Bid to unionize Amazon workers nears milestone
NEW YORK — A bid to unionize Amazon workers at a distribution center in New York City neared an important milestone, as organizers prepared to deliver hundreds of signatures to the National Labor Relations Board as soon as Monday for authorization to hold a vote.
Organizers say they have collected signatures from more than 2,000 employees at four Amazon facilities in Staten Island.
The bid to establish the Amazon Labor Union in New York City is the second attempt in the past year to form a union at the nation’s largest online retailer. In April, workers at an Alabama facility overwhelmingly rejected forming a union in an effort led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
The union drive in New York City is working without the help of a national sponsor and is being led by a former Amazon employee, Christian Smalls, who said he was fired just hours after he organized a walkout to protest working conditions last year at the outset of the pandemic.
Organizers need to collect signatures from at least 30% of the workers — about 7,000 in four Staten Island warehouses — who would be covered by the resulting collective bargaining agreement.
“We’ll have it by Monday. I’m going out there today, going out there tomorrow, the next day — until we get it,” said Smalls, who was elected Sunday as the nascent union’s president.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the company’s employees have a choice of whether or not to join a union but “we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees.”
“Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes — quickly,” Nantel said. “That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle.”
The union efforts in Staten Island come as Amazon is on a hiring binge. It announced in September it wants to hire 125,000 delivery and warehouse workers and is paying new recruits an average of $18 an hour in a tight job market. That’s in addition to the 150,000 seasonal workers it plans to bring on this season.
The organizing drive is also happening during a moment of reckoning across Corporate America as the pandemic and ensuing labor shortage has given employees more leverage to fight for better working conditions and pay. Workers have staged strikes at Kellogg’s U.S. cereal plants as well as at Deere & Co., Frito-Lay and Nabisco facilities nationwide.
“Worker discontent goes far beyond Amazon,” said Kent Wong, the director of the UCLA Labor Center. “Workers are feeling tremendous insecurity and they know that corporate leaders at Amazon are making record profits. There is a lot of discontent.”
Workers at other Amazon facilities are closely watching developments. Smalls said he’s been in discussions with other potential union organizers in about a dozen Amazon locations.
Employees have complained about long work hours, insufficient breaks and safety. The employee turnover rate has also been a concern.