12/2/2023 0 Comments Amazon strike usPrior to the COVID-19 pandemic, these recent labor wins would probably have seemed unimaginable. – both in terms of membership and influence. The elections follow years of union decline in the U.S. Perhaps more important than the victories at Starbucks and Amazon themselves are their potential for creating a sense of optimism and enthusiasm around union organizing, especially among younger workers. This marks a sea change from the way the labor movement has traditionally operated, which has tended to be more centralized and led by seasoned union officials. Instead, the campaigns have involved a significant degree of “self-organization” – that is, workers “talking union” to each other in the warehouse and coffee shops and reaching out to colleagues in other shops in the same city and across the nation. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find many experienced organizers among the recent successful campaigns. Inspired by pro-union sentiment in political movements, such as Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids, Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America, these individuals are spearheading the efforts for workplace reform rather than professional union organizers. Both the Starbucks and Amazon-Staten Island campaigns have been led by determined young workers. A different kind of organizingĪs a scholar of the labor movement who has observed union drives for two decades, what I find almost as striking as the victories is the unconventional nature of the organizing campaigns. Something is definitely happening in the labor movement. Even if Amazon wins, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union has – at very least – came tantalizingly close in what was deemed a long-shot union vote. Meanwhile, a re-run election at a Amazon factory in Bessemer, Alabama, will depend on the outcome of several hundred contested ballots. Several more Starbucks elections will take place in the coming weeks. The organizing campaign has now spread to over 170 Starbucks stores nationwide. This time, it was the chain’s flagship roastery in New York City that opted to unionize. On the same day, Starbucks Workers United – an organization affiliated with Service Employees International Union – won yet another election, making it 10 out of 11 wins for the union since first succeeding in Buffalo in December 2021. It means that Smalls’ warehouse in Staten Island, New York, will be the first to have a unionized workforce. In a result that could reverberate in workplaces across the U.S., the independent Amazon Labor Union – first formed in 2020 by Chris Smalls, an Amazon worker fired for protesting what he saw as inadequate COVID-19 safety precautions – got the better of the previously successful anti-union efforts of the online retailer. You can listen to more narrated articles here.Īpril 1, 2022, may go down as a pivotal day in the history of American unions.
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