As Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, told Vice, NLRB elections “are not a reflection of whether workers want a voice on the job, but rather show the imbalance of labor law and resources in favor of employers.” In the United States, every step of the unionization process is stacked against workers. It is a miracle that anyone ever unionizes. In polls, about half of nonunion workers in the country say they’d join a union if they could; there are countless obstacles ensuring that they won’t. The Bessemer campaign reflects that reality but to a heightened degree.
After RWDSU filed for an NLRB election in November of 2020, Amazon held “captive audience meetings,” mandatory sessions where workers heard management tell them why they shouldn’t unionize. Managers lie in these meetings, and the ones in Bessemer are no exceptions. The company texted workers several times a day to urge them to vote no. They papered the facility’s bathroom stalls with anti-union flyers. They outfitted temp workers, ineligible for the union but especially vulnerable to management pressure, with “vote no” swag, ensuring they’d serve as walking anti-union propaganda on the shop floor.
Perhaps just as important was Amazon’s success in setting the terms of the union itself. During NLRB hearings prior to the vote, the company argued that the bargaining unit should be 5,800 people, rather than the 1,500-person unit for which the union had filed. Under existing law, the employer has standing to say which workers should be in a union and which shouldn’t. Further, under a 2017 NLRB decision, it is easier than ever for the boss to determine the size and scope of a bargaining unit. Amazon won the argument over the unit’s size, adding many more temporary seasonal workers to the unit and thereby inflating the number of people organizers needed to reach. Contacting these workers, persuading them, keeping track of them, and inoculating them against the boss’s scare tactics takes an immense amount of time and energy. More than 3,000 workers signed union cards by mid-January, but that was time and energy that might have otherwise been devoted to shoring up a majority of the original 1,500-person bargaining unit.
it's definitely the "settlers" (a majority of whom are black) own fault the vote failed