Amazon Union Drive

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, on Friday, Amazon, one of the world's largest corporations, successfully crushed the most recent union drive at one of their warehouses, where workers were organizing for a voice on the job.

Let's be clear: This was never a fair fight.

Amazon is perhaps the world's most powerful corporation. It would not be raking in profits without the hard work and dedication of its hundreds--hundreds of thousands of American workers. Yet Amazon unleashed all that corporate power to fight those same workers.

They harassed employees with anti-union propaganda. They sent misleading text messages, websites, and fliers. Workers reported they didn't even get enough time for bathroom breaks in the warehouse. That is how intense the company's pressure is. And yet, when they are able to use the bathroom during this union fight, even there workers are hit with anti-union propaganda fliers on the stall doors.

Amazon demanded the U.S. Postal Service install a mailbox onsite at the warehouse so they could monitor employees mailing their union election ballots. It is all part of a pattern for Amazon.

In 2019, Amazon fired a Staten Island warehouse worker who called for unionization.

Amazon monitors employees' online communications. Last fall we learned the company planned to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for new software to monitor ``threats'' like unions. Amazon isn't alone. This union busting is standard operating procedure for most companies.

A growing number of Americans want to join unions. A recent poll found that about half of Americans would like to join a union if they could. Millennials are the most pro-worker, pro-union generation since World War II. The Center for Economic Policy and Research reported that 75 percent of new union members are under the age of 35.

I talked to one of those union workers at the end of last month. I spoke to Kate from Zanesville, OH, who joined UFCW--United Food and Commercial Workers--not too long ago. We talked about the work she and I and others did to save her future pension in the rescue plan, how her union had helped her learn about retirement security and helped her fight for her retirement security.

So if all those workers, especially young workers, want to join a union, if they want to have a voice on the job, they want to have more control over their work lives, why aren't more union drives successful?

Pretty important question to ask, pretty obvious answer--because corporations have so much power.

One union organizer told a reporter for the Huffington Post:

When people hear there's an election, they think everybody gets to vote, there's a secret ballot, and so on. What they don't understand--

What the public doesn't understand about union elections-- is that the company has access to the workers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and has enormous influence over their lives.

If they care to use that influence, and so often they do, here is what he said:

They can threaten. They can give a raise. They can demote. They can grant favors.

Or they cannot grant favors.

Every worker knows that.

This is what workers organizing are up against. There is nothing close, nothing at all resembling a level playing field for American workers.

That is why we need the PRO Act, Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

It is a comprehensive overhaul of our labor laws to protect workers' right to stand together and to bargain for fair wages and better benefits and safer workplaces.

It would level the playing field and finally, finally give workers a fighting chance against corporate union-busting tactics like we saw from Amazon.

We know what has happened in this country. We know we have seen--we have seen worker productivity go up. We have seen corporate profits go up. We have seen executive compensation skyrocket upward. Yet worker wages are flat.

Passing the PRO Act would strengthen the punishment against companies that violate workers' rights to organize and that retaliate against union organizers.

It would close loopholes that allow employers to misclassify their employees as supervisors and independent contractors to avoid paying their fair share and to avoid giving workers the benefits they have earned and that they deserve.

A union card is a ticket to a middle-class life when you fight for economic justice by making it available for all workers. We just need corporations to get out of the way, to be neutral, to let workers organize and take control over their careers and their futures.

We also need to empower all workers, whether they have chosen to join a union or not.

That means paid family and medical leave for all workers. It means a living wage for all workers. It means retirement security for all workers. It means power over your life and your schedule. It means overtime pay when you earn it. It means healthcare for all workers. It is, all in the end, about the dignity of work.

Remember what Dr. King said; that ``no labor is really menial unless you are not getting adequate wages.''

When you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work. That is what union organizers do in the face of overwhelming corporate opposition, like the billionaires at Amazon, and it is what all of us must continue to do until all work pays off.

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