[ Nearly a year after its victory on Staten Island, the Amazon
Labor Union is grappling with election losses and internal conflict.]
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STRAINS EMERGE INSIDE THE UNION THAT BEAT AMAZON  
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Noam Scheiber
March 21, 2023
New York Times
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_ Nearly a year after its victory on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor
Union is grappling with election losses and internal conflict. _

Christian Smalls, right, the Amazon Labor union president, at a rally
Saturday outside an Amazon air hub in Kentucky. , Jon Cherry for The
New York Times

 

One year after its surprise victory at a Staten Island warehouse, the
only union in the country representing Amazon workers has endured a
series of setbacks and conflicts that have caused longtime supporters
to question if it will survive.

In interviews, a dozen people who have been closely involved with the
Amazon Labor Union said the union had made little progress bringing
Amazon to the bargaining table, to say nothing of securing a contract.
Many cited lopsided losses at two other warehouses, unstable funding
and an internal feud that has made it difficult for the union to alter
a strategy that they considered flawed.

At the heart of the feud is a dispute between the union’s president,
Christian Smalls, and several longtime organizers.

Mr. Smalls’s former allies complain that he has pursued elections at
other warehouses without strong support from workers or a plan to
ensure victory. They say he has focused on travel and public
appearances while neglecting the contract fight at the Staten Island
warehouse, known as JFK8, where Amazon is still contesting the
election result.

The critics, who include the union’s former treasurer and its former
organizing director, favor an alternative approach: amassing enough
supporters to credibly threaten a strike and pressure Amazon to
negotiate. The process could take months but could increase the
chances of winning a contract and collecting dues, without which the
union is dependent on donations from other unions and third parties.

“We’re talking to workers, having one-on-ones, growing our power
in the building,” said Tristian Martinez, a JFK8 employee who began
helping Mr. Smalls organize workers early in the pandemic. “That’s
where it matters. Chris flying all over world is not going to make us
get to a contract any sooner.”

 

[A group of people conversing indoors, including two in red T-shirts
with A.L.U. logos.]

Tristian Martinez, right, at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse last year. He
helped Mr. Smalls organize workers early in the pandemic but has split
with him on union strategy and governance. Credit...DeSean
McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

For his part, Mr. Smalls said that the union was continuing to push
for a contract at JFK8, and that a strike threat was counterproductive
because it would alarm workers who feared losing their incomes. Amazon
had warned workers
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that unionizing could lead to a strike during which they wouldn’t be
paid.

“We’re not going to play into that,” he said in an interview.

He favors filing for elections at other warehouses without waiting to
build majority support, he said, because such support can be fleeting
amid high turnover
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among warehouse workers, and because the momentum and media attention
created by an election filing can rally workers to the union’s side.

Mr. Smalls called the revolt by his former allies an attempted coup
and emphasized that many of the dissidents are white while the union
leadership is largely Black, as are many workers. (Ruel Mohan, a
mixed-race worker involved with the union who is one of the critics,
said of the rift: “I didn’t see anything that had to do with
race.”)

At a tense union meeting in December, Mr. Smalls told longtime
organizers that they should step aside if they couldn’t get along
with him or those loyal to him. “You got a problem with me?
Deuces,” he said, using a slang term for “goodbye.” The two
factions have been operating independently since the meeting.

While strategic debates and personal rivalries are not unusual in the
labor movement, the stakes for the Amazon Labor Union are higher than
most. Given the e-commerce giant’s growing sway over industries
including retail, groceries and health care, many strategists doubt
that organized labor can reverse its decline without gaining traction
at Amazon.

That would be a tall order for a union under any circumstances. But
the Amazon Labor Union’s fracturing has complicated the task.
Labor’s hopes of winning at Amazon now hinge on taking on one of the
world’s wealthiest companies — amid growing challenges within the
union.

It was only days after the Staten Island victory that the union got
its first hint of the struggle ahead. Amazon filed more than two dozen
formal objections
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to the election result, which would tie the union up in hearings into
the summer. The company soundly defeated
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the union in an election at a warehouse across the street the next
month, and later restricted off-duty employees’ access to break
rooms, which organizers had relied on to recruit co-workers. Amazon
said it had made the change to ensure employee safety and building
security.

As a guerrilla leader who helped raise an insurgent army from a bus
stop outside JFK8
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Mr. Smalls had been dazzlingly effective. But he could appear shaky as
the president of an organization that formally represented thousands
of workers.

Though he was compelling in public appearances and proved adept at
raising money from outside groups, he showed little interest in
matters of governance or budgeting, three former officials said.
Organizers struggled to reach him as he bounded between appointments
in places like California, Texas, Nevada and Washington, D.C.

Finally, late last summer, the union appeared to find some stability.
Jane McAlevey, a prominent organizer and an author who had been
advising the group, led two intensive training sessions to help firm
up support among JFK8 workers and pressure the company to negotiate.

According to several people who attended, the sessions lasted about
six hours each and included role-playing about how to approach
workers, techniques for tracking support within the warehouse and
strategies for gradually ramping up protest actions, from circulating
a petition up to a strike.

Just before Labor Day, a hearing officer for the National Labor
Relations Board recommended dismissing
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Amazon’s election challenge, a big step toward certifying the
union’s victory. A few weeks later, the company announced a raise of
25 to 75 cents an hour at the Staten Island warehouse, an increase
whose limited size appeared to frustrate workers
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and increase interest in the union. At a union-sponsored barbecue soon
after, many workers signed
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a petition demanding that Amazon provide an immediate cost-of-living
increase.

But the momentum proved short-lived.

In October, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Southern California
filed a petition [[link removed]] for an
election to join the Amazon Labor Union. In backing the petition, Mr.
Smalls broke an agreement with Ms. McAlevey — reviewed by The New
York Times — in which Mr. Smalls had committed to scale back his
travel and refrain from backing elections at most other warehouses
until the union was actively negotiating a contract on Staten Island.

“I was in that meeting,” said Heather Goodall, the lead Amazon
Labor Union organizer at a warehouse near Albany, N.Y., known as ALB1.
Under the agreement, she said, “Christian couldn’t travel, no more
filing after ALB1.” But “what does he do?” she continued. “He
goes to L.A.”

Ms. McAlevey withdrew from advising the union not long after. In an
interview, Mr. Smalls argued that a worker-led movement should not
turn down workers in other buildings, and that Ms. McAlevey’s
experience was not directly relevant to Amazon. (He appeared in
Kentucky on Saturday to throw the union’s support
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behind an organizing campaign at an Amazon air hub.)

In mid-October, the union lost an election at ALB1 by a roughly
two-to-one ratio
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Many Amazon Labor Union organizers and officials had worried that the
election, which the union filed for in August, was another case in
which Mr. Smalls overextended himself.

Ms. Goodall said that workers and organizers in Albany did not receive
the support that Mr. Smalls had promised, and that his visits
typically happened without much advance notice and were difficult to
plan around.

Mr. Smalls said that the union’s job was to enable workers in other
buildings “to take a shot” but that it didn’t control what
happened there. “The leaders have to step up,” he said. “They
have to educate themselves.”

In an Amazon Labor Union board meeting shortly after the election,
organizers complained to Mr. Smalls that the Albany campaign had hurt
perceptions of the union’s competence, according to four people who
were present. They pushed for a process to determine which warehouses
the union would support and to add board members to make the union’s
leadership more responsive to their concerns.

The loss “made organizing inside JFK8 harder,” said David-Desyrée
Sherwood, a JFK8 worker who also served as a union organizer. “I had
workers come up to me and ask, ‘What happened in Albany?’”

As the union prepared to meet again in December, Mr. Smalls appeared
to be asserting more control, several workers and organizers recalled.

After winning an election, a union must file
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constitution and bylaws with the Labor Department that typically lay
out parameters like the method of selecting officers and the length of
their terms. The Amazon Labor Union created a constitution in the fall
of 2021, around the time it filed for an election at JFK8, and
modified it after its victory.

Both versions were largely written by some of the current dissidents,
including the union’s co-founder and former treasurer, Connor
Spence, and they tended to give ordinary workers considerable
influence, with low bars for running for office and amending the
constitution.

But before the meeting in December, Mr. Smalls oversaw changes to the
union’s constitution that restricted worker input in certain ways.
Most notably, the document, on file with the U.S. Labor Department,
delayed leadership elections that were to take place within a few
months until after the union ratified a contract, a process that can
take years if it happens at all.

“Going forward, here’s the structure,” Mr. Smalls said at the
meeting, according to a recording shared with The Times. “If you
can’t abide by this structure, that’s the door.”

Most of the volunteer organizers in the room walked out, according to
a half-dozen people in attendance. Mr. Martinez, the longtime
organizer, said he had told Mr. Smalls: “Chris, I cannot support
this constitution. We are not leaving the A.L.U. by any means, but we
do not agree with this.”

The union’s new director of organizing, Evangeline Byars, said it
was pointless to have an election before the union had a more
systematic way of interacting with workers in the building.

“Is it going to be democratic? No. Connor and them are just going to
come into power,” said Ms. Byars, a former official at a local
transit workers’ union who is a paid staff member of the A.L.U.

Since the December meeting, the two factions have largely operated on
separate tracks. The dissidents have continued to apply Ms.
McAlevey’s organizing model, regularly talking to workers in each
department, identifying supporters and potential organizers, and
preparing for a possible strike if Amazon refuses to bargain.

Mr. Smalls continues to travel widely — he has visited Atlanta,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London this year, appearing at labor
protests and speaking events — but attends union meetings regularly.
Ms. Byars leads shop steward trainings and said 12 workers had
completed the program so far. She said the union began a campaign in
January to make JFK8 workers aware that they had access to workers’
compensation.

With no contract in sight, the union remains dependent on funding from
outside groups whose appetite for donations appears uneven. The
Omidyar Network, a liberal philanthropy group, recently contributed
$250,000 to a worker support and education fund affiliated with the
union.

But a person familiar with the A.L.U. ’s payroll who declined to be
identified for fear of retribution said the union had at times been
late distributing paychecks in recent months.

Mr. Smalls said paychecks could be delayed if the union missed its
deadline for processing payroll. “Sometimes it happens because our
treasurer is a worker,” he said, stressing that the union was
financially sound.

But he acknowledged that the union’s funding was somewhat erratic.
“It comes in waves,” he said. “We have to get donations.
That’s what’s been keeping us afloat. That’s the reason I travel
so much.”

 

Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the
workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic, where he
covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is the
author of “The Escape Artists.” @noamscheiber
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* Amazon
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* Amazon Labor Union
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