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Health Concerns Are At The Heart Of New Amazon And Starbucks Unions

April 20, 2022 Alexa Spencer, The Observer. , , , ,
When news broke on Friday, April 1, 2022 that Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y. had managed to organize the first union in the notoriously anti-union company’s 27-year history, a common refrain across social media went something like this: This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. The news was so noteworthy that the name of Christian Smalls, a 33-year-old Black former Amazon employee and the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) who led the walk-out, even trended on Twitter. Did Smalls and the other employees want better pay and benefits? Absolutely. But what many people may not realize is that the drive to unionize at Amazon and elsewhere is being driven by employee concerns about health and safety at work.

JFK8 Union Must Be A Spark Towards A New Reality In Labor Relations

April 20, 2022 Pilar González Kelly, Portside. , , ,
On the first of April, thousands of Amazon warehouse workers voted to form the first union in the company’s history. Their unlikely victory against the $1.5 trillion behemoth’s union-busting campaign is arguably the most significant accomplishment for labor rights since the 1930s. Together with newly-formed Starbucks unions across the country, a post-pandemic labor rights movement has taken the media by storm and could represent a turning point in union influence. It's clear that this generation is growing tired of corporate interests dominating our government and society, treating “essential” workers as disposable in the name of productivity. And now, an independent pop-up group of workers has toppled America’s wealthiest and most influential company.

The Amazon Labor Union Victory – Lessons For All Of Labor

April 19, 2022 Ed Grystar, Popular Resistance. , ,
In one of the most remarkable labor organizing victories in decades, the Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU). This is the first organizing victory for any union at any of Amazon’s 110 warehouses across the USA, the nation’s second largest employer with over a million employees. This was a real bottom-up organizing effort potentially highlighting an effective way forward for the rest of labor – a victory that gives momentum to workers not only in the other Amazon warehouses but in all industries. It demonstrates how and why rank and file workers are the essential elements of not only a successful organizing drive but critical to a revitalized labor movement based on struggle.

Amazon Lashes Back In Staten Island Warehouses

April 15, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
The company has billed itself as the everything store. Now Amazon is the throw-everything-at-them union-buster—trying every trick in the playbook to throttle worker organizing at its Staten Island warehouses in New York City. The union vote at a second warehouse, a neighboring sorting center known as LDJ5, is set to start April 25, so the company has turned its focus there. “All those union-busters that were there to union-bust 8,000 workers at JFK8 have walked across the street and are in our little building of 1,600 people,” a visibly shaken Madeline Wesley, who works at LDJ5, told reporters at a press conference last week. “They’re really fighting us, and they’re playing really dirty.”

Grassroots Unionism: Lessons From The Victory At Amazon

April 11, 2022 Tatiana Cozzarelli And James Dennis Hoff, Left Voice. , , , ,
Amazon workers in Staten Island defeated one of the wealthiest and most anti-union corporations in the world. Their victory is a repudiation of the failed strategy of the labor bureaucracy and shows the power of real rank and file organizing.

Amazon Workers In France Wage Unprecedented Strike For Wage Increases

April 10, 2022 Gaëtan Gracia, Left Voice. , , ,
A strike by Amazon workers in France resumed in earnest on Tuesday, April 5, and extended to all Amazon sites across the country. “Management offered us a 3 percent increase, but we want at least 5 percent,” Antoine Delorme of the CGT Amazon trade union at Châlons-sur-Saône told Révolution Permanente. This is happening in the context of compulsory annual negotiations (NAO) under France’s Labor Code. Management’s proposal of a wage increase that is less than inflation has provoked an unprecedented strike movement at every Amazon France facility.

Laboring Beyond Black Representation

April 6, 2022 Too Black, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Because most of what passes as Black thought nowadays has been criminally captured by white capital (philanthropic foundations, corporate advertising, government funding, academia, business roundtables etc.) it was inevitable that the recent union victory against Amazon would fail to trend in the same spellbounding way as recent stories have in the Blacksphere. As a consequence, a feeble smack from one rich negro onto another and a token "First Black " woman judge appointed to a supreme court that regularly rules against (Black) labor is naturally lifted above the story of the first union to form against the insidiously hostile employer, Amazon, that was led by a working class Black man, Chris Smalls .

Workers Used Amazon’s Captive Audience Meetings Against Amazon

April 5, 2022 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. , , , ,
Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y., astonished the world last week when they voted to form the first-ever U.S. union at the e‑commerce behemoth, which is known for ferociously opposing its workers’ efforts to organize. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won the effort at the JFK8 fulfillment center, had been targeted by such anti-union efforts, and its co-founder, Chris Smalls, had been called “not smart or articulate” by Amazon officials. (Smalls co-founded the union after he was fired for organizing for safer conditions during the pandemic.) Workers and organizers across the country are looking to this campaign for lessons on how to overcome such aggressive tactics from Amazon, which has long proved difficult to organize.

Amazon Workers In Staten Island Clinch A Historic Victory

April 5, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
It’s the magical stuff of Disney movies. But yesterday, the improbable became the most probable when the scrappy band of workers who make up the Amazon Labor Union took the lead in a union election at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, putting within reach a historic labor win at the corporate behemoth. Before the vote count most reporters had dismissed the independent union’s chances, treating the organizing as a curiosity at best. “I think we have been overlooked,” said ALU Treasurer Madeline Wesley Thursday night. “And I think that that ends tomorrow when we are victorious.” The ALU clinched a decisive victory today, winning by a wide margin to create the first unionized workplace in Amazon’s extensive network of fulfillment, delivery, and sortation centers across the U.S.

Let Us Now Praise Courageous Men And Women

April 4, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
Let us honor those workers who stood up to Amazon, especially Chris Smalls, described by Amazon’s chief counsel as “not smart, or articulate,” who led a walkout at the Amazon warehouse at Staten Island JFK8 at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago to protest unsafe working conditions. He was immediately fired. Amazon’s high-priced lawyers, however, were in for a surprise. Smalls unionized the first Amazon warehouse in the country. He, along with his co-founder Derrick Palmer, built their union worker by worker with little outside support and no affiliation with a national labor group, raising $120,000 on GoFundMe. Amazon spent more than $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year alone, according to federal filings.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Pull Into The Lead

April 1, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , ,
In initial vote tallies today, Amazon warehouse workers in New York are ahead by hundreds of votes in favor of forming a union, while in Alabama the election is too close to call, pending a court hearing. The vote at Amazon’s mammoth warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was a rerun of the election last April that the union lost by more than 2 to 1. The results of that election were thrown out after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered with the vote. This time, out of 2,375 valid ballots, 993 workers at the fulfillment center voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, while 875 workers voted in favor. There are 416 ballots being contested by either the company or the union, and 59 voided ballots.

Our Organizing Must Match The Structure Of Our Target

April 1, 2022 Sam Nelson, The Forge. , ,
In September 2017, Amazon announced its intention to build a second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Over 200 municipalities in the US, Canada, and Mexico submitted proposals to host the site, with offers for everything from tax breaks to infrastructure improvements to promises of partnerships with high schools and universities in order to train a whole workforce for Amazon. Some even offered to rename their town Amazon. In the end, Amazon selected three locations: New York City, Arlington, and Nashville. Labor and community organizations in each location quickly coalesced to oppose the developments and the use of public money to incentivize them. In New York, the coalition organized demonstrations; allied with key elected officials, like Senator Michael Gianaris; and trained community members in Queens — Amazon’s would-be neighbors — to act as spokespeople.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Vote On A Union

March 31, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
New York City (Staten Island), New York - As the country cheers on Starbucks workers organizing, the votes will be counted this week in two big union drives at Amazon warehouses—one in Alabama and one in New York. Voting concluded March 25 in Bessemer, Alabama, after mail-in ballots were sent in early February to more than 6,100 workers who are deciding whether to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. This is a re-vote after Amazon’s interference tainted the first election, a landslide defeat last April. Meanwhile in an in-person election at the sprawling Amazon warehouse known as JFK8 on Staten Island in New York City, more than 8,000 warehouse workers will decide whether to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union, an independent union formed there last year.

How Amazon And Google Made Billions From Israel’s Occupation

March 28, 2022 Ramzy Baroud, Mintpress News. , , , , ,
Seattle, Washington - “We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This sentence was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military. In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government which provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government that “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”. This is called Project Nimbus. The project was announced in 2018 and went into effect in May 2021, in the first week of the Israeli war on besieged Gaza, which killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded many more.

Bessemer Alabama Amazon Workers Continue Struggle To Unionize

March 25, 2022 Saladin Muhammad, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Bessemer, Alabama - The second Bessemer Alabama Amazon workers and Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) labor board union vote will be counted starting on March 28th. It comes as a result of the National Labor Relations Board ruling that Amazon’s anti-union actions in the 2021 union campaign, was in violation of laws in the National Labor Relations Act. When looking at the challenges and meaning of the Bessemer Amazon union campaigns, It’s important to have a long view of organizing labor in the South. Transnational corporations like Amazon are attracted to the South, because of the low wages, its anti-union laws and the racist divisions in the working-class.
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