Last week, we commented on a labor-management conflict that pitted millionaires (the baseball players’ union) against billionaires (Major League Baseball owners). Think of it as Goliath Jr. vs. Goliath. Today, we turn our attention to a couple of unionization struggles that more nearly resemble David vs. Goliath.
Here in the Upper Valley, undergraduate students who work in Dartmouth College’s dining halls voted unanimously to unionize, 52-0, in an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. Those voting account for more than a third of the undergraduates working in the college’s 11 dining venues, who will now be represented by the new Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth.
Working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic were the impetus for the unionization drive, which began in January, as staff writer Liz Sauchelli has reported. According to Kaya Colakoglu, a second-year student who serves on the union organizing committee, the collaborative hopes to begin negotiations with the college soon on pay, benefits and sick leave.
Dartmouth’s response was interesting in two respects. Once the unionizing effort was announced, the college bumped up student pay to 1½ times the regular rate for working during the pandemic and agreed to provide paid time off if student workers contracted COVID-19. And the college declined to recognize the union voluntarily, thus requiring the NLRB-supervised vote. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing, since it gave the students experience with a process they will almost certainly need to engage in if they remain labor activists post-graduation.
Unlikely as it was that students could successfully unionize at an elite educational institution with an endowment of $8.5 billion, what transpired recently in New York was far more improbable. There, two ordinary guys armed with the organizational equivalent of a slingshot took down a behemoth the labor movement had heretofore been unable to reach — Amazon. Workers at the company’s massive warehouse on Staten Island, which employs 8,300, voted 2,654 to 2,131 to form the independent Amazon Labor Union.
It was the first time a union drive succeeded at an Amazon facility in the United States despite years of effort. It was pulled off by a handful of employees who received no support from national labor organizations and in the face of ferocious resistance by the company. Two prime movers were Christian Smalls, an employee who planned a walkout in the early days of the pandemic over safety conditions and was fired for his trouble; and his best friend in the warehouse, Derrick Palmer, who remained on the job, organizing from the inside.
Early on, the company’s chief counsel characterized Smalls as “not smart, or articulate” in an email mistakenly distributed to 1,000 recipients. That judgment eventually came back to bite Amazon after a patient, 11-month grass-roots organizing campaign built around safety conditions, poor communication and intense productivity monitoring at the warehouse took hold. The organizers also made timely appeals to the NLRB in the face of the company’s hardball anti-union tactics, and were rewarded with something like a level playing field.
It has been apparent for a long time that Amazon’s unparalleled market power was built on the backs of a labor force that it drives hard — some would say mercilessly. This small victory suggests that it could be otherwise.
Different as these two labor-intensive stories were, they have some commonalities. First, the pandemic and the shortage of workers it produced has given employees more leverage in the marketplace and led them to be more assertive about the things that affect them most directly: pay, working conditions and safety. Second, these two organizational efforts were organic. They were led by insiders working in the facilities themselves, not by organizers from large, national, bureaucratic unions who sometimes seem out of touch with the workers they are trying to organize. Third, it seems likely that both will need the experience and support of the broader labor movement in order to move forward and secure good contracts with rich and powerful employers.
In any case, it is heartening to see workers coming out of the pandemic with a new appreciation of their true worth and what they bring to the table, whether as union members or individuals. The American worker has been taken for granted for too long.