Labor movement targets Amazon as a starting point in the south

The South has never been hospitable to unions. But that may change, with a major test in Alabama, where thousands of workers on an Amazon campus decide to form a union.

Union organizers and activists see the David and Goliath struggle as a potential turning point in the region with a long history of undervalued work and ingrained hostility to collective bargaining rights. A victory could have economic and political repercussions for the labor movement and its Democratic Party allies who want a stronger foothold in the South amid decades of declining union power nationwide.

“This election transcends this one workplace. It transcends even this powerful company, ”said Stuart Appelbaum, National President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union. “If Amazon workers in Alabama, in the midst of the pandemic, can organize, it means workers anywhere can organize.”

The mere presence of a national union figure like Appelbaum in Alabama underscores the issues.

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The Amazon vote comes as Democrats and Republicans fight fiercely for working class voters. Over the decades, many white workers have drifted towards Republicans, drawn in part by cultural identity and an anti-institutional stance. This has left Democrats looking to sharpen their economic case, saying their party is the one fighting for higher wages, better working conditions and more affordable health care.

A victory in Bessemer, where the vast majority of the workforce is black, would have additional significance as a springboard for a new political organization in the South, where Democrats want to build on recent successes.

This could prove decisive in new battlefields like Georgia, which Biden brought back to the party’s presidential column for the first time since 1992 and where Democrats have won two Senate races. This could be a building block in GOP-dominated states like Alabama and Mississippi. And any domino effect nationwide could boost Democrats in former industrial Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Republicans have gained traction.

Biden drew applause from union leaders with a recent video speech pushing for the right to organize through “free and fair elections,” although he did not directly mention the Amazon campaign.

The current postal vote by nearly 6,000 workers is the biggest union push ever at Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world. The election, which runs through March, is also among the biggest unique organizing efforts in Southern history. It follows a string of failed organizational votes at auto assembly plants – Nissan in Mississippi in 2017, Volkswagen in Tennessee in 2019, among others – that have poured into the region over the past three years. decades.

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“Wages in this region have been depressed since the days of slavery,” historian Keri Leigh Merritt said, because “we have always had these lower classes competing from different races than the white elites” of the South and moreover “were able to play against each other.

The result, Merritt said, is that almost all workers are paid “below the national market.”

The median household income in the United States in 2019 was $ 62,843, according to Census Bureau data. In Bessemer, part of an industrialized strip outside of Birmingham that was once teeming with steelworks, that figure was $ 32,301.

“We just want what is owed to us,” said Kevin Jackson, a distribution center employee.

Jackson, who is black, compared Amazon wages, which start at $ 15 an hour, or about double the minimum wage, to the fortune of company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, whose net worth number in the hundreds of billions.

“When you kick a dog this many times, it’s going to bite,” Jackson said. “We bite.”

The union election overlaps with Biden and Congressional Democrats pushing for the “PRO Act,” a law that would overhaul labor law to make it easier to organize. The bill represents the most significant change in labor law since the New Deal era and follows a decades-long drop in union membership. In 1970, nearly a third of the American workforce was unionized. In 2020, that number was 10.8%.

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The House approved the overhaul Tuesday on a largely online party vote, but faces almost certain defeat in the 50-50 Senate where major bills require at least 10 Republican votes to avoid filibuster.

Even without this law, union leaders say the Amazon outcome could be a springboard for union organizing nationwide. At the regional level, a victory would provide a roadmap for a Southern workforce that is not used to unions in the mainstream economy.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the International Union of Service Employees, said workers in Alabama are “inspiring” and added that her union and others are watching closely as they consider expansion.

The southern deficit of organized labor is glaring: the 11 states of the former Confederation have so-called “right to work” laws, which allow workers in unionized workshops not to pay union dues even though they retain the benefits and job protection negotiated by the union. This weakens the unions by reducing their membership and their bargaining power. Most southern states also prohibit public sector employees from collective bargaining.

The region as a whole lags behind the national union when measured as a percentage of the workforce. For example, United Auto Workers has over 400,000 members, but only 12,000 in the southern states, despite the region’s abundance of internationally owned auto factories and associated suppliers.

Merritt, an expert on workers’ politics in the South, drew a straight line between the pre-Civil War economy and the current climate.

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Before the abolition of slavery, she said, white workers were threatened – explicitly or implicitly – with being replaced by slaves, depriving them of any power to lobby employers. After emancipation, free black workers and poor white workers had to compete in a devastated agricultural economy that struggled to rebuild after the war. Eventually, industrialists from the North entered the markets of the South, joining the white barons of the South to take advantage of cheap labor in industries such as textiles, steel, and mining.

The trend continued as the regional economy grew with chemical plants and oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana, shipbuilding along the coasts, and eventually auto plants from Texas to the Carolinas.

Generations of elected officials from the South – Democrats and Republicans – have perfected their arguments with outside companies.

“They’ve always offered big tax breaks and basically sold people to move their factories south and said, listen, we can offer you labor prices and labor laws at the lowest that will always favor employers, ”Merritt said.

Some observers say history should temper expectations.

“The political power of business and business leaders and anti-union power in the South is still quite strong,” said Duke University emeritus professor Robert Korstad, an expert on worker development from South. “So it’s not going to be easy.”

Amazon, which has a long history of responding to organizing campaigns, held mandatory sessions to tell workers that a union would demand dues when they were already getting the kind of compensation, including health insurance, that workers had to pay. unions are negotiating.

“We believe that we already provide everything that unions ask for and that we greatly value direct communication with our employees,” said company spokesperson Heather Knox.

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Amazon sent a similar message to elected Democrats who joined Appelbaum on a recent visit. “Members of Congress are welcome at Bessemer,” reads an electronic sign in the hotel’s parking lot. “Please match Amazon’s minimum wage of $ 15 / hour.”

All members of the House had already supported a payroll of $ 15.

Union organizers have their own sign in Bessemer – a sign that hints at the wider political possibilities beyond the campaign. Outside the Amazon warehouse is a banner depicting voting rights lawyer Stacey Abrams – considered one of the early architects of Biden’s victory in Georgia – as the character of “Rosie the Riveter ”, an emblematic symbol of workers’ power.

“We can do it,” the banner read.