David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Inside the Aurora, Colorado, Amazon fulfillment center in 2018. A warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, may become the company’s first unionized workplace in the United States.
BESSEMER, ALABAMA – Workers at an Amazon warehouse in the Deep South are hoping to make history by establishing the company’s first unionized workplace in the United States. Amazon can easily afford a unionized workforce. During the coronavirus pandemic, while workers were forced to choose between their safety or livelihoods, Amazon’s revenue swelled to more than $100 billion in the last three of months of 2020, a record-busting windfall, as professionals hunkered down at home did their shopping online. The company boasts a mind-boggling $2 trillion market cap.
Now, about 5,800 workers who contribute to producing that massive profit in a warehouse that’s just a short drive from Birmingham are poised to decide whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Mail-in ballots begin going out on February 8 and must be submitted by March 29.
One way Amazon has amassed such massive profits is by stealing its workers’ wages. On February 2, news broke that the Federal Trade Commission had ruled that Amazon owed $61.7 million to its drivers for having withheld their tips.
Amazon is no stranger to doing everything it can to defeat workers’ efforts to win some say in the conditions of their work. At Bessemer, it has mounted an assault on the workers’ attempts to form a union. It continually texts anti-union messages to its workers; it has created an anti-union website, DoItWithoutDues.com, and has compelled workers to attend “captive audience” meetings with managers to hear yet another anti-union message. And it hasn’t stopped there.
Besides its 5,800 employees, the warehouse is also staffed by between 500 and 700 contract workers who are employed by a staffing agency, though it is difficult to say exactly as these payroll records are separate from Amazon’s. As they’re not employees, these workers can’t vote in the election, and many have been enlisted by the company in its campaign to defeat the union—whether these workers want to be enlisted or not.
One such contract worker is Jonathan, whose last name has been withheld to protect his privacy. Jonathan tells me he doesn’t “know what the union is.” He’s been at Amazon for just the past six weeks, working in cleaning picking up cardboard and trash. He earns about $13 an hour. On his blue vest, he wears “Vote No” pins.
Since the unionization campaign began, Amazon has increasingly contracted the services of workers like Jonathan or Darius, who started working at Amazon two weeks ago, recently released from prisons and desperate for work.
RWDSU organizer Michael Foster (aka “Big Mike”) sympathizes with these young men, whom he describes as “a walking billboard” for Amazon’s anti-union efforts. “You got these guys just getting out of being incarcerated, so it’s hard for them to find employment. Amazon is preying upon their downfall.” Resisting management’s requests to help its campaign, he adds, can put their job in jeopardy. They think, “‘Even if I can’t vote and my manager comes up to me, the manager with the authority, the manager who’s giving me my paycheck, asks me to wear a pin that says, ‘Vote No,’ how can I tell him no?’ Amazon knows they’re trying to stay out of prison and feed their families.”
One of Amazon’s talking points is that if their employees choose to unionize, they’ll be compelled to pay dues to the union. Cue, a worker I spoke with who started work at the warehouse last July, says Amazon told him and his co-workers during one of the mandatory meetings that they’d have to pay union dues even if a union contract fails to deliver anything significant to them.
That’s a lie. Alabama is a “right to work” state where workers who enjoy the pay and benefits negotiated by a union can freely decline to pay union dues.
One leaflet—“Facts from the RWDSU Mid-South Council President”— that organizers hand out to the Bessemer workers as they drive into the warehouse counters this false information head-on. Fact #3 reads:
You will never be forced to give or pay any of your money to the Union. That’s your choice! And yours alone. You will still receive the best union representation even if you are not a member. GUARANTEED!
Amazon has even posted anti-union flyers in the warehouse’s bathroom stalls at just the right height so that as workers squat over toilets, they have no choice, unless they close their eyes, but to see them.
As in all anti-union campaigns, management is depicting its workplace as a haven of harmony. Through text messages to their phones and their A to Z work app, workers receive management messages telling them: “We are a winning team, and we believe working together directly is most effective. Don’t let outsiders divide our winning team! We don’t believe that you need to pay someone to speak for you.”
But organizers like Foster, who’s worked in a poultry plant for 20 years, say that the high-tech dystopia in which the workers labor has made those workers eager to control more of their experience on the shop floor, where they are treated as “gigabytes in the system,” Foster says. When workers demand respect on the job, he adds, they are saying, “We are not a gigabyte, we are not a robot, we are human.”
Before RWDSU began its organizing campaign, Foster says, workers interacted mostly with a robot through an algorithmic management system. They never saw a supervisor in the flesh. Since robots aren’t programmed to understand the needs and nuances of human life—the day care hours, the medical visits, the plans for a day off—workers complain of abrupt scheduling changes to their workweek, receiving random texts to report to work on days off that arrived only hours before start time, and then being penalized for being late. Workers also complain of being forced into mandatory overtime; refusals are counted against them. And through its time off task (TOT) tracking used to surveil worker productivity, and now extended to workers in its delivery fleet, Amazon monitors bathroom breaks, not accounting for delays if a bathroom on one floor is full and the worker has to find a bathroom on another floor. Such delays can result in disciplinary actions and termination.
Workers “feel like their job is in jeopardy every day,” Foster says.
Last November, when the Bessemer workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to form a union with RWDSU, the bargaining unit consisted of only 1,500 of the plant’s employees. Today, as ballots are about to be mailed out, the bargaining unit has increased nearly 300 percent to 5,800. While the plant in Bessemer was intended to employ 1,500 workers, Amazon flooded the shop floor to prevent the union from getting to the 30 percent threshold of employees required to call an NLRB election.
I asked Joshua Brewer, the campaign’s organizing lead in Bessemer, for clarification on that number, and he acknowledged that he was initially taken aback when the number of workers signing cards began to reflect not just how popular the union was but also how much the workforce had grown. “It was kind of a surprise at first. We had thousands of people signing cards, and we were like, ‘Holy shit, do we have 100 percent of this place? What is going on here? 5,800, that’s a lot of folks,” he recalls.
On October 20 of last year, as RWDSU went public with its campaign, workers and organizers were met with police trying to clear the traffic jam their rally created. Despite some initial attempt to harass them, the police have since left RWDSU organizers and supportive Amazon workers alone. Every day since, excepting only Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, RWDSU has been at the plant gates at every shift change, Brewer tells me.
Amazon is no stranger to doing everything it can to defeat workers’ efforts to win some say in the conditions of their work.
In recent years, RWDSU has enjoyed a string of organizing successes in Alabama, where most business leaders and politicians fiercely oppose unions. In 2012, RWDSU won a union election in Russellville, Alabama, to represent 1,200 workers at Pilgrim’s Pride, the U.S. poultry division of Brazilian beef and poultry giant JBS, the largest chicken producer in the U.S. Brewer also points to the 2019 contract win for Black women dialysis workers in Mobile, Alabama, against the multinational health care company Fresenius Medical, based in Germany. Brewer takes exception to the recent New York Times article “Amazon Union Drive Takes Hold in Unlikely Place.” “This is not out of nowhere,” he says. “This is very much a part of a movement. Not to be overly cheesy, it’s called the labor movement for a reason.”
“We are very much catching the wave of what had already begun. It’s been a constant uprising that’s beginning to get bigger and bigger in the South,” Brewer says, adding that it’s being led by a multiracial working class.
“Alabama has a rich history of labor organizing,” says Resha Swanson, policy and communications coordinator at the Adelante Alabama Worker Center in Birmingham. “For generations, Black workers have risked their lives to spearhead worker rights efforts—fighting for their lives in the face of lynching, death threats, job loss, and most of all, white supremacy. Amazon’s workers’ partnership and unionizing with RWDSU is just an extension of the legacy of worker militancy.”
Jacob Morrison, secretary-treasurer of the North Alabama Area Labor Council, also points to the state’s history of militant unions. “The Mine Mill Workers and the Sharecroppers Union were both very prominent and powerful institutions for a time in Alabama in this area, especially among the Black population—and Bessemer is 70 percent Black.”
That history isn’t entirely forgotten in Bessemer. “Around this area, we have a lot of older people [whose] parents were unionized steel workers, mining workers,” Foster says.
Peter Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, centered on the West Coast and in Hawaii, thinks that a victory in Alabama could have nationwide implications. “A victory at Amazon would be an inspiration to the thousands of Amazon workers around the country in hundreds of facilities who face the same grueling working conditions and lack of respect as workers in Bessemer,” he says. “It would be a game changer for the future of labor relations at Amazon.”
