Boeing’s Orders for Planes Signal a Recovery: Live Updates
President Biden’s video message last week expressing support for organized labor amid a heated unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse outside Birmingham, Ala., has invigorated the drive to improve working conditions at the retail giant — in a state historically inhospitable to organized labor.
“I couldn’t believe he said something,” said Darryl Richardson, one of the workers helping to organize a campaign that has targeted one of the world’s most profitable companies and its billionaire chief executive, Jeff Bezos.
“It matters. It eased minds that might be worried about losing their job,” he said.
Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a former steel town, are voting this week on whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
If successful, they would be the first of Amazon’s 400,000 American workers to join a union — a landmark undertaking and early test of Mr. Biden’s campaign claim that he will be the “most pro-union president” ever.
“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address posted on the White House Twitter page, after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.
“We’ve been waiting on him,” added Mike Foster, one of the lead organizers for the union, of Mr. Biden’s statement.
The drive has pitted company against worker and neighbor against neighbor as a potentially broader labor push brews at a corporation that has long resisted similar efforts. Mr. Biden’s words demonstrated a willingness to support communities that have often fallen outside the Democratic Party’s governing focus: working-class voters in Republican states, many of whom are Black.
The message also elevated the national debate about the future of labor and unions, a cross-ideological issue on which Mr. Biden can uniquely find common cause with the progressive wing of his party even as many Democrats continue to shy away.
Mr. Biden’s statement did not mention Amazon specifically and carefully avoided backing the union, calling instead for a fair election that followed federal labor guidelines.
What’s more, the presidential nod to Alabama supercharged the Democratic arms race to find the next Georgia, a Southern state where the party capitalized on decades of organizing and demographic change to break Republicans’ grip on statewide elections.
The task will be tougher in Alabama: The state is much more firmly Republican than its Southern neighbor. It has not experienced the rapid demographic change that made Georgia’s political transformation possible, and does not have its considerable numbers of college-educated suburban moderates.
Still, Alabama Democrats see the growth of unions — and the vote in Bessemer — as a crucial first step.
“Watching what happened in Georgia has given people a lot of hope,” said Kathleen Kirkpatrick, the political director of Hometown Action, a statewide activist group. “What Stacey Abrams did started a decade ago and took a lot of help. So let’s think about where we are on that path.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/09/business/stock-market-today/