Amazon’s campaign against the organizing effort raised a public outcry and galvanized support for the union even before the 1,798-to-738 vote on Friday. Amazon bombarded workers with anti-union messages under the slogan “Do it without dues” through text messages, signs in bathroom stalls and mandatory meetings at the warehouse.
Amazon also
successfully petitioned the county to change the stoplight patterns in front of its facility, in what some
workers said was a bid to make it harder to organize. It had the U.S. Postal Service install an unmarked mailbox at the facility in the midst of the election, something the union said could prompt workers to think Amazon would count their votes. It also put up a
website that said all workers would have to pay dues in Alabama, a state where that isn’t required with unionized employers.
An unnamed worker filed an unfair labor practices complaint to the National Labor Relations Board over the website. The union said it plans to file another about the mailbox, saying it sent a misleading message to workers about the election process.
“Anyone who has ever tried to make a change at their workplace isn’t surprised by Amazon’s behavior,” said Beth Allen, communications director for Communications Workers of America, which helped workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, launch a minority union
in January.
Amazon fights aggressively to defeat union drive in Alabama, fearing a coming wave
Amazon has defended its approach to the union-organizing effort. Company spokeswoman Heather Knox said, “It will impact everyone at the site, and it’s important all associates understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
Amazon has said the mailbox provides a convenient way for workers to vote and that the website was an educational site to help employees understand the facts about joining a union
Allen, like other labor advocates, said the experience made clear that action from Washington has become necessary. Many Democrats, including the president, are pushing for the Senate to
pass the Pro Act, which would overhaul the country’s labor laws to give workers more leverage when organizing.
The bill would create harsher penalties for companies that violate laws protecting worker activism, allow gig workers to potentially form unions and outlaw some of the coercive anti-union activity that many companies, including Amazon, have employed in the face of union drives.
“I can’t imagine a better example of why the Pro Act is necessary than the last few months of what Amazon has done in this election,” said labor lawyer Brandon Magner, who writes the Labor Law Lite newsletter.
Beyond proposing legislation, Biden also is nominating noted skeptics of tech industry power to key positions. That includes a prominent advocate for considering antitrust action against Amazon — Columbia University associate law professor Lina Khan — to the Federal Trade Commission, which shares with the Justice Department responsibility for enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws.
Biden also has chosen to the National Economic Council outspoken scholar
Tim Wu, author of
“The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” to advise him on technology and competition policy.
Vanita Gupta, who in her previous post as president of the
Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights issued pointed critiques of Facebook’s civil rights record, is Biden’s nominee as associate attorney general, the No. 3 post at the Justice Department.
Those moves come in addition to federal and state moves — begun during the Trump administration — to pursue antitrust investigations against some of the biggest names in tech, including Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.
Last year, Congress
for the first time grilledthe CEOs of those four companies, demanding answers from them on acquisitions and other monopolistic behaviors.
Amazon’s anti-union blitz stalks Alabama warehouse workers everywhere, even the bathroom
“The growth of big tech has outpaced legislation to control them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an interview with The Post after the union vote count. “We need the Attorney General to start looking at the antitrust implications of some of the growth of some of these companies, and we need legislation to address it as well.”
They could ‘quash us at any moment’
Silicon Valley has had an anti-union reputation since the 1970s, as the region’s fruit orchards were transformed into an electronics hub. Industry leaders touted automation, but pioneered the use of subcontractors in its offices and relied on immigrants and undocumented workers in its factories to avoid offering the kind of protections standard in manufacturing jobs elsewhere in the country.
The perks now synonymous with working in tech, such as stock options and free lunches, were awarded to full-time employees in part to ward off labor unions. But companies narrowly defined who counted as a tech worker and had access to the benefits and high salaries.
Even as far back as 1998, engineers for Microsoft hired as contractors attempted to unionize, but efforts faltered. In 2000, the Communications Workers of America unsuccessfully tried to persuade 400 Amazon call-center workers in Seattle to unionize.
In the early 2010s, when bus drivers, security guards, cafeteria workers, and other subcontracted swaths of workers who served in the San Francisco Bay area’s sprawling tech campuses began unionizing and fighting for fair wages and working conditions, it drew little attention from the tech press or support from white collar tech workers.
But years of backlash against the tech industry, including public criticism from white-collar workers disillusioned by what they thought was a different kind of capitalism, has exposed some of these hidden hierarchies. Now, tech companies are increasingly pressured to be accountable for the treatment of vital swaths of their workforce that were framed as somehow outside the core.
Silicon Valley’s two-tiered system for white-collar workers is under pressure as coronavirus spreads
Companies like Facebook and Google, for instance, have faced pressure to treat content moderators better. Some contract workers have said they were underpaid and faced the
worst of the Internet — hate speech, child porn, suicides, massacres — without adequate mental health support, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Companies say they work with third-party firms because it allows them to adjust to shifting demands around language and time zones and that they carefully choose partners who provide support for moderators’s mental health and well-being.
Last year, gig companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash spent more than $200 million on a California ballot initiative to roll back the gains after state legislators
approved Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which would reclassify certain gig workers as employees.
After the win, Uber and Lyft
said they planned to loudly advocate for similar policies at the federal level.
And for years, critics have accused Amazon of underpaying and overworking its warehouse employees. Most of the company’s 1.3 million employees work in its logistics operation, picking, packing or stowing goods. Those jobs can be mundane and strenuous, with workers walking many miles a day, moving package after package in the process with few breaks.
The challenges came into sharp relief during the pandemic. Last October, the company disclosed that nearly 20,000 of its U.S. employees had tested positive, or had been presumed positive, for the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
And earlier this month, the company came under fire after it disputed claims that its productivity demands are so intense that workers routinely urinate in bottles because they can’t take restroom breaks.
After Twitter lit up with claims by workers, particularly drivers who work for companies that deliver packages for Amazon, that they have needed to urinate in bottles, Amazon apologized. The company acknowledged that its drivers, as well as those who deliver packages for other companies, often have trouble finding restrooms.