Why Amazon employees near Albany were divided about joining a union

Published

2 years ago

October 19, 2022

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Workers stand in line to cast ballots for a union election at Amazon’s JFK8 distribution center, in the Staten Island borough of New York City, U.S. March 25, 2022.

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

For the past few months, an Amazon warehouse near Albany has hosted the latest labor battle between the retail giant and its workers.

Workers at the facility, located in the upstate town of Schodack, sought to capitalize on a successful union campaign at another Amazon warehouse, more than 150 miles away on Staten Island, which resulted in the company’s first unionized site in the U.S.

On Tuesday, those hopes were dashed.

Employees at the warehouse near Albany voted overwhelmingly against joining a union, delivering a blow to the Amazon Labor Union, the group behind the Staten Island victory. The ALU can challenge the results of the election, and it has a week to file an appeal to the National Labor Relations Board.

Workers at the ALB1 warehouse began organizing earlier this year, believing that a union could give employees more power to address their concerns about safety, inadequate paid time off and low wages. The starting wage at the facility rose to $17 an hour, up from $15.70 an hour, after Amazon raised pay for its frontline workforce nationwide.

Following the vote, an Amazon spokesperson said “Amazon as we think that this is the best arrangement for both our employees and customers. We will continue to work directly with our teammates in Albany, as we do everywhere, to keep making Amazon better every day.”

Here’s what workers on the ground told us.

‘$18 does not stretch very far’

Cari Carter, who has worked at ALB1 for two years, makes $18.20 an hour as a packer, placing items into boxes before they’re shipped out. As a single mother with three children, she said she can’t afford to manage her expenses and recently took out a loan from Amazon in order to pay her car bills.

“Some people are happy making $18 an hour because that’s enough to support themselves. They’re usually single individuals,” Carter said in an interview outside the warehouse. “I myself am a single mother of three. $18 does not stretch very far.”

Her son, Najiel Carter, works the same morning shift as her at ALB1. He said he attended meetings held by Amazon and the union and was leaning toward voting for the union because he felt it could lead to longer break times and a less stressful atmosphere at work.

Carter said she threw her support behind the union after she grew frustrated about pay and Amazon’s policies around unpaid time off. She said Amazon enforced the policy too harshly, pointing to a co-worker who was recently fired after he ran out of unpaid time off, and was absent from work for six hours while he dealt with a car emergency.

Amazon refused to let the employee use their vacation time to cover the absence, she said, adding that employees even offered to “donate their unpaid time” to help him keep his job.

“It just so happened that he had an unforeseen incident happen, he’s negative six hours, and he’s gone,” she said.

Michael Verrastro said he also feels a union is necessary to keep Amazon from unfairly disciplining its workers. In late August, Amazon fired Verrastro from ALB1 after he kicked an empty box out of frustration when tools at his workstation repeatedly malfunctioned.

Amazon said Verrastro, who joined the company in 2020, violated its workplace violence policy and claimed a box hit his co-worker after he kicked it. Verrastro said he acted out because he was concerned he wouldn’t reach his productivity goals for the day.

Verrastro said the loss of his job has created significant hardship for him, as he was diagnosed in 2020 with aggressive prostate cancer and is still undergoing treatment. Two weeks ago, he was denied unemployment benefits.

“Here I am, now 60 years old, aggressive prostate cancer, ran out of insurance, had to go short term on Medicaid, no right to an appeal to go back to work, and Amazon just refuses to acknowledge what they’re doing,” Verrastro said. “Unfortunately, I’m not the only person who something like this has happened to.”

After he was fired, Verrastro said he got a call from lead organizer Heather Goodall and was connected to the ALU’s lawyers. They filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over his firing. Verrastro has also filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights.

“I want people to know what this company does to its people, to its employees, to the people who make the company possible,” Verrastro said.

‘A union isn’t good for Amazon’

Other employees said they voted against the union, saying they felt it was unnecessary because the pay and benefits offered by Amazon are generous.

“If anything, I’m concerned a union will take money out of my paycheck,” said Dionte Whitehead, who works as a stower at ALB1. “A union isn’t good for Amazon.”

Workers also expressed skepticism about the ALU. The organization was started by Chris Smalls last year after he was fired from his management assistant job for leading a protest at Amazon’s sprawling JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. The victory at JFK8 turned into a lightning rod for labor organizers seeking to unionize Amazon and other companies across the country.

But the group has struggled to build momentum after a failed union drive at another Staten Island facility, and it has suffered from infighting among members. The election win has also been clouded by a months-long court battle with Amazon, which is seeking to have the results thrown out.

Amazon sought to discredit the ALU in posters and other communications broadcast at ALB1. One message displayed on a screen inside the warehouse called the union “untested and unproven,” while flyers left on a break room table said “The ALU isn’t telling the truth.”

ALB1 worker Tyrese Caldwell said he voted no because he felt the ALU is too inexperienced.

“They’re a fresh union, and they’re trying to tackle something as big as Amazon,” Caldwell said.

Michael Oakes, another ALB1 employee, agreed. “If it were an established union, not the ALU, I might be behind it,” he said.

Plan B: A more experienced union?

Carson, the packer, said ahead of the vote on Tuesday that ALB1 organizers had discussed other strategies if they lost the election, including asking workers if they’d prefer to be represented by a well-established union.

“There are a lot of people who were opposed because it was a startup union,” she added.

Major national unions have tried to unionize Amazon workers for years to no avail. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is seeking to represent workers at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, but a vote there last spring did not have a clear outcome and is currently in court as both sides challenge some votes. Meanwhile, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters last year announced a renewed push to scale up efforts to organize Amazon workers.

Even if some workers question the fledgling Amazon Labor Union’s ability to organize ALB1, Smalls signaled he remains committed to the effort.

“This won’t be the end of ALU at ALB1,” Smalls said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

Technology

Microsoft confirms performance-based job cuts across departments

Published

10 hours ago

January 9, 2025

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Microsoft confirms performance-based job cuts across departments

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a press briefing on the company’s campus in Redmond, Washington, on May 20, 2024.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Microsoft is cutting a small percentage of jobs across departments, based on performance, the company confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

“At Microsoft we focus on high-performance talent,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Wednesday. “We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action.”

Business Insider reported on the plans late Tuesday.

The job cuts will affect less than 1% of employees, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss private information.

Microsoft had 228,000 employees at the end of June. While the company’s net income margin of nearly 38% is close to its highest since the early 2000s, Microsoft’s stock underperformed its peers last year, rising 12% while the Nasdaq gained 29%.

Microsoft’s latest cuts are slim compared to recent downsizing efforts.

In early 2023, the company laid off 10,000 employees and consolidated leases. In January 2024, three months after completing the $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft’s gaming unit shed 1,900 jobs to reduce overlap.

As 2025 begins, Microsoft faces a more tenuous relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which the company has backed to the tune of over $13 billion. The partnership helped propel Microsoft’s market cap past $3 trillion last year.

Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the phrase “cooperation tension” while discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on a podcast released last month.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant, which draws on OpenAI technology, has yet to become pervasive in business. Analysts at UBS said in a note last month that they came away from Microsoft’s Ignite conference with the impression that Copilot rollouts “have been a bit slow/underwhelming.”

Microsoft is still touting its growth opportunities. Finance chief Amy Hood said in October that revenue growth from Microsoft’s Azure cloud will speed up in the first half of this year because of greater AI infrastructure capacity.

WATCH: Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion to build out AI this year

Technology

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is ‘dead wrong’ about quantum computers, D-Wave CEO says

Published

13 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang is 'dead wrong' about quantum computers, D-Wave CEO says

D-Wave CEO responds to Jensen Huang's quantum comments

D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz said Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is “dead wrong” about quantum computing after comments from the head of the chip giant spooked Wall Street on Wednesday.

Huang was asked Tuesday about Nvidia’s strategy for quantum computing. He said Nvidia could make conventional chips that are needed alongside quantum computing chips, but that those computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, that they currently have.

Getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years, Huang told analysts.

Huang’s remarks sent stocks in the nascent industry slumping, with D-Wave plunging 36% on Wednesday.

“The reason he’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on “The Exchange.” Baratz said companies including Mastercard and Japan’s NTT Docomo “are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”

“Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now,” Baratz said. “But right now today.”

D-Wave’s revenue is still minimal. Sales in the latest quarter fell 27% to $1.9 million from $2.6 million a year earlier.

Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Technologists have been working on it for decades, and companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM are pursuing it today, alongside researchers at startups and universities.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding a Project Digits computer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

D-Wave was among a number of companies that enjoyed a revival of interest from investors in December, when Google announced a breakthrough in its own research. Google said it had completed a 100 qubit chip, the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits.

D-Wave shares soared 178% in December after popping 185% the month prior. Quantum company Rigetti Computing, which plummeted 45% on Wednesday, quintupled in value last month. IonQ dropped 39% on Wednesday. The stock rose 14% in December following a 143% rally in November.

Baratz acknowledged that one approach to quantum computing, called gate-based, may be decades away. But he said uses an annealing approach, which can be deployed now.

While Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers, well, they are 100% off base for annealing quantum computers,” Baratz said.

Nvidia declined to comment.

Even after Wednesday’s slide, D-Wave shares are up about 600% in the last year, giving the company a market cap of $1.6 billion.

Quantum computing has also been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, the technology that’s led to surging demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which use conventional transistors instead of qubits. Nvidia’s market cap has increased by 168% in the past year to $3.4 trillion.

Baratz said D-Wave systems can solve problems beyond the capabilities of the fastest Nvidia-equipped systems.

“l’ll be happy to meet with Jensen any time, any place, to help fill in these gaps for him,” Baratz said.

WATCH: D-Wave CEO responds to Huang’s comments

Technology

EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

Published

18 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.

EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.

The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.

The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.

EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.

Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.