Posts tagged Chris Smalls
A Doc On How Amazon Workers Unionized Drew Critics’ Praise, But No Major Takers to Distribute
October 23, 2024 // The plan the group has put in place is unabashedly pro-union; it’s unclear if it ever would have been greenlit by a major entertainment company. The film will screen once or a few times in cities chosen because of partners on the ground (in Detroit, for instance, the screening is sponsored the Metro-Detroit Coalition of Labor Union Women and several University of Michigan programs) and/or because these cities are in proximity to Amazon warehouses. Several of these screenings include post-film Q&As, such as in Columbia, Missouri, where the discussion will focus on local cannabis workers’ push to unionize. The filmmakers are offering reduced ticket prices to labor partners and union members in most markets. The strategy is “tied to where the impact was strongest,” says Tuckman.
A union for Amazon warehouse workers elects a new leader in wake of Teamsters affiliation
August 1, 2024 // Only 5% of the 5,312 workers employed in the warehouse voted by mail-in ballot, said Arthur Schwartz, an attorney who represents the dissident group. Spence received 137 out of 247 votes cast, Schwartz said, defeating a current ALU officer named Claudia Ashterman and another prominent organizer named Michelle Valentin.
Amazon Labor Union members vote overwhelmingly in favor of an affiliation with the Teamsters
June 19, 2024 // John Logan, a labor history professor at San Francisco State University, said teaming up with an established union was like a “lifeline” for the independent ALU because the group is “going nowhere at the moment.” “Doing it independently is just so difficult when you’re up against a company like (Amazon), which is big, wealthy and is determined to defeat the union,” Logan said. The Amazon Labor Union’s 2022 victory in Staten Island remains its only election win to date. Yet the group is the only labor organization to pull off the feat at an Amazon warehouse in the U.S., in part due to opposition from the company and the sheer size of many of its facilities.
Amazon Labor Union moves to affiliate with the Teamsters union amid struggles
June 5, 2024 // If ratified, members of the Amazon Labor Union, which belong to one warehouse located in the New York City borough of Staten Island, will essentially join the Teamsters as an “autonomous” local union with the same rights and duties as a standard chapter, according to the agreement. The Teamsters said its board has already unanimously approved the affiliation, a step that will bring them closer to their goal of unionizing Amazon's non-corporate workforce.
Two years after its historic win, a divided Amazon Labor Union lurches toward a leadership election
April 9, 2024 // Smalls, a former Amazon worker who co-founded the union during the coronavirus pandemic, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. Last year, he told the New York Times that he traveled to help raise money for the union. He also told financial news website Business Insider in December that he would not seek reelection as ALU president. Meanwhile, two other prominent organizers, Connor Spence, the union’s co-founder and former treasurer, and Michelle Valentin Nieves, a union leader who says she was pushed out of the group last year, have thrown their hats in the ring. Amazon fired Spence last year for violating a company policy that forbids workers from accessing company buildings or outdoor work areas when they’re off the clock, a policy critics say is designed to hinder organizing. He's leading the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus, while Valentin Nieves is running her own independent campaign.
How the Amazon Labor Union helped shape modern workers’ rights
October 19, 2023 // For every 1% of Amazon's workforce that unionizes, analysts expect it to lead to an incremental $150 million in annual operating expenses.
Sean O’Brien’s summer of the strike
June 26, 2023 // It’s the spark for the combative spirit that permeates Teamsters headquarters, where a whiteboard charts a long-term battle plan on a timeline — “practice picketing,” “CAT trainings” (for “contract action teams”), “identify strike teams” … and finally, on the July 31 spot that marks the end of the current contract: “STRIKE.” Why strike now? As O’Brien himself acknowledged in his Senate testimony, UPS already offers the most plum jobs in the logistics industry, with driver salaries starting at $93,000. But O’Brien argues that the pandemic gave UPS workers the greatest leverage they’ve had in decades. In 2020, union members risked their health to keep packages moving. UPS’s profits surged and have remained high, with customers still hooked on the online shopping habits they adopted during the lockdowns. “Our members are fed up” and remain convinced, he said, that “the only concern that was being addressed was UPS’s bottom line and their balance sheet.” No better time, O’Brien reasons, for workers to go to the mat to demand wages beginning at $20 an hour, tighter safety provisions and an end to the two-tier employment system ushered in by the last contract.
AI is now giving big business the power to bust labor unions
June 9, 2023 // All that has now been eclipsed by AI. Why keep an eye or an ear trained on employees, or purchase software to read their posts and Facebook pages, when a centralized AI can detect union-friendly phrases and behaviors in every Amazon warehouse automatically in real time and at zero cost? Disconcertingly, union-busting AI relies on exactly the same scientific breakthroughs that yielded the germ-busting AI. Before AI, researchers categorized molecules as vectors that either contained or did not contain certain groups of chemicals. This was no different, and no more efficient, than Amazon’s SPOC software categorizing employees on the basis of their perceived temptation to form a union.
‘War of attrition’: why union victories for US workers at Amazon have stalled
April 11, 2023 // The Athena Coalition, consisting of numerous worker centers and non-profits, has focused on supporting workers at Amazon and their efforts in garnering support for petitions and organizing walkouts supporting concrete demands at Amazon sites in Georgia, California, Illinois, Minnesota and elsewhere.