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**NOVEMBER 26, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

The Long-Running Search for Amazon's Conscience

Earlier this week, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama,
filed a notice

to hold a unionization election. The Retail, Wholesale and Department
Store Union division of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which
has been conducting an organizing campaign among the warehouse's 1,500
workers, met the 30-percent-of-the-workforce threshold required by
federal labor law to trigger an election, but it's clear that the
RWDSU wouldn't have filed if it didn't have substantially more
support than that.

Should the workers prevail, they'll be breaking through a number of
barriers. Amazon, perhaps the most iconic monopoly of the 21st century,
is entirely non-union in the United States, though many of its
warehouses are unionized in Europe, where business and the political
order are less pathologically anti-union than they are in the U.S.
Despite the substantial documentation of the brutal working conditions
within its warehouses, Amazon has thus far fended off all efforts by its
American workers to win collective bargaining. A report

this week from Vice

****documents the company's ongoing efforts, using electronic
surveillance and Pinkerton agents, to spy on its employees precisely to
kill any drives toward unionization. And, as if opposition from the
company with the world's highest market value, headed by the
individual (Jeff Bezos) with the world's largest fortune (about $180
billion and rising), wasn't daunting enough, the state of Alabama and
its governing officials can also be counted on to do everything to
defeat their workers' efforts. (Historically, Southern right-wingers
have opposed unions not just because they hate and fear them as such,
but also because unions are often multiracial and may erode the
South's racial hierarchy. The racially diverse workforce of an Amazon
warehouse could present just such a threat.)

The move by Amazon's Alabama employees to win a voice and some power
also poses a challenge to the company's vastly more advantaged
workers, who write and run the software that facilitates product
logistics and keeps its cloud afloat. A number of such employees, in its
Seattle headquarters and satellite offices, have periodically protested
the company's abuse of its less-favored workers; its top software
engineer actually quit the company last May to protest such treatment.
Assuming RWDSU frames this struggle in the most compelling way, the
coming months could see a poor, exploited workforce doing frontline,
essential work in the face of a pandemic battling the world's richest
man determined to deny them their rights. That could mobilize many of
the company's privileged tech workers to come to the warehouse
workers' defense-at least, if common decency hasn't been driven
out of them. It should also mobilize many thousands of Americans to
rally to the workers' cause, too.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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