Current Events > The lengths Amazon is going to to oppose unionization at an AL warehouse

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https://prospect.org/labor/warehouse-workers-wage-historic-fight-for-union-recognition-amazon/

Amazon is no stranger to doing everything it can to defeat workers efforts to win some say in the conditions of their work. At Bessemer, it has mounted an assault on the workers attempts to form a union. It continually texts anti-union messages to its workers; it has created an anti-union website, DoItWithoutDues.com, and has compelled workers to attend captive audience meetings with managers to hear yet another anti-union message. And it hasnt stopped there.
Besides its 5,800 employees, the warehouse is also staffed by between 500 and 700 contract workers who are employed by a staffing agency, though it is difficult to say exactly as these payroll records are separate from Amazons. As theyre not employees, these workers cant vote in the election, and many have been enlisted by the company in its campaign to defeat the unionwhether these workers want to be enlisted or not.
One such contract worker is Jonathan, whose last name has been withheld to protect his privacy. Jonathan tells me he doesnt know what the union is. Hes been at Amazon for just the past six weeks, working in cleaning picking up cardboard and trash. He earns about $13 an hour. On his blue vest, he wears Vote No pins.
Since the unionization campaign began, Amazon has increasingly contracted the services of workers like Jonathan or Darius, who started working at Amazon two weeks ago, recently released from prisons and desperate for work.
RWDSU organizer Michael Foster (aka Big Mike) sympathizes with these young men, whom he describes as a walking billboard for Amazons anti-union efforts. You got these guys just getting out of being incarcerated, so its hard for them to find employment. Amazon is preying upon their downfall. Resisting managements requests to help its campaign, he adds, can put their job in jeopardy. They think, Even if I cant vote and my manager comes up to me, the manager with the authority, the manager whos giving me my paycheck, asks me to wear a pin that says, Vote No, how can I tell him no? Amazon knows theyre trying to stay out of prison and feed their families.

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Last November, when the Bessemer workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to form a union with RWDSU, the bargaining unit consisted of only 1,500 of the plants employees. Today, as ballots are about to be mailed out, the bargaining unit has increased nearly 300 percent to 5,800. While the plant in Bessemer was intended to employ 1,500 workers, Amazon flooded the shop floor to prevent the union from getting to the 30 percent threshold of employees required to call an NLRB election.
I asked Joshua Brewer, the campaigns organizing lead in Bessemer, for clarification on that number, and he acknowledged that he was initially taken aback when the number of workers signing cards began to reflect not just how popular the union was but also how much the workforce had grown. It was kind of a surprise at first. We had thousands of people signing cards, and we were like, Holy shit, do we have 100 percent of this place? What is going on here? 5,800, thats a lot of folks, he recalls.
On October 20 of last year, as RWDSU went public with its campaign, workers and organizers were met with police trying to clear the traffic jam their rally created. Despite some initial attempt to harass them, the police have since left RWDSU organizers and supportive Amazon workers alone. Every day since, excepting only Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, RWDSU has been at the plant gates at every shift change, Brewer tells me.

https://twitter.com/AsyaPikovsky/status/1357803872761360388

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It's America and they're trying to unionize in Alabama.

It's going to be an extremely hard battle.

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Bump

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Geez

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Jesus

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PipeHam posted...

It's America and they're trying to unionize in <u>Alabama. </u>

It's going to be an extremely hard battle.

Sad but true. No one should be surprised that Amazon (or any other corporation) is evil as shit though.