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30 Mar, 11 tweets, 5 min read
Today is the final day for warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, to vote on whether to form the first Amazon union in the United States.

More Perfect Union has been on the ground in Bessemer with labor reporter @GrimKim covering this historic campaign. youtube.com/playlist?list=…
We gave a platform to Amazon workers to tell their own stories and talk about their working conditions and why they wanted a union.
We covered Amazon’s extensive union busting campaign, and broke the news that Amazon even had county officials change traffic light patterns to stifle union organizing.
We revealed that Amazon was running anti-union ads on Twitch, against the platform’s ads policy.

Within 48 hours, Twitch took down all the ads and put out a statement saying, “these ads never should have been allowed to run on our service.” businessinsider.com/amazon-anti-un…
Amazon also worked with the USPS to host a union election ballot drop box at their facility, violating a direct order by the U.S. government.
Amazon’s extraordinary power over local government doesn’t stop there. We reported this week that the Bessemer police department is providing “off-duty security” to Amazon in public police cars.
But despite Amazon’s monumental show of power, workers, organizers, and elected officials are standing firm to defend workers’ rights. National figures like Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Danny Glover, and Stacey Abrams spoke out to support @BAmazonUnion.
.@RevDrBarber drew parallels between this unionization campaign and the civil rights protests Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led 56 years ago.

“Bessemer is our economic Selma.”
Workers and organizers have told us they feel confident in their chances of winning. But they recognize that this campaign is bigger than one warehouse or one company.

“It’s not just about me, it’s about everybody.”
On the first day of the union election, @GrimKim explained how workers come together to form a union. According to RWDSU President @sappelbaum, over 1000 Amazon workers across the country have reached out to the union about organizing their own warehouses.
We’ll continue to cover this historic union campaign as ballots are counted over the next week. Follow us and subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest reporting. youtube.com/c/moreperfectu…

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More from @MorePerfectUS

More Perfect Union Profile picture
30 Mar
Amazon warehouse workers expose the sexist working conditions they deal with every day.

Women are given impossibly short bathroom breaks, forced to choose between their families and jobs, and face routine sexual harassment.

They voted union YES to change that.
Workers face unpredictable schedules and are often forced to come into work last minute—leaving them scrambling to find childcare or risk being fired.

Linda Burns told us: “You have to choose between picking up your kids or picking up a package.”
Workers have two 30min breaks per 10hr shift. Break rooms and bathrooms are often a “football field” away. Outside of these breaks, workers are penalized for taking too much Time Off Task.
Read 6 tweets
More Perfect Union Profile picture
29 Mar
An army of purported Amazon warehouse workers has suddenly appeared on Twitter to defend the company’s union busting and brutal working conditions.

@JayCarney, their well-paid chief spokesperson, still hasn’t commented on extensive allegations of union busting.
Jay Carney is Amazon's VP of Policy and Press.

He praised collective bargaining rights when he was Obama's White House Press Secretary, but he has been silent for months.

These accounts have said more about the company's stance on unions than he has.
Amazon's supposed warehouse workers all use the same bio:

“(Job titles) @(warehouse shorthand location). (Duration) Amazonian. (2- or 3-item list of things they like.)”
Read 5 tweets
More Perfect Union Profile picture
25 Mar
UPDATE: We've been reporting on the illegal ballot dropbox that Amazon set up with USPS at its Bessemer warehouse.

Union organizers met with the local Postmaster on Tuesday. He refused to answer questions about the dropbox — then he called the cops.

We were recording.
Amazon asked the @NLRB if they could place a dropbox at their warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama to collect ballots in the union election.

The NLRB said no, but Amazon did it anyway.

Who installed the dropbox? Who has the keys?

No one knows.
.@RWDSU organizer Josh Brewer wanted to know: Did the USPS install the illegal dropbox at Amazon's facility against their own policy?

The Bessemer postmaster refused to say whether USPS installed it or if Amazon lied and installed it themselves.
Read 4 tweets
More Perfect Union Profile picture
25 Mar
Amazon executive Dave Clark claims Amazon is a "progressive" employer.

But, Amazon has a long, well-documented record of violating the rights of their workers.

A thread of Amazon's long history of abusing their workers:
Let's start with the "peeing in bottles thing."

Amazon uses digital sensors to count the number of seconds they take between tasks. Workers can be fired if they take too much "time off task" (TOT).

Bathroom breaks count as TOT.
Linda in Bessemer explains how a 25min bathroom break—with a 5min walk both ways—resulted in HR calling her into the office for taking too much TOT.

When the bathroom is on the other side of the facility, workers—especially women—are pushed to the limit.
Read 7 tweets
More Perfect Union Profile picture
24 Mar
This week, the NLRB found Amazon illegally interrogated a worker who organized for safer conditions early in the pandemic at an Amazon warehouse.

It’s the latest in Amazon’s long history of violating the law to keep their workers from organizing unions.
vice.com/en/article/dy8…
Amazon has a union busting formula:

1. Hire union avoidance consultants & former FBI officials
2. Use surveillance technology to identify “threats”
3. Threaten, intimidate or fire pro-union workers
4. Pay fines for breaking the law + post a notice saying they won’t do it again
Amazon’s union busting strategy starts with surveillance.

Since 2017, @Amazon has hired more than 20 former FBI agents. Last year, Amazon was caught trying to hire two “intelligence analysts” tasked with tracking “labor organizing threats.”

theintercept.com/2021/02/11/ama…
Read 13 tweets
More Perfect Union Profile picture
24 Mar
1. Please pay attention to what's happening to the baristas, bakers, and others at @ColectivoCoffee.

In 7 days, they decide whether to form the largest unionized cafe chain in the U.S.

The owners are responding with psychological warfare. Read on.

2. When managers learned that barista Zoe Muellner supported a union, they cut off social ties and stopped answering her emails.

She was laid off a short time later, she told @aliceraeherman for @inthesetimesmag.

inthesetimes.com/article/colect… Image
3. Another barista said Colectivo managers “pulled her aside for multiple tense & vaguely disciplinary meetings” focused on her mental well-being.

“[The meeting] was framed all around my mental health, and ​‘what can we do to help you succeed, because you’re clearly struggling." Image
Read 9 tweets

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