Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionised warehouses

After Amazon employees at a massive warehouse on Staten Island scored an upset union victory last month, it turned the union’s leaders into celebrities, sent shock waves through the broader labour movement and prompted politicians around the country to rally behind Amazon workers. Now it also appears to have created fallout within Amazon’s management ranks.

On Thursday, Amazon informed more than a half-dozen senior managers involved with the Staten Island warehouse that they were being fired, said four current and former employees with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

The firings, which occurred outside the company’s typical employee review cycle, were seen by the managers and other people who work at the facility as a response to the victory by the Amazon Labor Union, three of the people said. Workers at the warehouse voted by a wide margin to form the first union at the company in the United States, in one of the biggest victories for organised labour in at least a generation.

Word of the shake-up spread through the warehouse Thursday. Many of the managers had been responsible for carrying out the company’s response to the unionisation effort. Several were veterans of the company, with more than six years of experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Workers who supported the union complained that the company’s health and safety protocols were too lax, particularly as they related to COVID-19 and repetitive strain injuries, and that the company pushed them too hard to meet performance targets, often at the expense of sufficient breaks.

Many also said that pay at the warehouse, which starts at more than $18 per hour for full-time workers, was too low to live on in New York City.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company had made the management changes after spending several weeks evaluating aspects of the “operations and leadership” at JFK8, which is the company’s name for the warehouse. “Part of our culture at Amazon is to continually improve, and we believe it’s important to take time to review whether or not we’re doing the best we could be for our team,” said Kelly Nantel, the spokesperson.

The managers were told they were being fired as part of an “organisational change,” two people said. One of the people said some of the managers were strong performers who recently received positive reviews.

The Staten Island facility is Amazon’s only fulfilment centre in New York City, and for a year current and former workers at the facility organised to form an upstart, independent union.

The company is challenging the election, saying that the union’s unconventional tactics were coercive and that the National Labor Relations Board was biased in the union’s favour. And the union is working to maintain the pressure on Amazon so it will negotiate a contract.

Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, testified Thursday before a Senate committee that was exploring whether companies that violate labour laws should be denied federal contracts. Smalls later attended a White House meeting with other labour organisers in which he directly asked President Joe Biden to press Amazon to recognise his union.

A White House spokesperson said that it was up to the NLRB to certify the results of the recent election but affirmed that Biden had long supported collective bargaining and workers’ rights to unionise.

Amazon has said that it invested $300 million on safety projects in 2021 alone and that it provides pay above the minimum wage with solid benefits like health care to full-time workers as soon as they join the company.

More than 8,000 workers at the warehouse were eligible to vote, and the union made a point of reaching out to employees from different ethnic groups, including African Americans, Latinos and immigrants from Africa and Asia, as well as those of different political persuasions, from conservatives to progressives.

Company officials and consultants held more than 20 mandatory meetings per day with employees in the run-up to the election, in which they sought to persuade workers not to support the union. The officials highlighted the amount of money that the union would collect from them and emphasised the uncertainty of collective bargaining, which they said could leave workers worse off.

Labour experts say that such claims can be misleading because it is highly unusual for workers to see their compensation fall as a result of the bargaining process.

Roughly one month after the union victory at JFK8, Amazon workers at a smaller facility nearby voted against unionising by a decisive margin.

The votes came during what could be an inflection point for organised labour. While the rate of union membership reached its lowest point in decades last year — about 10% of US workers — petitions to hold union elections were up more than 50% over the previous year during the six months ending in March, according to the NLRB. The number of petitions is on pace to reach its highest point in at least a decade.

Since December, workers at Starbucks have won initial union votes at more than 50 stores nationwide, while workers have organised or sought to organise at other companies that did not previously have unions, such as Apple and outdoor-apparel retailer REI.

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