If the NLRB rules against Amazon, then the vote at the Staten Island facility will mark the first time in Amazon’s 28-year history that one of its facilities successfully unionized. But what would that win really mean for the workers of JFK-8, for Amazon, and for the millions of workers at its hundreds of U.S. facilities who just witnessed an unprecedented victory?
Breaking the mold
A good way to gauge the ALU’s path ahead could be to look at some similar cases.
Even among the few companies that leverage a nationwide network of warehouses, Amazon is still somewhat unique. UPS, which operates a network comparable to Amazon’s, has been unionized for decades through the Teamsters, an international labor union with over one million members in the U.S. and Canada. But the circumstances that led to UPS unionizing don’t necessarily apply to Amazon.
“It is a local type of union rather than a national type of union, in that very few companies have so many distribution centers across the country,” Kilgore explained.
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But those efforts didn’t exactly pan out — pro-union voters were crushed by a margin of 1,738 to 798.
“It’s an external entity, a third party. Nobody knows these people. They’re coming in and trying to get you excited about organizing as a local union within their national union,” Kilgore reasoned, “whereas the Staten Island effort was a grassroots, bottom-up movement.”
“Amazon, as one of the largest private companies in the United States, has unlimited resources to oppose unionization,” Custin said. “However, in a David and Goliath battle, the ALU, unlike a well-funded and traditional Teamster campaign, successfully manipulated grassroots activities such as crowdsourcing and small intimate gatherings to score a victory over Amazon.”
A recipe for success
“The ALU’s strategic win can be credited to a post-COVID work environment and a direct challenge to Amazon’s close monitoring of worker productivity, which often results in worker dissatisfaction, especially if carried to an extreme,” explained Custin.
“I don’t know too many examples of that being the path to unionization at warehouses — ever,” Kilgore said of JFK-8’s grassroots strategy.
But nevertheless, it worked, and it could spur change from Amazon’s top brass.
“Time will tell whether the ALU is a JV squad or simply a one-off,” Custin speculated. “The ball is now in Amazon’s court to make meaningful changes in the workplace.”
Amazon’s next move
“The best thing for the Amazon employees nationwide is simply the threat of this happening in another place. It’s going to make Amazon a much better parent,” he asserted. “They’ll want to make it look like Staten Island is the best place to work ever. The management of Staten Island would be dumb not to, because they want to use this example to show everybody else.”
Kilgore thinks Amazon will attempt to improve the working conditions of its facilities, starting with JFK-8. He doesn’t predict sweeping changes. But the company might make some smaller concessions as a way to discourage other facilities from following Staten Island.
That’s important, because it could be months — or even years — before the ALU formally unionizes JFK-8.
“The step they’ve taken is really the first in a series of steps. It’s not over — they haven’t really been unionized until they ratify the contract,” Kilgore explained. “If Amazon wants to, they can stretch that out over multiple years. Then you have years of contract negotiations going on, and you could have lawsuits coming up because of that.”
In the meantime, the ALU will attempt to spread its influence to other Amazon warehouses, beginning with LDJ5, the other Staten Island facility. Kilgore believes the union could follow in the footsteps of Ford employees. Those workers unionized the entire company warehouse by warehouse, ultimately forming a companywide organization.
It will most likely take years for the ALU or another organization to win over enough facilities to do the same. But the ball is rolling, and it’s now in Amazon’s court.
