Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via AP Images
Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, April 2020
Earlier this week, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, filed a notice to hold a unionization election. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union division of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has been conducting an organizing campaign among the warehouse’s 1,500 workers, met the 30-percent-of-the-workforce threshold required by federal labor law to trigger an election, but it’s clear that the RWDSU wouldn’t have filed if it didn’t have substantially more support than that.
Should the workers prevail, they’ll be breaking through a number of barriers. Amazon, perhaps the most iconic monopoly of the 21st century, is entirely non-union in the United States, though many of its warehouses are unionized in Europe, where business and the political order are less pathologically anti-union than they are in the U.S. Despite the substantial documentation of the brutal working conditions within its warehouses, Amazon has thus far fended off all efforts by its American workers to win collective bargaining. A report this week from Vice documents the company’s ongoing efforts, using electronic surveillance and Pinkerton agents, to spy on its employees precisely to kill any drives toward unionization. And, as if opposition from the company with the world’s highest market value, headed by the individual (Jeff Bezos) with the world’s largest fortune (about $180 billion and rising), wasn’t daunting enough, the state of Alabama and its governing officials can also be counted on to do everything to defeat their workers’ efforts. (Historically, Southern right-wingers have opposed unions not just because they hate and fear them as such, but also because unions are often multiracial and may erode the South’s racial hierarchy. The racially diverse workforce of an Amazon warehouse could present just such a threat.)
The move by Amazon’s Alabama employees to win a voice and some power also poses a challenge to the company’s vastly more advantaged workers, who write and run the software that facilitates product logistics and keeps its cloud afloat. A number of such employees, in its Seattle headquarters and satellite offices, have periodically protested the company’s abuse of its less-favored workers; its top software engineer actually quit the company last May to protest such treatment. Assuming RWDSU frames this struggle in the most compelling way, the coming months could see a poor, exploited workforce doing frontline, essential work in the face of a pandemic battling the world’s richest man determined to deny them their rights. That could mobilize many of the company’s privileged tech workers to come to the warehouse workers’ defense—at least, if common decency hasn’t been driven out of them. It should also mobilize many thousands of Americans to rally to the workers’ cause, too.
