In recent years, communities in California's Inland Empire, upstate New York, and rural Massachusetts, have protested the arrival of Amazon facilities, charging that the company brings air pollution, traffic jams, and non-union warehouse jobs that push wages downward, while bullying cities and states into offering generous tax breaks. In recent years, Amazon threatened to stop hiring and opening warehouses in Texas and North Carolina until both states offered tax breaks. Most American cities, though, particularly in low-income areas, welcome the company with generous rewards. "Bezos has made getting government handouts and tax incentives a major pillar of how he grew this business," said Stacey Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "Lots of places are struggling economically. It makes it hard to say 'no' to the appearance of anything that looks like jobs ...It’s impossible to overstate how much those public subsidies and tax advantages helped Amazon grow.""I thought that working for the richest man in the world meant that he was going to treat us right.”
A few months after the Bessemer facility opened, Amazon warehouse workers, including Richardson, called up organizers at RWDSU. They planned a secret meeting. In September, roughly a dozen workers and organizers met at a Fairfield Inn, about a mile from the Amazon warehouse, to discuss working conditions at Amazon and the potential for a union."They really treat you like an animal, like something that's built for a task.”
RWDSU had already played a key role in pushing Amazon to abandon its plans to open a second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens in 2018. It had also been organizing in Black communities in Birmingham and Alabama since the 1960s and 1970s, when union members marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery. Workers at the Bessemer warehouse, which is 85 percent Black and 65 percent women, trusted RWDSU organizers. During several highly-publicized United Auto Workers (UAW) campaigns over the past decade, at Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen plants, union detractors argued the UAW was an untrustworthy northern outsider. During the campaign to unionize the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama in 2013, an anti-union group famously paid for a billboard along the same Interstate that the Amazon warehouse now sits off. It read: "Don't let the UAW turn Alabama into the next Detroit." Each of these efforts failed. It was hard to make the same outsider argument of RWDSU, which has long occupied a two-story office building in downtown Birmingham.Other unions that have led high-profile unionization drives in the South in recent years have been accused of being outsiders. But it’s hard to make the same argument of RWDSU.
"For them, this is just a short term job. I try to tell them, 'hey it's okay to support the union.'"
In recent days, warehouse workers removed and vandalized RWDSU's tent outside the Circle K gas station, and "Vote Yes!" union signs that line the sides of Power Plant Road. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America Birmingham chapter have been canvassing neighborhoods, asking strangers to put signs on their lawns indicating that they support a union at Amazon. "We think we're gonna win," said Brewer. "But we think we have a really, really big fight on our hands. This is definitely a very real race. There's absolutely a 'no' base. There's absolutely a 'yes' base."Do you have a tip to share with us about labor organizing at Amazon? Please get in touch with the reporter Lauren via email Lauren.gurley@vice.com or securely on Signal (201) 897-2109.