Since Oct. 20, the poultry workers have been standing outside the Amazon gates every day starting at 4:30 a.m., urging workers stopped at a traffic light to join a union.
“I am telling them they are part of a movement that is worldwide,” said Michael Foster, a Black organizer in Bessemer, who works in a poultry plant. “I want them to know that we are important and we do matter.”
Unions have been forming in other unlikely places this year. This month, more than 400 engineers and other workers at Google formed a union, a rare move in the mostly anti-union tech industry. The Google union is meant primarily to bolster employee activism, while the union being proposed at Amazon in Bessemer would eventually be able to negotiate a contract and would seek to influence wages and working conditions.
Amazon, which has embarked on a hiring spree during the pandemic, now has more than 1.2 million employees globally, up more than 50 percent from a year earlier. But the company has also begun to face pressure from its corporate employees, over climate change and other issues, and from many warehouse workers around the country who have felt emboldened to speak up. The attention is likely to only increase with Amazon on pace to surpass Walmart as the country’s largest private employer in a few years.
Success at the Bessemer warehouse, which opened in March, could inspire workers in the booming e-commerce industry more broadly, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If you can do it in Alabama, we can do it here in Southern California for sure,” he said. “It would have a huge ripple effect.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/business/amazon-union-alabama.html
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