"It's Over." Amazon Labor Union is broken and broke
Without a contract, the ALU is unable to forcibly collect union dues from Amazon's workers and, as donations have dwindled, the union is left financially vulnerable.
By Peter List, Editor | April 2, 2024
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which made headlines around the world for becoming the first union to unionize an Amazon facility in the United States, has zero members, is besieged by infighting, and is “broke.”
“The union right now is broke, zero money," Arthur Schultz, a pro-bono labor lawyer representing ALU opponents to founder Chris Smalls told Bloomberg.
Indeed, a review of ALU’s 2023 financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Department of Labor and posted on Monday—known as LM2 forms—reveals that the union has zero members, and spent $67,083 more than it took in.
The report also showed that, at the end of 2023, the union was past due on money owed to its landlord, as well as to a law firm.
In part, the ALU’s financial problems stem from the fact that it has zero members from which to collect union dues and fees—a necessity for any union to survive.
Even though there are roughly 8,000 workers at Amazon’s Staten Island facility, the union did not win a majority of the 8,000 workers’ votes (the Amazon Labor Union won the 2022 election with 2,654 yes votes versus 2,131 no votes for the company) the union arguably represents all 8,000 workers.
Although the ALU did receive $669,898 in 2023, nearly all of it came from donations—with $425,000 coming from the International Commission for Labor Rights, a non-profit that is based in New York, and “coordinates the pro bono work of a global network of lawyers and labor experts.”
However, donations from established unions, as well as the ICLR have reportedly dried up and, until the union negotiates a contract, it is unable to collect union dues from workers’ paychecks.
“Without a contract in place, the ALU is not receiving any union dues from the 8,000 employees it had a mandate to represent,” writes Bloomberg’s Dave Lee.
Were it not for the fact that New York does not have a so-called Right-to-Work law, it is lawful for a union to require union fees as a condition of employment.
Were the union to have a contract, and if union dues were $30 per month per Amazon employee, with up to 8,000 employees at the facility where ALU won its election in 2022, the union would garner approximately $240,000 per month or nearly $2.9 million per year.
However, the law does not require the union and the company to ever agree to a contract and it appears that, even if the ALU gets to the bargaining table with Amazon, the union may never get one.
Right now, the union is beset with infighting, according to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this year and it is unknown whether the union has any support to sustain a contract campaign within the facility.
ALU co-founder and president Christian Smalls “lost support from some workers and former union officers who have said he appears more interested in globe-trotting and fame than in his initial goal of unionizing Staten Island warehouses,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “A group of union dissidents also accused Smalls of not being transparent with union funds, a claim he disputes.”
"The membership has rejected him," Michelle Valentin Nieves, the union's vice president, told Business Insider in December. Smalls "has no support in the building."
Bloomberg’s Lee talked to several Amazon workers, stating, “given the extreme rate of turnover at Amazon warehouses, none of them had been working at the company at the time of the ALU’s victory.”
“They’d heard about “old” efforts to form a union, they told me, but nobody mentioned it anymore,” Lee writes. “‘It’s over,’ one of them said.”