All eyes on Alabama
On leaving the news business and taking a side
The most important election this year is the one taking place at an Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.
About 5,800 workers there are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). The stakes are high for the workers, who faced grueling working conditions before the pandemic even hit.
The consequences of this vote will reverberate far beyond Bessemer. If the union drive is successful, the Bessemer shop will become the first Amazon facility in the United States to unionize. It will also be one of the largest union wins in the American South in this century, dwarfing even the 1,800 hospital nurses’ union victory in Asheville last year.
The National Labor Relations Board mailed out ballots on Feb. 8, and votes are due by March 29. If a majority of the workers vote to unionize, Amazon will be forced to recognize and bargain with the union.
The implications of the vote in Bessemer are obvious: If Amazon workers can win a union in Alabama, they can win a union anywhere.
Amazon doesn’t want this to happen. The company is rabidly anti-union even by the standards of American corporations, and it has dipped into its unfathomable wealth to hire Pinkerton thugs, surveil its employees who express pro-union sentiment, fiddle with the traffic light cycles in Bessemer during pro-union roadside pickets, blast workers with anti-union text messages, and post anti-union propaganda in bathroom stalls. (Side note, my friend Dave Infante wrote a fun takedown of Amazon’s clownish anti-union website on his newsletter this week; it’s worth a read.)
As a small token of solidarity, working people across the country held rallies on Saturday Feb. 20 to show their support for the Bessemer union drive. I showed up with some friends from Charleston Democratic Socialists of America at a sidewalk rally in front of an Amazon-owned Whole Foods on Savannah Highway. We were joined by friends from the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, Southern Workers Assembly, and the International Longshoremen’s Association local.
There wasn’t much to it. About 25 of us stood beside the highway for an hour waving pro-union signs at traffic and handing out leaflets to anyone who rolled down a window at the stoplight. Some people honked and cheered; others flipped us the bird. A longshoreman pulled up and raised his fist in the air.
It was a small act, but it felt good after a year of isolation to be part of something bigger than myself. I hope they win in Alabama. I hope we all do.
I’ve had friends and family ask me when I became a socialist, and I’m never sure what to say. I was a newspaper reporter throughout my 20s, which meant I couldn’t join a political party or public demonstration. Political activism is a taboo across most of the industry, and I actually had to sign a document promising to stay out of activist groups when I started working at the daily paper in town.
I held my own political beliefs all along, and they skewed leftward since college, but for the most part that didn’t matter. I could vote, sure, but what does that do in the grand scheme of things? When the local Democratic Party puts up another ineffectual milquetoast to appeal to moderates, do I vote harder for them?
In my one other political act — reporting — I had trained myself to counteract my own biases and beliefs.
When I lost my job in 2019 and found work outside the field of journalism, I was suddenly free to take a side. My first public act as a private citizen was to speak at a school board meeting, not as a journalist, but as a parent of three with strong beliefs. I felt a thrill in my chest, like I was breaking a vow of chastity. A few teachers whooped from the back of the boardroom when I’d spoken my piece, and I took that to mean I’d said something right.
In 2020 I joined DSA. This was probably a funny turn of events for Nick, one of the founding members of our chapter, who remembered me from my reporting days.
I first crossed paths with Nick in 2011 when I was writing for the alt-weekly newspaper in town and he was a member of Occupy Charleston, a short-lived offshoot of Occupy Wall Street. I covered the protests and arrests and court dates, and I attended a few of the meetings as a reporter until one day near the end of the movement when, at an Occupy Charleston meeting in the public library, Nick called a vote on whether to allow me in the meeting. The group voted to throw me out, and honestly I couldn’t blame them.
Shortly before I joined DSA, I met Nick at our neighborhood dive bar and we had a little laugh about the whole episode. I’d come to respect him over the years for his principled stands and his selfless commitment to the cause of liberation. Now we’re standing shoulder to shoulder, so to speak.
Since joining DSA, I’ve met other people like Nick who volunteer their time and put themselves on the line for justice. They inspire me.
I’ve gotten a taste of life on the other side. I’ve had the opportunity to work on tenant organizing, vet a candidate seeking endorsement, write press releases for protest actions, launch pressure campaigns on local politicians, and, yes, occasionally stand on the side of the road waving a sign at traffic.
It all still feels so new. It all still feels a little bit taboo. For the first time in my adult life, I am free to take a side. I will never take that for granted.
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For updates on the Amazon union drive in Bessemer, I recommend visiting bamazonunion.org and following @GrimKim on Twitter.
If you want to know more about DSA, email me or reply to any of my emails. I’m still pretty new to this, but there is a lot of work to be done and we’d love to have you. You can join and read a little bit about membership by clicking here.