Filings Reveal Amazon Spent Over $14 Million To Bust Union In 2022 Alone

Even within the booming anti-union consulting industry, this is an unusually high amount of spending.

By Sharon Zhang , Truthout

As Amazon Labor Union’s groundbreaking labor movement gained momentum — and, in some ways, faltered — in 2022, Amazon was busy shelling out millions of dollars to anti-union consultants in order to ensure that the union movement would fail, new filings show.

As first reported by HuffPost, new financial disclosures filed on Friday with the Department of Labor show that Amazon spent $14.2 million on anti-union consultants. These consultants are hired by companies seeking to bust union efforts, advising them on ways to skirt or violate federal laws in order to crush labor organizing.

It is common for union-busting companies to spend large sums of money to hire such consultants, who help the company carry out classic anti-union moves like holding mandatory anti-union meetings, which Amazon has done in droves; Labor experts have estimated that union busting is so widespread that it has created an anti-union industry that rakes in $430 million yearly.

Even in this context, Amazon’s spending is astonishingly high.