"If the workers aren't motivated to organize themselves, there's no union." An Interview with Connor Spence of the Amazon Labor Union.
by Brendan O’Connor
Last week on Staten Island, a tiny, independent union did something that no one else in the American labor movement has yet been able to do: they won an election at Amazon. Strikewave spoke with Connor Spence, who serves as the Amazon Labor Union's vice president of membership, on Monday, just after Amazon had refused to accept ALU's request-to-bargain letter.
The 26-year-old Spence had been working at an Amazon fulfillment center in New Jersey, where he is from, when he heard about Christian Smalls' firing early in the pandemic. He sought out Smalls, who is now president of the ALU, at a protest in Manhattan to talk to him about building a union. Not long after, Spence got a job at JFK8 and started organizing.
ALU withdrew its first election petition, which would have covered four Amazon warehouses on Staten Island, late last year. The union adjusted its efforts, refiling for an election solely at JFK8, one of the largest Amazon facilities in the country. Now, even as ALU works to get Amazon to the table to begin negotiating at JFK8, it is preparing for another election at a second warehouse on Staten Island, LDJ5, later this month.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Strikewave (SW): How did you come to be involved in the union effort?
Connor Spence (CS): I was one of the founding members of the ALU. A couple months after Chris got fired, he was doing protests, doing one in New York in front of Jeff Bezos' Manhattan penthouse, and I got on a bus, went to go meet him, to join up with him and pitch him on the idea of taking this momentum from his firing and transforming it into an organizing project for Amazon.
SW: Did you have organizing experience prior to this?
CS: No.
SW: What prompted you to do that?
CS: I knew about unions. When I was working at Amazon, I saw a union as being one of the only things that could improve the working conditions there, but I guess I just waited for a long time for somebody to come and organize Amazon—for an established union to come do it. And then I realized, that's not how it works. The workers have to do it themselves.
When I saw what happened to Chris, it was kind of the nexus of everything going on at the time: it was Covid, it was labor issues, it was Black Lives Matter. It was an important opportunity to see if we could turn that momentum into an Amazon union.
SW: How did it feel when you found out that you'd won? What did you do? Where were you?
CS: I was there at the NLRB office, we were getting the live vote count from inside. I'd already known by then that we'd won, we already had a lead that was insurmountable. Obviously I was happy, but it was weird because we never really conceived of losing. Failure was not an option for us. We never really saw ourselves as stopping or giving up, but at the same time we never really conceived of what winning would look like, so it was really difficult to process at the time.
I was definitely more excited when our petition actually got approved for the vote. When the vote turned out in our favor, I was definitely happy, but I wasn't jumping for joy like I was then. I was more like, finally it's over.
SW: How did you stay in that headspace of failure not being an option, when not so long ago RWDSU didn't just lose in Bessemer but got rocked?
CS: We were able to learn from a lot of things that experienced labor experts said that they did wrong, but also we had a lot of advantages in that we were Amazon workers and we knew Amazon so well. We're all [Amazon] veterans. We were able to apply our experience to crafting an organizing campaign that we thought would be successful.
We chose to be independent, not because we don't like established unions, but because we saw how easily Amazon was able to smear established unions, paint them as greedy outsiders, and disenfranchise the workers from the union. If we built a union that was literally just a committee of Amazon workers, how could they really attack us? They still tried, but it didn't work.
In addition to that, we just tried to lead by example, to be brave. What we saw in Bessemer is that they didn't have many workers talking to journalists, they didn't have workers doing affidavits with the board. We thought that was a way that the union was reinforcing the idea that the workers should be scared, should capitulate to fear. We did the opposite. We tried to be as open and outspoken about our union support as we could be.
SW: How did you put that into practice on the shop floor?
CS: We had our union shirts, we would organize in the buildings, we would organize in the break rooms, we would hand out flyers in the break rooms. We engaged in small-scale collective action. When they had the captive audience meetings, we'd always shut them down by being aggressive, asking difficult questions that were hard for them to answer. We'd file lots of charges—every time a manager or union buster stepped out of line. That is something that ended up putting a lot of pressure on the company, legally. And then also we would try to expose Amazon on social media or to the media whenever we had the opportunity. We'd post pictures on social media, post videos on social media, make sure that people were always aware of what they were doing on the inside—the kind of union busting they were engaging in.
The union busters in the beginning were super aggressive. In the end, they were so docile. We really put them in their place. The union busters even said it themselves, that they were impressed with us. The [NLRB] said, “we've never seen anybody deal with these consultants the way you guys do.” Their union busters were a waste of money. They weren't able to provide the service they're supposed to provide to the company.
SW: What would you say were some of the most widely and deeply felt grievances? It seems like the churn and the turnover at JFK8 is a big factor in what drove people to organize, that people want to change.
CS: They try to achieve a high turnover, and that it has a lot of byproducts or side effects. For instance, after three years of working at Amazon, you're capped out and can't make any more raises. That's something the veterans feel very strongly about, because with inflation they're essentially being punished for every year they work for Amazon after three years.
For everybody right now, it's the pay. Everybody's struggling, everybody's living paycheck to paycheck. This is not a living wage for New York City, the $18.25 or whatever it is we make. For some people it's the time off. For other people it's the rates—they can't work as fast as their manager wants them to. For other people it's the job security, the fact that you can be fired by computer and there's nobody in the entire company whose job it is to help you fix that.
Everybody has different grievances but I think it all stems from the fact that they want a high turnover workforce, that everybody is very fungible, that they don't have power individually. They treat you like fuel to be consumed, a resource that's consumed to create profit.
SW: How do you bargain over that, if it's so core to Amazon's business model?
CS: There's things that you can fix immediately that would fix the turnover issue: if you got rid of the cap on raises after three years, suddenly veterans would want to stay; if you gave more time off and had just cause employment, people wouldn't be fired by accident; if you raised the pay, you'd attract people who wanted to stay there long term and care about the job. We also want to bring back incentives, like bonuses for productivity at the end of the month, and turn it into a stable, middle-class job.
The turnover is going to work against them when it comes to bargaining. It's been reported that they're already running out of workers across the country. When we go to the bargaining table with them, they've bluffed and said, "You can get less, we can take stuff away," but the reality is that they can't take anything away without affecting their ability to keep bringing people in the door. So already we know, when we go to the bargaining table, they're in a weak position.
SW: What tactics and strategies are replicable by other Amazon workers in other places, and what's unique about JFK8 and Staten Island? Why did the breakthrough happen here, now?
CS: The things that need to be replicated is that if there's any kind of union campaign going on, the bulk of the organizing needs to be done by the workers. If the workers aren't motivated to organize themselves, there's no union. You can have an established union throw a lot of money at a campaign and eke out a win, but at the end of the day if they don't have organized workers within that union it only exists as a legal concept. It's like a body without a soul. That is a principle that we just understood fundamentally, and that's part of why we were successful. We forced ourselves to have to organize that way because we didn't have an established union behind us.
The unique things that we had—this isn't true for every company, but it's true for Amazon—they were so much in the public eye, we were able to put so much pressure on them from the outside by exposing them on social media, exposing them to the media, because their PR was already a big issue for them.
Additionally, we felt pretty comfortable taking risks, because it was the building that Chris got fired from. We'd already shown them how much that backfired. It was such a PR nightmare, we didn't foresee getting fired for organizing. We actually felt they were more scared of us than we were of them. That's not going to be true of every company. Since labor laws are still so weak, it'll just be in the best interest of certain companies to just fire lead organizers and see if that puts an end to the campaign. But at the end of the day that's why you have to have so many strong lead organizers that firing one of them doesn't stop the campaign. I told the board, we're like cockroaches: you can't get rid of us. We're here to stay.
SW: With a shop like Amazon though, even if they're not targeting lead organizers, this high turnover rate is part of what's made organizing so difficult. How are you dealing with that as you try to build a durable organization that can negotiate a contract, enforce a contract, and continue to do internal organizing work even if worker leaders all move on?
CS: We built our constitution so that the ALU, even if the core group right now left, would still be a democratic organization that functioned by using the collective experience of the workers. Right now, the way we build the union, despite the turnover, is that we've deeply organized the internal veterans of the company. Now, because we have Weingarten rights, we can curb wrongful terminations a lot more than we used to be able to. We still have to build the infrastructure so that it exists independent of the organizers, so that it's just something we inhabit.
SW: How will you know when you have successfully done that?
CS: If we negotiate a good contract or engage in large-scale collective action we'll know that we were successful.
SW: Do you have any further thoughts on what being an independent union allowed you to do that otherwise would not have been possible? How has that given you room to maneuver?
CS: It's given us a lot of freedom to have workers involved in building the union in ways they probably wouldn't have been involved if they joined up with an established union. We got to democratically decide what our dues are. Everybody got to be part of the ratification process for the constitution. Everybody got to be part of deciding how executive board members are elected, how stewards are elected, what the salaries are for these positions. It made people feel more comfortable that they had a voice within, as opposed to just being subsumed within a larger entity that might make a lot of decisions on their behalf that they weren't all right with.
SW: Is there anything to indicate that older, legacy, more established unions might learn something from what you have shown?
CS: I hope they focus more on bottom-up organizing, motivating workers to organize themselves and not doing the work for them. If the workers aren't organized, they're gonna get a bad contract, and if they get a bad contract, it's going to make unionizing everyone else harder.
SW: Chris said that if you won, you'd all get ALU tattoos—have you gotten one yet?
CS: We're still busy but gonna try to make time for it.
Brendan O’Connor is a freelance journalist, Strikewave editorial collective member, and the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. You can find him on Twitter @_grendan.