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The narratives that journalists choose to tell about union campaigns largely promote the opposite idea: that unionism is aligned with the Democratic Party and its policy platform, opposition to a union campaign with Republicans or conservative Southern politics, and that workers’ support for a union in their workplace flows from their values and political identity. Conversely, when we start by talking to coworkers about their experience of work, people who are generally suspicious of unions or even right-wing politically become powerful union militants. As Organizing Work contributors have written about before, coworkers who espouse pro-union views often turn out not to want to do the hard work of talking to their coworkers or risk putting their jobs on the line with collective action. They lean towards gathering support as a matter of individual opinion. Mass media strategies paint the company as bad, the union as good, and try to garner “yes” votes the same way a political candidate gets votes. Organizing a union in a workplace isn’t about abstract support for the concept of a “union,” it’s about workers building relationships with each other to tackle the issues they face on the job.
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By the metrics of an earned media campaign, it was wildly successful.īut as we have learned, media coverage cannot win an organizing campaign. Joe Biden weighed in with his support for the organizing effort. It was featured in over 53,000 news stories. The Bessemer campaign had massive coverage. And this takes a steady stream of new applicants who believe it’s paid well enough to try. Amazon is filtering for the workers who are desperate enough, able-bodied enough, to work to the bone. Working at the speed demanded by bosses takes a worker who is willing to risk their health and work to exhaustion. In facilities like the one in Bessemer, most workers spend their whole 10-hour shift doing repetitive tasks directed by a computer: putting items on shelves, taking them off, sorting them into individual orders, packing boxes. Besides, Amazon’s “innovation” is not lower wages but Taylorism applied to the warehouse as if it were a factory. The starting wage in facilities near expensive metropolitan areas, like the large warehouse south of Seattle that opened in 2016, was already approaching $15 an hour. The company had expanded to the point that they could no longer simply choose to locate their warehouses in economically depressed areas with few jobs and low costs of living. Bernie Sanders had introduced a proposed tax with a name shortened to the “Stop Bezos Act.” However, Amazon’s decision to raise wages seems to have had as much to do with the labor market.
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The best-known instance was the $15 wage floor, announced in October 2018.
#WHO LIVES WHO DIES WHO TELLS YOUR STORY SOFTWARE#
On June 10, barely two weeks into the massive wave of protests over George Floyd’s murder, they announced a one-year moratorium on selling facial recognition software to police departments. Like many unions, they have often used the “corporate campaign” strategy of beating an employer up in the press.Īmazon has bowed to public pressure before - or, more precisely, they have responded to shifts in public opinion.
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Not all of that may have been RWDSU’s intention, although they constantly promoted and responded to the coverage. The RWDSU campaign against Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama was a media frenzy from the beginning. Carmen Molinari analyzes why media strategies don’t win organizing campaigns.