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How Labor Beat Amazon At Its Own Game

Apr 4, 2022 Andrew Perez
HuffPost looks at how Amazon union organizers turned workers against Amazon's union busters
How Labor Beat Amazon At Its Own Game
Amazon labor organizers celebrate their Staten Island union victory on April 1. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson published an outstanding story on Monday about how organizers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse turned the company’s anti-union strategy against them and scored the first-ever union victory within the mega-corporation’s U.S. operations.

According to Jamieson, Amazon hired a team of anti-union consultants to speak one-on-one with workers on the ground. So Amazon Labor Union organizers researched the consultants and then followed them around the warehouse, broadcasting the sizable sums Amazon was paying them — discrediting the union-busters and turning workers against management.

“Their job is to operate in the shadows,” said Connor Spence, Amazon Labor Union’s vice president of membership. “When you expose them for what they are, it makes it very difficult for them to do their job.”

The details of the historic labor win will likely provide a roadmap for other Amazon unionization efforts moving forward. As Spence told Jamieson, “The whole [idea] was to lead by example.”

Read the full HuffPost story here.

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