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At 3:27 on a recent morning in Bessemer, Alabama, Randy Hadley, a sixty-five-year-old man, was dancing at a traffic light. He waved a sign which read: “Without Change, Nothing Changes.” Beside him, a younger man named Curtis Gray held up a different sign: “Don’t Back Down.”. He and Hadley, members of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have been passing out pamphlets and holding up their signs in this spot almost every day since October, in an attempt to unionize a group of Amazon workers in America for the first time.
While the vote by workers on whether to unionize failed yesterday by a margin more than 2-to-1 in a major win for the world’s largest online retailer, the effort is widely seen as a potential catalyst for similar efforts at other locations.
(Image: ET)
Why did Workers at Amazon want to Unionize?
On the 30th of March, a group of 5,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, voted on whether to join the R.W.D.S.U. It was the first large-scale union vote in Amazon’s history, and a decision by the workers to organize would have implications for the labour movement across the country, especially since the online retail giant has gained greater power — and added more workers — during the pandemic.
Amazon, one of the largest employers in the world, has no collective bargaining agreements with any of its U.S. employees – though it does in Europe. Workers typically seek union representation for higher wages and better benefits, and a union can provide a higher level of job security through seniority provisions and grievance procedures in contracts. Winning the election doesn’t automatically mean workers are unionized and get a labour contract. It means only they have the right to negotiate for one.
Another reason why fulfillment center employees want to unionize is how Amazon treats them. Amazon tracks workers’ every move with computers in all its facilities, from how many goods they pick, pack, or stow per hour, to how much time they are not performing their duty, known as Time Off Task, or TOT. There have been instances where workers had to use plastic bottles to pee, an accusation which Amazon completely denies. However, the company accepts that its drivers might have had to face such circumstances due to a lack of public washrooms and rural routes.
Amazon’s Response & The Politics Attached to it
Inside Amazon’s corporate headquarters, company leaders treated the vote as a crisis. The company pushed hard to convince workers to vote against unionization — convening mandatory in-person meetings during worker shifts to stress the upsides of the current work environment and the downsides of Unions, sending frequent texts to workers with anti-union messages and encouraging them to vote no, and even posting anti-union flyers on employee bathroom stall doors. A series of allegations leveled at Amazon over its attempts to disrupt the union includes that it altered a traffic-light system outside the warehouse, to give union officials less time to leaflet workers, that it unsuccessfully tried to appeal against a National Labour Relations Board ruling allowing workers to vote by mail, that it bombarded workers with texts, posters, and signs encouraging them to vote no and that it ran anti-union ads on its streaming platform, Twitch, which was later removed.
At the time, RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said: "Amazon is leaving no stone unturned, including ads on Twitch - in its efforts to deceive and intimidate their employees into voting against the union."
In September, the company briefly advertised job openings for two intelligence analysts whose work duties would include keeping an eye on union activity - but after becoming national news, the advert was removed.
The vote also attracted a lot of political heat. Both the US President and Vice President have commented on the vote and have supported the efforts to unionize. Senators and House Representatives have been very vocal on Social Media platforms and have raised their voices against Amazon. Senator Elizabeth Warren got into a verbal spat with one of the official Amazon Twitter accounts over Amazon’s practices.
Amazon’s Fears
A union victory in Bessemer would have marked a historic win for US labour organizers who have long failed to crack Amazon, which is the second-largest private-sector employer in the US and has been accused of demanding a punishing pace of work and surveilling its workforce too aggressively. Unionization is something Amazon executives have long feared because of how it might upend the speed and agility of warehouse operations; typically, the faster Amazon pushes warehouse workers, the quicker the company can get orders out the door to customers. And the express shipping options that come with an Amazon Prime membership are one of the key reasons shoppers choose the tech giant over competitors.
The Aftermath
The union plans to challenge the results based on Amazon’s conduct during the election. Also, workers will now have to wait another year before trying again. This is to prevent unions from engaging in continuous organizing efforts and repetitive elections.
Officials at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) argued that Amazon’s unfair tactics were to blame in an election where only just over half of eligible workers cast ballots.
In a statement, the RWDSU said, “The results of the election should be set aside because conduct by the employer created an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals and thus interfered with the employees’ freedom of choice.”
Amazon in a blog post denied the outcome resulted from intimidation of its employees.
“We’ve always worked hard to listen to them, take their feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay and benefits in a safe and inclusive workplace,” it said.