After years of Amazon workers organizing and pressuring the company to negotiate over wages and working conditions, two prominent unions are teaming up to challenge the online retailer.
The partnership was finalized in a vote that ended Monday after members of the Amazon Labor Union, the only union that officially represents Amazon warehouse workers in the United States, voted overwhelmingly to join the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters members. Voting is overseen by the Amazon Association.
ALU scored a surprise election victory at a Staten Island warehouse in 2022. However, it has yet to begin negotiations with Amazon, which continues to dispute the election result. Leaders of both unions said the merger agreement would put them in a better position to challenge Amazon and give the ALU more money and staff support.
“The Teamsters and the ALU will fight fearlessly to ensure Amazon workers get the good jobs and safe working conditions they deserve in a union contract,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said in a statement early on Tuesday.
Amazon declined to comment on the partnership.
The Teamsters are stepping up their efforts to organize Amazon workers nationwide. The union voted to create an Amazon division in 2021, and Mr. O’Brien was elected that year in part on a platform of attacking the company.
The Teamsters told the ALU they had set aside $8 million to support organizing at Amazon, according to Christian Smalls, the ALU president, and that the largest union was prepared to use more than $300 million for the strike and defense to aid in the effort. The Teamsters would not comment on their budget for organizing Amazon.
The Teamsters also recently reached a collective bargaining agreement with workers organizing at Amazon’s largest airplane hub in the United States, a facility in Kentucky known as KCVG. Experts said KCVG’s union action could give workers significant leverage because Amazon relies heavily on the hub to meet its one- and two-day shipping goals.
David Levin, staff director for Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a union reform group that helped mobilize United Parcel Service workers during last year’s successful contract campaign, said many Teamsters members who had been involved in lobbying UPS were now helping Amazon workers to organize.
“Labor leaders and activists are coming out of the UPS contract campaign and getting involved in creating Amazon volunteer organizing committees,” Mr. Levin said.
Efforts to unionize Amazon over the past decade have been scattered across a variety of established unions and independent worker groups. Some experts argue that given the company’s size and longstanding opposition to unions, building a significant union presence there will require some organizational consolidation.
“We had these different efforts, all these different pockets, that produced some important discoveries,” said Barry Eidlin, a sociologist at McGill University in Montreal who is studying the work. “But they also revealed the limitations of the diffuse approach.”
The cooperation agreement with the Teamsters, a copy of which was shared with the New York Times, states that the ALU will have the exclusive right within the Teamsters to organize additional Amazon warehouse workers in New York and promises to help the new locals organize, research, communicate and legal representation.
It also gives the ALU a role in the larger Teamsters Amazon organization, stating that at least three members of the local will take part in “executive planning and strategy discussions” of the Teamsters’ Amazon chapter and that the local will “lend expertise to help organizing other Amazon facilities’ across the country.
The ALU energized the labor movement with its victory in 2022, but soon faced major challenges. He lost a union election at a nearby warehouse in Staten Island a few weeks later and another election at a warehouse near Albany, New York, that fall.
The union began to crumble after the second defeat, with several ALU organizers expressing concerns that union leaders had too much power and were not accountable to members. Mr. Smalls argued that the union was worker-led.
An ALU dissident group critical of Mr. Smalls filed a lawsuit in 2023 seeking to force a leadership election. The two sides announced a settlement in January, and elections are scheduled for the summer, overseen by a federal court-approved observer. Mr. Smalls is not running, while the dissident group, the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, is fielding candidates for all four leadership positions. The slate is headed by Connor Spence, founder of ALU.
Meanwhile, ALU has struggled financially and ended last year with $33,000 in assets and $81,000 in liabilities, according to federal filings.
In May, both ALU factions visited Teamsters headquarters in Washington, where Teamster officials pitched them the idea of ​​joining, Mr. Smalls said.
He said the Teamsters offered to make their resources available to Amazon workers — including strike pay — while largely preserving Amazon’s union independence. He signed the accession agreement in early June.
The signing surprised the reform group, which had told the Teamsters that ALU members would need more time to discuss. But the caucus ultimately decided to support participation after ALU members endorsed it, saying it would help “turn the beach we’ve secured on Staten Island into a fighting, self-governing local.”
Mr. Spence, the reform group’s candidate for ALU president, said that if his group won the Staten Island leadership election, he would draw up a plan to deal with Amazon in consultation with workers and present the plan to Teamsters in hopes of securing the necessary resources.
Amazon fired Mr. Spence last fall for what it said were violations of its policy governing off-duty access to its facilities. He is challenging the firing in a case before an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board.
Mr Spence and another fired Amazon worker were taken away by police last week after appearing in front of the warehouse to try to persuade workers to ratify the partnership agreement. Officers handcuffed the two former workers, took them to a station and gave them tickets requiring a court appearance.
Lisa Levandowski, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the company called the police because a group, mostly Teamsters, was creating a disturbance outside the warehouse and refused Amazon’s request to leave. He said that after police arrived, everyone but Mr Spence and his former partner had left. (Employees are permitted to distribute materials outside the building during off-building hours.)
Mr Spence said he had appeared in front of the building several times for organizing purposes in recent weeks without encountering police.
