By Hilary Russ
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The COVID-19 pandemic, labor shortage, Black Lives Matter movement and other social and economic forces have contributed to an uptick in high-profile union organizing across the United States, with a win at Amazon on Friday garnering national attention.
Union negotiators would still have to bargain with Amazon over pay and workplace issues at the New York City warehouse.
Not all labor drives are successful, including the preliminary result of a ballot count of Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama.
Only 10.3% of U.S. wage and salary workers were in a union in 2021, half the rate of 1983, and union membership in the private sector – including Amazon and Starbucks – was just 6.1% in 2021.
There were 149 total union elections in January and February of this year, versus 103 in the same two months of 2021. Here are some notable recent union wins:
AMAZON – Workers at an Amazon.com facility in New York City’s Staten Island on Friday voted in favor of forming a union, making it the online retailer’s first U.S. facility to organize.
The victory for a new, independent union at the second-largest U.S. private employer adds to recent success by labor activists pushing into new industries.
STARBUCKS – Employees at nine U.S. Starbucks locations have voted in recent months to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The now-unionized cafes include five in Buffalo, New York; two in Mesa, Arizona, and one each in Seattle, Washington, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
About 150 others have petitioned for elections. Ballot counts are scheduled for more than a dozen other cafes in the next couple weeks.
The company beat back the union in one Buffalo store.
NEW YORK TIMES – About 600 designers, software engineers, data analysts and other tech employees at the news provider voted in March to join the NewsGuild of New York, which has won a number of other elections in the last two years.
The March results created the largest union of tech workers in the United States with bargaining rights. The NewsGuild also represents Reuters’ U.S. journalists.
GOOGLE FIBER – Contractors for the high-speed internet provider Google Fiber in Kansas City, Missouri voted last week to unionize. While only 10 workers are involved, it was the first group of Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) with bargaining rights.
AWU says it has 800 members since launching just over a year ago, but those members do not have the right to collectively bargain.
CANNABIS INDUSTRY – In June, the United Food and Commercial Workers reached agreements with cannabis lab Sonoma Lab Works and cannabis manufacturer CannaCraft Manufacturing to unionize their workers in California.
As the number of cannabis growers and dispensaries have grown, so too have union drives in the industry. UFCW now says it is the largest cannabis workers union in the country with more than 10,000 members.
SILICON VALLEY – In 2020, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter’s employees voted to join a union, the first big tech company to do so. However, workers at location data startup Mapbox in August lost their bid to form a union.
(Reporting by Hilary Russ; editing by Peter Henderson and Nick Zieminski)
