How Workers at Amazon's Staten Island Warehouse Won Their Union Vote

For most of a year, the headquarters of the union that would beat Amazon was a bus stop. Outside the company's JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, a handful of current and former workers set up a tent, a folding table and a grill near the stop where shifts changed. They handed out food, talked to people waiting for the bus and collected signatures on union cards. They had no national union paying their bills; they raised money online and from small donations. On April 1, 2022, in a federal office in Brooklyn, the National Labor Relations Board counted the ballots. The Amazon Labor Union had won, 2,654 votes to 2,131. It was the first successful union election at an Amazon warehouse in the United States, at one of the largest and most closely watched employers in the world, and it was won by an organization that had not existed two years earlier.

In short: An independent, worker-run union won a union election at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in April 2022 by organizing from a bus stop and building trust shift by shift. Amazon challenged the result and has not agreed to a first contract, showing how federal labor law lets a determined employer delay. Later drives have learned from both the win and the long wait.

A firing at the start of the pandemic

The story usually begins in March 2020. COVID-19 was spreading through New York, and workers at JFK8 were worried about safety inside a building where thousands of people worked in close quarters. A process assistant named Christian Smalls helped organize a walkout to demand more protection and more information about infections. Amazon fired him the same day, saying he had violated a paid quarantine order after contact with a sick co-worker. Smalls said he was fired for protesting. New York's attorney general later sued Amazon over its pandemic safety practices and its treatment of workers who complained.

Smalls and his friend Derrick Palmer, who still worked at the warehouse, decided that protests were not enough. In 2021 they founded the Amazon Labor Union. They were not following the playbook of a national union. They decided to organize as insiders: workers and former workers who knew the building, the shifts, the break rooms and the managers.

There was a reason for that choice. A national union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, had just lost a high-profile election at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, in 2021. Smalls and Palmer believed that workers would trust one another more than they would trust outsiders, and that Amazon's usual argument against unions, that a third party was coming in to take workers' dues, would land differently against a group of people workers already knew.

How the campaign actually worked

What the Amazon Labor Union did well is worth spelling out, because it is easy to tell the story as an underdog miracle and miss the method.

First, it organized where the workers were. JFK8 was enormous, with thousands of employees and high turnover. Many workers commuted by bus. The bus stop was where people waited with nothing to do, which made it the best place in the borough to have a conversation. The organizers fed people, which is not a trivial thing to someone coming off a ten-hour shift.

Second, the organizers worked inside the building. Supporters wore union shirts and talked to co-workers in break rooms. Workers who had been on the fence saw people they knew taking a public stand.

Third, the union framed the campaign around concrete conditions: the pace of work, break times, injuries, pay compared with the cost of living in New York and the way the company's systems tracked productivity. These were not abstractions. They were what workers lived with every shift.

Fourth, the organizers stayed in it for a long time. They filed for an election, withdrew, gathered more support, and filed again. Union drives are a test of patience, and the organizers kept showing up through a cold Staten Island winter.

Amazon, for its part, ran a large campaign against the union. It held meetings for workers on the clock to hear the company's case, a practice that the labor board later ruled unlawful in a 2024 decision involving Amazon, and it spent millions of dollars on outside labor consultants, according to the disclosure forms that federal law requires them to file. The company argued that workers were already well paid and had good benefits, and that they could talk to managers directly without paying dues. Some workers were persuaded. A majority were not.

Amazon's objections and the refusal to bargain

Winning the vote did not end the fight. Amazon filed objections with the labor board, arguing that the union and the board's own regional office had improperly influenced the election. A hearing officer heard the evidence and recommended rejecting the objections; the regional director agreed; and the board certified the Amazon Labor Union as the workers' representative in early 2023.

Amazon still did not come to the table. Under federal law there is no direct way for an employer to appeal a union certification to a court. The only route is to refuse to bargain, let the labor board find the company in violation and then challenge the certification when the board's order goes to a federal appeals court. That is a lawful strategy, and it takes years. Amazon also joined other employers in arguing in court that the structure of the labor board itself is unconstitutional, a line of argument that has picked up strength since 2025.

Here is the honest summary as of November 2026: the workers won their election in 2022, and there is still no first contract at JFK8. The election proved that Amazon warehouse workers could win. The aftermath proved how much room federal labor law gives an employer that is determined not to sign.

The fair case for Amazon, and the reply

It is worth giving Amazon's position a fair hearing. The company raised its starting pay several times in the years around the vote and has emphasized its benefits, including health coverage from the first day and tuition programs. It argues that a direct relationship between managers and workers is more flexible than a union contract, and that its pay is competitive for the jobs it offers. On the specific election, Amazon has argued that procedural problems tainted the result, and it is entitled to raise those arguments in the forums the law provides.

The reply is that both things can be true at once. Amazon can pay more than some warehouse employers and still run workplaces where workers feel the pace is unsafe and the productivity tracking is relentless. Raises announced during union drives are part of the story too; they show that organizing moves wages even before a contract exists. And a legal strategy can be lawful and still frustrate what the law was meant to do. The National Labor Relations Act declares it the policy of the United States to encourage collective bargaining. A system in which a certified union can wait years for a first session is not encouraging much.

Growing pains inside the union

It would be dishonest to tell this story as if the only obstacles were outside. The Amazon Labor Union went through hard internal fights after the win. A second election at a nearby Amazon facility on Staten Island, known as LDJ5, was lost in May 2022. Members disagreed about leadership, elections inside the union and strategy, and a reform group within the union pushed for changes.

In June 2024, the Amazon Labor Union voted to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, gaining the resources of a large national union while keeping its local identity. In December 2024, the Teamsters led strikes at several Amazon facilities, including JFK8, pressing the company to bargain. These were short strikes, and they did not produce a contract, but they showed that the union was still organized and willing to act.

Movements that grow fast from nothing are messy. The lesson is not that independent unions fail; it is that winning an election takes one kind of organization, and sustaining pressure for years takes another. The JFK8 workers had to build both.

What other drives have learned

Organizers across the country have studied JFK8 closely. A few lessons stand out.

Worker-led committees matter. Campaigns run by people inside the building have credibility that no outside organizer can match. Even national unions now put far more effort into building strong committees of workers before they file.

Winning the vote is the start, not the finish. Campaigns now plan from the beginning for the fight over a first contract: building community support, preparing for strikes, and pressuring customers, investors and public officials.

Amazon's scale cuts both ways. Its size makes it hard to beat in any one building. It also means a win anywhere becomes national news and inspires workers somewhere else. Drivers who deliver for Amazon through contractors, and workers at other warehouses, have been organizing with the Teamsters, arguing that Amazon should be treated as their employer too. Elections at other facilities, including one in Garner, North Carolina, in early 2025, have been lost, sometimes by wide margins. Organizing at Amazon is a long war, not a single battle.

And the law matters. Every observer of the JFK8 fight has noticed the same gap: there is no deadline for a first contract and no meaningful penalty for delay. That is a policy choice, and it can be changed.

Inside the building: rates, scanners and injuries

To see why workers at JFK8 were willing to take on a company of Amazon's size, it helps to understand what the work is like. In a large fulfillment center, workers are assigned to stations: picking items from shelves brought to them by robots, stowing incoming goods, packing boxes or loading trucks. Handheld scanners and software track how many items each worker handles and how much time passes between scans. Amazon sets expected productivity rates, and workers who fall short can be coached, warned and eventually fired. The company has said the systems help it manage a huge operation fairly and that rates are set at achievable levels.

Workers' complaints centered on the pace. Repetitive lifting, twisting and reaching for ten hours a shift wears down shoulders, backs and wrists. Federal injury data that Amazon is required to report have been analyzed by unions, researchers and journalists, who have argued that serious injury rates at Amazon warehouses run above those for the warehouse industry generally; Amazon disputes those comparisons and points to its investments in safety. In December 2024, the Democratic staff of the Senate labor committee under its then chair, Bernie Sanders, released a report after an investigation into injuries at Amazon warehouses, concluding that the company's pace contributed to them. Amazon rejected the report's findings.

A further pressure is turnover. Large numbers of workers leave Amazon warehouses within months of being hired. For a union, high turnover is a double problem. Every week brings new workers who have never heard the organizers' pitch, and every delay before a contract means more of the people who voted yes have moved on. The organizers at JFK8 had to keep re-winning the building even as they won the vote.

Amazon is also the second-largest private employer in the United States, behind only Walmart. What happens to its warehouse workers sets expectations, for pay and for pace, across the entire logistics industry. That is why both sides fought so hard over a single building on Staten Island.

There is one more thing about JFK8 that outsiders often miss: who works there. Staten Island is the most suburban of New York's boroughs, and the warehouse drew workers from across the city and from New Jersey, many of them Black and Latino, many of them immigrants, many of them young and working their first full-time job. The organizers looked like the workforce. Smalls and Palmer are Black men who had worked in the building for years, and the union's early committee included workers from a range of backgrounds and languages. In a building where managers could seem remote and the rules seemed to come from an algorithm, that familiarity carried weight. Workers were not being asked to trust a logo. They were being asked to trust the person on the next line over, someone who had worked the same overnight shifts and stood at the same bus stop in the cold.

What you can do

If the JFK8 workers' story matters to you, these are places to start:

• Track the next votes. The labor page lists union elections the National Labor Relations Board has recently counted, with the winners, so you can see where warehouse and delivery workers are organizing.
• Call about labor law. Look up your members of Congress through find your representatives, which gives you their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes. Ask whether they support a deadline and arbitration for first contracts.
• Keep up with the corporate side. Our topic page on corporate power follows how the largest companies fight regulation and unions, including Amazon.
• Help warehouse workers locally. Find worker centers, unions and legal-aid groups near you in the organizations directory.

The organizers at the bus stop were not famous when they started. They were people with a grill, a table and a list of names. Most of what changed in that warehouse began with someone stopping for a plate of food and staying to listen.