After the vote count was announced Thursday, the outcome of the election to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse still hung in the balance. The tally stands at 993 votes against unionizing and 875 in favor; however 416 ballots remain challenged, mostly on the grounds of voter eligibility.
The National Labor Relations Board will hold a hearing in the next few weeks to determine if any of the challenged ballots should be counted. Afterwards, it will release a final count that will determine which party wins the election.
Meanwhile, the Amazon Labor Union leads in an election to unionize a Staten Island warehouse, which is expected to conclude tomorrow.
The election was held again in March after the union lost the original vote 1,798 to 738 last year, and Amazon was later found to have violated labor law by installing a mailbox on its premises and using “Vote no” paraphernalia to poll workers.
The gap between yes and no votes narrowed considerably this year, but not enough so far to alter the outcome. Roughly 2,300 out of 6,100 eligible voters cast ballots this year, a turnout rate of 38 percent. This was down from last year’s turnout rate of 52 percent.
The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board and has until April 7 to file objections to the conduct of the election. If the board determines that Amazon’s behavior interfered with a free and fair election, it could overturn the results once again, leading to a third election round. The charges include allegations that Amazon instituted a rule change limiting workers’ access to the facility during nonwork hours, and that it removed pro-union fliers from break rooms. The company denies these claims.
The vote count caps off a two-year-long effort that drew congressional attention, celebrity endorsements, a presidential pronouncement, and renewed focus on US labor law, which favors employers in union elections.It echoed far beyond a single warehouse. As one of the world’s largest employers and the second largest in the US, Amazon is seen as a standard setter for working conditions across industries. Many in the labor movement see unionization as vital to curb what they describe as a harsh work environment. Amazon, for its part, urged its employees to vote against the union, saying that it already offers everything workers are demanding.
In a statement about the Bessemer facility, which Amazon calls “BHM1,” company spokesperson Kelly Nantel wrote, “We invest in both pay and benefits for our team—regular full-time BHM1 employees earn at least $15.80 an hour and have access to health care on day one, a 401k with company match, and more.”
The effort began humbly enough. In 2020, a warehouse worker named Darryl Richardson, who had previously been a union member at an automobile factory, performed a Google search for a union who could represent Amazon workers. The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) surfaced in the results, so he filled out a form on its website.
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BHM1’s opening in 2020 coincided with the start of pandemic-driven lockdowns in the US. As Amazon’s essential employees continued reporting to work and the company’s executives became richer, some said that the company failed to notify them about Covid-19 infections inside the facilities. Workers of color, disproportionately represented among the essential workforce, bore the brunt of the risk. This was in evidence at the Bessemer warehouse, where more than 80 percent of workers are Black.
Nantel said the company has invested $15 billion in Covid-19 safety measures since the start of the pandemic and communicates new cases to employees, performs contact-tracing, and alerts local health authorities.
In Bessemer, employees criticized the company’s Time Off Task (TOT) system, which tracks each second a worker is not scanning a barcode, including bathroom breaks, and terminates them if they accrue too much TOT. Workers bemoaned their unpredictable schedules and minimal breaks during physically taxing 10-hour shifts. Between the app logging their every scan, cameras blanketing the warehouse, random security screenings at the warehouse exit, and off-duty police officers patrolling the grounds, some workers felt hyper-surveilled. Jennifer Bates, an outspoken worker and union organizing committee member, complained of spending her unpaid break time enduring random security screening.
“Like most companies, we have expectations for how our employees perform, but we do not require them to meet specific productivity speeds or targets,” Nantel wrote. “We want all employees to stay engaged in their assigned tasks and work safely–but also to take time when needed to engage with their manager, ask for help, or share barriers they’re facing.”
While the RWDSU has yet to notch a victory at Amazon, it “has taken on a lot of organizing campaigns that many bigger unions probably would not have taken on,” says John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University. “This is one of them.” He cites successful campaigns at H&M and Zara stores in New York City and at Southern poultry plants, where employer opposition tends to be fierce. The union financed the original Amazon campaign without help from its parent union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which contributed to the rerun, along with other unions. A decade ago, UFCW launched a big, expensive campaign to unionize Walmart that faced ferocious opposition from the company and ultimately failed to add any dues-paying members. It subsequently elected a president who vowed to pursue a more pragmatic approach.
Amazon, like Walmart before it, launched its own intense anti-union campaign, flying in high-priced union avoidance consultants to canvas the warehouse floor and hold round-the-clock anti-union classes, known as captive audience meetings. Many of their talking points seemed misleading, according to some workers who attended. For instance, the company frequently told workers they could end up with more, the same, or less after union negotiations, leading many workers to worry about losing their pay and benefits, particularly in a state like Alabama where Amazon’s starting pay is more than double the minimum wage. Amazon didn’t mention that US union workers earn more on average than nonunion workers—17 percent more last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The company also failed to mention that the majority of the union’s members must ratify a contract, an unlikely event if it came with a pay cut.
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“It’s our employees’ choice whether or not to join a union. It always has been,” wrote Nantel ahead of the results. “If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site, which is why we host regular informational sessions and provide employees the opportunity to ask questions and learn about what this could mean for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
Workers say the company also told them that the RWDSU is a business, looking to rake in money to buy themselves lavish cars. The union is in fact a nonprofit. “It’s a little hypocritical of Amazon, when they are a literal business that seeks profit,” says one worker in Bessemer, who heard this line at a captive audience meeting and immediately thought of the perks enjoyed by the company’s board members.
Among its unfair labor practice charges, the RWDSU challenged the legality of captive audience meetings. In doing so, the union hopes to set a new precedent. In the fall, National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo calling for cases that would contest the legality of the meetings.
Given the lopsided defeat last year, the union had a steep hill to climb. A Bloomberg Law analysis of federal labor board data found that unions have prevailed in 55 percent of rerun elections since 2012. Many of these involved smaller units, however, and tighter margins than the initial Bessemer blowout.
Results aside, this campaign intensified scrutiny on working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses and sparked interest in unionizing other facilities. Newly elected Teamsters president Sean O’Brien has vowed to take on Amazon, promising a more aggressive stance than his predecessor during a speech this month. A second election in Staten Island is wrapping up this week, and a third is set for a smaller Staten Island warehouse in April.
One worker in Tennessee, who asked to remain anonymous, shared a photo from inside his warehouse of the Voice of the Associate board, a whiteboard on which workers can write feedback. Lodged in between complaints about unpaid time off and insufficient parking spaces, a worker scrawled what they must have seen as a solution to the list of grievances: “We demand union representation.”
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