Standing outside the N.L.R.B. office in Brooklyn where the ballots were tallied, Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who started the union, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press. “To the first Amazon union in American history,” he cheered.
Derrick Palmer, who packs boxes at the warehouse and co-founded the union, said he expected other facilities to follow Staten Island. “This will be the first union,” he said, “but moving forward, that will motivate other workers to get on board with us.”
One question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is the extent to which they will help the Amazon Labor Union, an upstart, independent group, withstand potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract, such as by providing resources and legal talent.
“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers. “The labor movement has to figure out how to support them.”
Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.
“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/technology/amazon-union-staten-island.html
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