Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskwon an unexpected victory at8, an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, to form the company’s first union in America. President Joe Biden has met Mr Smalls and told him: “You’re my kind of trouble.” One reason these unions have found success is that they have chosen to focus on organising workers within single firms rather than those across an entire industry.
Their names tell the story. Older unions have often had long names that describe their sectors—sometimes a mouthful . This reflected their ambition. They wanted to win collective agreements covering all workers in an industry, to drive up wages and improve conditions across the board. But new unions are shunning complex monikers and using company names instead, such as Target Workers Unite .
Anastasia Christman of the National Employment Law Project, a think-tank, suggests that this helps target workers who lack experience of unions. Mr Smalls sought to distance’s name helped to create a shared identity rooted in the warehouse and not in a remote sectoral union. Using company names makes it harder for firms to distance themselves from “independent contractors”. Instead, through their union’s branding, workers “insist on their identity as employees”, argues Ms Christman. Borrowing their employer’s brand also helps them alert consumers to the idea it could be associated with labour exploitation, says Catherine Fisk, director of the Berkeley Centre for Law and Work.5 warehouse, in New York, voted against forming a union.
democrats control and corrupt unions