In the first dark days of the Pandemic, as an Amazon worker named Christian Smalls planned a small, panicked strike over safety conditions at the retailer's only fulfillment center in New York City, the company quietly mobilized.
The Global Intelligence Program is a security group staffed by many military veterans. The company named an incident commander and used a test response and labor activity plan.
There were more executives who were aware of the protest than workers who attended it. In an email mistakenly sent to more than 1,000 people, Amazon's chief counsel described Mr. Smalls as "not smart, or articulate." Mr. Smalls was fired by the company because he attended the walk out.
The company relied on hardball tactics to drive its dominance of the market. One of the most significant labor victories in a generation occurred on Friday, when he won the first successful unionization effort at any Amazon warehouse in the United States. The company's response to his initial protest may haunt it for a long time.
After Mr. Smalls was forced out of the warehouse, he and his friend, Derrick Palmer, set their sights on unionizing. Along with a growing band of colleagues and no affiliation with a national labor organization, the two men spent the past 11 months going up against Amazon, whose 1.1 million workers in the United States make it the country's second-largest private employer.
They built bonfires at the bus stop on Staten Island to warm up the colleagues waiting to go home. TikTok was used to reach workers in the city. Mr. Palmer brought homemade baked ziti to the site, as well as empanadas and West African rice dishes to appeal to immigrant workers. They put up signs saying "free weed and food."
Mr. Smalls said that the union spent $120,000 on the project. According to federal filings, Amazon spent more than $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year.
The unionization vote shows the rise of worker power. Starbucks stores have voted to organize in recent months. One of Amazon's signature warehouses is JFK8 with 8,000 workers.
Amazon considered unionization a threat to its business model. The ability to speed packages to consumers is built on a vast chain of manual labor that is monitored down to the second. No one knows what will happen if the newly organized workers try to change that model or if their union is replicated among the more than 1,000 Amazon fulfillment centers and other facilities across the country.
The Staten Island organizers had a cultural moment on their side. They were helped by a tightened labor market and a National Labor Relations Board that made a key decision in their favor. Traditional labor organizers who failed at unionizing Amazon from the outside were defeated by the low-budget push by the independent Amazon Labor Union.
I think it will shake up the labor movement and flip the orthodoxy on its head, said Justine Medina, a box packer and union organizer at JFK8 who had waited with an enthusiastic crowd in Brooklyn to hear the news.
Sara Nelson, head of the flight attendants union, said that the future of American unionizing efforts can be about people coming in from the outside with an organizing plan.
Daily business updates The latest coverage of business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday.The JFK8 union and Amazon face questions. The union is likely to face a legal battle over the vote and contract negotiations. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, will have to decide whether to reconsider some of its tactics and address the underlying labor dissatisfaction that handed it such a sweeping defeat.
Mr. Smalls wrote on Friday that he was undaunted by the task ahead and that Amazon wanted to make him the face of the unionizing efforts against them.
New York, America's most important consumer market, was both drawn to and wary of Amazon when it opened the JFK8 site. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union wants to turn JFK8 into the first organized Amazon warehouse in the country.
Soon Amazon withdrew from its plan to open a second headquarters in the city, as a backlash grew over public subsidies it would receive and its history of opposing unions. There was no talk of organizing JFK8. Many thought that Amazon's tactics were too combative for a union to succeed.
Mr. Palmer and Mr. Smalls confronted managers about the safety of their employees. Managers documented in newly released court records that employees were worried about rising infections and felt that Amazon was not notifying them in a timely manner.
Amazon said it had taken extreme measures to keep workers safe. JFK8 was turned into a lifeline by the Pandemic, with a fleet of trucks delivering supplies as it went into lock down.
Two human resource employees at JFK8 doubted the wisdom of Mr. Smalls' dismissal as Amazon moved to fire him. She wrote that Mr. Smalls was outside and peaceful. She predicted that his firing would be perceived as retaliation.
The chief counsel made a statement against Mr. Smalls after he was fired, and the two friends decided to take action. Mr. Smalls and Mr. Palmer were both outspoken. They were both black men from New Jersey. Both had dropped out of community college and were proud of their high scores on Amazon's performance metrics.
They made new plans. Mr. Palmer would like to change it from inside.
They took a road trip to another warehouse. Mr. Palmer and Mr. Smalls wanted to watch the union drive. They found organizers from the retail union who had declared an interest in JFK8 less than welcoming and thought the professionals seemed like outsiders who had descended on the community.
Workers in Bessemer rejected the union by a 2-to-1 margin. Few took Mr. Palmer and Mr. Smalls seriously when they said they intended to organize JFK8. When more experienced operatives had been beaten, why should they win?
Cracks in Amazon's employment model were obvious as they set about their first task.
JFK8 offered jobs to workers who had been laid off from other industries. An investigation by the New York Times last June revealed that the warehouse was burning through employees, firing others because of communication and technology errors, and wrongly denying workers of benefits.
According to an internal document, black associates at JFK8 were more likely to be fired than their white peers. Amazon warehouses had a turnover rate of 150 percent.
As Mr. Palmer and Mr. Smalls approached workers at the bus stop, Amazon's tone toward its employees kept shifting. Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, was handing over the role of chief executive to Andy Jassy, and the company raised wages and added the goal of being Earth's best employer to its guiding principles. It promised to listen to complaints and improve working conditions.
At times, it was contentious. Amazon apologized after it sounded so disrespectful about workers who couldn't take bathroom breaks and had to urinate in bottles.
The N.L.R.B filed a complaint against Amazon after an anti-union consultant called the labor organizers "thugs" at JFK8.
The labor agency said in November that Amazon had shown "flagrant disregard" for the law and threw out the results of the warehouse vote.
After months of gathering support, the New York union organizers delivered more than 2,000 signatures to the labor board, but they were rejected for not meeting the minimum required to hold an election. Mr. Smalls said that Amazon had submitted payroll data to the board that indicated that half of the people who had signed cards no longer worked at the warehouse.
Mr. Palmer said in an interview that after months of hard work it seemed like the momentum was gone. He spent a lot of time away from the warehouse between his shifts at JFK8 and his time off. Some of the employees he approached were skeptical of unions or just grateful for Amazon's health care and pay, which starts above $18 an hour at JFK8. Others were too tired and wary to engage.
The union leaders posted the TikTok videos, made outdoor s’mores, and sang along to hip-hop and Marvin Gaye. The union prayed when workers faced family crises. A group set up a fund-raising campaign after a fired employee became homeless.
The more comfortable they are with us, the easier it is for them to open up to us.
Ms. Medina said that some union sympathizers took jobs at JFK8 to help organize.
The full force of Amazon's anti-union apparatus was countered. Court documents show that it harassed workers with text messages and blanketed the warehouse with signs that said "Vote NO" or claimed the union leaders were outsiders. Managers and consultants cast doubt on the company's effort to hold more than 20 mandatory meetings a day, The Times reported last month.
One presentation said that the Amazon Labor Union had never negotiated a contract. The union has no experience managing this huge amount of money, and dues would be expensive.
A union vote is scheduled for this month at a smaller Amazon warehouse. He said that he was leaning toward voting yes because of Amazon's mandatory meetings. He wants his employer to address the question: What could you do better?
The organizers at JFK8 filed dozens of complaints with the N.L.R.B. claiming that Amazon violated workers rights to organize. The labor board pursued many of the allegations that Amazon denied.
The organizers won a major legal victory by Christmas. Amazon agreed to a nationwide settlement that said workers could stay in the buildings when they were off the clock.
The organizers moved their potlucks indoors to give them more access and legitimacy. macaroni and cheese, candied yams, collard greens and baked chicken were some of the home-cooked soul food provided by Mr. Smalls' aunt.
A lawyer who represented the organizers said that they created a community that Amazon never had for workers.
Mr. Smalls was called to the police when he brought lunch to the break room. They were arrested. The videos of the episode on TikTok have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Kathleen Lejuez, who worked for Amazon for nine years, voted for the organizing effort to send a message to the company that she felt had lost its connection to workers.
In the weeks before the election, Amazon laid the groundwork for potential challenges to the election, arguing in legal filings that the labor board had abandoned its neutrality.
Mr. Smalls sat next to Amazon's lawyer to look at the ballot. His knee moved as the votes were presented.
The votes were counted for the union and against it. With a comfortable margin secured, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Smalls and other representatives emerged into the spring light, screamed with joy and clasped one another in a tight circle.
Workers at JFK8 were watching the results in between packing and storing boxes. There wasn't a formal announcement. Instead, a shout came up from the floor: "We did it!" We won!
Noam Scheiber and Grace Ashford contributed to the report.
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