Overcoming final company hurdle, over 6,000 Amazon workers start union recognition vote

By MARK GRUENBERG
PAI Staff Writer

Bessemer, Ala. (PAI) — Overcoming one final company-crafted hurdle, almost 6,000 workers — most of them Black in a 70 percent Black city — at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., started mail voting on Feb. 8 on whether to unionize.

Final results of the balloting, on whether the workers will join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a sector of the United Food and Commercial Workers, will be announced March 29.

The last-ditch hurdle, which other anti-union bosses have tried, was to force the 5,805 workers to vote in the traditional manner — in the warehouse during time off from their shifts — despite the lack of physical distancing and other anti-coronavirus measures. The National Labor Relations Board, even with a GOP-named majority, unanimously OKed the mail ballot.

“Once again Amazon workers have won another fight in their effort to win a union voice,” RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum said after the board’s Feb. 5 ruling.

“Amazon’s blatant disregard for the health and safety of its own workforce was demonstrated yet again by its insistence for an in-person election in the middle of the pandemic. Today’s decision proves that it’s long past time that Amazon start respecting its own employees, and allow them to cast their votes without intimidation and interference.”

BREAKTHROUGH FOR ORGANIZED LABOR
If RWDSU wins, it would mark a double breakthrough for Organized Labor in two notoriously hostile environments: Amazon and Alabama. Only eight percent of the state’s workers were union members last year, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. And while union density rose around the U.S. in 2020, it declined in “right-to-work (for less)” Alabama.

Meanwhile, Amazon hired 400,000 new workers last year to deal with huge increases in shipping volume due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kevin Vasquez reported in Harvard Law School’s On Labor blog.

Amazon’s also notoriously anti-union, even though it could easily afford to pay its workers higher, living wages. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest people in the U.S. None of Amazon’s facilities in the U.S. are unionized.

Appelbaum told Reuters earlier that top union officials had discussed the organizing drive with top aides to new Democratic President Joe Biden, a strong union backer, just after the Jan. 20 inauguration. He did not disclose who talked, or the Biden aides’ response.

Appelbaum stressed the importance of the Bessemer campaign to the entire Labor Movement and its effort to break through in the notoriously union-hating South, where bosses and politicians often play off whites versus Blacks to thwart union organizing drives.

LONG HISTORY OF ABUSE
Amazon “has a long and well-documented history of workplace abuses, poor working conditions and illegal labor practices,” Vasquez added. “A successful union campaign could incite a flurry of organizing activity and spread rapidly to its other warehouses.

“In Amazon’s eyes, there is apparently no contradiction between the contentions that Black Lives Matter” — a campaign it verbally supported — “on the one hand and that the majority-Black workforce in Bessemer should not be afforded the protections and benefits of a union, which will, among many other things, help to protect them from the unchecked spread” of the coronavirus.

Amazon grudgingly admitted in September that the coronavirus had infected more than 19,000 of its workers. It refused to say how many have died. It hasn’t released figures since then. Lack of protection against the virus is a key issue for the Bessemer workers.

LACK OF PROTECTION
Past Amazon retaliation against warehouse workers around the country who spoke up — and in the case of four Staten Island workers, sued — about lack of coronavirus protection, reinforced the lack of protection Amazon workers have.

In the Staten Island warehouse case, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed their suit last year. He said the workers should have taken their complaint about lack of safety measures to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, instead. But OSHA, under GOP Trump regime rule, was notorious for not enforcing job safety laws in coronavirus cases, until, literally, after Biden won last November’s election.

Before that, Staten Island worker Chris Smalls had led a lunchtime walkout of dozens of workers over lack of personal protective equipment for workers at that warehouse. Amazon later fired him on trumped-up charges. It also fired Bashir Mohamed in Minneapolis and Courtney Bowden in Philadelphia, among others.

BuzzFeed reported in early February that its Freedom of Information Act request revealed the NLRB’s Philadelphia regional office decided in November that Bowden had a legitimate complaint about illegal retaliation in violation of labor law. It scheduled a hearing for her case to start on March 9.