San Jose What is happening with organizing around Amazon? They’ve slipped down the news cycle even as they race to dominate the world and curry favor with the White House.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this week rejected yet another Hail Mary pass by Amazon in its continuing effort to delay bargaining by challenging every NLRB action on the successful Staten Island warehouse election. They’ve tried to argue the NLRB is itself unconstitutional as well. The Amazon Labor Union that won that election and then lost several others has now gone through a leadership change and affiliated with the Teamsters Union.
The Teamsters have had some recent successes via the NLRB. Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect reports,
…the local region of the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to begin bargaining with the more than 100 warehouse workers at DCK6, a majority of whom had signed Teamster affiliation cards. In keeping with the Board’s 2023 ruling in the Cemex case, employers who refuse to request a Board-certified election within the several weeks following the majority of their workers signing such cards must enter into bargaining. Anticipating the application of Cemex’s rules to Amazon’s warehouse workers, the Teamsters have recently obtained affiliation cards from majorities of the workers at Amazon warehouses in New York, Atlanta, Chicago’s Skokie suburb, and several in Southern California, including a mega-warehouse in San Bernardino.
Of course, with the upheaval at the board level of the NLRB given Trump’s dismal of one member, how long Cemex will stand or whether or not it is strong enough to support a sustainable organizing strategy has to be a question, though props to the Teamsters for moving on Cemex hard, where others have not.
The Teamsters got another win from the NLRB on their multi-year strike with subcontracted drivers in Palmdale, California, when the Board ruled that Amazon was a “joint-employer.” Meyerson adds that,
Under the Board’s ruling during Trump’s first term, those particulars made Amazon a “joint employer” of the Palmdale drivers. Since that ruling came down last year, a majority of drivers at a host of other subcontractors (called Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs) have also opted to join the Teamsters—in New York’s Queens borough, in California’s Victorville, and in Skokie.
Of course, Amazon will continue to appeal all of these rulings, as it did to the Fifth Circuit, in order to continue to run out the clock and discourage worker organizing.
On the West Coast, talking to fellow organizers, I heard about an interesting exchange where the Teamsters were challenged by a large SEIU local leader to get serious about the money they were spending to organize Amazon. To make sure his point was clearly understood, he committed to putting into the Amazon organizing pot $5 million from his local, challenging the Teamsters and others to double down on the organizing. He certainly got their attention. Whether the money is coming and the work is accelerating is less clear. House guests in New Orleans for Jazz Fest and various conferences, before I left for the Bay Area, told me about Teamster organizers being hired out of Denver and put on the road, I assume on these drives.
In past decades, when I would drop one of my hoopty vehicles off for repair, my mechanic would tell me, “Don’t bring a twenty, bring plenty!” Likely, that’s what it would take to give Amazon workers justice as well.