Unions Can Organize High-Turnover Workplaces
Organizing workplaces like Amazon with enormous turnover is a steep challenge. But workers there and elsewhere are experimenting with different tactics to unionize despite the churn.
Amazon warehouse workers protest Amazon’s unfair labor practices and shameful response to workers’ demands for better, safer jobs with fair wages and an end to retaliation at Amazon Air Hub on Friday, October 14, 2022 in San Bernardino, CA. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
When the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over one thousand of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.”
The sky-high turnover at the eight-thousand-worker fulfillment center on New York’s Staten Island, made collecting cards “a race against Amazon firing everyone,” she said.
Amazon has annual turnover of 150 percent. “They design the productivity quota, the rates system, to be a constant speedup situation, and that makes it hard to keep the job,” said Medina, who still works at the warehouse. Several ALU leaders have been fired.
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