What Next: Amazon Gets Its First Union

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Business, News, Society & Culture

3.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Steve Greenhouse wrote the book on the American labor movement.
0:11.5	Literally, it's called beaten down, worked up, the past, present, and future of American
0:16.1	labor.
0:17.1	And you can tell it's organizing is more than just a beat for him.
0:22.0	Like as soon as we got on the line, he had this question for me.
0:24.9	Isn't Mary Harris the original name of Mother Jones, or am I a misrememberance?
0:30.2	It is.
0:32.7	Mother Jones became famous for organizing mine workers in the 1900s.
0:37.8	Yes, OK, good.
0:38.9	Yeah.
0:39.4	My high school social studies teacher made sure that I looked that up in the library
0:43.8	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.
0:52.4	Steve is used to seeing labor movements get quashed.
0:56.3	So when an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted in favor of unionization last week,
1:02.0	a historic first, I knew Steve would be able to offer a little perspective.
1:08.6	He said it was kind of a miracle that this vote went down and all.
1:12.0	To my mind, Amazon was easily the most difficult place in the country to unionize.
1:19.8	Amazon is fiercely anti-union.
1:21.7	It's so darn hard to try to unionize a place with more than 8,000 workers as the warehouse in Staten Island is.
1:29.5	And Amazon is famous for infamous that it has humongous turnover among workers.
	...

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