The Amazon Union Election

Will the workers of Amazon win their union election? It’s going to be very, very tough. I do not at all doubt that the core of workers want that union. But Amazon’s intense anti-union pressure is also a hell of a thing.

Amazon is no stranger to doing everything it can to defeat workers’ efforts to win some say in the conditions of their work. At Bessemer, it has mounted an assault on the workers’ attempts to form a union. It continually texts anti-union messages to its workers; it has created an anti-union website, DoItWithoutDues.com, and has compelled workers to attend “captive audience” meetings with managers to hear yet another anti-union message. And it hasn’t stopped there.

Besides its 5,800 employees, the warehouse is also staffed by between 500 and 700 contract workers who are employed by a staffing agency, though it is difficult to say exactly as these payroll records are separate from Amazon’s. As they’re not employees, these workers can’t vote in the election, and many have been enlisted by the company in its campaign to defeat the union—whether these workers want to be enlisted or not.

One such contract worker is Jonathan, whose last name has been withheld to protect his privacy. Jonathan tells me he doesn’t “know what the union is.” He’s been at Amazon for just the past six weeks, working in cleaning picking up cardboard and trash. He earns about $13 an hour. On his blue vest, he wears “Vote No” pins.

Since the unionization campaign began, Amazon has increasingly contracted the services of workers like Jonathan or Darius, who started working at Amazon two weeks ago, recently released from prisons and desperate for work.

RWDSU organizer Michael Foster (aka “Big Mike”) sympathizes with these young men, whom he describes as “a walking billboard” for Amazon’s anti-union efforts. “You got these guys just getting out of being incarcerated, so it’s hard for them to find employment. Amazon is preying upon their downfall.” Resisting management’s requests to help its campaign, he adds, can put their job in jeopardy. They think, “‘Even if I can’t vote and my manager comes up to me, the manager with the authority, the manager who’s giving me my paycheck, asks me to wear a pin that says, ‘Vote No,’ how can I tell him no?’ Amazon knows they’re trying to stay out of prison and feed their families.”

You see, if companies like Amazon start losing their bid to stay union-free, the New Gilded Age would take a massive blow. This is like the struggle to organize U.S. Steel and Ford and General Motors and all the iconic companies that took decades of struggle to organize. We are back at the beginning here and Amazon will go to the lengths those companies did to not allow workers even the slightest modicum of power.