The unions had won the media battle. They lost the ballot box. Employees at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a poor town south of the former mining town of Birmingham, Alabama, voted against unionizing their site in a ratio of more than two to one.
According to CNBC, of the 3,215 ballots cast, 1,798 votes were against the union and 738 votes in favor. This is more than the required majority of 1,608, while the gap between “no” and “yes” is greater than the approximately 500 contested ballots, which, therefore, are unlikely to be counted.
The National Labor Relations Board, the federal body which organizes the ballot and its counting, had not yet declared, Friday, April 9, around noon local time, an official winner. The case is expected to continue in court. At stake, the right to vote granted or not to employees who have left the company as well as the late questioning of a letterbox installed in the Amazon parking lot, hidden by a tent, where employees could hand in their newsletter.
A highly politicized consultation
Nevertheless, the defeat is enormous in this highly politicized consultation. Several explanations: first, employees vote for their direct interests and there has clearly been no “convergence of struggles” between wage demands and the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, in a factory where nearly 80% of employees are African-American. Amazon pays an hourly wage of more than $ 15 (12.60 euros) an hour, more than twice the minimum wage, which is only $ 7.25 in Alabama.
Then, the company offers many health insurance plans, which allow employees to be covered from day one, which is decisive in this poor South during the Covid period. A large part of the employees are African-American women and perhaps they also wanted to ensure the rear for their families, especially as no one dared rule out that Amazon is closing the giant warehouse which employs around 5,600 people. .
All America remembers that, in early 2019, Jeff Bezos’ firm gave up its second headquarters in the working-class neighborhood of Queens, New York, when elected officials, including New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the muse of the American left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have started to ask that the site can be syndicated. “I don’t want it to end like in Florida, where they shut down three breweries after the unions cleared”, declared us, in March, in the parking lot of Amazon the employee Sandra McDonald.
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