A18 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022
ture of a man, mask on, inside the
warehouse and identifies him as a
consultant. “He tries to hide his
name and lie about who he is to
workers at Amazon,” the tweet
reads.
The ALU has also passed out
fliers including pictures of two of
the union-busting consultants.
Filings with the Labor Depart-
ment show that Amazon has hired
multiple union-busting firms
over the past year to work both on
Staten Island and in Bessemer.
The company also regularly
sparred with union organizers. In
one instance, Amazon called the
police on Chris Smalls, the Ama-
zon Labor Union’s interim presi-
dent, for trespassing in a compa-
ny parking lot regularly used by
visitors.
Video of Smalls’s arrest was
shared widely online. Amazon
said at the time that Smalls tres-
passed multiple times, despite
warnings, and that Smalls “chose
to escalate the situation” when
police asked him to leave.
Smalls, who was delivering
containers of pasta and chicken to
workers in an area regularly traf-
ficked by visitors, was charged
with resisting arrest, obstruction
of government administration
and trespassing. He disputes that
he resisted arrest and said previ-
ously that the incident “made the
company look very ugly.”
“They lost the election right
there,” Smalls said.
In a more recent incident, out-
side the warehouse scheduled to
vote Monday, Smalls quickly left
the parking lot when he was
threatened again with arrest.
The company used similar tac-
tics, sending text messages and
posting fliers in bathrooms at an-
other large warehouse in Ala-
bama, where workers last year
rejected the union vote. Federal
regulators found Amazon im-
properly interfered in that elec-
tion and ordered a redo vote earli-
er this year. Those results remain
too close to call.
Tech companies are facing
some blowback for deploying
these tactics, so they may get
more secretive, said Bradley Tusk,
an early Uber investor and advis-
er.
“They’re going to have to do it
unbelievably quietly,” he said.
“The criticism they will get will
not be worth it.”to do stints at Apple’s corporate
headquarters, known as a “career
experience.”
Organizers at that store
dubbed themselves Fruit Stand
Workers United and voted Feb. 21
to affiliate with a national labor
union that has supported the suc-
cessful unionization efforts of
Starbucks employees around the
country, according to a site by the
group.
Last week, before Atlanta’s
Cumberland Mall Apple Store be-
came the first to qualify for a vote,
the company notified employees
it would dispatch its version of
HR to the store for one-on-one
meetings, according to a screen-
shot reviewed by The Washington
Post.
Apple told employees the pur-
pose of the meetings was to “solic-
it feedback,” but labor experts say
these meetings are often used by
large companies to dissuade em-
ployees from voting to unionize.
At Amazon’s smaller Staten Is-
land warehouse, union-busting is
at full steam before workers at the
roughly 1,500-employee ware-
house start voting on whether to
join the Amazon Labor Union on
Monday. The company has held
regular classes for workers at its
warehouses to encourage them to
vote no, pulling employees from
their work stations to attend. And
it has spent millions on consul-
tants to talk to workers, some-
times roaming warehouse floors
with employees.
Amazon’s Nantel previously
said that it was employees’ choice
whether to join a union and the
classes “provide employees the
opportunity to ask questions and
learn about what this could mean
for them and their day-to-day life
working at Amazon.”
At the nearby bigger JFK
warehouse that voted to unionize
this month, Connor Spence, a
worker and organizer, said that
outside contractors would roam
the facility’s aisles with no clear
purpose, stopping to talk to em-
ployees as they labored and some-
times employing intimidation.
“We had one guy who said, ‘If
the union comes in, you will go on
strike; if you go on strike, Amazon
will replace you,’ ” Spence said.
The ALU started “outing” the
consultants to employees and the
public on their Twitter page. One
tweet from February shows a pic-materials explored during its
short engagement with IRI Con-
sultants.
In January 2021, hundreds of
workers formed the Alphabet
Workers Union (AWU), a “minori-
ty union.” It does not have bar-
gaining rights with Google’s par-
ent company Alphabet but is sup-
ported by the Communications
Workers of America.
The pandemic has further
deepened the divide between
white-collar and hourly workers,
such as “essential” retail and
warehouse workers who contin-
ued to work on-site. Contractors
received fewer remote privileges.
And as the economic and physical
turmoil of the past few years have
further eroded norms against
unionizing in tech, companies are
getting more aggressive.
Contract workers at a Google
Fiber store in Kansas City, Mo.,
who voted to unionize in March
after they were denied cost-of-liv-
ing raises during the pandemic,
were required to attend “captive
audience” meetings with an anti-
union consultant who said voting
to unionize could force Google to
drop its contract.
“The tone was vaguely threat-
ening,” said retail worker Emrys
Adair, who uses the pronouns
they/them. Workers were repeat-
edly told “what we’re asking for
isn’t really how businesses work,”
despite Google Fiber paying a
starting salary that is $2.50 an
hour less than Spectrum stores in
the same city, they said.
The contractors in Kansas City
voted in March to join the Alpha-
bet Workers Union, which repre-
sents both Google employees and
the company’s vast army of con-
tractors.
Apple Store employees have
also faced company blowback in
the face of organizing.
When Apple announced this
year that it was offering raises for
retail employees across the coun-
try, employees at New York’s
Grand Central Terminal store
who appeared disappointed were
taken aside by managers and giv-
en a speech about the pitfalls of
unionization there, according to
employees who spoke on the con-
dition of anonymity for fear of
retaliation.
In meetings, managers warned
that unionization would mean the
loss of benefits, such as the abilitypleased to offer very strong com-
pensation and benefits for full
time and part time employees,
including health care, tuition re-
imbursement, new parental leave,
paid family leave, annual stock
grants and many other benefits.”
Tech giants are no strangers to
worker activism. And they’ve suc-
cessfully subdued it for years.
Amazon has been using anti-
union consultants for nearly two
decades, defeating efforts to
unionize in Britain in 2004 and
Virginia in 2016, and releasing an
anti-union training video in 2018.
It also hired Pinkerton, the pri-
vate security agency used to infil-
trate unions since the late 1800s,
to stop Whole Foods workers in
2020, according to internal docu-
ments obtained by Vice.
Pinkerton did not respond to a
request for comment.
Some of the first signs of tradi-
tional union-busting at Google
appeared in 2019, when the com-
pany quietly hired the anti-union
firm IRI Consultants and later
fired the engineers who tried to
draw more attention to IRI’s work
for Google, dubbed Project Vivi-
an.
The move was a departure for
Google. Since about 2011, Liz
Fong-Jones, a former site reliabili-
ty engineer at Google, operated as
a liaison between employees and
management, who emphasized a
willingness to listen and make
concessions to employee con-
cerns.
“This open dialogue was some-
thing that stalled unions for a
while,” she said. But after they
hired IRI, it became clear “the
sleeker union-busting didn’t
work, and therefore they were
resorting to brute force.”
That same year, a group of
Google employees regularly held
a lunchtime meeting in the San
Francisco office to talk about or-
ganizing, said Laurence Berland,
one of the Google engineers who
was fired after drawing attention
to the IRI. The employees
watched undercover videos show-
ing an Amazon union-buster, fig-
uring Google would try similar
tactics.
“It was pretty clear that they
were trying to get everyone to
shut up and get back to work,”
said Berland. Mencini, the Google
spokesperson, said the company
decided in 2019 not to use theganda and hired anti-union con-
sultants, according to interviews
with workers and organizers.
They’ve also forced workers to
attend “captive audience” meet-
ings to undermine union talking
points, lobbied for laws that will
prevent workers from getting the
right to unionize and fired em-
ployees who drew attention to
these tactics.
There are burgeoning union-
ization movements among white-
collar tech employees, including
video game testers at Activision.
But they are outnumbered by
hourly wage workers, who aren’t
part of the tech elite. Amazon, the
country’s second-largest private
employer, has more than 1 million
employees in the United States,
many of them at warehouses. Ap-
ple has more than 200 retail
stores in the country, and Google’s
shadow workforce of contractors
and temporary workers has ex-
ceeded its 156,500 employees
since 2018.
In an emailed statement, Ama-
zon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel
said the company invests billions
in pay, benefits and resources for
employees.
“We also know that there are
outside organizations working
hard and spending heavily to
spread inaccurate information
about us to our teams,” she said.
“So — like many other companies
— we also work to ensure our
employees are fully informed
about their rights and how deci-
sions about outside representa-
tion could impact their day-to-day
lives working at Amazon.”
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
owns The Washington Post.)
Google spokesperson Courte-
nay Mencini said the company
has contracts with both unionized
and nonunion suppliers, and re-
spect their employees’ right to
choose whether to join a union.
“We’ve always worked hard to
create a supportive and reward-
ing workplace for our workforce.
Of course our employees have
protected labor rights that we
support. But as we’ve always
done, we’ll continue engaging di-
rectly with all our employees,”
Mencini wrote.
Apple said in a statement that
the company is “fortunate to have
incredible retail team members
and we deeply value everything
they bring to Apple. We areto join the Amazon Labor Union if
it votes yes. “It’s not convincing
anyone, but it’s pissing them off.”
The unionizing workers at
Amazon join a larger movement
across the country triggered in
part by high inflation and the
pandemic. Workers at Starbucks
voted to unionize, and Kellogg’s
workers agreed to a new contract
after months of striking. The shift
is most notable in the tech indus-
try, where giants such as Amazon,
Google and Apple have long ward-
ed off worker activism with a mix
of tools, including high pay, plen-
tiful employee perks, beloved con-
sumer brands and core missions
that made their workforces feel
they were making the world a
better place.
But blue-collar workers under-
gird the tech industry — and they
often don’t have access to the
benefits of the corporate jobs. The
Amazon Labor Union notched a
historic win this month at an
8,000-worker warehouse in Stat-
en Island, following years of un-
successful efforts by national
unions to organize workers. An
election at a warehouse in Besse-
mer, Ala., is too close to call.
Meanwhile, employees at an
Atlanta Apple Store on Wednes-
day became the first to file for a
vote on unionizing, and other
stores are closer to doing the
same. Contract workers at a
Google Fiber store in Kansas City,
Mo., who are employed by a third-
party firm, unionized in March.
Faced with the threat of union-
ized workforces, tech companies
— some of the most valuable and
fastest-growing in the world —
are increasingly turning to classic
union-busting tactics to preserve
their control over their work-
forces.
“The tech giants will up the
ante trying to wrest the landscape
back to where it was,” said labor
organizer and author Daniel
Gross, who has helped unionizing
campaigns for workers in retail,
food manufacturing, Starbucks
and more recently in high-tech.
Tech companies make up the
dominant industry, and their ac-
tion “tilts the scales badly for all
workers.”
Tech companies have sur-
veilled workers suspected of orga-
nizing, posted anti-union propa-
UNIONS FROM A
Tech giants’ e≠orts to discourage unionizing look like industry tactics of old
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)Monday, April 25 at 2:45 p.m.Kaine discusses his legislation to expandresearch and treatment resources forpeople living with long COVID and hisown personal experiences with the virus.To register to watch, visitwapo.st/kaineaprilor scan code below witha smartphone camera:Listen wherever podcasts are available.@POSTLIVE #POSTLIVESen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)Monday, April 25 at 2:45 p.m.Kaine discusses his legislation to expandresearch and treatment resources forpeople living with long COVID and hisown personal experiences with the virus.wapo.st/kaineaprilCORONAVIRUSLong COVID