The head of the largest US trade-union federation said that moves by Starbucks Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. against their workers’ attempts to organize show why labor reform is necessary to allow employees to more easily join unions.
(Bloomberg) — The head of the largest US trade-union federation said that moves by Starbucks Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. against their workers’ attempts to organize show why labor reform is necessary to allow employees to more easily join unions.
“There are workers that have been organizing in workplaces across the country that have faced intimidation and threats and firings,” Liz Shuler, president of AFL-CIO, said on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power” Thursday. Earlier in the day, she argued that “the fundamentals of labor law are broken,” and said “labor-law reform is needed,” at a Christian Science Monitor event in Washington.
Shuler’s federation has been pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act — federal legislation that expands workers’ rights but is stalled in Congress, blocked by Republicans and some moderate Democrats.
Hundreds of Starbucks cafes and an Amazon warehouse have unionized in the past year as workers demand higher wages and job protection. Additional locations have filed petitions to unionize.
Americans “have woken up to the fact that they don’t have to take poor conditions at work,” said Shuler, who was elected as president at a labor convention in June. “Coming together collectively is how we rebalance the scales.”
Wrongdoing Denied
Starbucks has been accused by staff and the National Labor Relations Board, the government’s labor law enforcement arm, of retaliation as workers seek to form unions.
Starbucks has denied wrongdoing, with spokesperson Reggie Borges saying last month that “claims of anti-union activity are categorically false.”
Amazon has faced similar criticism from the NLRB, allegedly threatening employees with retaliation if they unionized. The company has also denied wrongdoing.
The AFL-CIO represents about 12.5 million workers in the US across industries including manufacturing and the service sector. Shuler’s federation aims to add an additional 1 million to the unionized ranks over the next decade.
Workers have been flexing their power as employers grow desperate to fill job openings that remain near a record high. While government data show that the share of union membership has declined over the past half-century, the past year has marked a shift in strikes, walkouts and workplace union voting.
Overall, the labor market remains tight, with unemployment near the lowest level since the 1960s. More than half a million jobs were added to payrolls in July, while government data Friday is forecast to show a slower pace of gains, of about 300,000, for August.
(Updates with additional quotes from Bloomberg TV interview starting in second paragraph.)
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