24 CityAndStateNY.com
What will it take for Amazon workers to unionize? The e-commerce behemoth is a formidable opponent to labor organizers, even in a union town like New York City. By Annie McDonough
New Yorkers have protested Amazon for years, including when the company attempted to build a headquarters in Queens, left. Chris Smalls, right, has been a vocal critic.
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N 1999, 22 years before one of the richest men on the planet shot himself into suborbital space and thanked employees at his trillion-dollar company for funding the trip, a group of Seattle call center workers at that company tried to form a union. The workers were organizing over issues including low wages and job insecurity. Amazon, the company that employed those call center workers, was not yet the retail and cloud computing giant that it is today. But one organizer on the scene in 1999 said that Jeff Bezos’ behemoth company was already using a union-fighting playbook that it relies on to this day. “Management began one-on-one meetings with workers, putting a lot of pressure on them to dissuade them from joining the union,” said Marcus Courtney, who was an organizer with the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers – a part of the Communications Workers of America – which was helping the call center workers organize. Amazon had an internal website for managers that laid out warning signs that workers were organizing and provided anti-union material to circulate. Courtney
said the playbook was similar to what he saw Amazon use during a first-of-its-kind and ultimately unsuccessful union drive led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this year. “I mean, it was basically version 1.0,” Courtney said. That playbook – plus Amazon’s virtually limitless resources – is what workers hoping to unionize face today. But even in the face of two decades of union resistance and the recent failure in Bessemer, Amazon employees and organizers in New York are already back to work, hoping that their efforts to form a union will succeed where others before them have sputtered and failed. That includes a worker-led union drive currently underway at Amazon’s Staten Island facilities. The Teamsters have also set their sights on Amazon facilities nationwide. And while RWDSU declined to get specific on their organizing work, a spokesperson said the union is in contact with over 1,000 Amazon employees across the country, including in New York. RWDSU has tried to unionize Amazon workers in New York before. In the fall of 2018, when Amazon opened its mas-
SCOOTERCASTER, RINGO CHIU/SHUTTERSTOCK
September 6, 2021
