Why The PRO-Act Is Key To Racial Justice And Economic Democracy
The initial results for RWDSU’s high profile organizing drive at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama demonstrate the extent that labor laws favor employers during unionization efforts. The historic campaign also illustrates the struggles that working class people of color face in achieving economic justice in the fast growing fulfilment and logistics sector. And more presciently, the campaign highlights the need for better legal protections for such workers seeking to unionize, namely passage of The PRO-Act.
In a video press conference on April 9, RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum recognized the efforts of the Bessemer workers while pointing out, “The results demonstrate the powerful impact of employer intimidation and interference. Amazon misled and tried to manipulate workers. They took full advantage of terrible labor laws.”
Amazon pulled out all of the stops to counter the union campaign in its Bessemer location. From hiring big dollar union avoidance consultants to requiring mandatory hour long anti-union meetings, to launching anti-union social media accounts and websites, and blanketing the facility with posters and banners, even in bathrooms. Amazon worked to change traffic light patterns at intersections where organizers were canvassing and even installed its own USPS mailboxes in front of the facility to collect ballots. For the time being, these tactics were successful and RWDSU has challenged the outcome of the campaign with objections filed to the National Labor Relations Board. The context of Bessemer gives that much more of a sense of urgency for the legal protections that Senate passage of the PRO (Protecting the Right To Organize) Act would bring to working people.
Passed by the House of Representatives in March, the PRO-Act is the strongest labor legislation in decades, and may also be the most effective tool to ensure economic democracy and racial justice in the modern era. The PRO Act would introduce enforceable penalties for companies that violate workers’ rights, expand collective bargaining rights and close loopholes that allow companies to exploit workers, and critically, strengthen workers’ access to fair union elections and require companies to respect the results. The bill would also enable more people currently classified as contractors to be given the status of employees, paving the way for freelancers and gig workers to negotiate better pay and working conditions. Essentially, much of what Amazon management did to convince workers to vote down and defeat the union would be illegal under the PRO-Act.
This new intersection of workplace democracy and racial justice has never been more visible and important. Over eighty percent of the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer are Black and a majority of them are women. This trend is consistent with recent labor history across the South: Black women have been leading unionization efforts for over fifty years, including successful efforts at textile factories, auto plants, shipyards, meat processing plants and hospitals. As Stuart Appelbaum of RWDSU noted in the video conference, “The struggle is a civil rights struggle as much as a labor struggle.”
And these demographic trends for unionization extend nationally. Nearly two-thirds of union workers are women and/or people of color and Black workers are unionized at higher rates than white workers. Black union women earn 19 percent more than women without a union and Black construction workers in New York City earn 36 percent more than nonunion black construction workers. Union wage premiums are largest for low-wage sectors where jobs are primarily held by Black, Latino and immigrant workers, such as hospitality, nursing and janitorial services. Union workers in such food service and janitorial jobs make 87 percent more in total compensation, and over 50% more in wages, than non-union workers.
These union workers are also much more likely to have employer-provided health care plans and pensions, and have much more vacation time. And in the wake of Covid-19, there is ample evidence that unions create safe workplaces by enabling workplace democracy and protection from retaliation. And public opinion of unions has become more favorable recently, with 68 percent of 18-29 years old’s viewing unions favorably and nearly 48% of non-unionized workers saying they would join a union.
Meanwhile, Big Tech companies are celebrating the current RWDSU defeat while putting millions of dollars into union avoidance campaigns and defeating the PRO-Act. While a handful of such executives and investors have benefited from well documented racialized wealth disparities and dystopian working conditions in their supply chains, unions have a hundred year long track record of enabling better wages and working conditions, especially for women and people of color in recent decades. The struggle for racial justice won’t be won by hollow and sanctimonious corporate virtue signaling that overlooks any guarantees of material gains. It will instead require solidarity, workplace democracy and collective bargaining to overcome the decades of stagnant wages, growing wealth inequality and exploitative working conditions that have tracked with declining union density. Do you want justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in the work place? Then support the PRO-Act.
Or as RWDSU’s Mid South Regional Vice President, chicken processing plant worker and union organizer “Big Mike” Foster said during the April 9th video conference, “We have just begun to fight.”
