ALU President Chris Smalls instantly became a media celebrity. Many others were equally shocked, including some of the ALU’s own leaders. (There were seventeen void ballots, while a plurality of the 8,325 workers who were eligible chose not to vote.) When I first saw the final tally, I thought I might be hallucinating. Meanwhile, in Staten Island, the ALU won by a comfortable margin, in a 2,654–2,131 vote with only sixty-seven challenged ballots. It did, but by a much smaller margin than before, and with enough contested ballots that a reversal of the outcome is still possible. With its deep pockets and intransigent opposition to the RWDSU drive, most observers predicted that Amazon would prevail in the March 2022 do-over as well. In an April 2021 union representation election in Bessemer, Amazon defeated the RWDSU by a more than two-to-one margin, but in November the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered a second election after it determined that the company had flagrantly violated the law. Unlike the union drive led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama, which was constantly in the media spotlight, the ALU’s campaign seemed like such a long shot that it was mostly ignored. Until its stunning victory on April 1, just about everyone thought the Amazon Labor Union’s year-long effort to organize the giant Staten Island “JFK8” Amazon warehouse was a hopeless-if noble-quest. How did a scrappy group of organizers without institutional backing prevail over the second-largest employer in the United States? Ruth Milkman ▪ April 8, 2022ĪLU members, including Chris Smalls, left, celebrate their win on April 1, 2022.
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