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In a warehouse on Staten Island, which is due to begin voting for union on Monday, Amazon has hired union breakdown consultants, appointed classes to discourage the organization and threatened to arrest union leaders for violating the border.
“ALU IS TRYING TO OFFEND YOUR INTELLIGENCE,” said a flyer targeting Amazon’s emerging labor union. In an attempt to intimidate the workers, it claims that the employees of the new union “can sue you and fine or fire you”. A message from Amazon, pasted on one of the snack machines in the warehouse, thunders: “ALU is lying to you! The only thing they guarantee is … you don’t have a voice anymore. “
“There are concerted efforts to stop us from talking to workers and concerted efforts to scare workers,” said Julian Mitchell-Israel, an Amazon employee and organizer of a volunteer union at the warehouse, which will be the company’s second facility in the United States to join. to Amazon. The labor union, if it votes in favor. “It doesn’t convince anyone, but it makes them angry.”
Amazon’s unionized workers are joining a larger movement across the country, caused in part by high inflation and the pandemic. Starbucks workers voted in favor of unionization, and Kellogg workers agreed to a new contract after months of strikes. The change is most noticeable in the technology industry, where giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple have long prevented workers’ activism with a combination of tools, including high pay, plenty of employee benefits, favorite brands and key missions that drive their workforce to it feels like they made the world a better place.
But blue-collar workers support the technology industry – and they often don’t have access to the benefits of corporate jobs. Amazon’s labor union marked a historic victory this month in a warehouse of 8,000 workers on Staten Island, after years of unsuccessful efforts by national unions to organize workers. Elections at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, are too close to be announced.
Meanwhile, employees at the Apple Store in Atlanta on Wednesday became the first to apply for a union vote, and other stores are closer to doing the same. Contract workers at a Google Fiber store in Kansas City, Missouri, who were hired by a third-party firm that merged in March.
Amazon workers in Staten Island voted in favor of the union on April 1, marking the first successful organized US effort in the history of the retail giant. (Video: The Washington Post)
Faced with the threat of union labor, technology companies – one of the most valuable and fastest growing in the world – are increasingly turning to the classic tactics of breaking up unions to maintain control over their workforce.
“Technology giants will step up the pace of trying to get the landscape back where it was,” said work organizer and author Daniel Gross, who has helped consolidate campaigns for workers in retail, food, Starbucks and more recently technologies. Technology companies make up the dominant industry, and their actions “tip the scales badly for all workers.”
Amazon workers have voted to join a union in New York in a historic move
Technology companies have monitored workers suspected of organizing, published anti-union propaganda and hired anti-union consultants, according to interviews with workers and organizers. They also forced workers to attend meetings of “captive audiences” to undermine union talks, lobbied for laws that would prevent workers from getting the right to unite, and fired employees who turned their attention to these tactics.
There are thriving syndication movements among white-collar technicians, including Activision video game testers. But they are more numerous than hourly-paid workers who are not part of the technological elite. Amazon, the country’s second-largest private employer, has more than 1 million employees in the United States, many of them in warehouses. Apple has more than 200 retail stores in the country, and Google’s workforce overshadowed by contractors and temporary workers has exceeded 156,500 employees since 2018.
Apple’s Atlanta store was the first to apply for a union
In an e-mail statement, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the company was investing billions in pay, benefits and resources for employees.
“We also know that there are external organizations that work hard and spend a lot to spread inaccurate information about us among our teams,” she said. “So – like many other companies – we also work to ensure that our employees are fully informed of their rights and how outsourcing decisions can affect their daily lives on Amazon.”
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
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Google spokesman Courtney Mencini said the company has contracts with both unionized and non-union suppliers and respects the right of their employees to choose whether to join a union.
“We have always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our workforce. Of course, our employees have protected labor rights, which we support. But as we have always done, we will continue to engage directly with all our employees, “Mencini wrote.
Apple said in a statement that “we are happy to have amazing members of the retail team and deeply appreciate everything they bring to Apple.” We are pleased to offer very strong compensation and compensation for full-time and part-time employees, including health care, refund of tuition fees, new parental leave, paid family leave, annual share subsidies and many other benefits.
Technology giants are no strangers to labor activism. And they have been successfully conquering it for years.
Amazon has been using anti-union advisers for nearly two decades, defeating union efforts in the UK in 2004 and Virginia in 2016 and releasing a training video against unions in 2018. It also hired Pinkerton, the private security agency. used to infiltrate unions from the late 1800s to stop Whole Foods workers in 2020, according to inside documents obtained from Vice.
Pinkerton did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the first signs of a traditional union at Google appeared in 2019, when the company quietly hired anti-union firm IRI Consultants and later fired engineers who tried to draw more attention to IRI’s work for Google, called Project Vivian.
This move was a departure for Google. Since about 2011, Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google site reliability engineer, has worked as a liaison between employees and management, who have emphasized their willingness to listen and make concessions to employee concerns.
“This open dialogue was something that stopped the unions for a while,” she said. But after hiring an IRI, it became clear that “a more elegant breakup of unions doesn’t work, so they resort to brute force.”
That same year, a group of Google employees held a regular luncheon meeting in the San Francisco office to discuss the organization, said Lawrence Berland, a Google engineer who was fired after drawing attention to IRI. Officials watched undercover videos showing a robber of Amazon’s unions, believing that Google would try a similar tactic.
“It was pretty clear they were trying to make everyone shut up and go back to work,” Berland said. Spokesman Mencini said that Google decided in 2019 not to use the materials studied during its brief engagement with IRI Consultants.
In January 2021, hundreds of workers formed the Alphabetical Workers’ Union (AWU), a “minority union.” It has no rights to negotiate with the parent company of Google Alphabet, but is maintained by Communications Workers of America.
Google workers are starting a non-traditional union with the help of Communications Workers of America
The pandemic further deepened the division between white-collar workers and hourly workers as “main” retailers and warehouse workers who continued to work on site. Performers received fewer remote privileges. And as the economic and physical turmoil of the past few years has further undermined anti-union norms in technology, companies are becoming increasingly aggressive.
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Contract workers at a Google Fiber store in Kansas City, Missouri, who voted for unionization in March after being denied an increase in the cost of living during the pandemic were required to attend so-called “captive public” meetings with anti-union. a consultant who said the union vote could force Google to withdraw from its contract.
“The tone was vaguely threatening,” said retail employee Emris Adar. Workers have been repeatedly told that “what we want is not really how businesses work,” although Google Fiber pays a starting salary that is $ 2.50 an hour less than Spectrum stores in the same city, she said. .
The Kansas City performers voted in March to join the Alphabet Workers’ Union, which represents both Google employees and the company’s vast army of performers.
Apple Store employees have also faced a twist in the company’s face.
When Apple announced this year that it offered promotions to retailers across the country, employees at the Grand Central Terminal store in New York, who seemed disappointed, were removed from managers and spoke about union traps there, according to officials who spoke. the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
During meetings, managers warned that joining a union would mean losing benefits, such as the opportunity to work at Apple’s corporate headquarters, known as the “career experience.”
The organizers of the store called Fruit Stand Workers United and voted on February 21 to join a national union that supported successful efforts to unite Starbucks employees across the country, according to the group’s website.
Some Apple Store employees in the United States are working for unionization, part of a growing response from workers
Last week, before Cumberland Mall Apple in Atlanta …
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