By Sebastian Herrera
Amazon.com Inc. employees in Alabama voted not to unionize,
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.
Workers at the Bessemer warehouse overwhelmingly rejected
unionization, with 71% casting ballots not to join the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Union, according to the National
Labor Relations Board. Some who voted no said they didn't see how a
union would substantially improve their pay and benefits.
"Amazon didn't win -- our employees made the choice to vote
against joining a union," the company said Friday.
The rejection is a blow to efforts to increase union membership
in the private sector nationally, which has experienced a
decades-long decline. The Amazon facility represented an
opportunity to organize workers at the second-largest U.S.
employer, in a fast-growing industry and in an environment where
labor unions have thrived in the past -- a large blue-collar site
where many employees do similar jobs.
"It's much harder to organize big groups. Large employers like
Amazon and Walmart have been the holy grail," said Jonathan Spitz,
co-leader of the labor relations practice at Jackson Lewis, a
management-side law firm.
President Biden had endorsed the union movement, and he has
pledged to create more union jobs. The White House said Friday that
it would wait until the NLRB completes its analysis of the results
before making a comment. "We know it's very difficult for workers
to make the choice to form a union," White House Press Secretary
Jen Psaki said.
In a news conference organized by Amazon, workers from the
Bessemer facility who sided against organizing said the union
ultimately didn't offer a convincing argument. The workers called
for changes at the facility, such as added training for managers,
but said they could resolve issues with the company without a third
party.
"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 there and voted against unionizing. Ms. Jennings,
who talked to The Wall Street Journal before the results were
final, 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."
The outcome underscores unions' difficulties in boosting their
ranks in the U.S. private sector, where they represent just 6.3% of
workers, down from 24.2% in 1973, according to the earliest
available data from Georgia State University's union stats
database. Of total U.S. workers, 10.8% were union members last
year, according to the Labor Department.
Unions are a much larger presence in the public sector, where
they represent 34.8% of government workers, according to the Labor
Department.
Shares of Amazon rose 2.2% Friday to $3,372.20, closing at its
highest level in two months. The company's win will mean continued
flexibility as it adds workers at a record pace and expands into
new industries. Last year, Amazon hired 500,000 workers globally
and extended its reach further into healthcare, grocery and other
markets.
The NLRB on Friday finished counting all the votes that weren't
challenged. The federal agency has yet to certify the results,
which could happen in about a week, but it has noted that the
challenged ballots aren't enough to exceed the vote margin against
unionization. The Bessemer facility employs fewer than 1% of the
roughly 950,000 Amazon employees in the U.S.
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, 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. Amazon said it has "worked
hard to listen to them, take their feedback, make continuous
improvements" and would keep working "to get better every day."
Previous unionization efforts at Amazon also failed. 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.
Politicians in both parties and celebrities had rallied for
pro-union employees. Supporters painted the election as a battle
that transcended traditional workplace disputes over pay and
benefits. They contrasted Amazon's reputation for growth, profit
and innovation with the working conditions for rank-and-file
employees.
Some employees in Bessemer had said they wanted to unionize to
negotiate over issues including their compensation, the pace of
their work and the amount of break time they have per shift. One
worker in Bessemer said he is expected to pick roughly 300 items
per hour and at times doesn't have enough time to take a bathroom
break without potentially getting in trouble. Amazon has said
employees can take bathroom breaks when needed.
Amazon 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.
The tech giant 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%.
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."
Eric Morath, Lauren Weber and Inti Pacheco contributed to this
article.
Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 09, 2021 18:01 ET (22:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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