{"id":118379,"date":"2021-04-12T17:21:14","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T17:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/04\/amazon-union-organizing-bessemer-defeat-rwdsu\/"},"modified":"2021-04-12T17:21:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T17:21:14","slug":"the-defeat-at-amazon-and-the-union-fights-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/12\/the-defeat-at-amazon-and-the-union-fights-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"The Defeat at Amazon and the Union Fights to Come"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The union loss in Bessemer, Alabama against Amazon was a crushing defeat. It\u2019s a reflection of a disjunction between \u201claborism,\u201d the intellectual and activist infrastructure supportive of organized labor, and the labor movement itself.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n A sign at the Amazon BHM1 fulfillment center is seen before sunrise on March 29, 2021 in Bessemer, Alabama. (Patrick T. Fallon \/ AFP via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

I was too sentimental this time. In 2014, in these very pages, I noted<\/a> that a friend had asked me for a prediction as to the vote in the United Auto Workers\u2019 (UAW) effort to organize Volkswagen\u2019s Chattanooga, Tennessee facility. With a lot of luck, leavened by instincts and decades of experience working in and studying the labor movement, I nailed it exactly: a 53-47 union defeat. In that one you could see that the UAW had a shot \u2014 they had been working this campaign for a long time and had won a pledge of company neutrality from the German-based company. It turned out to be not quite enough. But okay, a fairly close loss.<\/p>\n

So a couple of weeks ago, as we looked to the results at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the same friend asked me what I thought would happen this time. I said a 55-45 defeat. I agreed with every labor person I had talked to \u2014 nobody thought the union had a chance to win. But my own historiographical awareness<\/a> of the militant organizing<\/a> of the Mine Mill and Smelter\u2019s union of mostly black workers during the Depression in the same area in Alabama had me yearning for a modern invocation of that memory today.<\/p>\n

The result, however, was much worse than I imagined: a 70-30 rout with a terrible 55 percent turnout, indicating that many workers were either too fearful or too alienated to vote at all. The result was born of a combination of the standard union-busting tactics used in the most anti-union nation in the advanced world, refined to a coercive perfection by an enormously sophisticated and powerful company \u2014 and also the manifold mistakes, essentially malfeasance, of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), the fairly small union running the campaign. (Jane McAlevey smartly walks thr<\/a>o<\/a>u<\/a>gh<\/a> many of these mistakes in her postmortem in the Nation.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The key point McAlevey makes is that once Amazon won the fight to enormously change the composition and size of the bargaining unit at the warehouse, the union had to either sharply revisit its strategy or simply withdraw to fight another day. Companies make these unit size objections all the time in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union elections \u2014 it\u2019s how they dilute the strength of union activists. In this case, the unit size went from about 1,500 to about 5,800 \u2014 a fourfold increase.<\/p>\n

Yet the union plowed on and ultimately submitted about 2,000 authorization cards to the NLRB, around 35 percent of the unit. This was not a harbinger of success but of failure.<\/p>\n

Whenever I had this discussion with organizers during my years working in labor, we saw between 60 and 70 percent as the minimum percentage for initial interest in unionizing necessary if the union had a chance at winning an NLRB election. (There are other ways to fight a company \u2014 long \u201ccomprehensive campaigns\u201d that seek to finally get the company management to recognize a union without a board election. But most unions organizing a single site still go through the election process.) This gets back to the tilted terrain of struggle on which the company and union engage each other. Union support will almost always attrit, not accrete, in a time-sensitive board election fight, because union organizing in the United States is not a fair fight and never can be as long as the boss signs workers\u2019 checks and is able to manipulate and intimidate them without fear of severe legal reprisal.<\/p>\n