Amazon workers in Albany prepare for pivotal union vote
Amazon (AMZN) workers at an Albany warehouse are set to start voting tomorrow in a pivotal union election that sets up another clash between the company and the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU).
"[This vote is] vitally important for the ALU," John Logan, director of labor studies at San Francisco State University, told Yahoo Finance. "They need to show they can replicate the remarkable success they had at JFK8. ... Albany will be a test... but if they win, it will give a huge boost to organizing nationwide at Amazon and beyond."
The stakes are high for Amazon as the ALU's first victory at a Staten Island warehouse in April has proven to be a thorn in the e-commerce giant's side. The company failed to overturn the vote and increasingly has faced pressures coming out of Washington, including a labor investigation by OSHA, scrutiny by the FTC, and a boosted tax bill put in place by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
The union election is also taking place as macroeconomic challenges ripple through the economy. Inflation is squeezing consumers, workers, and companies, and the Federal Reserve shows no sign of backing down from aggressively hiking interest rates. Meanwhile, a choppy stock market has rattled Big Tech stocks including Amazon, which is down more than 32% year-to-date.
Amazon has sought to rehab its image as an employer recently by announcing plans to spend $1 billion to raise pay for its warehouse and delivery workers.
However, the labor fight at Amazon is likely to be protracted. Even if the ALU comes up short in Albany, the independent union isn't likely to throw in the towel anytime soon, according to Rutgers University labor expert Rebecca Givan.
"In all union elections, the odds are against the workers trying to unionize," Givan said. "So this is an important vote, but even if the workers don’t successfully unionize, we can still expect more organizing from the Amazon Labor Union."
Why the ALU just might win in Albany
Despite the odds, experts believe there's still a path to victory in place for the independent union.
"Organizing at Albany has also been organic," Patricia Campos-Medina, activist and executive director at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, told Yahoo Finance. "Workers inspired by what ALU did in NYC at the first facility took it upon themselves to demand a union vote. They are energized, but we will have to see if the millions of dollars spent in anti-union intimidating tactics worked in favor of Amazon."
Logan agreed, though he cautioned that any victory would be hard-won.
“What I’ve been told is that the ALU believes that they will win in Albany,” he said. “But every time it’s David versus Goliath. If they were to win, that would be amazing.”
Timing is another factor that could affect the outcome of the vote. Amazon is currently in the midst of its second Prime Day event of the year, called Prime Early Access.
According to Daniel Olayiwola, who works as a picker in an Amazon warehouse in Texas, these deal events are famously difficult for workers.
“There are so many incidents where stuff is overhanging from bins,” Olayiwola said. “You can just be driving by and crash into it, and then your cage explodes. So with the next person coming up behind you, you can either wait, try to fix it, call for help, or just hope that that next person doesn’t get hurt. So that’s what people are dealing with, and there are already accidents already. [On Prime Days] those injuries go up a lot.”
Amazon warehouses, even outside of the busiest times of the year, have been shown to have high rates of injury. Serious injuries at Amazon warehouses are 40% more likely than at non-Amazon warehouses, according to a study by the National Employment Law Project.
Recently, the tech giant faced outrage and a subsequent OSHA investigation following the death of a worker in New Jersey during July's Prime Day, the company's most successful ever.
“The amount of people crashing into each other is a continuous thing, and when people are rushing, it’s even worse," Olayiwola said.
A long road ahead
The ALU is hitting the road, hoping to recapture the magic it had in Staten Island.
"This is the first vote for ALU outside of NYC, and support for the union could signal a new winning formula to organizing Amazon that goes beyond the personality power of Chris Smalls," Campos-Medina said. "Remember, Chris has always said that he wants workers to be the ones organizing themselves, that ALU would support them, but that he is focused on getting a contract for its first facility."
Still, should the ALU emerge with a victory in hand, a contract likely remains far off.
"Amazon will do everything it can to slow down the negotiation process," Givan said. "Their goal will be delaying and trying to win a war of attrition. Most employers try to avoid reaching a first contract at all."
Amazon has continued to face criticism for how it has been managing the union push at its fulfillment centers. Campos-Medina, for one, didn't mince words, calling Amazon's strategy one of "union-busting."
"Rather than using all those resources to negotiate a contract and settled their labor relations problems, they are using [them] to create fear and division with the rest of the workforce in the hope of curtailing more union elections in other facilities," she said. "In the long run, that strategy will make anti-union lawyers rich, but it will only continue to create disruptions for Amazon on the supply chain and will damage its brand with American consumers."
In Logan's view, though elections have winners and losers, if the ALU can keep inspiring workers, it will keep it — and this wave of unionization efforts – alive and well.
"The real significance of these elections is their ability to inspire and energize and give optimism to young workers," he said. "That was what meant this had the potential to spread rapidly."
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks.
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Amazon to Close All But One U.S. Customer Call Center to Cut Costs
E-commerce giant Amazon is closing all but one of its U.S.-based customer call centers in a bid to cut costs, as the ongoing economic slump continues to impact the tech sector.
Only one call center, likely either the one in Huntingdon, West Virginia, or Houston, Texas, will remain open, according to a source familiar with the situation who spoke to Bloomberg.
Jeff Bezos/Instagram
Via Bloomberg:
The retailer has been seeking to reduce expenses as revenue sales growth slows amid rising inflation and economic uncertainty. This year, U.S. online sales will increase 9.4% to $1 trillion, the first time growth has slipped into the single digits, according to Insider Intelligence. The cost-cutting comes after Amazon quickly expanded its warehouses and logistics operations when consumer demand jumped during the early stages of the pandemic.
The pandemic also forced companies to embrace remote work for customer service roles and many employees are resisting efforts to return to offices. Offering work-from-home will help Amazon recruit employees in an industry with high turnover. Its cloud computing division sells Amazon Connect software that helps companies create remote customer service networks.
According to the source who spoke to Bloomberg, the facilities that amazon plans to shut down include locations in Kennewick, Washington; Lexington, Kentucky, and Phoenix, Arizona.
The tech giant’s cost-cutting decisions come amid a wider economic slump. Other tech companies have also been affected — like Facebook, which recently announced a hiring freeze. Amazon also had to walk back a promised corporate pay increase recently, which it blamed on a computer glitch.
Like most tech stocks, the value of Amazon shares have plunged over the past year. The company’s shares are now valued at roughly $115 per share, down from highs of nearly $186 per share in mid-2021.
Joe Biden: Mass Immigration, Changing Demographics Making America ‘So Much Better’
President Joe Biden celebrated mass immigration to the United States at the White House on Friday, saying the constant flow of millions of illegal and legal immigrants every couple of years is making America “so much better.”
During a speech for Hispanic Heritage Month, Biden celebrated that the U.S. foreign-born population has hit a record-breaking nearly 47 million and that 26 percent of students in American schools speak Spanish rather than English.
“When in American history has there been a circumstance where one ethnicity has the potential to have such a profound impact on the direction of a country?” Biden said.
“Twenty-six percent of every child who’s in school today speaks Spanish — 26 percent,” Biden continued. “We’ve had large waves of immigration before but the thing is, we just have so much opportunity to make this country so much better. I really mean it … so as my father would say ‘Let’s go get ’em.'”
The remarks come as Biden has spiked the number of foreign-born residents across a multitude of states and Democrats vow to add a million foreign-born voters to the nation’s voter rolls in the next four years.
Already, annually, the U.S. government rewards over a million foreign nationals with green cards and another more than a million with temporary work visas to take American jobs. In addition, under Biden, about 2.2 million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. interior.
The decades-long waves of mass immigration, bragged about by Biden, have been largely unpopular with American voters — particularly working and middle class Americans who are the most likely to compete for jobs, housing, and public services against new arrivals.
A YouGov poll from August revealed that a 35 percent plurality of American adults said current immigration levels are making the U.S. “worse off.
This month, another YouGov poll found that the majority of GOP voters now say current immigration levels are making the U.S. “worse off.” Similarly, an AP-NORC poll in May showed that nearly half of Republicans said Biden and Democrats are using mass immigration to import new voters and retain a permanent political majority in Washington, D.C.
Research and the establishment media have consistently admitted that the larger a region’s foreign-born population, the more likely that region is to vote for Democrats over Republicans.
In 2019, for example, The Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein found that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average are won by Democrats. This means every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding 15 percent has a 90 percent chance of electing Democrats and only a ten percent chance of electing a Republican.
The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Axios, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all admitted that rapid demographic changes spurred by mass immigration are tilting the nation toward a permanent Democrat political majority.
“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios acknowledged in 2019. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”
Already, the U.S. has the most generous immigration system in the world — expected to bring in 15 million new foreign-born voters by 2042. About eight million of those voters will have arrived entirely due to the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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