Workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, have lost their bid to seek union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, in what would have been the first of the company’s U.S. facilities to unionize.
Before the results rolled in, mainstream media had, for weeks, touted the election as a make or break point for organized labor in the South.
Unfortunately, despite a strong campaign led by the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (of which the Amazon workers would’ve become members), the election results swayed in Amazon’s favor on April 9, with a current tally of 738 votes for unionizing and 1,798 against it.
On Friday morning, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union filed a legal challenge with the NLRB to contest the results, alleging that Amazon, in the weeks leading up to the election, had created an “atmosphere of confusion, coercion, and/or fear” in order to dissuade workers from unionizing. By peppering the Bessemer facility with anti-union messaging (such as posters with the slogan “Do it without dues”), the union argued, Amazon was able to tilt the vote.
Before the results rolled in, mainstream media had, for weeks, touted the election as a make or break point for organized labor in the South. More broadly, news outlets portrayed this election as an indicator of the ability of organized labor to build a union movement in the twenty-first century.
But a look back at the successful, industry-wide union campaigns of U.S. history shows that, rather than officially sanctioned elections, sit-down strikes more often resulted in companies recognizing a union.
During the Great Depression, the labor movement gained steam when, in 1934, longshoremen launched a strike in San Francisco, California, over unfair working conditions. Eventually, the workers’ action spiraled into a general strike that forced the employers’ association to recognize their union and significantly increase wages. This, in effect, led to a wave of similar strikes from 1935 to 1937, across dozens of industries including at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, at the time the heart of the United States’ automotive empire.
In many of these cases, the strikes ended with the companies reluctantly recognizing workers’ right to union representation. In 1938, as a result of worker unrest at key plants, General Electric recognized the United Electrical Workers; similarly, the United States Steel Company, in 1937, bowed to the demands of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee—which became the United Steelworkers of America—to avoid increasingly radical confrontations in steel towns across the country.
Indeed, throughout the tumultuous decade, it was rare—if not completely unheard of—for a union to gain recognition via an election. It was almost entirely through putting direct pressure on companies that workers’ rights were advanced.
This is not to say there weren’t any NLRB elections in the 1930s, but that they typically took place after direct actions by workers and, in several cases (such as with restaurant workers in San Francisco), the election process replaced direct actions and functioned to dampen labor militancy.
I’m certain that workers at Amazon, Walmart, and Microsoft will continue to organize with increasing velocity.
In fact, the argument can be made that this was the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal-era bill that created the NLRB in 1935. Elections replaced mass mobilizations and pitched battles in the streets by taking the fight for union recognition off of the streets, out of the workplace, and, instead, into the ballot box.
Nevertheless, even though the campaign in Bessemer lost, I’m certain that workers at Amazon, Walmart, and Microsoft—as well as the legions of gig workers employed by app companies like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart—will continue to organize with increasing velocity.
This is because, after decades of being told that the free market is the best and only way to guarantee prosperity for all, the dark truth that capitalism feeds off of the labor of the most vulnerable has been brutally laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. And for each defeat that workers suffer, there’s every reason to believe that they will inevitably respond in the same way that workers have in the past, by developing new organizing strategies and continuing the struggle for workplace representation.
So regardless of the NLRB election results, Bessemer’s workers have already highlighted an important fact that has become clear to thousands of workers across the country: When it comes to guaranteeing a safe workplace, better wages, health care, and dignity on the job, there’s no substitute for a union.