A group of former and current Amazon workers pulled off what other long-established labor organizations have never accomplished.

They successfully unionized a very small slice of Amazon, the sprawling conglomerate worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

By a margin of more than 500 votes, the Amazon Labor Union won a union election last week at this Staten Island warehouse.

“Workers are being treated like robots,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “Their humanity is not being respected.”

Appelbaum leads the retail workers union, known as RWDSU, which has tried to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama over the last year. Results from the most recent election there are still pending, but the union is currently trailing.

Appelbaum said there may be several reasons why the Staten Island unionization effort was more successful. For one: location.

“The difference between Staten Island and Bessemer, Alabama is location,” he said. “New York City is a union-friendly town. Everyone in New York knows someone who is a member of a union.”

Unlike RWDSU, the Amazon Labor Union is not part of the political establishment.

Instead, they’re a grassroots movement that started within the warehouse in 2020, when the union’s leader protested the company’s COVID-19 policies. Chris Smalls was then fired, kicking off two contentious years between union organizers and the company.

Amazon says he was fired for violating their COVID-19 quarantine policy. Smalls says it was because he was organizing. Smalls no longer has a job with Amazon, but his former co-workers now have a union.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said the union must be given a tremendous amount of credit for the organizing they did within the large Staten Island warehouse.

Simultaneously, she said, the company did “everything wrong” in their opposition to the union and attacks on Small.

“They made him into a martyr, which made the workers all the more angry,” Bronfenbrenner said. “Amazon, everyone thought it was invincible. It couldn’t be organized.”

“It’s huge. This is an 8,000 person warehouse,” she added. “Not only that, but it was organized by an independent union without a big treasury, without big infrastructure. And they didn’t just win, they won big.”

The Amazon Labor Union has already sent management its request to start negotiating a contract and propoising a sit down next month to hash out details.

That timeline may be unlikely.

In a statement Friday, Amazon indicated it could challenge the results, claiming the National Labor Relations Board, which ran the election, had “undue influence” over the process.

That could trigger a lengthy hearing or court process that could delay any contract negotiation.