Labor movement targets Amazon as a foothold in the South

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

Labor organizers and advocates see the battle of David and Goliath as a potential turning point in the region with a long history of undervalued labor and entrenched hostility to collective bargaining rights. A victory could have economic and political ripples for the labor movement and its allies of the Democratic Party who want a stronger foothold in the South amid decades of dwindling union power at the national level.

‘This election is about this one workplace. It even transcends this powerful company, ”said Stuart Appelbaum, national president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “If workers at Amazon in Alabama, in the midst of the pandemic, can organize, that means workers can organize anywhere.”

The mere presence of a national union figure like Apple Tree in Alabama underscores the importance.

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The Amazon vote comes as Democrats and Republicans fight fiercely for working-class voters. Over decades, many white workers have drifted toward Republicans, drawn in part by cultural identity and an anti-establishment attitude. This is why Democrats want to refine their economic pitch, arguing that their party is fighting for higher wages, better working conditions and more affordable health care.

A victory in Bessemer, where the vast majority of staff are black people, would have further significance as a starting point for new political organizations in the South, where Democrats want to build on recent successes.

This could be crucial in newfound battlefields such as Georgia, which Biden has included in the party’s presidential column for the first time since 1992 and where Democrats have won two Senate games. It could be a building block in GOP-dominated states, such as Alabama and Mississippi. And any domino effect nationally could give Democrats a boost in old industrial Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Republicans have won ground.

Biden drew feathers from labor leaders with a recent video address urging the right to organize through ‘free and fair elections’, although he did not directly mention the Amazon campaign.

The constant mail vote by nearly 6,000 employees is the biggest union push ever at Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world. The election, which runs until March, is also one of the largest single organizational efforts in Southern history. This follows a series of failed organizational votes at, among others, car collection plants – Nissan in Mississippi in 2017, Volkswagen in Tennessee in 2019 – which have flowed into the region over the past three decades.

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“Wages in this region have been depressing since the time of slavery,” said historian Keri Leigh Merritt, because “we have always had these competitive underclasses of different races that enable white elites,” from the South and elsewhere, ” was to play each other off. ”

The result, according to Merritt, is that almost all workers are paid ‘below the national market’.

The average household income for 2019 in the US was $ 62,843, according to data from the Census Bureau. In Bessemer, part of an industrialized track outside Birmingham that once teemed with steel mills, it was $ 32,301.

“We just want what we owe,” said Kevin Jackson, a distribution center worker.

Jackson, who is black, has Amazon wages, which are about $ 15 an hour, about double the minimum wage, compared to the fortunes of the company’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, whose net worth measures in the hundreds of billions. .

“If you kick a dog so many times, he’s going to bite,” Jackson said. “We bite back.”

The union’s election overlaps with Biden and Democrats in Congress pushing for the ‘PRO law’, legislation that will revise labor legislation to facilitate organization. The bill represents the most important labor law amendment since the New Deal era and follows a decade-long slide in union membership. By 1970, nearly a third of the U.S. workforce was united. In 2020, it was 10.8%.

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The House approved the overhaul Tuesday on a largely party-line vote, but it is almost certainly confronted in the 50-50 Senate, where major bills require at least ten Republican votes to avoid a filibuster.

Even without the law, labor leaders say the outcome of Amazon could be a springboard for labor organizing nationwide. Regional will provide a roadmap for a Southern workforce that is not accustomed to unions, as a routine of the economy.

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

The southern shortage of organized labor is striking: all 11 states of the old Confederacy have so-called ‘right to work’ laws, which enable workers in trade union shops to avoid paying their unions, even if they retain the benefits and job protection over which the union. It weakens unions by reducing their membership and their bargaining leverage. Most southern states also prohibit public employees from bargaining collectively.

The whole region is less than a member of the national trade union, measured as a percentage of the labor force. The United Auto Workers, for example, has more than 400,000 members but only 12,000 in the southern states, despite the abundance of the region’s internationally owned auto plants and associated suppliers.

Merritt, an expert on southern labor policy, draws a straight line from the pre-civil war economy to the current climate.

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Before the abolition of slavery, she said, white workers – explicitly or implicitly – were threatened with being replaced by slaves, who deprived them of any leverage with employers. After emancipation, free black workers and poor white workers had to compete in a devastated agricultural economy that struggled to rebuild itself from the war. Eventually, northern industrialists entered southern markets and joined white southern land barons to exploit cheap labor in industries including textiles, steel, and mining.

The trend continued as the regional economy expanded with chemical plants and oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana, coastal coastal shipbuilding, and eventually automobiles from Texas to the Carolinas.

Generations of Southern elected officials – Democrats and Republicans – have perfected their pitch to outside businesses.

“They have always offered huge tax cuts and sold people who moved their factories to South Africa by saying: look, we can offer you the price of labor and labor legislation that will always benefit employers,” Merritt said.

Some observers say that history should temper expectations.

“The political power of business and corporate leaders and the anti-union power in the South are still strong,” said Robert Korstad, an emeritus professor at Duke University, an expert on the evolution of southern labor. “So it’s not going to be easy.”

Amazon, which has a long track record of organizing campaigns, has held mandatory sessions to tell employees that a union will pay money when they already get the kind of compensation benefits, including health insurance, that unions negotiate.

“We believe that we already offer everything that the unions request and that we value direct communication with our employees,” said company spokeswoman Heather Knox.

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Amazon offered a similar message to democratically elected officials who recently joined Appelbaum. ‘Congressmen welcome to Bessemer’, reads an electronic sign in the car park of the facility. “Please adjust Amazon’s minimum wage of $ 15 / hour.”

All the members of the house there already supported a wage bill of $ 15.

The union organizers have their own sign in Bessemer – one that points to the broader political possibilities outside the campaign. Outside the Amazon warehouse, a banner bearing Stacey Abrams, considered an early architect of Biden’s victory in Georgia, is a “Rosie the Riveter” character, an iconic symbol of the power of the workers, depicted.

“We can do it,” reads the banner.