Amazon Union Drive takes place in an unlikely location

The largest and most viable effort to unionize Amazon in many years began last summer not in a union stronghold like New York or Michigan, but in a Fairfield Inn outside of Birmingham, in the State of Work Law of Alabama.

It was late summer and a group of workers from a nearby Amazon warehouse contacted an organizer from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union. They had had enough, they said, of how the online retailer was tracking their productivity and wanted to talk about organizing.

When the workers arrived at the hotel, union officials monitored the parking lot to make sure they had not been followed.

Since that clandestine meeting, the organizing campaign at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, has progressed faster and further than anyone expected. In late December, more than 2,000 workers signed cards indicating they wanted an election, the union said. The National Labor Relations Board then determined that there was “sufficient” interest in a union election among the approximately 5,800 warehouse workers, which is a significant hurdle to be met with the overseeing government body. the voting process. About a week ago, the council announced that postal voting would begin next month and continue until the end of March.

Just getting to an election is an achievement for unions, which for years failed to break into Amazon. But persuading workers to vote for a union is a bigger challenge. The company began to counter organizing efforts by claiming that a union would charge workers dues without any guarantee of higher wages or better benefits.

This will be the first union election involving the company in the United States since a small group of technical workers at a Delaware warehouse voted against forming a union in 2014.

Much has changed since that vote seven years ago, allowing unions to make inroads with Amazon employees in a place like Alabama. Most of these changes have come in the past year during the pandemic as workers from meat packing plants to grocery stores have spoken out, often through their unions, about the lack of protective gear. or insufficient remuneration.

The retail union highlighted its success by representing workers during the pandemic as a selling point to Bessemer.

“The pandemic has changed the way a lot of people think about their employers,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the retail union. “Many workers see the benefit of having a collective voice.”

Union organizers are also building their campaign around the themes of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of Amazon’s warehouse workers are black, a fact that the retail union focused on issues of racial equality and empowerment. And leading the organizing effort are about two dozen unionized workers from nearby warehouses and poultry factories, most of whom are also black.

Since October 20, poultry workers have stood outside the gates of the Amazon every day from 4.30 a.m., urging workers arrested at a traffic light to join a union.

“I tell them they’re part of a global movement,” said Michael Foster, a black organizer at Bessemer, who works in a poultry factory. “I want them to know that we are important and that we matter.”

Unions have formed in other unlikely places this year. This month, more than 400 engineers and other Google workers formed a union, a rare move in the largely anti-union tech industry. The Google union is primarily aimed at strengthening employee activism, while Amazon’s proposed union in Bessemer would eventually be able to negotiate a contract and seek to influence wages and working conditions.

Amazon, which embarked on a wave of hiring during the pandemic, now has more than 1.2 million employees worldwide, up more than 50% from the previous year. But the company also began to face pressure from its employees, climate change and other issues, and from many warehouse workers across the country who felt encouraged to speak up. The attention will only increase with Amazon poised to surpass Walmart as the nation’s largest private employer in a few years.

The success of the Bessemer warehouse, which opened in March, could inspire workers in the burgeoning e-commerce industry more broadly, said Nelson Lichtenstein, labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara . “If you can do it in Alabama, we can certainly do it here in Southern California,” he said. “It would have a huge ripple effect.”

In a statement, Heather Knox, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company did not believe the union “represents the majority of our employees’ views.” She added, “Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we offer some of the best jobs available anywhere we hire, and we encourage anyone to compare our total compensation, health benefits and work environment to any other. company with similar jobs. “

The company created a website that suggests union dues – which could add up to about $ 9.25 per week for a full-time employee – would leave workers with less money to pay for school supplies.

“Why not save some money and get the books, gifts, and things you want?” the website says.

An early version of the website featured photos of happy-looking young workers, including an image of a black man leaping through the air that appeared to be from a free photo website. On the site, the man and a woman are pictured in an image titled “Excited African American couple jumping, having fun”.

Asked about the site, Amazon called it “educational” and said it “helps employees understand the facts about joining a union.” (Last Tuesday evening, the company removed archival photos, including that of the man who was jumping.)

Race has often been at the heart of organizing campaigns in the South. A century ago, the multiracial steel and coal miners’ unions around Birmingham were a “cockpit of labor activism,” said Lichtenstein.

In the 1960s, unions – including the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union – gave black workers a venue to assert their civil rights and achieve more equality in the venue. of work.

Organizing was dangerous work. A black organizer of the Alabama retail union, Henry Jenkins, remembers being shot and receiving death threats in his home. At one point, a bomb was found in his car outside a church in Selma. Mr. Jenkins died in 2011 from an illness.

The retail union has been influential in the Northeast, representing workers at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. But its strength has also grown in the South, particularly in poultry, an industry with traditionally dangerous jobs and a workforce that has many black employees.

This spring, the union has been active in publicizing the deadly virus outbreaks in poultry factories. The union’s Mid-South Council chairman Randy Hadley called on the industry for “blatant inaction” in providing basic protections to workers.

Building on its growing profile during the pandemic, the union formed a group of workers to begin organizing additional poultry facilities in the South. When Amazon workers contacted, the union, which had failed to gain traction in an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island two years earlier, decided to redirect the poultry workers to the warehouse of Bessemer. Unlike previous campaigns, the union decided it would remain mostly silent during the Alabama organizing campaign.

“Some people don’t expect us to be successful,” said Josh Brewer, who is leading the organizing effort. “I think we can do it.”

On the evening of October 20, two dozen poultry and warehouse workers showed up at the gates of the Amazon.

Mona Darby, who has spent the past 33 years processing chickens, immediately began approaching Amazon workers in their cars as they drove home. Ms. Darby grew up in Alabama, one of 18 children. She started working as a cleaner for local doctors and lawyers at the age of 15. But she wanted more stable work, health care and retirement benefits, so she got a job at a chicken factory.

Today, starting salaries at unionized poultry factories in Alabama are about the same as Amazon’s. (The average hourly wage at the Bessemer warehouse is $ 15.30.) But Ms Darby said the union provided her with protections and job security that other jobs lacked.

“You can pay me $ 25 an hour, but if you don’t treat me well, what’s that money worth?” she said.

On the first night at the Bessemer warehouse, Ms Darby said, a white man approached her and told her Amazon didn’t want a union and he didn’t want his “black ass.” on our property ”.

“You’re going to see my black ass here all day, every day,” Ms. Darby said as she responded.

Ms Darby said she saw the man remove his badge before walking towards her. She told a police officer present what the man had said, but the officer did not take any notes.

Bessemer police said they had no record of the incident. Amazon declined to comment.

On December 18, lawyers for Amazon and the union met on Zoom to discuss the number of workers who would be part of the potential union.

The hearing lasted for days, as Amazon’s attorney asked painstakingly detailed questions about the warehouse, until the federal hearing officer finally interrupted testimony.

One issue that Amazon has insisted on is that the election be held in person at the warehouse. The company has even offered to rent hotel rooms to federal election observers to help them avoid contracting the virus in an area with a 17% infection rate. The National Labor Relations Board voted against the in-person vote on January 15, saying a company paying for hotel rooms for government employees was not a good idea. Amazon called for a suspension of the postal election on Friday, arguing infection rates were dropping and insisting that the vote take place at the warehouse.

Until all votes are cast, Mr Foster and the other poultry and warehouse workers plan to stay outside the gates of the Amazon. He said some of the Amazon workers were afraid to be seen talking to organizers at a red light.

On a few occasions Mr. Foster prayed with the workers before the light turned green.

“We want to show them that we are not leaving them until this is done,” he said.