Amazon employs more than a million workers across the globe, is worth around a trillion dollars, and, in its 26-year history, has undercut, outstripped, or absorbed almost every competitor—but one of the retail giant’s greatest concerns revolves around the votes of 5,805 warehouse workers in the suburb of Bessemer, Alabama. If, by March 29, more than half of the employees mark ‘no’ on their ballot, Amazon will be able to add Bessemer to its long list of successfully-quashed unionization attempts. If, however, more than half vote ‘yes,’ then the warehouse will make history, forming the company’s first American union represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU)—and, as organizers are hoping, possibly start a chain-reaction across the country.
Such a reaction is precisely what Amazon is hoping to prevent. In Bessemer, the company has turned up the heat on its already robust anti-union messaging, mandating that all warehouse employees attend daily screenings of videos that warn against the cost of paying dues, and tally the benefits the company already gives them. Amazon goes so far as to blow up employees’ phones up to five times a day with texts like “don’t let outsiders divide a winning team,” and plaster “Vote No!” flyers on the insides of bathroom stalls. According to RWDSU organizers, the company even got the city to recalibrate red lights around the distribution center to be shorter, so that organizers (pulled from already-unionized poultry plants) had less time to approach people as they waited in cars, one of their primary strategies.
The intensity of the concerted push-back has intimidated workers, but has also proved to them that Amazon is treating them as a serious threat. The company attempted to force an in-person vote, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) denied their request, and mail-in ballots were sent out. This much success was unexpected. Past unionization efforts hardly ever reached the voting stage—a prerequisite for a vote is that the NLRB recognize a “significant” number of employees calling for a union election. The last instance was in 2014, where the majority of thirty Amazon repair technicians voted ‘no.’ What’s changed? Part of the answer is the pandemic: as Amazon doubled its profits—they reported 5.2 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2020 compared to 2.6 billion in 2019—a lack of paid time off and greater concerns for worker safety have fomented discontent. Such discontent is not merely confined to Bessemer, of course. On February 16, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Amazon for lack of protections against COVID-19. But Amazon’s strategies focus on portraying union organizers as outsiders, and Bessemer is where the organizers have strong ties to employees, which have only been strengthened by the Black Lives Matter movement.
As many as 85 percent of workers in the Bessemer warehouse are Black, and so are many of the organizers. “We see this as much as a civil rights struggle as a labor struggle,” RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum told Bloomberg in an early-February article entitled “Will Amazon Unionize?” Jeff Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon’s CEO, previously expressed his support for Black Lives Matter, but his support means little to Bessemer’s workers, who are banking on a union, not a proclamation, to give them the power to negotiate a usable bathroom break, higher wages, and safety while a pandemic rages.