AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Sebastian Herrera 

Amazon.com Inc. employees in Alabama voted not to unionize, according to a Wall Street Journal tally, handing the tech giant a victory in its biggest battle yet against labor-organizing efforts that fueled national debate over working conditions at one of the nation's largest employers.

With about 80% of ballots counted, some 71% of the Bessemer, Ala., warehouse workers voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, according to the Journal's vote tally.

The National Labor Relations Board has finished counting all votes that weren't challenged by either side, and the number of votes against a union exceeds 1,608, the total needed to reach a majority of the 3,215 mail-in ballots workers submitted. The NLRB hasn't declared an official winner.

Shares of Amazon rose more than 1% to the highest level since mid-February.

The Bessemer facility employs fewer than 1% of the roughly 950,000 Amazon employees in the U.S., but the vote emerged as a watershed moment for a company that hired faster than almost any private corporation in history last year.

Supporters contrasted Amazon's reputation for growth, profit and innovation with the working conditions for rank-and-file employees, some of whom have complained both publicly and to the company about the physical demands of the job. They also compared the wealth of Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos -- with a net worth of $193 billion, according to Bloomberg -- to the experiences of hourly warehouse workers.

Some Bessemer employees said they wanted to unionize to negotiate over issues including their compensation, the pace of their work and the amount of break time they receive per shift. One worker in Bessemer said he is expected to pick roughly 300 items an hour and sometimes doesn't have enough time to take a bathroom break without risking getting in trouble. Amazon has said employees can take bathroom breaks when needed.

Amazon has long opposed labor organizing and told its workers in Alabama that unionizing isn't necessary, saying it pays double the state's minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which is also the federal minimum. The company warned of the cost of union dues and highlighted what it says are the generous healthcare benefits it offers employees.

Some workers who voted not to unionize said they ultimately didn't see how a union would improve their pay or working conditions.

"A lot of us are in agreement that we don't need anybody there to speak for us and take our money," said Cori Jennings, 40 years old, who works at the Bessemer facility and voted against unionizing. Ms. Jennings said she and many of her colleagues were also eager for the national attention to fade: "We want our lives to go back to normal."

Each side has about a week to contest results before the NLRB certifies the outcome. The union said it would appeal the vote, accusing Amazon of violating legal restrictions governing unionization campaigns. Amazon has said it followed the law in communicating with employees before and during the election. The appeal would seek to overturn results of the election or have it held again. The union is expected to take issue with meetings Amazon held with Bessemer employees and a mailbox the company pushed to install outside the facility.

"We won't rest until workers' voices are heard fairly under the law. When they are, we believe they will be victorious in this historic and critical fight to unionize the first Amazon warehouse in the United States," RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said.

Amazon, in a blog post Friday, said, "It's easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that's not true. Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us." Fewer than 16% of the employees at the fulfillment center voted to join the union, the company said.

The election marks an important victory for the e-commerce giant, which has grown rapidly in the past year as consumers and companies leaned on its services during the pandemic. Amazon had $386.1 billion in sales in 2020 and saw its share price rise about 76%. As the company was inundated with orders, it hired more than 500,000 people globally to meet demand.

As its employees worked to keep up with those orders, some workers complained that Amazon didn't do enough to protect them from Covid-19. Amazon said it changed hundreds of processes to help prevent the spread of coronavirus in its warehouses. The company said last year that more than 19,000 employees were known to have contracted the virus, below its expectations based on infection rates in the general population.

The Bessemer union drive began last summer, when a group of workers contacted a branch of the RWDSU. Union representatives and members from nearby warehouses, poultry plants and nursing homes started meeting with the workers in restaurants and hotels. In October, they began their outreach campaign to other employees.

As the election began earlier this year, politicians in both parties and celebrities rallied for pro-union employees. Supporters painted the election as a battle that transcended traditional workplace disputes over pay and benefits. Some union supporters saw the vote as a check on the company's growing power and a barometer for organized labor in the U.S., where the share of workers in labor unions has fallen in recent decades.

The union's defeat in Alabama is a setback for labor activists and organizing efforts at the nation's second-largest private employer, which has successfully beaten back such efforts previously. In 2018, an effort by Whole Foods Market employees to unionize failed to gain traction, and four years earlier a small group of Amazon workers in Middletown, Del., rejected a union push.

Even in defeat, pro-union workers have achieved a significant milestone, said Arthur Wheaton, a scholar of labor relations at Cornell University who has consulted for unions, as the election has cast a fresh light on workers' experience. The Bessemer union drive "has provided a pathway" for employees everywhere, he said.

Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who runs the e-commerce analytics company CommerceIQ, said the company would continue to grow no matter how its labor battles play out. Amazon's advantage "is based on its technology, and that will continue to be the case regardless of incremental productivity-level shifts in fulfillment center workers."

Inti Pacheco and Paul Ziobro contributed to this article.

Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 09, 2021 13:17 ET (17:17 GMT)

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