Cory Clark/NurPhoto via AP
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is trying a second time to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, distribution center.
As anyone who follows the ebbs and flows of workers’ attempts to gain some power over their jobs already knows, there’s an easy way to predict whether those workers will win or lose. Workers who can’t be intimidated because they’d be very hard to replace—those at media outlets, museums, think tanks, and such—have been joining unions in record numbers over the past several years. Workers who can be fired without recourse—like those at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama—can be intimidated into rejecting a union, as Amazon proved last year by waging an inherently coercive and intrusive anti-union campaign.
Now, however, the union that didn’t prevail in last year’s vote—the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU)—is trying again, with workers currently voting in the RWDSU’s second such campaign. This time around, however, the union is trying to change the rules under which such campaigns are governed—or rather, restoring those rules so they conform to the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act, which was intended to secure workers’ rights to form unions. In so doing, they are relying on the Biden appointees on the National Labor Relations Board and its Biden-appointed general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, to interpret the law as its drafters intended.
Abruzzo in particular has made clear that she views the steady erosion of the law’s guarantees—erosions which have permitted employers to intimidate their workers when they’re considering joining a union—to be violations of the NLRA that require remedies from the Board. As I noted last summer, in one Abruzzo memo, she told the Board’s regional counsels to consider applying a long-ignored rule (named after the employer in question, Joy Silk) that would require a company that had employed unfair labor practices in its anti-union campaign to recognize and bargain with the union once a majority of company employees had signed union affiliation cards.
In a subsequent memo, Abruzzo suggested some remedies that the Board’s regional offices could impose on employers when they engaged in what has become such routine union-busting activity as requiring employees to attend its anti-union propaganda “captive audience” meetings and plastering the workplace with anti-union propaganda. Amazon used every trick in the book to defeat the union last year, including captive-audience meetings and affixing anti-union broadsheets to bathroom stalls. Here, from her memo, are the remedies to these practices that Abruzzo laid out:
Union access (e.g., requiring an employer to provide a union with employee contact information, equal time to address employees if they are convened by their employer for a “captive audience” meeting about union representation, and reasonable access to an employer’s bulletin boards and all places where notices to employees are customarily posted).
Today, the RWDSU filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, alleging that the captive-audience meetings that Amazon is currently compelling its workers to attend, its removal of union literature from break rooms, and other such common practices for employers in recent decades are violations of the NLRA. In its press release, the union cited and quoted at length Abruzzo’s memo—saying, in effect, that there’s a new sheriff in town not willing to go along with decades of Board and court decisions that have enabled employers to trample workers’ rights in defiance of the NLRA.
In short, the union is wagering that for the first time in many years, the state will intervene decisively on the workers’ side. If it does—and there’s little doubt that Biden’s appointees are heading in that direction—maybe, just maybe, workers will be able to win some power not just in rarified sectors but across the length and breadth of American worksites.
