Labor's Trophy Catch: Amazon

Is Jeff Bezos a 'POS'?

I caught up with the 2024 cinema vérité documentary “Union,” the record of a years-long hit-and-miss organizing effort at JFK8, an Amazon distribution center in Staten Island, New York. Cinema vérité in this instance means short on narrative structure and long on repetitive shots of amateur labor organizers bickering over strategy, serving up free pizza, and pushing handbills on workers, many of whom just pass them buy.

But watch it anyway. “Union” offers a fascinating look at a David and Goliath contest pitting warehouse hourly workers against one of America’s largest and most powerful companies. You have to marvel at the nerve and endurance of what the organizers are calling the Amazon Labor Union.

I kept waiting for a mention of the Teamsters, which has mounted a long-running organizing campaign at Amazon. Despite what looked like a disappointing visit of the plucky band of ALU organizers to a Teamsters local (unidentified) we get no explicit mention of them until late in the documentary. Odd.

Neither do we hear from ALU’s lawyers or learn how the organizers are paying for all this free pizza. I did see, but only in my mind’s eye, an office building full of Amazon staff lawyers taking careful notes on what’s going on at JFK8.

The New Yorker, in a review, noted that the film crew “embedded” with the organizers beginning in 2021 (which explains all the COVID masks):

“Union” is a document of solidarity, in which the scandal of the gig-economy model registers on a human scale. Indie films have come to be defined by a certain kind of aesthetic, but “Union” is an independent film in the market sense: when no major distribution company wanted to take the film, the producers chose to distribute it themselves, lest the politics of its creation be compromised by a film industry that is increasingly beholden to the project’s antagonist, Amazon.

If the gig economy is scandalous, then a few million Americans are complicit.
Gig work can give people an honest shot at taking care of themselves and their families, which is why all those New Yorkers are making the daily trek, sometimes on miserably long public transit routes, to the Amazon warehouse. The solidarity among the organizers of the ALU and workers is personal, not ideological. When in one scene an unidentified collaborator joins a Zoom call and addresses everyone as “comrade” it just generates blank stares. We don’t see her again.

I may have missed it in the documentary, but with a little digging, I learned that in June 2024 the ALU became affiliated with the Teamsters. Yes, solidarity, finally.

The ALU, amazingly, has some successes and, less surprisingly, some failures. But surely they knew that a successful union vote among the rank and file was not the last step in their crusade? After certification, you need to bring the employer to the table to negotiate a contract. A bill labeled the “Faster Labor Contracts Act” would force employers to negotiate a new contract within 10 days of certification. This article asserts that after three years, Amazon refuses to negotiate.

Here ate the contract demands of ALU, including a $30 an hour wage, profit sharing, and other benefits, for the roughly 5,500 Staten Island workers. The Amazon jobs page for JFK8 shows quite a few job openings. Most are “up to” $20 an hour.

One of the more fascinating bits in “Union” is the spy cam footage of life inside the Staten Island distribution center. The amount of automation is astounding and you have to wonder how long it will take Amazon to automate every single human out of this place. If you’re sorting Prime at Amazon, chances are you’re a robot tender.

I’ll say it again: If your company has a union, it probably deserved one.

For their part, the Teamsters are the most formidable antagonist that Amazon is facing. The union has made some headway.

The National Labor Relations Board, according to the Teamsters, is “is seeking a bargaining order to force the company to the negotiating table” after workers at a San Francisco site voted to join the union last year. The company has 110 fulfillment centers in the United States employing some 740,000 workers..

“More than 10,000 Amazon workers have joined the Teamsters and we are just getting started,” said Peter Finn, President of Teamsters Joint Council 7 and Western Region International Vice President. “Workers at DCK6 are in this fight and Amazon workers will keep fighting until this greedy corporation comes to the bargaining table.”

In building its logistics business, Amazon has created a parallel postal system from scratch. With 390,000 drivers, according to one estimate, its volume of deliveries is now second only tot he U.S. Postal Service. The vast majority of post office employees are unionized.

Isn’t its curious that the tech culture, with all of its bland humanitarianism and financial tributes to social causes du jour, is so allergic to labor unions?

On the Aug. 5 episode of Honestly with Bari Weiss, the host talked with Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien. He’s unimpressed with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Weiss: So why have they not or why has organizing efforts not been successful at Amazon?

O’Brien: Well, I think for two reasons, there’s such a they have such a program. They spend about $500 million a year on union busting. That’s awful.

And they have captive audience of those employees that are inside every single day. And they’re talking about what’s going to happen to them if they organize retribution, retaliation, all this stuff, which we are fighting that on state levels to make it illegal to have those meetings. We’ve been very successful in states.

I think we’ve gotten success with the DSP model. And when we took over this task, we knew it was going to be a five to seven year plan to organize Amazon nationwide. We’ve got some good decisions in California from the acting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.

So I think there is going to be a path to victory at some point in time. It’s just going to be a fight.

Weiss: If Jeff Bezos were sitting here, what would you say to him?

O’Brien: Oh, I’d call him a piece of shit.

Weiss: Have you ever met him?

O’Brien: Never met him … “

You can understand O’Brien’s frustration. Amazon is operating from a position of massive strength and will, if the past is any indication, continue to thwart efforts to unionize its workforce in any way it can. From Amazon’s perspective, unionization is tantamount to losing control over its business.

But if the Teamsters can continue to make headway, then maybe all the talk about a labor resurgence, as “Union” claims, isn’t just hot air.

This high-stakes Teamsters and Amazon battle is far from over.

Here’s the full conversation from the Honestly episode:

From Honestly with Bari Weiss: Why Unions Went for Trump, Aug 5, 2025