What Could the ALU’s Affiliation With Teamsters Mean for Labor?

In recent years, Amazon has exemplified the relentless pursuit of profit maximization, using cutting-edge technology to streamline operations while exploiting a nonunionized workforce. This model has allowed Amazon to amass significant wealth and power on the backs of its workforce. The company has become a focal point for unionization efforts, as reaching a first collective bargaining agreement with Amazon would not only transform the working conditions for its over 1 million employees, but also challenge this hyperexploitative framework — having implications for the logistics industry and the working class as a whole.

Among the various sectors attempting to unionize Amazon workers, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully established the first union at Amazon in 2022, has made a significant move by affiliating with the Teamsters union, which represents 1.3 million workers, most of them related to the logistics and freight industry. This alliance has ignited considerable debate within labor circles: Should the ALU have remained independent? Can it maintain autonomy within the Teamsters, or will it be subsumed by the union’s top-down bureaucracy? Can the ALU secure a contract on its own, or does it need the backing of a larger organization? What’s the potential firepower of Amazon and UPS workers united under one union? Furthermore, does this affiliation present an opportunity to infuse more leftist and radical elements into the Teamsters? Through these questions, we delve into the implications of this recent affiliation and its potential impact on the broader labor movement.

Amazon Labor Union

On April 1, 2022, Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, New York, made history by voting to unionize. Leading the charge against the second-largest US employer were Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, workers at JFK8, who took up a union campaign after Smalls was unjustly fired after organizing a walkout during the pandemic. This victory marked the formation of the first US union in Amazon’s history, as the workers established the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU). The news reverberated globally, signifying a major breakthrough in labor organizing.

Their win ignited a wave of labor organizing, inspiring a new generation of workers to form new unions and democratize existing ones. This new moment for labor must be viewed in the broader context of a shift in working-class consciousness brought on by the pandemic, which exposed workers’ essential role as the backbone of society. Simultaneously, the country witnessed the massive Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, which spread across the world. Despite efforts by union leaderships to keep the movements separate, the BLM movement profoundly influenced vast sectors of the working class — especially at Amazon, whose warehouse workers are mainly Black and immigrant workers.

Expectations soared after the JFK8 victory, but the reality unfolded differently. Two years later, the JFK8 warehouse remains Amazon’s only unionized workplace in the United States. The ALU faced setbacks, losing elections at LDJ5 in Staten Island and ALB1 near Albany. These outcomes were shaped by intense union-busting campaigns by the company, but also reflected the shortcomings of ALU’s strategies under Chris Smalls’s leadership.

The ALU, led by Chris Smalls, made missteps early on. Smalls guided the ALU with a strategy that hinged on a mix of factors: widespread disdain for Jeff Bezos, the significant impact of the ALU’s initial victory, Smalls’s public persona, and support from progressive Democrats. But taking on a trillion-dollar company such as Amazon is a herculean task, one that cannot rely on these elements alone. Missing from the ALU’s strategy was sustained grassroots organizing, direct action, and, most importantly, workers’ democracy and class independence.

This summer, the ALU will elect a new union leadership, and Smalls will not run for president or any other position. Yet, despite his imminent detachment from the thousands of Amazon workers at JFK8, Smalls recently signed an agreement with the Teamsters to move forward with a membership-affiliation vote. Amazon workers first learned about this negotiation through the Teamsters’ social media accounts, which misleadingly suggested the affiliation was already complete.

The Teamsters rushed this process for several reasons, one being to secure the agreement before Smalls left the ALU; negotiating with the reform caucus slate could have led to more challenging negotiations for the Teamsters. In this situation, the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus had to take a rushed decision and decided to support the affiliation and encourage Amazon workers to vote in favor of affiliating with the Teamsters.

True to their style, the Teamsters published a statement claiming “a near-unanimous 98.3 percent in favor.” But they omitted that only 829 of the roughly 5,500 to 6000 Amazon warehouse workers at JFK8 participated in the vote — a stark contrast to the historic union vote in 2022, which saw over 4,800 workers casting ballots. The fact that the Teamsters initiated this affiliation with maneuvers and rushed what should have been a participatory, democratic, and formative decision already highlights the contradictions and limitations the ALU will face within the Teamsters.

Affiliating With the Teamsters

The affiliation agreement charters a new local, known as Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ALU-IBT Local 1), for the five boroughs of New York City.

Back in 2022, the victory of the ALU was seen as a fresh and encouraging union drive, organized by workers and fired workers with few resources and without the weight of a traditional union. This success demonstrated that the low unionization rate in the U.S., currently under 10 percent, is a result not only of anti-union laws and union-busting tactics but also of the adaptation and lack of interest from big unions in organizing the working class.

Meanwhile, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) is at a crossroads. Amazon’s practices, particularly its rapid technological advancements and unchecked exploitation of its massive workforce, threaten the jobs of unionized workers at UPS. For the IBT, unionizing Amazon has become essential for its survival. The IBT has a strong incentive to invest in organizing Amazon, since its existence as a union depends on it.

Many union organizers support the ALU’s affiliation with the Teamsters, arguing that without resources, staff, and structure, winning a strong contract against a giant like Amazon is impossible. This perspective places more faith in a bureaucratic apparatus rather than in the creativity and power of the working class. Ultimately, the decision to join a larger union or remain independent is a tactical one. Both paths require rank-and-file members to take their struggle into their own hands, make decisions democratically, and strategize their fight against Amazon. It is their jobs, livelihoods, and futures that are at stake.

Joining a larger union is no silver bullet. The potential power of a union is not the same as its power under top-down leadership. It remains to be seen how much the Teamsters will boost or hinder organizing efforts at Amazon and how “pre-Teamsters” union organizing there can influence the Teamsters. The Amazon workers will bring in an enormous workforce to the union that, depending on its politics and organizing, could change and fundamentally challenge the union and its structure.

The affiliation with ALU and Teamsters carries enormous potential. With over 1 million Amazon workers who are yet to be organized, this affiliation could generate the firepower to fight for greater numbers of Amazon warehouses and distribution centers to unionize as well. This unity of Amazon workers with the other 300,000 UPS workers would represent a huge step in organizing the logistics sector — a sector that is critical to today’s capitalism and strategically powerful for the labor movement.

This new union organizing at Amazon has also presented an opportunity to discuss concrete examples of how to build workers’ democracy in our unions, challenging the top-down union leaderships. Union constitutions, as one example, could be developed from below in democratic assemblies, and voted on by the rank and file. Workers could advocate for democratic measures like union elected officials earning the same wage as Amazon workers, rotating the president’s position to avoid entrenchment, developing new worker leaders, and pledging unity with the international working class. A democratic union constitution fully written by Amazon workers could encourage other workers to reform and democratize their unions.

These powerful ideas about workers’ democracy are not just “the right thing to do,” but actually represent a strategic necessity for the working class — democratically discussing strategy and decisions, fighting for our own demands, and refusing concessions by top-down leaders.

With all this in mind, it’s important to note that Local 1 will represent the first ALU-IBT affiliate established under the Teamsters’ constitution, likely limiting the space for constitutional discussion and other democratic demands.

The Teamsters Under Sean O’Brien

The ALU Reform Caucus now finds itself in a complicated situation. On the one hand, it must reorganize the JFK8; on the other hand, it must answer some difficult questions: Why did the union fail to make meaningful progress in fighting for a contract under Smalls? Why did the union need a strategic shift? What does it mean to affiliate with the Teamsters? And how will it organize democratically from below to secure a contract and build a fighting union?

Yet Amazon workers’ affiliating with the Teamsters should not mean being uncritical of the union’s leadership; nor does it mean ignoring or postponing the discussion of the contradictions involved in joining the Teamsters. We need to be clear: Teamsters president Sean O’Brien is neither a role model of union leadership nor an example of working-class independence.

First, this was made abundantly clear with O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican National Committee. Under O’Brien, the Teamsters have donated over $40,000 to the Republican Party, had meetings with Trump and his people, and recently praised Trump and Vance at the RNC. This convention represents the most conservative, right-wing, anti-worker, and anti-immigrant elements of the capitalists’ agenda. O’Brien’s appearance hurts the unity of the working class.

As we explain in this article, O’Brien in a clear example of business unionism. In his speech, while criticizing multinational companies and “apologists,” O’Brien pointed out that profits can still soar at companies with good union jobs, boasting UPS’ worldwide efficiency as an example, not mentioning that one of the key secrets for its success has been the hyper exploitation of warehouse workers historically allowed by the Teamsters union.

Second, it’s important to have an honest balance sheet from the UPS contract struggle. As a warehouse worker, I wrote an article about it called “A Power Restrained: Lessons from the Front Lines of the UPS Contract Struggle,” that goes more into the details. We can also take a look at these comments by Sam Gindin and Jane McAlevey, who recently passed.

Sam Gindin wrote for Jacobin, “The union made big gains — but in opting not to strike over demands beyond wages, the Teamsters may have passed up a transformative opportunity for the labor movement.”

Gindin further raises an important question regarding warehouse workers:

the reprehensible secondary status for part-time workers — generally the “inside” workers in the warehouses and a majority of the union members at UPS — remains firmly in place, and the promise of more full-time jobs is little more than a paper commitment. Also, warehouse workers saw little or no attention paid to their working conditions. How then do supporters of democracy and militancy so readily accept a settlement, resolved without a strike, that limits workers’ active resistance for five years?

McAlevey wrote in the Nation,

As a movement, we need to remain sharply aware of moments when we have sufficient leverage to set new standards and pay it forward, rather than limiting ourselves to restoring previous gains. … UPS workers right now are in a strategically advantageous position, coming out of the height of the pandemic with UPS reporting record-shattering profits, while shareholders and the CEO gorge on the money made by an exhausted rank and file whose sweat and suffering earned the bosses that money — and with the country as a whole facing a tight labor market, and massive pro-worker and anti–greedy CEO sentiment flaring up with each strike workers are waging in sector after sector.

Third, one of the most important struggles taken up by the labor movement these last nine months has been the fight against the genocide in Palestine, which puts the rank and file in direct confrontation with the Biden administration and with union leaderships. One if its greatest chapters was written by the University of California student workers, who went on strike against the repression of the pro-Palestine movement and the genocide.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, not only have the Teamsters failed to mobilize their membership to oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but they have not even done the bare minimum of issuing a statement against it. Instead, O’Brien has shaken hands with the two presidential candidates who support Israel’s massacre of the Palestinian people. Neither Genocide Joe nor Trump represent a progressive alternative for the Palestinian people, nor the working class here in the United States. The upcoming elections reflect a shift to the right in the political situation, and as the working class, we have to prepare to fight back with our own perspective and methods of struggle.

In this context, Amazon workers need to know what they are getting into from the jump. Explaining the contradictions and bureaucratic tendencies among the Teamsters leadership later in the game, when a crisis erupts, might be too late. Rather than confusing workers by putting forward uncritical support toward the Teamsters affiliation, a clear assessment of the possibilities and contradictions will better guide Amazon workers. As the recent presidential debate and its aftermath have exposed, the working class needs to show an alternative with a clear and class-independent solution.

Organizing at Amazon is not easy. Its empire has been built on grueling working conditions, union busting, high turnover, workforce flexibilization, and exhausting long shifts. Amazon’s legacy has been built on a foundation of precarity for its workforce.

As Josefina Martinez explains,

Although Amazon workers (and logistics workers generally) occupy a key strategic position, this does not automatically mean greater power vis-a-vis the company. In order to make use of this advantage, it is necessary, first of all, to go beyond the methods of “traditional unionism” or the old union bureaucracies, to recover combative forms of struggle, to unite the demands of permanent and temporary workers, native-born and migrant workers, warehouse workers and transport workers, to be able to articulate a powerful force that truly challenge the company.

The workers’ movement of 2023 — which culminated in the UAW stand-up strike — showed us that strikes work, that we have the power to throw a wrench into the massive profits that bosses obtain from squeezing our last drops of sweat. The working class has shown that is ready to fight, but while the working class has advanced as a social force and have begun to rupture with its traditional representatives — as shown by the twin phenomena of the rise of Trumpism and Sanderism (which was consumed by the Democratic Party) — the working class has not taken on yet its own subjectivity outside the context of the bipartisan regime.

As O’Brien’s appearance at the RNC shows, our struggle at workplaces is crossed by politics. As we explained in a previous article, “For us, there is a different alternative: to be truly independent from the Democrats and the Republicans, and from the ruling class, which is served by all capitalist political parties. This alternative requires advancing as a class-independent political subject that can command our own political destiny outside of — and in direct confrontation with — the capitalist parties.”

New heroic chapters about the Amazon workers are still to be written, and they will be written by its own protagonists.