President Biden and his senior administration officials met with the organizers of both the Amazon Labor Union and the Starbucks Union on May 5th to discuss the groups’ challenges in successfully forming the unions. However, companies criticized Biden for meeting with the organizers of these groups, and Starbucks requested a meeting with the president following the unions’.
“They [Amazon officials] isolate workers every single day, question them, pretty much gaslighting them, acting like they are working to improve the conditions but they are really just polling to see who’s pro-union [and] who’s not,” Amazon Labor Union organizer, Chris Smalls, said. “They report that information back to management. They have captive audiences every single day.”
The Amazon Labor Union is an independent, worker-led organization promoting job security, union pay, better working conditions, and other necessary additions to the workplace. The workers at the JFK8 Amazon Fulfillment Center in Staten Island, New York became the first warehouse to unionize. They are hoping to draw in their partner warehouse, the LDJ5 Amazon Sort Center in Staten Island, NY, during their next election to vote the warehouse into a union on August 25, 27, 28, and 29. They need 51% of employees to vote yes in order to join the Union.
However, getting enough Amazon employees to vote yes is a struggle due to the stigma and danger surrounding unionization. Jeff Bezos, for example, has said in the past that workers are inherently lazy, therefore ignoring any requests for higher wages or other benefits necessary for employees.
Starbucks employees also started a union last year for similar reasons as the Amazon employees. However, Starbucks responded more directly to the unionization. After stores began unionizing, Starbucks began to offer employees new benefits, but only to the non-unionized locations.
Those benefits include a $15 minimum wage or a 3% raise (whichever is higher). These policies came after roughly 50 stores unionized around the country and roughly 230 locations filed petitions for union elections. Some other benefits include expanded employee training, credit-card tipping, and improved sick leave. None of these benefits will go into effect at unionized locations in the near future.
The creation and persistence of these unions is viewed by some as a path to better working conditions. Barstow student and Starbucks employee, James Knoflicek (‘24) said, “I support the Starbucks worker union, as I believe employees deserve compensation for the work we put in. Starbucks recently announced that we will be getting a raise, and I believe this is due to pressure put upon them by the union.”
While the pressure may be persuading Starbucks to raise wages, they are still standing firm in their opposition to the union, given that the benefits don’t apply to unionized locations. It may, however, be a sign that organized labor has the potential to be beneficial for all workers, even if they are not part of a union.
The meeting at the White House was a start towards recognizing unions, something that has been absent in recent decades. The employees hope to get more paid time off, higher wages, longer maternal leave, and many other things that make the workplace significantly more worker-friendly than it is today.
