Amazon's victory against a union drive in Alabama proved workers want better workplaces, but America's labor laws are too broken to help them get that, experts say
Amazon; Elif Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty; Dustin Chambers/REUTERS; RWDSU; Samantha Lee/Insider
- Amazon has the votes to defeat a historic union vote by workers in Bessemer, Alabama.
- But experts say companies' battles with workers, regulators, and politicians are far from over.
- They told Insider that Amazon's anti-union push proved companies have too much power over workers.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
After one of the most high-profile union - and anti-union - campaigns in recent history, Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, voted overwhelmingly against unionizing, with the National Labor Relations Board confirming Friday that 71% of eligible ballots were cast in opposition.
But eight labor experts told Insider that focusing on the vote tally misses the bigger takeaway from this saga: that American workers are demanding better workplaces and a voice on the job, and America's current labor laws simply aren't designed to help them accomplish that goal.
Still, they said, Bessemer put a spotlight on how stacked the deck is against workers, and that the broad, diverse public support for the union drive showed the US labor movement is gaining more steam than it has in decades.
Amazon, which had aggressively opposed the union effort, undoubtedly won a significant battle this week (pending likely legal challenges from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union). But it may have put a target on its back that could prove costly in what's likely to be an ongoing war over how companies treat their workers, the experts said.
The fight was never going to be fair
Amazon responded to the vote Friday by saying its "employees made the choice to vote against joining a union" and that it was glad their "collective voices were finally heard."
But experts said that misrepresents what has happened since November, when Bessemer employees officially asked the NLRB to hold a union election.
"The result reflects the imbalance in current US labor law, rather than any genuine expression of whether workers would like to have more of a voice in their workplace," Rebecca Givan, an associate labor and employment professor at Rutgers University, told Insider.
"This demonstrates just how hard it is for workers to gain a voice on the job when the employer has unlimited resources, full access to workers all day long, and very few legal constraints on what it can do or say," she said.
Over the past several decades, American executives and politicians have chipped away at labor laws and workers' right to organize, experts said. At the same time, companies have kept American workers' pay and benefits down, and shipped jobs overseas where labor is cheaper - even as workers' productivity, as well as corporate profits and executive pay, have soared.
In European counties, like France, where labor laws more heavily favor workers, some Amazon employees have been able to successfully unionize. That has paid dividends: in July, Amazon gave its French employees a 1.6% permanent raise following union negotiations.
In Bessemer, workers had a much tougher road to travel.
"Unions lose in 90% of the cases when management opposes the organizing effort," which Amazon's management did, Tom Kochan, a professor of management at MIT, told Insider.
That's depite a surge in pro-union sentiment in the US in recent years. Kochan's research in 2017 found that around 48% of non-union workers would join one if they had the opportunity, while a Gallup poll from August found that 65% of Americans approve of unions - the highest percentage in nearly 20 years.
But under US labor law, companies have lots of tools at their disposal to try to prevent employees from unionizing, from forcing them to listen to anti-union messaging in "captive-audience" meetings, to having a significant say over which employees are eligible to unionize in the first place. Even when companies violate those laws, the NLRB, which oversees union elections, lacks the power to issue fines, which experts said gives companies little incentive to play fair.
"The most important story is not the fact that the union didn't win. Rather, it's that they got as close to winning as they did," Erin Hatton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo whose research focuses on work and labor movements, told Insider.
"Through legal coercion and illegal tactics, employers spend a great deal of money to keep unions out and it usually works. So this outcome isn't all that surprising. And yet the workers were incredibly successful in so many ways," she said.
Anti-union tactics in the spotlight
One of those successes, experts said, was bringing attention to Amazon's industry-standard, but still aggressively anti-union tactics.
"Amazon's tactics during the campaign and voting process were successful for them but now are being questioned legally and in the public view," Lynne Vincent, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University, told Insider.
Even before employees started talking about forming a union, Amazon had hired private detectives known for union busting, spied on workers' private Facebook groups, and tracked unionization risk with a heat map tool in an effort to thwart organizing efforts before they gained momentum.
Amazon also illegally fired multiple employees last year who organized demonstrations to shed light on what they said were unsafe and grueling working conditions, the NLRB found. Amazon previously said it disagreed with the board's findings in one case, while the other case is still pending before an NLRB administrative law judge.
Once employees took their union drive public, Amazon enlisted expensive "union avoidance" consultants to help kick its union-busting tactics into overdrive. Amazon pushed its anti-union message through websites, t-shirts, frequent texts to employees, and midnight "education" meetings, which labor experts told Insider were fairly typically in union campaigns like this.
Amazon's executives and PR team also waged an atypical attack on members of Congress who voiced support for the unions (Amazon later apologized for some of its tweets), and deployed an army of warehouse employees to respond to criticism of the company on social media.
But the company also sought to shape the voting process itself.
The NLRB has allowed mail-in voting in union elections since March 2020 due to the pandemic, but Amazon (twice, unsuccessfully) tried to get the NLRB to hold an in-person election. When that failed, it reportedly pressed the United States Postal Service to install a mailbox outside the Bessemer warehouse.
An Amazon spokesperson previously told Insider that the USPS installed the mailbox "for the convenience of our employees."
But the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union - under which Amazon's Bessemer employees would have unionized if the vote had passed - accused Amazon of using the mailbox to intimidate workers and plans to file unfair labor practices charges with the NLRB that, if serious enough, could cause the NLRB to throw out the election result.
John Logan, a labor and employment professor at San Francisco State University who specializes in companies' union avoidance strategies, told Insider that the mailbox's placement likely gave employees an impression that "Amazon was playing some kind of direct role in monitoring and even perhaps in counting the votes, which clearly creates an atmosphere of pressure and potentially unlawful intimidation."
Vincent said that companies who use a similar anti-union playbook to Amazon "may see validation in the effectiveness of the tactics," but that the Bessemer campaign may also cause politicians to reexamine and ultimately outlaw some of those tactics.
What's next for American workers?
Kochan said the Bessemer union drive was "another clear indication that [US] labor law is broken, perhaps in its current form, beyond repair."
But many of the experts who spoke to Insider said the massive amount of attention and public support it generated suggest there may finally be an appetite to begin those repairs.
Under the Trump administration, the NLRB "systematically rolled back workers' rights," according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. President Joe Biden has already signaled he intends to be much more pro-worker than his predecessor, releasing a video in support of unionization efforts and against corporate "anti-union propaganda" - as Amazon employees were voting.
"Given the pro union sentiment in many areas, as well as the clear backing of the current administration, it would still not be surprising to see successful efforts to unionize businesses in other areas, and eventually, even at Amazon itself," Joseph Seiner, a labor and employment law professor at the University of South Carolina, told Insider.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voiced support for the Amazon employees' push to unionize. The House also passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize, harder for employers to misclassify workers, and ban certain union-busting tactics - though the bill faces steep odds in the Senate.
Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings who researches how technology impacts workers' lives, said that the Bessemer vote may push regulators to look more closely at how giant tech firms like Amazon exert power over workers.
"A lot of regulatory focus has hinged on anti-trust regulation-the need to break up Amazon because of its significant market power-but the truth is, Amazon also exerts monopsony power in labor markets. In areas where Amazon warehouses exist, wages go down, not up," Dubal said.
The COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests following George Floyd's death last May have also forced Americans to reckon with how race plays a role in the workplace. That became a focus in Bessemer, where the RWDSU estimated that 85% of Amazon's employees are Black, according to The New York Times.
"The core issue in the campaign was not about specific concessions but worker power. And in this case, it can't be distinguished from the struggle for racial equity," Premilla Nadasen, an associate professor of history at Barnard College who researches alternative labor movements, told Insider. "Black people are being disenfranchised electorally and subject to systemic violence. So, the struggle for economic control over matters more."
"Official union membership figures aside," she said, "more and more working-class Americans are recognizing the need to have a collective voice."
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