Updated
Feb 24, 2021
Amazon Workers Fight To Unionize Draws Help From Around The World
Labor groups across the country and beyond are joining the effort to create a union at an Amazon facility in Alabama, which would be a first in the U.S.
Roughly a hundred organizers have been calling workers from Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse in recent weeks, making the case for why they should unionize. The robust phone-banking operation reflects the high stakes for organized labor as workers at the facility consider forming the first Amazon union in the U.S.
The organizing effort extends well beyond the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which would represent the facility’s employees. The phone campaign includes around 20 organizers on loan from the AFL-CIO, the influential labor federation that includes 55 unions. A dozen nurses who recently unionized their hospital in North Carolina also have been pitching on the effort, calling workers to tell them large-sc
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Through March 30, almost 6,000 Amazon workers are voting on a potentially groundbreaking decision: whether to form the company s first unionized warehouse in America. It s the first unionization vote in years at a company that s ballooned into the country s second largest private employer and one of the world s most valuable.
For years, labor organizers and workers have tried to galvanize Amazon warehouses all around the country, including places famous for being union-friendly like New York. But the first one to get to this potentially historic union vote is in Bessemer, Alabama.
We explain how this warehouse union election came to be, and how it could upend history for both Amazon AND the South.