Damn

The union drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama failed. It failed spectacularly: 

Earlier today the National Labor Relations Board announced the results of the vote on whether workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., would join a union. The vote was 738 in favor to 1,798 against. It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.

The stories of horrific working conditions at Amazon are well-known. Long before the campaign at Bessemer, anyone paying even scant attention would be aware that workers toil at such a grueling pace that they resort to urinating in bottles so as not to get disciplined for taking too much time to use the facilities, which the company calls “time off task.” Christian Smalls was fired a year ago for speaking publicly about people not getting personal protective equipment in his Amazon facility, in bright-blue state New York. Jennifer Bates, the Amazon employee from the Bessemer warehouse, delivered testimony to Congress that would make your stomach turn. Workers at Amazon desperately need to unionize, in Alabama, Germany—and any other place where the high-tech, futuristic employer with medieval attitudes about employees sets up a job site of any kind. With conditions so bad, what explains the defeat in Bessemer?

Three factors weigh heavily in any unionization election: the outrageously vicious behavior of employers—some of it illegal, most fully legal—including harassing and intimidating workers, and telling bold lies (which, outside of countries with openly repressive governments, is unique to the United States); the strategies and tactics used in the campaign by the organizers; and the broader social-political context in which the union election is being held.

First, it needs to be stated that the legal and regulatory environment regarding unionization in the US has been hostile the labor unions since the passing of Taft-Hartley, but the organizers knew that.

I will add that Mike Elk at Payday Report has a very good analysis of what the organizers did wrong:

Today, the union drive at Amazon in Alabama, which drew unprecedented political and media attention, was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin.

………

In our interviews with workers, we discovered most workers held similar views to Beringer. It wasn’t that they hated unions, who were heavily against them, but that they didn’t know much about unions and didn’t feel they could trust them.

In winning union elections, the election feels like more of a formality since the organizing committee has already been acting as a union, winning campaigns in the workplace to change things and standing up for co-workers facing unfair disciplining.

Then, when the union election comes, workers feel like they already know the union and are a part of it. In massive facilities with thousands of workers like Amazon, the process of building a strong organizing committee and building trust in the organizing committee through concerted action can sometimes take years.

RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] had only started its campaign last June when outrage over unsafe working conditions during COVID was raw. While they had an outpouring of initial momentum and interest, they never developed a strong organizing committee that took the time to build trust through shop-floor action and organizing against the boss.

Instead, they rushed a union election or did what is known in union organizing as “hot shopping,” where union organizers hope to take advantage of an outburst of anger in a facility over things such as poor COVID working conditions to force and win and a quick union election.

A "hot shopping" campaign is were the unionization effort is driven by an immediate issue, think shootings of clerks at a store and management refusing to add security cameras, rather than a long term organizing effort.

This was a case of long standing issues and the philosophy of management, and the effort needed to deeper and broader

However, their initial union enthusiasm support collapsed under the weight of a sophisticated anti-union campaign by Amazon that combined threats of job loss with promises of improvement if workers rejected the union. Many workers in interviews that voted against the union, admitted that they knew little about unions. This allowed the company through anti-union meetings to create fear over the change that unions could bring, warning workers that their wages may actually decrease under a contract or worse that their facility may close.

………

Without a strong organizing committee already engaging the boss in shop-floor action, workers had no ability to see the potential upside of the union because they never got to see the union in action on the shop floor before being asked to vote on joining it.

(emphasis mine)

There are a number of people, including Mike Elk, suggesting that there are the seeds of victory in this loss, but I don't see that.

If it were, many Walmarts around the nation would already be unionized.

The only people heartened by this development are Jeff Bezos and his Evil Minions^™.