In a 2019 segment on working conditions in Amazon’s eerily named “fulfillment centers,” Comedian John Oliver gave the world’s largest e-commerce company the brilliant faux-tagline: “Amazon: try not to think about it.”
But as the world watched the historic unionization drive at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama unfold over the last several months, ending with a defeat to the organizers earlier this month, the reality of Amazon's labor practices have become harder to ignore. The union vote came in the midst of tens of thousands of Amazon workers testing positive for Covid-19 over the past year, strikes at the company’s facilities across Italy, in Germany, and on Chicago’s South Side, and reported firings of workers demanding better conditions.
Amazon employs about 1.3 million people and touches the lives of millions of other workers in the supply chains of the products it sells, transports, and delivers. The company’s vast ecosystem has made Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos the world’s richest person. Bezos is on track to become a trillionaire in five years.
This blog post discusses the recent unionization drive in Bessemer, Alabama and the connection between poor conditions in Amazon’s own facilities and in the supply chains of products it sells and allows others to sell on its platform.
Alabama Organizing Effort and Conditions in Amazon Fulfillment Centers
On Friday April 9, after a monumental organizing effort-- one that triggered a massive backlash from Amazon-- enough “no” votes from workers at a fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama were tallied to defeat a months-long unionization drive. The Bessemer vote was the largest National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union vote in three decades and the “BAmazon” union drive behind it posed the biggest organized labor challenge to Amazon that the company has yet seen.
Brutal working conditions, including lack of air conditioning, excessive physical demands, insufficient breaks, random security checks on break time, and invasive personnel tracking, combined with demands for a living wage triggered the organizing effort in Bessemer.
Despite the picture of happy workers that Amazon paints, the company recorded 14,000 serious injuries in fulfillment centers in 2019 alone and at least 19 people have died from work-related injuries since 2013. In general, warehouse facilities tend to have higher rates of injuries and illnesses than many other industries in the United States, even higher than mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction. Amazon’s overall injury rate reportedly increased by 33% from 2016-2019 and in 2019 was nearly double the industry standard.
Dangerous and exploitative working conditions in Bessemer and other Amazon facilities are well-documented. Associates report taking extreme measures to avoid the risk of being penalized for taking too much “time off task,” Amazon’s term for time spent not performing specific fulfilment tasks that the company monitors to the second. While too much time off task leads to discipline or firing, workers report not being informed of the upper limit, leading to self-monitoring and distress (à la Foucault’s panopticon analysis). Amazon delivery drivers even report that work schedules have led them to urinate in bottles instead of taking a few minutes to stop at a restroom.
During the pandemic, during which at least 20,000 Amazon workers have reported testing positive and at least 10 have died Covid-related deaths, warehouse workers in Staten Island sued Amazon, alleging that the threat of “time off task” penalties discouraged pandemic precautions like hand washing. (Amazon fired a warehouse associate at the same facility who had organized a related strike months earlier.)
“Amazon is going to poor communities saying they want to help the economic growth. That should mean paying people a living wage and benefits that truly match the cost of living and ensure workers work in safe and healthy conditions because we are not robots designed to live to work. We work to live.”
-- Jennifer Bates, Organizer
(More about “time off task” tracking and other labor practices in Amazon fulfilment centers in this episode of The Daily, Organizer Jennifer Bates’s testimony before the US Senate Budget Committee, and the Bessemer unionization drive website.)
Abuses at Amazon’s facility in Alabama, a state with a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and convict leasing, touch a historical nerve.
In an address to the organizing workers in Bessemer earlier this month, Killer Mike referred to Jeff Bezos as part of the “planter class” who in the antebellum South owned plantations and used poor white people and Blacks to work the land for profit. He said: “This country was built [...] on the cornerstone of not only slavery […] but an indentured servitude and a suppressive workplace that kept poor people poor by keeping them separated, keeping them humiliated, and keeping them down.”
Alabama, and Bessemer in particular, have a long history of organizing against abusive working conditions, including Black-led and interracial movements. In the early and mid 1930s, the interracial International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union (Mine Mill) twice went on strike to demand better conditions and an end to retaliation against union members in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel that Historian Robin Kelley argues was “equivalent to the Amazon of its day.” In 1938, after the strikes, the NLRB reinstated 160 workers who had been illegally fired for striking and ordered back pay of over $100,000 (the equivalent to about USD $2 million today.)
The great potential of interracial organizing in places like Bessemer, Alabama to affect change is one of the reasons for stringent “right to work” laws in more than half of US states. According to Professor Kelley: “[...] The reason why we have anti-labor legislation, we have violence against labor in Alabama [...] Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of Black people, the most draconian anti-immigration laws, is precisely because those who rule the South know the potential of an interracial labor movement, because they’ve seen it.”
Amazon’s core business model-- its online store with the cheapest and fastest shipping possible-- depends on a divided, distracted, and unorganized workforce. In Alabama, Amazon is benefitting from, and leaning into, repressive tactics that government actors and companies have long discharged against communities resisting abusive working conditions.
Amazon’s Defensive
Amazon pulled out all the stops to thwart the organizing efforts in Bessemer. It reportedly paid consultants with Koch brothers ties more than $3,000 a day to undermine the unionization drive. These efforts included bringing in hundreds of people to the warehouse floor (during a pandemic) to dissuade workers from voting “yes,” requiring workers to attend anti-union “education” meetings sometimes multiple times a week where workers who questioned the content were documented and expelled from the room, and spreading disinformation. Workers report that they were told joining a union would cause them to lose their benefits, which is untrue and illegal.
Amazon covered the Bessemer warehouse in flyers, sent workers anti-union text messages up to five times a day, and shortened the timing of a stoplight outside the facility where organizers often spoke to workers on their way out. Amazon led such a ruthless online campaign that even internal security staff thought the company’s social media accounts had been hacked. Hundreds of fake anti-union social media accounts also emerged (including some darkly humorous profiles with headshots taken from stock images) before Twitter banned them. After the NLRB rejected the company’s challenge to mail-in voting in February, Amazon installed a mailbox in the warehouse and persuaded hundreds of workers to vote on site.
In the wake of this anti-union effort and the decision against unionization, Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) that led the Bessemer effort said: “People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon’s working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union.”
The RWDSU will file an objection to the vote claiming that Amazon's interference was illegal. Veteran organizers like Jane McAlevey think that while they are likely to win a new vote, Bessemer workers and their supporters will need to double down on organizing efforts for a change in outcome.
The Bigger Picture
Not only does Amazon directly employ more than a million people across fulfillment centers, but its platform is also a clearing house for so many products that the company rakes in about fifty cents to every dollar spent online in the United States. Many of these products have supply chains with harmful conditions for workers.
Amazon should respond to the recent spotlight on its labor practices with meaningful action. To start, it should stop thwarting organizing efforts of Amazon employees. As rights groups like Global Labor Justice- International Labor Rights Forum have argued, it should also prohibit-- at minimum-- the sale of goods made with forced labor on its platform.
Avery Kelly is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab. She grew up in Mobile, Alabama.
