You might think you know just how anti-union Amazon is, but you probably underestimate it by a country mile.

There’s a horrifying scene in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, in which a ruthless gangster intimidates the detective Philip Marlowe by smashing a Coke bottle against his own girlfriend’s face. “That’s someone I love,” the gangster tells Marlowe. “You I don’t even like.”

I flashed back to that ghastly moment when I read in The New York Times that Amazon fired “more than half a dozen senior managers” last week who were “involved with” Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. Last month, JFK8 became the first Amazon facility in the United States to unionize. The firings (the identities of those let go have not been made public) looked very much like a warning to other managers: Lose a union election, and you will lose your job.
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It’s certainly difficult to ignore that “the last several weeks” coincided with the aftermath of the union vote. And if Amazon were not trying to send a message (“That’s someone I love”), why would it fire these managers all at once? “It strikes me,” said Moshe Marvit, a labor lawyer and fellow at the Century Foundation, “that they want this to be the news.” If they didn’t, he said, they’d just wait until each manager came up for his next job evaluation.

The next Amazon union election will be in New Jersey.
Meanwhile, the Starbucks union continues to rack up wins.

In the 60 elections that have been run so far, the union has won 90 percent of the time and the average unit size of the unionized stores is 28 workers. If these same numbers hold for the 193 open cases where an election has not yet been administered, then the Starbucks union will soon win an additional 174 elections and thereby add an additional 4,870 workers to their rolls.

Combining the numbers from the elections that have been run and these projections for the elections that will be run soon reveals that, based on current filings alone, the Starbucks union is likely to have 6,384 workers at 228 locations in the next few months.

In a only slightly related note, the Left seems to be getting its act together in France behind Melenchon.

Few thought the day would ever come, but an earthquake is about to shake up French politics. Ahead of next month’s legislative elections, France’s famously fractious leftwing parties have decided to join forces, with Europe Ecology-the Greens (EELV), the Socialist party (PS) and the French Communist party (PCF) coalescing around Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left populist La France Insoumise (LFI) and uniting around a common set of candidates.

In France’s semi-presidential system, the legislative elections often go overlooked, but they play a decisive role in determining how much of the president’s agenda can actually be enacted. Without a majority in the national assembly, the president is forced to share power with a rival prime minister and cabinet – a situation known as “cohabitation”. It’s happened three times before, but not since 2002, when legislative elections were moved to take place just after the presidential election.

And yet, cohabitation is a real possibility in today’s highly volatile landscape, with polls suggesting the new unity coalition – the Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale (Nupes) – on track to win a significant share of seats. Even if it does fall short of obtaining an outright majority and forming a government of its own, a newly empowered left bloc in parliament could pose headaches for the president, Emmanuel Macron, as he embarks on his second term in the Elysée.