All About Striketober

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Have you heard the word Striketober? We're going to talk now about the many strikes and labor actions seeming to be happening simultaneously across the country this month, virally branded online as Striketober. Here in New York, just yesterday, Amazon workers on Staten Island filed for a union vote with the National Labor Relations Board. The coalition of workers known as the Amazon Labor Union have been fighting to unionize some 7,000 employees at fulfillment centers on Staten Island. While they still have a ways to go, the group gathered enough grassroots support for this initial step.

The energy of this local labor movement is reflected in national work stoppages. Over 20,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers, 10,000 John Deere workers, 1,400 Kellogg's workers all engaged in strikes across multiple states, plus 2,000 hospital workers in Upstate New York. It's the result, at least in part, of collective bargaining breakdowns, including over issues like fair pay, benefits, time off, staff shortages, and workplace safety standards.

The latter issue draws increased attention as we learn more about the fatal accidental shooting on the set of the movie Rust, where don't forget this aspect of that story, and we'll do a separate segment on it later in the show, unionized crew members, walked off the set amid safety concerns and were replaced by non-union workers. The IATSE representing film workers, that's the initials for their union or the acronym, IATSE, only narrowly avoided joining the strike wave last week. Remember there was almost that big strike against the TV and film industry generally.

All this as members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters will elect a new president in November, choosing between a reform candidate and one backed by outgoing union head, James Hoffa Jr, son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, the result could change the vision and strategy of the powerful union during a decisive moment for labor. Joining me now to break it all down on the local level is Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union. He's a newsmaker right now. He heads the coalition of workers trying to formally create a union on Staten Island.

For a national perspective, we have Jane McAlevey, organizer, senior policy fellow with the University of California at Berkeley's Institute For Research on Labor and Employment. She is also the nation's strike correspondent, they have that position in their newsroom, and author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. She was last here to talk about that book. Thank you both for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC, both of you. Hi.

Chris Smalls: Hey, how ARE you doing? Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, do we have you?

Jane McAlevey: Yes, you do. Good morning. Hi. Good morning, Chris. Good morning, everybody.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, let's start with you. Your group filed for a union election yesterday. Some of the listeners may remember your other appearance on this show when Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers tried to organize for a union not that long ago and failed. What did you do yesterday, and what's different this time?

Chris Smalls: After the results came out on Alabama, I could tell you some of my members, including myself, we went down there and we saw some of the missed opportunities first hand. We thought while the iron is hot, it's time for us to go now. This was about six months ago, and we just started it. We started our campaign. We didn't really know, especially as a brand new-- Who creates unions in 2021? We just decided to just give it a shot.

We are Amazon workers, I'm a former Amazon worker. We know the ins and out of the company. I've been there almost five years. I was assistant manager for four and a half years. I opened up three buildings in the tri-state area. For me to lead away and the workers to follow suit, we thought it would be the best way possible to organize Amazon. It's been working in our favor. Here we are filing for an election already done yesterday. I'm happy to be a part of it.

Brian Lehrer: By way of background, you were fired by Amazon in March, they say, for violating pandemic restrictions. You and others, including State Attorney General Letitia James, from what I understand, say it was retaliatory against you for protesting health and safety conditions. To be clear for our listeners, what I think you were just describing was why you are doing this independently with the workers at the Staten Island Amazon facilities, forming a new union basically that you're calling the Amazon Labor Union, rather than working with a larger national union, which is what you did in your previous attempt, right?

Chris Smalls: I never had a previous attempt. This is literally my first time ever. I never was a union organizer prior. I was just a concerned supervisor. I was a leader in Amazon. Now that I was terminated, I'm just trying to continue that fight on a different team. I want to give a shout-out to Jane McAlevey because, we actually before we even started our campaign, we took her courses. Me and several members of my union, we took the courses and we followed suit with some of her work and it's been beneficial and helpful for us. I just want to say thank you for that, Jane. We started this time and this is our first time ever. We're still learning, but we're walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: On that point, we'll bring in Jane McAlevey. Jane, would you put what's going on at Amazon on Staten Island right now in the national perspective of what's being called Striketober?

Jane McAlevey: Sure. I think what we're seeing across the country right now is a lot of workers saying they are seriously sick and tired of being seriously sick and tired. It's an old adage, but it's really true. There are a wave of both strikes, strike votes, contract campaigns, as you cited with the Teamsters, there's also United Auto Workers internal democracy balloting happening right now about will they replace their archaic civil electoral college system and go to a direct member vote for the president of the United Auto Workers.

There's a lot of upheaval that I think is a reflection of the fact that workers now know coming out of this or in this pandemic, we're not out of it at all, so that workers now see the way the employer class, the corporate class has abused them consistently throughout this pandemic has led people to not just quit their jobs in record numbers, we know that over four million people quit their jobs in August. That's individual action, but the work that's happening in state island and elsewhere is collective action. Frankly, it's going to take collective action to restore a sense of decency and fairness in this country, and that can only come through workers acting collectively.

On the West Coast, if we just go coast to coast, we've got the IATSE, the stagehand workers union, which we might come back to that. It's outstanding whether or not those workers are going to ratify the agreement, right? There's a tentative agreement, workers in that union still have not seen the details of it by the way, but they're being asked to vote on it. That's just winding its way through the system. As we saw with the John Deere campaign, still workers on strike, 10,000 workers rejected the agreement that their national organization came to with the John Deere company.

Then you've got nurses on strike. All the issues are the same, Brian. You've got nurses on strike now in Buffalo, outside of Boston, we've got 45,000 healthcare workers in Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast poised through a strike vote to take strike action. We've got coal miners on strike and Kellogg workers, Nabisco workers. What the theme is of all of this is a total degradation of the quality of life of ordinary people in the United States at the hands of a disgustingly greedy corporate class that has been running this country into the ground. That's what's happening right now. People are saying no more.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, before we let you go, there have been several failed attempts to organize Amazon workers in various places. You cited the one that was in the news in Alabama recently, and ultimately the workers voted against it. Why do you think it would be different on Staten Island this time?

Chris Smalls: We are in New York. New York, it's a union town. We're surrounded by unions, even the Amazon workers. We're only stationed at the public bus stop right across the street from the building, we can't really move anywhere else. Legally, we're protected on public grounds when we organize. We tell these workers-- When we get off the bus, the MTA buses, we're like, "Talk to your bus driver and the union and making almost $40 an hour, they have pensions, they have benefits, they job security.

The bus drivers have been helpful. They've been telling them, "You guys need a union. We hear y'all when y'all get on the bus talking about how terrible the working conditions are, how Amazon was firing your coworkers, how people are quitting every day, how people are getting carried out on stretchers every other day." These things are real stories. Not only that, the construction workers that build the action facilities are unionized, the sanitation workers are unionized, the police officers are unionized., the fire department, you name it. It goes on and on. We're surrounded by unions.

Most of the workers here are familiar with unions, but they just need a little bit more education on them. Maybe they know relatives, or maybe they've been a part of one in the previous employment, but here is a different energy than Alabama. I think this building, JFK, it's been around for three years. I opened the building. My lead organizer has been a part of Amazon for years, so we have a different influence on our coworkers. They’ve known us. They're literally considered our extended family. I've spent 40, 50, 60 hours a week with some of these people for years.

When I see them on the ground, they know that I know what's going on inside Amazon. They know that we're here to solve these grievances that we all complained about every single day. I think the way we're organizing from the inside out, that's just been beneficial. We built a workers' committee of over 100 members in all four of those locations that we're organizing in.

We have leaders that are talking to their coworkers as we speak. That's what it's going to take. It's going to take the workers organizing themselves. Having a third party establishing a union is [unintelligible 00:12:07] difficult. If Amazon was that easy to be unionized, it'd been done already. It's been around for 27 years. They had the expertise, they had the resources, they had the money, but at the end of the day, it's not always about that. It's about earning the trust of the other workers. I think that's what we've been doing. We're doing a great job with that.

Brian Lehrer: Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, the coalition of workers trying to officially create a union at Amazon facilities on Staten Island. Thanks for giving us a few minutes. Good luck.

Chris Smalls: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on anything related not just to Amazon on Staten Island, but "Striketober", generally, if you have a comment or you're personally involved in any of these situations, or if you have a question for Jane McAlevey, who's following many of the strikes and labor actions happening nationally as strike corresponding for The Nation among other things, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. I'm probably going to do that for a while now. I'm going to reflexively start giving the other phone number that we've been using the last year and a half during the pandemic when we had technical issues with our usual phone number.

We are back as of yesterday to our real long-standing call-in number with the 212 at the beginning in case you had no idea what city we were in. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Jane, can you put Chris's effort in the context of the long-standing attempts to form a union for Amazon workers, in particular, there was the Alabama story in the news. Chris just referenced to various ways that this might be different on Staten Island. A, it's New York, B, they're trying to do it organically from the inside out with the Amazon workers themselves, rather than rely on a national union coming in from outside trying to organize them. Put this in the context of previous efforts to organize Amazon workers.

Jane McAlevey: There actually has been a lot of activity. I would trace it back to one of the more successful collective actions against Amazon actually happened a few years ago in Minneapolis when many Muslim workers in the plant there actually walked off and demanded the right for prayer time because the conditions at Amazon factories are so egregious.

There's so little break time that workers couldn't even get in their requisite right to their own faith, which allegedly is one of the rights that our current pro-business supreme court might support, but we digress about that.

What's different is it's New York, but I don't know that that alone is going to put the kind of campaign that needs to be run against Amazon over the top because it's an egregious employer. As we saw from Alabama, they will go to all possible lengths to destroy a unionization effort. To give people a little perspective on how it feels as someone who has gone up against union busters like Amazon in what we call union certification votes, meaning workers trying to form unions.

When people are seeing the stories in the last few days of super polarized school board meetings across the country where the anti-vax mask people show up and create the most polarizing possible conditions, that's essentially what union busters do once workers try to form a union. They come in, they create division, they sow hatred. It's like a little mini Facebook machine as we now know how Facebook works inside every campaign, meaning that they thrive on dividing workers. They thrive on polarizing workers. These are well-known tactics of union busters. Amazon sits among the top of the union buster heap.

What's interesting, I think, Brian, is that we've got several studies in the last couple of years showing overwhelming support for unions. Gallup showed the highest support for trade unions and strike activity this year, the highest number since 1965. We had a recent poll that just was released yesterday by Data for Progress looking at support for unions and specifically testing-- Commissioned by the AFL but it was testing support for recent strike activity. Over 60% of Republicans said they support it. 72% of independence, 87% of Democrats.

I think this is a moment where the actions of the Amazon workers are perfectly in sync with the general sentiment of the United States, which is that corporations and their greed are completely out of control. If public polling on any number of issues is what made something policy, we'd be living in something like Scandinavia. Just the fact that the public supports workers doesn't mean that workers are yet having the lawful right to form unions because of the presence of union busters.

When I am working with workers in a contract campaign or maybe towards a strike, we say to people upfront there's going to be a blistering campaign to divide you, there's going to be union busters coming in to try and wreak havoc inside of your workplace for the simple act of trying to express your alleged right in the United States from the 1935. I want to fast forward and just say in this country when inequality was falling, we had one to two million workers a year on strike.

The idea that the numbers that we're seeing now are going to get us the new reestablish, let alone win, a quality of life that the ordinary workers in this country deserve, we're quite a ways from creating a crisis for corporations that I believe we need to create. In all three of my books that you and I've talked about before, part of what I learned as a young union organizer was that if our side can't create a crisis for the employer, we probably can't win. Creating a crisis to the employer class as a whole in this country, we're far from it though I love to see the activity in the private and public sector.

By the way, there's more strikes. The sector workers in Philadelphia are threatening to walk out, graduate workers at Harvard and Columbia. Let alone the 45,000, it went from 30,000, now another group have jumped into the Kaiser walkout. It's both starting, but it also started in 2018. I see this as a continuum from the 2018 strikes where we had the largest number of workers on strike in 2018 than we had in 30 years in this country. The pandemic put a lid on it because people were scrambling to survive, literally, and still are in many cases but I think the lid is being torn off right now as the vaccinations are happening and as people are being asked to do more with less.

The accident on the set in New Mexico is a pattern. The safety issues that were going on the shooting set in New Mexico was not an aberration. It's part of why there's still only a tentative agreement with the stagehand workers union because rank and file workers are very upset that the conditions on their job sites, like nurses are, are just leaving them in untenable positions.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to do a separate segment later in the show in about a half-hour on the shooting on the movie set with safety concerns, including the walkout by six union members top of mind when we do that. This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. Few more minutes on Striketober with Jane McAlevey from The Nation. Angelic in Oakland, you're on WNYC. Hi, Angelic.

Angelic: Hi, Brian. I've called in before. I'm a huge fan. I've been a dedicated listener for definitely over 15 years now. You're like my only news guy even though I live on the West Coast.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much.

Angelic: I've been talking to a lot of friends. I'm a school teacher in Oakland and we've been talking a lot about income inequality in my class. I've seen a lot of friends going through depression since the pandemic. It seems like collectively as a society, we're starting to realize that because the pandemic forced us to slow down that we've lived with the unacceptable for so long. People are starting to realize that, I think, and starting to realize the power of collective bargaining, of standing up for basic human rights. At this point, if you look at the top earners in the country, there's no reason why anybody should be making less than $25 an hour across the country just so that way they can get by.

In the cities and the urban areas, you need to be making more than that. The idea that as a school teacher going into my ninth year that I'm still working two jobs, and that I work a 60-hour week is crazy just to get by. That's not even to do well, that's just getting by. I'm still living paycheck to paycheck. I'm just curious, how long is it going to take though for us to actually move the needle because the needle was moved-- It feels so insignificant to move it up to $12 or $15 an hour. We need to be making comparable money to what the people at the top are making. There's just such a big influx of cash at the top. How do we fight that?

Brian Lehrer: Jane, how do we fight that?

Jane McAlevey: We fight it together,

Brian Lehrer: Can you hear the frustration in her voice?

Jane McAlevey: Yes, I can hear the frustration. In fact, I'm working with the leadership, it sounds like, of her union in Oakland right now who are working very hard preparing for their own contract campaign. I think that her statements and her frustration are super real and that is what we're seeing. Again, I'm going to back to the 1930s for a minute. Workers sanctioned right to collective bargaining in 1935 in this country. What I frequently say to people is they think all the strikes and the organizing and success began after that. Part of what I explain to people is your conditions in the auto plants in the early 1930s and all through the 1920s were as bad as conditions are today in an Amazon plant.

The difference was unionization. What's interesting is there were a lot of illegal, unsanctioned, very big strikes in 1933, 1934, and 1935 that did create a crisis on the employer class that gave FDR the right to move and lay the foundation for labor law right in 1935. It's after that that waves and waves of striking workers begin to take to the streets in this country to reset a grotesque power imbalance.

Strike power and collective power is about how do we have the power to challenge a corporate elite that has been governing as if the rest of us were a doormat for them? It's not going to happen when people act individually. It's going to happen when people like Angelica, the people who are calling into your show take action together in strategic sectors, in particular, of this economy, and go after the corporate class. That's what it took to rebalance power and inequality in American society in the '30s, '40s, and '50s and that's what it's going to take again.

Brian Lehrer: Angelic, thank you. We appreciate your listening. Keep calling us from Oakland. One more call before we ran out of time. Holter in Inwood, you're on WNYC. Hi there. We've got about 30 seconds for you.

Holter: Hi. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jane, for your information. Can she just give us a very quick primer on what the Amazon people have to do and how much they're up against in terms of getting cards and then getting an actual contract and then the bargaining unit bargains, but they don't necessarily have to bargain to an actual contract. Just what they're up against the actual practicalities of it. Thank you very much. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Holter, hang on. I'm going to give you a few more seconds because you told our screener that you're a previous union president and in your experience, the employers hold all the cards. You want to elaborate on that just a little.

Holter: I was a former president of SAG-AFTRA in New York and a vice president of AFTRA National and was in too many contract negotiations. It just always becomes very clear that the employers, through the NLRB and everywhere else, do have an upper hand. You have to go to something as radical as a work stoppage to get even the smallest thing accomplished. I was hoping Jane could lay out frankly how convoluted that is and how many steps before anyone sees a dime of increase. I wish them luck. Thank you very much.

Brian Lehrer: Holter, thank you very much. Jane, we have a minute left.

Jane McAlevey: Holter, great comments. One thing I should point out is, frankly, I'm going to put Amazon to blame for part of what happened indirectly on the set in New Mexico because of the presence of new media. Amazon is a giant producer at this point and they're part of what's called new media driving the standards down throughout the entire film and television industry. It's also interesting to note that IATSE, the stagehand workers union, does sit down and negotiate against Amazon.

SAG and AFTRA and all the unions that Holter just mentioned, Amazon sits down with them. Why? Because they have what we call strategic sectoral power in the film and TV industry that's different than a warehouse worker that Jeff Bezos can cynically thank as he's escaping planet Earth and the mess he created on his rocket. The obstacles are huge. What I would say, which hasn't come up yet, is that it is time for Biden to get off of it and start weighing in and putting the thumb on the scale in some of these campaigns.

Some of the strikes need the voice of the president. At a time when very little is being achieved in Congress, it's like, "Where is the most pro-labor administration when it comes to walking picket lines?" We haven't seen it. We need to see it. I could go into great detail as you know, but all my books do about the very many obstacles that they're going to face in the Staten Island campaign.

I'd rather say, where is the allegedly most pro-labor administration in all these strikes. I wrote an article this summer in Dissent magazine saying they need to step it up and intervene because the levers of government have been working against workers for decades. It's time for this administration to step out and support workers actively so that they stand a chance in a ridiculously skewed power system in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Washington press corps if you're listening, you have a question there from Jane McAlevey that you can ask President Biden or Jen Psaki, his press secretary, the next time you have a chance. Jane McAlevey is an organizer, senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She is the nation's strike correspondent and author of books including A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. Jane, as always, thank you very much.

Jane McAlevey: A pleasure, thank you.

 

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