Can Amazon’s labor foes regroup?

Hi, it’s Matt in Seattle. A year ago Saturday, Amazon lost its biggest labor battle to date. Still, the company may be winning the war. But [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Matt in Seattle. A year ago Saturday, Amazon lost its biggest labor battle to date. Still, the company may be winning the war. But first... Today’s must-reads: • Alibaba’s [breakup has ramifications for China tech]( • Elon Musk [urged a halt on chatbot development]( • Apple [moved into K-pop]( Help us make this newsletter better by [filling out this survey]( The dominoes didn’t fall On April 1, 2022, the Amazon Labor Union won the right to represent more than 8,000 workers at the e-commerce giant’s JFK8 warehouse in New York City. The win — by an upstart, against a vehemently anti-union company, in a country where organized labor has declined for decades — was David besting Goliath and seemed to foreshadow a wave of Amazon organizing across the country. (As we [put it](: “Amazon Union Win in NYC Holds Potential to Spread Far and Wide.”)  Today, that victory stands alone. The ALU was soundly defeated in two subsequent votes at other New York warehouses. A re-run election at a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, remains too close to call as Amazon.com Inc. and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union battle in court. Organizing drives have popped up in places like California, Minnesota, North Carolina and Washington state. But none have made it to an election. If JFK8 was the first domino, the others haven’t started falling.  Now the labor movement, which always knew organizing Amazon would be a slog, must contend with more bad news: The ALU itself is fraying. I first wrote last July about [concerns raised]( by current and former members, who said the union lacked a coherent strategy and wasn’t able to offer much aid to other Amazon organizing drives. Some worried that Chris Smalls, the fired Amazon junior manager who founded and runs the union, seemed more interested in a semi-permanent roadshow of rallies and speaking gigs than the grind of organizing. Those concerns have deepened since. Last week, the New York Times [reported]( that critics of the ALU’s approach now include former members of the group’s executive board and a growing slate of its longest-standing organizers. Some say Smalls consolidated power undemocratically and that his travels have indeed come at the expense of organizing. “I didn’t get the support that was promised,” Heather Goodall, the leader of a [failed ALU campaign](bbg://news/stories/RJYI7FT0AFB5) to organize a warehouse outside of Albany, New York, told me. The stalled momentum is not all down to internal politics. Amazon has fought back. Ferociously so, organizers say, with mandatory anti-union meetings and $1,000-a-day “union buster” consultants. The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that some of Amazon’s conduct was illegal. The NLRB [said last week](bbg://screens/%7BNSN%20RRY28PDWX2PS%20%3CGO%3E%7D) that Amazon’s decision to cut off employee access to company facilities on days when they weren’t working discriminated against union supporters. Amazon denies violating labor law and says the rule was put in place for safety. The upshot of the endless legal jousting: no contract talks for the foreseeable future. The environment for organizers has changed, too. The highest inflation in decades means paychecks don’t go quite as far. For some, living precariously is a reason to band with coworkers and demand a raise. For others, it only adds to the pressure to keep your head down. It’s also an open question how much the high-profile union drives of the last few years were fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic’s workplace hazards and the increased attention paid to critical jobs in logistics and retail.  Despite landmark wins at places like Apple Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Trader Joe’s, union membership fell in 2022 as more people entered the workforce. Just 10.1% of all US wage and salary workers were members of unions, down from 10.3% in 2021 and the lowest rate on record going back 40 years. Union workers earn about 18% more than their non-union counterparts, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  A New York magazine photo last April captures Smalls and 19 compatriots, standing together at the bus stop where they first persuaded coworkers to form a union. Fresh off their surprise triumph, the ALU was gearing up for its second election, at another Staten Island facility. (“The results could signal an organizing wave on the horizon,” the [story predicted](.)  The ALU lost that vote, of course. And more than half of the people in the photo have since left the union or are at odds with Smalls over the group’s strategy, current and former ALU members said. Smalls, as he has done in the past when questioned by associates, dismissed the criticism and downplayed his critics’ contributions to the ALU. “None of them represent my union,” he said in an interview. “I have the same core that was there in 2020 when I walked out,” Smalls said. “As long as we’re together, this movement doesn’t die.” —[Matt Day](mailto:mday63@bloomberg.net), with Spencer Soper The big story Politicians called the Silicon Valley Bank collapse the “first Twitter-fueled bank run.” It wasn’t. Instead, growing anxiety about the bank’s finances [unfolded on WhatsApp and other private forums](. Get fully charged NetEase, China’s second-biggest gaming company, is focusing on serving up original hits to fans at home and abroad after [terminating its 14-year partnership with America’s Blizzard Entertainment](. Google pulled back the curtain on its advertising system, rolling out a [tool similar to one offered by Meta](. Security researchers said free AI programs, which many major tech companies are scrambling to adopt, [could be prone to risks](. Germany’s technology lobby said a planned law designed to lower hurdles for immigrant skilled workers [falls short](. The UK’s antitrust agency will probe Broadcom’s proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud-computing company VMware, an acquisition that is [already under scrutiny from regulators in Brussels](. More from Bloomberg Listen: [Foundering: The John McAfee Story]( is a new six-part podcast series retracing the life, the myths and the self-destruction of a Silicon Valley icon. 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