A whole bunch of Amazon workers in Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland, Denver and Southern California are uniting, encouraged by their colleagues in Alabama. sensational trade union campaign, Bloomberg Reported Friday.
Amazon workers have been fighting for years to organize, with reference reversible workload, unsafe conditions amid the global covid-19 pandemic, dystopian workplace monitoring, and Amazon’s history of blatant retaliation against those who speak out against this unfair treatment. Well, almost 6000 employees at an Amazon distribution center in the majority-black city of Bessemer, Alabama, will vote this month on whether they want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the RWDSU said that 1,000 Amazon employees across the country have already reached out to explore their options for potential unions in their own facilities.
“People understand this is about something much bigger than Alabama and even much bigger than Amazon,” RWDSU Stuart Appelbaum told the outlet. “It’s really about the future of work and how workers will be treated.”
Several Amazon workers with whom Bloomberg spoke discussed the union with their colleagues after seeing the success of the Alabama campaign. One employee at a warehouse in Denver, Colorado, said he created an online chat room for employees to discuss organizations. Another warehouse worker in New Orleans, Louisiana, said he drove five hours to Bessemer last month to attend a pro-union rally. He added that all of his collaborators from Alabama’s hard work could become a hotbed of reform if other Amazon warehouse staff followed suit.
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“If the most powerful enterprise in the world can be united in a counter-union state like Alabama, it gives hope to people in Louisiana, in Mississippi, in West Virginia, who are trying to do the same,” he said. “We just have to support the fight wherever it is, because the fight is going to come to us.”
However, many workers fear retaliation because of Amazon’s strict trade union efforts over the years. The company has launched an extensive campaign against unions in Alabama to keep ads Twitch is owned by Amazon, Twitter and other social media platforms, sms workers with pro-management messages, and walk recruitment ads for experts breaking unions. President Joe Biden even weighed in on Amazon’s involvement before the Alabama vote, and the e-commerce giant warned that its union efforts should involve “no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda.”
One warehouse worker in Pennsylvania told Bloomberg that, given the overcrowding of Amazon’s already exhausting workload, it was difficult to get colleagues to shoot enough to even start union talks.
“People are just trying to work and go home,” she said in an interview with the store. “Amazon makes you very tired, physically as well as mentally, but the benefits are good.”
The election in Alabama is done through ballot papers counted on March 30, after which Amazon can see a flood of union campaigns in its other warehouses and beyond. A recent nationwide poll shared with Gizmodo surveyed hundreds of U.S. and Canada-based Amazon delivery managers and found that most of them support union.
In his interview with Bloomberg, Appelbaum said that even if Amazon employees in Alabama end up not working to unite themselves, this campaign will result in an explosion in the organization across the country. ‘