Like Amazon, workers at the store, which sells outdoor equipment and clothing, started organizing partially due to COVID-19 safety concerns.Īfter the first win in SoHo, workers at REI’s store in Berkeley, California, voted to unionize 56-38, joining United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5. While union elections were close in many of Amazon’s and Starbucks’ victories, workers at Manhattan’s REI voted to unionize 88 to 14 on March 2. “Their disappointment at its hollowness and the sort of false promise (is) part of what drives them to organize.” “Some of the impetus is that workers who go to work there are attracted to that progressive posture on the part of the company,” Milkman told City & State.
In CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies’ 2022 “State of the Unions,” Milkman and fellow union expert Joseph van der Naald wrote that young, progressive college-educated people have spurred on unionization efforts such as the one at Starbucks. While western New York remained a hot spot for unionized Starbucks stores, New York City got its first on April 2: the company’s flagship store in Chelsea. 2021 victory in Buffalo, the union won 31 New York elections in 2022, according to data from the NLRB collected by Miami University professor Kevin Reuning.
While the first Starbucks Workers United union was not formed in 2022, the union saw rapid expansion across the country in the past year. “They didn't have time to really follow the same playbook (as JFK8),” said Alethia Jones, a distinguished lecturer at CUNY School of Labor and Urban studies, on the second Staten Island vote. In October, Amazon warehouse workers in Albany also shot down unionization, voting 406 to 206. Workers at LDJ5, an Amazon package sorting center also on Staten Island, voted against unionizing 618 to 380. 11.ĭespite the historic win, the ALU has not won an election since. While Amazon filed 25 objections with the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB officially upheld the win on Jan. On April 1, Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer and a total of 2,654 yes votes at JFK8, one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers on Staten Island, created the first chapter of the Amazon Labor Union. Here’s a rundown of some of the most significant labor actions of the past year. Throughout the past year, many of the labor movements that dominated media attention, such as Amazon and Starbucks, got their start in the Empire State. “So all this publicity and media attention to these iconic companies that have had some recent experience of successful unionization, it’s kind of a drop in the bucket in terms of the whole labor market in New York,” she said. In 2012, 23.2% of New York workers were union members, 2.5 points higher than it is today.ĬUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies Labor Department Chair Ruth Milkman said that despite 2022’s historic union victories, many were with small firms. In 2022 alone, nearly 200 workplaces in the state filed for representation through the National Labor Relations Board.īut, despite the hype and a 57-year high in Americans’ approval of labor unions, New York’s union participation (and the country’s as a whole) is still trending downward. In the public sector, just around two-thirds of New Yorkers are in a union. Only one other state, Hawaii, has a unionization rate higher than New York’s 20.7%.
New York is still a union state, at least, according to the data.
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