Opinion | Maybe Amazon Shouldn’t Have Dissed Its Own Workers

What makes this all the more remarkable is the extent to which the Amazon Labor Union had no formal ties to (or assistance from) more established unions. This was the bottom-up triumph of an independent organization, something very rare in American labor history, especially in light of the size of the shop in question, with its thousands and thousands of workers organized into 24/7 coverage.

There has already been a wealth of commentary and reporting on the meaning of this win for organized labor, on the prospects for unionizing other Amazon warehouses and on the specifics of the organizing effort itself. To these, I would like to add a few observations about the structural factors that helped make this victory possible.

To start, there is the economy. Even with rising inflation, this is the strongest economy we’ve had for workers in at least a generation. Overall, in 2021 the United States added more than 6.4 million jobs to its economy, an all-time high. At the start of this year, the nation’s labor market was on track to recover from the pandemic three times faster than it did from the Great Recession a decade earlier. And it still is: The United States added 431,000 jobs in March and 95,000 more than previously recognized for the months of January and February, both of which also saw record job growth. Unemployment has dropped below 4 percent, the lowest since the economic boom of the 1990s, and wages are growing this year at an annual rate of more than 5 percent.

Employers can go ahead and threaten to fire workers who try to unionize, even if these threats are illegal, but the tight market for labor gives those workers other options, which makes the threat less potent than it might have been when the economy was weaker and jobs were scarce. On the flip side, a red-hot labor market means that employers who want to fire employees are hamstrung by the fact that they may not be able to replace them with new workers. This, on its own, gives workers leverage where they may have previously possessed very little.

Additional leverage, for Amazon workers in particular, comes from the nature of the enterprise itself. In theory, Amazon could simply close a warehouse that voted to unionize, in the same way that a 20th-century textile company might have shut down a mill or moved it rather than face an organized work force. But the value of Amazon’s shipping business rests on its ability to deliver packages as quickly as possible, which means that the products must be as physically close to customers as is feasible. The very thing that makes Amazon what it is — its ubiquitous presence across the American landscape — also makes it vulnerable to those workers who are able to organize themselves.