Recent US Union Victories At Amazon, Starbucks, and Others

Last year, 10.3 percent of pay and salary employees in the United States were union members – less than half the 1983 rate – while union membership in the private sector, which includes Amazon and Starbucks Corp, was only 6.1 percent. In January and February of this year, there were 149 union elections, compared to 103 in the same two months last year.

The following is a list of important recent union wins.

AMAZON

Workers at an Amazon.com plant on Staten Island, New York, voted on Friday to become a union, making it the online retailer's first unionized site in the United States.

The creation of a new, independent union at the No. 2 private company in the United States adds to previous victories for labor organizers in new areas. Not all labor campaigns succeed, as seen by the early outcome of a vote count among Amazon warehouse employees in Alabama.

STARBUCKS

Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, was recently formed by employees at ten Starbucks stores in the United States. Five are located in Buffalo, New York; two are located in Mesa, Arizona; one is located in Seattle, starbucks; and one is located in Knoxville, Tennessee.

As of Friday, at least 170 further petitions for elections had been filed. Over a dozen other cafés will conduct ballot counting in the coming weeks.

Starbucks defeated a union at one of its Buffalo locations.

The New York Times

The New York Times' around 600 designers, software engineers, data analysts, and other technology staff voted in March to join the NewsGuild of New York, which has won a number of previous elections over the last two years.

The March results established the biggest union of bargaining-united technology workers in the United States. Additionally, the NewsGuild represents Reuters journalists based in the United States.

GOOGLE FIBER

Contractors in Kansas City, Missouri, for Google Fiber, a high-speed internet service owned by Alphabet Inc, voted last week to unionize. While just ten employees were participating, it was the inaugural bargaining unit of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU).

The AWU claims to have grown to 800 members in less than a year since its inception, although those members lack the right to collective bargaining.

INDUSTRY OF CANNABIS

The United Food and Commercial Workers unionized cannabis lab Sonoma Lab Works and cannabis producer CannaCraft Manufacturing in June.

As the number of cannabis cultivators and dispensaries has increased, so has the number of union campaigns in the business. The UFCW said that it has grown to become the biggest union representing cannabis workers in the United States, with more than 10,000 members.

VALLEY OF SILICON

Kickstarter workers chose to become a union in 2020, making it the first large technology business to do so. Workers at Mapbox, a location data business, lost their effort to organize a union in August.