The momentous unionization effort at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama appears to have failed as of Friday after the tally showed the “no” votes took up more than half the ballots.
I guess Bessemer’s workers are happy to have jobs at all. Some time back I was visiting a customer in Birmingham and they took me to lunch to an excellent Greek restaurant in Bessemer, which seemed like only thing that was still going in town, everything else was boarded up shops, abandoned steel mills and warehouses, think a mini Cary Indiana with a nice restaurant. We parked at the Bessemer’s Chamber Of Commerce parking lot, and I was thinking that sad place that office would be.
“Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees…”
”Sure, we have to pee in bottles under appalling conditions – but at least we’re not in a commie union!”
Shitty messaging. It’s almost like an anti union agitator ran their campaign. WTF.
TPM, this framing is dishonest:
Appears? It was BEATDOWN 70-30. That is hard to accomplish. Framing it was close is absurd and a disservice to your readers.
Growing pains
The South is not union territory right now for multiple reasons
I’m discouraged at how much of the Twitterati treat this result as indicative of funny business on Amazon’s part, or employees being duped/too dumb to vote in their own self-interest, etc. etc.
Employees who voted in this union question have agency, and their decision is clear. Unions are not an end deliverable in and of themselves, but instead a tool that can solve some problems better than others. Far be it from me to tell Amazon warehouse workers how best to address their workplace concerns when I’ve never worked in one.
Jennifer Bates describes how Amazon forced employees to go to hour long anti union meetings. She talks about it starting at about the 5 minute mark during her testimony before Congress. ( video is only seven minutes long.
I find it really odd that progressives love shopping at Amazon. They are anti union, pro robot (both human and regular types), and do not pay any federal taxes. They’ve killed at least three jobs for every one they have created.
This video interviews employees on all side of the union issue. But it confirms what Bates said.
These workers aren’t dumb or duped. They know they face being illegally fired or having the whole warehouse shut down should they vote for a union.
Some highlights from past unionization drives at Amazon workplaces:
The Chester settlement notice mentions one worker by name: Bill Hough Jr., a machinist who led the union drive. The notice said Amazon had issued a warning to Mr. Hough that he was on the verge of being fired. Amazon said it would rescind the warning.
Six months later, in August 2016, Amazon fired him anyway.
Amazon brought in an Employee Resource Center team — basically, its human resources department — to reverse any momentum. A former technician at the warehouse, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, said the reps on the team followed workers around, pretending to be friendly but only seeking to know their position on the union drive.
Several technicians said they recalled being told at a meeting, “You vote for a union, every one of you will be looking for a job tomorrow.” At another, the most outspoken union supporters were described as “a cancer and a disease to Amazon and the facility,” according to Mr. Hough and a union memo.
Don’t be surprised if in 6 months we see all of the union organizers and biggest supporters at Bessemer have been fired.
Ya think maybe Amazon had anything to do with many of those boarded up shops?
At the time Amazon sold mostly books and CDs. It was a steel town (hence the name, like the Bessemer process) when the mills went bust, the whole town came crashing down.
That’s sensible. I guess there were primarily two sides providing information to the workers, one with experience owning warehouses and the other with experience working in them.
Nope
The “appears” reflects the fact that the final official result wasn’t ready when the article was posted. It wasn’t meant to suggest the result was close.
See many book stores that are still around since Amazon started selling books?
But I get what you’re saying about the steel mills going under.
Birmingham was much more than steel plants. At least in was back in 80s and 90s when I went through there. US Steel and Nucor still have steel plants in Birmingham. US Steel recently expanded.their plant there.
And it’s precisely why corporations like Amazon make their biggest investments there. They know unions have no chance of infiltrating the business and, so, the corporation can go on the cheap for their employees - lower wages, lower benefits, poor treatment, none of which would stand anywhere else.
And Amazon probably has a waiting list of people wanting to work there.
I heard a discussion on the radio about working at a Amazon warehouse last week. The guest was describing that Bessemer used to be a big manufacturing town, that had good manufacturing wages. This person described how after a shift during the boom years of manufacturing employees would chat with each other in parking lot, or go to a bar and have a drink before going home.
Now at the Amazon warehouse employees leave there like a bat of Hell, and don’t try to get in their way when they leaving.
In this interview they went on talk about the how a “picker” used to do the job, they’d get their list and run around the warehouse going to the shelves to get the items. Now its that they stay in one section, the robots bring them the shelving unit where the item is stored in a bin, and the picker grabs it. Apparently they haven’t been able to teach robot to grab things.
So the job was physically demanding before the robots, you ran around, you were timed. But now you stand in one place, you are still timed, but the work is monotonous and repetitive, which is not good on the body.
Also a lot of people who work in Amazon warehouses are not Amazon’s direct hires, they are temps supplied by a company that Amazon contracts with.
They probably had a whole lot more to do with getting those shops back open.
When the residents are working, they have money to spend. Disposable income.
What was it Henry Ford said about workers? I think it was Henry that said something about paying workers enough so they could buy the products they made? Might’ve been someone else, but the point is, the market for manufactured products depends upon people being able to afford them. If people aren’t working, they can’t afford them.
Not everyone was in love with Southern workers. From Paul Krugman in 2005:
But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V.'s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario’s work force.
What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.
But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern U.S. have been unfavorably surprised by the work force’s poor level of training.
Not surprising at all, doesn’t anyone else remember back at the beginning of the pandemic almost a year ago, Amazon workers were going to the press and telling how Amazon is not giving them masks, or have enough masks and hand sanitizer. The ones who talked got fired.
