The biggest and most feasible effort to unionize Amazon in many years began last summer, not in a union fortress like New York or Michigan, but at a Fairfield Inn outside Birmingham, Alabama’s state of the labor law.
It was late summer and a group of warehouse workers near Amazon contacted an organizer from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. They were fed up, they said, with the way the online retailer monitored their productivity and wanted to discuss unionization.
When workers arrived at the hotel, union leaders watched the parking lot to make sure they were not followed.
Since that clandestine meeting, the unionization campaign at Amazon’s call center in Bessemer, Alabama, has progressed faster and further than anyone expected. At the end of December, more than 2,000 workers signed portfolios indicating that they wanted an election, the union said. The National Council for Labor Relations then determined that there was “sufficient” interest in a union election among the approximately 5,800 workers in the warehouse, which is a significant obstacle to be met by the government agency that oversees the voting process. About a week ago, the council announced that voting by mail would begin next month and continue until the end of March.
Just reaching an election is an achievement for unions, which for years have failed to enter Amazon. But persuading workers to actually vote for a union is a bigger challenge. The company began to oppose organizational efforts by arguing that a union would overburden workers with fees without any guarantee of higher wages or better benefits.
This will be the first union election involving the company in the United States since a small group of technical workers at a warehouse in Delaware voted against forming a union in 2014.
Much has changed since that vote seven years ago, allowing organized work to make inroads with Amazon employees in a place like Alabama. Most of this change occurred last year, during the pandemic, when workers from slaughterhouses to supermarkets spoke out, usually through their unions, about the lack of protective equipment or inadequate wages.
The retail union pointed to its success in representing workers during the pandemic as a selling point in Bessemer.
“The pandemic has changed the way many people feel about their employers,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the retail union. “Many workers see the advantage of having a collective voice.”
Union organizers are also building their campaign around the themes of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of the employees at Amazon’s warehouse are black, a fact that the retail union used to focus on issues of racial equality and empowerment. And leading the organizational effort are about two dozen unionized workers from warehouses and aviaries nearby, most of whom are also black.
Since October 20, poultry farmers have been outside the gates of the Amazon every day from 4:30 am, asking workers stopped at a traffic light to join a union.
“I’m saying that they are part of a movement that is worldwide,” said Michael Foster, a Black organizer in Bessemer, who works in a poultry industry. “I want them to know that we are important and that we really matter.”
Unions have been forming in other unlikely places this year. This month, more than 400 engineers and other Google workers formed a union, a rare move in the anti-union technology industry. The main objective of the Google union is to support employee activism, while the proposed union at Amazon in Bessemer would eventually be able to negotiate a contract and seek to influence wages and working conditions.
Amazon, which embarked on a wave of hiring during the pandemic, now has more than 1.2 million employees worldwide, an increase of more than 50% over the previous year. But the company also began to face pressure from its corporate employees, due to climate change and other issues, and from many warehouse employees across the country who were encouraged to speak up. Attention will likely only increase with Amazon on its way to overtake Walmart as the country’s largest private employer in a few years.
The success of the Bessemer warehouse, which opened in March, may inspire workers in the expanding e-commerce sector more broadly, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If you can do that in Alabama, we can certainly do it here in Southern California,” he said. “That would have a big ripple effect.”
In a statement, Heather Knox, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the company does not believe the union “represents the majority of our employees’ opinions”. She added: “Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we offer some of the best jobs available everywhere we hire, and we encourage anyone to compare our total compensation package, health and workplace benefits with any other company with jobs. similar. ”
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The company has created a website that suggests that the union’s annuity – which could total about $ 9.25 a week for a full-time employee – would leave workers with less money to pay for school supplies.
“Why not save money and get the books, gifts and things you want?” says the website.
An early version of the site included pictures of happy-looking young workers, including the image of a black man jumping in the air that appeared to be from a free stock photo site. On the website, the man and a woman are portrayed in an image called “excited African American couple jumping, having fun”.
Asked about the site, Amazon called it “educational” and said it “helps employees understand the facts of union membership.” (Last Tuesday night, the company had removed stock photos, including the jumping man.)
The breed has always been at the center of union campaigns in the south. A century ago, multiracial steel and coal miners’ unions in Birmingham were a “cockpit for labor activism,” said Lichtenstein.
In the 1960s, unions – including the Retail, Wholesale and Warehouse Union – gave black workers a place to enforce their civil rights and gain more equality in the workplace.
Organizing was dangerous work. A black organizer for the Alabama retail union named Henry Jenkins remembers being shot 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 has had an influence in the Northeast, where it represents Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s workers. But its strength has also grown in the South, especially in poultry, an industry with traditionally dangerous jobs and a workforce that has many black employees.
This spring, the union was active in spreading deadly virus outbreaks in poultry plants. The president of the union’s Mid-South Council, Randy Hadley, called the industry “blatant inaction” in providing basic protections for workers.
Spurred on by its growing profile during the pandemic, the union trained a group of workers to begin organizing additional poultry facilities in the south. When Amazon workers got in touch, the union, which had failed to gain strength at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island two years earlier, decided to redirect the poultry farmers to the Bessemer warehouse. In contrast to previous campaigns, the union decided that it would remain silent during the Alabama organization campaign.
“Some people don’t expect us to succeed,” said Josh Brewer, who is leading the organizational effort. “I believe we can do this.”
On the night of October 20, two dozen poultry farmers and warehouse workers appeared outside the gates of the Amazon.
Mona Darby, who has spent the past 33 years processing chickens, immediately started approaching Amazon workers in their cars as they returned home. Mrs. Darby grew up in Alabama, one of 18 children. She started working as a domestic worker for local doctors and lawyers when she was 15. But she wanted more stable work, health and retirement benefits, so she got a job at a chicken factory.
Today, starting salaries at unionized poultry factories in Alabama are almost equal to those at Amazon. (The average hourly wage in Bessemer’s deposit is $ 15.30.) But Darby said the union offered her protections and job security that were lacking in other jobs.
“You can pay me $ 25 an hour, but if you don’t treat me well, how much is that money worth?” she said.
That first night at the Bessemer warehouse, said Darby, a white man approached her and said that Amazon did not want a union and that he did not want his “black ass on our property”.
“You will see my black ass here all day, every day,” said Darby who had responded.
Mrs. Darby said she saw the man remove his badge before approaching her. She told an officer present what the man had said, but the officer did not take notes.
Bessemer police said they had no record of the incident. Amazon declined to comment.
On December 18, lawyers from Amazon and the union met at Zoom to discuss how many workers would be part of the possible union.
The hearing dragged on for days, while Amazon’s lawyer asked questions in the smallest detail about the deposit, until the federal hearing officer ended up shortening the deposition.
One issue that Amazon insisted on is that the election be held in person at the deposit. The company even offered to rent hotel rooms to federal election monitors, to help them prevent virus contamination in an area with an infection rate of 17%. The National Council for Labor Relations decided against the vote in person on January 15, stating that a company paying hotel rooms for civil servants was not a good idea. On Friday, Amazon called for the postal election to be suspended, arguing that infection rates were decreasing and insisting that the vote should take place at the warehouse.
Until all votes are cast, Foster and the other poultry and warehouse officials plan to stay outside the gates of the Amazon. He said some of the workers in the Amazon fear being seen talking to organizers at the traffic lights.
On some occasions, Mr. Foster said a prayer with the workers before the light changed to green.
“We want to show them that we are not going to leave them until this is done,” he said.