An independent union that led Amazon warehouse workers to a victorious vote last month fell short on its second attempt to organize workers in the Staten Island borough of New York City.
Workers at a smaller Staten Island warehouse voted against joining the Amazon Labor Union on Monday, with about 380 votes for unionization and 618 votes against.
It's a setback for the union, which gained significant momentum from its victory last month -- a win that marked the first time an Amazon warehouse in the United States had successfully voted to unionize.
Amazon strongly opposes unionization at its warehouses, and workers say the company ramped up its union-busting efforts at smaller warehouse LDJ5 in the weeks before the vote. The company held mandatory classes to discourage workers from voting for the union, and hired outside consultants to talk to workers on the warehouse floor.
"This is a huge disappointment for the Amazon Labor Union a day after May Day," labor organizer Jason Anthony said.
But John Logan, the chair of the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University, said the result was not a surprise because Amazon had been campaigning hard against the effort.
"But there's no question that the ALU's organizing campaign will continue and that labor activism at Amazon will continue to spread across the country," he said. "In many ways, this election was even more important to Amazon than it was to the ALU -- a second defeat could have proved fatal to the company's efforts to stop the organizing from spreading like wildfire, just as it has done at Starbucks."
The new labor union, started by a fired worker and led by former and current employees, won 55% of the vote in its first election on April 1, with little support from established national unions. Workers at the enormous JFK8 warehouse voted 2,654-2,131 to join the ALU -- stunning many labor observers who believed that Amazon would succeed in using its vast resources to discourage workers from organizing.
Then the union took its fight across the street to smaller warehouse LDJ5, which has about 1,500 employees.
The ALU turned its full attention to the second warehouse after notching its first victory. Amazon responded by ratcheting up anti-union tactics at the facility. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The company has strongly opposed the union campaigns, paying outside consultants millions of dollars to discourage employees at its U.S. warehouses from voting yes. Amazon also has held "captive audience meetings," where it requires workers to leave their work stations and attend classes meant to dissuade them from unionizing. And it has printed posters, sent text messages and handed out fliers suggesting that the union's primary motive is collecting union dues and enriching itself.
Those kind of tactics can be hard for organizers to overcome, but the ALU succeeded at the larger warehouse.
The day before voting started last week at the smaller warehouse, politicians and labor leaders rushed to Staten Island to support union organizers and to pressure Amazon to recognize the union, even as it protests the outcome of the first election.
Many pro-labor politicians and top executives of large, established unions had been reluctant to embrace the ALU before its surprising victory. Now they view the union's success as essential to reviving an organized-labor movement that has been shrinking for decades.
The day before voting started on April 25, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and other labor supporters gathered outside the Staten Island facility.
"You have been an inspiration for millions of workers all across this country who have looked at you ... and said that if they could do it in Staten Island, we could do it throughout this country," Sanders told a crowd packed on a patch of worn grass just beyond the warehouse's parking lot.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., gestured toward the 8,000-person warehouse that was home to the ALU's first victory on April 1, calling it "the first domino to fall."
The politicians were joined later in the afternoon by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who pledged to help the ALU grow into a national force.
"Morally, we must support you. Righteously, we must support you," she said. "Because with you goes workers' rights; with you goes solidarity; with you goes everything."
For many employees of the LDJ5 warehouse, the stakes were more personal. Worker Micheal Aguilar, 22, a union supporter, said he has seen "so many of my friends and family fired for the stupidest things" during his years with the company. He hoped the union would bring job security and better pay.
"I want people to stay here as long as they want," he said. "I want people to have livable wages instead of slave wages."
Last year, an Amazon warehouse in Alabama was the first in several years to hold a vote on unionizing. That vote failed, but regulators later called for a repeat after finding that Amazon had improperly interfered with the process. The second vote remains too close to call.
The ALU has heard from workers at dozens of other warehouses who are interested in organizing, according to the union's interim president, Chris Smalls. After the LDJ5 vote, he said, organizers plan to take a short break from campaigning to strategize about how best to scale up their effort.
"We got a lot on our shoulders now, obviously, after the first victory," he said.
The organizing push at Amazon coincides with increasing labor momentum at other large businesses, notably Starbucks, where workers at dozens of stores have voted this year to join unions. National labor unions are hoping to be part of the action at Amazon after the ALU's win, throwing their support behind the independent union in the form of pledges of money, office space and legal help.
"The unions close to the action at JFK8 seemed to know that the ALU needed a lot of elbow room," said Logan. "Other unions should follow their lead and make clear their readiness to assist, but at the call of the self-organizers."
The ALU has said it believes much of its strength comes from being "insiders" at Amazon.
Information for this article was contributed by Jacob Bogage and Anna Betts of The Washington Post.