Since late 2021, worker organizing efforts in the United States have culminated in multiple victories against corporate giants, including the country’s first successful unionizations at Amazon and Starbucks.
This is big news because unionization has hit an all-time low in the United States, with unions representing only 10% of the workforce even though unionized workers continue to receive better wages and benefits. At the same time, the political power mega corporations like Starbucks and Amazon hold is at an all-time high in the United States and globally – a sign of just how much we need the counter balance that organized labor provides. (Check out this recent testimony by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute on unions as a check on corporate power.)
Even if the broader state of unionization in the US is still bleak, the organization of workers at Amazon and Starbucks (and many of the less emblematic victories of the last few months) is an important step forward on the road to challenging unsustainable business models designed to profit at the grave expense of workers.
In this International Workers’ Day post, we discuss the recent victories for organized labor in the United States and suggest that the companies where workers are organizing against all odds should meaningfully respond to these workers’ demands and to the demands of workers across international supply chains of products they make and sell.
Organized Labor Wins
On December 9, 2021, a small group of baristas in Buffalo, New York established the country’s first Starbucks union, Starbucks Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. Starbucks workers across the country have documented low pay, understaffing, and impossible work loads, which have gotten worse during the pandemic.
Before December, not a single one of the 9,000 Starbucks locations around the country had a union. But the Buffalo unionization has had a domino effect. Workers at more than 220 Starbucks stores across the country have now petitioned for union elections, with 28 successfully unionizing thus far.
On April 1, 2022, the vote was called for unionization at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which employs 8,000 people, in Staten Island, New York. Workers embraced, cried, and popped champagne to celebrate establishing the Amazon Labor Union, the company’s first union in the United States, even against Amazon’s relentless union-busting campaign. (Amazon paid anti-union consultants more than $4 million last year alone.
Despite the company’s purported goal to become “Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work,” workers in Amazon warehouses across the country have long documented the brutal and unsafe conditions workers face on a daily basis, including extreme monitoring and surveillance, lack of air conditioning, inadequate break times, injuries and deaths, and the expectation to continue working when co-workers collapse.
The organizers at Amazon’s JFK8 facility built worker solidarity despite high turnover, intimidation, and misinformation, and other challenges. They used history and political theory to back their decisions and inform their strategies, turning to William Foster’s notes on organizing in the steel industry in the early 1900s and learning about the early roots of the Industrial Workers of the World.
While Amazon is challenging the legitimacy of the JFK8 vote, workers at more than 100 Amazon facilities across the country and around the world have reached out to Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, and the other movement leaders with interest in organizing elsewhere. A union vote at a second Staten Island warehouse is now underway. These successes came as workers at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama twice narrowly voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RDWSU) in the face of Amazon’s massive disinformation campaigns. The RDWSU challenged the legitimacy of the first elections, held in April 2021, and after a months-long investigation, the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon had improperly interfered in the election and mandated a new vote. After the re-do, RDWSU is again contesting the outcome based on the company’s interference.
While the wins at Amazon’s JFK8 facility and at the Buffalo Starbucks are the most emblematic of the last several months, they are not the only recent victories for organized labor in the US. For example, in late 2021 workers at a Burgerville location in Vancouver, Washington became the first US fast food workers to form a union. Kellogg’s workers across four states won better pay and benefits, and John Deere workers gained better pay, both after successful strikes.
In the first few months of 2022, workers at a New York REI store voted to join the RDWSU, in the country’s first successful REI unionization. Alabama coal miners at Warrior Met Coal hit the one-year mark of their strike, demanding restoration of lost benefits and wages. Workers at El Milagro tortilla plants in Chicago won better pay and shorter hours after months of negotiations with management. Workers at an Apple store in Atlanta, Georgia filed a petition for a union vote, which if successful, would make it the first unionized Apple retail store in the country. And a union for student workers at Grinnell College just became the country’s largest undergraduate union and the first to win legal recognition.
Time for a Meaningful Response
It goes without saying that Amazon, Starbucks, and many of the other companies where workers are organizing are wildly powerful and profitable companies. Amazon’s sales are mind boggling. The company is poised to rake in $400 billion of the estimated $1 trillion dollars to be spent online by US consumers alone this year. While Starbucks grosses far less than Amazon annually, it still does nearly $30 billion in business every year.
While Amazon and Starbucks function in different industries and have differing human rights concerns, there are basic steps that both companies could take to meaningfully respond to the fact that many of the products they sell (and/or allow others to sell, in Amazon’s case) are produced– and then packaged, shipped, and delivered– in ways that harm workers in the United States and around the world.
First, Amazon and Starbucks could stop thwarting unionization efforts, negotiate with unions in good faith, and engage in due diligence to clean up their supply chains. They could immediately pay workers in their US facilities living wages and concede to the other immediate worker demands for decent working conditions and benefits.
Starbucks and Amazon could also address the connection between their companies and abuses against workers outside of the United States. For example, Amazon could prohibit the sale of goods made with forced labor on its platform, as NGOs have called on it to do for years. Starbucks could similarly prohibit the sale of goods produced with forced labor in its stores.
As for their own products (like Starbucks coffee and Amazon Basics and Essentials), Starbucks and Amazon could implement worker-enforceable supplier codes of conduct and enact real due diligence measures to address abuses in their global supply chains. If any companies have the resources to implement these and other measures towards advancing human rights and human dignity in their business models, it’s them.
For more, check out a related post we wrote last year on the first unionization effort at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama.
Avery Kelly is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab.
