Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss
By 
A new era of union organizing means a new era of unionbusting and boy howdy does it look the same as the old era of unionbusting.
Amazon has been using anti-union consultants for nearly two decades, defeating efforts to unionize in the U.K. in 2004 and Virginia in 2016, and releasing an anti-union training video in 2018. It also hired Pinkerton, the private security agency used to infiltrate unions since the late 1800s, to stop Whole Foods workers in 2020, according to internal documents obtained by Vice.
Pinkerton did not respond to a request for comment.
Of course!
These are pretty aggressive union-busting techniques. These companies are more than happy to go full Gilded Age on unionizing workers.
At Amazon’s smaller Staten Island warehouse, union busting is at full steam before workers at the roughly 1,500-employee warehouse start voting on whether to join the Amazon Labor Union on Monday. The company has held regular classes for workers at its warehouses to encourage them to vote no, pulling employees from their work stations to attend. And it has spent millions on consultants to talk to workers, sometimes roaming warehouse floors with employees.
Amazon’s Nantel previously said that it was employees’ choice whether to join a union and the classes “provide employees the opportunity to ask questions and learn about what this could mean for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
At the nearby bigger JFK8 warehouse that voted to unionize this month, Connor Spence, a worker and organizer, said that outside contractors would roam the facility’s aisles with no clear purpose, stopping to talk to employees as they labored and sometimes employing intimidation.
“We had one guy who said ‘If the union comes in you will go on strike, if you go on strike Amazon will replace you,’” Spence said.
The ALU started “outing” the consultants to employees and the public on their Twitter page. One tweet from February shows a picture of a man, mask on, inside the warehouse and identifies him as a consultant. “He tries to hide his name and lie about who he is to workers at Amazon,” the tweet reads.
The ALU has also passed out fliers including pictures of two of the union busting consultants.Filings with Labor Department show that Amazon has hired multiple union busting firms over the past year to work both on Staten Island and in Bessemer.
These truly are the worst people in the world.