President Biden Supports Amazon Workers’ Union Organization Vote

Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person, acquired on the backs of warehouse workers working long hours under often grueling, unsafe labor conditions. (Don’t believe those “we’re all one big happy family” ads Amazon runs on TV).

Workers in Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse – yes deep red Republican anti-union Alabama – are in the middle of a union organization vote right now. Amazon fight with workers: ‘You’re a cog in the system’:

Joseph Jones doesn’t find the gruelling physical demands of his job at Amazon particularly troubling – he can walk as many as 17 miles per shift. The firm’s attitude towards his work, however, is something else.

“It’s a very adversarial relationship with the supervisors and the staff,” says the 35-year-old, who started working part-time at the company’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama in October. “You’re a cog in the system… and it’s very obvious.”

During the busy season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, for example, he says Amazon required staff to extend their shifts – typically with little notice. Once, he says he didn’t even know he had been asked to put in extra time until he arrived for work and the company app informed him he was an hour late.

Last year, the treatment prompted him to join a petition that sought an official vote on creating a union at the warehouse.

In December, state labour officials ruled the request had garnered enough support to warrant an election – the first such vote Amazon has faced in the US since 2014. Ballots were mailed [in mid-February].

If the campaign succeeds, the Bessemer facility, which opened in March, would become the only unionised Amazon location in the US.

RWDSU campaign

“This election takes on enormous importance because Amazon is not just another company,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which is leading the effort. “This election transcends Bessemer. It’s really about how workers are going to be treated in the future.”

Organisers have spent months making their case to the nearly 6,000 people who work at the facility. They have lined the side of the road with signs, posted representatives at the plant’s gates, hosted meetings and rallies, and spent hours “talking, talking, talking”.

For its part, Amazon has responded with mandatory weekly meetings discouraging the proposal, plastered the warehouse with anti-union flyers, blasted text messages to staff, and launched a website “Do it without Dues”, which promotes the firm’s “high wages” – hourly pay starts at $15.30 – health benefits, and safety committee.

It also sought, unsuccessfully, to force the election to be held in person, rather than by mail, as officials required due to the pandemic.

Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox says the company is “providing education” on the impact of a potential union – which it estimates would cost full-time staff $500 in dues – and does not believe the RWDSU “represents the majority of our employees’ views”.

“Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we offer some of the best jobs available everywhere we hire, and we encourage anyone to compare our total compensation package, health benefits, and workplace environment to any other company with similar jobs,” she says, adding that the company has improved its safety measures since the start of the pandemic.

At the plant, Joseph says the pressure has been intense, with rumours flying about the firm’s efforts to infiltrate workers.

“They’re terrified of what precedent this could set,” he says of the company.

Pandemic effect

For years, Amazon has been able to brush past complaints about its business practices and working conditions.

But the pandemic – which brought health risks alongside a surge in the firm’s business and profit – has galvanised workers around the world. This is despite the firm’s notoriously aggressive efforts to squelch labour activism, says Christy Hoffman, secretary general of UNI Global Union, which works with unions globally, including the RWDSU.

“Amazon’s dynamics did not shift but the workers became much more active during the pandemic when the danger to them in connection with social distancing, the pace of work, the volume of work became so dangerous,” she says.

Last year, the company was hit by strikes in Italy and Germany and protests at warehouses and grocery stores in the US. In France and Spain, unions lodged complaints with the state, leading to government intervention.

In Bessemer, a majority black suburb of Birmingham, Alabama where a quarter of families live below the poverty line, tensions emerged amid last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

Staff sought out the RWDSU. Mr Appelbaum says they wanted more information about co-workers falling ill and were upset by the “dehumanising” way they were managed – receiving unpredictable assignments from robots and getting disciplined via an app.

Other affronts came into play. In June, the firm abruptly ended hazard pay, an extra $2 per hour that it had offered at the start of the pandemic, even as virus cases continued to rage.

“Amazon’s business is thriving and they do something as picky as taking away hazard pay from their employees,” Joseph says. “I think it put a bad taste in everybody’s mouth.”

Will the campaign succeed?

The Birmingham area has a rich history of civil rights activism and unionization, tied to its past as a coal mining and steel center.

But unionization rates have plunged in the US and in southern states, like Alabama, suspicion of organised labour runs deep. In Bessemer, a city of 27,000 hit hard by the departure of major manufacturers in the 1980s, Amazon’s arrival was welcomed as a source of employment.

“The educated folks will tell you money’s not a motivator. Well I guarantee you… money is a motivator and the biggest difference with Amazon is they pay,” says labor leader Bren Riley, president of the Alabama AFL-CIO, of which the RWDSU is an affiliate. “They don’t have problems getting people to come to work.”

Alan Draper, the Ranger professor of government at St. Lawrence University, says unions lose votes like the one facing Amazon much more than they did in the past.

“The sense of fear that employers are able to create is tremendous. That the union has been successful enough to get workers past that fear in order to get to an election is remarkable today,” he says. “Unfortunately it’s very episodic.”

If the union wins, Amazon would be forced to negotiate over a contract, which could address anything from pay and holidays, to discipline and production expectations.

With ballots due on 29 March, the fight has attracted national attention. Liberal political stars in the US such as former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the NFL Players Association, which represents American football players, have chimed in with support.

President Joe Biden expressed support for a union vote by Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama in a two-minute video posted on Twitter Sunday, though he did not name Amazon specifically.

The New York Times reports, Biden expresses solidarity with Alabama workers attempting to unionize an Amazon warehouse.

President Biden expressed solidarity with workers attempting to unionize an Amazon facility in Alabama in a video released Sunday that emphasized his broad support of the labor movement — without explicitly backing their cause or naming the company itself.

Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a former steel town outside of Birmingham, are voting over the next week on whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

If successful, they would be the first of Amazon’s 400,000 American workers to join a union — a landmark undertaking and early test of Mr. Biden’s campaign claim that he will be the “most pro-union president” ever. (Since Truman, anyway).

“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address posted on the White House Twitter page, after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.

“Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union,” he said. “But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either.”

It is unusual for a president to weigh in on a labor dispute, and Mr. Biden was careful to skirt an all-out endorsement of the drive in his two-minute address. But he warned Amazon and its supporters that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” (too late).

Amazon, which has fought off attempts to unionize its American work force, has been working against the effort, summoning workers to mandatory meetings — and placing anti-union fliers in the stalls in the facility’s bathrooms.

More than 2,000 of the warehouse’s workers signed cards indicating interest in joining the union, meeting the threshold to hold a vote under National Labor Relations Board rules.

The site of the unionization drive is not insignificant. Alabama was a key battleground for the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and many of the workers at the Bessemer facility are Black, a fact that Mr. Biden noted on Sunday. But Alabama is now a right-to-work state, making it harder for unions to organize or negotiate with employers — which has made it a draw for big companies, especially auto manufacturers.

The unionization drive takes place at a time of “reckoning on race,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “It reveals the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”

The Times adds, Amazon Workers’ Union Drive Reaches Far Beyond Alabama (excerpt):

A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers. On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is one of the world’s dominant companies, an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history.

The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at the Bessemer warehouse, which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South.

The retail workers union has a long history of organizing Black workers in the poultry and food production industries, helping them gain basic benefits like paid time off and safety protections and a means to economic security. The union is portraying its efforts in Bessemer as part of that legacy.

“This is an organizing campaign in the right-to-work South during the pandemic at one of the largest companies in the world,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School. “The significance of a union victory there really couldn’t be overstated.”

The warehouse workers began voting by mail on Feb. 8 and the ballots are due at the end of this month. A union can form if a majority of the votes cast favor such a move.

[I]n Alabama, some workers are growing weary of the process. One employee recently posted on Facebook: “This union stuff getting on my nerves. Let it be March 30th already!!!”

The situation is getting testy, with union leaders accusing Amazon of a series of “union-busting” tactics.

The company has posted signs across the warehouse, next to hand sanitizing stations and even in bathroom stalls. It sends regular texts and emails, pointing out the problems with unions. It posts photos of workers in Bessemer on the internal company app saying how much they love Amazon.

At certain training sessions, company representatives have pointed out the cost of union dues. When some workers have asked pointed questions in the meetings, the Amazon representatives followed up with them at their work stations re-emphasizing the downsides of unions, employees and organizers say. The meetings stopped once the voting started, but the signs are still up, said Jennifer Bates, a pro-union worker in the warehouse.

* * *

Despite the union’s suspicions, it has not filed any formal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, Mr. Appelbaum said. Typically, unions can raise objections to a company’s tactics before an election and the labor board can step in.

If a complaint were to be filed, the labor board could potentially determine that the election is invalid because of Amazon’s actions. But after working for months to build support inside and outside the Amazon warehouse, the last thing the union wants is for the labor board to intervene and rule that the election must be held again. The voting has already been taking place in Bessemer for nearly a month.

Mr. Sachs, of Harvard Law School, said that despite Mr. Biden’s admonishments of companies’ interfering in elections, the current labor law does allow Amazon to hold certain mandatory meetings with workers to discuss why they shouldn’t unionize and enables the company to post anti-union messages around the workplace.

“It is very helpful that the president is calling out these tactics, but what we need is a new labor law to stop companies from interfering,” he said.

* * *

By pushing back aggressively against the union, Amazon risks angering Democrats in Washington, many of whom are already calling for more antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies, whose businesses have grown even larger in the pandemic. Amazon has mounted a public campaign supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, buying prominent ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.

In his video on Sunday, President Biden specifically mentioned how unions can help “Black and brown workers” and vulnerable workers struggling during the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.

The Times‘ Jamelle Bouie writes that Biden Is Saying Things Amazon Doesn’t Want to Hear (excerpt):

The surest way to bring about major change, however, is through legislation. Last year, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would grant workers new collective bargaining rights as well as penalize employers that retaliate against workers who organize.

The obstacle here isn’t Biden, however, it is the Senate and its supermajority requirement for legislation. And with that in mind, perhaps the best thing Biden’s rhetoric can do beyond the specific situation in Alabama is put a little more pressure on Democrats to bring majority rule to the chamber and let Congress finally govern on behalf of the country and its workers.

Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post.  I will be curious to see if he uses the pages of The Post to attack President Biden, and Democrats generally, for their pro-labor, pro-worker legislation and advocacy.




1 thought on “President Biden Supports Amazon Workers’ Union Organization Vote”

  1. On Monday, “Amazon Was Sued for ‘Systemic Pattern’ of Anti-Black Racism and Equal Pay Act Violations”, https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/amazon-sued-for-systemic-pattern-of-anti-black-racism-and-equal-pay-act-violations/

    Amazon has a pattern of anti-Black “structural racism” that infects and informs its corporate hiring and promotion practices, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court on Monday.

    “Their practices when it comes to hiring and promoting Black people and other underrepresented minorities to high-level positions (and paying them commensurately) perpetuate decades-old patterns of discrimination,” the complaint filed in D.C. District Court alleges. “Like so many other Black and female employees at Amazon, Charlotte Newman was confronted with a systemic pattern of insurmountable discrimination based upon the color of her skin and her gender.”

    The lawsuit claims the company’s racist structure both diminishes opportunities for certain classes of employees and has resulted in a climate that perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes.

    “Ms. Newman and other Black and female employees in corporate roles at Amazon have spent years doing work beyond the Level at which the Company has hired them, and they languish at these lower Levels and titles, falling behind their white and male comparators in compensation and promotions,” the filing alleges. “Therefore, Ms. Newman and other Black and female employees are underpaid, even if the others working at the same assigned “Level” are paid approximately the same amount—because, again, they and their white and male coworkers at the same Level are not doing the same job.”

    [N]ewman, a former adviser to Sen. Cory Booker, says she was subject to de-leveling and that while hired for a Level 6 position after being told she was perfect for a Level 7 position, was quickly expected to perform Level 7 tasks without the commensurate Level 7 pay.

    And the pay pattern, according to the lawsuit, is more or less part of a feedback loop that perpetuates the company’s racist atmosphere.

    [T]he lawsuit says it aims “to hold Amazon and its executives accountable for their unlawful and discriminatory practices” and relies on six separate causes of actions against the e-commerce (and recently brick-and-mortar) retail giant.

    Newman is suing for one violation of federal Civil Rights law as it relates to contract formation, two violations of the D.C. Human Rights Act, one violation of the Equal Pay Act, bias-related crimes under D.C. law and one count of sexual assault and battery.

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