Amazon is ready to stop workers’ efforts to unionize

Amazon has secured enough votes to block a union effort at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, prove the power of the online shopping giant and block a path that labor activists had hoped would lead to similar efforts across the company and beyond.

Amazon crossed the threshold to secure a majority of the vote, with 1,798 warehouse workers rejecting the union and 738 voting in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the process.

Of the 3,117 votes cast, 76 were annulled and 505 were questioned by either Amazon or Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which led the organizational efforts in Bessemer. But the NLRB said that the disputed votes were not sufficient to lead the result.

The union said it would file a complaint against the NLRB accusing the company of illegally interfering in the union’s vote. It will seek a hearing with the works council to determine whether the results “should be set aside because the employer’s behavior created an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and / or fear of retaliation.” The union accused Amazon of spreading misinformation about union work at meetings that workers were required to attend.

Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to ignite its own employees. We will not allow Amazon’s lies, fraud and illegal activities to go unchallenged, says Stuart Appelbaum, President of RWDSU.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

The union was the largest in Amazon’s 26-year history and only the second time that an organizational effort from the company came to a vote. But Bessemer was always seen as a long shot because it pitted the country’s second largest employer against nearly 6,000 workers in a state where laws do not benefit unions.

That the labor movement in Bessemer even came this far was unexpected. Amazon has an undefeated record of sniffing out union efforts before they can spread. And at a time when the economy is still trying to recover and companies have eliminated jobs, it is one of the few places still employing during the pandemic, adding 500,000 workers last year alone.

But the pandemic also revealed inequality in the workforce, where many had to report to their jobs even when the coronavirus broke out, leading to health and safety concerns. Organizational efforts in Bessemer coincided with protests across the country after police killed George Floyd, raising awareness of racial flaws and further frustrating how workers in the warehouse – more than 80% who are black – are treated, with 10-hour days of packaging and loading drawers, and just two breaks of 30 minutes.

Workers in Bessemer approached RWDSU last summer to organize and the pace had built up since then. The union was pushed into the national spotlight and attracted the attention of professional athletes, Hollywood stars and high-profile elected officials, including President Joe Biden.

During the voting process, workers flooded with messages from Amazon and the union. Amazon hung anti-union signs throughout the warehouse, including internal bathroom stalls. It held mandatory meetings to convince workers why the union was a bad idea and also claimed that it already offered more than twice the minimum wage in Alabama plus benefits without paying union dues.

Meanwhile, union organizers stood outside the warehouse gates and tried to talk to people driving in and out of work. It also got volunteers to call all the nearly 6,000 workers, and promised that a union would lead to better working conditions, better pay and more respect.

Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University Business School, says Amazon’s stocks are “juicy targets for opportunity” for unions because they can be organized one at a time. The company employs more than 950,000 full-time and part-time employees in the United States and nearly 1.3 million worldwide. In addition, the status of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world makes him easily degraded, especially when his company had record profits last year that climbed 84% to $ 21 billion.

Cohen, formerly CEO of Sears Canada, called retail a “rough and tough” industry, adding that “Bezos has built a high-performance culture with expectations of performance and productivity at all levels down to the business floor. If it’s not your gig, do not go to work for them. ”

The National Retail Federation, the country’s largest retail group, struck a relief after the vote in Bessemer.

“The process works and employees can make an informed decision despite the enormous scrutiny during which this campaign was conducted,” said David French, a spokesman for the federation. “Trade union representation is a choice for workers, but many clearly prefer opportunities in a competitive market that provide strong wages and benefits over anonymity in a collective agreement.”

Trade unions have lost ground nationally for decades since their peak in the decades after World War II. In 1970, almost a third of the American workforce belonged to a trade union. In 2020, that figure was 10.8%, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employees now account for less than half of the 14.3 million union members across the country.

Richard Bensinger, former director of the AFL-CIO and United Automobile Workers, noted the large number of workers who did not vote for Bessemer: “For me, it’s about paralysis, fear. They do not want to support the company but they are afraid to stand up for the union. ”

Bensinger, who said he was involved in early union efforts by Amazon workers in the United States and Canada, spoke to a couple of these workers on Thursday night “and tried to tell them what happened so they would not be deterred.”

Despite this recent defeat, workers’ experts and union leaders believe that the organizational work in Bessemer can still inspire other Amazon workers to want to join unions at the company’s hundreds of facilities across the country. And it could spread beyond the company, prompting action by Walmart, the country’s largest employer and other major retailers, according to Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School.

Sachs points to the 1930s, when the car industry, then a symbol of the new economy, was unionized and helped galvanize workers.

“I think no matter what happens, this is the beginning of a long story about unions and Amazon – not the end of the story,” he said.

(AP)