Jay Reeves/AP Photo
Michael Foster of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union holds a sign outside the Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon facility, February 9, 2021.
On Friday, Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) led a delegation of members of Congress to Bessemer, Alabama, where workers at an Amazon warehouse are striving to become the first unionized facility managed by the e-commerce giant anywhere in the country. The members, who included Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), Nikema Williams (D-GA), and hometown congresswoman Terri Sewell (D-AL), met with workers and held a roundtable discussion, in addition to visiting the front gates of the facility. The labor movement has gone all in on this election, amid some of the more innovative anti-union tactics in recent memory. I talked to Levin by phone from the gate as he was flying out of Birmingham, Alabama, about his visit, the importance of the election for workers at Amazon and across the country, and why we’re seeing workers rise up in a moment of economic insecurity during the pandemic.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Dayen: Tell me what the mood was like from workers at the Alabama facility?
Andy Levin: So on the one hand, the mood was upbeat. Even to some extent euphoric. But also kind of somber and determined. This is no joking matter, to go up against Amazon in 2021. The pressure these workers are under is unbelievable. It’s why they’re trying to form a union.
When I organized workers directly for SEIU, there were all manner of tactics the boss used. But no one felt like they were under surveillance every second on the job. These are measurements for every second these workers are away from their station. And if they’re away too long they’re fired. A lot of times there’s no supervisor involved [with that monitoring], it’s all digitized. To talk to HR you have to send an email through the system and maybe someone talks to you. I organized workers at nursing homes and they would say directly to their bosses, “How can you do this to me?” Now these people are working in this 16-football-field facility, where packages zoom in and they process them.
So there’s a lack of a presence from the company to confront.
Yeah. And then once the drive starts, the company brought in hundreds of people, supervisors, union-busting consultants, to confront the workers on a minute-by-minute basis. These workers, they get two half-hour breaks on a ten-hour shift. It takes ten minutes to walk to the break room and ten minutes back. So you have ten minutes to eat or do whatever. They’re told that every second is important. And now they’re pulled off their shifts for hours to go to an anti-union propaganda session? What is that?
We’ve all heard about Amazon pulling out all the stops to beat this vote, but could you feel it in talking to the workers and seeing what was going on at the facility?
Absolutely. There’s this one worker, when she first came into the union hall, we were chatting before having a more structured discussion. So I said something anodyne, like “How’s it going.” And she just took this big sigh, and said, “I just try to not talk to them anymore. Just try to stay away from them because of all the pressure.” Then in the meeting when she spoke, she’s going to nursing school. And she’s almost done. She could quit, but she said she won’t because she’s going to stick with the other workers.
The other thing that’s so obvious about the situation, this is an 80 to 90 percent African American workforce, in Alabama. And this company is treating people the way they do. The whole Black Lives Matter element of it was so strong.
I come from the district that’s probably the biggest national symbol of the white working class. Macomb County is 64 percent of my district. It’s where the term “Reagan Democrat” was coined. [By our own Stan Greenberg –ed.] It’s probably the number one place that national reporters go when they want to write about it. Even in Macomb, the real story is that the working class is incredibly diverse. One of the main ways to solve this problem is to bring together workers, Black and white and native-born, in all of our diversity. Union workers have much lower gaps in pay, between male and female, between Black and white and Latino. It’s just inspiring to see all these workers organizing.
This vote has really become a major cause of the labor movement, with a lot of cross-union solidarity. Why do you think it’s so critical?
So I got hold of a database of 25,000 NLRB elections in this century. This is the third-biggest election in this century, based on number of workers. There are 5,800 workers in the unit. There were two elections at Kaiser Permanente in California that had 40,000 to 45,000, in an already unionized workplace that was forming a system-wide union. This is different. This is the biggest union election in this century, in Bessemer, Alabama, with an African American workforce, going up against the symbol of the economy today and really the symbol of the alienation of work. If these workers pull this off, it could kick off a surge of worker organizing, like the introduction of the CIO did.
Also, every detail of what’s happening here is why you need to pass the PRO Act. It would get rid of “right to freeload,” that’s what I call the right to work. We would return to the freedom of contract, which is supposed to be the basis of the capitalist economy. All of the workers would pay their fair share for a contract that benefits them. The PRO Act would make it so companies are not a party to the election. There would be no captive-audience meetings.
I met a guy today, who showed up to work yesterday, a young Black man. His card [to enter the building] didn’t work. Went to the place where you go when your card doesn’t work. They didn’t deal with him. A loss prevention person came over. He said he found himself arrested and handcuffed and taken to jail. A young Black man. There was a union lawyer there at the meeting to tell us about the legal situation with the election. So after the meeting, this worker, who doesn’t even technically know if he was fired or not—they said they would call him and they didn’t—has the lawyer trying to help him. And the workers acted like this was nothing, it happens all the time.
I don’t even understand why he was arrested!
There was some reason, they say he trespassed. He was so freaked out. Can you imagine? If you’re a young Black man, being arrested? He has a wife and kids. And the workers didn’t act like it was an unusual story at all. They were like, “Oh yeah.” Even when I helped nursing home workers organize in the ’80s, it is hard to explain to Americans how impossible it is for workers to organize. When we got here, some of my colleagues were like, “You can’t go on the premises?” I said, “No, they will arrest you.” I said to Jamaal [Bowman], the first time I was working as a labor organizer, after they unionized we held a meeting, and it was the first time I’d ever sat in a break room. I was arrested trying to help workers organize, I was not even on the premises. I was standing on a public sidewalk.
Did you hear about the mailbox?
No.
In this campaign, Amazon won a month-and-a-half delay over what the size of the unit would be. And they tried to make it an in-person election. They lost that, but Amazon requested that there would be drop boxes on the grounds. It was determined [by the NLRB] that this would not be done, because it would be intimidating to the workers to cast their ballot on the premises. So Amazon runs to the U.S. Postal Service and gets a mailbox installed in the employee parking lot. And it puts a tent up over the box, and the tent has anti-union propaganda all over it. And they encourage all their employees to cast their ballots there. [Rep. Levin took a picture next to the box –ed.]
There’s no question it’s an unfair labor practice. But the union is in a no-win situation. They have a pile of unfair labor practices. But if they went to the board, the board would stop the election. The only remedy is that they’d hold an election later. And they said they have 100 percent annual turnover at this Amazon facility. So they’re taking their chances with this election, even with all the intimidation and unfair labor practices.
Last question. You mentioned the introduction of the CIO. That happened during the Depression. Is there something about this moment, with the pandemic and the economic suffering that has caused, and also for this particular group of workers George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, that has triggered all this organizing? Is there something about a time of precarity that gets workers fed up and willing to take risks?
I hope so. It’s all what you say but then also the worst income and wealth inequality in a hundred years. For my entire adult lifetime, since Reagan was elected when I was 20 years old, the working class has gotten the short end of the stick. It’s been a death by a thousand cuts. It’s been tax policy, and trade policy, and economic policy. It’s been federal and state decisions. When I grew up in Berkley, Michigan, many families had two parents, and one worked and the other did the immensely important work of managing the household. And we were middle-class. Now both parents work, sometimes multiple jobs, and they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I don’t know when the dam was going to bust. But there’s no way we’d get a president like Trump without the economic suffering so many people are facing.
I honestly felt like I was at the birth of a new organizing surge for working people. What if they did it? It’s hard to expect it when you have such a powerful employer. Did you hear about the billboards?
No.
Amazon put up special billboards, they said “Welcome Congress, Match Us at $15 an Hour.” Well, we’re saying every employer in the U.S. needs to do at least $15 an hour. So Amazon, how about matching us and letting your workers go to the bathroom? How about matching us and giving people real break times? How about matching us and not treating employees like widgets and offering them a modicum of human dignity?
Note: A version of this story originally said an Amazon worker’s delivery car did not work, leading to his arrest. It was actually the worker’s swipe card to enter the building.
