Activists protest alleged union busting and other issues outside Amazon’s 2019 shareholder meeting. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

Amazon landed in hot water this week when job posts revealed apparent details about the company’s strategies for identifying potential union activity in its workforce.

The company quickly took down the two employment ads for intelligence analysts whose duties were to include tracking “labor organizing threats,” saying they did not accurately describe the roles.

But it was just the latest illustration of the uneasy and, at times, contentious relationship between unions and one of the country’s largest private employers. Amazon has successfully avoided unions in its ranks for years, despite a workforce that includes hundreds of thousands of front-line warehouse and logistics workers.

However, labor leaders say growing scrutiny of Amazon, coupled with the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, could usher in a new era of unionization at the tech giant.

As reported by CNBC, the job posts were for intelligence analysts charged with gathering information on “sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company,” as well as protests, geopolitical crises and other risks. The analysts were to report their findings to “internal stakeholders, up to and including executive leadership,” according to one of the descriptions.

“It was made in error and has since been corrected,” said Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski of the company’s decision to remove the posts.

But labor advocates are unconvinced, given the company’s history. Adding weight to their skepticism was a surveillance tool that mysteriously cropped up on the open internet and was unearthed by Motherboard this week. According to the report, Amazon corporate employees received reports through the tool about planned strikes and organizing activity among Amazon Flex contract delivery drivers.

Levandowski confirmed the tool’s existence to GeekWire and said that Amazon will discontinue it.

“We have a variety of ways to gather driver feedback and we have teams who work every day to ensure we’re advocating to improve the driver experience, particularly through hearing from drivers directly,” she said via email. “Upon being notified, we discovered one group within our delivery team that was aggregating information from closed groups. While they were trying to support drivers, that approach doesn’t meet our standards, and they are no longer doing this as we have other ways for drivers to give us their feedback.”

Amazon has successfully kept unionizing efforts at bay throughout its 25-year history. For example, the company closed a call center in 2000 after the Communication Workers of America launched a campaign to unionize 400 customer service employees there. Amazon said at the time that the call center was closed as part of broader restructuring and layoffs.

Union advocate Marcus Courtney.

Marcus Courtney is a veteran labor advocate who helped launch the call center campaign. In an interview with GeekWire this week, he said that Amazon is employing the same approaches, 20 years later.

“They always felt that they needed to have a strategy in place to dissuade workers from organized union activity,” he said. “You saw that in 2000. That’s what they did in 2000, that’s the seed that took hold then, and that has continued with the latest revelation.”

That same year, reports surfaced about how Amazon trains managers to spot unions and provides them with anti-union materials to pass on to employees.

Four years later, Amazon warehouse technicians in Delaware petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to organize a union and held the first vote if its kind within Amazon’s fulfillment operations, according to Time magazine. Amazon and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers launched dueling lobbying campaigns. Amazon hired a law firm that specialized in helping companies subdue union activity.

Ultimately, employees voted 21-6 against joining the union.

Amazon says that its workers don’t need collective bargaining agreements because the company already offers much of what unions demand. In 2018, the company announced a landmark $15 minimum wage for all employees and in 2019, Amazon pledged to spend $700 million by 2025 to upskill a third of its American workforce. All full-time employees have access to competitive benefits and career training programs.

“Amazon respects its employees’ right to choose to join or not join a labor union,” Levandowski said. “We believe a direct open-door policy that encourages associates to bring their comments, questions and concerns directly to management is the best relationship we can have with our associates.”

Despite those policies, three major unions are working to organize Amazon employees today. The Teamsters, United Food & Commercial Workers Union, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union have supported strikes and collective bargaining campaigns in recent years.

Campaigns to organize Whole Foods and Amazon warehouse workers are ongoing, confirmed Chelsea Connor, director of communications for RWDSU. She declined to comment further or make members of the campaigns available for interviews, out of concern that those interviews could jeopardize the efforts.

The unionization campaigns come as Amazon faces increased scrutiny over its treatment of the blue-collar workers that power its delivery infrastructure. Warehouse workers across Europe and the U.S. have held strikes and walkouts demanding better pay and more forgiving standards.

The coronavirus pandemic turned up the heat this year as COVID-19 outbreaks at Amazon warehouses across the country grabbed headlines. From the beginning, Amazon has declined to disclose the number of cases in its workforce, drawing criticism from employees and activists demanding more transparency.

In the spring, Amazon found itself navigating employee safety concerns and a huge spike in orders from customers who turned to the online shopping giant to avoid risking exposure to the virus in brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon hired an additional 175,000 employees to keep up with demand and posted $5.2 billion in profits in the second quarter of this year, doubling its bottom line from the same quarter a year ago, despite spending more than $4 billion on COVID-19 initiatives.

Customers flocking to Amazon during the pandemic have been an undeniable financial boon, but their increasing reliance on the company could also be a liability, according to Courtney.

“If you think about labor history and where unions took hold, you think about the automobile plants,” he said. “You had Ford, GM. You had Boeing … critical industries to the success of the nation. The technology industry, up until the moment of COVID, has never been put in the context of a critical national industry that is vital to the success of our country, for the economy, for people outside of it, and broader. I think that is ultimately why unionization will take hold inside of this sector.”

Labor organizers in Amazon’s blue collar workforce are also getting support from their white collar counterparts, a new trend that could make Amazon’s anti-union attitude a greater liability.

Tech workers at Amazon have been organizing around climate change and social justice issues for more than a year, including supporting walkouts and protests at warehouses in recent months. In June, the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice hosted a virtual walkout after several activist tech employees and warehouse workers were fired.

Underpinning these shifting dynamics is the upcoming presidential election. Vice President Joe Biden is campaigning, in part, on a plan to bolster unions that won support from the AFL-CIO.

“No successful unionization happens without active government support of it,” Courtney said. “Amazon, looking forward to the future, … sees that if there is a change in administrations, that that administration is more likely to [support] the formation of unions in the nation’s critical industries and now the technology industry is that.”

If Biden wins the presidency, Courtney predicted, Amazon’s decades-long record of keeping unions at bay could come to an end.

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