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Amazon Workers on Staten Island Vote to Unionize

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It was a union organizing campaign that few expected to have a chance. A handful of employees at Amazon’s massive warehouse on Staten Island, operating without support from national labor organizations, took on one of the most powerful companies in the world.And, somehow, they won.Workers at the facility voted by a wide margin to form a union, according to results released on Friday, in one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.Employees cast 2,654 votes to be represented by Amazon Labor Union and 2,131 against, giving the union a win by more than 10 percentage points, according to the National Labor Relations Board. More than 8,300 workers at the warehouse, which is the only Amazon fulfillment center in New York City, were eligible to vote.The win on Staten Island comes at a perilous moment for labor unions in the United States, which saw the portion of workers in unions drop last year to 10.3 percent, the lowest rate in decades, despite high demand for workers, pockets of successful labor activity and rising public approval.Critics — including some labor officials — say that traditional unions haven’t spent enough money or shown enough imagination in organizing campaigns and that they have often bet on the wrong fights. Some point to tawdry corruption scandals.The union victory at Amazon, the first at the company in the United States after years of worker activism there, offers an enormous opportunity to change that trajectory and build on recent wins. Many union leaders regard Amazon as an existential threat to labor standards because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them.Amazon employees waited to vote in the parking lot of the JFK8 fulfillment center last week.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesBut the win by a little-known, independent union with few ties to existing groups appears to raise as many questions for the labor movement as it answers: not least, whether there is something fundamentally broken with the traditional bureaucratic union model that can be solved only by replacing it with grass-roots organizations like the one on Staten Island.Amazon is likely to aggressively contest the union’s win. An unsigned statement on its corporate blog said, “We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees.”The Staten Island outcome followed what appears likely to be a narrow loss by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at a large Amazon warehouse in Alabama. The vote is close enough that the results will not be known for several weeks as contested ballots are litigated.The surprising strength shown by unions in both locations most likely means that Amazon will face years of pressure at other company facilities from labor groups and progressive activists working with them. As a recent string of union victories at Starbucks have shown, wins at one location can provide encouragement at others.Amazon hired voraciously over the past two years and now has 1.6 million employees globally. But it has been plagued by high turnover, and the pandemic gave employees a growing sense of power while fueling worries about workplace safety. The Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, was the subject of a New York Times investigation last year, which found that it was emblematic of the stresses — including inadvertent firings and sky-high attrition — on workers caused by Amazon’s employment model.“The pandemic has fundamentally changed the labor landscape” by giving workers more leverage with their employers, said John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University. “It’s just a question of whether unions can take advantage of the opportunity that transformation has opened up.”Standing outside the N.L.R.B. office in Brooklyn, where the ballots were tallied, Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who started the union, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press. “To the first Amazon union in American history,” he cheered.Christian Smalls, a former Amazon worker who led union efforts on Staten Island, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press on Friday.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesAmazon said it was evaluating its options, including potentially filing an objection to “inappropriate and undue influence” by the N.L.R.B. for suing Amazon in federal court last month.In that case, the N.L.R.B. asked a judge to force Amazon to swiftly rectify “flagrant unfair labor practices” it said took place when Amazon fired a worker who became involved with the union. Amazon argued in court that the labor board abandoned “the neutrality of their office” by filing the injunction just before the election.Amazon would need to prove that any claims of undue influence undermined the so-called laboratory conditions necessary for a fair election, said Wilma B. Liebman, the chair of the N.L.R.B. under President Barack Obama.President Biden was “glad to see workers ensure their voices are heard” at the Amazon facility, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “He believes firmly that every worker in every state must have a free and fair choice to join a union,” she said.The near-term question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is the extent to which they will help the upstart Amazon Labor Union withstand potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract, such as by providing resources and legal talent.“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers. “The labor movement has to figure out how to support them.”Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”A culture of fear created by intense productivity monitoring that was documented by The Times at JFK8 has been a key motivator for the unionization drive, which started in earnest almost a year ago. The Amazon facility offered a lifeline to laid-off workers during the pandemic but burned through staff and had such poor communication and technology that workers inadvertently were fired or lost benefits.For some employees, the stress of working at the warehouse during Covid outbreaks was a radicalizing experience that led them to take action. Mr. Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, said he became alarmed in March 2020 after encountering a co-worker who was clearly ill. He pleaded with management to close the facility for two weeks. The company fired him after he helped lead a walkout over safety conditions in late March that year.Amazon said at the time that it had taken “extreme measures” to keep workers safe, including deep cleaning and social distancing. It said it had fired Mr. Smalls for violating social distancing guidelines and attending the walkout even though he had been placed in a quarantine.After workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., overwhelmingly rejected the retail workers union in its first election last spring, Mr. Smalls and Derrick Palmer, an Amazon employee who is his friend, decided to form a new union, called Amazon Labor Union.While the organizing in Alabama included high-profile tactics, with progressive supporters like Senator Bernie Sanders visiting the area, the organizers at JFK8 benefited from being insiders. For months, they set up shop at the bus stop outside the warehouse, grilling meat at barbecues and at one point even passing out pot. (The retail workers said they were hamstrung by Covid during their initial election in Alabama.)They also filed numerous unfair-labor-practice charges with the N.L.R.B. when they believed Amazon had infringed on their rights. The labor agency found merit in several of the cases, some of which Amazon settled in a nationwide agreement to allow workers more access to organize on-site.At times the Amazon Labor Union stumbled. The labor board determined this fall that the fledgling union, which spent months collecting signatures from workers requesting a vote, had not demonstrated sufficient support to warrant an election. But the organizers kept trying, and by late January they had finally gathered enough signatures.Amazon played up its minimum wage of $15 an hour in advertising and other public relations efforts. The company also waged a full-throated campaign against the union, texting employees and mandating attendance at anti-union meetings. It spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants nationwide last year, according to annual disclosures filed on Thursday with the Labor Department.In February, Mr. Smalls was arrested at the facility after managers said he was trespassing while delivering food to co-workers and called the police. Two current employees were also arrested during the incident, which appeared to galvanize interest in the union.The difference in outcomes in Bessemer and Staten Island may reflect a difference in receptiveness toward unions in the two states — roughly 6 percent of workers in Alabama are union members, versus 22 percent in New York — as well as the difference between a mail-in election and one conducted in person.But it may also suggest the advantages of organizing through an independent, worker-led union. In Alabama, union officials and professional organizers were still barred from the facility under the settlement with the labor board. But at the Staten Island site, a larger portion of the union leadership and organizers were current employees.“What we were trying to say all along is that having workers on the inside is the most powerful tool,” said Mr. Palmer, who makes $21.50 an hour. “People didn’t believe it, but you can’t beat workers organizing other workers.”The independence of the Amazon Labor Union also appeared to undermine Amazon’s anti-union talking points, which cast the union as an interloping “third party.” On March 25, workers at JFK8 started lining up outside a tent in the parking lot to vote. And over five voting days, they cast their ballots to form what could become the first union at Amazon’s operations in the United States.Another election, brought also by Amazon Labor Union at a neighboring Staten Island facility, is scheduled for late April.Jodi Kantor More

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    Workers at REI Store in Manhattan Seek to Form Retailer’s Only Union

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    In filing for a union election, employees of the outdoor equipment retailer cited safety during the pandemic, among other concerns.Employees at an REI store in Manhattan filed for a union election on Friday, making the outdoor equipment and apparel retailer the latest prominent service-industry employer whose workers have sought to unionize.Amazon employees in Bessemer, Ala., rejected a union in an election last year, though the National Labor Relations Board later threw out the result, citing improprieties on the part of the company, and ordered a new election to begin next month.In December, workers at two Starbucks stores in Buffalo voted to unionize, making them the only company-owned Starbucks locations in the country with a union. Employees at about 20 other Starbucks have since filed for union elections.The filing at the REI store in SoHo asked the labor board for an election involving about 115 employees, who are seeking to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the same union that has overseen the union campaign at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama.In addition to filing for the election, the REI employees have asked for voluntary recognition of their union, which would make a vote unnecessary.Like Starbucks, REI, a consumer cooperative made up of customers who buy lifetime memberships for $20, cultivates a progressive image. REI’s website says that the cooperative believes in “putting purpose before profits” and that it invests more than 70 percent of its profits “back into the outdoor community” through initiatives like dividends to members and employee profit-sharing.The site also says that REI closes all of its roughly 170 stores, none of which are currently unionized, on Black Friday to allow employees to spend the day with family and friends.The retailer has more than 15,000 employees in the United States, compared with more than 230,000 at roughly 9,000 U.S. Starbucks locations that are owned by the company.In a statement, Graham Gale, an employee involved in union organizing at the SoHo REI store, said the campaign was partly a response to “a tangible shift in the culture at work that doesn’t seem to align with the values that brought most of us here.” The statement also pointed to “the new struggle of facing unsafe working conditions during a global pandemic.”In a follow-up text, Mx. Gale, who prefers gender-neutral courtesy titles and pronouns, said REI declined to bring back some long-tenured employees who had been outspoken about workplace concerns after the retailer temporarily closed its stores in 2020.Since the beginning of the pandemic, some REI employees have criticized the retailer over what they say are insufficient safety protocols, including a lack of transparency over which employees have tested positive for Covid and a decision to relax its masking policy. The retailer has said that it follows relevant guidance from state and federal health authorities, but it has adjusted some policies as it faced criticism.Responding to the union campaign in Manhattan, REI said in a statement: “We respect the rights of our employees to speak and act for what they believe — and that includes the rights of employees to choose or refuse union representation. However, we do not believe placing a union between the co-op and its employees is needed or beneficial.”The statement went on to say that the co-op was committed to working with employees at the SoHo store to resolve their concerns.Despite the organizing efforts at companies like Amazon and Starbucks last year, membership in unions declined to 10.3 percent of the work force, matching its lowest figure in Labor Department records that date back to 1983. More

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    For Retail Workers, Omicron Disruptions Aren’t Just About Health

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    Stores are shortening hours, fitting rooms are being closed and some employees can’t go on break. “Morale could not be lower,” one retail worker said.Long checkout lines. Closed fitting rooms. Empty shelves. Shortened store hours.Plus the dread of contracting the coronavirus and yet another season of skirmishes with customers who refuse to wear masks.A weary retail work force is experiencing the fallout from the latest wave of the pandemic, with a rapidly spreading variant cutting into staffing.While data shows that people infected with the Omicron variant are far less likely to be hospitalized than those with the Delta variant, especially if they are vaccinated, many store workers are dealing with a new jump in illness and exposures, grappling with shifting guidelines around isolation and juggling child care. At the same time, retailers are generally not extending hazard pay as they did earlier in the pandemic and have been loath to adopt vaccine or testing mandates.“We had gotten to a point here where we were comfortable, it wasn’t too bad, and then all of a sudden this new variant came and everybody got sick,” said Artavia Milliam, who works at H&M in Hudson Yards in Manhattan, which is popular with tourists. “It’s been overwhelming, just having to deal with not having enough staff and then twice as many people in the store.”Ms. Milliam, a member of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, is vaccinated but contracted the virus during the holidays, experiencing mild symptoms. She said that fewer employees were working registers and organizing clothing and that her store had been closing the fitting rooms in the mornings because nobody was available to monitor them.Macy’s said last week that it would shorten store hours nationally on Mondays through Thursdays for the rest of the month. At least 20 Apple Stores have had to close in recent weeks because so many employees had contracted Covid-19 or been exposed to someone who had, and others have curtailed hours or limited in-store access.At a Macy’s in Lynnwood, Wash., Liisa Luick, a longtime sales associate in the men’s department, said, “Every day, we have call-outs, and we have a lot of them.” She said the store had already reduced staff to cut costs in 2020. Now, she is often unable to take breaks and has fielded complaints from customers about a lack of sales help and unstaffed registers.“Morale could not be lower,” said Ms. Luick, who is a steward for the local unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Even though Washington has a mask mandate for indoor public spaces, “we get a lot of pushback, so morale is even lower because there’s so many people who, there’s no easy way to say this, just don’t believe in masking,” she added.Store workers are navigating the changing nature of the virus and trying their best to gauge new risks. Many say that with vaccinations and boosters, they are less fearful for their lives than they were in 2020 — the United Food and Commercial Workers union has tracked more than 200 retail worker deaths since the start of the pandemic — but they remain nervous about catching and spreading the virus.At a Stop & Shop in Oyster Bay, N.Y., Wally Waugh, a front-end manager, said that checkout lines were growing longer and that grocery shelves were not being restocked in a timely manner because so many people were calling in sick with their own positive tests or those of family members.That has forced remaining employees to work more hours. But even with overtime pay, many of his colleagues are not eager to stay in the store longer than they must. Mr. Waugh has started taking off his work clothes in his garage and immediately putting them in the laundry before entering his house — a routine he hadn’t followed since the earliest days of the pandemic.Wally Waugh in his garage, where he changes out of the clothes he wears to work at a Stop & Shop to avoid possibly spreading the coronavirus.Sasha Maslov for The New York Times“People are not nervous like when Covid first started,” said Mr. Waugh, who is a steward for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “But we are gravely concerned.”At a QFC grocery store in Seattle, Sam Dancy, a front-end supervisor, said many colleagues were calling out sick. The store, part of a chain owned by Kroger, has closed early several times, and customers are helping to bag their own groceries. There are long lines, and some of the self-checkout lanes are closed because employees aren’t available to oversee them.“Some people are so tired of what’s going on — you have some that are exposed and some that are using it as an excuse to not have to work to be around these circumstances,” said Mr. Dancy, a member of the local food and commercial workers union, who has worked at the chain for 30 years. “I have anxiety till I get home, thinking, ‘Do I have this or not?’ It’s a mental thing that I think a lot of us are enduring.”Shifting guidelines around isolation are also causing confusion at many stores. While H&M has instructed employees like Ms. Milliam to isolate for 14 days after testing positive for Covid-19, Macy’s said in a memo to employees last week that it would adopt new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that recommended shortening isolation for infected people to five days from 10 if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving.But even if retailers shorten isolation periods, schools and day-care facilities may have longer quarantine periods for exposed families, putting working parents in a bind.Ms. Luick of Macy’s said she felt the guidance was aimed at “constantly trying to get people to work,” and did not make her feel safer.Even as Omicron spreads faster than other variants, employers have not shown a willingness to reinstitute previous precautions or increased pay, said Kevin Schneider, secretary-treasurer of a unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers in the Denver area.Like many retailers, Kroger hasn’t provided hazard pay nationally since the early stages of the pandemic, though the union is negotiating for it to be reinstated. The chain has also discontinued measures like controlling how many customers are allowed in stores at a time. The union has been asking for armed guards at all of its stores in the Denver area as incidents of violence increase.“The company says they are providing a safe environment for workers to do their jobs in,” Mr. Schneider said. “We don’t believe that.”In a statement, a Kroger spokeswoman said, “We have been navigating the Covid-19 pandemic for nearly two years, and, in line with our values, the safety of our associates and customers has remained our top priority.”The company added that frontline employees had each received as much $1,760 in additional pay to “reward and recognize them for their efforts during the pandemic.”Some workers have reached another breaking point. In Jacksonville, Fla., one Apple Store employee organized a brief walkout on Christmas Eve to protest working conditions after he witnessed a customer spitting on his colleague. Dozens of people at other stores also participated.“It was my final straw,” said Daryl Sherman II, who organized the walkout. “Something had to be done.”In some cases, municipalities have stepped in to obtain hazard pay for workers. In Seattle, Kroger has been required to pay grocery store employees like Mr. Dancy an extra $4 an hour based on local legislation.“Some people are so tired of what’s going on,” said Sam Dancy, a front-end supervisor at QFC, a grocery store chain.Grant Hindsley for The New York TimesMore broadly, the staffing shortages have put a new spotlight on a potential vaccine-or-testing mandate from the Biden administration, which major retailers have been resisting. The fear of losing workers appears to be looming large, especially now.While the retail industry initially cited the holiday season rush for its resistance to such rules, it has more recently pointed to the burden of testing unvaccinated workers. After oral arguments in the case on Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expressed skepticism about whether the Biden administration had legal authority to mandate that large employers require workers to be vaccinated.The National Retail Federation, a major industry lobbying group, said in a statement last week that it “continues to believe that OSHA exceeded its authority in promulgating its vaccine mandate.” The group estimated that the order would require 20 million tests a week nationally, based on external data on unvaccinated workers, and that “such testing capacity currently does not exist.”When the top managers at Mr. Waugh’s Stop & Shop store began asking employees whether they were vaccinated in preparation for the federal vaccine mandates that could soon take effect, he said, a large number expressed concern to him about being asked to disclose that information.“It was concerning to see that so many people were distressed,” he said, though all of the employees complied.Ms. Luick of Macy’s near Seattle said that she worked with several vocal opponents of the Covid-19 vaccines and that she anticipated that at least some of her colleagues would resign if they were asked to provide vaccination status or proof of negative tests.Macy’s told employees last week that it would adopt new guidance from the C.D.C. that recommended shortening isolation periods.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesStill, Macy’s was among major employers that started asking employees for their vaccination status last week ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on Friday and said it might require proof of negative tests beginning on Feb. 16.“Our primary focus at this stage is preparing our members for an eventual mandate to ensure they have the information and tools they need to manage their work force and meet the needs of their customers,” said Brian Dodge, president of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which includes companies like Macy’s, Target, Home Depot, Gap and Walmart.As seasonal Covid-19 surges become the norm, unions and companies are looking for consistent policies. Jim Araby, director of strategic campaigns for the food and commercial workers union in Northern California, said the retail industry needed to put in place more sustainable supports for workers who got ill.For example, he said, a trust fund jointly administered by the union and several employers could no longer offer Covid-related sick days for union members.“We have to start treating this as endemic,” Mr. Araby said. “And figuring out what are the structural issues we have to put forward to deal with this.”Kellen Browning contributed reporting. More

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    Amazon Faces Wider Fight Over Labor Practices

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    A second union vote may be held at an Alabama warehouse, and new tactics by the Teamsters and other groups aim to pressure Amazon across the country.Since the start of the pandemic, Amazon has ramped up its hiring, bringing on hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. But challenges to the company’s labor practices are growing quickly, too.Those challenges were underscored when a hearing officer for the National Labor Relations Board recommended a new union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, saying the company’s conduct during the organizing campaign had precluded a fair vote.The board’s regional office will rule on the recommendation in the coming weeks. If it leads to a new election, as seems likely, the union would face long odds of victory. But Amazon faces a widening campaign to rein in the power it wields over its employees and their workplace conditions.Those efforts include a campaign by the Teamsters that would generally circumvent traditional workplace elections and pressure the company through protests, boycotts and even fights against its expansion efforts at the local level. Legislation in California would force Amazon to reveal its productivity quotas, which unions contend are onerous and put workers at risk.Throughout the pandemic, Amazon warehouse workers have protested what they consider unsafe conditions, sometimes resulting in embarrassment for the company, as with the disclosure of notes from an internal meeting in which an Amazon executive called a worker-turned-protester “not smart, or articulate.”In April, the general counsel of the labor board found merit to charges that Amazon fired two white-collar workers who had raised concerns last year about the conditions facing the company’s warehouse workers during the pandemic. The election in Alabama brought intense scrutiny of the company’s labor practices, with even President Biden taking it as an opportunity to warn employers that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” during such a campaign.In a statement after the hearing officer’s recommendation was reported on Monday, Amazon said, “Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers.”Since the results were announced in early April, showing that Amazon won by more than two to one, many unions and union supporters have argued that the outcome points to the need for new tactics to organize the company.Perhaps the most prominent voice in this discussion is the more than one-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which approved a resolution at its convention in June committing the union to “supply all resources necessary” to organize workers at the company and help them win a union contract.The Teamsters argue that holding union votes at individual work sites is typically futile at a company like Amazon, because labor law allows employers to wage aggressive anti-union campaigns, and because high turnover means union supporters often leave the company before they have a chance to vote.Instead, the Teamsters favor a combination of tactics like strikes, protests and boycotts that pressure the company to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a contract covering wages, benefits and working conditions. While the union hasn’t laid out its tactics in detail, it recently organized walkouts involving drivers and dockworkers at a port in Southern California to protest the drivers’ treatment there.They hope to enlist the help of workers at other companies, sympathetic consumers and even local businesses threatened by a giant like Amazon, partly to mitigate the challenges presented by high employee turnover.“Building our relationships within the community itself is the way to deal with that,” Randy Korgan, a Teamsters official from Southern California who is the union’s national director for Amazon, said in a recent interview. “We could have filed for an election in a number of places in the last more than a year, gotten into that process, but we realize that the election process has its shortcomings.”The union believes that it can pull a variety of political levers to help put the company on the defensive. Mr. Korgan cited a recent vote by the City Council in Fort Wayne, Ind., denying Amazon a tax abatement after a local Teamsters official spoke out against it, and a vote by the City Council in Arvada, Colo., to reject a more than 100,000-square-foot Amazon delivery station. While the Arvada vote centered on traffic concerns, Teamsters played a role in drumming up opposition.In California, the Teamsters have joined forces with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, an advocacy group, to back a bill that would require certain employers to disclose the often opaque productivity quotas applied to workers, which they can be disciplined or fired for failing to meet. The legislative language makes it clear that Amazon is the main target.The bill, offered by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the author of a 2019 law effectively requiring gig companies to classify workers as employees, would also direct the state’s occupational safety and health agency to develop a regulation ensuring that such quotas don’t put workers at high risk of injury. It passed the State Assembly in May and will be considered by the State Senate later this summer.Other labor groups are pressing ahead with less orthodox efforts to increase the power of Amazon workers. Over the first six months of this year, a group called the Solidarity Fund, which raises money from individual tech workers, distributed over $100,000 in grants to workers seeking to organize their colleagues to push for workplace improvements.About half the money, in $2,500 increments, went to workers at Amazon. It funded a laptop to assist with organizing, as well as hiring a freelance graphic designer to help make pamphlets, among the varied efforts. Later this month, the fund will begin accepting applications for a second round of grants.The group’s sister organization, called Coworker.org, is putting together a detailed report on workplace surveillance measures, including a number of technologies that it says Amazon either developed or pays other companies to use. Along with these efforts, the company is likely to face another high-profile election at its warehouse in Bessemer, Ala. Labor law experts said that in such cases a regional director typically accepts the recommendation of the hearing officer, who argued for setting aside the results.The officer recommended the dismissal of many of the union’s objections to the election, including the contention that Amazon illegally threatened workers with a loss of pay or benefits if they unionized. But she found that a collection box that Amazon pressured the U.S. Postal Service to install near the warehouse entrance gave workers the impression that the company was monitoring who was voting, thereby tainting the outcome.A union brief described how Amazon surrounded the collection box with a tent, on which it printed a company campaign message (“Speak for Yourself”) and the instruction “Mail Your Ballot Here.” The union noted that Amazon’s surveillance cameras could record workers entering and leaving the tent. The company did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.If the labor board’s regional office accepts the recommendation to order a new election, Amazon has vowed to appeal to the five-member board in Washington. A recent shift there may affect the outcome: Democrats were assured control of the board in late July, when the Senate confirmed two of President Biden’s nominees.Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which oversaw the union campaign at the Amazon warehouse, acknowledged in an interview after the first election that high turnover at Amazon and the company’s ability to hold mandatory anti-union meetings made winning a vote difficult. But he said that a long-term campaign could be victorious.“I think that we’re going to be able to build on this,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “We pushed the ball downfield. Maybe it’s not the first election. Maybe it’s the second or third election.”Workers have long complained that one of the most fundamental features of an Amazon warehouse is the amount of control the company exerts — over the pace of work, the way workers perform it, the frequency of their breaks, the time they must spend waiting at metal detectors on their way home.In its objection to the election results, the union argued that Amazon had tried to assert a similar level of control over the voting itself, through measures like the collection box. Now the labor board appears on the verge of clawing some of that power back.The board’s role in administering union elections was “usurped” by Amazon’s conduct in obtaining the box, the hearing officer said. That conduct, she said, “justifies a second election.” More

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    Companies Begin to Mandate Covid Vaccines for Employees

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    Tyson and Microsoft were the latest to require employees to be vaccinated. Other major employers have tried less sweeping approaches.Some of the nation’s largest employers, for months reluctant to wade into the fraught issue of whether Covid-19 vaccinations should be mandatory for workers, have in recent days been compelled to act as infections have surged again.On Tuesday, Tyson Foods told its 120,000 workers in offices, slaughterhouses and poultry plants across the country that they would need to be vaccinated by Nov. 1 as a “condition of employment.” And Microsoft, which employs roughly 100,000 people in the United States, said it would require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to gain access to its offices.Last week, Google said it would require employees who returned to the company’s offices to be vaccinated, while Disney announced a mandate for all salaried and nonunion hourly workers who work on site.Other companies, including Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, and Lyft and Uber, have taken a less forceful approach, mandating vaccines for white-collar workers but not for millions of frontline workers. Those moves essentially set up a divide between the employees who work in offices and employees who deal directly with the public and, collectively, have been more reluctant to get the shots.“We did not take this decision lightly,” Tyson’s chief executive, Donnie King, wrote in a memo to employees announcing the company’s full mandate. “We have spent months encouraging our team members to get vaccinated — today, under half of our team members are.”The moves brought praise from the White House.“I want to thank Walmart, Google, Netflix, Disney, Tyson Foods for their recent actions requiring vaccination for employees,” President Biden said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Look, I know this isn’t easy — but I will have their backs.”“Others have declined to step up,” he said. “I find it disappointing.”Indeed, most other big employers have so far avoided mandates entirely. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the country, has not announced any plans to require immunizations, nor has Apple or many of the biggest banks.“We are strongly working to get our employees vaccinated,” Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said in a call with reporters last week, “and we hope everyone else gets vaccinated and this goes away.”Amazon has encouraged employees to get vaccinated but says it has no plans to mandate that they do.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe coronavirus, however, shows no signs of going away. With vaccination rates stagnating in many parts of the country and the Delta variant surging, a new wave of infections is forcing businesses to act.“The rise of the Delta variant is on people’s minds,” said Douglas Brayley, an employment lawyer at Ropes & Gray. “I think they are looking around and seeing a greater number of employers start to mandate, and so they’re wondering whether they should reconsider as well.”But vaccine hesitancy remains an entrenched and emotionally charged issue inside many American workplaces.Many companies, already facing staffing shortages, are worried that requiring vaccines could give employees another reason to quit. At the same time, companies are struggling for new ways to encourage workers to get vaccinated after efforts like offering cash bonuses did not boost immunization rates quickly enough.Much of the remaining hesitancy to vaccines appears to be rooted in a complex mix of politics, cultural beliefs and misinformation that no cash payment or gift certificate from an employer can overcome.“The reason many workers are refusing the vaccine has been for political and ideological reasons,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents workers in food factories in the Midwest, where vaccination rates are relatively low. “In places where we have the largest number of Trump supporters is where we are seeing a large number of vaccine resisters.”But many unions are wary of mandates for a different set of reasons that are not primarily political. They say many of their members are worried about potential health side effects or bristle at the idea of an employer’s interfering in what they regard as a personal health decision.Marc Perrone, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, representing 1.3 million employees in grocery chains such as Kroger and at large meatpacking plants, said he would not support employer mandates until the Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the vaccine, which is being administered on an emergency basis.“You can’t just say, ‘Accept the mandate or hit the door,’” Mr. Perrone said in an interview on Monday.After Tyson announced its vaccine mandate on Tuesday, Mr. Perrone issued a statement that the union “will be meeting with Tyson in the coming weeks to discuss this vaccine mandate and to ensure that the rights of these workers are protected and this policy is fairly implemented.”Tyson Foods will give its frontline employees until Nov. 1 to be fully inoculated.John Konstantaras/Associated PressAsked whether he supported vaccine mandates, Mr. Appelbaum said, “I am not prepared to answer that yet.” But he did say that companies needed to closely negotiate the terms of any such requirements with workers and that they also needed to expand benefits, such as paid sick time, for workers during the pandemic.Together, Mr. Perrone’s and Mr. Appelbaum’s unions represent more than 30,000 workers in Tyson plants, which complicates the meat company’s plans for a mandate.Tyson and others in the meatpacking industry were criticized during the pandemic’s early stages for not doing enough to protect workers as several meat plants became virus hot spots. Now, it is requiring its leadership team to be vaccinated by Sept. 24 and the rest of its office workers by Oct. 1. Frontline employees have until Nov. 1 to be fully inoculated, extra time the company is providing because there are “significantly more frontline team members than office workers who still need to be vaccinated,” a Tyson spokesman said.Throughout the pandemic, companies have treaded carefully in carrying out public health measures while trying to avoid harm to their businesses.Last year, when major retailers began requiring customers to wear masks, they quietly told their employees not to enforce the rule if a customer was adamant about not wearing one.Companies like Walmart have tried a similarly tentative approach with vaccine requirements.Walmart announced last week that it was requiring the roughly 17,000 workers in its Arkansas headquarters to be vaccinated but not those in stores and distribution centers, who make up the bulk of its 1.6 million U.S. employees.In a statement, the retailer said the limited mandate would send a message to all workers that they should get vaccinated.“We’re asking our leaders, which already have a higher vaccination rate, to make their example clear,” the company said. “We’re hoping that will influence even more of our frontline associates to become vaccinated.”Workers at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco must be vaccinated, but its drivers do not have to be.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesUber and Lyft told their corporate employees last week that they would need to show proof they had been inoculated before returning to company offices.Requiring vaccinations “is the most effective way to create a safe environment and give our team members peace of mind as we return to the office,” said Ashley Adams, a spokeswoman for Lyft.But those mandates did not extend to the workers the companies contract with to drive millions of customers to and from their destinations. The drivers are being encouraged to be vaccinated, but neither Lyft or Uber has plans to require them.Public health experts warn that limited mandates may reinforce the gaping divide between the nation’s high- and low-wage workers without furthering the public health goal of substantially increasing vaccination rates.They also say it’s naïve to think that workers who resisted vaccines for ideological reasons would suddenly change their mind after seeing a company’s higher-paid executives receive the shots.“Ultimately we want to ensure that they really have the broadest reach,” Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, the vice dean for population health and health equity at the University of California, San Francisco, said of company directives. “Failing to do that, I think, will only cause others to be more suspicious of these types of mandates.”Legally, companies are likely to be on solid ground if they mandate vaccines. Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said employers could require immunization, though companies that do could still face lawsuits.George W. Ingham, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, said companies with mandates would potentially have to make difficult decisions.“They are going to have to fire high performers and low performers who refuse vaccines,” he said. “They have to be consistent.” Reasons an employee could be exempted include religious beliefs or a disability, though the process of sorting those out on an individual basis promises to be an arduous one.Companies may also have to contend with pushback from state governments. Ten states have passed legislation limiting the ability to require vaccines for students, employees or the public, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Disney is among the few big companies pursuing a broad vaccine mandate for their work forces, even in the face of pushback from some employees.Roughly 38,000 workers at Walt Disney World in Florida are unionized. The company’s vaccine mandate does not apply to them.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesIn addition to mandating vaccines for nonunion workers who are on-site, Disney said all new hires — union and nonunion — would be required to be fully vaccinated before starting their jobs. Nonunion hourly workers include theme park guest-relations staff, in-park photographers, executive assistants and some seasonal theme park employees.It was the furthest that Disney could go without a sign-off from the dozen unions that represent the bulk of its employees. Walt Disney World in Florida, for instance, has more than 65,000 workers; roughly 38,000 are union members.Disney is now seeking union approval for the mandate both in Florida and in California, where tens of thousands of workers at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim are unionized. Most of the leaders of Disney’s unions appear to be in favor of a mandate — as long as accommodations can be worked out for those refusing the vaccine for medical, religious or other acceptable reasons.“Vaccinations are safe and effective and the best line of defense to protect workers, frontline or otherwise,” Eric Clinton, the president of UNITE HERE Local 362, which represents roughly 8,000 attraction workers and custodians at Disney World, said in a phone interview.Mr. Clinton declined to comment on any pushback from his membership, but another union leader at Disney World, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly, said “a fair number” of his members were up in arms over Disney-mandated vaccinations, citing personal choice and fear of the vaccine.“The company has probably done a calculation and decided that some people will unfortunately quit rather than protect themselves, and so be it,” the person said.Lananh Nguyen More

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    Amazon Workers Defeat Union Effort in Alabama

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    The company’s decisive victory deals a crushing blow to organized labor, which had hoped the time was ripe to start making inroads.Amazon workers at a giant warehouse in Alabama voted decisively against forming a union on Friday, squashing the most significant organizing drive in the internet giant’s history and dealing a crushing blow to labor and Democrats when conditions appeared ripe for them to make advances.Workers cast 1,798 votes against a union, giving Amazon enough to emphatically defeat the effort. Ballots in favor of a union trailed at 738, fewer than 30 percent of the votes tallied, according to federal officials.The lopsided outcome at the 6,000-person warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., came even as the pandemic’s effect on the economy and the election of a pro-labor president had made the country more aware of the plight of essential workers.Amazon, which has repeatedly quashed labor activism, had appeared vulnerable as it faced increasing scrutiny in Washington and around the world for its market power and influence. President Biden signaled support for the union effort, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent. The pandemic, which drove millions of people to shop online, also raised questions about Amazon’s ability to keep those employees safe.But in an aggressive campaign, the company argued that its workers had access to rewarding jobs without needing to involve a union. The victory leaves Amazon free to handle employees on its own terms as it has gone on a hiring spree and expanded its work force to more than 1.3 million people.Margaret O’Mara, a professor at the University of Washington who researches the history of technology companies, said Amazon’s message that it offered good jobs with good wages had prevailed over the criticisms by the union and its supporters. The outcome, she said, “reads as a vindication.”She added that while it was just one warehouse, the election had garnered so much attention that it had become a “bellwether.” Amazon’s victory was likely to cause organized labor to think, “Maybe this isn’t worth trying in other places,” Ms. O’Mara said.The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which led the drive, blamed its defeat on what it said were Amazon’s anti-union tactics before and during the voting, which was conducted from early February through the end of last month. The union said it would challenge the result and ask federal labor officials to investigate Amazon for creating an “atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals.”“Our system is broken,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president. “Amazon took full advantage of that.”Amazon said in a statement, “The union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true.” It added, “Amazon didn’t win — our employees made the choice to vote against joining a union.”About half of the 5,876 eligible voters at the warehouse cast ballots in the election. A majority of votes, or 1,521, was needed to win. About 500 ballots were contested, largely by Amazon, the union said. Those ballots were not counted. If a union had been voted through, it would have been the first for Amazon workers in the United States. More

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    Amazon Union Vote: Labor Loss May Bring Shift in Strategy

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    After an election defeat in Alabama, many in labor are shifting strategies, wary of the challenges and expense of winning votes site by site.The lopsided vote against a union at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., was a major disappointment to organized labor, which regards the fight with Amazon as central to labor’s survival. Yet the defeat doesn’t mark the end of the campaign against Amazon so much as a shift in strategy.In interviews, labor leaders said they would step up their informal efforts to highlight and resist the company’s business and labor practices rather than seek elections at individual job sites, as in Bessemer. The approach includes everything from walkouts and protests to public relations campaigns that draw attention to Amazon’s leverage over its customers and competitors.“We’re focused on building a new type of labor movement where we don’t rely on the election process to raise standards,” said Jesse Case, secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters local in Iowa that is seeking to rally the state’s Amazon drivers and warehouse workers to pressure the company.The strategy reflects a paradox of the labor movement: While the Gallup Poll has found that roughly two-thirds of Americans approve of unions — up from half in 2009, a low point — it has rarely been more difficult to unionize a large company.One reason is that labor law gives employers sizable advantages. The law typically forces workers to win elections at individual work sites of a company like Amazon, which would mean hundreds of separate campaigns. It allows employers to campaign aggressively against unions and does little to punish employers that threaten or retaliate against workers who try to organize.Lawyers representing management say that union membership has declined — from about one-third of private-sector workers in the 1950s to just over 6 percent today — because employers have gotten better at addressing workers’ needs. “Employees have access to the company in order to express any concerns they might have,” said Michael J. Lotito of the firm Littler Mendelson.But labor leaders say wealthy, powerful companies have grown much bolder in pressing the advantages that labor law affords them.Before Amazon, few companies better epitomized this posture than Walmart, which union leaders targeted in the 1990s and 2000s, convinced that the retail giant was driving down wages and benefits across the retail industry.Walmart, in turn, took sometimes drastic steps to keep unions at bay. In 2000, after a small group of meat cutters at a Texas store decided to unionize, the company eliminated the position across other stores. Five years later, when workers at a Walmart in Quebec were seeking to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the company shut the store. Walmart said the store was not performing well financially.“Everywhere they tried, they were defeated,’’ Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said of the unions. “Walmart would send teams to swamp the stores to work against a union. They are good at it.”As with Walmart, labor leaders believed it was critical to establish a foothold at Amazon, which influences pay and working conditions for millions of workers thanks to the competitive pressure it puts on rivals in industries like groceries and fashion.But the labor movement’s failure to make inroads at Walmart despite investing millions of dollars has loomed over its thinking on Amazon. “They felt so burned by trying to organize Walmart and getting basically nowhere,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.It was only a relatively small, scrappy union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, that felt the election in Alabama was worth the large investment. As the votes were being tallied, Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president, attributed the one-sided result to a “broken” election system that favors employers.Amazon saw things differently. “It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true,” the company said in a statement. “Our employees made the choice to vote against joining a union. Our employees are the heart and soul of Amazon, and we’ve always worked hard to listen to them.”Yet even as elections have often proven futile, labor has enjoyed some success over the years with an alternative model — what Dr. Milkman called the “air war plus ground war.”The idea is to combine workplace actions like walkouts (the ground war) with pressure on company executives through public relations campaigns that highlight labor conditions and enlist the support of public figures (the air war). The Service Employees International Union used the strategy to organize janitors beginning in the 1980s, and to win gains for fast-food workers in the past few years, including wage increases across the industry.“There are almost never any elections,” Dr. Milkman said. “It’s all about putting pressure on decision makers at the top.”In some respects, labor’s effort to gain traction at Amazon had begun to follow this playbook before the campaign in Alabama. In early 2019, Mr. Appelbaum’s union, working with nonprofit organizations, local politicians and other labor groups, helped scuttle a deal that would have brought a second Amazon headquarters to New York by drawing attention to the company’s anti-union posture.That fall, several nonprofit groups formed a coalition, called Athena, to help persuade Americans that the company was a monopolist and that it exploited workers. And during the pandemic, Amazon workers around the country have joined groups and staged walkouts to amplify their concerns about safety and pay.Labor leaders and progressive activists and politicians said they intended to escalate both the ground war and the air war against Amazon after the failed union election, though some skeptics within the labor movement are likely to resist spending more revenue, which is in the billions of dollars a year but declining.More than 1,000 Amazon workers across the country have contacted the retail workers union in recent months and many appear to be girding for confrontation with the company.Mr. Appelbaum said in an interview that elections should remain an important part of labor’s Amazon strategy. “I think we opened the door,” he said. “If you want to build real power, you have to do it with a majority of workers.”But other leaders said elections should be de-emphasized. Mr. Case said the Teamsters were trying to organize Amazon workers in Iowa so they could take actions like labor stoppages and enlist members of the community — for example, by turning them out for rallies.During the pandemic, Amazon workers around the country have joined groups and staged walkouts to amplify their concerns about safety and pay.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesLate last year, a nonprofit group called the Solidarity Fund invited tech industry workers to apply for stipends that would help fund their organizing efforts. According to Jess Kutch, the group’s executive director, Amazon employees claimed about half of the roughly $100,000 that the group has distributed, reflecting the growing activism of its employees.As for external pressure, progressive groups said they intended to draw attention to a broad range of concerns about Amazon, from its power over small businesses to the potentially questionable uses of its home security technology, Ring.“We will be raising questions around Ring and the breadth of agreements they have with local police departments,” as they relate to surveillance of people of color, said Lauren Jacobs, a longtime labor organizer who now runs the Partnership for Working Families, a network that seeks to reduce economic inequality and that is a co-founder of the Athena coalition.Many labor officials urged Congress to increase its scrutiny of Amazon’s labor practices, including its use of mandatory meetings, texts and signs to discourage workers in Alabama from unionizing. “There have to be consequences for people like Bezos,” said Richard Bensinger, a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. organizing director who is advising workers at other Amazon facilities, referring to Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder. “We need congressional hearings to publicize this stuff.”Some members of Congress indicated that they would heed this call. “How long will Jeff Bezos thumb his nose at the United States Senate?” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in an interview, citing Mr. Bezos’s refusal to appear at a recent Senate hearing on executive pay. “He has done it in the past, but the winds are blowing from a different direction today.”Other labor leaders said the loss in Alabama should prompt Congress to rewrite labor law to make it easier for workers to form unions. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, which the House passed last month, would outlaw mandatory anti-union meetings and impose penalties on employers who violate labor law. (There are currently no financial penalties for doing so.)But after Bessemer, many labor leaders think Congress should go further, letting workers unionize companywide or industrywide, not just by work site as is typical. The loss “can be an opportunity to look beyond the PRO Act and why we need labor law with a focus on the sector,” Larry Cohen, chairman of the progressive advocacy group Our Revolution and a former president of the Communications Workers of America, said in a text message.Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, agreed that the key to taking on a company as powerful as Amazon was to make it easier for workers to unionize across a company or industry. “It’s not going to happen one warehouse at a time,” she said.But Ms. Henry said workers and politicians could pressure Amazon to come to the bargaining table long before the law formally requires it — in the same way that President Biden warned that there should be no intimidation or coercion during the Alabama union election.“It would be incredibly powerful if Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh called on McDonald’s and Amazon and other major corporations to set a bargaining table with workers and government and they would help support it,” she said.Michael Corkery More

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    Organizing Gravediggers, Cereal Makers and, Maybe, Amazon Employees

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    A group of gravediggers in Columbus, Ohio, who just negotiated a 3 percent raise. The poultry plant that processes chicken nuggets for McDonald’s. The workers who make Cap’n Crunch in Iowa. The women’s shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is not the largest labor union in the United States, but it may be one of the most eclectic. Its membership, totaling about 100,000 workers, seems to reach into every conceivable corner of the American economy, stretching from the cradle (they make Gerber baby food) to the grave (those cemetery workers in Columbus).And now it is potentially on the cusp of breaking into Amazon, one of the world’s most dominant companies, which since its founding has beaten back every attempt to organize any part of its massive work force in the United States.This month, a group of 5,800 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., are voting whether to join the R.W.D.S.U. It is the first large-scale union vote in Amazon’s history, and a decision by the workers to organize would have implications for the labor movement across the country, especially as retail giants like Amazon and Walmart have gained power — and added workers — during the pandemic.The Amazon campaign, said Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president, “is about the future of work and how working people are going to be treated in the new economy.”For some labor activists, the union and its early success at the Bessemer warehouse represent the vanguard of the modern organizing campaigns. It is outspoken on social issues and savvy on social media — posting a TikTok video of support from the rapper Killer Mike and tweeting an endorsement from the National Football League Players Association during the Super Bowl.“It’s a bit of an odd-duck union,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor emeritus of labor history at Queens College at the City University of New York. “They keep morphing over the years and have been very inventive in their tactics.”The union is also racially, geographically and politically diverse. Founded during a heyday of organized labor in New York City in 1937 — and perhaps best known for representing workers at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s — most of its members are now employed in right-to-work states, across the South and rural Midwest.Workers lowering a lid onto a vault at Union Cemetery in Columbus. Their organization is known as “a bit of an odd-duck union” for the variety of industries it covers.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesLou Willis, operating a backhoe at the cemetery.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesBrian Kaiser for The New York TimesWhile the union’s overall membership has stagnated over the past decade, the number of members in its Mid-South office, which includes Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, has nearly doubled, to about 9,000 from 4,700 in 2011, driven by aggressive recruitment efforts in the poultry, warehouse and health care industries. More than half of its members across the country are workers of color.In the Mid-South office, which is leading the organizing at Amazon, local officials begin almost every meeting with a prayer, lean in favor of gun rights and say about half their members supported Donald J. Trump’s re-election bid. (Unlike the national union, which publicly backed President Biden, the southern office did not issue an endorsement of either candidate.)“We are known as the church union,” said Randy Hadley, president of the Mid-South Council. “We put God first, family second and then our jobs.”The retail and wholesale workers union is run nationally by Mr. Appelbaum, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Democratic Party operative from Hartford, Conn., who has written about his identity as a gay, Jewish labor leader.Since becoming union president in 1998, Mr. Appelbaum has created a niche by organizing workers from a wide variety of professions: airline caterers, employees in fast fashion stores and gardeners at a cannabis grow house. “When you buy a joint, look for the union label,” Mr. Appelbaum said jokingly.Stuart Appelbaum, the union president, in 2016. The Amazon effort, he said, “is about the future of work and how working people are going to be treated in the new economy.”Christian Hansen for The New York TimesThe strategy has helped the union to keep flourishing, even as its core work force in brick-and-mortar retail stores continues to shrink as shopping moves online.The union often ties its organizing campaigns to the broader struggle to advance the rights of vulnerable workers, such as the predominately gay, lesbian, trans and nonbinary employees in sex toy shops in New York and undocumented immigrants working in the city’s carwashes.After World War II, the union advocated for Black servicemen who were being shut out of jobs at Macy’s, which paid the highest commissions. “It has a history of being a militant, feisty, left-wing crowd,” Professor Freeman said.Even the Alabama office, which leans further to the right on some issues, has stood up for workers in ways that are locally unpopular.Mr. Hadley said one of his biggest accomplishments was negotiating a paid holiday on Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, at a Tyson poultry plant in Tennessee, where a large number of Somali immigrants work.“We had Muslims in the facility, they said, ‘We look at that day like Christmas,’ and I thought, ‘Who am I to judge?’” recalled Mr. Hadley, a former meat cutter. “I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”The president of the union’s Mid-South Council, Randy Hadley, back row, center right, with other leaders and staff in Birmingham, Ala. The Mid-South office is leading the organizing at Amazon.Retail, Wholesale and Department Store UnionRatified in 2008, the Muslim holiday took the place of Labor Day as one of the paid holidays that workers were allowed at the facility, and was criticized by some as being un-American.Over the years, the union has faced some powerful enemies. In the 1960s, its Black organizers were threatened — one was even shot at — while trying to sign up food industry workers across the South.Johnny Whitaker, a former dairy worker who started as a union organizer in the 1970s, said he had grown up in a white family in Hanceville, Ala., without much money. Still, he was shocked by the working conditions and racism he witnessed when he started organizing in the poultry plants years ago.Black workers were classified differently from their white counterparts and paid much less. Women were expected to engage in sexual acts with managers in exchange for more hours, he said. Many workers could not read or write.Despite threats that they would lose their jobs if they organized, thousands of poultry workers have joined the R.W.D.S.U. over the past three decades, though the industry still is predominantly nonunion.Roberto Cuellar, a union member and flight coordinator at Flying Food Group, an airline caterer whose workers are represented by the R.W.D.S.U.Meghan Marin for The New York TimesMr. Cuellar checked meals at Kennedy International Airport before a flight.Meghan Marin for The New York TimesMeghan Marin for The New York TimesWhen a small group of Amazon workers contacted the union in late August about their interest in organizing the Bessemer warehouse, Mr. Whitaker acknowledged, “there was a lot of doubt” internally about the idea.The R.W.D.S.U. had tried to lay the groundwork for organizing Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island in 2019, but the effort failed when the company pulled the plug on its plans to build a second headquarters in New York, known as HQ2, partly because of political pressure to allow organizing at its facilities.“What we learned from HQ2 was that Amazon was going to do anything it possibly could to avoid having a union at any of its workplaces,” Mr. Appelbaum said.At the time, Amazon said it canceled its plans after “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.”But the more the workers in Alabama kept talking to the union about their working conditions, the more Mr. Appelbaum and others believed the warehouse was fertile ground for organizing.The employee cafeteria at Flying Food Group.Meghan Marin for The New York TimesThe workers described the control that Amazon exerts over their work lives, including tracking their time in the restroom or other time spent away from their primary task in the warehouse. Some workers have said they can be penalized for taking too much time away from their specific assignments.“We are talking about bathroom breaks,” said Mr. Whitaker, an executive vice president at the union. “It’s the year 2021 and workers are being penalized for taking a pee.”In an email, an Amazon spokeswoman said the company does not penalize workers for taking bathroom breaks. “Those are not our policies,” she said. “People can take bathroom breaks.”The campaign in Bessemer has created some strange political bedfellows. Mr. Biden expressed his support for the Alabama workers to vote freely in the mail-in election, which ends later this month. Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida went even further, encouraging the Bessemer workers to unionize in order to protect themselves against the “woke culture” at Amazon.A greenhouse in the PharmaCann facility near Montgomery, N.Y. The company grows cannabis for medical use in several states; the R.W.D.S.U. has organized workers there.David Steinberg for The New York TimesMark Etri Jr. assembling cartridges.David Steinberg for The New York TimesLiz Ferran tending to plants.David Steinberg for The New York TimesIf the union wins the election in Bessemer, the effort to court workers will continue. In a right-to-work state, workers are not required to pay union dues even if they are represented by a union.At a Quaker Oats plant in Iowa, which is also a right-to-work state, the R.W.D.S.U. finds ways to motivate workers to join the union by posting the names of workers who have not yet joined on a bulletin board.“In a right-to-work state, you are always organizing,” Mr. Hadley said.Early in the afternoon of Oct. 20, Mr. Hadley met with about 20 organizers before they headed out to the Bessemer warehouse to begin their campaign to sign up workers. The plan was for the organizers to stand at the warehouse gates talking to workers early in the morning and in the evening when their shift changes. In a pep talk with the group, Mr. Hadley invoked the story of David and Goliath.“We are going to hit Goliath in the nose every day, twice a day,” he told the group, referring to Amazon. “He’s going to see our union every morning when he comes to work, and I want him thinking about us when he closes his eyes at night.” More

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    Amazon Labor Fight: Wages May Not Ward Off Union

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    Recent organizing campaigns in the South suggest the company’s wage scale may have left it vulnerable to a union.In making the case against a union at its warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., Amazon has touted its compensation package. The company notes that base pay at the facility, around $15.50 an hour for most rank-and-file workers, is more than twice the local minimum wage, and that it offers comprehensive health insurance and retirement benefits.But to many of Amazon’s Bessemer employees, who are voting this month on whether to unionize, the claims to generosity can ring hollow alongside the demands of the job and local wage rates. The most recent figure for the median wage in greater Birmingham, a metropolitan area of roughly one million people that includes Bessemer, was nearly $3 above Amazon’s pay there, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.“If you go into certain rural areas in the South, where wages are suppressed and there’s no industry, that may seem attractive,” said Joshua Brewer of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, who is the campaign’s lead organizer. “For our folks here in Bessemer and Birmingham, it’s barely enough to keep the lights on. To tote it in front of them like it’s something to be prized is mildly offensive.”It is common for employers facing a union vote to emphasize the generosity of their wages and to suggest that workers could be worse off if they unionize. But the message takes on added resonance in the South, where incomes are lower and jobs with good pay can be harder to find. As a result, organizers say, employers and their surrogates in the region often use such tactics more aggressively.A commercial during a 2017 union campaign at a Boeing plant in South Carolina showed a casino boss urging workers to roll dice at a craps table to make the point that joining a union could put their livelihood at risk. Union campaigns at a Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., and a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., featured similar appeals.The catch is that wages at these plants tended to be substantially higher than the typical wage in their areas, reinforcing workers’ sense that they had something valuable to lose.Veteran production workers made $23.50 an hour at the Volkswagen plant in 2019, the year of the most recent campaign there. The comparable figure was $23 at Boeing’s South Carolina facility when workers voted on a union and $26 at Nissan’s Mississippi plant during the vote there, also in 2017. The union lost in all three cases.“The global manufacturing companies took more steps to pre-empt unionization by offering better pay,” Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director for the United Automobile Workers and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said in an email.Mr. Bensinger, who was involved in the Nissan and Volkswagen campaigns and is helping workers organize at other Amazon facilities, held up Mercedes-Benz as a telling example. The U.A.W. tried to organize the company’s plant in Vance, Ala., about 25 miles from Bessemer, for several years during the last decade. But it could never quite get a majority of workers to sign cards, Mr. Bensinger said, partly because wages at the plant were so high — $28 an hour for veteran workers, and even more today.“They paid U.A.W. scale to try to keep the U.A.W. out,” Mr. Bensinger said. (Mercedes, like other automakers, also used temporary workers whom it paid far less.)By contrast, unions have been successful when companies have held down wages. During the first half the 2010s, workers unionized at several auto parts suppliers in Alabama and elsewhere in the South, often citing low pay and benefits as the impetus.In 2015, employees at Commercial Vehicle Group in Piedmont, Ala., which made seats for trucks, voted to join the U.A.W. by a roughly two-to-one ratio. Workers at the plant complained of wages that started as low as $9.70 an hour for temporary workers and topped out at $15.80 for full-time employees. The company laid off many of the workers when it later consolidated its operations.“Workers always say this: It’s about respect, recognition,” said Gary Casteel, the U.A.W.’s former second-ranking official, who helped oversee much of its organizing in the South. “That’s not the case. It is about the money. Everybody wants to get paid more.”Darryl Richardson, an Amazon worker in Alabama, has seen the power of a union to raise wages.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesDarryl Richardson, an Amazon employee in Alabama, knows firsthand the catalyzing effect of low wages. In 2012, he was part of a group of workers that voted overwhelmingly to unionize at Faurecia Interior Systems in Cottondale, Ala., which made seats for the nearby Mercedes plant.Mr. Richardson said that he had made around $12.50 an hour when he started at the plant but that, thanks to the union, his hourly pay had nearly doubled by the time he left in 2019, after the plant lost its contract with Mercedes. He said several of his co-workers at Faurecia were now working at Amazon and had seen the power of a union to raise wages.“From Faurecia to Amazon, it’s a big pay difference,” said Mr. Richardson, who now makes $15.55.Heather Knox, an Amazon spokeswoman, said that workers in Bessemer were eligible for raises every six months and that they had received a $2-an-hour bonus during much of last spring. Full-time rank-and-file employees received $300 bonuses during the holiday season and $500 last June. The company also provides significant tuition reimbursement for employees who take classes in certain fields.Some workers at the Bessemer facility, which opened just as Covid-19 was bearing down last March, regard the pay as more than adequate, especially younger employees.“I feel like it is fair,” said Roderick Crocton, 24, who previously made $11.25 as an overnight stocker at a local retailer. “In my old job, I lived in my apartment, never got to go anywhere, paid my bills. Today I’m able to go out and experience being in the city.”But other workers emphasize that pay at Amazon isn’t particularly high for the Birmingham area, even if the pandemic has reduced their job options. An Amazon employee named Clint, a union backer who declined to give his last name for fear of retaliation, said he had stood to make about $40,000 a year installing satellite dishes before the pandemic left him unemployed. He said he made his finances work partly by living with his mother.The retail workers’ union said it represented employees at nearby warehouses where pay is $18 to $21 an hour, including an ice cream facility and a grocery warehouse not far from Amazon.At a plant owned by NFI Group, a Canadian bus manufacturer, about an hour east of Birmingham, hourly pay for rank-and-file workers ranges from $14.79 to $23.31, according to the company.A survey of about 100 workers at the NFI plant by Emily Erickson, a professor at Alabama A&M University, found that white workers earned about $3 an hour more than Black workers on average. One former employee who currently works for a labor group in the area, Charles Crooms, said this made it more difficult to persuade white workers to join a union organizing effort. (The company said all employees with the same job grade and tenure were paid the same.)Workers and organizers said the dissatisfaction over wages at the Amazon warehouse was heightened by the vast wealth of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder.The Amazon warehouse in Bessemer opened just as Covid-19 was bearing down last March.Bob Miller for The New York Times“He’s one of the richest men in the world, yet you treat employees like scavengers,” said Jennifer Bates, an Amazon employee who earned more in her previous job at a pipe factory but joined Amazon hoping it would provide an opportunity to grow.Ms. Bates was mystified that the company was urging Congress to match its pay efforts by raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. “It looks to me like Amazon is admitting it’s only paying a minimum wage, and this is not a minimum-wage job,” she said. Amazon has said its starting wage is higher than $15 an hour in most of the country.Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the retail workers’ union, noted that Mr. Bezos could have given each of Amazon’s more than one million global employees last year a bonus larger than the annual pay of a warehouse worker just from the wealth he accumulated during the pandemic.All of which raises a question: Why didn’t Amazon, which regards unions as a threat, follow the example of Nissan and Mercedes and pay its Alabama employees more as a way to pre-empt a union?The company did not respond to a request to address that question.Mr. Appelbaum, the union president, said the company had underestimated its workers.“I think they took it for granted that we’d be out there for a few days leafleting, then go away,” he said. “They didn’t believe there was any possibility that we’d be able to get enough cards from employees to get to an election.” More