In a result that could reverberate across the U.S., the independent Amazon Labor Union – first formed in 2020 by Chris Smalls, an Amazon.com Inc. worker fired for protesting what he saw as inadequate COVID-19 precautions – got the better of the previously successful anti-union efforts of the online retailer. It means that Smalls’ warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y., will be the first to have a unionized workforce.
On the same day, Starbucks Workers United – an organization affiliated with Service Employees International Union – won another election, making it 10 out of 11 wins for the union since first succeeding in Buffalo, N.Y., in December 2021.
The Starbucks and Amazon campaigns have been led by determined young workers.
Inspired by pro-union sentiment in political movements, they are spearheading the efforts for workplace reform rather than professional union organizers.
The campaigns have involved a significant degree of “self-organization” – workers “talking union” to each other and reaching out to colleagues in other shops. This marks a sea change from the way the labor movement has traditionally operated, which has tended to be led by seasoned union officials.
Perhaps more important than the victories at Starbucks and Amazon are their potential for creating a sense of optimism and enthusiasm around union organizing, especially among younger workers.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, these labor wins would have seemed unimaginable. Powerful corporations appeared invincible, at least in the context of National Labor Relations Board rules, which are stacked heavily against pro-union workers. Under NLRB rules, Amazon and Starbucks can – and do – force workers, on the threat of dismissal, to attend anti-union sessions.
The significance of the recent victories is in part about instilling in workers the belief that if pro-union workers can win at Amazon and Starbucks, they can win anywhere.
The homegrown nature of these campaigns deprives Amazon and Starbucks of employing a decades-old trope of corporate anti-union campaigns: that a union is an external “third party” that is more interested in collecting dues.
But those arguments mostly ring hollow when the people doing the unionizing are colleagues they work alongside.
This “self-organization” is consistent with what was envisioned by the authors of the 1935 Wagner Act, the statute that provides the foundation of today’s union representation procedures.
The NLRB’s first chairman, J. Warren Madden, understood that self-organization could be fatally undermined if corporations were allowed to engage in anti-union pressure tactics.
Over the past half century, anti-union corporations and their consultants and law firms – assisted by Republican-controlled NLRBs and right-wing judges – have undermined that process of worker self-organization by enabling union elections to become employer-dominated.
But for the long-term decline in union membership to be reversed, pro-union workers will need stronger protections. Labor law reform is essential if the almost 50% of non-union American workers who say they want union representation are to have any chance of getting it.
The biggest weapons that anti-union corporations have in suppressing labor momentum are the fear of retaliation and a sense that unionization is futile. The recent successes show unionizing no longer seems so frightening or so futile.
John Logan is a professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
