Depending on who you ask, Amazon’s victory in last weeks’ union vote in Bessemer was either a crushing defeat for organized labor in America, or the first step in a continuing campaign to bring unions to online retail and Big Tech.
According to the results of last Friday’s vote count, only about 12.5% of the eligible workers at Amazon’s Bessemer fulfillment center actually voted to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union, even after a mail-in election period that lasted for almost two months. That showing also came after weeks of national media coverage and public shows of support that went all the way to President Joe Biden.
The U.S. labor secretary said it would be a mistake to think of the vote as anything more than one election in one corner of the country.
Here is full coverage of the Alabama Amazon unionization effort
“I don’t think you can judge the fate of labor on one vote,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “I think there will be other conversations as we move forward in the country, in other companies as well as Amazon.”
Upon the election result, the RWDSU immediately called for an investigation into Amazon’s conduct during the union drive, accusing the company of unlawfully interfering with the right of employees to engage in union activity.
But the Bessemer vote could signal a change in tactics for union organizers around the country.
During the RWDSU campaign, five Democratic Representatives, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), visited Bessemer, drawing attention to The Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the U.S. House and is currently with the Senate.
The Pro Act is being called the most sweeping change to labor law in decades. But observers give it little chance of passing through an evenly-divided Senate. Among its more controversial provisions would be eliminating right-to-work protections that keep employees from being forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment.
According to Fortune, it would also expand the definition of what an employee is, and allow for more strikes while making it harder for employers to replace striking workers. Enacting those changes might reverse years of declining union membership. Private sector union membership stood at 6.3 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2020, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
Patricia Campos-Medina is the executive director of The Worker Institute at Cornell University, which studies contemporary labor issues. She said the Bessemer vote illustrates why the PRO Act is being advanced. Currently labor law provides for union votes at individual workplaces instead of companywide. If the union had won at Bessemer, for example, Amazon would still have had more than 100 fulfillment centers around the country without unions.
“We who follow organizing and the labor movement understand that there are big mountains to overcome in terms of labor law reform that is needed for enterprise labor organizing to be successful,” Campos-Medina said. “So from the beginning we understood that it was a very high risk that the union was not going to win this election, because the deck is stacked against workers organizing against a multinational company like Amazon.”
Chances the PRO Act would pass the Senate are unlikely, unless the Senate Democratic leadership were to change the filibuster rules. Failing that, some observers say the next likely strategy might be establishing a minority union.
Susan Schurman, a distinguished professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, said a minority union would only represent workers who wish to join. This would allow them to elect officers and shop stewards and engage in activity to improve working conditions.
“We saw a prominent example earlier this year when 200 Google workers formed a minority union,” Schurman said. “The problem is that labor leaders do not think of minority representation as a viable option. But with private sector unionization at a historic low of 6.3%, it’s time they started.”
Organizers at Alabama auto manufacturers, for example, have spoken of adopting minority union strategies, as every plant-wide union vote at foreign owned auto plants in the Deep South has failed. Unions have had more success with auto suppliers instead of the main manufacturing plants. Campos-Medina mentioned a similar strategy with Amazon, given its size and the complexity of its logistical network.
“Organizing Amazon requires both a change of law to sectoral bargaining, to more comprehensive approaches by different union across the production line,” Campos-Medina said. “This campaign in Bessemer is just the beginning of a long coming battle to transform Amazon’s monopoly control of warehousing and logistics workplace standards.”