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NY Times, May 17 2016
Amazon Proves Infertile Soil for Unions, So Far
By NICK WINGFIELD
SEATTLE — In early April, Kellen Wadach, the general manager at Amazon’s
warehouse in Middletown, Del., told hundreds of workers at the cavernous
facility a troubling story about his family being abandoned by his
father’s union.
Flashing a photograph of himself as a boy with his father, Mr. Wadach
said the union did not help his family financially after his father died
suddenly in front of their house, not even bothering to send a
condolence card, according to three current workers at the warehouse who
heard him speak and asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
The problem with Mr. Wadach’s story was that much of it appears to have
been untrue.
For years, Amazon has successfully battled to keep unions out of the
company. And the incident involving Mr. Wadach was an illustration of
how important it was to Amazon — or at least to some of its employees —
to keep it that way.
Just days after a reporter approached Amazon about inconsistencies in
Mr. Wadach’s story, Scott Stanzel, an Amazon spokesman, said Mr. Wadach
was no longer with the company.
Mr. Wadach did not respond to repeated messages sent to his email
address and Facebook account. A voice mail message left at a listed
number for his mother was not returned.
In the United States, Amazon employs more than 90,000 people in what the
company calls fulfillment centers, giant warehouses where customer
orders are prepared and shipped.
Some Amazon fulfillment center workers see unions as a way to gain more
influence on pay, how job assignments are doled out and the handling of
workplace complaints. Amazon worries unions will burden its operations
with red tape, hurting the nimbleness of facilities it is constantly
adjusting to be more efficient with robots and other innovations.
“Amazon’s culture and business model are based on rapid innovation,
flexibility and open lines of direct communication between managers and
associates,” Mr. Stanzel said. “This direct connection is the most
effective way to understand and respond to the wants and needs of our
associates.”
Union officials think Amazon fights so hard to keep them at bay to
prevent a domino effect among its warehouses.
“This is Amazon’s biggest fear,” said Andy Powell, a district organizer
for the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers who
is trying to organize Amazon fulfillment center workers in Delaware and
several nearby states. “The minute one falls and people see they got a
better deal, it’s going to be a cancer for them.”
Unions have not made much progress at Amazon after years of campaigns,
which union officials and warehouse workers blame partly on the high
turnover rate in its fulfillment centers.
A labor union in Germany has organized frequent strikes over pay and
workplace conditions by a portion of workers at Amazon fulfillment
centers in the country, though workers do not have a union contract with
the company.
In 2014, the machinists union helped organize a union vote by a small
number of technicians and mechanics who worked on order-fulfillment
equipment at the fulfillment center in Middletown, a community of about
19,000 about a half-hour from Wilmington.
It was the first vote of its kind at an Amazon warehouse, but workers
voted 21 to 6 to reject the plan, which was opposed by Amazon. The
company said there were about 3,000 full-time workers at the facility.
Since late fall, representatives of the machinists union, including Mr.
Powell, have passed out leaflets at a busy intersection outside the
fulfillment center. Some employees at the facility have encouraged
co-workers to consider the potential benefits of joining a union.
In many cases, pay and benefits are not even the top concerns of workers
— pay at the Middletown warehouse starts around $13 an hour and health
care and parental leave benefits are the same for warehouse workers as
they are for senior executives at Amazon. The company said full-time
workers at the facility made, on average, over $15 an hour in overall
compensation when including base pay, bonuses and stock awards.
But workers want things like better protection from termination and
mechanisms for contesting favoritism by managers. Mr. Stanzel said the
company had a process for employees to appeal terminations and an
open-door policy that encourages workers to bring their concerns to
managers.
Like many other companies, Amazon employs standard “union avoidance”
techniques, telling workers in gatherings that they will no longer be
able to communicate directly with Amazon if a union represents them,
union officials said. Around Christmas last year, managers began making
the rounds at the Middletown warehouse, questioning workers on their
thoughts about unions, said employees at the warehouse.
Last June, Scott Gragilla, a former Amazon fulfillment center employee
at the warehouse, began asking questions about why workers were not
receiving bonuses they had gotten in the past. Not long after, he said,
he was reprimanded for his job performance for the first time.
Mr. Gragilla, 38, worked as a picker, someone who gathers items from
shelves for Amazon orders, and eventually was promoted to “ambassador,”
an employee who leads training sessions for other employees.
He began openly promoting the idea of unionizing the warehouse to
co-workers. But in early December, Mr. Gragilla said he was told he was
being fired by Amazon for his work performance, including leaving early
for his lunch break and failing to return after being ordered back to
work by two managers. He denies either is true.
Amazon maintains that no employee has ever been terminated as a result
of union activity, said Mr. Stanzel, the company spokesman.
Mr. Gragilla filed a complaint about his termination with the National
Labor Relations Board. He said he was unable to gather enough former
co-workers from the Amazon fulfillment center to testify on his behalf,
and the board declined to take the case to a judge.
Mr. Wadach’s emotional story, after those months of union activity,
aroused suspicions among employees who were skeptical that a union would
act so callously.
Word of the story got to the machinists union, which found an obituary
in The Ithaca Journal in New York on April 20, 2006, that said Mr.
Wadach’s father, Peter Dana Wadach, had died while jogging on a family
vacation in South Carolina — not in front of the family home, as Mr.
Wadach had said.
The obituary and another news story said Peter Wadach was a partner at
an insurance agency in Ithaca and had worked in the insurance business
for nearly three decades. He was 49 when he died.
Amazon declined to discuss details of Kellen Wadach’s departure from the
company.
Charlotte Garden, an associate professor of law at the Seattle
University School of Law, said Mr. Wadach’s story, odd as it may have
been, would probably not reach a legal threshold for “coercive” behavior.
“That’s a pretty high bar,” she said. “That means a lot of employer
persuader activity is lawful.”
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