Amazon and Starbucks employees unionize

[Winehole23]

Abusive management during the pandemic lit the spark

Many of these campaigns have important things in common. These are the kind of low-wage, service-sector workers who seemed so impossible to unionize for so long. Amazon and Starbucks workers aren’t bringing in organizers from big, established unions, but instead workers are leading the way themselves. And they’re going store by store, location by location. It was long thought that such a campaign couldn’t work. ‘What people didn’t recognize is the contagion factor.’ said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Target Workers Unite is hoping to instigate exactly that kind of national spread…. They’re working with the Industrial Workers of the World and plan to make Target Workers Unite a subsidiary of IWW, which they hope will allow them to issue union cards at any store that wants to hold an election…. As with their counterparts at Amazon and Starbucks, the Target workers are clear that they’re using a different model than that of big industrial unions like the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, or SEIU. The Amazon Labor Union is completely independent, and while Starbucks workers are mostly organizing with Workers United, an affiliate of SEIU, the union is letting workers themselves do the organizing, acting instead as a resource. ‘They build a workforce overwhelmingly around contingent, precarious, transient workers.’ [Adam Ryan, organizer at Target Workers Unite] tells his co-workers that IWW won’t send people in from headquarters who tell them what to do.

https://newrepublic.com/article/1664...azon-starbucks

[Winehole23]

Union could have real clout if Amazon keeps burning employees.