Primed for Change: Why unionizing Amazon’s Alabama warehouse turns a page for all American workers
Today, the vote count begins for nearly 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama weighing in on whether to form Amazon’s first union shop in America. Like the first domino to tip in a line, if successful, the vote will be a likely turning point for workers mobilizing at Amazon’s hundreds of warehouses nationwide.
Amazon, of course, is a company that would rather keep ambulances on site than turn on air conditioning in the blaze of summer, whose workers urinate into plastic bottles because of insufficient bathroom breaks and face workplace injury at sometimes three times the national rate. 4,000 Amazon employees are on foodstamps in nine different states — only Walmart, McDonald’s and two dollar-store chains have more workers requiring such assistance.
But Amazon leadership — and increasingly, Amazon workers — know that unions can hold this behavior to account — not just in Bessemer, but across the country. For a labor market that has changed more in five years than five decades, a yes vote provides a watershed opportunity to turn from the worsening wealth imbalance of the pandemic digital age and shape how work is understood for a coming generation.
Defeating the HQ2 Deal
In 2018, I co-founded PrimedOut NYC, a grassroots organization based in Queens, NY created to oppose Amazon HQ2. PrimedOut played a critical role in lending on-the-ground representation to the greater opposition movement — members were locals from the neighborhood who had skin in how an Amazon campus would affect housing, transportation and schools. Many served on or went regularly to Community Board meetings, or volunteered for local charities or advocacy groups. We all lived “along the 7” — the train line that took us from one end of the world’s borough to the other.
Many things cost Amazon in the court of public opinion: extracting tax dollars to build the proposed multimillion dollar campus; profiting from facial recognition technology used in the separation of immigrant families (over half of Queens’ 2.2 million residents are foreign born); offering insulting hiring prospects to residents of the largest public housing development in the country less than a mile away (fewer than forty jobs were guaranteed for locals, mostly in building maintenance roles).
But that sum paled compared to the cost of unionization — a cause supported by New York State Senator Mike Gianaris, one of HQ2’s chief critics and the newest appointee to the only government body directly voting on HQ2, the Public Authorities Control Board. The deal needed to be approved unanimously by the five person board, and as a result had the power to leverage labor, public benefits and other assets into a legally binding agreement. He was nominated by State Senate Majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, less than a week following hearings where she described Amazon’s opposition to unionization as “disturbing.”
Days later, Amazon’s “Valentine’s Day Pullout” demonstrated just how worried the company was about unions. It was not coincidental that the day after meeting with city officials and labor leaders wherein parties “(agreed on a) way to move forward” on worker’s issues that Amazon announced its exit from the deal. The short-lived compromise involved the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which sought to represent warehouse workers in Amazon’s Staten Island facility — the same union that is now primed to represent workers in Bessemer.
Having to treat their workers collectively was a key, if not deciding factor, for what inspired Amazon’s retreat from Queens. If Staten Island, why not Berkley? If Bessemer, why not Louisville? For a company valued at $1.7 trillion (for scale, just less than half of all the U.S. government’s 2019 revenue), a few line items for local subsidies, infrastructure investments, and community programs was a drop in the bucket. But contending with the financial and organizational implications of up to 1.3 million potentially unionized Amazon and Whole Foods workers would strike a blow to both its bottom line and ideological perspective.
Amazon has invested significant effort into deterring union activity at its various arms. At Whole Foods, managers are trained to handle any hints of labor organizing with T.I.P.S. — an acronym standing for “Threaten, Interrogate, Promise, Spy.” Employee relations managers with “significant experience in handling union organizing activities" have been recruited to watch over staff. The company has come under fire for using data collection, surveillance and analytics to track and predict union organizing. This has trickled down to monitoring employee emails and listservs, infiltrating closed facebook groups — even controlling bathroom breaks and in-person communication between employees.
Life in Bessemer
In Bessemer, those efforts have only intensified. Amazon has sent out mass texts, set up an anti-union website, and placed ads on Facebook and Amazon’s child company Twitch (against Twitch’s own policies) encouraging workers to vote no. During a global pandemic, the company appealed against the election being carried out by mail, hiring legal guns such as Russell Brown (a consultant to the Koch Brothers) to the tune of $3,200 per day — twenty six times the daily sum a warehouse worker takes home. It has even gone so far as to (successfully) petition local government officials to change stop light patterns at the facility’s entrance, citing the need to reduce traffic during shift change — which organizers claim made it more difficult to talk with workers heading in and out. (There is no indication that local officials knew about this particular motive.)
Those in Bessemer supporting unionization have cited struggles with high-pressure, physically demanding working conditions, scant job security and transparency in disciplinary actions, and excessive surveillance and time-keeping practices that often result in docked wages for workers. While $2/hr in additional hazard pay was initially granted at the onset of the pandemic, that pay was abruptly revoked in June — despite Amazon’s record-breaking profits. Even with assurances employees would be alerted if they had been in contact with colleagues positive for COVID, workers reported exposures were not shared.
The influence of big business on legislation and public opinion has made Bessemer, and Alabama in general, resistant to labor organizing. Alabama is a right-to-work state, a classification that weakens the political power of unions by cutting them off from a primary source of financial power — member dues. States that are right-to-work mandate employees cannot be required to belong or pay dues to a union, while the National Labor Relations Act simultaneously stipulates unions must represent all employees — even those who are not members. All employees benefit from wage increases and gains secured through union advocacy and organizing, even while unions now have to stretch fewer dollars to cover more workers.
Alabama is also a place I have a peculiar bit of personal history with — and part of the reason that inspired me to write this piece.
At 25, I discovered that I had been adopted. The discovery was an accidental sort of realization, in a moment of piecing together bits of my life that never quite made sense without something to tie things together. What I do know of my biological mother — we’ll call her Rebecca — is more holes than content, and what I do know doesn’t speak to an easy life. In 1986, she became pregnant for the first time at seventeen, somewhere in Cook County, Illinois (she chose to terminate the pregnancy). Two years later she had me. She again wasn’t ready for motherhood, but was able to give me a life with another family, my true family, one that provided a comfortable home in a middle-class (you guessed it) union household. My father was part of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; my mother, a member of the United Federation of Teachers, NYC.
After birth, I was taken back to New York. I got to learn piano, played on every sports team, and sang in the church choir with my grandmother. I knew how to read by the time I was three — my parents could afford for my mom to stay home while I was growing up. Even when my dad got put on furlough, or was later injured on the job, our family sustained a comfortable baseline because the union helped us get by.
The contrast between my family’s opportunities and what I know of Rebecca’s could not be more distinct. After my discovery was confirmed, I immediately started looking for more information about my past. The first time I saw her face, it was against the white of a screen, a frown worn into a face that looked disarmingly like mine. The photo had been taken at intake. She was serving two years of jail time for chemical endangerment of a child. The charge could mean a lot of things — drugs were involved. Giving, taking, buying, selling — who can say?
The jail she served time in is in Alabama, not far from Bessemer. What took her from my birthplace in Chicago to where she is now is a mystery. I wonder if she’s out, what her life is like. I know this connection is purely circumstantial, but — I think of her. I think of the limited choices she will have for the rest of her life.
I think of how prisons turn people into slaves, not only while in jail, but also after a supposed “release.” I think of the gilded steel of New York’s Hudson Yards, the stories of contractors recruiting and then subjecting formerly incarcerated parolees to exploitative and unsafe conditions, assuming they had too much to lose to protest. After a protracted and expensive legal fight, the Yards’ developer, The Related Companies, agreed to build (mostly) union, and many of these formerly exploited workers were welcomed into the union rank and file.
I think about what people are afraid to lose. $15 an hour goes a long way in Bessemer, where the median household income is $31,610 and unemployment is higher than the national average as of January 2021. Amazon’s multi-million dollar investment in the warehouse center was described as the largest to ever come to the 138-year-old city, one whose wealth had dwindled in the wake of the steel industry’s collapse. I think of how poverty is a prison without bars.
I think about how at the warehouse, punishment comes suddenly and swiftly. Warehouse employee Jennifer Bates described working at the warehouse as “being treated like we’re prisoners who’re there to get a job done.” Disciplinary measures are administered via an app for offenses as minimal as taking too long of a bathroom break — let alone rallying fellow workers for better conditions. In the last year, individuals at all levels (from warehouse worker to software engineer) have reported retaliatory termination for speaking up against unfair treatment.
I think about how Black women, who suffer disproportionately from the consequences of over-policing and imprisonment, represent the majority of Amazon’s local workforce — and how it’s those same black women who are leading the charge for better conditions. Mothers who come home in tears from the pain of grueling labor, grandmothers who limp up and down flights of stairs, sisters who are left in the dark when exposed to co-workers who’ve contracted COVID. The movement has become as much of a civil rights struggle as it is a labor struggle.
I also think of how even the simplest work can possess dignity if we ground our values in respect and honor. Honesty. Gratitude. Humility.
The Future of Work
I often say that I am “a software engineer by way of public service.” For nearly a decade, I made my mark in local politics — by day, a representative to two consecutive city-wide elected officials, by night, elected in my own right as the first female President of the Queens County Young Democrats in New York City. My life as a software engineer is unrecognizably different sometimes. However, I see transference between the two.
In order to solve problems, you need to understand the environments in which they exist. You must be willing to humble yourself to learn, to ask questions when there’s poorly documented histories behind local issues, or when the code you wrote by trial and error feels held together by duct tape and hope. There is something magical about asking the right questions, at the coffee table at the home of the belabored activist, or into the steadily ticking cacophony that composes the collective myth of the internet.
What I see between both of these fields is how more and more they are on track to converge. Every year, innovation changes how we move and travel; how industry thrives or chokes; how we define human rights, justice, freedom, & each other. While Uber and Lyft drivers fought for the right to collectively bargain, medallion owners took their own lives on the steps of City Hall, unable to face the crushing debt that came with the changing taxi industry. The Social Dilemma not long ago depicted in great detail the global consequences of technology when it is not used to create a better world, but to yield a bigger profit.
I also see our shared debt to the labor movement: the five day work week, eight hour days, living wages, health care. Today, both the package handler and the Amazon engineer benefit from our shared history as workers.
No worker is above the struggle that got us here. Because of that, all workers have a responsibility to fight for better conditions — no matter what industry they are in. Since the pandemic started, billionaires have become 44% richer, while workers face massive layoffs across the board. The nature of work is changing. Increases in automation threaten the employee behind the desk and the forklift. Whether your concern is negotiating for better health care, being treated fairly, or putting food on the table — when workers fight together, we win for all of us.
We decide every day what kind of values we will embody, the society we will become. Much of that happens in the everyday choices, the quieter moments where we build friendships, find home, work, create. But sometimes, something happens and becomes a cornerstone. As votes are counted over the next few weeks, we will see whether this moment becomes that cornerstone — part of the narrative of what history will say our values were, and the world we were heading towards as a result.