NYSUT Communications
Friday April 01 2022 1:03 PM

BREAKING: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize in stunning win for labor

Despite heavy lobbying by the company, workers at the facility voted by a wide margin for a union. It was seen as a rebuke of the company’s treatment of its employees.

amazon labor union

Sorry, Amazon, but this is no April Fool's joke.

Via the New York Times:

Workers at Amazon’s massive warehouse on Staten Island voted by a wide margin to form a union, according to results released on Friday, in a stunning win for a campaign targeting the country’s second-largest employer and one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.

Employees cast 2,654 votes to be represented by Amazon Labor Union and 2,131 against, giving the union a win by roughly 10 percentage points, according to an initial tally released by the National Labor Relations Board. More than 8,300 workers at the building, the only Amazon fulfillment center in New York City, were eligible to vote.

The win on Staten Island could herald a new era for labor unions in the United States, which saw the portion of workers in unions drop last year to 10.3 percent, the lowest rate in decades, despite widespread labor shortages and pockets of successful labor activity.

No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them.

Read the full story at nytimes.com.