Pivotal week kicks off for Amazon unionization campaigns

Workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., Amazon facility will begin voting in person Friday on whether they want to unionize.

At the same time, a thousand miles south, workers at the e-commerce giant’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse are in the final stretch of a mail in vote that will be counted Monday. 

The two elections are labor’s best chance to get a foothold at Amazon yet and a bellwether for the future of organizing at the nation’s second-largest private employer.

“Amazon has a model of paying little to no taxes, feasting on public subsidies and mistreating and dehumanizing its employees,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which would represent workers at the Bessemer facility in the event of a unionization victory, told The Hill.

“What we are concerned about is that the way that Amazon treats its employees does not become the model for the future of work,” he continued. “So for us the importance of this election transcends this one warehouse.”

Workers at both facilities are organizing for similar reasons — supporters of unionization have been critical of Amazon’s demanding work schedules, pay and protection from diseases such as COVID-19. 

The approaches they have taken are very different. 

Workers at the Staten Island warehouse will be voting on whether or not to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent group led by current and former employees of the facility. 

Their election will stretch until Wednesday, and the National Labor Relations Board will begin counting votes soon after.

This will be the second election at the Bessemer facility in as many years over whether workers want to be represented by the RWDSU, which represents 60,000 workers across America. The National Labor Relations Board previously determined Amazon had improperly interfered in the first vote.

Unionization faces long odds at both warehouses. The ALU failed to hit 30 percent support among the over 5,000 employees of the JFK8 facility in Staten Island the first time it petitioned for an election and will need to clear 50 percent to clinch an election win.

The RWDSU was defeated by a ratio of more than 2-1 in the first election at the Bessemer warehouse before contested ballots were counted. The facility, like most Amazon warehouses, has also had significant turnover among its 6,000 plus employees since the last election, cutting into the union’s head start gathering support. 

Beyond the numbers, one of the key reasons that Amazon is favored is the sheer amount of resources the company has put into defeating the unionization efforts.

Amazon has plastered both facilities with “vote no” posters and literature, flooded employees with texts urging against unionization and hired armies of consultants to persuade individual voters on warehouse floors.

The company has also leaned heavily on in-person meetings with staff during work hours to convince employees.

Dale Wyatt, who started at the Bessemer plant in August of 2021, told The Hill that Amazon held weekly so-called captive audience meetings from October all the way to when ballots were sent out in February. 

During those meetings, according to Wyatt, managers tried to paint the RWDSU as an outside organization that will make decisions against the workforce’s wishes and suggested that wages and benefits could be reduced in the event of a union win.

“I always felt intimidated by what they had to say,” he explained. “There were a couple of times where I stood up and said ‘this is just a lie.’ They would shut the meeting down immediately if they were ever questioned.”

Workers at the Staten Island facility have had similar experiences. 

Our focus “is generally counteracting the sheer volume of information that Amazon is sending out,” explained Connor Spence, vice president of membership at the ALU and current JFK8 employee.

“They’ve been doing captive audience meetings literally back to back every single day,” he told The Hill. “They send texts, they send emails … the walls are completely plastered with anti-union posters and flyers.” 

This is not the first time workers in Bessemer and the RWDSU have faced these tactics, and the union is confident that conditions are better for them this time around.

“The biggest change since the first vote is the vaccine,” Appelbaum said. “There is noting more effective than having face-to-face conversations with workers in their home — that’s what we couldn’t do in the first vote and that has been the thrust of this revote campaign.”  

Workers at both facilities have also gotten a boost from labor regulators in the last year. 

Amazon reached a settlement with the NLRB in December to notify workers of their rights to organize and allow employees to stay on site longer after their shifts. 

The NLRB also flexed its muscles by issuing an injunction earlier this month to reinstate Gerald Bryson, who was fired in April 2020 after protesting unsafe working conditions at JFK8.

These will not be the last union elections at Amazon warehouses — one is already scheduled at another Staten Island facility later this spring — but could go a long way in forecasting how successful the campaign to organize the company’s over a million American workers will be.

“Should one of these Amazon votes be successful,” Jeffrey Hirsch, a law professor at University of North Carolina School of Law, said, “I think you’re more likely to see other Amazon and frankly even employees at other firms be a little more interested in unions.”