Amazon workers at JFK8, the company’s Staten Island warehouse that voted to unionise earlier this year, held a sit-in, strike on Monday after a fire broke out in the warehouse.
Seth Goldstein, a lawyer for the Amazon Labour Union (ALU), said that a machine had been causing problems and smoking for weeks before Monday, according to employees in the warehouse. Goldstein was told Amazon had poured water on the machine to stop the smoke.
Goldstein said: ‘God forbid they have to replace the machine and lose their profits.
‘One of the reasons people are unionising at Amazon is because the employer cares about profits, and doesn’t care about their lives.
‘Nobody else in New York would tolerate this. I’m calling out to New York, to the Department of Labour, to the Fire Department, to make sure workers have safety when they go into work.’
Meanwhile, employees who worked at the Starbucks location on the Country Club Plaza in Independence near Kansas City, Missouri, gathered outside the store on Monday to protest the company’s decision to close the store and sack the entire workforce.
The coffee shop closed suddenly on Monday afternoon, surprising many employees.
Addy Wright, who had worked for Starbucks for three years, said that management communicated the closure to employees via video chat.
She said: ‘There was no compassion or empathy there.’
Wright and a dozen other employees picketed outside the closed storefront.
Many held signs criticising the coffee chain. Wright’s read ‘Starbucks Corporate is Cowardly.’
A sign outside the restaurant said the location would be closed permanently, but did not give a reason.
Employees said management had told them the closure was due to safety concerns, specifically a shooting at a nearby parking garage earlier in August.
Wright pointed out that the restaurant had stayed open that day, and that prior violent incidents on the Plaza had not led to any closures.
Wright added: ‘I don’t understand why this incident, which had no direct impact on any of the workers, influenced them to make this decision without input from the workers.’
The Country Club Plaza location was among the first in the Kansas City area to unionise.
Many of the employees suggested the closure may be a union-busting tool.
In late September, Starbucks said it wanted to start contract negotiations at the hundreds of stores that have voted to unionise.
Elsewhere, workers are unionising in fields where they haven’t had a big presence, including world-class cultural institutions.
Staff at around two dozen museums across the United States have joined unions since 2019, according to a National Public Radio (NPR) analysis of news reports and announcements.
An ongoing strike at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is emblematic of the tensions driving this movement.
One common thread, union organisers say, is the contradiction that comes from working with priceless pieces of art or history while struggling to pay your bills.
Adam Rizzo, museum educator and president of the PMA union, said: ‘A lot of people say, ‘You can’t eat prestige. I think that’s true.’
Like other professional workers who recently unionised, such as architects, museum workers point to the expensive degrees their jobs require when demanding higher pay.
Rizzo added: ‘We don’t make enough money to actually pay off our student loans to buy a house.
Workers at this museum make about 30 per cent less on average compared to institutions of a similar size and budget, based on figures from an industry-wide survey, according to the union.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a $600 million grant and a $60 million annual budget, according to financial documents on its website.
In 2020, workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art voted to join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union representing employees in charities, government and the arts.
Since then they have been negotiating with management over a first contract. Sticking points remain around salary, benefits and hours.
Management has offered rises adding up to 11 per cent by July 1st, 2024, as well as four weeks of parental leave, among other proposals.
But the workers say these raises are cancelled out by high inflation, and don’t fix the underlying low salaries.
On September 26th, the local union branch of around 180 people went on strike.
Museum seamstress Beth Paolini, one of the workers picketing last Wednesday outside the museum’s north entrance, has worked there for more than 17 years and earns less than $50,000 annually.
Paolini said: ‘I have never in all the years I have worked here gotten any kind of promotional raise.’
Museums last saw a wave of union activism in the 1970s and ‘80s.
That’s when many began offering educational programming and hiring teachers, some who had previously had union representation, according to Laura-Edythe Coleman, assistant professor of Arts Administration and Museum Leadership at Drexel University.
In this wave, the organising tools are different.
Online spaces for museum workers to vent and share information have cropped up, such as Museum Workers Speak and the Art + Museum Transparency spreadsheet, an online document launched in 2019 where museum workers could anonymously disclose their salaries.
Coleman said: ‘Suddenly museum workers were able to see vast differences in pay between people who worked in the same jobs, in the same institutions sometimes, but also across institutions.’
The spreadsheet helped fire up museum employees in Philadelphia.
Nicole Cook, programme manager for graduate academic partnerships at the art museum and one of the people who helped compile the data, said: ‘That’s how I learned that I was actually making less than some of the fellows who I was meant to be advising.’
Workers at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City held protests earlier this year, and employees at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston staged a one-day walkout in November 2021, as both pursued their first contracts.
But the Philadelphia walkout appears to be the longest strike by US museum workers in recent history.
Coleman added: ‘This is the loudest, longest strike that I’ve seen.’
The museum is staying open during the strike, and says non-union strike breakers are covering the roles of some strikers.
It repeatedly declined to comment when asked if outside workers were brought in to mount a new Matisse exhibit, which the union raised concerns about.
Aside from this one fight, there’s also a bigger strategy.
The number of unionised professional or technical workers has increased over time, according to data from the AFL-CIO trade union federation, even as the total proportion of the national workforce that is unionised has declined.
Organising one workplace can serve as an example for other similar workplaces to do the same.
Rizzo concluded: ‘All of these wonderful institutions are experiencing what we’re experiencing and I think workers have just had enough.’
Last year, employees at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology voted to join them.
The cafeteria workers at the autonomous driving tech company, Waymo, are forming a union that makes them the latest group of people to organise at one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies.
Waymo’s food service personnel are also following in the footsteps of the 4,000 Google cafeteria workers who quietly unionised during the Covid-19 pandemic. The driving tech company used to be an experimental unit under Google before it became an Alphabet subsidiary.
Like Google’s other food service workers, Waymo’s are employed by contracting firm Sodexo.
Workers cited the high cost of living in the Bay Area where Alphabet’s offices are located as the reason why they want to unionise.
They said their $24-per-hour pay isn’t enough to live adequately in the city, where rents are astronomical, and that their health plan is prohibitively expensive.
The workers are also asking for better treatment and benefits, since they don’t enjoy the same perks as full-time Alphabet employees.
Organisers for the unionisation efforts at Waymo said that they’ve already gathered signatures from the majority of the workers.
- Strikes continue at Sysco, the Houston, Texas-based food service company after they were unable to reach an agreement with the Teamsters union.
Around 1,000 workers at sites in Syracuse, New York, Plympton, Massachusetts and at three sites in New Hampshire will be balloted for more strike dates in November.
The Teamsters called the strike because of low wages and also as the company has tried to stop the workforce from joining a trade union.
In 2021 Sysco made $528 million worth of profits.
