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Despite the Trump administration’s baseline hostility to organized labor, union organizing continues apace, even—or perhaps, especially—at Amazon.

Jeff Bezos designed his money mill so that he wouldn’t have to share the merest smidgen of his power with his employees, by contracting out his delivery drivers to ostensibly independent contractors, and by making warehouse work so onerous that the average employee quits within eight months—a workforce so transient that union-building would be impossible. That message didn’t trickle down, however, to organizers at the Teamsters and their advocates in the courts, whose work has enabled Amazon’s warehouse and delivery workers to go union.

The most recent victory—both real and provisional, as I’ll explain below—came in San Francisco on Monday, when the local region of the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to begin bargaining with the more than 100 warehouse workers at DCK6, a majority of whom had signed Teamster affiliation cards. In keeping with the Board’s 2023 ruling in the Cemex case, employers who refuse to request a Board-certified election within the several weeks following the majority of their workers signing such cards must enter into bargaining. Anticipating the application of Cemex’s rules to Amazon’s warehouse workers, the Teamsters have recently obtained affiliation cards from majorities of the workers at Amazon warehouses in New York, Atlanta, Chicago’s Skokie suburb, and several in Southern California, including a mega-warehouse in San Bernardino. The company having refused to request elections at those facilities, too, it doubtless will be ordered to begin bargaining with the workers at those warehouses as well.

The drivers of Amazon’s delivery trucks have benefited from a different NLRB ruling in California, this time in Palmdale in northern Los Angeles County. There, the local NLRB region noted that despite Amazon’s contracting out its delivery drivers to a subcontractor, those drivers were required to deliver Amazon’s packages driving Amazon’s trucks, wearing Amazon’s uniforms, and by the time and distance standards Amazon set, verified by the Amazon cameras installed in their Amazon cabs. Under the Board’s ruling during Trump’s first term, those particulars made Amazon a "joint employer" of the Palmdale drivers. Since that ruling came down last year, a majority of drivers at a host of other subcontractors (called Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs) have also opted to join the Teamsters—in New York’s Queens borough, in California’s Victorville, and in Skokie. By invoking both the Board’s joint-employer standard and its Cemex decision, the Board’s regions are likely to order Amazon to sit down with the Teamsters in those and other locales in the coming weeks and months.

Credit here goes to a tenacious organizing effort headed by Southern California–based Teamster Randy Korgan, which has worked alongside a team of lawyers, most particularly at the Los Angeles–based firm of Bush Gottlieb, who have successfully argued for the application of the joint-employer and Cemex rulings. The third party responsible for these breakthroughs was the NLRB’s general counsel during the Biden presidency, Jennifer Abruzzo, whose efforts to restore some teeth to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), including initiating the cases that led to the Cemex ruling, I chronicled for the Prospect.

Discharged by President Trump shortly after he took office, Abruzzo joined Bush Gottlieb last week in an of-counsel position. (She also will serve as an adviser to the Communications Workers of America.) At Bush Gottlieb, she joins attorney Julie Gutman Dickinson, who heads the firm’s strategic initiatives practice, working with unions like the Teamsters to win rulings that facilitate organizing campaigns. Gutman Dickinson (who once gave a notable speech on "rebellious lawyering") also represents the Teamsters in opposing Amazon’s way-over-the-top efforts to have the entire NLRB declared unconstitutional. To date, those efforts have taken the form of Amazon’s seeking immediate injunctions to stop the "irreparable harm" the company would supposedly suffer from any adverse Board decision, inasmuch as the Board, it contends, is unconstitutional (though the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 1937, and the irreparable harm it allegedly inflicts has not been cited by the many thousands of businesses and unions whose cases it has ruled on in the intervening 88 years). The injunction requests are now before federal appellate courts in both the Fifth and Ninth Circuits.

As I noted, these very real legal and organizing victories are both significant breakthroughs and, alas, provisional. Amazon will delay compliance by any means possible, including contesting the Cemex ruling, the joint-employer standard, and the NLRB’s constitutionality all the way to a labor-hostile Supreme Court if necessary. Even before then, Trump will make some appointments to the NLRB (now down to just two members out of the allotted five), who will likely take it on themselves to weaken the powers that the NLRA vests in workers, which Abruzzo worked to restore. They could, for instance, very well strike down Cemex.

That said, all such processes take time, and during that time, the Teamsters will work to establish more facts on the ground, building on these recent legal victories to organize more drivers and warehouse workers. And who knows? Maybe Trump, despite his loathing of anti-autocratic power-sharing organizations like unions, may conclude Teamster President Sean O’Brien, who spoke for him at last summer’s Republican Convention, did more for him than Jeff Bezos has done by helping fund his inaugural bash and clamping down on any but laissez-faire economics on The Washington Post’s editorial pages. In addition to Korgan’s tenacious organizers, and Gutman Dickinson’s and now Abruzzo’s legal briefs, there may be that as well.