Amazon Workers Score a Decisive Win in Staten Island!

The best thing about arrogant bosses is that they underestimate the intelligence of their workers. leaked company documents, originally given Vicereveal what Amazon’s General Counsel said at a meeting attended by Jeff Bezos about activist Chris Smalls, whom the company just fired after he helped Conduct a strike at the beginning of the pandemic on health and safety issues related to Covid.

“He’s neither smart nor articulate, and to the extent that the press wants to focus on us against him, we’ll be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky said in notes from the meeting that were widely circulated around the company.

Smalls never gave up. At the time, he was an employee at Amazon in Staten Island, known as JFK8 they fired him. Today, the Amazon Labor Union, an independent union he founded, won a decisive victory. Of the votes cast, 2,654 workers voted in favor of unionization and 2,131 against. In this fierce union struggle, a 523 yes vote is very impressive. This is despite Amazon spends $4.3 million are trying to prevent their workers from unionizing in 2021.

Today’s historic victory took place in a so-called fulfillment center. Next, workers at a nearby Staten Island warehouse dubbed the Sorting Plant (known as LDJ5) have an opportunity to join their newly unionized organization Amazon Union Colleagues. Nothing helps workers vote yes quite like seeing other workers win – which is just one of many reasons this win is so important. This time the workers won.

The company has up to seven days to appeal the election. With the usual anti-union playbook being delay, delay, delay, it seems certain that Amazon will object, even though it knows it will lose later. With the next vote, scheduled for April 25, the employer will be working hard to advance what is known in anti-union jargon as “futility”. The message, which will hit hard at the workers at the LDJ5 facility, is a variation on “We have appealed and are ultimately confident that the Fulfillment Center election will be overturned; Therefore, despite whatever action they or you have taken, there will be no union at Amazon.” The company will expand mandatory “captive audience” meetings, where workers are forced to face lies about management on paid time to listen to union formation. These meetings can be very effective, especially without an activist committee that can flip them from tense to humorous by doing things like bringing loud bags of popcorn into meetings and crunching loudly, asking lots of questions that expose employer lies, putting on party hats or any way to show the boss that you are not impressed.

In the meantime, let’s beware of oversimplified hot shots of this truly historic first win. Many important analyzes have to be carried out here. For example, for the past few weeks, a veteran labor strategist named Gene Bruskin has been leading Smithfield Foods’ winning campaign, was brought in to advise the Amazon Union. He brings a wealth of knowledge from winning the largest private sector factory fight in 2018 in Tar Heel, NC. We also know that many unions have offered some of their best and brightest to help, including organizers from UNITE HERE, the union that helped deliver the Georgia Senate race. And that only scratches the surface of the analysis.

Let’s celebrate the Amazon Labor Union workers today. Their efforts did more to raise expectations than is fully comprehensible. go to them social media sites and donate to support them; There will be huge legal fees and the need to focus on winning at the sorting facility.

Today marks a decisive victory for workers in the brutal class struggle in the United States. Yes, we can win – and yes, we must.

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