The Amazon Union Election
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The face of the Staten Island union effort is primarily Christian Smalls, a former Amazon warehouse worker. Smalls said the group is running on “pennies compared to other campaigns,” largely relying on $100,000 in donations raisedthrough various pages set up on GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform. The organization has received some support from established labor in the form of legal fees for an attorney, who Smalls said is being paid by the local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, as earlier reported by Bloomberg. A UFCW spokesperson did not respond to request for comment. (Smalls said financial disclosures will be filed with the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards, where unions disclose their financing, if the election is successful.)
Smalls has been vocal about his desire to take on Amazon since he was fired by the company in March 2020 after leading a walkout over pandemic-related health and safety concerns at the Staten Island facility, known as JFK8. While he says his firing was retaliation, the company claims he was terminated for violating its policy that required him to quarantine after being notified of a possible Covid-19 exposure.
Erik Loomis, a labor historian and associate professor at the University of Rhode Island, told CNN Business that while both efforts face an uphill battle, a grassroots organization is taking on significant additional challenges — especially when going up against one of the richest companies in the world.
“You can win with an independent union,” he said, “but to do so is very difficult.” An established union “provides resources, lawyers, organizers, the necessary financial resources to at least have a shot at winning,” he said. “Not going with an established union tends to be more of an ideological choice than a strategic one.”
I suspected that unions were probably offering legal teams pro bono and this turns out to be true. But the problems with doing this as an independent union are real. It’s hard enough to do this with a real union that actually knows what it is doing. Making it harder for yourself for ideological reasons probably is not going to work. But hey, good luck! More than happy to be wrong!