Amazon warehouse sets second election for union
NLRB orders rerun vote after finding company behaved improperly
During the first union election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, early last year, organizers largely avoided visiting workers at home because COVID-19 was raging and few Americans were vaccinated.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union believed the precaution was prudent, even if it made persuading workers harder and may have contributed to the union’s lopsided defeat.
On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board mailed out ballots to workers at the same warehouse in a so-called rerun election, which the agency ordered after finding that Amazon behaved improperly during the last campaign.
But for this election, which runs through March 25, the labor movement is pulling few punches. Several national unions have collectively sent dozens of organizers to Bessemer to help rally workers. And organizers and workers have spent the past several months going door to door to build support for the union.
“It’s a huge difference that was made possible by vaccinations,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the retail workers. “By the time people start voting on Monday or Tuesday, we will have gone to every single door — all 6,000 workers.”
None of those changes make the odds of a different outcome high, however. Unions have won fewer than half of similar rerun elections since late 2010, compared with far more than half of all elections during that time, according to data from the National Labor Relations Board.
“In cases where the margin of victory is pretty significant one way or the other, the outcome often doesn’t change the second time,” said David Pryzbylski, a management-side lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg.
Those odds may be longer still at a company such as Amazon, which has the resources to hire consultants and saturate workers with anti-union messages, as it did during the last election.
Turnover at Amazon is high — more than 150% a year even before a recent surge of quitting nationwide — and could introduce uncertainty because it is unclear how new workers will respond to arguments on either side.
But in practice, such turnover could further dampen the union’s support, said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, since frustrated workers may leave rather than wait out a campaign. Many workers who support the union have complained about punishing productivity targets, insufficient break times and low pay, which is just under $16 an hour for a typical entry-level, fulltime position.
“We’re proud to create both shortterm and long-term jobs with great pay and great benefits,” said Barbara Agrait, an Amazon spokesperson. She added that employees have access to health benefits as soon as they join the company and that more than 450 employees have been promoted at the Alabama warehouse since it opened in 2020.