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MARCH 23, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

The Problems With the Amazon Labor Union

How the company's refusal to bargain has empowered the ALU's
president but hurt the union

There's trouble in the Amazon Labor Union.

Yesterday, The New York Times' Noam Scheiber reported
<[link removed]>
that a rift has opened between the union's president, Chris Smalls,
and many of the union's activists, staff, and other leaders. At issue
is Smalls's emphasis on organizing other Amazon warehouses beyond the
one that successfully voted to go union-JFK8, on Staten Island-and
the opposition's emphasis on continuing to maintain workers' support
at JFK8 and building organizational infrastructure and procedures there,
to strengthen the union's hand in bargaining a contract with Amazon.

The opposition has much the better case. None of the other warehouses
that Smalls has visited and pushed for a vote at have seen workers
prepare the necessary groundwork for a successful unionization vote;
Smalls's cross-country trips smack more of a grand tour than an
organizing strategy. Conversely, those who've sought to focus on
building the capacity at JFK8 to successfully grapple with the company
over the bargaining table brought in Jane McAlevey, one of the most
accomplished union strategists and organizers, to help them build that
support. But Smalls's continued emphasis on his more far-flung and
far-fetched strategy compelled McAlevey to cease her work with the
union. Smalls then told staffers and other leaders that if they
disapproved of his strategy, they could leave. Worse yet, he insisted
that the union not hold an election for its officers among its members
until a contract is reached with Amazon, thereby ensuring his continued
tenure in office for-well, for the foreseeable future.

Which brings us to the real authors of the union's troubles-the
company and the weakness of labor law that permits it to delay any
serious bargaining with the union. The sad fact is that employers
routinely and often indefinitely delay bargaining a first contract with
workers who've voted to go union, in the hope that the delay will
cause workers to lose interest in the union and possibly vote to
decertify it. A study
<[link removed]> by Cornell
University's Kate Bronfenbrenner revealed that one year after their
workers have unionized, 52 percent of the companies still have not
bargained a contract with them, and two years after that vote, 37
percent of those companies have yet to bargain a contract. The various
efforts that Democrats have waged to restore labor law to its original
potency have included provisions for mandatory mediation and contract
enactment if certain time limits are exceeded, but none of those efforts
have been able to clear the Senate's 60-vote hurdle to become law.

We Can't Do This Without You
<[link removed]>

How, then, did the massive unions that formed in the 1930s, and grew to
represent over one-third of the workforce by mid-century, overcome this
hurdle? The short answer is, through direct action that compelled the
companies to bargain-more precisely, strikes that shut those companies
down. The great strike against General Motors that autoworkers waged for
recognition of their union in the first months of 1937-the
breakthrough strike for American labor-took the form of occupying,
fortifying, and thereby closing down two factories that produced the key
components for GM's cars, most especially Flint, Michigan's
Chevrolet Number 4, which assembled the motors for nearly all GM
vehicles. Thousands of workers ringed the plant to keep company thugs
from attacking it, and President Roosevelt and Michigan Gov. Frank
Murphy-both of whom had received huge labor support in the November
1936 elections-declined to send in the National Guard or Army to break
the strike. Given all that, GM quickly agreed on a contract with the
UAW.

Today's Amazon workers, and for that matter, the workers at the more
than 200 Starbucks outlets who've voted to go union, face a more
hazard-strewn landscape. Taking one Amazon warehouse, or even several
hundred Starbucks, offline won't shut down those companies. Alfred
Sloan, GM's president in 1937, was every bit as anti-union as
Starbucks's Howard Schultz is today, but a company with just two dozen
factories, which in turn were dependent on the parts from just one
factory, was much more susceptible to workers' desire for a union than
a global retailer with hundreds or thousands of facilities is today.
Moreover, in the decades since the 1930s, a series of court decisions
and more anti-union business practices have so undermined labor law that
even a company with just a few workplaces can delay reaching a contract
for months or years, as well as simply violate labor law with little or
no fear of any meaningful penalty.

There's one other significant difference between then and now that the
current rift within the ALU makes clear. Unions that suddenly spring
into existence often have initial leaders with the charisma to have
inspired the first group of workers to go union, but have little
capacity to actually run a union. That's exactly what happened in the
UAW in its first years. The small, fledgling union was initially led by
Homer Martin, a former Baptist minister who could make rousing speeches.
When the union suddenly ballooned to include several hundred thousand
members, Martin was plainly out of his depth, and was replaced by more
competent leaders. Precisely because the union did grow and establish
itself-by winning contracts with the Big Three auto companies-an
organization and a culture took shape that was capable of selecting
appropriate leaders.

Today, Chris Smalls seems a leader in the mold of Martin. But because
Amazon has successfully opposed unionization everywhere but JFK8, and
has refused to bargain a contract with the union there (once the
contract is in place, the union would be required to hold the election
that Smalls is currently resisting), it is effectively complicit with
Smalls in keeping him atop the union. Such is the state of business
practices and labor law that an unlikely pairing of Jeff Bezos and Chris
Smalls has now emerged. This is not good news.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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