A lot of Amazon workers in Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland, Denver and Southern California are looking to unionize, encouraged by their Alabama colleagues profile union campaign, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Amazon workers have been struggling to organize for years, citing burdensome work tasks, unsafe conditions against the background of the global covid-19 pandemic, dystopian surveillance at work, and the history of Amazon a flagrant reprisals against those who oppose this unfair treatment. Now, almost 6,000 employees at an Amazon distribution center in the black-majority city of Bessemer, Alabama, is set to vote this month on joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store.
In an interview with Bloomberg, RWDSU said that 1,000 Amazon workers across the country have already reached out to explore options for potential unions at their own facilities.
“People understand that this is something much bigger than Alabama and even much bigger than Amazon,” Stuart Appelbaum told RWDSU to the press. “It’s really about the future of work and how workers will be treated.”
Several Amazon workers, with whom Bloomberg spoke, began discussing unionization with their co-workers after seeing the success of the Alabama campaign. An employee of a warehouse in Denver, Colorado, said he created an online chat room for colleagues to discuss the organization. Another warehouse worker in New Orleans, Louisiana, said he drove five hours to Bessemer last month to attend a pro-union rally. He added that the hard work of all his colleagues in Alabama could become a turning point for reform if other Amazon warehouse employees follow suit.
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“If the strongest company in the world can be unionized in an anti-union state like Alabama, it gives hope to the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, who are trying to do the same,” he told reporters. “We just have to support the fight wherever it is, because the fight will come to us.”
However, many workers fear retaliation from Amazon strict efforts to break the union over the years. The company is conducting an extensive anti-union campaign in Alabama, promoting advertisements Amazon-owned twitch, Twitter and other social platforms, sending text messages with pro-management messages and runs recruitment ads for experts that have collapsed. President Joe Biden it even influenced the Amazon mix before the Alabama vote, warning the e-commerce giant that its efforts to break up the union must involve “no intimidation, no coercion, no threat, no anti-union propaganda.”
A worker at the Pennsylvania warehouse told Bloomberg that, given all this, in addition to Amazon’s already exhausting workloads, it was difficult to fire enough colleagues to even start union talks.
“People are just trying to work and go home,” she said in a press interview. “Amazon makes you very tired, drained both physically and mentally, but the benefits are good.”
The Alabama election is taking place through ballots that will be counted on March 30, after which Amazon could see a flood of union campaigns at its other depots and beyond. A recent national survey shared with Gizmodo they surveyed hundreds of Amazon delivery drivers in the US and Canada and found that most of them support unionization.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Appelbaum said that even if Amazon workers in Alabama eventually choose not to unionize, “this campaign will result in an explosion in the organization across the country.”