There are already allegations of ‘dirty tricks’ by the company that will be contested …
The YUGE company is strongly fighting labor and unionization of its almost million workers across the country….
Amazon has won a victory in its hard-fought campaign to stop workers at an Alabama warehouse forming the company’s first union, in a tough blow for the US labor movement.
Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama, plant have voted 1,798 to 738 so far to reject the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Although counting is still going on, that number is enough to hand Amazon the win.
The union immediately said it would launch a legal challenge to the outcome, which is likely to look at the high number of contested ballots, and union allegations of unfair tactics during the campaign.
The fight to form a union in the warehouse in Bessemer, a suburb north of Birmingham, we eagerly watched by America’s labor movement as one of its most important battles in recent history. Some 5,800 workers were eligible to vote on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union as the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the US.
The union’s struggle has attracted the support of a raft of leftwing politicians and some Republicans eager to court working-class voters. But Amazon had fiercely resisted the effort.
Amazon is the US’s second largest private employer after Walmart, with 950,000 employees, the majority of whom work in its massive warehouses, which have been the subject of numerous reports of hazardous and gruelingworking conditions.
The union drive was the biggest unionization push at the company since it was founded in 1995, and workers faced fierce lobbying from both sides ahead of the vote….
Guess those employees don’t think their working conditions are “hazardous and grueling.”
As we know management at Amazon has made clear they don’t want a union…
Alabama isn’t a strong union/labor place either.
There will more moves by labor against the company
I have a very ambivalent feeling towards union, they have been instrumental in changing labor rights in this country, which I am totally appreciative of, but on a micro level they often fight the wrong battles and protect shitty workers that shouldn’t be working along side the largely hard working individuals that make up their membership…its like you have to live with a a bunch of rotten eggs in order to get the bigger benefits…
But amazon for sure spent a shit ton of resources to fight this and they have the home field advantage cause labor organizers can’t organize on company property but the company can advocate their position at work 24-7.
Amazon has gotten way TOOOOO BIG I feel…
Bezos keeps getting richer and not , it seems sharing the wealth…
As i mentioned….
This is but a first skirmish in a state that is not a union friendly place….
An article in Dissent by Nelson Lichtenstein (worth reading in full) concludes:
“So how can Amazon and other recalcitrant giants be unionized? McAlevey’s call for hard work and dedication is a recipe for continued trench warfare. But to generate the strategic breakthrough that built the mass production unions in the 1930s and the public employee organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, liberals and unionists must deploy a pincer attack that squeezes Amazon both from the grassroots and from Washington’s corridors of power. The organization of A&P and other large grocery retailers in 1930s came not just as a result of working-class insurgency in stores and warehouses. The unions achieved success because the anti-chain store movement of that day commanded the support of numerous legislative and political leaders on both the federal and state levels. A&P executives came to see the mass unionization of their employees as a lesser evil, and as a political shield against anti-trust efforts to break up the newly emergent chains. Today we see a similar dynamic, where taming and fissuring Amazon and other Silicon Valley companies has become a subject of serious legislative discussion and regulatory statecraft.
“We have not heard the last of organizing efforts at Amazon.”
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-next-amazon-union-drive
Actually?
I’d like to see Amazon broken up
It’s too big and into toooooo many things