What The Amazon Union Vote Really Means For The Labor Movement

Union organizers Syrena (L) and Steve (no last names given) wave to cars exiting an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama on March 27, 2021. [AFP/ Patrick T. Fallon]

By Sam Adler-Bell

Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, appear to have voted against forming a union in their warehouse, by a margin of 738 to 1,798.

In recent weeks, the organizing drive, which pitted thousands of mostly Black workers against the profitable corporate behemoth, had inspired progressives and labor activists across the country. Sen. Bernie Sanders, rapper Killer Mike and Reverend William Barber all paid much-publicized visits to Bessemer. Even Joe Biden put out a tepid pro-union statement name-checking the Amazon workers. All the attention buoyed hopes that an American union might finally prevail at Amazon. 

But it wasn’t in the cards. (Or rather, the ballots — had the process been conducted by card count, as labor activists prefer, the result might have been different.) The result was announced on Friday, when the final votes were tallied at the office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Birmingham. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) has promised to challenge the count, as they should. Amazon employed every dirty trick, a powerful union-busting law firm and likely millions of dollars to manipulate the process. The majority of 500 set-aside ballots were reportedly challenged by Amazon, which suggests the result could be closer in the final tally. But the 2-1 margin — and the fact that companies rarely face serious consequences for lawbreaking during union drives — suggests RWDSU will not succeed in reversing the outcome. 

The right-wing explanation

For some pundits, the explanation is simple enough: the workers, already paid double the minimum wage in an impoverished town, didn’t see the need for a union. It’s not a crazy idea. But it ignores the fact that most of the union’s grievances in Bessemer — like those of Amazon workers across the country — revolve around the punishing and dehumanizing pace of work. As for wages, there is also the matter of fairness; the workers risked their lives to keep Amazon’s customers satisfied through the pandemic while Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased by $75 billion. The Brookings Institution estimates Amazon could have quintupled its hazard pay to workers in 2020 and still earned more profit than in 2019. Workers at Amazon may get paid, but not what they’re owed. 

The left-wing explanation

The left, of course, will offer its own post-mortems. Some, I suspect, will blame history and geography, adding Bessemer to a list of high-profile, failed union drives below the Mason-Dixon line since 2015 — Volkswagen in Chattanooga, TN; Nissan in Canton, MS; and Boeing in North Charleston, SC. In our historical imagination, the failure of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO)’s “Operation Dixie” still looms large. Perhaps organized labor is doomed in the South, where the legacies of Jim Crow run deep, and a “pro-business” political hegemony reigns. 

But this somber lament does not account for the hundreds of poultry workers in Russellville, Alabama, who voted to unionize with RWDSU in 2012, nor the thousands of slaughterhouse workers in Tar Heel, North Carolina, who joined United Food and Commercial Workers in 2008, nor the nearly 2,000 nurses in Asheville who unionized last September. Labor can’t win in the South except when it does.

What really happened

The fact is, unionizing at Amazon was always going to be a moonshot, and a huge number of factors had to fall into place for the drive to succeed. Here are a few things to consider:

1. The timeline: Amazon had almost four months to conduct an extremely aggressive and well-financed anti-union campaign, bombarding Bessemer workers with propaganda in captive-audience meetings and even during their bathroom breaks. It’s an organizing truism that the longer it takes between filing a petition and the actual election, the greater advantage for the company. Obama’s NLRB had introduced rules to drastically shorten that interregnum; Trump’s NLRB modified those rules in 2019, allowing bosses to drag their feet. 

2. The bargaining unit scope: In December, against the union’s objection, Amazon’s lawyers succeeded in tripling the size of the proposed bargaining unit (relying, again, on a Trump-era NLRB legal standard to do so). This maneuver — a management tactic for diluting the pro-union vote — added thousands of seasonal workers, maintenance and robotics employees to the bargaining unit who were not part of RWDSU’s original petition. RWDSU was suddenly tasked with organizing thousands of additional workers whom they hardly knew. 

3. The pace of organizing: The warehouse in Bessemer is brand new. It opened in March 2020, and the union petitioned the labor board in November. Unions can spend years building up their organization inside a single shop before going public with a campaign. At the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, NC, for example, it took 15 years and two failed elections to win the union, at last, in 2008. The idea that RWDSU would succeed at organizing 5,000 workers in a matter of months beggars belief. That they managed to get 30% on a petition by November is no mean feat.

4. The industry: With few exceptions, the rapidly expanding logistics sector remains non-unionized, indicating just how difficult organizing has been in warehouse settings. There’s an extremely high rate of turnover; the jobs are seasonal and often arduous, so people often don’t last long enough to form the bonds that make organizing feasible. Moreover, such thin unionization means few workers have ever experienced “the union difference.” This is always a problem with organizing new sectors; by far the hardest shop to organize is the first. 

For these reasons, the result in Bessemer is not cause for despair. The workers faced down fear, endured harassment, and convinced themselves and their coworkers to take an extraordinary risk, to engage in a conspiracy of hope. That such a painful and beautiful endeavor should end in defeat is straightforwardly cruel. Every time. 

But the cards were stacked against them, for all the reasons above. And despite all that, taking the challenged (and as yet untallied) ballots into account, they appear to have gotten nearly 1,000 “yes” votes. When that many people vote for a union in a workplace, often they will win it — just not yet. And their example has already inspired workers at other warehouses across the country to conspire together too.   

Still, when a union loses an election by this large a margin, it’s crucial for those in the labor movement to consider what went wrong. If RWDSU didn’t have a sturdy majority, they shouldn’t have gone forward with an election. As Jane McAlevy put it, “There’s no justification for putting workers on what organizers call a ‘death march.’” Acknowledging mistakes is as important as reckoning the imbalanced playing field. Our enemy is monstrously powerful; we have to beat them anyway. As the great playwright Bertolt Brecht once said, “It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.”

Finally, and crucially, many of the tactics Amazon used to fight the Bessemer union would be illegal under the PRO Act, the Democrats’ labor law reform bill. Amazon’s behavior during this campaign, and the circumstances of this defeat, should inspire all of us to put more pressure on lawmakers to do whatever it takes to pass the bill.  

When I think of Amazon — a massive machine for disciplining workers that is reshaping the global economy — I often remember a different passage from Brecht: “General, your tank / is a powerful vehicle / it smashes down forests / and crushes a hundred men. / but it has one defect: / it needs a driver.”

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