For weeks, tension grew in this small town warehouse in central Alabama, awaiting a landmark vote, starting this week, to form what would be the first American union in Amazon’s nearly 27-year history.
The fact that the pressure to unionize has brought this far is unlikely, according to several counts. Not only are the workers hiring the second largest employer in the United States whose business has boomed in the face of the global pandemic, but these workers are based in the South, where union representation is lower than in other parts of the country. country. . This effort was spurred not only by a group of employees at the Amazon Bessemer facility, but also with union workers from other local factories and facilities, including poultry workers, already represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which advocated their safety because poultry factories were badly affected by the virus.
Jennifer Bates, an employee organizer at the Bessemer facility who has been working at Amazon since shortly after the warehouse opened last spring, said it is a huge achievement in itself to get to this point. “We didn’t know how we were going to reach so many people,” Bates, a learning ambassador who trains other employees at the facility, told CNN Business. “Amazon is so big. We have four floors and thousands of people in there. But we realized there were enough votes and enough problems. You can have complaints at any job, but these were just catchphrases.”
Bates, who said she was represented by a union in a previous job, ticked a list of issues workers hope to improve with the help of union representation, including adequate break time, better procedures for filing and receiving complaints on complaints, higher wages , as well as protections from Amazon falsely applying policies such as social distancing to discipline workers.
In a statement to CNN Business in January about the union effort, Amazon spokesman Heather Knox said, “We opened this site in March and since then we’ve created more than 5,000 full-time jobs in Bessemer, with an average wage of $ 15.30. per hour, including full health, vision and dental insurance, 50% 401 (K) match from day one; in safe, innovative, inclusive environments, with training, continuing education and long-term career growth. “
“We are working hard to support our teams and over 90% of the employees on our site in Bessemer say they would recommend Amazon as a good place to work for their friends,” added Knox. Over the past year, Amazon has said repeatedly that safety is a priority and that it has a “zero tolerance policy for retaliation against employees who raise concerns.”
While the pandemic has been a boon to Amazon’s business, it was also a factor behind a more widespread worker revolt. Workers at other facilities have expressed concerns about juggling the company’s obsession with productivity, while maintaining social distance and other pandemic-related precautions. Meanwhile, Amazon has slowly phased out some of its pandemic security policy. The company ended its unlimited unpaid time off in May, as well as its $ 2 hourly wage and double overtime in June; it restored its “time off” statistic to track worker productivity this fall. It also restores daily stand-up meetings, which were interrupted since the start of the pandemic, but will
resume soon as ‘stand-up gatherings for small groups with a social distance’.
Amazon has said it has made more than 150 process updates to ensure the health and safety of its employees. The company, which continues to offer up to two weeks of paid time off to employees diagnosed with the coronavirus, has also given out two special bonuses to frontline workers since eliminating the pandemic-related wage bumps.
“The pandemic has opened many people’s eyes that workers really need a voice in their workplace to protect themselves,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU. “People are worried about their lives.”
At the same time, Bessemer’s workers are motivated by the ongoing movement for racial justice, said Appelbaum, who said about 85% of the workforce is black. “People were inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to stand up for their own rights and dignity,” said Appelbaum. “This campaign was both a civil rights campaign and a labor campaign. We are talking about basic dignity for working women and men.”
It is unclear whether the union action will ultimately succeed. The Washington Post previously reported that more than 3,000 Amazon employees had signed a card indicating that they support the union, although given the company’s high turnover and the fact that some employees are seasonal, not all are still with the company.
“The most aggressive anti-union campaign I’ve seen”
Although some Amazon employees in Europe are unionized, the company has so far fended off unions in the United States. In 2014, a much smaller union election was held in a Delaware warehouse, but this resulted in workers rejecting the effort.
To counter the current effort at Bessemer, Amazon hired a former Republican member of the NLRB to assist in the fight. It launched an anti-union website warning against paying dues: “Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts, because you won’t have those nearly $ 500 you paid in dues.” And it has conveyed its position on unions by sending countless text messages to employees, pulling them to one-on-one meetings on the warehouse floor and requiring them to attend the few shifts group meetings, employees and the union told CNN Business. (In a statement this week, Knox told CNN Business that Amazon “has provided education that helps employees understand the facts of joining a union.”)
Group meetings, also known as “captive auditors” meetings, must be stopped 24 hours before an election; a company spokesperson previously told the Post it will comply. According to Hirsch, Amazon’s insistence on holding a personal election may be, at least in part, due to the company not being able to hold these meetings for the longer duration of the mail-in election period, potentially making it more difficult for the company. to counter the union’s efforts to rally workers at this time.
Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said in a statement to CNN Business last week that the company’s “goal” in pushing for a personal election was to “provide the most fair and effective format for achieving maximum employee participation.”
All told, Appelbaum called it “the most aggressive anti-union campaign I’ve seen.”
Employees must now search the mixed messages. A Bessemer employee, who asked for their names to be withheld for fear of retaliation, said they wonder the financial impact of membership fees and the potential benefits of union representation.
The employee, who has not yet decided how to vote, was initially attracted to the job due to the set hours and schedule, but is now concerned about pandemic security measures at the facility. ‘If you don’t want people to have a union, you have to do everything [to address the concerns], or at least little by little, ”said the worker.
Another Bessemer employee, Dawn Hoag, is adamant about how she will vote: “No.” She said she doesn’t feel like Amazon hid any of the terms of the job when she was hired. “Not everyone is going to enjoy working hard,” said Hoag, a seasonal employee who said she would ask to move to a different facility if the union succeeded. “I see no purpose in paying someone else to fight my fight. I’ve always been told you have to fight your own battles. ‘
Employees in other Amazon warehouses in the United States are watching the result. At a facility in Baltimore, Andre Goodin, an Amazon employee, said he and several of his colleagues talk “quite often, believe it or not” about the Alabama union’s voice. Goodin, who has also previously worked for a union, said he believes there are a lot of things that could potentially be improved with the support of a union.
“We hear from Amazon employees across the country. I think what has happened so far is significant regardless of the election outcome,” said RWDSU’s Appelbaum. “It opens the door to more organization in the future. It opens the door and shows you can face Amazon.”
