The big news today is that an Amazon warehouse was finally unionized.

(AP) — Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, voted to unionize on Friday, marking the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the retail giant’s history and handing an unexpected win to a nascent group that fueled the union drive.

Votes were still being tabulated but union supporters secured a wide enough margin to give the fledgling Amazon Labor Union enough support to pull off a victory. The votes that were either voided or contested by either Amazon or the ALU did not appear to be enough to sway the outcome.

More than 8,300 eligible workers cast their ballots. Amazon provides the list of eligible workers to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the process. Organizers say a high attrition rate may have shrunk that pool since the election was scheduled.

The victory was an uphill battle for the independent group, made up of former and current workers who lacked official backing from an established union and were out-gunned by the deep-pocketed retail giant.

Chris Smalls is the David v. Goliath hero here.
The most impressive aspects was that this was done without an established union, without money, and without any visible political support.
At the same time the Amazon warehouse in Alabama was having a revote, which the NLRB forced after Amazon engaged in shady practices during the first vote.

Union supporters are narrowly trailing opponents in a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, the National Labor Relations Board said on Thursday. But the count was far closer than a vote at the same warehouse last year, when workers rejected the union by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.

The union had 875 yes votes versus 993 no votes, but the more than 400 challenged ballots are sufficient to potentially affect the outcome.

There's still some hope here because Amazon traditionally does the bulk of the challenges.

Meanwhile, another anti-union giant, Starbucks, continues to lose union elections.

The union organizing Starbucks workers extended its winning streak on Friday, adding an eighth store to the list of unionized locations.

Employees at the store in Mesa, Arizona, voted to join Workers United by a count of 11 to 3, according to a vote tally conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. That brings the union’s success tally to five stores in the Buffalo area, two in Mesa and one in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle.

The coffee chain has roughly 9,000 corporate-owned stores around the country, of which those eight are the first to unionize. The newly organized shops represent a tiny fraction of Starbucks’ overall workforce, but the union has petitioned for elections at 150 stores in 27 states, making it almost certain more workers will join.

It's hard not to notice a trend going on here.
Big union drives by national unions frequently lose.
But small, grassroots union drives, driven by local employees, are winning big.