Amazon’s Anti-Unionism Costs It Again
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I admit that at this point, I’m a bit skeptical that the Amazon Labor Union is going to amount to much. It was a huge win in that Staten Island facility, but in the meantime the ALU has become the Chris Smalls Traveling Road Show and there are credible accounts about purges within the union to replace people with his loyalists. We’ll see. Everyone sort of forgets that the ALU got something like 20 percent of the workers in the second Staten Island facility to vote for it. I’d love to be wrong here. I don’t think I am.
However, Amazon remains quite vulnerable to unions because unlike 20th century manufacturing, it is a distribution industry and thus can’t just avoid pro-union areas. Those unions are acting when they can. Thus, this recent story from Newark.
For the second time, plans by Amazon to substantially expand its presence in the New York area have been abandoned after labor and community groups mobilized in opposition.
In 2019, Amazon abruptly canceled plans to build a second headquarters in New York City after facing a barrage of criticism that it did not anticipate. This time, the e-commerce giant was unable to complete a deal for a cargo hub at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The project, which hinged on a 20-year lease worth hundreds of millions of dollars, attracted opposition after the Port Authority disclosed it last summer.
“Unfortunately, the Port Authority and Amazon have been unable to reach an agreement on final lease terms and mutually concluded that further negotiations will not resolve the outstanding issues,” Huntley Lawrence, the Port Authority’s chief operating officer, said in a statement on Thursday.
Advocacy groups and unions involved had said they could not support the lease unless Amazon made a set of concessions that included labor agreements and a zero-emissions benchmark at the facility.
“This victory signals that if Amazon wants to continue growing in New Jersey, it’s going to have to do it on our terms,” said Sara Cullinane, director of Make the Road New Jersey, an advocacy group that had questioned the deal.
If Amazon was smart, it would just make a deal with the unions. It’s not as if having unions in your plants make work impossible. But no, they aren’t going to do that because they are more concerned with ideological purity than they are about running a sustainable business that treats workers with even a modicum of respect.