Leaders of the new Amazon Labor Union were clear last week on who doesn’t deserve credit for their victory in organizing a Staten Island warehouse: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You could chalk up her disinterest in the cause to the risk of being associated with a campaign that could have lost or just disorganization — but the reality is that AOC’s Democratic Socialists of America don’t mix well with traditional labor unions. 

Just after the vote to organize the 8,300-strong workforce at the JFK8 complex, the first such win in the country, movement leader Christian Smalls said AOC “doesn’t deserve this moment.”  

She was supposed to attend a rally last summer for the workers, but jilted them without warning — a snub Smalls called “a slap in the face.” She has cited both scheduling conflicts and security concerns as excuses.  

Fact is, though, the DSA movement has never been a union movement. Nearly four years ago, when AOC herself first won her Democratic primary, she beat the union-backed incumbent, Joe Crowley.  

Just days before the vote in 2018, Crowley stood with Bill de Blasio as the then-mayor announced a brand-new benefit for unionized teachers: six weeks of parental leave, at full salary. “I applaud Mayor de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers for striking this important deal,” Crowley said. 

Unionized teacher support obviously didn’t carry Crowley to re-election — but there’s one word in Crowley’s statement that DSA adherents such as AOC don’t like: “deal.” 

New York state had already created a new paid family-leave program for all private-sector workers here months earlier. People working more than 20 hours weekly could take eight weeks at half pay (now higher) to care for a new baby. Like with Social Security or Medicare, all workers pay for this program via a regular paycheck deduction. 

The deal the teachers scored, then, was better than what everyone else gets — much better. Full pay and no deduction from paychecks to fund it (the city paid for it through vague “savings”). The teachers were effectively saying: Whatever everyone else gets is not good enough for us, and we are powerful enough to get better. 

This stance is not at all unusual in the union world. Take retiree health care. Right now, hundreds of thousands of city-government retirees are fighting a de Blasio-era cost savings asking them to pay $191 monthly to keep their otherwise entirely free health plan or switch to a plan with fewer benefits and maintain the no-cost status. 

Of course, almost nobody in the private sector can depend on his former employer to pay his health care in retirement. That is why the US government created Medicare, a subsidized — but not free — retiree health-care plan.  

City workers can retire in their 50s and enjoy free health care, but private-sector workers who retire early must wait until age 65 for Medicare because the federal government has determined that people younger than that should generally be in the workforce. 

Private-sector workers unionize, too, because they want something better than the legal minimum. Amazon’s starting wage in New York City is already $18 an hour, $3 above the city’s legal minimum. Unionized auto and other industrial workers have long enjoyed better retirement benefits than most private-sector workers (although they lost some in the 2008 financial crisis). 

This all creates a huge tension between Amazon (and Starbucks) workers creating unions and AOC types who claim to stick up for workers’ rights. 

AOC wants people to look to the government for all their benefits, whereas Smalls and fellow organizers want to extract even better benefits from their employers. Unionized workers with excellent health care have never been advocates of “Medicare for All” because they don’t need it.

AOC and fellow Democratic Socialists claim to support unions, but much of their labor agenda consists of universal benefits that would make labor unions obsolete. The most obvious one, from the DSA’s platform: to “guarantee a job with union wages and benefits to everyone who wants one by creating millions of public sector jobs.” With “union wages and benefits,” there is no need for a union.  

Ironically — and something AOC is well smart enough to understand — a newly powerful service-sector workforce actually harms support for the DSA movement. Unionized Amazon jobs are going to be really good logistics jobs (not so much Starbucks jobs, as the economics just don’t work — you can’t sell people $15 cups of coffee). 

And people with good jobs are not street protesters or socialist voters. 

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.