Thousands of
warehouse workers at an Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama, are at the
center of a potentially game-changing union vote taking place right
now. On February 8, the warehouse workers were sent ballots by mail
to decide over the next seven weeks if they want to join the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Union
(RWDSU). Just getting to this point was a major victory, considering
the aggressive union-busting by the world’s largest retailer
and the fact that employees are working during a pandemic. If workers
vote affirmatively, they would have the first unionized Amazon
workplace in the United States.
Stuart
Appelbaum, the president of the RWDSU, described to me in an
interview
the shocking details of what he calls “the most aggressive
anti-union effort I’ve ever seen,” aimed at the
5,800-strong workforce. “They are doing everything they
possibly can,” he said. The company has been “bombarding
people with propaganda throughout the warehouse. There are signs and
banners and posters everywhere, even in the bathroom stalls.”
According to
Appelbaum, the company is also texting its workers throughout the
course of the day urging a “no” vote and pulling people
into “captive-audience” meetings. Unsurprisingly, Amazon
is resorting to the most commonly told lie about unions: that it will
cost workers more money to be in a union than not. One poster
pasted on the wall of the warehouse claims, “you already know
the union would charge you almost $500 a year in dues.” But
Alabama is a “right-to-work” state where workers cannot
be compelled to join a union if they are hired into a union shop, nor
can they be required to pay dues.
Complementing
its heavy-handed, in-person union-busting efforts is a slick
website that the company created, DoItWithoutDues.com,
where photos of happy workers giving thumbs-up signs create a veneer
of contentment at the company. On its site, Amazon innocently offers
its version of “facts” about a union that includes
scare-mongering reminders of how joining a union would give no
guarantee of job security or better wages and benefits - with no
mention of how Amazon certainly does not guarantee those things
either.
On the
company’s
own list
of “Global Human Rights Principles,” Amazon states, “We
respect freedom of association and our employees’ right to
join, form, or not to join a labor union or other lawful organization
of their own selection, without fear of reprisal, intimidation, or
harassment.”
But in a page
out of Donald
Trump
and the Republicans’ playbook, the company
tried to insist
that even in the middle of a deadly pandemic, the union vote must be
“conducted manually, in-person, making it easy for associates
to verify and cast their vote in close proximity to their workplace.”
The National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s appeal for
a one-day physical election.
Ballots were
mailed out to workers on February 8, and the union and its advocates
are shrewdly using the seven-week-long voting period to campaign and
encourage workers to vote “yes.” But Amazon is also
continuing its efforts at countering the RWDSU. Organizers in
Bessemer had taken to engaging the workers while they stopped at a
red light upon leaving the Amazon warehouse. But the company,
according to Appelbaum, “had the city change the traffic light
so our organizers wouldn’t be able to speak to them.” (A
statement from Bessemer city denies
the claim.)
So aggressive
are Amazon’s anti-union tactics that 50 members of Congress
sent the company a warning letter
saying, “We ask that you stop these strong-arm tactics
immediately and allow your employees freely to exercise their right
to organize a union.” Even the company’s own investors
are so shocked by the tactics that more than 70 of them signed on to
a
letter
urging Amazon to remain “neutral” in the vote.
The path to
this union vote was paved by staggeringly high inequality that
worsened during the pandemic as workers were stripped of their
insultingly low hazard-bonus
of $2 an hour
while the company reaped
massive gains
over the past year. CEO and soon-to-be “Executive
Chair”
of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s second-richest man. He is
now worth a mind-boggling $188
billion
and saw his wealth increase by $75 billion over the past year alone -
the same time period in which about 20,000
of his workers
tested positive for the coronavirus.
Bezos’
announcement that he was moving into a new role at the company came
on the same day that the Federal Trade Commission announced Amazon
had stolen nearly $62
million in tips
from drivers working for its “Flex” program. Appelbaum
speculated that “what Bezos was trying to do was to create a
distraction just like Trump would do,” and that “instead
of focusing on the $62 million they stole from their drivers, people
would talk about the fact that Bezos was getting a new title.”
Appelbaum sees
the historic union vote in Bessemer as more than just a labor
struggle. “Eighty-five percent of the people who work at the
facility are African American. We see this being as much a civil
rights struggle as a labor struggle,” he said. Indeed,
conditions at the warehouse are so shocking that they sound like a
modern-day, technologically-enabled incarnation of slavery. “People
were being dehumanized and mistreated by Amazon,” said the
union president. He explained, “people get their assignments
from a robot, they’re disciplined by an app on their phone, and
they’re fired by text message. Every motion they make is being
surveilled.”
Union
advocates are countering Amazon’s combative anti-union efforts
with their own information war. In addition to organizers talking to
the warehouse workers in Bessemer every chance they get, an
informational website, Bamazonunion.org,
shares data from various studies about the dangerous working
conditions in Amazon facilities. The site reminds workers that unions
are able to win contracts where workers can only be fired for “just
cause” and not on the whim of managers; that complaints against
the company can be filed via formal grievances; and that wages and
benefits are negotiated collectively.
As a proud
union member of SAG-AFTRA,
my colleagues and I at KPFK Pacifica Radio have benefited regularly
from such protections even against a small nonprofit public radio
station struggling to make ends meet. When faced with a ruthless
for-profit corporation that has built its empire on the backs of a
nonunionized workforce, Amazon’s workers are on the front lines
of those who most need the protections a union can provide.
“This
election is the most important union election in many, many years
because it’s not just about this one Amazon facility in
Alabama,” said Appelbaum. “This election is really about
the future of work, what the world is going to look like going
forward. Amazon is transforming industry after industry, and they’re
also transforming the nature of work,” he said.
Indeed, the
level to which Amazon has fought against unionization at just one
warehouse in Alabama is an indication of how important it is to the
company that its workers remain powerless.
This article
was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
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