The victory at Amazon, as well as a string of such victories at Starbucks that started with a café in Buffalo, New York, reflects teeming pro-union excitement among many workers, especially young workers.
Union leaders across the nation would have to rise to the occasion-and so far that’s not happening. C-suite concern is warranted, but a surge of unionization that increases worker power and pressures corporations to share more of their profits is far from guaranteed. Nonetheless, last week a tiny, new, underfunded union managed to pierce Amazon’s Maginot Line at an 8,000-employee warehouse in Staten Island, New York.Īs a result of that huge upset victory, executives across corporate America are no doubt wondering whether their carefully constructed anti-union defenses are nearly as impregnable as they thought, and whether their decades of being “union free” will soon be over. And second, because unionizing a warehouse with thousands of workers is logistically daunting. First, because Amazon has famously mounted such ferocious, full-court presses to stifle unionization efforts. Organizing workers in the United States is almost always hard because corporations fight so fiercely against unionization, but if any workplace was considered impossible to unionize, it was an Amazon warehouse.
