It seems clear that Amazon is one of the contemporary companies that is broadly transforming the nature of labor in the 21st century. This is happening along many different fronts: executives whose life-changing wealth is tied to the company’s stock success, cloud programmers looking for new ways to automate pieces of entire industries, third-party affiliate sellers and delivery drivers whose fates are tied to a company that does not, strictly speaking, employ them, and warehouse workers whose constant surveillance and negotiation with their own continually reprogrammed workplaces are becoming a model for a new kind of global blue-collar work. Any of these transformations would be significant: for all of them to be crucial in the evolution of an enormous company at once can be difficult to wrap your head around.
This is one of several reasons so many of us have been fascinated by the recent unionizaton election by employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Union protection for at least one class of Amazon workers, plus collective bargaining and everything that comes with it, might introduce some stability and predictability into this transformation of labor. So far, it’s the corporate side of Amazon that has been setting the pace. If unions were introduced to American Amazon warehouses, and they become commonplace, then everything becomes more recognizable. Workplace safety issues become part of the labor agreement; you have fewer standoffs directly between the company and politicians (at least pertaining to warehouse work); the jobs and careers themselves ideally become more stable, as greater salaries and benefits accrue to more experienced workers, and so forth. The 21st century labor struggle would look a lot more like the 20th century one, and not the wild, inchoate mess it looks like now.
But in Bessemer, the union was not approved at the ballot box. Two solid stories that have appeared in the past few days that describe how and why this happened are CNN’s overview, including several interviews with anonymous voters in that election, and Labor Notes’s interview with Joshua Fuller, one of the lead organizers from RWDSU, the union seeking recognition in the election. Together, they describe a workplace strongly motivated to unionize, but also one facing both procedural hurdles and a well-funded, impossible-to-ignore campaign by Amazon to defeat the unionization effort.
There will be court challenges arguing that Amazon illegally interfered with the election. There will also be a renewed push to pass the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act in Congress, a change that could make it easier to organize other Amazon workplaces. And other unions and labor activists, like the Teamsters (who are organizing delivery drivers in Iowa) and the SEIU, are proposing using different tactics against Amazon that are less dependent on winning union elections — a battle unions never won, despite great efforts, against Amazon’s predecessor, Walmart:
The idea is to combine workplace actions like walkouts (the ground war) with pressure on company executives through public relations campaigns that highlight labor conditions and enlist the support of public figures (the air war). The Service Employees International Union used the strategy to organize janitors beginning in the 1980s, and to win gains for fast-food workers in the past few years, including wage increases across the industry.
For its part, Amazon’s leadership seems to be aware that bad PR and public fights with politicians could leave it vulnerable going forward (which is one thing that made its social media strategy during the Bessemer election so bewildering — that move seemed likely to backfire, and difficult to sustain, Walmart-style).
