FORMING A LABOR UNION, A STARK CONTRAST, BETWEEN WHAT WE SEE IN THE LABOR UNIONIZATION OF AMAZON WAREHOUSE WORKERS IN STATEN ISLAND, NY AND VIETNAMESE WORKERS IN VIETNAM – VIETNAMSE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT HELP BUT BLOCK VIETNAMESE WORKERS’ RIGHTS TO FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION AND PROTECTION OF THE RIGHT TO ORGANISE PER ILO No. 87

By Nguyễn Thư, September 26, 2022.

In April 2022, for the first time in Amazon’s history, workers at the Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse were able to organize their labor union, the first labor union in Amazon, after many challenges and obstacles. A closer look at the start-to-finish process shows few details that are worth noting.

First, on the workers’ side, they need a leader who can lead the workers to achieve the goal of organizing a labor union. Such a leader has several required qualifications: knowledge of the operation of Amazon’s warehouses, a devoted commitment, a determination to succeed, good people skills for communicating, rallying, uniting, and leading other workers, and the capability to lead workers to achieve the goal of organizing a labor union for the warehouse.

Luckily, the Amazon workers at Staten Island warehouse had such a leader with all those qualifications: Chris Smalls. This young black man worked at the JFK8 warehouse since 2018 and was fired by the Company after a strike related to how workers were overloaded, laid off, and unfairly treated by Amazon during Covid19 at the warehouse.

Chris Smalls and a small group of current and former Amazon workers formed the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). This organization is open to Amazon union organizers to join and work together, and they can work with Amazon workers at other locations and help them unionize and form labor unions for their locations. The ALU was not backed by any national union with a depth of resources and connections. They held many events selling food, books, etc. to raise fund for their activities.

Chris Smalls led the Staten Island warehouse workers to file a petition with the independent federal agency called “National Labor Relations Board” to seek help from the agency to hold unionization election. An election was held and the Amazon workers at the Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize on April 1, marking the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the retail giant’s history.

Second, the role of the government’s agency named “National Labor Relations Board” in the unionization process is critical. The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency that protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions. Chris Smalls and other organizers filed a petition with this agency to form a labor union for Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse workers.

The agency received the petition, helped set up a unionization election for all workers at the warehouse to vote. They helped collect the votes, count the votes, and verify the election result. This government agency or the US government in general, does not hold any authority to either permit or block workers’ rights to freedom of association but rather is responsible for safeguarding the workers’ rights by virtue of the protection afforded by the agency.

Chris Smalls and other organizers representing more than 2,000 Amazon workers at Staten Island warehouse in New York filed a union petition with the local office of the National Labor Relations Board in late October 2021. In April 2022, the agency helped the Amazon Labor Union organizers hold a union election for all Amazon workers at the warehouse. And the result, on April 1, 2022, was that Amazon Labor Union secured 2,654 “yes” votes to Amazon’s 2,131 “no” votes.

The union won the election with 55% of the vote, a lead of 523 votes. The union and Bloomberg both declared victory for unionization Friday morning. After this result, the ALU President and the leading organizer, Chris Smalls, and other ALU organizers formed the first Amazon union.

Obviously, the entire process showed the ALU organizers and the Staten Island warehouse workers had full control and ownership of the decision-making process to unionize or not, to exercise their rights to organize their labor union by a democratic process of voting in union election, with participation from all workers at the facility, and that the election process was set up by the National Labor Relations Board, a government agency.

The union election result was what decided if the organizers have the authority to proceed with forming the labor union or not, and the government agency does not have any authority or interference in the process.

The government helps facilitate the unionization process and protect the workers’ rights to organize and the government does not exert any control over the workers’ unions by injecting government-affiliated people into the labor unions’ leadership. Labor unions are totally independent from the government and are fully led by workers. We also see the fact that the workers at the warehouse were the only people who voted to decide their own destiny, to be with or without a labor union according to the spirit of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 87 – Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention. It is obvious that the US government does not have any authority, either to permit or to block the workers’ rights to form labor unions.

Turn around to Vietnam and compare what we saw in the story above, how Chris Smalls and Amazon workers formed the first Amazon labor union at Staten Island, NY, to the current state of unionization in Vietnam, we see the key issues with the Vietnamese government’s efforts to control, delay, and block Vietnamese workers’ rights to organize independent labor unions.

In America, the challenges and obstacles that Chris Smalls and the ALU organizers encountered all came from Amazon and none from the government. In Vietnam, workers face tremendous obstacles from the government which runs its communist party-controlled and state-controlled trade unions in all companies and its national “Vietnam General Confederation of Labor (VGCL)”.

The Vietnamese government has been reluctant and hesitant in recognizing workers’ rights to organize independent workers’ representative organizations (WROs) and does not intend to lend a hand to help workers’ unionization effort compared to what we see the US government doing to help American workers unionize.

The Vietnamese government passed the new Labor Laws in 2019 and put these laws into effect on Jan 1st, 2021, to allow workers at each location to unionize and form independent workers’ representative organizations (WROs) for their locations; however, the government requires union organizers to seek permissions from the government within 15 days after workers organized and formed a WRO or an independent labor union at the work site. Only after the government grants permission can the newly-formed WRO or independent labor union be legally recognized to represent workers and start its operation. Clearly, with the above requirement, the Vietnamese government has appointed itself as the ultimate authority which has total control of workers’ labor unionization with its self-granted authority to permit or block workers from organizing independent labor unions.

Effectively, the Vietnamese government has taken over and overridden workers’ rights to organize according to ILO 87. Per ILO 87, it is workers’ rights to organize, not the government’s, but the Vietnamese government has made itself the authority to permit or block workers from exercising their rights.

Ironically, in its propaganda, the Vietnamese communist government has always proclaimed that its Marxist-Leninist communist party represents and serves the interests of workers and farmers but in reality, it uses its control of the permission requirement as a hidden trick, a hidden intention, a hidden workaround to delay and block workers’ unionization, an important labor right and interest of workers and farmers.

The Vietnamese government continues imposing control over the labor unionization, and effectively deprives workers of their rights to freedom of association and protection of the right to organise per ILO 87.

The Vietnamese government has not issued any decrees or procedures to let workers know what they need to do to obtain permissions from the government and to establish Worker Representation Groups (WROs) or independent labor unions (as opposed to government-controlled and communist-party-controlled trade unions). Nowhere in Vietnam can workers find any designated government offices to submit unionization applications and request permissions. Nowhere in Vietnam can workers’ union organizers find any information on the procedures to form WROs or independent labor unions, or find any procedures, guidelines to seek permissions from the government to organize independent labor unions.

But the big question is why do Vietnamese workers have to have permissions from the government to exercise their labor rights to organize and form independent labor unions when ILO 87 guarantees that right and Vietnamese government has agreed to when it signed CPTPP, EVFTA, UKVFTA, and recently the US-ASEAN joint vision statement in May 2022 that requires all signing countries to abide by all applicable international labor standards?

More reading:

1.https://clb.org.hk/content/vietnamese-workers-still-dark-about-potential-new-representative-organisations

2.Chris Smalls, and other ALU organizers formed the first Amazon union.

3.filed a union petition to the local office of the National Labor Relations Board in late October 2021