On 12/30/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ala. Amazon workers win right to vote to have a unionAmazon, Capitalism in its pure form. And where within the struggle of
https://themilitant.com/2020/12/26/ala-amazon-workers-win-right-to-vote-to-have-a-union/
BY SUSAN LAMONT
Vol. 85/No. 1
January 4, 2021
ATLANTA — Despite objections from Amazon, the National Labor Relations
Board ruled Dec. 16 that workers at Amazon’s warehouse and distribution
center in Bessemer, Alabama, have shown enough support for the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Union to hold a vote on representation.
Hundreds of workers at the huge facility, which opened in late March,
have signed union cards over the past two months.
The board held a hearing beginning Dec. 18 to decide on the details of
the election, after the bosses and union officials couldn’t reach
agreement on who would be eligible to vote and when it will be held.
The stakes are high. If the union wins the vote, it would be the first
unionized Amazon facility in the U.S.
“This will be good,” Sharon Franklin told the Militant Dec. 19 by phone
from Bessemer. Because of her fear of retaliation by Amazon bosses, the
Militant is using a pseudonym. Franklin, who used to work in
housekeeping in the area, started at Amazon in June.
The union says the bargaining unit and vote should be for the 1,500
permanent full- and part-time warehouse and distribution center workers.
Amazon wants the vote to include office staff, engineers, software
workers and other employees not on the shop floor — which it claims
would bring those eligible to vote to more than 5,700. The company hopes
this would kill the organizing effort.
“People get sick in there every day,” Franklin said. “But if you go to
the Wellness Office and say you’re sick and need to leave, the manager
says, ‘I need you here.’ You’re not given the time and equipment to
clean your own area.”
“Every day they come up with new rules,” she said. “The work is too
much, 10 and 12 hours a day. We get written up for all kinds of things.
Everything is ‘TOT’ — ‘time off task.’ If you take more than five
minutes to use the bathroom, they start docking your time.”
According to the Washington Post, Amazon said in October that nearly
20,000 of its U.S. employees had tested positive or showed symptoms of
COVID since the pandemic began.
Union organizers are continuing to get workers to sign authorization
cards. Bessemer is near Alabama’s unionized coalfields and is part of
the greater Birmingham industrial area, long a center of steel
production, with strong union traditions.
After the NLRB decision “the company sent us two long texts right away
about why we shouldn’t sign union cards,” Franklin said, trying to
intimidate workers. “They said if we signed a union card, we’d be giving
up the right to speak for ourselves and that if we feel like we were
misled by the union, we should ask for our card back.”
While thousands of small proprietors and other retail bosses are being
driven out of business in the wake of government-ordered lockdowns and
other pandemic-justified restrictions, Amazon’s online sales are booming.
The second-largest U.S. employer after Walmart, Amazon has some 1.1
million workers worldwide and 760 fulfillment centers in the U.S. and
touts its hourly jobs as great. Since July it has averaged hiring 2,800
workers every day.
Amazon’s real impact, however, has been to drive down the average wages
of warehouse and delivery workers in areas it moves into.
“Six years ago, before the company opened a giant fulfillment center in
Robbinsville, New Jersey, warehouse workers made $24 an hour on average,
according to BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data. Last year the
average hourly wage slipped to $17.50,” reported a Dec. 17 article on
the Bloomberg News website titled, “Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class
Warehouse Career Into a McJob.” Amazon is also pushing down wages of
truck and other delivery drivers.
Amazon hasn’t responded to the Militant’s request for comment.
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Carl Sagan “Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No,
no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection
for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics,
Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s
done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule
is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.” ― Carl
Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
