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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Chris Smalls: We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because when he was up there, we were signing people up.

Speaker 3: Yes. We were down here casting evidence. [crosstalk]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Last week, warehouse workers in Staten Island faced off with one of the nation's largest employers and won. Workers voted in favor of unionizing the first Amazon warehouse in the nation. Nearly 5,000 votes were cast in the union election, and yes votes ended up winning by about 500.

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This moment was actually two years in the making, back in 2020 during the height of the pandemic in New York City, Chris Smalls led a walkout of workers at the warehouse known as JFK8 to protest working conditions. He was fired that same day and formed the Amazon Labor Union shortly after. Here he is speaking at a press conference after the ballot count.

Chris Smalls: It's not about me, Amazon tried to make it about me from day one. I never said it was going to be Amazon versus Chris Smalls, it's always going to be Amazon versus the people, and today the people have spoken, and the people wanted the union.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Between labor laws that inhibit unions and the millions of dollars Amazon spent to dissuade workers across the country from organizing, Staten Island vote is a very big deal.

Chris Smalls: We went for the top dog because we want every other industry, every other business to know that things have changed. We going to unionize, we're not going to quit our jobs anymore. This is a prime example of the power that people have when they come together.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: The Amazon Labor Union has a second upcoming election in just three weeks at a warehouse known as LDJ5, across the street from Staten Island's JFK8. In a statement issued on its site, Amazon said, "We're disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. We're evaluating our options including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence of the NLRB." Now in recent weeks, workers at an REI store in Manhattan, New York, also voted to form the company's first union at the beginning of March.

Last week, Starbucks workers in Chelsea voted to unionize making it the first Starbucks in New York City and the 10th store nationwide to unionize. Despite these notable wins, the overall union membership numbers in the US for workers went down by more than 200,000 people from 2020 to 2021. What exactly do these prime cases of winning for labor mean nationwide?

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Chris Smalls: The game's changed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here with me is Gwynne Hogan, a reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, and Rebecca Givan, Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Welcome back to The Takeaway Gwynne and Rebecca.

Gwynne Hogan: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Givan: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Gwynne, let me start with you. First, thank you for some of that fantastic sound that you brought us from the JFK8. Talk to me about how the JFK8 union organizers managed to get this win.

Gwynne Hogan: This job was always a difficult one, but I think like it did in many industries, the pandemic set off just a whole host of new conditions for workers. Many of us were at home ordering Amazon Prime items while workers at JFK8 had higher quotas, were put in unsafe conditions where they didn't have access to PPE at the very beginning of the pandemic. Then workers reached a breaking point and some of them walked out of the facility at the end of March in 2020, among them was Chris Smalls who helped organize the walkout.

He was fired shortly after. Amazon officials and leaked memos attempted to smear him, they called him not smart or articulate. They didn't think he was a real threat, but here two years down the line, he didn't go anywhere. He's still unemployed, but instead of giving up and trying to find a new job, he was determined to change this organization along with a number of current and former employees. 11 months ago, they decided to turn their efforts to forming an actual union. They have just been pushing for different kinds of improvements for essential workers, and finally, we got to the results of last week that they won. They've proved to be the first successful union drive in an Amazon warehouse anywhere in the country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, I want to stick with you for just a second because you were at the National Labor Relations Board offices in downtown Brooklyn on Friday, and that's when the union ballots were being counted. Can you just maybe help us to understand what was the feeling among union organizers? Set that scene for us a bit.

Gwynne Hogan: Yes. I talked to a bunch of these folks leading up to the vote and some of them were very, very confident they were going to win. Experts were looking at this kind of like, "Can these guys pull it off?" Really they had no idea what was going to happen. Some of the organizers that I spoke with were skeptical. They didn't know if they were going to be able to beat these odds, because Amazon spent millions, The New York Times reported on that, the federal filings, how much they spent to try to dissuade this union.

These guys had about $120,000 that they had through a GoFundMe. I talked to folks who said at times they had $4 or $5 left in their bank account. As each vote count came through, they were checking updates on Twitter and Telegram, and this sense of excitement at each time they got a different update, screams, and hugging and chanting. Then of course real just explosive energy when the final vote count was confirmed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca, I don't want to presume especially given that nearly a quarter-million fewer people are now in unions than previously. I don't want to assume that my listeners have been through a unionization process before, that they know why it costs money, or what is the company spending money on when we say they're spending money to dissuade workers. Can you just walk us through what does it mean to go through a process of trying to form a union? Where is the money being spent and what in the world are these multiple votes?

Rebecca Givan: Yes. When workers decide that they want to form a union, they get a show of support from their coworkers which means they have them sign very simple cards that say, "Yes, I would like to be represented collectively in a union." They file the initial cards with the National Labor Relations Board. They can do it with as few as 30% of their co-workers signing cards, and that's what the Amazon Labor Union did. That was already something that seemed a little bold. Most more established unions would want 50%, 60%, 70% of possible members to have shown support.

At that point, the board will order an election and usually, then we see the massive, massive anti-union campaign ramping up. Employers will usually use law firms and consultants to absolutely bombard workers with anti-union messaging. At Amazon that meant messages in bathroom stalls. Most employers will use a lot of text messages if they have an app that their workers are on. They'll communicate through the app and they'll have these mandatory meetings in the workplace, we call them captive audience meetings because workers are required to attend them.

Workers at Amazon at JFK8 had to sit and listen to anti-union rhetoric about how scared they should be and how nothing is guaranteed if you unionize. There's a whole well-established playbook, there's a huge industry around selling this service to employers. Really the idea is to sell fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the workers to make them feel that it's too unknown, it's too scary, and maybe they won't get anything better even if they vote to unionize.

The employer wants the workers to feel really pressured, to feel like there's too much focus on them, they're under scrutiny and none of this existed before the union, as if it were an outside party came along. They really, really want to create a pressure cooker atmosphere and they want workers to feel stressed and frustrated and uncertain and ultimately scared that somehow unionizing could cause more harm than good. The employers like Amazon will spend an almost unlimited amount of money in order to try to create this feeling.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Does having a union, Rebecca ever cause more harm than good, or are there circumstances where that happens, and is it simply overridden by the good that comes to workers?

Rebecca Givan: Yes it's not really reasonable to say that unions are perfect and everything that they do is always better for everybody. What workers initially will do once they unionize is negotiate a contract and then vote on whether or not to ratify that contract. The idea that you could, for example, end up with lower pay or benefits is a bit preposterous because workers would not be likely to ratify a contract with lower pay or benefits.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Gwynne, do you have a sense of how much this was really prompted by the conditions brought on by COVID? In other words, was there already a bubbling discontent among Amazon warehouse workers prior to the big push that comes with COVID and all of us, again, happily at home, protected in a certain kind of job and ordering everything we want from Amazon, or was this really about what happened with the pandemic?

Gwynne Hogan: I definitely think that the pandemic was a catalyst and we do see this, you mentioned Starbucks and REI. I've talked to workers at both of those shops and we've seen this bubbling up of traditional union votes happening in New York City. A lot of them talk about the pandemic being a catalyst and not just the pandemic but what we saw after the massive protests in the summer of 2020. A lot of these people who organize the union drive are young people of color who marched in 2020. There's an interesting through-line I think to think about that year as a massive disruption to the status quo and where we find ourselves now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We heard Chris Mosley, the other industries we want folks, businesses he's saying, in general, to know things have changed. Rebecca, have things changed? Given that we are now moving to at least a modicum of normality, masks are coming off all around the country, who knows what then happens on the backside of that. I'm wondering if this impulse towards unionizing and these wins that we've seen will either roll back or stall out at this point.

Rebecca Givan: It's a great question. Right now the winds are significant and influential but the numbers are as you said no one near big enough to overcome the long-term decline in union membership, but we are seeing I think some really important changes. Workers are feeling emboldened to speak up when they hear these anti-union messages at the workplace. In places like Starbucks and Amazon, we have cases where workers speak up when they're in these captive audience anti-union meetings and they engage the consultants and the managers that they're hearing from and they are willing to disagree with them.

These workers don't feel as afraid to lose their job which is something that happens frequently in retaliation for organizing possibly because the job market is so good. If they were to lose their job, they can go get another equivalent job pretty easily. We're seeing some real changes in the approach to organizing and in which workers are organizing. It's young workers, it's multiracial workers, it's workers with a wide range of gender identities. They're really speaking up and holding employers accountable to some of this rhetoric about equity and fairness and about claiming to be a good employer. I think the approach is a bit different at this point

Melissa Harris-Perry: A tight labor market is kind of that external pressure that's created so the internal pressure of the workers and the tight labor market on the outside. Certainly, what we saw in the 20th century with America's mass effort to unionize. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with more on Amazon's Labor Union's historic union win at the Staten Island Amazon warehouse in just a moment.

We're back and talking about the Amazon Labor Union's historic win at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse. Now, it's your turn. We wanted to know what you think about these recent efforts to unionize by Amazon, REI, Starbucks, and other workers.

Lou Stern: Hi this is Lou Stern in the town of Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I believe that unions are necessary unless large corporations can be fully responsible to provide living wages and conditions for all their workers.

Louis: My name's Louis I'm from Anchorage, Alaska. Normally, I'm not a big fan of unionization but in the case of Amazon especially, they mistreat their workers so horribly and they're such a big company, a union is really going to be the only way they can get that put in check.

Denise McQuin: Hi, this is Denise McQuin calling from Dallas, Texas. As far as unionization, I'm all for it. We fought this battle back in the '40s and how else are these people supposed to maintain decent working conditions and equitable pay? I am very happy to hear that they were successful.

Mark Cooper: Mark Cooper calling from Arkansas. I am a member of the Postal Workers Union and I am in full support of more unions protecting the rights and welfare of our laborers in this country. I think that we have seen that trickle-down economics is just a fantasy. We have a broken model in this country and unions are only one way to protect people from that broken model and the graph that is part of the greed.

Speaker 1: I am so happy that they're unionizing. I think it's a long time coming and I think as some of the biggest employers with the worst records on employee rights and protections, it's a change that's greatly needed. I think it'll start a wave of smaller companies beginning to put more effort into workers' rights and worker protections as well. It'll empower workers all across the nation whether they're working at small places, private companies, or big corporations to do the same thing. I'm really happy about it.

Speaker 2: The labor-management balance is out of whack. Management is taking too many liberties against labor. I think it's a great thing that the union movement is growing again. It will create some balance in the work-life of people and in the work and in the labor-management discussion.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Still with me is Gwynne Hogan, a reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. Rebecca Givan is an Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Rebecca, I'm wondering about what we heard from Louis there from Alaska who said, "Look, Starbucks treats their employees. Amazon treats their employees badly." I'm wondering one how outside observers make a decision like that? How we think about what labor conditions are and whether or not any or all of us are influenced by what we're told and how the companies themselves are advertising the kinds of employers that they are.

Rebecca Givan: Employers really have a brand as an employer not just as a product. Starbucks does have this brand as a better employer and they really tout their benefits whereas Amazon I think has decided it doesn't care about its brand as an employer. I think a lot of people know at least it has a very very high turnover. Most workers only last a few weeks to a few months. They have a really almost unbelievably high injury rate. They really grind through their workers and they don't seem to care about that. They have a sort of insatiable appetite to hire new people and basically chew them up and spit them out. They project a really different image than a place like Starbucks.

I think when people perceive whether an employer is a good employer provides good benefits and things like that, what matters to workers is what they can really count on and what's sustainable. Even if you believe and even if employees believe that Starbucks is a good employer when everything is imposed top-down and not negotiated with unionized workers, it can be taken away.

We're seeing that at Starbucks where stores that are unionizing workers are losing their hours that they've counted on for a long time, workers who've had the same schedule and been able to count on how big their paycheck's going to be for a long time are suddenly losing their hours and finding difficulty making ends meet. Because they don't have a collective bargaining agreement they have no ability to enforce how that's done and the employer can change things at any time on a whim.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Gwynne, the Amazon Labor Union has a second union vote at another warehouse in just a few weeks. Any expectations around that?

Gwynne Hogan: That is a much smaller vote. This first one 8,000 employees were eligible. This is 1,500 and some of the core organizers work in that building. It seems like that's going to be a much lower lift because it's just such a smaller population. Amazon has fought this tooth and nail so far like a host of the playbook of anti-union activity, firing union organizers, targeting organizers for performance writeups, threatening their firing, they even had some organizers arrested about a month ago. I think that we can definitely see a long fight ahead not just for that union vote but also for their contract negotiations with the ALU. The Amazon Labor Union says wants to begin in May who knows how long that's going to take.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is the ALU part of one of the larger organizations AFL-CIO, SEIU, is it part of one of those?

Gwynne Hogan: No, this is actually a grassroots organizing campaign that's not affiliated with any major union at all. In Bessemer, you saw the Retail Workers Union, they organized that drive. This is all current and former employees, a brand new union that didn't exist until Friday.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca, I'm wondering taking a look at a place like New York, a company like Amazon. Does that mean that Amazon and other big companies will be wanting to locate more in places like where I live in the south where we have these strong so-called right to work laws that actually make it extremely difficult for unions to form?

Rebecca Givan: Yes, we definitely see that in things like manufacturing where companies can choose where to locate. The interesting thing about both Amazon and Starbucks is they need to be close to their customers. Amazon's whole logistics business model is based on quick delivery everywhere. They need these large warehouses, the size of JFK8 in each Metro area or region in order to keep those customers happy. They can't just close if they're going to provide the same high-speed delivery everywhere.

That's a little bit different when we're talking about something like manufacturing, where those companies have certainly moved to states that are much less friendly to workers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are you expecting to see more union organizing activity, not only inside of Amazon, but I'm thinking particularly in Starbucks here in New York City?

Speaker 3: That's like the million-dollar question and I was poking around talking to experts and historians to try to figure this out. It's definitely too soon to tell but when we look back in history specifically the 1930s, a lot of historians point to one major strike at GM sparked a ripple effect, and shops all across inspired strikes and union efforts all across the country in a matter of weeks and days.

The organizers on the ground are super excited about this and are hopeful that this momentum bubbles up across the city and across the country and at least across Amazon warehouses in the Metro area. We're going to be watching, they definitely have the odds stacked against them with the way that the laws are written and the resources that these companies like Amazon have and can tap to counter their efforts. It's definitely an interesting moment for labor.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Gwynne Hogan is a reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, and Rebecca Givan is an Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Thank you both for joining us on The Takeaway.

Gwynne Hogan: Thank you.

Rebecca Givan: Thank you.

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