Amazon Gets Its First Union
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Few were betting that a group of workers on Staten Island could win union recognition at their Amazon warehouse. Now that they’ve done it, can they replicate this win at other shops across the country? And what will the nation’s largest unions do to help Amazon workers join the labor movement?
Guest: Steven Greenhouse, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Steve Greenhouse wrote the book on the American Labor movement. |
| 0:11.8 | Literally, it's called Beaten Down, Worked Up, the past, present, and future of American labor. |
| 0:17.1 | And you can tell organizing is more than just a beat for him. |
| 0:21.8 | Like, as soon as we got on the line, he had this question for me. |
| 0:25.0 | Isn't Mary Harris the original name of Mother Jones or am I misrememberance? |
| 0:29.9 | It is... |
| 0:31.9 | Mother Jones became famous for organizing mine workers in the 1900s. |
| 0:37.8 | Yes, okay, good, yeah. |
| 0:39.3 | My high school social studies teacher |
| 0:41.1 | made sure that I looked that up in the library when I was 15. |
| 0:45.1 | And he or she didn't get fired for telling you that? |
| 0:48.6 | No, he was great. |
| 0:52.2 | Steve is used to seeing labor movements get quashed. |
| 0:56.2 | So when an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted in favor of unionization last week, a historic first, |
| 1:04.0 | I knew Steve would be able to offer a little perspective. |
| 1:08.5 | He said it was kind of a miracle that this vote went down at all. |
| 1:11.9 | To my mind, Amazon was easily the most difficult place in the country to unionize. |
| 1:19.1 | You know, Amazon is fiercely anti-union. It's so darn hard to try to unionize a place with more |
| 1:25.6 | than 8,000 workers as the warehouse in Staten Island is. |
| 1:29.6 | And Amazon is famous or infamous that it has humongous turnover among workers. |
| 1:34.2 | Workers leave after eight months on average. |
| 1:36.4 | So it's like hard for a union or for anyone to like try to reach out to all these people before they leave. |
... |
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