The biggest, most viable attempt to unite Amazon in many years began last summer not in a union stronghold like New York or Michigan, but in a Fairfield Inn outside Birmingham, in the right-wing state of Alabama.
It was late summer and a group of employees from a nearby Amazon warehouse contacted an organizer in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. They were fed up, they said, about the way the online retailer was monitoring their productivity, and wanted to discuss the union.
When the workers arrived at the hotel, union officials watched the parking lot to make sure they were not being followed.
Since the secret meeting, the union has moved faster and further than anyone expected at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala. By the end of December, more than 2,000 workers had signed cards indicating they wanted an election, the union said. The National Labor Relations Council then determined that there was ‘sufficient’ interest in a union election among the approximately 5,800 employees of the warehouse, which is an important measure to take at the government agency overseeing the voting process. About a week ago, the board announced that voting by mail would begin next month and continue until the end of March.
Just getting to an election is an achievement for unions that have not been able to break into Amazon for years. But convincing the workers to really vote for a union is a bigger challenge. The company began to thwart the organizational efforts by arguing that a union would saddle workers with money without any guarantee of higher wages or better benefits.
This will be the first union election in which the company is involved in the United States, as a small group of technical workers in a warehouse in Delaware in 2014 voted against forming a union.
Much has changed since the vote seven years ago, which enabled organized labor to start with Amazon employees in a place like Alabama. Most of the change has taken place during the pandemic in recent years, as workers from meat packaging plants to grocery stores, often through their unions, have spoken out about the lack of protective equipment or insufficient payment.
The retail union pointed out that during the pandemic, it represented its employees as a selling point in Bessemer.
“The pandemic has changed the way many people feel about their employers,” said Stuart Appelbaum, retail union president. “Many workers see the benefit of a common voice.”
Trade union organizers are also building their campaign around the themes of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of the employees at the Amazon warehouse are Black, who previously focused the retail union on issues of racial equality and empowerment. And the leadership of the organization is about two dozen union workers from nearby warehouses and poultry plants, most of whom are also black.
Since October 20, the poultry workers have been standing outside the Amazon gates every day from 4:30 a.m., urging workers to stop at a traffic light to join a union.
“I’m telling them they’re part of a global movement,” said Michael Foster, a Black organizer in Bessemer who works at a poultry plant. “I want them to know that we are important and that we matter.”
Trade unions have formed in other unlikely places this year. This month, more than 400 engineers and other workers at Google formed a union, a rare move in the mostly anti-union technology industry. The union Google is primarily intended to bolster workers’ activism, while the union proposed at Amazon in Bessemer will eventually be able to negotiate a contract and try to influence wages and working conditions.
Amazon, which began hiring during the pandemic, now has more than 1.2 million employees worldwide, more than 50 percent from a year earlier. But the company has also come under pressure from its corporate employees, over climate change and other issues, and from many warehouse workers across the country who have encouraged them to speak out. The attention will probably only increase with Amazon, which will surpass Walmart as the largest private employer in the country in a few years.
Success in the Bessemer Warehouse, which opened in March, could further inspire workers in the booming e-commerce industry, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If you can do it in Alabama, we can definitely do it here in Southern California,” he said. “It will have a big ripple effect.”
In a statement, Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox said the company did not believe the union “represented the majority of our employees’ views.” She added: “Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we have some of the best work available anywhere we hire, and we encourage everyone to compare our total compensation package, health benefits and workplace environment with any other business with similar work.”
Business and Economics
The company has created a website that suggests that unions – which could cost about $ 9.25 a week for a full-time employee – leave workers with less money to pay for school supplies.
“Why not save the money and get the books, gifts and things you want?” the website says.
An early version of the site contained photos of happy young workers, including the image of a black man jumping in the air, apparently coming from a free stock photo site. The website depicts the man and woman in an image with the caption “excited African-American couple jumping and having fun.”
When asked about the website, Amazon called it “educational” and said it “helps employees understand the facts of joining a union.” (As of last Tuesday night, the company had removed the stock photos, including those of the jumping man.)
Race was often the core of unions in the South. A century ago, unions for multiracial steel and coal mines in Birmingham were a “cabin of labor militancy,” he said. Lichtenstein said.
In the 1960s, unions – including the Union, Retail and Wholesale Store – gave black workers a place to assert their civil rights and achieve more equality in the workplace.
Organizing was dangerous work. A black organizer at the Alabama Retail Union, named Henry Jenkins, recalled being shot at and receiving death threats at his home. At one point, a bomb was found in his car outside a church in Selma. Mr. Jenkins died in 2011 after an illness.
The retail union was influential in the Northeast, where it represented employees of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. But its strength has also grown in the South, especially in poultry, an industry with traditionally dangerous jobs and a workforce with many black workers.
This spring, the union was active in announcing deadly virus outbreaks in poultry plants. The union’s president, Midy South Council, Randy Hadley, called on the industry for ‘serious activity’ to provide basic protection to workers.
The union was steamrolled by its rising profile during the pandemic, training a group of workers to organize additional poultry facilities throughout the South. When the Amazon workers reached out, the union, which had failed at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island two years earlier, decided to lead the poultry workers to the Bessemer warehouse. Unlike previous campaigns, the union decided that it would remain largely silent during Alabama’s organization.
“Some people do not expect us to succeed,” said Josh Brewer, who is leading the organizational effort. “I believe we can do it.”
On the evening of October 20, two dozen poultry and warehouse workers arrive outside the Amazon gates.
Mona Darby, who has been processing chicks for the past 33 years, immediately started approaching the Amazon workers in their cars when they returned home. Ms. Darby grew up in Alabama, one of 18 children. She started working as a housekeeper for local doctors and lawyers when she was 15 years old. But she wanted more stable jobs, health care and retirement benefits, so she got a job in a chicken plant.
Today, the starting salaries in Alabama’s union poultry plants are about the same as those at Amazon. (The average hourly wage at the Bessemer Warehouse is $ 15.30.) But Mrs. Darby said the union offers her protection and job security that other jobs lack.
“You can pay me $ 25 an hour, but what good is it if you do not treat me well?” she said.
The first night in the Bessemer warehouse, Mrs. Darby said, a white man approached her and said that Amazon does not want a union and that he does not want her to have a black hole on our property. ‘
“You’re going to see my black ass here all day, every day,” said Mrs. Darby said she answered.
Mrs. Darby said she saw the man remove his name tag before walking up to her. She told a police officer present what the man said, but the officer did not make any notes.
Bessemer police said they had no record of the incident. Amazon declined to comment.
On December 18, attorneys from Amazon and the union will meet at Zoom to discuss how many workers will be part of the potential union.
The trial lasted for days while Amazon’s attorney briefly asked questions about the warehouse until the federal trial official finally cut short the evidence.
One issue Amazon has insisted is that the election be held in person at the warehouse. The company even offered to rent hotel rooms to the federal election monitors to help them detect the virus in an area with an infection rate of 17 percent. The National Labor Relations Council ruled against a personal vote on January 15, saying a company that does not pay hotel rooms for civil servants is a good idea. On Friday, Amazon called for a halt to the by-elections, arguing that infection rates were falling and insisting that a vote be taken at the warehouse.
Until all the votes have been cast, Mr. Foster and the other poultry and warehouse workers to stay outside the Amazon gates. He said some of the Amazon workers are afraid of being seen with the organizers at the stoplight.
On a few occasions, Mr. Foster said a prayer with workers before the light turned green.
“We want to show them that we are not leaving them until this is done,” he said.