Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, gave the online retail giant a decisive victory when they voted to form a union and cut a path that labor activists hoped would lead to similar efforts in the whole business and beyond.
After months of aggressive campaign on both sides, 1798 warehouse workers finally rejected the union, while 738 voted in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the process.
Of the 3,117 votes cast, 76 were declared invalid because they were filled in incorrectly, and 505 were disputed by Amazon or by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which led the organizing efforts in Bessemer. However, the NLRB said that the disputed votes were not enough to make the result successful. About 53% of the nearly 6,000 workers cast their ballots.
The union said it would lodge an objection with the NLRB, accusing the company of interfering illegally with the union. It will be heard with the Labor Council to determine whether the result should be “set aside” after accusing Amazon of spreading disinformation about the union effort at meetings in which workers had to attend.
‘Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to relieve its own employees. We will not leave the lies, deception and illegal activities of Amazon undisputed, ”said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the RWDSU.
Amazon said in a statement that it does not intimidate employees.
“Our employees have heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers and media than they have heard from us,” the company said. “And Amazon did not win – our employees made the choice to vote against a union.”
The union was the largest in Amazon’s 26-year history and only the second time an organizational effort within the company has been put to the vote. But Bessemer is always seen as a long shot, as it puts the country’s second-largest employer against warehouse workers in a state with laws that do not benefit unions. Alabama is one of the 27 “right-to-work” states where workers do not have to pay money to unions they represent.
That the labor movement in Bessemer had even come this far was unexpected. Amazon has an unbeaten record of excluding union efforts before they can distribute. And at a time when the economy is still trying to recover and companies are eliminating jobs, it is one of the few places still employed during the pandemic, adding 500,000 employees last year alone.
But the pandemic also revealed inequalities in staff, and many people had to report their jobs, even while the coronavirus was raging, leading to health and safety concerns. Organizational efforts in Bessemer coincided with protests across the country following the assassination of George Floyd by police, which raised awareness of racial injustice and sparked further frustration over how workers at the warehouse were treated – more than 80 % black – with 10-hour days of packing and loading boxes and only two 30-minute breaks.
At a press conference held by Amazon, four workers in the Bessemer warehouse said the talk of abuse by the company is the opinion of some workers, not all.
“We are very sorry that their experience was not the same as ours,” said Will Stokes, one of the warehouse workers who voted against the union.
The organizing effort within the Bessemer warehouse began last summer when a group of workers approached the RWDSU over the formation of a union. The movement has since gained momentum and attracted the attention of professional athletes, Hollywood stars and conspicuously elected officials, including President Joe Biden.
During the voting process, workers were flooded with messages from Amazon and the union. Amazon hung signs against unions through the warehouse and held mandatory meetings to convince workers why the union was a bad idea. It also argued that he had offered more than twice the minimum wage in Alabama plus benefits without paying unions.
Union organizers, meanwhile, stood outside the warehouse gates trying to talk to people driving in and out of work. It also had volunteers calling all the nearly 6,000 workers, promising that a union would lead to better working conditions, better pay and more respect.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive icon who traveled to Alabama last month for a pro-union rally, said he was “disappointed but not surprised by the vote.”
“It is extremely encouraging for workers to embark on one of the world’s richest and most powerful enterprises, a company that has spent unlimited sums of money to defeat the organizational effort,” he said in a statement.
Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University Business School, says Amazon’s warehouses are a ‘juicy target of opportunities’ for unions because they can be organized one by one. The company has more than 950,000 full-time and part-time workers in the US and nearly 1.3 million worldwide. The status of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon as the richest man in the world, also makes him easily maligned, especially when his company had a record profit of 84% to $ 21 billion last year.
Cohen, a former executive at Sears Canada, calls the retail industry a ‘rough and tough’ industry, adding that ‘Bezos’ has built a high performance-based culture with expectations of performance and productivity at every level down to the store floor. If this is not your concert, do not work for them. ”
The national retail federation, which represents Walmart, Target and other major retailers, showed a show of relief after the vote in Bessemer.
“Trade union representation is a choice for employees, but many clearly prefer opportunities in a competitive market that offer strong wages and benefits over the anonymity of a collective bargaining agreement,” said David French, a spokesman for the federation.
Trade unions have lost nationally for decades since their peak in the decades after World War II. In 1970, nearly a third of the U.S. workforce belonged to a union. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was 10.8% in 2020. Private sector workers now account for less than half of the 14.3 million union members across the country.
Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO and the United Automobile Workers, notes the large number of workers who did not vote in Bessemer: ‘For me, it’s about paralysis, the fear. They do not want to support the company but are afraid to stand up for the union. ”
Despite the union’s defeat, Lynne Vincent, a professor at Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, believes the momentum of the labor movement will continue to grow, with more Amazon employees considering union and the possibility of labor laws changing. to benefit employers less.
“I don’t think Amazon can breathe comfortably,” she said.
Emmit Ashford, a pro-union Amazon worker in Bessemer who spoke at a press conference held by the retail union, said he was not giving up.
“It’s just a spark that ignited the fire,” Ashford said. “We will keep fighting. This experience bound us. Our time will come again and next time we will win. ”
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Follow Joseph Pisani on Twitter: @ josephpisani