the last election and has benefitted from the presence of other right-wing candidates in the race who make her look reasonable by comparison.
Just when Sen. Joe Manchin raised the possibility of restarting talks on Build Back Better, now word comes that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema isn’t all that interested in reviving the bill. I’m sure “Washington” will be to blame.
Senator Chuck Grassley has pledged to investigate Joe Biden’s brother James for his dealings with Chinese business people. I know someone else he ought to look into for the same reasons: Former Transportation Secretary and wife of Mitch McConnell Elaine Chao, who is already under investigation for using her office to promote her family’s shipping business in China. What do you think the chances are Grassley would investigate Chao if Republicans won control of the Senate in 2022? Judges:
“The top 20% of earners in the United States pay 82% of federal income tax — and, if you do the math, and 45% to 50% don’t pay any income tax, you can see the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share, depending on how you want to define it.”—Ohio Republican Senate candidate Mike Gibbons
Oklahoma has passed a near-total ban on abortion. The only exception would be if a mother’s life was in danger. (Exceptions for rape and incest are falling out of favor among conservatives.) Abortion providers would face up to ten years in prison under the law. Further south in Texas, a woman has been arrested for murder following a self-induced abortion. Meanwhile, a battle is brewing in the states over FDA-approved drugs that individuals can take to facilitate abortions in the privacy of their homes.
I’ll need to develop this into a future article: Political scientists have long dismissed the idea that ideological media shape the ideological composition of the voting public. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear Democrats claim FOX News distorts Americans’ view of the political world. The problem with that claim is that FOX News viewers choose to watch FOX News because they are already interested in consuming conservative media. FOX’s audience is an audience of the persuaded, not the persuadable, meaning FOX News is essentially preaching to its conservative choir. It’s therefore unlikely FOX has turned many Americans into conservatives. But a new study by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla adds a wrinkle to this thesis. For their experiment, Broockman and Kalla paid FOX News viewers to watch CNN. Those who did were more likely to moderate their views despite remaining conservative. Therefore, it seems the critical question is not how ideological media affect the ideological views of the public at large but rather how they affect the ideological inclinations of its ideologically sympathetic viewers.
Life expectancy in the United States has fallen for a second straight year due to COVID. The biggest declines were found among White Americans, while Latinos held steady and Black life expectancy increased.
This is an important overlooked story: The IRS is underfunded and struggling to process millions of backlogged tax returns. From the Washington Post: “The IRS’s unprecedented backlog last winter of 24 million returns and pieces of taxpayer correspondence for the 2020 tax year was propelled by colliding crises: The pandemic decimated its workforce after years of budget cuts and attrition; new stimulus measures added to the workload; and the agency remained crippled by its way of doing business, processing the millions of returns it still receives on paper each filing season with red-pen edits, manual data entry and clunky computer software that dates to the 1960s.” Under Trump, Republicans attempted to destroy the IRS through neglect. Meanwhile, it takes a tremendous amount of political will to get politicians to bolster one of the federal government’s most despised but absolutely essential agencies. What many Americans don’t understand is that a well-funded IRS—one that would be able to adapt to the times and that could recover billions of dollars owed to the government by wealthy tax cheats—would improve government functioning.
By Emily Stewart (Vox): “The Awful American Consumer: We Want Cheap Stuff Fast and Don’t Care Who Gets Hurt”
A report by the American Library Association found an unprecedented number of attempts to have books removed from libraries in 2021. One would assume in this era of “political correctness run amuck” that most of those challenges would have originated on the left in an attempt to “cancel” the work of conservative authors, but no, as the ALA reports, “Most targeted books were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons.” It’s amazing how the crusade against political correctness, so often waged in the name of free speech and tolerance, morphs so quickly into censorship driven by old-fashioned intolerance. Equally amazing is how so many people assume the most dire threat to free speech in this country is posed by so-called “woke activists” when reports like those published by the ALA show that is not the case at all.
A follow-up to last week’s article about the incident involving Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Here’s actor David Oyelowo (Selma) writing in The Hollywood Reporter: “As a Black man in the public eye, you are constantly aware of the fact that your very existence is political. You are consistently in a state of either being used as an example to perpetuate or debunk a stereotype. Those stereotypes are tied to criminality, civility, education, sexual prowess, poverty, social responsibility and so much more. It’s a burden I have to accept despite it being exhausting in nature. The moment I slowly realized the nature of what had just occurred on the stage at the Dolby Theater, I was confronted by the same rising anxiety all Black people feel when the face that flashes up on the news after a crime is reported, is a Black one. You find yourself thinking, “What does this mean for us?” “What does that mean for me?” Very soon after the now infamous Oscar ceremony, I walked into an Oscar after party and was immediately confronted by that which I feared. An older white gentleman sidled up to me with relish in his demeanor and said “He should have been dragged right out of there.” You may well agree with that sentiment, but it’s not what he said, it’s the way he said it. I know that relish. I know that demeanor, and it is ugly to its core in all of its coded messaging.”