Union busting
This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.
Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.
That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.
The union said it would challenge the results.
It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.
“Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which organised the effort.
We live in corporate America. Amazon is one of the biggest regions in corporate America.
If successful, the union drive would have meant that Amazon, the second largest employer in the US, would have had to negotiate a contract with union officials on issues such as work rules and pay.
And now they don’t. Work rules will continue to suck.
Rebecca Givan, professor of labour studies at Rutgers University, said she was not surprised by Amazon won the battle, given the outsize power employers have to fight union efforts under current US law.
“Employers have a huge advantage in these situations,” she said. “They have almost unlimited money and almost unlimited access to the workers to bombard them with messages of anxiety and uncertainty and we see the result of that here.”
Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of unions, said Amazon’s conduct during the campaign showed that US labour law was “broken”.
But we can all bask in the reflected light of Jeff Bezos’s billions, yeah?
Same nonsense happened when the other local aerospace titanium plant tried unionizing this destroying any chances of the dominant plant unionizing in the near future…
I was not surprised since much of the South believes that a union impinges on the “right to work”. Somehow, Southerners are convinced that unions are a coercive force that takes their money and prevents them from working. They resent being forced to join a union just so their wages and working conditions improve, because they believe that they have the freedom to find another job if they don’t like this one. In many parts of the South, that other job is either WalMart or fast food, but at least they have that choice.
I am heartened by the current administration’s support of unions, and I hope we get more messages about how important unions are for the prosperity of our country.
Yes. I’ve been pleasantly astonished by how pro-labor Biden is turning out to be. Clinton-style “New” Democrats used to avoid the subject like the plague – that was their claim to novelty.
Trying to unionize in the South was always going to be difficult. A VW plant in Tennessee has tried to unionize twice and lost both times, and this was with VW being completely neutral about the issue.
Link to story:
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/15/733074989/tennessee-workers-reject-union-at-volkswagen-plant-again
My boss has been trying for years (at least since I’ve been there, which is 15 of those units) to break the union. They have even tried to use the pandemic to push us into working extra hours without pay, realizing the moment we go outside of our contract hours, they will probably be able to get us to do that again and again and again. Right now the teacher’s union remains viable, but I worry how long that will last. And these days being a teacher is becoming a really shitty job.
Plus, after our last contract negotiation, the president effectively told us he would refuse to follow one of the clauses in our contract, which just said that the school was going to follow the law. He basically said, nope, not so. The law in question regarded copyrights on our work.
Which line employers keep pushing, even though most if not all of the southern states are right to work states, and thanks to that decision of the Supreme Court a couple of years ago, they all effectively are now since even in California they are no longer allowed to charge non-union members for services received from the union.