Union push gets backing

Amazon workers’ labor drive reaches far beyond Alabama

“Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union.” — President Joe Biden

Players from the National Football League were among the first to voice their support. Then came Stacey Abrams, the Democratic star who helped turn Georgia blue in the 2020 election.

Actor Danny Glover traveled to Bessemer, Alabama, for a news conference last week, where he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s pro-union leanings in urging workers at Amazon’s warehouse there to organize. Tina Fey has weighed in, and so has Sen. Bernie Sanders.

And on Sunday, President Joe Biden issued a resounding declaration of solidarity with the workers now voting on whether to form a union at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, without mentioning the company by name. Posted to his official Twitter account, his video was one of the most forceful statements in support of unionizing by a U.S. president in recent memory.

“Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union,” Biden said.

A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers at Amazon, one of the world’s dominant companies whose power has increased exponentially during the pandemic. On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history.

The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at the Bessemer warehouse, which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South.

The retail workers union has a long history of organizing Black workers in the poultry and food production industries, helping them gain basic benefits like paid time off and safety protections and a means to economic security. The union is portraying its efforts in Bessemer as part of that legacy.

“This is an organizing campaign in the right-to-work South during the pandemic at one of the largest compa

BOB MILLER — THE NEW YORK TIMES Union organizers offer literature to employees departing the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. A vote on whether to form a union at the e-commerce giant’s warehouse has become a labor showdown.