Amazon workers in Alabama are voting against forming a union

With 72% of the ballots counted, about 71% in Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse workers voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. The number of votes against a union exceeds 1608, the total needed to reach a majority of the 3,215 ballots sent by workers. The National Council for Labor Relations continues to count live votes on a show and has not yet declared an official winner.

Each party has about a week to challenge the results before the NLRB certifies the result, and the union is expected to call for a vote and accuse Amazon of violating the legal restrictions governing union campaigns. Amazon said it complied with the law in its communication with employees before and during the election.

The Bessemer facility employs less than 1% of Amazon’s approximately 950,000 employees in the United States, but the vote came as an important moment for a company that hired at a faster rate than almost any private corporation in history last year.

Supporters contrasted Amazon’s reputation for growth, profit and innovation with working conditions for basic employees, some of whom complained both publicly and to the company about the physical demands of the job. They also compared the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to the experience of hourly warehouse workers.

Some Bessemer employees said they want to unionize to negotiate issues such as their compensation, the pace of their work and the amount of break time they have in return. A Bessemer worker said he is expected to collect about 300 items an hour and sometimes does not have enough time to take a break from the bathroom without problems. Amazon said employees can take bath breaks when needed.

Amazon said unionization of workers is not necessary, saying it pays double the minimum wage in Alabama and offers workers what it says are generous health benefits. The company highlighted the cost of union dues and said employees feel better without organizing. The company’s executives also pushed against the critics, noting that Amazon’s payment far exceeds the federal minimum wage.

Some workers who voted not to join a union said they had not seen a union improve their wages or working conditions.

“Many of us agree that we don’t need anyone to speak for us and take our money,” said Cori Jennings, 40, who works at the Bessemer unit and voted against unionization. Ms. Jennings said she and many of her colleagues were eager for national attention to disappear. “We want our lives back to normal.”

The election marks an important victory for Amazon, which has grown rapidly over the past year as consumers and companies have relied on its services during the pandemic. Amazon had sales of $ 386.1 billion in 2020 and saw its share price rise by about 76%. As Amazon grew flooded with orders, it employed more than 500,000 people globally to keep up with demand.

While those employees were working to keep up with the orders, some workers complained that the company did not do enough to protect them from Covid-19. Amazon said it has changed hundreds of processes to help prevent the spread of coronavirus in its stores. The company said last year that more than 19,000 employees were known to have contracted the virus, below what was expected based on the infection rate of the general population.

The Bessemer union began last summer when a group of workers contacted an RWDSU branch. Trade union representatives and members of nearby warehouses, poultry plants and nursing homes began meeting with workers in restaurants and hotels. In October, they started an awareness campaign for other employees.

As the election began earlier this year, politicians from both parties and celebrities rallied for pro-union employees. Supporters painted the election as a battle that overcame traditional workplace wage and benefit disputes. Some on the pro-union side have come to see the vote as a test of the company’s growing power and a barometer for organized labor in the United States, where the share of union workers has declined in recent decades.

The defeat of the Alabama union is an obstacle for workers’ activists and for organizing efforts at the nation’s second largest private employer. Amazon has successfully surpassed previous efforts. In 2018, an effort by Whole Foods Market employees to unionize failed to gain traction, and four years earlier, a small group of Amazon workers in Middletown, Del., Rejected a union impulse.

Even in defeat, pro-union workers reached a significant milestone, said Arthur Wheaton, a Cornell University labor relations scholar who consulted for unions. The election shed light on the workers’ experience, Mr Wheaton said.

The Bessemer trade union “provided a way” for employees everywhere, he said.

Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who runs e-commerce analysis firm CommerceIQ, said the company will continue to grow, no matter how its labor battles unfold. Amazon’s advantage “is based on its technology, and this will continue to be the case regardless of the incremental productivity level changes of the workers in the fulfillment center.”

—Inti Pacheco and Paul Ziobro contributed to this article.

Write to Sebastian Herrera la [email protected]