The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is making a bid to organize workers at Amazon but the contenders for the Teamsters presidency have very different ideas on how to go about it.
The Teamsters present a far more credible threat to the online shopping giant than the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which tried to unionize an Amazon distribution center in Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this year. They are more than ten times the size of RWDSU. In their June convention, the Teamsters passed a resolution to unionize Amazon to organize the unorganized and preserve existing Teamster jobs in competitive industries, such as parcel delivery and food distribution.
“If we’re negotiating substandard agreements, why would any person want to join the Teamsters union? We have to set the bar so high.”
The Teamsters began their vote for union leadership on October 4; this is the first wide-open election since 1998 when James Hoffa, the son of the legendary Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, was elected general president. All 1.4 million Teamsters are eligible to vote directly for president and general secretary-treasurer, among other leadership roles.
The candidates running for Teamster leadership are, at the top of the ticket, Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman on the reform Teamsters United slate, and Steve Vairma and Ron Herrera on the Hoffa-endorsed Teamster Power slate. O’Brien, in the first debate against Vairma, faulted the Hoffa leadership for not organizing Amazon when it was a small online bookseller twenty years ago. Now, with twenty percent of the trucking industry consisting of Amazon employees, organizing the online behemoth will be a major struggle for any union, regardless of size.
Elliot Lewis, a UPS driver in New York City and a member and alternate shop steward for Teamsters Local 804, tells The Progressive about what is at stake in organizing Amazon.
“UPS and union companies are forced to compete with Amazon, and it pushes them to try and cut our wages and push for concessions in our contracts,” Lewis says. “Amazon puts a downward pressure on wages and conditions in the industry in addition to hyper exploiting its own workers.”
According to Lewis, Amazon pays its drivers half of what UPS drivers make on average, and their workers do not get a pension. A unionized Amazon would not only create better conditions for Amazon workers, he adds, but also create more leverage for workers in the industry as a whole: Amazon workers would get higher wages, better health care, and a pension. At the same time, UPS workers would have more power in fighting for their own wages and better working conditions.
While the “United” and “Power” slates both agree that Amazon must be unionized, they have different organizing philosophies that they would bring to such a massive project.
Lewis is a member of the internal reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), and a supporter of the United slate, which has been endorsed by TDU. “Helping Amazon workers organize a union and fight for better conditions is pretty much do or die for our union,” he tells The Progressive. “I don’t think the Vairma slate takes that seriously, and the Teamsters United slate does.”
Teamsters United states in its online platform: “Amazon’s sweatshop wages and working conditions are a threat to Teamster jobs and Teamster contracts. We will build a nationwide army of member-organizers out of a successful UPS contract campaign. Amazon and other nonunion workers want to be part of a union that's standing up to the bosses and winning for workers.”
In the debate, O’Brien described the need to build worker power across the industry. The United slate wants to create a context in which Amazon workers actually want to be unionized.
“We need to negotiate strong contracts in the industries we currently represent regardless of the threat to make sure that these workers are looking at what a product looks like when you’re under a collective bargaining agreement,” O’Brien said. “If we’re negotiating concessionary contracts, if we’re negotiating substandard agreements, why would any person want to join the Teamsters union? We have to set the bar so high.”
The Power slate is somewhat more vague on details on their website. Instead of a platform, they have a page of more abstract “values.” In the debate against O’Brien, Vairma did some bureaucratic sidestepping when asked about how he would unionize Amazon.
“There’s a lot of ways we have to take on this battle with Amazon, but I can’t tip the hand, I can’t tell everybody how we’re going to do it, I can’t give the playbook to Amazon, but I believe in the director that we’ve appointed to run that vision,” Vairma said.
Overall, the United slate argued from a place of desire for greater rank-and-file militancy. It expressed a willingness to strike and to be tougher in negotiating stances. The Power slate, on the other hand, argued from a business union perspective, based on many years of experience making the hard choices inside a declining labor movement.
These differing mindsets have been in play for many years. A reform slate has run in every Teamster election for the last several decades, and TDU has been in existence since 1976. What is different this year is that the reformers appear to have the establishment on the run.
At the June 2021 Teamsters convention several internal reforms passed alongside the resolution to organize Amazon. TDU helped eliminate the two-thirds rule, which had allowed leadership to sign onto a contract even after a majority of members had voted against it.
This rule allowed James Hoffa to force through an unpopular contract with UPS in 2018, which most members had voted against. The United slate brings together TDU reformers with O’Brien, a former Hoffa appointee, who had broken ranks over the last UPS contract.
Lewis tells The Progressive that the grassroots reform movement in the Teamsters has crafted the United slate’s platform.
“The driving force in the coalition is the TDU reformers,” he says. “So the whole coalition will be held accountable to that vision of rank-and-file unionism because of that.”
After making progress at the convention, it appears the chances of a reform movement taking power and building enough rank-and-file militancy to take on Amazon are now a real possibility.