by Mei W.
Last Tuesday, an administrative law judge ordered a third union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, citing that the e-commerce monopoly’s union-busting campaigns rigged the last union election in 2022. Initial counts in 2022 showed 875 votes for and 993 votes against unionizing under the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), while 311 ballots remained under challenge and have been voided following the order. Amazon employed similar anti-union campaigns during the first union election in 2021, when the Bessemer warehouse, with around 5,800 workers, became the largest US Amazon facility to vote on unionization since the company’s establishment 20 years ago.
The campaigns that Amazon managers wielded during the elections include confiscating union materials from break rooms and replacing them with anti-union banners and signs, sending mass texts and holding mandatory meetings that spread misinformation on unions, and threatening workers that Amazon will close the Bessemer warehouse if they voted to unionize. Anti-union consultants were hired by the e-commerce monopoly, who were paid $3,200 per day to help managers deter workers’ unionization efforts. Workers reported to monopoly media that the company also shortened the timer on the traffic light in front of the warehouse where union organizers would approach workers driving in to speak to them about the union elections during the red light.
Amazon has appealed the judge’s ruling, claiming that the election results reflect “the will of our team members” and that the company “will continue working to make sure that our team’s voices are heard.” The e-commerce monopoly is also facing union and organizing activity in other sites—in Staten Island, New York, where warehouse workers won the first successful unionization drive in the history of the company in the US in 2022, Amazon is continuing to stall negotiations with the union, most recently challenging the National Labor Relations Board’s accusation that the company has illegally refused to bargain with the union. The Amazon Labor Union formed at the Staten Island site has not yet secured a contract with Amazon.
At the Bessemer warehouse, the hourly wage starts at $15, less than the $17 hourly wage needed to pay the rent of an average 1 bedroom housing in the state of Alabama, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The rate of injury at the Bessemer warehouse has increased since its opening, with a 43% increase in the rate of serious injury from 2020 to 2021 at the site.
According to a report by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the average injury rate at Amazon warehouses is 70% higher than the rate at non-Amazon warehouses, and their average serious injury rate was more than twice the rate at non-Amazon warehouses. A recently published federal study found that on Amazon Prime Day in 2019, the injury rate at US Amazon warehouses was 45%. The majority of warehouse injuries have been found to be repetitive stress injuries, resulting from the e-commerce monopoly’s demanding production quotas, where warehouse workers are tracked by surveillance technology that detects their production rates.
As the second largest private employer in the US that expanded massively up to and through COVID’s inception, Amazon has not been immune to the economic crisis, experiencing decreases in the growth rate of online stores sales in the past few years. The $325 million Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, where a third of its majority-Black population lives in poverty, opened in 2020 as the city’s largest single investment in its 130-year history. The state of Alabama permitted Amazon $41.7 million in tax breaks over the 10 years following the opening of the warehouse. This follows the general trend of monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Mercedes who are relocating operations to the South where they can extract higher profits from non-unionized labor, lower wages, and heavy government subsidies.
