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“Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama handed the online retail giant a decisive victory when they voted against forming a union… After months of aggressive campaigning from both sides, 1,798 warehouse workers ultimately rejected the union while 738 voted in favor of it.” AP News
The right applauds the vote and criticizes the unionization effort.
“The unionization vote suggests that Amazon employees are, on the whole, happy with their conditions. Walter Olson—a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who wrote a book on employment law—noted that Amazon’s Bessemer workers have highlighted their pay and benefits in interviews. ‘They have a sense of what wages—and especially benefits—are like in jobs of that sort in the neighboring community,’ he told The Dispatch. ‘They believe that they’re being paid well above the market standards for that sort of job in their community.’…
“Mike Elk, a reporter for the Payday Report, asked several workers who voted against unionization for their rationale. ‘I’ve been a member of unions in the past and was actually a member of this same union,’ said 59-year-old Ken Worth. ‘I don’t really feel like they represented us well. I think that unions could do a whole lot more.’…
“Ashley Beringer, 32, didn’t want to mess with the status quo. ‘I don’t want someone coming in and changing everything, especially if certain things are good in the situation,’ she said. ‘And if [the union] comes in, I don’t know how it’s gonna be.’”
Dispatch Staff, The Dispatch
“The vote again shows the practical divide between today’s unions and workers. Big Labor portrays itself as the vanguard of social justice, but workers care about their opportunities and income. When they think a company is doing well by them, they see no need for a union that will take some of its income away in dues. The union problem in Bessemer is that workers don’t like what the union is selling…
“‘Amazon is the only job I know where they pay your health insurance from Day 1,’ employee Lavonette Stokes was quoted as telling the New York Times. She disliked that organizers tried to cast the union drive as an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement because most of the workers are black. ‘This was not an African-American issue,’ said Ms. Stokes, who is black.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Why would any worker not want to be represented by a labor union? To answer that question, we might turn to Frank Giovinco, recently sentenced to four years in prison for managing the Genovese crime syndicate’s control of two labor unions in Brooklyn. If Giovinco is unavailable for comment, we might ask Charles Farris Jr., the former president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) affiliate in New Castle, Pa., who has been indicted on five felony counts of theft… [or 10 other examples]…
“A few bad apples, you say? All these cases are from 2020, and there are many, many more from the same year. That’s a whole peck of bad apples…
“The third-rate plunderers trying to insinuate themselves into Amazon and similar businesses would have you believe that they are the second coming of the Molly Maguires, saving an exploited workforce from Jeff Bezos’s sweatshops, where the median pay is . . . between $15 and $20 an hour in the warehouses, with delivery drivers making around $70,000 a year and getting nice benefits. That is not big money compared to what a software developer makes, at Amazon or anywhere else — but it is pretty good money compared to what workers typically make in warehouse jobs.”
Kevin D. Williamson, National Review
“What this shows is the reason private-sector unions outside of the [skilled] trades have receded. Minimum-wage laws, economic growth, and the expansion of federal and state workplace-safety regimes have eliminated most of the necessity for collective bargaining. In that sense, unions are the victims of their own success, having hitched their wagons to legislators inclined to pursue such issues in regulation rather than negotiation.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
The left is disappointed by the vote and calls for stronger unions to protect workers.
The left is disappointed by the vote and calls for stronger unions to protect workers.
“Workers toil at such a grueling pace that they resort to urinating in bottles so as not to get disciplined for taking too much time to use the facilities, which the company calls ‘time off task.’ Christian Smalls was fired a year ago for speaking publicly about people not getting personal protective equipment in his Amazon facility, in bright-blue state New York. Jennifer Bates, the Amazon employee from the Bessemer warehouse, delivered testimony to Congress that would make your stomach turn… With conditions so bad, what explains the defeat in Bessemer?…
“The most comprehensive academic research on successful unionization, by Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor research education at Cornell University, makes an irrefutable case for house-calling. Yet the Bessemer organizers declared that they were relying on ‘digital strategies.’…
“In a hard-to-win campaign, you should put on a mask, ring the doorbell, have your sanitizer dangling from your chest or in your hands so it’s obvious, and step back and engage the worker, socially distanced but securely… Workers can win unions—and workers can strike and win. It is hard as hell, and to do that requires a no-shortcuts approach.”
Jane McAlevey, The Nation
“Amazon also applied enormous pressure to workers. The company flyered warehouse bathrooms with anti-union material; workers received multiple emails and texts a day urging them to vote ‘No.’ Darryl Richardson, a worker who supported a union, previously told Intelligencer that Amazon flew in managers from out of town to ‘walk around talking to employees about why we don’t need the union.’…
“The Washington Post reported earlier on Thursday that Amazon pressured the U.S. Postal Service into installing a mailbox outside the Bessemer facility. The NLRB had previously rejected a request from Amazon to place mailboxes in the facility for in-person voting on the basis that doing so would appear to allow Amazon to surveil and potentially retaliate against workers… Amazon also urged workers to use the mailbox by the first of March — weeks before voting was scheduled to conclude.”
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
“Labor law gives employers sizable advantages. The law typically forces workers to win elections at individual work sites of a company like Amazon, which would mean hundreds of separate campaigns. It allows employers to campaign aggressively against unions and does little to punish employers that threaten or retaliate against workers who try to organize…
“The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, which the House passed last month, would outlaw mandatory anti-union meetings and impose penalties on employers who violate [the National Labor Relations Act, which protections the rights of workers to unionize]. (There are currently no financial penalties for doing so.) But after Bessemer, many labor leaders think Congress should go further, letting workers unionize companywide or industrywide, not just by work site as is typical.”
Noam Scheiber, New York Times
“Just how much those workers need unions has been documented by an Economic Policy Institute study authored by former EPI President Larry Mishel, which was coincidentally released last Thursday, as the vote-counting at Bessemer began…
“Between 1979 and 2017, the share of workers covered by union contracts declined from 27 percent to 12 percent, and that decline, Mishel calculated, has led to a concomitant decline in the median worker’s yearly wages of $3,250 (and to a decline of $5,171 for median male workers, who’d comprised the overwhelming majority of union members in 1979).”
Harold Meyerson, American Prospect
