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    Amazon Workers on Staten Island Vote to Unionize

    It was a union organizing campaign that few expected to have a chance. A handful of employees at Amazon’s massive warehouse on Staten Island, operating without support from national labor organizations, took on one of the most powerful companies in the world.And, somehow, they won.Workers at the facility voted by a wide margin to form a union, according to results released on Friday, in one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.Employees cast 2,654 votes to be represented by Amazon Labor Union and 2,131 against, giving the union a win by more than 10 percentage points, according to the National Labor Relations Board. More than 8,300 workers at the warehouse, which is the only Amazon fulfillment center in New York City, were eligible to vote.The win on Staten Island comes at a perilous moment for labor unions in the United States, which saw the portion of workers in unions drop last year to 10.3 percent, the lowest rate in decades, despite high demand for workers, pockets of successful labor activity and rising public approval.Critics — including some labor officials — say that traditional unions haven’t spent enough money or shown enough imagination in organizing campaigns and that they have often bet on the wrong fights. Some point to tawdry corruption scandals.The union victory at Amazon, the first at the company in the United States after years of worker activism there, offers an enormous opportunity to change that trajectory and build on recent wins. Many union leaders regard Amazon as an existential threat to labor standards because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them.Amazon employees waited to vote in the parking lot of the JFK8 fulfillment center last week.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesBut the win by a little-known, independent union with few ties to existing groups appears to raise as many questions for the labor movement as it answers: not least, whether there is something fundamentally broken with the traditional bureaucratic union model that can be solved only by replacing it with grass-roots organizations like the one on Staten Island.Amazon is likely to aggressively contest the union’s win. An unsigned statement on its corporate blog said, “We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees.”The Staten Island outcome followed what appears likely to be a narrow loss by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at a large Amazon warehouse in Alabama. The vote is close enough that the results will not be known for several weeks as contested ballots are litigated.The surprising strength shown by unions in both locations most likely means that Amazon will face years of pressure at other company facilities from labor groups and progressive activists working with them. As a recent string of union victories at Starbucks have shown, wins at one location can provide encouragement at others.Amazon hired voraciously over the past two years and now has 1.6 million employees globally. But it has been plagued by high turnover, and the pandemic gave employees a growing sense of power while fueling worries about workplace safety. The Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, was the subject of a New York Times investigation last year, which found that it was emblematic of the stresses — including inadvertent firings and sky-high attrition — on workers caused by Amazon’s employment model.“The pandemic has fundamentally changed the labor landscape” by giving workers more leverage with their employers, said John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University. “It’s just a question of whether unions can take advantage of the opportunity that transformation has opened up.”Standing outside the N.L.R.B. office in Brooklyn, where the ballots were tallied, Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who started the union, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press. “To the first Amazon union in American history,” he cheered.Christian Smalls, a former Amazon worker who led union efforts on Staten Island, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press on Friday.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesAmazon said it was evaluating its options, including potentially filing an objection to “inappropriate and undue influence” by the N.L.R.B. for suing Amazon in federal court last month.In that case, the N.L.R.B. asked a judge to force Amazon to swiftly rectify “flagrant unfair labor practices” it said took place when Amazon fired a worker who became involved with the union. Amazon argued in court that the labor board abandoned “the neutrality of their office” by filing the injunction just before the election.Amazon would need to prove that any claims of undue influence undermined the so-called laboratory conditions necessary for a fair election, said Wilma B. Liebman, the chair of the N.L.R.B. under President Barack Obama.President Biden was “glad to see workers ensure their voices are heard” at the Amazon facility, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “He believes firmly that every worker in every state must have a free and fair choice to join a union,” she said.The near-term question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is the extent to which they will help the upstart Amazon Labor Union withstand potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract, such as by providing resources and legal talent.“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers. “The labor movement has to figure out how to support them.”Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”A culture of fear created by intense productivity monitoring that was documented by The Times at JFK8 has been a key motivator for the unionization drive, which started in earnest almost a year ago. The Amazon facility offered a lifeline to laid-off workers during the pandemic but burned through staff and had such poor communication and technology that workers inadvertently were fired or lost benefits.For some employees, the stress of working at the warehouse during Covid outbreaks was a radicalizing experience that led them to take action. Mr. Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, said he became alarmed in March 2020 after encountering a co-worker who was clearly ill. He pleaded with management to close the facility for two weeks. The company fired him after he helped lead a walkout over safety conditions in late March that year.Amazon said at the time that it had taken “extreme measures” to keep workers safe, including deep cleaning and social distancing. It said it had fired Mr. Smalls for violating social distancing guidelines and attending the walkout even though he had been placed in a quarantine.After workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., overwhelmingly rejected the retail workers union in its first election last spring, Mr. Smalls and Derrick Palmer, an Amazon employee who is his friend, decided to form a new union, called Amazon Labor Union.While the organizing in Alabama included high-profile tactics, with progressive supporters like Senator Bernie Sanders visiting the area, the organizers at JFK8 benefited from being insiders. For months, they set up shop at the bus stop outside the warehouse, grilling meat at barbecues and at one point even passing out pot. (The retail workers said they were hamstrung by Covid during their initial election in Alabama.)They also filed numerous unfair-labor-practice charges with the N.L.R.B. when they believed Amazon had infringed on their rights. The labor agency found merit in several of the cases, some of which Amazon settled in a nationwide agreement to allow workers more access to organize on-site.At times the Amazon Labor Union stumbled. The labor board determined this fall that the fledgling union, which spent months collecting signatures from workers requesting a vote, had not demonstrated sufficient support to warrant an election. But the organizers kept trying, and by late January they had finally gathered enough signatures.Amazon played up its minimum wage of $15 an hour in advertising and other public relations efforts. The company also waged a full-throated campaign against the union, texting employees and mandating attendance at anti-union meetings. It spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants nationwide last year, according to annual disclosures filed on Thursday with the Labor Department.In February, Mr. Smalls was arrested at the facility after managers said he was trespassing while delivering food to co-workers and called the police. Two current employees were also arrested during the incident, which appeared to galvanize interest in the union.The difference in outcomes in Bessemer and Staten Island may reflect a difference in receptiveness toward unions in the two states — roughly 6 percent of workers in Alabama are union members, versus 22 percent in New York — as well as the difference between a mail-in election and one conducted in person.But it may also suggest the advantages of organizing through an independent, worker-led union. In Alabama, union officials and professional organizers were still barred from the facility under the settlement with the labor board. But at the Staten Island site, a larger portion of the union leadership and organizers were current employees.“What we were trying to say all along is that having workers on the inside is the most powerful tool,” said Mr. Palmer, who makes $21.50 an hour. “People didn’t believe it, but you can’t beat workers organizing other workers.”The independence of the Amazon Labor Union also appeared to undermine Amazon’s anti-union talking points, which cast the union as an interloping “third party.” On March 25, workers at JFK8 started lining up outside a tent in the parking lot to vote. And over five voting days, they cast their ballots to form what could become the first union at Amazon’s operations in the United States.Another election, brought also by Amazon Labor Union at a neighboring Staten Island facility, is scheduled for late April.Jodi Kantor More

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    NYC Retail Zones: Midtown Has Been Empty, but Other Areas Have Bounced Back

    Shopping locally has helped foot traffic in some commercial districts across the city return almost to prepandemic levels.All eyes are on Midtown Manhattan as everyone anxiously waits to see if and when office workers and tourists will return to what have been eerily empty streets and whether the businesses that line them will regain customers lost during the pandemic.But other retail corridors across New York are also important barometers of the city’s economy, as well as key to its recovery; a survey of five of them, one in each borough, showed signs of resilience.“On the whole, business districts outside Manhattan are holding up better and some are really thriving,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future.This is not to gloss over the hardship experienced practically everywhere.Corridors outside Midtown that have much in common with it — commuter hubs drawing 9-to-5 workers — have also experienced a dramatic falloff in foot traffic and, therefore, customers for stores and restaurants. The same goes for areas reliant on leisure activities that Covid restrictions shut down.But retail hubs surrounded by residential development have fared better during a time when many people who normally work in offices were holed up at home for extended periods. When they went out, they spent locally. Supermarkets and other essential businesses have been flourishing.Larger economic forces that were in play even before the pandemic — such as the decline in brick-and-mortar retail in the face of online shopping — have continued to exact their toll. Empty storefronts were an issue on many streets before Covid, and the closing of Century 21 and Modell’s Sporting Goods outlets during the pandemic have left gaping holes in some shopping districts.Street vendors have long been part of the scene on Harlem’s 125th Street; some now sell face shields and other pandemic items.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesRetailers that remain have scrambled to adapt to ever-changing pandemic policies. Some have branched into online sales, often with the help of merchant groups, business improvement districts or the NYC Small Business Resource Network, a new public-private partnership that has deployed “small business support specialists” to neighborhoods throughout the city. But stores are also competing with street vendors, which have proliferated during the pandemic, and other problems have emerged, including increases in graffiti and litter.On streets with empty storefronts, asking rents are falling as landlords try to lure new tenants. Some new businesses have opened because they have been able to take advantage of lower rents, more flexible lease terms and the ability to move into a space that had already been kitted out by a departing business.But store openings do not match closings, and the moratorium on commercial evictions that was put in place to protect tenants during the pandemic is set to expire May 1. Many businesses owe back rent because they had no income during the lockdown and reduced earnings since then.“Many of our merchants are still in business because of the eviction moratorium,” said Jennifer Tausig, co-chair of the NYC BID Association, which represents 76 business improvement districts across the city. “We don’t know what will happen when the rent apocalypse hits.”Much is still unknown, and the absence of hard data has left people searching for signs of recovery wherever they can find them.Thomas J. Grech, president and chief executive of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, estimates that 1,000 of the 6,000 restaurants in his borough have closed for good. But he is busy going to ribbon cuttings for new businesses. And he has noticed more small delivery trucks on the streets — “the Boar’s Head trucks, the folks who supply bacon and eggs to diners.” To him, it means “people are buying sandwiches,” he said. “All that stuff has a ripple effect.”The businesses along 125th Street have benefitted from local residents shopping locally.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesManhattan: 125th Street While Midtown has been a ghost town for much of the pandemic, four miles north, 125th Street in Harlem has at times felt like its old bustling self, a clamorous mix of chain stores, mom-and-pop shops and sidewalk vendors.For years, Harlem boosters had made efforts to attract “Class A” office buildings and hotels, with relatively little success. But ironically, during the pandemic, that meant the east-west corridor did not suffer the way areas dependent on 9-to-5 workers and tourists have.Instead, 125th Street had 600,000 residents within walking distance and shopping locally. Those who otherwise would have been heading to offices sheltered in place and, when they ventured out, spent money closer to home.“We had a lot of the essentials — the banks, the telecoms, even the pawn shops,” said Barbara Askins, the president and chief executive of the 125th Street Business Improvement District. “People needed money and that kept the pawn shops busy.”When Covid restrictions shut down the Apollo Theater, 125th Street lost a  major generator of foot traffic.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesAll is far from normal, though. The Apollo Theater, which typically attracts about 220,000 visitors annually, was forced to close, eliminating a big draw.Overall pedestrian activity declined, according to the BID’s counts. After a dramatic falloff during the lockdown of April and May of last year, it rose steadily until, by September, foot traffic was back to February 2020 levels. It dropped again when the city’s gradual reopening was put on hold by the surge in Covid cases last fall and winter.Vacant storefronts are noticeable, and average asking rents have declined six percent since 2019, according to a report from the Real Estate Board of New York. Some landlords are trying to hang onto the tenants they have. Leah Abraham, the founder of Settepani and the owner of a building on 125th Street, has lost a tenant and cut the rent of others, with her eye on better days to come. “Harlem has such a strong cachet,” Ms. Abraham said. “I am sure it will rebound.” One promising sign: Trader Joe’s and Target will be coming to a 17-story mixed-use development on 125th Street at Malcolm X Boulevard that is slated to open in 2023 and will also include some affordable housing, the headquarters for the National Urban League and New York’s first civil rights museum.Some retailers on Fordham Road in the Bronx say sales are nearing pre-pandemic levels.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe Bronx: Fordham Road Fordham Road, the biggest shopping district in the Bronx, an open-air bazaar strung along a major east-west transportation corridor, went into the pandemic with a three percent vacancy rate, according to the Fordham Road Business Improvement District. Today, the vacancy rate is still three percent. And asking rents, after declining slightly last year, are back up to prepandemic levels, said Scott Silverstein, a broker with Colliers.All this says something about the staying power of the historic shopping corridor, especially after a year that saw the loss of 40 percent of the borough’s businesses, not to mention the highest Covid death rates in the city and an increase in the unemployment rate to nearly 18 percent.While some businesses have closed during the pandemic, street vendors have proliferated.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIt also says something about the demographics of the area around Fordham Road. Many people who live nearby are essential workers who continued to commute to work, providing foot traffic to the businesses that occupy 175 storefronts between Jerome and Washington Avenues, the core of the district.Businesses hustled to survive — adding masks and hand sanitizer to their offerings, shifting to online sales and banding together in what Wilma Alonso, executive director of the Fordham Road BID, called a “mini mall” trend. Where a single establishment might previously have occupied a storefront, now there could be multiple businesses in one location. “It looks like one store,” Ms. Alonso said, “but when you go inside there’s an eyebrow place, a jewelry store and a lingerie person.”City Jeans, a Bronx-born chain started in 1993, has a store on Fordham Road — one of many sneaker outlets here. Sales are 80 to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, said Marko Majic, community coordinator for the chain. The City Point shopping center, just off Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall, draws shoppers from a wide swath of Brooklyn.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesBrooklyn: Fulton Mall As in Midtown Manhattan, the office buildings of Downtown Brooklyn have been largely empty during the pandemic. Ditto the courthouses.The absence of commuters has been felt on Fulton Mall, the eight-block stretch of Fulton Street that is closed to cars and normally sees some 77,000 people a day, according to the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a local development corporation. In 2020 foot traffic dropped by 48 percent to less than 41,000.But there has been a boom in residential development in the area in recent years, with new towers rising around the mostly low-rise buildings on Fulton Mall. And with people sheltering in place and shopping locally, this has helped balance things out, said Regina Myer, president of the development corporation.City Point, a multilevel indoor shopping mall just off Fulton, has drawn people from a wider swath of Brooklyn to its stores, which include anchor tenants Target and Trader Joe’s. This has benefited Fulton Mall as a whole, said Ms. Myer, pointing to pedestrian counts that reached 91 percent of 2019 levels on the corner of Fulton and Hanover Place in December.But it’s unclear whether Brooklynites flocking to City Point are also shopping in the chain stores and at independents selling cellphones, children’s clothing, sneakers and flashy gold jewelry on Fulton Mall.Of the strip’s 83 storefronts, 11 are closed permanently, although some of the closings predated the pandemic and some inactive sites are being marketed for redevelopment.The historic Gage & Tollner restaurant opens for indoor dining April 15 on a block where some vacant storefronts have been identified for redevelopment.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesGage & Tollner, the recently revived Victorian-era restaurant on the strip, has been doing takeout business since February but will open for indoor dining April 15. On a recent visit, its ornate white-painted facade stood out on a block lined with gated storefronts. “We have no neighbors here,” said St. John Frizell, a partner in the restaurant.Gage & Tollner is a landmark and by law must be preserved, but other sites on the block are slated for redevelopment, according to Claire Holmes, a spokeswoman for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.Rents on sites not up for redevelopment range from $125 to $250 per square foot, according to brokers, reflecting a slight drop from prepandemic highs. “They were hitting $300 per square foot at one point,” said Peter Ripka, co-founder of Ripco Real Estate.But Mr. Ripka was bullish about what he called “one of the granddaddies of the great borough streets.” “Fulton Mall will come back,” he added.Shoppers have returned to downtown Flushing, but storefront vacancies have increased and rents have fallen.Tom Sibley for The New York TimesQueens: Main Street in FlushingFlushing’s Chinatown is typically teeming, especially on weekends when people who live outside Downtown Flushing make pilgrimages to its dim sum restaurants and Asian specialty stores. The neighborhood is a major shopping district and transportation hub.The district went uncharacteristically quiet in early 2020, long before other parts of the city shut down, when many Chinese business owners here recognized the seriousness of the pandemic, and hostility directed at Asian-americans became more overt. Area residents were among the first to don face masks, shelter at home — and close stores and restaurants.Many of these businesses have not survived the year since then. Nearly half of the barbershops and hair and nail salons, many of which had been situated on side streets, have closed. So have about 35 restaurants, including longtime favorites like Joe’s Shanghai and Good Kitchen. Banks, medical offices and grocery stores, on the other hand, have done well, and a new supermarket has just opened in a space Modell’s previously occupied.There has been a 16 percent increase in consumer interest for shopping, restaurant and food categories in the Main Street corridor since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Yelp, at the same time that the share of consumer interest declined 49 percent for Midtown.These days the street feels as busy as ever, but the vacancy rate has risen to five or six percent from less than one percent, said Dian Song Yu, executive director of the Downtown Flushing Transit Hub BID. “We’ve never seen that before,” he added. Rents have dropped about 15 percent, said Michael Wang, founding partner of Project Queens, a brokerage. But deals are being made.In response to anti-Asian hate crimes, a volunteer patrol has sprung up to help keep local streets safe.Tom Sibley for The New York Times“Pre-Covid, if you had a retail store in the main strip you would have 30 offers,” Mr. Wang said. “Now the demand is much lower, but you still have five people very serious about moving in.”But anti-Asian racism that existed before the pandemic has flared up here, just as it has elsewhere, with people falsely blaming Asian-Americans for spreading the coronavirus. Earlier this year a woman was thrown against a row of newspaper stands and injured outside a bakery. Main Street Patrol, a volunteer group, has sprung up to document, record and, if necessary, intervene in hate crimes, as have other neighborhood watch groups around the city.Empire Outlets, an outdoor shopping mall in St. George, lost 65 to 70 percent of its foot traffic during the pandemic but visitors have recently increased.Erica Price for The New York TimesStaten Island: Bay Street The city’s most suburban-style, car-centric borough doesn’t have the density other parts of the city do, and many of its retailers line small commercial corridors and strip malls.The former have fared better than the latter during the pandemic, said Linda M. Baran, the president and chief executive of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. While most of the stores and restaurants along places like New Dorp Lane and Forest Avenue have been holding their own, the strip malls “are where I’m seeing vacancies,” she said. Six percent of the borough’s businesses have closed for good, according to a recent survey by the chamber.Bay Street, on the North Shore, is in its own category. It stretches from the Staten Island Ferry terminal south through three neighborhoods that together make up Downtown Staten Island: St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton.Home to mostly mom-and-pops, Bay Street was regarded as a work-in-progress before the pandemic. A 2017 city report counted 232 storefronts, many in poor condition, and put the vacancy rate at 21 percent. The rate had declined somewhat by early 2020, however.St. George, the neighborhood most familiar to day trippers who arrive by ferry, is the area that has seen the greatest falloff in foot traffic. This is where borough hall, courthouses and cultural institutions are clustered, and the businesses here have struggled ever since government workers were sent home, tourists stopped riding the ferry from Manhattan and the St. George Theater closed to visitors.Vacant storefronts have been a longstanding issue on Bay Street.Erica Price for The New York TimesSome restaurants have pivoted to takeout (and Enoteca Maria, famed for its rotating cast of chef grandmas, to selling bottled sauces). Some have opted to shut their doors and wait out the pandemic. But some new food purveyors have opened, including on Bay Street.Empire Outlets, an outdoor shopping mall near the ferry terminal, was still finding its footing before the pandemic. It has lost 65 to 70 percent of its visitors and four retailers, said Joseph Ferrara, a principal at BFC Partners, the mall’s developer. However, foot traffic increased 20 percent between February and March and parking jumped 140 percent.Empire Outlets and other area businesses are banking on the return of municipal workers, now scheduled for June 1. NYC Fast Ferry will start providing service to St. George from Battery Park City and Midtown Manhattan this summer. And on the horizon: the recently announced revival of the New York Wheel project, albeit in a scaled-down form and not until 2025.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More