[Amazon is still refusing to recognize the union, much less begin
negotiations. In the face of this stalemate, two approaches have
emerged, and they are in conflict. ]
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REFORM CAUCUS RISES, SUES FOR ELECTIONS IN AMAZON LABOR UNION  
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Luis Feliz Leon
July 10, 2023
Labor Notes
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_ Amazon is still refusing to recognize the union, much less begin
negotiations. In the face of this stalemate, two approaches have
emerged, and they are in conflict. _

The brightly colored union posters that adorned the bus stop by the
Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse are gone, replaced by a legal
letter from January demanding that the company negotiate with the
Amazon Labor Union. , Luis Feliz Leon

 

One year after the landmark union victory
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at the Amazon warehouse JFK8 on Staten Island, New York, the brightly
colored posters that once adorned the glass at the iconic bus stop
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in front of the plant are gone.

This was the bus stop from which Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Connor
Spence, Gerald Bryson, Jordan Flowers, and others launched an
insurrection that won an unprecedented union authorization election at
the 8,000-worker warehouse.

The posters have been replaced by a torn letter dated January 17,
2023, asking the company’s lawyers to begin bargaining and recognize
the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) as the exclusive bargaining agent.

But Amazon is still refusing to recognize the union, much less begin
negotiations. And elections to unionize other facilities with ALU have
been unsuccessful so far.

In the face of this stalemate, two approaches have emerged, and they
are in conflict. The current leadership, including Smalls, seems
dedicated to assisting members individually, and, for a while,
emphasized supporting other warehouses attempting to organize.

The other approach, advocated by the 80-worker ALU Democratic Reform
Caucus, is to increase the heat on the shop floor to push for a
contract.

Today the caucus filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to
“reform ALU’s constitution and to hold an election for
officers,” according to a press release.

‘UNDEMOCRATIC AND ILLEGAL’

Caucus members say they’ve run into conflict with the union’s
board, which was self-selected at the beginning of the fight and has
appointed new members to its own ranks but has never been put to a
vote.

Before resorting to a lawsuit, caucus members say they spent eight
months on internal efforts to reform the union’s governance and hold
elections for key leadership posts.

That effort was capped off by a failed attempt at mediation by veteran
labor educator and organizer Bill Fletcher. The ALU board had agreed
to mediation and even suggested Fletcher as a mediator—then reversed
course and rejected mediation before it could begin.

“I am concerned that the apparent turmoil within the ALU [Executive]
Board means that little is being done to organize the workers and
prepare for the battle with Amazon,” wrote
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Fletcher in a memo to the caucus and board after the mediation plan
fell through. “It is clear that the ALU’s leadership must be
re-organized and re-affirmed by the membership.”

The caucus characterizes the union’s organizational structure as
“undemocratic and illegal.” Members never had a chance to ratify
the constitution, they argue. The union was slated
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to hold elections after the National Labor Relations Board certified
its victory in the authorization election at JFK8, but the
constitution was amended by the leaders to allow for an election to
take place only after the union ratified a contract.

That goal seems farther away than ever.

A SHIFT IN UNION CULTURE

Caucus members say they are leading the organizing inside the
warehouse with a bench of 50 active organizers and hundreds of
supporters. Their goal is to build power to win a strong contract.

“In order to do the kind of organizing necessary to take on Amazon
and get a strong contract, democracy is key,” said Connor Spence, a
co-founder of the union and its former treasurer, via text message.
“Rank-and-file workers need to be engaged, collaborating on
strategy, surveying demands, and engaging in shop floor action. Most
importantly, they need to have a say in who their leaders are.”

Brima Sylla, one of the 86 plaintiffs on the lawsuit and a member of
the reform caucus, counterposed that vision to what he described as a
union whose leadership now kicks members out of its Wednesday worker
committee meetings when they raise questions.

Eventually meetings became biweekly, and then in May they stopped
altogether, Spence said.

“They were not getting the quorum, which is 10 active workers,”
said Sylla. Instead of going to membership meetings, he said, workers
started going to the bus stop.

Sylla, an immigrant from Liberia, worked the night shift in the
lead-up to the historic election at JFK8; he was key in organizing the
“yes” vote among African workers
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He used to teach high school economics and world history at a private
school on Staten Island, but lost his job during the pandemic and came
to Amazon to support his wife and four children.

Sylla said he has been taken aback by the level of disrespect and
yelling aimed at rank-and-file union members by the union’s
leadership.

“Amazon never respected us,” he said. But one of the key
principles of ALU’s scrappy organizing culture was that the union,
by contrast, _did_ show respect—or did for a while.

“We created our own culture,” said
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Smalls at a People’s Forum event last year. “Amazon has its own
culture that is run completely on metrics, numbers—no human
interaction. We interacted. We brought a human aspect to it. We cared
for one another. We showed the workers every day that we cared for
them. Even if they disliked us, we didn’t argue; we didn’t sit
there and get into fights... We stuck to the issues and built off of
that commonality.”

SERVICE VS. ORGANIZING

Spence describes the union’s current orientation as servicing the
members. “Workers see the e-board and staff as the union,” he said
via text message. “Everyone is appointed [by the board], from
stewards up to officers, and there [is a] huge emphasis on
‘offering’ things such as connecting people with a workers comp
attorney rather than having organizing conversations, identifying
issues, recruiting leaders, and organizing shop floor actions.”

He said the shift began once Evangeline Byars, a former officer at
Transport Workers Union Local 100, became the union’s director of
organizing. Byars told
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the _New York Times_ in March that having an election would be
pointless because the reformers would win. “Is it going to be
democratic? No,” she told the _Times_. “Connor and them are just
going to come into power.”

Gerald Bryson, one of original co-founders of ALU, also argued that
the reform push is about Spence, telling _Labor Notes_, “This whole
coup is about Connor Spence being in charge. They’d rather tear it
all down because Connor isn’t in charge.”

He pointed to a December membership meeting where caucus members
walked out. “Somewhere along the line, they lost that mission that
the union is about the people,” he said, “because they left and
walked out on us. They abandoned their posts.”

David-Desyrée Sherwood, who joined the union last June, said that
members walked out of that membership meeting because Smalls had
presented an illegally changed constitution. “We were told that this
is the constitution now,” he said. “We’re not allowed to vote on
it. I mean, these were his words exactly: ‘If you don’t like it,
there’s the door.’”

Bryson also invoked the racial composition of the caucus to discredit
what he describes as “seven white people” in a majority-Black
workplace. The lawsuit filed today has 86 Amazon workers signed on as
plaintiffs.

“The majority of the people who walked out during the December
meeting were people of color,” said Sherwood, who is Filipino.
“Also, the caucus as it currently stands is extremely diverse, so
it’s a claim that really doesn’t have any merit.”

Bryson questioned the wisdom of even having a caucus. “Caucuses are
formed when you have a contract, and you want to change things,” he
said.

“At the end of the day, unions are supposed to be democratic
organizations that make sure workers have their voices heard,” said
Sherwood. “And we’re not seeing that in the slightest with how
things have been operating.

“I’m a huge supporter of the caucus and the movement to have
elections and let people decide democratically who they want to lead
the union and lead the fight against Amazon.”

Asked about the failed mediation, Bryson said the problem was that
Fletcher set the ground rules and decided who could be part of the
effort; co-founder Jordan Flowers and a former JFK8 worker, Tristan
Lion, couldn’t be involved. According to the caucus, the only people
excluded from mediation were ALU staff, and the sticking point was
their demand to hold a leadership election.

Michelle Valetin Nieves, the ALU’s vice president, directed all
questions to one of the union’s attorneys.

‘DID YOU REALLY WIN?’

Last week when I visited JFK8 to interview workers, no one mentioned
Smalls by name, but they remembered fondly the culture of solidarity
and care—the sharing of food and organizers responding to worker
complaints outside the warehouse or in the cafeteria.

Talk of the union was on everyone’s lips as they waited at the bus
stop after their shift or took a break on benches outside the
facility. In more than 20 interviews, the issues that rose to the top
were workplace conditions and Amazon’s refusal to bargain.

Kenny Oretuga said he had voted for ALU because he wanted a boost in
pay and more time off. He continues to support the union and blames
Amazon for stonewalling.

“Amazon is trying to play down the efforts of the union,” he said.
“Amazon is big, and they will resist as long as they can.”

Briana Lewis remembered when the ALU began organizing. She had just
started working at Amazon. “The union was everywhere,” she said.
“They’re outside in front of the building. They were making
calls.”

A constant refrain among workers if a problem arose, was, “‘Go to
the ALU people. They’ll help you with whatever.’

“Now I feel like it dried out. The labor union won, but I feel like,
yeah, they won on paper. Amazon is still standing and they barely
speak about the labor union inside. So did you really win?”

The mammoth warehouse now employs somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000
workers. The reform caucus gathered 822 signatures on a petition
calling for an election of ALU leadership.

The reformers say they’ve never been better organized in the
warehouse, and despite the internal discord, workers still want their
union—just one that brings the fight to Amazon.

‘TIME OFF TASK’

The working conditions have only gotten worse with write ups for
“time off task”
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(TOT), i.e. any moment that is not spent working. Handheld
radio-frequency scanners track and record workers’ productivity down
to the minute, and managers use the information to punish workers who
fall below their quotas. Dozens of workers at JFK8 blamed TOT for what
Lewis described as “random write-ups.”

“If your stomach hurts and you are in the bathroom, they’ll write
you for TOT,” she said. “It’s write-up after write-up.”

Sometimes the write-ups come as surprises. “I’ve known plenty of
people who have gotten fired over write-ups that they never even knew
about,” she said.

Felicia Price has only been here for three months. Turnover is
sky-high; like many of her co-workers, she had worked for Amazon
before, but in another warehouse. To make it to the far west of Staten
Island, she commutes three hours from Coney Island.

Though she hasn’t connected with the ALU yet, she said that she
wants to get involved; it would be good to have a shop steward in
meetings with management to get accommodations.

“We need a union,” she said. “If my doctor is saying that I
can’t perform this certain activity, I shouldn’t have to argue and
go back and forth with [management] about what my doctor’s note is
saying.”

Fianthen Barkley voted for the union last year and then left Amazon;
she’s been working there on and off since the facility opened in
2018. The day of my visit happened to be her first day back, and she
was a bit anxious, pacing back and forth by the bus stop. But she has
kept up with news through the Citizens app and talking with other
members of Staten Island’s tight-knit Liberian community.

Barkley said Amazon “wants everything out so fast—it’s orders,
orders, orders, orders. But at the end of the day, when we clock
out”—she made heaving sounds like an exhausted worker struggling
to catch her breath—“we are tired, and what are we getting out of
it?”

“You see me in my scrubs?” she asked, telling me about her second
job as a home health aide. “I’m coming from a whole other job, and
it shouldn’t be like that. I should be able to stick with just one
company.”

Luis Feliz Leon [[link removed]] is a
staff writer and organizer with Labor [email protected]

* Amazon Labor Union; Amazon;
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