Labor Unions Emergent

Recent unionization victories at places like Amazon don't come from the legacy union people. The wave of labor organization in the future is independent worker organization.

Amazon fought to beat back the unionization effort, and the victory against one of the country’s largest private employers could provide a new playbook for workers that are trying to reverse a historic trend away from union rights. And while Amazon confronts this new reality, other companies are dealing with restless workers, including railroad engineers, coal miners, baristas, nurses and teachers.

Some of these union drives aren’t being driven by Washington-led progressive groups. Instead, they are being launched by upstart, worker-led campaigns that effectively ambush large companies still relying on old-model, anti-union strategies.

“We did whatever it took to connect with those workers to make their daily lives just a little bit easier, a little bit less stressful,” said Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who led the Staten Island grass-roots effort funded by a GoFundMe account.

The Staten Island victory and recent successes at six Starbucks coffee shops in Buffalo were each accomplished by worker-led unions independent of the labor movement’s legacy organizations. Recruitment campaigns were deeply personal, with workers attracting colleagues one by one and including discussions about civil rights and environmental justice, not just wages and working conditions, strategies that national leaders say could be key to the future of the labor movement.

“If you think of unions as just for a certain industry or sector from the ‘old economy,’ that’s not the case. It’s an outdated view of what unions are,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. “Unions are what you want them to be. The workers themselves define it, and I’m seeing all kinds of innovative examples of unions being used to negotiate their companies carbon footprint, and workers in some of these new ‘emerging industries’ are facing the same working conditions and challenges around securing predictable schedules and decent pay and benefits as workers in the traditional economy.”

Workers are wielding new leverage as the economy emerges from pandemic conditions with fewer workers, making employers more desperate for talent. Nearly 8 million workers left the labor force since the start of the pandemic, and almost 4 million workers have quit their jobs each of the last six months, according to federal workforce statistics, in a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation. It’s led to a boost in wages as employers compete for staff; wages have risen 5.6 percent in the past year, although 7.9 percent inflation has eaten away at much of those gains.

“Amazon, like Google and others in tech, relies on a split workforce that is extractive and damaging to all workers — Amazon’s warehouse workers, who do the bulk of the work propping up the company, get a fraction of the pay and benefits given to software engineers and others,” said Parul Koul, a software engineer at Google and executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union.

There’s also renewed energy for unionization in the health-care industry, as grueling conditions and long hours during the pandemic have pushed more workers to seek out better protections and working conditions. Tens of thousands of health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente threatened to strike in 2021 over the company’s plans to introduce a system where newer employees would get less pay and benefits.

“In the short term there will probably be more organizing efforts at Amazon facilities throughout the country,” Sanders told The Post. “And more broadly it shows that working people are disgusted with the reality that corporate profits are soaring, and the billionaire classes are getting much richer, while working people struggle to meet their basic needs.”