LABOR REGROUPS AFTER AMAZON, ALABAMA EXECS BEAT UNION EFFORT

Despite the strongest public support and the most sympathetic president in years, the American labor movement just suffered a stinging defeat – again, Paul Wiseman and Anne D’Innocenzo reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, overwhelmingly voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in much-anticipated election results announced Friday.

The anti-labor Amazon and business groups as well as state officials who intimidated workers celebrated the decision, saying warehouse workers got a chance to weigh the pros and cons of union membership -- and voted to reject it.

But labor activists argue that the lopsided vote shows how unfairly the odds are stacked against union organizing efforts and highlights the need for Congress to reform US labor law. The House last month passed such legislation -- the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act -- but it looks likely to die in the Senate.

The Bessemer results “reveal a broken union election system,” Celine McNicholas, labor counsel at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said in a statement. “It is clear that if policymakers do not reform our nation’s labor law system, then they are effectively denying workers a meaningful right to a union and collective bargaining.’’

The retail union complains that Amazon plastered the Alabama workplace with anti-union posters and forced employees to sit through mandatory sessions in which the company disparaged the union. Labor organizers, by contrast, had to catch employees outside the warehouse gate to make their pitch.

“The law failed the workers,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard Law School. “The law gives employers far too much latitude to interfere in workers’ ability to make a choice to join a union. That choice should be for the workers to make, not the employers to make.”

Amazon supporters note that the company paid an average of $15.30 an hour -- more than double minimum wage in Alabama -- and offered health care and other benefits. “Randy Korgan, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ national director for Amazon, rejected the idea Amazon pays competitive wages at a time when $15 an hour has become the minimum wage in some states. Korgan said he made more than $15 an hour himself as a warehouse worker in the early 1990s.

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