Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, got an almost unprecedented show of support from President Joe Biden on Sunday, when he tweeted a video backing union rights in clear reference to their campaign. “Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union,” Biden said. “The law guarantees that choice. And it’s your right, not that of an employer, it’s your right. No employer can take that right away. So make your voice heard.”
Biden didn’t say the word “Amazon,” but a reference to Alabama wasn’t really needed to make his intentions clear. It was one of a series of boosts for the 85% Black Amazon workforce in Bessemer, including support from the Major League Baseball Players Association, the NFL Players Association, and a group of writers and entertainers including Tina Fey and Seth Meyers. But they’re also battling an intense anti-union campaign from management, which lead organizer Josh Brewer detailed in an interview with Steven Greenhouse.
Brewer describes multiple text messages a day from Amazon management to workers, supervisors seeking out workers individually, and captive audience meetings in which workers are lectured with anti-union talking points. If a worker speaks up for the union at one of those meetings, “you’re called to the front of the room. They take a picture of your badge like you’re an infidel. They cast you out of the room and send you back to work. Once you’re identified, you’ve been marked.”
What’s particularly noteworthy is the amount of worker time Amazon is taking to campaign against the union, in a workplace in which union supporter Darryl Richardson previously told Greenhouse his quota is to pick 315 items an hour, with infrequent breaks. Amazon workers in other locations have complained of not getting bathroom breaks, but there’s apparently all the time in the world when it comes to trying to harangue workers away from union support.
Amazon’s intense focus on defeating the workers’ organizing effort is simple: if a first major warehouse unionizes—and in Alabama—the company fears others will follow.
Much of management’s messaging, when it’s not demonizing unions, is about its own starting wage of $15 an hour, plus benefits. But while that’s a lot better than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which prevails in Alabama, it’s not necessarily a lot of money for many of the workers there. Richardson told Greenhouse he’d previously made more than $23 an hour at an auto parts plant, and Brewer told Greenhouse that wasn’t uncommon.
“Frankly, it’s pretty surprising that they focus so much on that,” he said. “Our response is there are warehouses in Bessemer and Birmingham represented by unions where the workers are making $19 and $20 an hour for the same work. Fifteen dollars an hour is something that is being approached at our most rural poultry plants. This idea that $15.30 is some mega-pay that is great—$15.30 is low for this area. Certainly, it’s higher than McDonald’s. But it’s not a wage that we can’t do better than. Look at how much more other warehouses in the area pay.”
The presence of other union workplaces in Bessemer is a key point, which journalist Kim Kelly also emphasized in an NPR interview. Union activism isn't the only form of activist experience these workers have, either. “Many of these people were part of the movement to tear down [Confederate] statues in Birmingham a few months back. It feels like a continuation of that,” Brewer told Greenhouse.
The union representation election is going on now, with workers voting by mail and ballots due on March 29. The South has dealt unions a lot of heartbreaks over the years, including at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant in 2014 and a Mississippi Nissan plant in 2017. But this is a different moment, a different workforce, and a different union. Maybe this will be the big breakthrough for worker power both in the South and at Amazon.
