Posts tagged Staten Island
STATEN ISLAND: Amazon Union Dissidents, in Challenge to Leader, Move to Force Vote
July 11, 2023 // On Friday, the reform caucus sent the union’s leadership a letter laying out its proposal to hold prompt elections, saying it would go to court Monday if the leadership didn’t embrace the proposal. The reform group is made of up more than 40 active organizers who are also plaintiffs in the legal complaint, including Connor Spence, a union co-founder and former treasurer; Brett Daniels, the union’s former organizing director; and Brima Sylla, a prominent organizer at the Staten Island warehouse. The group said in its letter that enacting the proposal could “mean the difference between an A.L.U. which is strong, effective, and a beacon of democracy in the labor movement” and “an A.L.U. which, in the end, became exactly what Amazon warned workers it would become: a business that takes away the workers’ voices.”
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.
‘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.
Amazon union faces division, delay a year after historic victory
April 3, 2023 // However, the visible presence of union support within the Staten Island warehouse has diminished significantly since the victory last year, according to three longtime workers at the facility. "Right after the election, there were about a dozen people I saw on the first floor wearing ALU t-shirts and yellow 'organizer' vests," Natalie Monarrez, a worker who considers herself pro-union and initially organized with the ALU but ultimately voted against unionization due to concerns regarding its leadership, told ABC News. "In the past few months, I haven't seen any ALU t-shirts or yellow vests," she added. Smalls, who has traveled nationwide over the past year to speaking engagements and meetings with Amazon workers at other warehouses, has received criticism from some union activists over a perceived lack of focus on organizing within the Staten Island facility, he said.
New York’s biggest labor actions of the past year
February 28, 2023 // Only one other state, Hawaii, has a unionization rate higher than New York’s 20.7%. In the public sector, just around two-thirds of New Yorkers are in a union. In 2022 alone, nearly 200 workplaces in the state filed for representation through the National Labor Relations Board. But, despite the hype and a 57-year high in Americans’ approval of labor unions, New York’s union participation (and the country’s as a whole) is still trending downward. In 2012, 23.2% of New York workers were union members, 2.5 points higher than it is today. CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies Labor Department Chair Ruth Milkman said that despite 2022’s historic union victories, many were with small firms. “So all this publicity and media attention to these iconic companies that have had some recent experience of successful unionization, it’s kind of a drop in the bucket in terms of the whole labor market in New York,” she said.
Amazon now has a legal obligation to bargain with the union, and can face serious penalties if it doesn’t.
January 17, 2023 // The Amazon Labor Union has officially been certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the union announced on Wednesday night. Amazon is now legally obligated to start bargaining a contract in good faith with the ALU, nine months after workers first won their union election at the company’s mammoth JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.
Judge tells Amazon: Stop retaliating against employees
December 1, 2022 // According to the decision, the NLRB's argument was that failing to rehire the terminated employee would result in a weakening of the ALU's ability to organize. There wasn't any evidence presented to indicate that, the judge said, adding that the employee "was terminated approximately one year before the ALU was formed." Per the judge, that means this case is distinguishable from similar ones in which reinstatement would be justified. JFK8 employees voted to join the ALU in April 2022, not long after the ALU petitioned the NLRB for the right to hold a union election. Another vote to organize a second Staten Island warehouse in May of this year failed to pass, which led the NLRB to file another complaint against Amazon in September alleging unfair treatment of union organizers. The NLRB alleges the treatment may have affected the vote, and the case is still ongoing.
Labor secretary takes to Starbucks and Amazon’s hometown paper to point out ‘more worker organizing than many of us have seen in our lifetimes’
November 28, 2022 // U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh reiterated the Biden administration’s support for organized labor with that statement in a Thanksgiving opinion article for the hometown newspaper of two giant companies at the center of union activity: Starbucks Corp. SBUX, +0.04% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.76% But Walsh wrote in the Seattle Times that getting to the next step — companies bargaining with unions in a timely manner in order to reach an agreement on a first contract — is key. He noted that federal labor law is “weak” and can allow companies to delay bargaining, which could “drag on for years.”
Amazon’s new robot can recognize objects!
November 16, 2022 // The company says it can run operations more efficiently and safely by using robots in its warehouses. Amazon, “Sparrow “By taking on repetitive tasks, it will allow our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also increasing safety.” sparrow, It will help us increase efficiency by automating a critical part of our order fulfillment process so we can continue to deliver fast to our customers.” He added that he was able to create more than 700 new job categories using robots.