Wayne O'Leary

Looking for the Union Label

The American labor movement is between a rock and a hard place. The rock is political: the dedicated opposition of a pro-business, anti-worker Republican Party and the tepid support of a nominally pro-worker but ultimately unreliable Democratic Party — a dichotomy making progress next to impossible. The hard place is a rising generation of employees mistrustful of all organizations and either unused to pursuing social goals through collective action, or averse to suggestions that it do so.

This situation played out recently in the unsuccessful attempt by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize the huge (5,800 workers) Amazon e-commerce warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. One of the company’s ironically labelled “fulfillment” centers, this site of mind-numbing drudgery would, if organized, have been the first Amazon workplace in America represented by a labor union. (A prior effort to unionize a company warehouse in Delaware failed in 2014.)

Unions have been pressuring Amazon, America’s second-largest private employer, for years — and not just in the US. As far back as 2013, 1,000 of the multinational’s unionized workers in Germany, then Amazon’s largest European market, went on strike for better working conditions. But here, unions have been unable to gain a foothold, let alone strike. The chief roadblock is Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire CEO, the most antiunion management figure in US business and the spiritual successor to Henry Ford, whose intransigence made his Detroit auto plant the last to be organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW) during the great union drive of the late 1930s.

Bezos, the cracker-barrel philosopher of 21st century capitalism, is said to view his company’s progress, or lack thereof, in terms of 24-hour days. As described by New York Times analyst David Streitfeld, Day One represents the start-up mentality of upward and onward; it means keeping the customer first and the worker second, ruthlessly cutting labor costs and increasing productivity.

Maintaining a Day-One operation entails controlling a worker’s every moment on the job, and that heavy-handed approach was evidently behind the Bessemer revolt, even more so than the issue of wages. Streitfeld quotes a 2016 shareholder letter in which the imperious Mr. Bezos laid out his economic philosophy: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

To preserve Day One, Amazon makes a fetish of break times, especially bathroom breaks, an apparent abuse of “company time,” which is held sacred by management. The rest of the workday is occupied by pushing employees to complete long shifts in stifling heat, with constant monitoring and demands to meet production quotas. “Robotic” is a recurring descriptive term about such warehouse work.

So it came as something of a surprise when Bessemer workers (with barely half voting) chose by a two-to-one margin not to unionize, despite celebrity support and the campaign’s strong White House endorsement. The South has always been infertile soil for labor unions, and Alabama is no exception. Complicated by race, some of the most intractable organizing struggles of the New Deal era, labor’s triumphal epoch, took place in Dixie, and in the postwar period, the South became home to the right-to-work movement.

Since four out of five of the workers they were appealing to were black, Bessemer organizers tied their campaign to civil rights. Black Lives Matter contributed advertising, and the national media jumped aboard, covering the vote in racial-justice terms. An encouraging pro-union message by President Biden also stressed the racial angle. A union, said the president, would offset discrimination and especially benefit “black and brown workers.”

In the narrow context of the Alabama decision, a flat-out racial argument for unionization may have made sense, but it could prove counterproductive for labor in the long run. If white workers come to view unions as mostly something for minorities, organizing efforts nationwide could suffer. Framing everything in racial terms, as Democrats and the Biden administration are increasingly prone to do, leaves out a large group of people. Better they should follow the Bernie Sanders strategy of presenting policy proposals as beneficial to all Americans, regardless of race, creed or color.

But in the end, the deciding factor was not racial; it was, instead, generational. A cogent analysis of the Amazon labor-management confrontation in the July issue of Harper’s cut to the core of the problem. In “Hard Bargain: How Amazon turned a generation against labor,” Daniel Brook exposed a critical fault line in the Bessemer labor force that may well be replicated nationally. RWDSU organizers, it seemed, were able to reach older workers, but were hard put to sell the idea of union solidarity to younger workers.

Millennials, in particular, exhibited a touching faith in the trustworthiness and caring nature of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. Young employees proved untutored in the ways of corporate capitalism, undemanding in terms of what they thought the system owed them, ignorant about their economic rights, and susceptible to company propaganda. They appeared woefully uninformed about the historical role of unions and the benefits they offer workers.

If Alabama’s Bessemer plant is typical, organized labor truly has its work cut out for it. Even youthful workers who considered themselves progressive, Daniel Brook discovered, were willing to give Amazon a pass. The understanding that progressivism means more than attending a Bernie rally has yet to penetrate their thinking.

The negative Bessemer vote would have been much closer, perhaps even reversed, had the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act been in force. Originally envisioned as part of the Biden administration’s infrastructure package, the PRO Act was unable to garner the necessary 50 Democratic Senate votes as a stand-alone measure — usual centrist suspects Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Mark Warner of Virginia were opposed — and notwithstanding possible inclusion of some of its elements in the Senate budget-reconciliation bill, it has apparently been withdrawn.

Among other things, the PRO Act would have outlawed company use of mandatory antiunion “educational” meetings for employees, a tactic Amazon used to great effect at Bessemer. The minimalist labor reform would also have strengthened the mediating National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), permitted secondary boycotts in support of strikes, overridden state right-to-work laws, and generally enhanced worker rights — obviously, far too much for the Democratic Party’s centrist bloc, the tail now wagging the Democratic donkey.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021

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