THE TRUTH ABOUT “EMPLOYEE RELATIONS”

Since last October, Amazon has flown in dozens of Employee Relations Managers from across the country to KCVG. These visits began shortly after the company announced an insulting $0.50 “cost-of-living” raise and management rejected a petition of nearly 400 of our coworkers to bring back the $2/hr Peak Pay that we received during Peak 2021.

One manager commented “It’s a good sign that ERC is getting involved. When I was at (another facility in the area) things really started to change when management brought Employee Relations in to hear our concerns.” In reality, nothing has fundamentally changed since Peak 2022. The day-to-day operations at KCVG have gotten significantly worse, we are regularly flexed-up with less than an hours’ notice, and morale is lower than ever with hundreds of our coworkers who opened this facility quitting since last year.

WHAT IS EMPLOYEE RELATIONS?

By now, you have probably attended an Employee Relations meeting: an Employee Town Hall, a Birthday Roundtable meeting, or a meeting specifically about our union campaign. You have also probably seen or talked one-on-one with someone in a red vest with “LEADERSHIP, HOW CAN I HELP?” on the back. Those are Employee Relations Managers. Their job is to gauge our coworkers’ concerns in the workplace, not to fundamentally change anything but to sway us against the union and workers that are seen as leaders away from supporting the union so that others will follow their lead.

In reality, Employee Relations Management is a field of Human Resources that is dedicated to undermining and preventing unionization. By 2027, it is estimated that the Employee Relations Management field will be worth over $38 billion. Last year alone, Amazon spent over $14 million dollars on third-party union-avoidance consultants to attack the union campaigns in Alabama and New York.

In the book Confessions of a Union Buster (1993) by Martin J. Levitt who worked as an anti-union consultant for decades, he writes: “I was making $200,000 a year and living on a five-acre wooded estate in an exclusive community. I traveled, dined and lodged first class, and drove only the finest luxury cars. By then I had directed more than 200 anti-union campaigns, and lost only five, and had trained craven managers to go and do likewise at their own companies. No, I was not driven from the field by need. I was driven by horror and remorse.”

How can Amazon call our union, led by our co-workers, a third party when the company spends millions on Union-busting?

Under widespread criticism including hundreds of unfair labor practice charges from the National Labor Relations Board, Amazon has increasingly handled their union-busting in-house by hiring over 120 Employee Relations staff including at least 50 Employee Relations Managers across the U.S.

This includes Ronnie Talbert, who has led many of the recent Employee Relations meetings. Before getting a job at Amazon, Ronnie spent 25 years attacking unions in Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee for Bridgestone Tires, a notoriously anti-worker corporation. In union negotiations, Ronnie demanded cutting wages to $13/hr for 33% of the workforce, cutting unemployment benefits in half without notice, and replacing secure pensions with risky 401k plans.

By now, dozens of Employee Relations Managers have visited KCVG to undermine thousands of workers' desire for a living wage of $30 an hour, better working conditions, more paid time off, and union representation to end retaliation and favoritism.

AMAZON’S UNION BUSTING PLAYBOOK

Nathan Shefferman, known as the “founding father of union busting”, came up with many of the methods used by major corporations like Amazon to fend off unions including the ‘Employee Roundtable’. These meetings are carefully advertised by management as welcoming spaces where our coworkers are allowed to air their grievances openly without threat of retaliation. The actual intention of these meetings is to give Employee Relations and management a way to tap into the grapevine of the informal workplace culture at our facility in order to identify which workers are seen as leaders in their departments, which workers are leaning toward the union, and which shifts Amazon needs to concentrate their anti-union efforts.

Although it is illegal under federal labor law for Amazon to require workers to attend anti-union “captive audience” meetings, management walks a fine line by labor-tracking us during the meetings and in some cases telling workers that the meetings are mandatory. It is your right to refuse to attend these meetings but we encourage pro-union workers to push back on management’s anti-union talking points, and in many cases workers have walked away from these meetings more supportive of the union and even signed a union card the same day.

The information gathered from Employee Roundtables and one-on-one conversations with workers is fed back to management at all levels, specifically Area Managers who have recently undergone union-busting training in order to identify pro-union workers and feed information back to Employee Relations in order to refine their anti-union messaging and assist management in building better working relations with their employees without implementing any lasting change that would impact Amazon’s productivity and profits.

DON’T LET AMAZON DIVIDE US!

While the Employee Relations meetings have convinced some of our coworkers of the need for a union, they have also instilled fear and doubt in our union by smearing the union as a “business”, lying to workers about union dues, and claiming that the union will take away our benefits.

It’s crucial that we confront Amazon’s lies in these meetings and convince our coworkers of what is possible with a union when we fight for it.

In recent months Amazon has concentrated their Employee Relations staff on our workplace and on the RDU1 Fulfillment Center in North Carolina where workers are organizing for a union. Amazon has even flown Area Managers at KCVG out to Dallas-Fort Worth for specialized Employee Relations training. From now on, Area Managers will increasingly be used by Amazon to try to divide us and coerce Process Assistants and Tier 1 workers that are seen as leaders to fight against the union.

While a few of these AMs might be uncomfortable with the role they have to play against the union, others will take it up enthusiastically and see it as an opportunity to climb the ladder. We talk a lot about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ managers at work, but no matter how you feel about a particular manager or see them as an advocate for some workers or their favorites, we need to realize the destructive role that Amazon is requiring them to play against our union campaign that places their career on the line in order to defend Amazon’s profits.

STOP AMAZON’S UNION BUSTING

• Record Your Conversations with Management: It is your right under the National Labor Relations Act to record any conversations with management relating to union activity. If you are in a Roundtable meeting or one-on-one conversation with Employee Relations or management, record it and talk to a coworker involved in the union campaign about next steps. Amazon may have violated federal labor law in this conversation and it is important that we document their activity and report any violations to the National Labor Relations Board

• Sign a union card today: Come find us at a union table and sign a union authorization card so we can vote YES for a union at KCVG!

• Attend a union orientation: To win our independent, worker-led union, we need everyone involved. Attending an orientation is a great first step to getting actively involved in the campaign!