A week after workers at its giant Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize, I went for a closer look.
Late Friday afternoon, I got in my car and drove from my home in lower Westchester County to Staten Island, to attend a press conference by the Amazon Labor Union outside the JFK8 warehouse where they got their start. It took 90 minutes to make it down the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge and through the never-ending traffic of the New Jersey Turnpike until I reached the exit for the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island. I fretted about getting lost and missing the event, but as my car reached the top of the bridge, which rises several hundred feet over the pipelines, container terminals and wetlands that riddle the border between Elizabeth, New Jersey and the northwest corner of Staten Island, I saw down below four massive structures, each the length of a dozen football fields, dominating the otherwise green landscape. There was no missing the JFK8 Amazon warehouse, or its sister monoliths the LDJ5 Amazon sort center, the DYY6 Amazon delivery station or the vast parking garage serving their thousands of workers. Behemoth was the only word that came to mind. The one road from the exit turnoff led straight there.
As I approached the warehouse complex, I spotted a small knot of about one hundred people standing on spit of freshly planted green grass, some holding signs. This was the ALU organizers press conference. These were the Davids and Davidas who had taken on a Goliath and lived to celebrate the day.
As press conferences go, this one was pretty untraditional. Instead of two or three speakers reading statements and taking questions, ALU interim president Chris Smalls invited more than a dozen worker-organizers to share their stories for more than an hour. The crowd curled around them listening was a mix of mainstream and left/labor press along with a lot of supporters of the budding union, many wearing ALU shirts or other labor insignia. One young person in the audience wore a Bernie Sanders 2020 T-shirt; another was in a Wu-Tang Clan shirt. A constant stream of cars and trucks flowed past in both directions, many of them leaning on their horns or rolling down their windows to shout “ALU all the way” as they came by.
I listened with one ear to the speakers and my eyes on the whole scene. Here’s what I noticed.
— The COVID crisis was the catalyst for the personal transformations that turned workers who originally put their faith in Amazon management into people who not only lost their faith but lost their fear, and staked their lives on each other instead. When Chris Smalls was fired after organizing a walkout to protest the lack of proper COVID safety measures inside the warehouse, Derrick Palmer, his friend and the union’s interim VP, said of himself, “a new man was birthed that day.” Another union member talked about how, after another died of COVID, there was no memorial inside the warehouse or even mention of the loss.
— Amazon’s own heavy-handed efforts to defeat the organizing effort helped it instead. One union member recounted being told by a union buster that Smalls drove a Lamborghini, a plain lie about someone who basically lived out his car for eleven months during the organizing drive. Pasquale Cioffi, an older Italian man who got involved in the final weeks of the organizing drive told me seeing management’s insulting treatment of Smalls, Palmer and some of their fellow organizers was what tipped him over. “It was game on from there.” A former longshoreman before he came to JFK8, he said he personally flipped 400–500 workers from No to Yes votes. “I’m the one guy you don’t want to piss off,” he bragged.
— People have been pushed too far by Amazon’s hypermodern management methods. Being docked an hour’s pay for being a few minutes late was the most relatable example; one older woman I spoke to mentioned that her “algorithm” had mistakenly put her on job probation for infractions as small as a count being off by one unit. “I’ve been here three and a half years,” she said, “should I get written up and have my career at risk for that?” At least three speakers, all Black men, spoke about work inside the warehouse as being like on a southern plantation picking cotton. “It’s a slave system in there,” Gerald Bryson, one of the ALU’s co-founders said.
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— The old labor traditions have found another lease on life. I was touched when a young Jamaican man joined with a young white woman to sing a reggae-tinged song with words like “What’s that I see a’coming? A union’s a coming.” Many of the ALU members around them joined in. I was also startled to hear one speaker comment that Amazon management used the police of the nearby 120th precinct “like their own Pinkertons or something.” Only someone who has read up on labor history would know what the Pinkertons were.
— Salts, or people who came from elsewhere to get a job in the warehouse in order to help organize it, were an important factor in the fight. Several of the people who spoke mentioned moving from across the country from places like Arizona and Florida in response to call from Chris Smalls to help out. And the budding union needs more of them. When I asked Derrick Palmer, its VP, for a list of what the ALU needs now, his key item was “organizers who are Amazon workers.” And as the event closed, Chris Smalls said the same thing from the stage: “If you need a job, get a job and help us organize from within.”
— There was a lot of youth and idealism on display, but behind it I also sensed fierce ideological commitment. Brett Daniels, a white ALU organizer from Arizona with blond buzz-cut hair and a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter profile, talked proudly about how the ALU’s precursor group, The Congress of Essential Workers, was founded on May 1, 2020, or “MayDay, a revolutionary international day for workers.” He added, “That’s when I decided to salt.” He ended his time at the mic with “all power to the people,” an old Black Panther slogan. Several people in the crowd chanted it back at him, raising their fists.
— The union spoke the workers’ languages. Brima Sylla, a 55-year-old Liberian immigrant who led the ALU’s efforts to reach immigrant workers, who make up about half the warehouse workforce, said he personally speaks seven languages and made sure the union’s materials were translated into all of them. Interestingly, he was the one speaker who framed his pitch for the union not in the class struggle terms favored by most, but as a way to fix Amazon and make it better. “We are not the problems, we are the solutions,” he said. “We have a lot of ideas to improve the company.”
Of course, a lot of those ideas are things that are anathema to Jeff Bezos and the ruthless productivity machine he has built. Giving people higher pay, longer breaks and better working conditions will no doubt reduce how many people are injured in Amazon’s warehouses or quit because they can’t take the physical and psychological intensity of the work, but if reducing turnover was Amazon’s business model it would have done those things already.
The union has another big test in two weeks at the smaller LDJ5 sort center, which employs about 1,800. None of the ALU speakers seemed cocky about winning there. But for a group that, according to Smalls, had just $3 in its account three weeks ago, the ALU’s path can only go up. (Donate here if you want to support them.) Workers at more than one hundred other Amazon locations have contacted the union since its April 1 victory, Smalls reported, and “our phone have literally not stopped buzzing since we won.” He wants the workers at other warehouses to learn from the Staten Island experience and take their time to build a core group of organizers and hold hundreds of one-on-one conversations before any try to surface and petition for recognition.
So whatever happens at LDJ5, the ALU isn’t going to disappear. Amazon’s own greed and hyper-management helped build this union as much as the independent organizers who convinced 2,654 of their colleagues that it was time to fight back for their own lives and dignity. A fire has been lit. Now the knowledge of how to do so is spreading.
p.s. Here’s my weekly newsletter, The Connector, which focused on the ALU in this week’s edition. Please subscribe!