The Amazon Union Vote and the Southern Textile Mill
The unionization efforts of Amazon’s fulfillment facility in Bessemer, Alabama failed to rally the needed number of votes to become the first unionized Amazon facility in the US. The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, which led the drive, blamed its defeat on what it said were Amazon’s anti-union tactics before and during the voting. The union said it would challenge the result and ask federal labor officials to investigate Amazon for creating an “atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals.”
Until then, the union effort will be analyzed by many people to determine what went wrong.
In 2020, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions, was 10.8%, up by 0.5% from 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To me, a telling quote from a New York Times article summed up the union failure:
In a news conference organized by Amazon, workers said they had concerns that they wanted the company to address, like better training and anti-bias coaching for managers.
“We just feel like we can do it without the union. Why pay the union to do what we can do ourselves?” said an Amazon worker.
I can close my eyes and hear most of my family who worked in textile mills in South Carolina back in the 1950s up to the 1980s literally say the same thing. All except my great-uncle Louie who led an effort to unionize a textile mill in the 1970s. He failed and was ultimately fired for some other reason but it was really because of his union attempts. I wonder what great-uncle Louie would say about Amazon if he was alive today?
I was intrigued when I first heard of the unionization efforts of the Amazon facility in Alabama. Not because it was Amazon but because there was a union effort in Alabama. I had a feeling it would be voted down simply because of where it was occurring.
The South, in general, has historically been anti-union, a reason why, I believe, a number of businesses have moved into the region. However, the region continues to evolve and there are pockets of union activity scattered throughout the region.
But, getting back to Amazon…
After reading Mark Solomon’s article, Amazon borrows from FedEx playbook to smoke union drive in Bessemer, I decided to take Mark’s article a step further.
Amazon not only borrowed from FedEx’s playbook but also Walmart’s playbook and other large corporations’ playbooks.
While playbooks have changed through the years, corporations have used similar persuasive abilities with employees to make union efforts here in the South difficult to win ever since the textile mills, much like Amazon fulfillment facilities, dotted the region.
Perhaps it’s me just being the armchair business historian but I equate Amazon with the early Southern textile mill in a lot of weird ways.
Consider this quote from an early mill worker: "nothing but a robot life. Roboting is my word for it -- in the mill you do the same thing over and over again -- just like on a treadmill. There's no challenge to it -- just drudgery. The more you do, the more they want done. But in farming you do work real close to nature. There's always something exciting and changing in nature."
This statement is similar to how some Amazon workers described their work:
“I was a picker and we were expected to always pick 400 units within the hour in seven seconds of each item we picked. I couldn’t handle it. I’m a human being, not a robot,” said an Amazon worker.
Indeed, not only does Amazon monitor the number of picks, but it also monitors employees throughout their work shifts. Earlier this year, Amazon installed monitoring cameras in delivery vehicles that send footage back to the company for review without telling the driver.
Amazon has been accused of being very controlling when it comes to its employees. So were the southern textile mills, not only in the mills but even outside of them.
As part of a series on Southern labor, a paper on the Southern textile industry from Georgia State University described mill towns:
“At the turn of the century, more than 90 percent of mill workers lived in company towns, where textile owners controlled everything from homes to churches and schools. Many had their own police forces. Though the textile owners initially built the mill villages to attract workers to the plants, many workers suffered from poor living conditions. Millhands also found that their lives were regulated through a series of rules that regulated their time outside of the mills. Some mill owners penalized workers for drinking in public -- even when they were off the job. Talk of unions was expressly forbidden.”
These mill towns lasted until at least the 1950s when the mills began to move away from managing these towns and allowing workers to buy their homes, disbanding their own police forces, and allowing other stores onto mill property.
What happened to most of the southern textile mills could serve as a warning to Amazon employees.
After a flurry of consolidation, textile mills began to invest in automation technology resulting in layoffs. This was then followed by the rise in outsourcing and resulted in most of the textile mills closing by the 1990s.
(This is the former Springs Industries plant in Lyman, SC. My mom’s first job after high school was here. My grandfather was plant manager and I had several other family members who worked here.)
Amazon is a technology company and has made significant technology investments in its fulfillment facilities. At the same time, it is hiring more and more employees. How long this trend continues is unknown. It may be indefinitely but Amazon could eventually take a page out of JD.com’s book and began to experiment with completely automated fulfillment facilities run by about 5 or ten employees.
Thanks for reading!
Cathy