“This is a revolution”: Could Amazon and Starbucks union wins signify a turning point for US labour relations?
Jason Anthony, a 35-year-old product picker at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, New York, was there on April 1st for the moment that he and his colleagues found out that they had successfully voted to form the first-ever US union in the company’s history. They popped champagne. They jumped and fist-pumped. Chants of “ALU” (Amazon Labor Union) rang through the air. A video of the moment, posted on Twitter, has nine million views and counting.
“This is part of a revolution,” Anthony says now, speaking over Zoom from his home in Brooklyn. His camera is on, but the video background is the Amazon Labor Union logo. In July 2020, Amazon fired him for taking too much unpaid time off, after he struggled to get to work due to pandemic-induced travel delays. He was eventually able to return to work in 2021, but the seeds had been sown. He became an ALU organiser shortly after.
There is a wave of union movement happening right now across the US. Amazon’s LDJ5 warehouse, across the street from JFK8, will vote on whether to unionise later this month. ALU is asking for higher pay and better job security. Workers at more than 200 Starbucks stores across the US are now forming unions too, after a store in Buffalo, New York, became the first to do so in December 2021. “Amazon Labor Union is just the start,” Anthony says.
Historically, the US has had a fractured relationship with unionisation — particularly since 1981, following then-President Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking air traffic controllers. Corporations across the country saw the move as a green light to stamp on their unions, and union membership has continued to fall year-on-year since. In the 1950s, a third of all workers were unionised. In 2021, this number sat at just 6.1 per cent for private sector workers (down 0.2% on 2020). Could Amazon and Starbucks workers really change the course of history?
Both companies have seen sizeable worker resistance over the years. There were the 2018 protests in Minnesota, when Somalian Amazon workers marched for the right to additional prayer breaks. Amazon workers in Alabama have held two (unsuccessful) votes to unionise in the last year. Worker movements at Starbucks extend as far back as the 1980s, but the coffee chain’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, has a long history of dissolving union efforts.
The pandemic has changed things. “In Amazon,” Anthony says, “they gave us no PPE, no gloves, no masks, no alcohol wipes. We didn’t have anything”. Christian Smalls, who founded the ALU in 2021, was fired from Amazon after staging a walk-out in March 2020 in retaliation to the company’s Covid-19 protocols. Amazon has denied this, saying the company spent billions on Covid-19 safety measures in 2020.
For employees on both sides of the pond, particularly those dubbed ‘essential workers’, Covid-19 concerns have been widespread.
Robert Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois, says that the pandemic has exposed the little regard that many companies have for employee welfare. “Workers at Amazon came face to face with a stark reality that just couldn't be denied,” he says. “To the company, their lives were worth far less than the profit it could generate.”
At Starbucks, too, the pandemic became a turning point. Mason Boykin, 23, a union leader at a branch in Jacksonville, Florida, says that Starbucks employees, known as partners, felt “overworked and underpaid” during the pandemic. Boykin cites severe staff shortages and inconsistent communication from managers as reasons for worker unrest, while he says that hazard pay introduced by Starbucks during the pandemic has been removed. “Covid-19 took a lot from a lot of people,” he says. “But it also gave that recognition that our jobs don't have to be treating us like this, because they need us.”
This is true. The US is currently seeing its biggest labour shortage since World War Two, with many sectors, particularly leisure and hospitality, struggling to retain workers. In February this year, the US had 11.3 million job vacancies but only six million unemployed workers, according to the U.S Chamber of Commerce. The trend is part of the so-called ‘Great Resignation’, with workers upping and leaving unfulfilling jobs at record levels since the start of the pandemic. In 2021 alone, 47 million US workers quit their jobs.
“Traditionally, vigorous [union] organising campaigns have happened and risen at times of labour shortage,” says US historian Jennifer Luff. “It's not surprising that workers are feeling more mobile and more willing to withstand pressure from employers not to organise.” Bruno agrees: “Being in a union right now looks like a better investment for a worker,” he says. “Your working conditions have been really terrible and so you're feeling more vulnerable, and you're probably not going to get fired, because employers desperately need workers.”
Regardless of whether an employer is in need of workers, firing or demoting someone for union activity is illegal under US federal law. However, this law is routinely broken by corporations, often under the guise of firing individuals for other reasons. In February, seven workers were fired from a Starbucks in Memphis, Tennessee, supposedly for speaking to journalists in the shop. On April 4th, in Phoenix, Arizona, Starbucks employee Laila Dalton was fired for recording a conversation with her manager. At the time, Dalton had a live federal complaint against the company, alleging that they were interfering with her attempts to unionise.
“The US has the worst labour law, concerning the ability to form a union and strikes, than any wealthy nation,” says Steven Ashby, author of ‘Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement’. “Employers routinely break the law…because the penalty is miniscule.” If the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US labour law enforcement agency, deems that a company has fired someone unlawfully, they can only enforce remedial action such as reinstating the employee, not punitive measures.
More often, workers themselves are penalised. In February, Anthony was arrested outside Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, alongside ALU founder Smalls and another colleague, for trespassing. “We were in the parking lot, trying to take some food for the workers during break time,” Anthony says now. The warehouse general manager — who Anthony says had been ardently encouraging workers to vote ‘no’ in the then-forthcoming union election — was the person who phoned the police. In a video shared on Twitter, Anthony is cuffed and surrounded by several police officers, while colleagues record and demand he is released. “Jason is a worker! Jason is allowed to be here,” shouts the person filming. “Amazon doesn’t care about their employees!” Amazon has stated that the police were only called on Smalls, as he is not an Amazon employee, though Anthony says charges against him are yet to be dropped.
At both Amazon and Starbucks locations, union busting has been rife. Last year, Amazon spent $4.3million (£3.3million) on anti-union consultancy, while on an as-yet unlaunched internal chat app, words pertaining to unionisation, from ‘grievance’ to ‘pay raise’ may be blocked, according to company documents. Amazon has denied this, as well as allegations of aggressive union-busting.
Starbucks has launched its own union busting website, while in a Buffalo store, before it voted to unionise, the president of Starbucks North America, Rossann Williams, was photographed sweeping the floors — a common union busting technique whereby senior management presence is upped as employees attempt to organise. Both companies have held so-called ‘captive audience’ meetings too, where employees are forced to attend meetings and persuaded to vote against unionisation. Starbucks, too, has denied allegations of union busting.
Such meetings have happened in the store where Maddie Vanhook, 24, works in Cleveland, Ohio. “Our district manager came in, met everybody for the first time, and basically told us to vote no,” the store supervisor says, calling from her bedroom, cat on lap. According to Vanhook, and union campaign Starbucks Workers United, the coffee chain has also been cutting hours despite record profits. Starbucks denies this.
“People at some stores have noticed that the pro-union partners are getting their hours cut more than others,” Vanhook says. Some of her colleagues were on the fence about getting involved in union organising, but once the cuts started, their minds were changed. “They were seeing people aren’t getting the hours they need to make rent,” she says. “I think Starbucks probably wanted [the cuts] to be a dissuasion tactic but in my experience, it's only convinced people that we need a union.”
Maite Tapia, a labor relations professor at Michigan State University, says that despite Starbucks and Amazon workers’ perseverance, dogged union busting attempts still affect workers across the states. “The employer has so much power,” she says. Her own research has found that Amazon is able to “enforce an organisational culture of near-carceral obedience”, while union busting creates a culture of “fear” and “intimidation” that may deter many workers from unionising. “Companies can just reach all these workers in a second, and they do it daily to say they should vote no,” she says. “That does have an impact.”
What perhaps separates the union drives at Starbucks and Amazon from previous movements, though, is exactly how workers are coming together, both to unionise and to expose union busting techniques. Maria Flores, a 23-year-old Starbucks barista, says that social media has been instrumental in furthering the campaign.
“A huge part of this unionising process has been to be on Twitter, to be educated on what's happening across the nation,” she says, sitting in her kitchen in Queens, New York. She is referring to how Twitter has been used to raise awareness when employers have been fired or mistreated, such as the video showing ALU leaders being arrested. “A lot of that would be kept under wraps if it wasn't for the fact that this is such a big deal now,” she says. The messaging hasn’t just reached other workers, either — Flores says that her regular customers have seen the social media campaigning. When they order coffee now, they order under the name ‘Union Strong’, which is then written on their cup.
The Amazon Labor Union has seen success on social media, too — their Twitter account has exceeded 100,000 followers. However, where their campaign really differs from other recent movements is how they’ve operated on the ground.
Unlike most other union campaigns in the US, which are tied to larger, national union organisations, ALU created their own. “We were there literally every single day,” says Anthony, on how ALU secured support from colleagues. “We gave them free food, we gave them literature, we did everything that it took.”
“They organised in the way they wanted to organise,” says Tapia. “They set up tents, they put on bonfires, they had music going on. The great thing when you see these young workers organising is the innovation and experimentation that comes from it.” This matters, says Bruno at the University of Illinois, because major union successes from the 1930s to the 1950s were often driven by new labour organisations, not existing ones. “That means that there's a lot of energy coming from the workers themselves from the grassroots level,” he says. “That's another reason why this is a big deal.”
A change in presidency helps, too. “Amazon, here we come,” said Joe Biden, speaking at a trade union conference days after ALU’s win. Under Republican administration, the NLRB functioned as an “anti-union, anti-worker body”, according to Bruno, but the board has since turned in favour of workers, and is currently pushing to make captive audience meetings illegal.
However, one of the most crucial pieces of legislation that could really swing labour law in favour of workers, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), is still up in the air. The act would dilute employer power by introducing penalties for companies that violate NLRB laws, and enable the NLRB to set union election procedures, as opposed to employers. “One of the biggest things that [the Democrats] ask for,” says US labour law expert Michelle Kaminski, “is the ability to form a union just by having a majority of workers sign a card saying they want a union.”
The law would prevent workers from having to endure the current lengthy and demoralising union election processes, which often involve months of delays and union busting. The act has passed the House of Representatives, but “it would never pass the Senate at this point in time,” Kaminski says, because of the Senate’s polarised political composition.
As it stands, even once a group of workers successfully organise in favour of unionisation, there is a lengthy NLRB process to get to the point of a union election. “Our original, generous estimates were that about now, we would know whether or not we had a union,” says Vanhook in Ohio, whose store filed for election in January. “We haven't even heard back from the [NLRB]. It is a little frustrating.” Workers who have voted to unionise also come up against significant challenges, with employers either refusing to acknowledge the union (Amazon is seeking to overturn JFK8’s win), or deliberately avoiding bargaining with workers or signing a contract.
This has been the case for decades, says Luff, the historian. “Employers use that refusal to sign a contract to induce a sense of futility among workers that, even if they’re organised, there's no point, they’re not going to get a contract, and it would be permanent war in the workplace,” she says. “But now, workers may be more up for permanent war.”
They are. There is something in the air, and these workers are zealous in their demand for change. It’s contagious. “Our store was inspired not only by the stores that have been unionised before us, but just the collective bargaining movement across the United States,” says Flores, the barista in Queens. “When they win, we feel like we win too.” At ALU, organisers have been contacted by over 100 other Amazon facilities across the US and internationally about how to start their own movement. The number of union petitions filed to the NLRB between October 2021 and March this year has increased by 57 per cent on the previous year.
Whether the wins seen at both companies will translate into a wider, long-term union push remains to be seen. After all, no new contracts at either company have been signed. There are countless historical worker movements that have appeared as harbingers of change, yet not succeeded. However, there are reasons to remain optimistic.
Bruno sees the likes of Amazon and Starbucks as potential modern equivalents of US Steel or General Motors — monolithic, hugely influential companies that, when impacted by worker action in 1919 and 1936 respectively, changed the course of labour relations across the country. “In that regard, this is an enormous big deal. This is the biggest labour victory in 40 years,” says Bruno. “But it's truly pivotal, historical quality will only come about if it turns out that by organising Amazon at one place, they can organise them in other places.”
For the workers who have spent months of their lives fighting for the victories seen today, there is no going back to the way things were. “This is just the breaking point,” Flores sighs. Low-paid workers, she says, are done being silenced by powerful corporations. “It’s no longer worth it to just rinse and repeat.”
Anthony’s coming weeks will be spent over the road from his Amazon warehouse, with organisers at the LDJ5 facility. Together, between shifts, the ALU will be handing out leaflets, putting together placards and banners, and rallying support. The next vote to unionise is on the horizon.
“At the end of the day, we succeeded against a trillion-dollar company,” Anthony says. “It’s a sign. We’re not taking any more excuses from corporate America.”
