When I recently traveled to Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama, I found many workers there bouncing with excitement in their determination to persuade a majority of their co-workers to vote “yes” for a union.
The joy and enthusiasm I witnessed in Alabama cannot be imported from the outside. It can only come when workers take ownership of a campaign and want to control their future.
Hundreds of Bessemer’s workers are publicly taking on one of the world’s most powerful companies — speaking out on social media, holding informational meetings inside the fulfillment center’s break rooms, and wearing pro-union T-shirts on the job.
These are just some of the telltale signs that support for joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, is real. The union committee in Bessemer is a vibrant group of mostly young, overwhelmingly Black workers who are ready to have a say over their working conditions.
Whatever the result of the upcoming election (which is expected on or around April 6), the workers have come together and created what would, in almost any other country of the world, already be considered a union. In Europe, for example, not a single country requires that membership exceed 50% to establish bargaining between a company and a union, but the U.S. National Labor Review Board does.
This is because, in many other countries, labor law recognizes what the majority of Americans believe: that unions are good for the country, for the economy and for working people. We know that work covered by collective bargaining is safer and better paid.
But in the United States, the 50%-plus-one rule for bargaining, coupled with the brutality of corporate anti-union campaigning, prevents an overwhelming number of workers who want a union voice from having access to this fundamental right.
Many U.S. workers are employed “at will,” meaning they are always at risk of unfair dismissal, without recourse. As a result, a classic union-busting campaign — full of threats, intimidation and surveillance — can more easily coerce pro-union workers to reject their union. Some workers can withstand this kind of pressure, but many others just don’t want that much conflict with their boss.
It’s a big reason why support for unions is at a 55-year high, but the number of workers in unions is at a near all-time low.
While heading to the airport, my taxi driver told me a story that sums up why thousands of Amazon workers in Bessemer want a union. She said her older daughter had worked at the warehouse but “just couldn’t take” the backbreaking production pace, long hours and lack of voice in the facility.
Her daughter isn’t alone. The turnover at Amazon warehouses is so high that about half of the 6,000 workers were no longer employed or otherwise not eligible to vote at the time of the first union election, just one year ago.
That 2021 vote captured the world’s attention and helped launch a wave of organizing in the United States that we are seeing bear fruit. Workers are organizing in new industries, at new companies, and at established companies including Starbucks, REI and the New York Times. While this is a good omen for the vote in Bessemer, the size of the 6,000-worker facility and the virulence of Amazon’s anti-union attack have put this campaign in a league of its own.
In most of the Western world, this type of high-energy campaign would be an easy win. Here, it remains an uphill battle.
But whatever the outcome of the vote, the workers have already achieved something remarkable: they built a movement in their workplace. They have created passion for change. They have built a union.
And Amazon should recognize that.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Christy Hoffman is general secretary of UNI Global Union. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
