The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lone Amazon labor union now divided, in turmoil
Group still doesn’t have contract 2 years after historic win.
Two years after winning a historic victory at a warehouse in New York City, the first labor union for Amazon workers in the United States is divided, running out of money and fighting over an election that could determine who will lead the group in the future.
Despite campaigns at several facilities in the past few years, the warehouse on Staten Island still is the only site in the U.S. where Amazon workers have voted in favor of union representation. But cracks emerged within the Amazon Labor Union ranks after it lost the votes at a second Staten Island warehouse and at one in upstate New York, spurring disagreements about the group’s organizing strategy.
Some felt Chris Smalls, the union’s president, spent too much time traveling and giving speeches instead of focusing on Staten Island, where the union still does not have a contract with Amazon. Prominent members resigned or left to form a dissident labor group, which sued the union in federal court last summer to force an election for new leadership.
Although many of the union’s problems are internal, it also continues to face roadblocks from Amazon, which has resisted efforts to come to the bargaining table despite pressure from federal labor regulators to do so.
The company, for its part, has accused the National Labor Relations Board and the ALU of improperly influencing the outcome of the successful unionization vote. Amazon also claims the results — 2,654 in favor, 2,131 against — do not represent what the majority of employees want. About 8,300 people worked at the JFK8 Fulfillment Center at the time of the April 2022 vote.
“When the law allows management to drag out negotiations over years, and to use legal arguments to delay the progress that the workers have begun, it’s just an enormous hurdle,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard University.
In January, months after the splinter group called ALU Democratic Reform Caucus filed its lawsuit, the union agreed to a court-brokered plan to allow rank-and-file members to vote on whether to hold an election for a slate of new officers. For five days that ended in early March, tables with ballots were set up outside the doors of the Staten Island warehouse.
Smalls and other union leaders campaigned against the election, and the vote didn’t go their way. In court documents, Arthur Schwartz, an attorney who represents the dissident caucus, said that of the roughly 350 union members who voted, 60% favored having an officer election in June or July.
But the referendum, which had a low turnout rate, didn’t settle the legal back-and-forth and internal power plays. Last week, Jeanne Mirer, an attorney for the union, argued in a legal filing that the federal court in New York should reopen the court-brokered plan. She called it a “flawed” agreement that violated the union’s constitution. Mirer said the current ALU governing document requires members to pass an amendment or arrange a constitutional convention if they want to hold an officer election before a collective bargaining agreement is negotiated with Amazon. The current leaders also say the union has run out of money, which makes it challenging for them to conduct an election.
“It doesn’t matter who’s in the chair,” Mirer said. “Anybody who is a leader has to get Amazon to the table, and working against each other isn’t going to do it.”
Schwartz, the attorney for the dissidents, called the union’s legal claims “totally baseless,” arguing that the constitution at issue was imposed by Smalls — without a vote — in late 2022. He noted that the neutral monitor overseeing the implementation of the court-brokered plan — labor attorney Richard Levy — has scheduled candidate nomination meetings for May, which could allow an internal election to be held as early as June 11.
Smalls, a former Amazon worker who co-founded the union during the pandemic, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. Last year, he told the New York Times that he traveled to help raise money for the union. He also told Business Insider in December that he would not seek reelection as ALU president.
Meanwhile, two other prominent organizers, Connor Spence, the union’s co-founder and former treasurer, and Michelle Valentin Nieves, the union’s former vice president, have thrown their hats in the ring. Amazon fired Spence last year for violating a company policy that forbids workers from accessing company buildings or outdoor work areas when they’re off the clock, a policy critics say is designed to hinder organizing. He’s leading the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, while Valentin Nieves is running an independent campaign.
Valentin Nieves, who helps run the conveyor belts at the warehouse that unionized, said she felt frustrated during her time as an ALU officer by how much Smalls traveled. She said she spoke with him about reducing his time away and encouraged him to periodically go to a public bus stop near the warehouse, where many workers gathered after their shifts ended. But she said Smalls didn’t take her advice.
“We need someone that is here. We need a contract and we need to organize the building,” Valentin Nieves said. “If we’re not able to do this, it’s going to have a domino effect and a lot of Amazon workers are going to lose hope.”
In addition to the vigorous legal pushback against the union’s win, Amazon has continued to spend millions on labor consultants who often try to persuade workers against joining a union. In 2023 alone, Amazon spent more than $3 million on such consultants for its delivery network, a target of the Teamsters union.
Last month, the NLRB filed a complaint against Amazon,
alleging the company illegally attempted to disrupt organizing efforts by an independent union associated with the ALU at an air hub in Kentucky. Amazon spokesperson Mary Kate Paradis said the complaint was “without merit.”
When vegan Nikki Kranz moved to Atlanta from Memphis in the late 1990s as a teenager, she was delighted in the dining options available. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there are six restaurants I can eat at,’” Kranz recalled. “That was a big deal at the time.”
The vegan and vegetarian scenes in Atlanta have changed quite a bit since then.
Before the advent of social media, Kranz and her fellow vegans relied on the website HappyCow to find suitable dining options in the Atlanta area. The site depended on users to update it, however, and wasn’t necessarily the most reliable source.
“You’d go to a restaurant and discover it closed two years ago,” Kranz said.
Her early go-to spots were Chinese restaurant
Harmony Vegetarian, Cafe Sunflower and Soul Vegetarian #2. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when Yelp and Twitter started, that Kranz saw a shift in Atlanta’s vegan scene. People could share their favorite spots in real time and an online community formed. Today, Kranz moderates a Vegan Atlanta group on Facebook with about 11,000 members.
Some of the earliest pioneers of vegan food in Atlanta can be found in the West End, where restaurants such as Soul Vegetarian #1 long have catered to the local community. In recent times, the neighborhood has become a hotbed of vegan restaurants, with such options as Tassili’s Raw Reality, Caribbean-inspired Healthful Essence and Bakaris Plant Based Pizza. They continue to thrive, with people often waiting in long lines at Tassili’s for a massive wrap stuffed with kale and couscous.
One of the first restaurants to bring vegan and vegetarian dining options to a wider audience was R. Thomas Deluxe Grill, which the late Richard Thomas opened in 1985. The Buckhead restaurant began as a fine-dining spot, general manager Brittany Curran said. Before opening the restaurant, Thomas was a fast-food entrepreneur. “He felt guilty about the type of food that he was giving people, because food is healing, food is your body,” Curran said, “and he created this place.”
At R. Thomas, veggie-friendly options such as the breakfast quinoa bowl with scrambled eggs, or the meatless loaf with peppers and mashed potatoes, sit happily on the menu next to hearty classics like the chicken king omelet.
While Atlanta’s vegan and vegetarian dining options continue to expand, R. Thomas persists thanks to its quirky atmosphere and unique offerings. “It’s one of those local places you can’t find anywhere else, with unique combinations of items,” Curran said. One of the most popular dishes on the menu is the Thai Express bowl, which has sautéed red cabbage, red onions, broccoli, carrots and cilantro tossed in a peanut dressing and served over rosemary quinoa.
Lee Allen grew up in Atlanta and remembers when, as a vegan teen, she’d have to modify her orders heavily at Willy’s and Moe’s. Eventually, she worked in fine-dining restaurants like Bacchanalia and observed the shift in attitude toward vegetarians and vegans from within the industry.
“When I first started working in restaurants, there was definitely a vibe of, ‘Ugh, vegetarians are coming in. What are we going to serve
them? Let’s throw something together,’” Allen said.
Over time, however, as food sensitivity awareness and interest in plant-based diets expanded, she noticed that Staplehouse and other restaurants were happy to accommodate meat-free diners. “They started thinking about it more seriously and maybe got more excited about composing those sorts of dishes,” Allen said.
As plant-based diets became more popular, Atlanta experienced a boom of undeniably cool vegan friendly places. Upbeet opened in 2017, bringing artfully crafted vegan and vegetarian bowls to the area west of Midtown, while Pinky Cole opened her Slutty Vegan in the Westview area in 2019, serving Impossible patties topped with cheekily named combinations.
The past year saw Miamibased Planta open two Atlanta locations, and even restaurants that aren’t strictly plantbased offer veggie options, such as Bona Fide Deluxe, with its cauliflower and rapini sandwich with lemon yogurt, or Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q’s location at the Works, which has a pulled mushroom sandwich served on a vegan bun.
One of the hottest vegan restaurants is Reynoldstown’s La Semilla, which opened at the end of 2022. Husbandand-wife co-owners Reid and Sophia Trapani went vegan in 2017 and quickly started perfecting their recipes with the help of Rouxbe, an online culinary school, familiarizing themselves with such ingredients as jackfruit and seitan. They launched a catering service, Happy Seed, in 2018, and as they staged pop-ups around town, they saw a demand for delicious, highly executed vegan food.
The feedback was glowing, Sophia Trapani said, and “it wasn’t just vegans that were at those events.”
Now, at La Semilla, the Trapanis serve vegan versions of Latin dishes, including a Cubano sandwich and tangyspicy queso blanco.
As for where vegan food in Atlanta is headed, Sophia Trapani believes it’s only up from here. “There can always be more,” she said. “We’re not a New York, Miami, L.A., but I think with the growing population and people being more mindful to what they consume, it’s just going to trend upward.”
As plant-based diets became more popular, Atlanta experienced a boom of undeniably cool vegan places.