On Monday, 1,600 warehouse workers in Staten Island will vote on whether or not to form the second-ever Amazon union in the United States. In response, the company is using every dirty trick in the book to intimidate workers and undermine the vote.
By James Dennis Hoff, LeftVoice
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) victory on Staten Island has transformed the terrain of the U.S. labor movement and has inspired millions of workers. On Monday, a second unionization vote will begin at another Amazon warehouse of 1,600 workers just across the street, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If successful, this second victory at warehouse LDJ5 would further consolidate the power of the ALU and prove that their first win was not a fluke. A second successful unionization vote would also confirm the importance of the ALU’s grassroots organizing model and hasten what seems like an already inevitable wave of organizing efforts at other Amazon warehouses across the country. In response, Amazon is taking every opportunity it can to lie, cheat, and intimidate workers in order to undermine the unionization effort and to overturn the first vote. Working people and unions everywhere must come out in full support of the ALU’s ongoing unionization efforts on Staten Island and beyond.
Like Cogs in a Machine
Amazon, which raked in record profits last year, has built its entire business model on the exploitation of an underpaid, overworked, and highly precarious workforce. The starting pay for most full-time warehouse workers is less than $30,000 a year and the turnover rate, as the New York Times reported in June, is 150 percent, meaning that the vast majority of workers never make it past the first year of employment. This is because the company treats its workers like cogs in a machine, monitoring and measuring their every move in order to provide cheap and fast delivery of its products around the world. And it is this exploitative business model that makes Amazon so incredibly hostile to any organizing efforts that might threaten its profits, or its ability to totally control every minute of their employees’ work life. The company has spent millions of dollars to defeat unionization efforts in its warehouses, including filing more than 25 objections to the original vote at the JFK8 warehouse.
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