Alabama’s Amazon union push latest chapter in state’s tumultuous labor history

Amazon union

A man stands along Powder Plant Road with a sign encouraging Amazon employees to vote yes for a union, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. (William Thornton/al.com)

A mail-in vote beginning this week on whether employees at Amazon’s Bessemer fulfillment center can be represented by a union has garnered worldwide attention, in no small part because of Alabama’s reputation as a right-to-work state.

But Alabama’s history shows a persistent, and in some cases, strong history of union agitation and action.

“If you go from California to Maryland,” Michael Innis-Jimenez, a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, said, “Alabama historically has the highest number of union employees in the Deep South and lower Southwest. Obviously‚ it doesn’t compare to traditional union states like New York or Illinois or California, but it is high.”

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"Some of the Most Attractive Floats in the Big Labor Day Parade in Birmingham." From the rotogravure section of the Birmingham Age-Herald, Sunday, October 8, 1916.

Ballots go out Feb. 8 to more than 5,000 workers in a mail-in vote on whether workers at the Amazon center want to organize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). With a membership of up to 18,000 members in Alabama, the RWDSU represents more than 100,000 across the U.S.

Workers must return the ballots by March 29.

Here is full coverage of the Alabama Amazon unionization effort

The National Labor Relations Board says it will be the largest mail ballot election run during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its catching attention as the first major push for a union among Amazon workers since 2014.

Alabama is a right-to-work state, meaning that workers cannot be forced to join a union or pay union dues. Those laws have been on the books since the early 1950s.

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Members of the Alabama National Guard on duty during a coal miners' strike in Jefferson County in 1908

Nationally, a little less than 11% of American workers were represented by a union in 2020. Alabama was beneath that average, at 8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number has fluctuated over the last few years. The union membership rate for the state was at its recent peak in 1993, when it averaged 14.7%, and at an ebb in 2017 at 7.4%.

But back in Alabama’s postwar industrial heyday, union membership was estimated as high as 30%, with union activity heavy in mining, steel production and textiles. And, as in the case of the Amazon push, Alabama’s union history has occasionally been at the center of the state’s enduring struggle over race and civil rights.

“At first glance, it’s probably surprising, but once you get into it, you realize it’s not that out of character, especially for the Birmingham area, especially a working-class suburb (like Bessemer),” Innis-Jimenez said.

At a rally Saturday for the union in Bessemer, Joshua Brewer, an organizing director for the RWDSU, alluded to the history of organizing in the area.

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"Striking miners, both white and negro, as they were stopped on their march to the Red Diamond Mine are shown listening to Lieut. Col. James A. Webb, in command of the National Guard troops who told them that nothing could be gained by bloodshed. After listening to the speech the miners dispersed." April 22, 1934.

“This is a union town. It’s long been a union town, and it’s going to continue to be a union town,” Brewer said.

Historian Wayne Flynt, who has written extensively about labor issues in several Alabama histories, related a story his father told about witnessing a fight between union workers and scabs brought in during a strike in the 1930s. Baseball bats and axe handles were the order of the day.

“He said it was the damnedest fight he’d ever seen in his life,” Flynt said. “He decided he didn’t want any part of that.”

Alabama saw widespread organizing in the later part of the 19th century among mine workers. By the early 1900s, the United Mine Workers believed they had enlisted about 65 percent of the miners in Alabama, both among Blacks and whites. But, as historian Robert Norrell wrote in “The Making of Modern Alabama,” race was used to break strikes.

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Man playing a piano at a Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) union meeting in Ensley during at strike at the TCI U.S. Steel plants in Birmingham, Alabama. Description Both white and African American members are attending the meeting. A sign on the walls read, "The S.W.O.C. Gave You a Vacation with Pay - What Have You Done?" 1941-09-27

During a 1908 miners’ strike, Gov. Braxton Comer instructed the state militia to cut down tents where striking miners were living. He threatened to rewrite vagrancy laws and imprison striking Black miners, and warned strikers not to block railroads unless “they wanted to be run over.” The strike was broken.

Union mobilization was so strong in the 1930s, in fact, that the American Communist Party opened an office in Birmingham. In 1931, a mob killed six black sharecroppers looking to organize near Camp Hill, dumping one man’s body on the Tallapoosa County Courthouse’s steps in Dadeville to be used for target practice.

In July 1934, textile workers in Gadsden and Guntersville walked off the job, touching off a nationwide strike that some consider the largest labor conflict in U.S. history. But the effort failed, largely because of the fractured nature of the textile industry.

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Guardsmen on duty outside the gates of the TCI U.S. Steel plant at Ensley during a strike in Birmingham, Alabama. 1941-09-27

Flynt said the history of union organization in Alabama is largely forgotten because the state’s industrial strategy has been focused on “selling Alabama as providing cheap labor.”

“Our whole recruitment strategy has been - we won’t tax you, we won’t regulate you, and we won’t side with labor against you,” he said.

Innis-Jimenez said Alabama also defies certain conventional thinking about who belongs to unions. While membership largely involves working class whites, their involvement hasn’t traditionally been automatically affiliated with the political left.

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Communications Workers of America members pointing at a door where strikers threw eggs and smashed windows at the 6th Avenue exchange of the Southern Bell Telephone Company in Birmingham. They are carrying signs that reads, "C.W.A. on Strike Against Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Co." and "C.W.A. on Strike Because Southern Bell Rejected Arbitration." In 1955, CWA members staged a successful 72-day strike against Southern Bell. This photograph was published in the Birmingham News on April 9 with the following caption: "Pickets at the Sixth-av exchange of Southern Bell Telephone Co. here point to doors of the building where strikers and their sympathizers threw eggs and smashed windows early Saturday."

“When people think of unions, they think of progressive or Democrat – it’s seen politically as a blue thing,” he said. “Of course, that’s been thrown out of the window with Trump. Because you’ve got white, working class union members who supported Trump. At first glance, it’s probably surprising, but once you get into it, you realize it’s not that out of character, especially for the Birmingham area, especially a working-class suburb.”

Race was one reason for fractured union activity, Flynt said. While union meetings often featured high-flown rhetoric about brotherhood, that same spirit wasn’t evident once the meeting was over.

“Once Blacks walked out of the meeting, they were back in an apartheid society,” he said. “Whites and Blacks had common economic interests, but no much beyond that. And it’s hard to build a union when people don’t trust each other.”

Stuart Appelbaum, RWDSU president, said race is still playing a part in organization today, as organizers have pointed to the high percentage of Black workers at the Bessemer Amazon center.

“Alabama was one of the most highly organized states in the union before right to work legislation,” Appelbaum said. “I think what’s really significant about this campaign too is that it’s as much of a civil rights struggle as a labor struggle.”

What happened to unions in Alabama in the later half of the 20th century reflected national trends. The influence of organized labor began to diminish with the decline of the industries - steel, coal and textiles. Unions themselves also lost influence as America’s middle class grew following World War II.

Innes-Jimenez said Amazon probably didn’t expect union organization in Alabama - not like it might have anticipated in New York or Chicago. But the RWDSU has a regional headquarters in Birmingham, and a base among poultry workers. And activity has been largely local, he said.

“The organizers are Alabamians,” he said. “I think it makes a difference. You have workers organizing and there’s no big outside union leader.”

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