The Alabama Town That Could Defeat Jeff Bezos

Some 5,800 people who work at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, a town just outside of Birmingham, will receive union ballots on Monday. They have until March 29 to decide whether they want to affiliate with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, and in doing so, defy the wishes of Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world.

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It’s pure David and Goliath, though maybe that doesn’t fully capture it. Bezos is worth $184 billion; the median household income in Bessemer is just over $30,000. One in four residents live in poverty. This is a man who has everything trying to crush a town. Should the organizing drive succeed, the Bessemer employees will be the first Amazon workers to unionize in the U.S. A smaller effort, involving a few dozen technicians in Middleton, Delaware, was defeated in 2014, with a vote of 21 (no) to 6 (yes).

The question of how this happened is one Bezos is probably asking himself, wondering how his union-detection algorithms failed to predict an organizing drive at this location, and one that emerged so quickly. Usually it takes years for the newness of a facility to wear off, while here, not even the $15.30 starting wage, more than double the Alabama minimum of $7.25, could stave off a union push, which happened within months of the warehouse’s opening in March of last year.

Part of the story is that this isn’t just Alabama; it’s Bessemer.

The Birmingham-Bessemer region was once a center of both the steel and iron industries, as well as home to coal and iron-ore mines. Coal strikes were a regular occurrence, and it was a stronghold of the United Mine Workers of America, responsible for Alabama having a 25 percent union membership rate by the mid-twentieth century. For context, that’s higher than any state’s current union membership rate. Deindustrialization decimated these numbers: In 2020, only 8 percent of Alabama workers were union members.

While there were segregated union locals, as in much of the South, there were also left-led, multiracial unions such as the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill, for short). In the latter, as described by historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “the prevalence of Black workers and the union’s egalitarian goals gave the movement an air of civil rights activism.”