The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) tried to organize the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, and they failed. The vote was 1798 against and 738 for the union, from a total of 5698 workers.
I get my information from several articles at Left Voice (LV - here, here and here), from Socialist Resurgence (SR - pdf, see p. 4), from Vice (here) and from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ - here and here).
My correspondents give several reasons for the loss. First, they claim that Amazon cheated. There was an "illegal" USPS mailbox set up at the employees' front door to make it easier for them to mail in their ballots--but gave the impression that the company would check the ballots. Employees were required to attend meetings where the union was denigrated. The size of the bargaining unit was inflated to include supervisors and managers, and workers were subject to a barrage of text messages. The WSJ partially disputes some of these points, and I doubt--even if true--that any of this could have swung the election to such an overwhelming extent. If the workers really wanted a union, none of these tactics would've mattered.
Second, the loss is blamed on "business unionism." That is, the union tried to organize from the top down, and failed to do the grass roots work necessary to sway the vote. LV's reporter, Tatiana Cozzarelli, relates that, as a reporter, she found it nearly impossible to interview actual Amazon workers. They weren't involved in organizing activity at all. The union dismissed this, saying that they were keeping them under wraps to prevent retaliation. But to me (and apparently also to Ms. Cozzarelli) it was because the workers just weren't interested. The lopsided vote, along with the large number of non-voters, bears out this hypothesis.
Finally, the WSJ suggests that workers didn't think the union could do anything for them. They already get, as starting wages, $15/hour, which in Alabama is pretty good scratch. Amazon recently announced that, while keeping starting salaries the same, it was raising wages nationwide of many employees by as much as $3/hour. The workers didn't believe a union could improve on that, and then would take a cut off the top for union dues.
Amazon has a reputation (probably never entirely fair) of treating its employees like disposable commodities--as casual labor. If somebody quits, a new worker could replace them easily enough. But this is no longer true, for two reasons.
- There is a labor shortage in this country. Demand for labor is strong as we recover from the pandemic, and the supply of workers is diminishing for demographic reasons.
- Amazon is automating its warehouses. This means that it needs fewer employees, but they require higher skills. They need to work well around complicated and potentially dangerous machinery.
The result is Amazon has to pay higher wages, it has to provide some kind of career track, and it has to cover medical and retirement benefits. It's doing all those things. This is no longer a job for casual labor. Amazon can and will raise wages as much as needed to make sure it has the labor force it needs. If wage increases are what workers are after, they don't need a union--and the workers knows that.
So instead of promising wage increases, the union offered better working conditions. LV guest contributor Michael Goldfield describes it as "dignity."
And, there were not clear sets of public demands the union put forward, just dignity, etc. They should have said, if the union is certified, we will ask for $20 or so per hour, union safety and health committees, longer and more frequent breaks and lunch periods, less monitoring by computers and supervisors, no discussion of output and breaks without a union steward present, etc., demands that could have been developed at public meetings of workers, not to put in stone the examples that I have given.
Unfortunately, this dignity thing is expensive! And not just that--it destroys Amazon's entire business model. The company can't run a business paying employees to take longer breaks, extended lunch periods, and endless discussions with shop stewards.
But the real clinker is the "monitoring by computers and supervisors." Amazon has invested millions in equipment--robots if you will--and it's the robots who drive the speed of work. The investment is wasted if the employees purposely slow down the line. From the company's point of view this is complete non-starter. If the workers can't work, then Amazon will just pick up its robots and move them some place else.
The bargain is: you (worker) promise to arrive on time, every day, and to work as hard as you can during your shift. In return, we (Amazon) will pay you as much as you need to make that happen. For all that, Amazon is doing its best to improve working conditions within the constraint of running an efficient shop, e.g., by rotating workers from job to job to reduce repetitive motion problems.
What the union really asked for was the right to sabotage Amazon's business. The workers, by overwhelming margin, understood that for what it was, and rejected it. Because they realized that a secure future with a solid paycheck, health and retirement benefits will not be forthcoming if the business is destroyed.
This illustrates an important point: the incentives for the union differ from those of the employees. The workers benefit from higher pay and benefits, and reasonable attention to working conditions.
The union, meanwhile, benefits most by increasing the total number of employees--for union dues increase more by employee number than by salary level. That's why they want to gum up the works as much as possible, for by minimizing worker productivity they maximize headcount. Apparently Amazon employees saw through this scam, too, and understood that their long-term future is not well served by sabotage.
I think the traditional union with contractual bargaining rights is a dead letter. It's very expensive, it leads to an unaccountable bureaucracy, and has incentives that don't correspond to the employees'. A strike to form a union benefited first and foremost the RDSWU--and that's why Ms. Cozzarelli couldn't find many workers involved in the effort.
More successful will be an informal employees' association, similar to what the West Virginia teachers had when they won their strike. An association travels light--it doesn't suffer under the legal and bureaucratic constraints of a legal union, it needs little or no staffing, doesn't need to pay dues to an "international," and is under no contractual or legal constraints.
My Trotskyist friends might call this suggestion-box unionism. And they'd be right in those cases where labor-management relations are good. But if there's any conflict, an association could make life very difficult for their employer. Recall that the West Virginia teachers' association actually called a strike--despite not being a union. Note that Amazon has a reputation for treating workers poorly--no union is necessary to make that case if the charge is true. The company would be forced to respond--as it is currently doing.
By voting down the RDSWU, the workers at Amazon's Bessemer warehouse showed they are much smarter than the college professors and grad students who write for Left Voice and Socialist Resurgence give them credit for.
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