In an organizing call Monday night with Amazon Labor Union leaders, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., said he believes the grassroots group’s historic election victory in Staten Island in earlier this month allowed workers across the country to collectively confront their corporate employers and fight for better conditions.

“Across this country, people are saying, ‘Whoa! If these guys at Amazon can take on this business, so can we,” said Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “What we’re looking at, I think, is a massive national movement.”

In the days following the independent union’s victory – which Amazon is trying to overthrow with a host of formal objections – workers at more than 100 of the retail giant’s facilities across the United States contacted the ‘Amazon Labor Union (ALU) over organizing their workplaces, a nightmare scenario for management.

ALU’s historic victory also came amid a wave of union victories at Starbucks locations nationwide. After Starbucks workers in Buffalo, NY, voted to unionize in December, employees at more than a dozen company stores won election victories in the weeks that followed – a momentum that Starbucks executives are actively trying to mitigate.

“People are tired of corporate greed,” Sanders said on Monday’s call, which featured ALU President Chris Smalls, Speaker Angelika Maldonado and Workers’ Committee member Michelle Valentin. Nieves.

“I know I have colleagues in Congress who feel the same way I do,” added the Vermont senator. “Our request now is that [Amazon’s billionaire executive chairman Jeff] Bezos and Amazon sit down and start negotiating a contract. Our demand is that they stop spending millions trying to prevent workers from exercising their constitutional right to form a union.

In an attempt to galvanize additional union campaigns, the call directed viewers to a website that aims to connect employees with organizers and provide them with key information and resources.

But Smalls, who was fired by Amazon in 2020 after leading a strike at JFK8 over the company’s inadequate pandemic safety protocols, stressed that face-to-face conversations are key to helping workers “really understand what unions provide”.

“Find someone who is in a union and talk to them,” Smalls suggested to the workers. “And not just one conversation, it takes multiple conversations…. In the end, you will probably make the decision that you want to join one.

Maldonado, a current employee at Amazon’s JFK8 plant in Staten Island, also stressed the importance of in-person interaction and education in laying the groundwork for unionization.

“No matter where you work,” Maldonado said, “you deserve to have certain rights that other workers at other companies have.”

The call to organize came as ALU prepares for a second Staten Island union election on April 25, when voting is expected to begin at Amazon’s LDJ5 warehouse, which has 1,500 workers.

Like The city reported Monday, ALU’s demands “remain the same at LDJ5: $30 per hour minimum wage, better working conditions, including two 30-minute paid breaks and a one-hour paid lunch break, better medical time off, extra paid time off, and eliminating productivity rates that require workers to pick a certain number of items per hour.

Common dreams

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