By Alexa Spence for Word in Black
When news broke on April 1, that Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y. had managed to organize the first union in the notoriously anti-union company’s 27-year history, a common refrain across social media went something like this: This is not an April Fool’s Day joke.
The news was so noteworthy that the name of Christian Smalls, a 33-year-old Black former Amazon employee and the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) who led the walk-out, trended on Twitter.
Did Smalls and the other employees want better pay and benefits? Absolutely. But what many people may not realize is that the drive to unionize at Amazon and elsewhere is being driven by employee concerns about health and safety at work.
Despite employees at companies like Amazon being called “essential workers” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Smalls says he saw people getting sick and the company wasn’t enforcing health and safety measures.
“Every day I noticed somebody in my department was becoming ill, whether it was dizziness, fatigue, vomiting,” Smalls told Democracy Now.
“Something was wrong. It was a very eerie situation in the building. We didn’t have any PPE. We didn’t have any cleaning supplies. We didn’t have any social distancing. Amazon wasn’t really enforcing any guidelines. Everything was just hearsay.”
As a result, an employee protest started in March 2020 at the “JFK8” warehouse when workers held a walk-out due to concerns about lacking COVID-19 safety precautions.
Smalls said before the walk-out, he and other workers voiced their grievances to the general manager daily, but nothing was done. After one week of this and without a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, he was told to quarantine by management — but no one else was told to do the same.
Smalls took this as a sign that they were attempting to prevent him from organizing workers. But he didn’t stop. He led the walk-out and was fired a few hours later.
That walk-out led to the formation of the ALU, which triumphed over Amazon on April 1, when employees at the warehouse voted to form a union; with 2,654 for the union and 2,131 against it.
Amazon filed objections against the election on April 8.
“We’ve always said that we want our employees to have their voices heard, and in this case, that didn’t happen — fewer than a third of the employees at the site voted for the union, and overall turnout was unusually low,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “Based on the evidence we’ve seen so far, as set out in our objections, we believe that the actions of the NLRB and the ALU improperly suppressed and influenced the vote, and we think the election should be conducted again so that a fair and broadly representative vote can be had.”
Records filed by Amazon, the second-largest private employer behind Walmart, with the U.S. Department of Labor show the company spent $4.3 million on union-busting efforts at its warehouses.
While coronavirus sparked the ongoing protests at JFK8, workers at the facility had pre-existing safety and health concerns.
In 2019, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) published a report detailing the notoriously unsafe work conditions at JFK8 and other Amazon facilities.
After speaking with 145 workers, NYCOSH found that 80 percent of workers were pressured to work harder or faster; 66 percent expressed experiencing physical pain while performing work duties, and 42 percent continued to experience pain after work.
“Workers’ safety and health can be seriously affected by pressure to perform strenuous activities faster,” NYCOSH said in the report. “Muscles, joints, and bones can be severely impacted by physical demand and postural stress from performing tasks in an Amazon distribution center.”
Repetitive back-bending while lifting objects, picking, selecting, storing and packing is stressful and awkward positions make workers more likely to suffer from musculoskeletal disorders than workers who are less exposed to these tasks.
Derrick Palmer, 33, who is vice president of organizing at ALU and a current Amazon employee, dedicated himself to organizing workers on the inside after his best friend, Smalls, was fired.
Now that workers have a say in the conditions at JFK8, he told Democracy Now he’s advocating for “better benefits, better pay, you know, like sick time.”
Help us Continue to tell OUR Story and join the AFRO family as a member – subscribers are now members! Join here!