On April 1, workers at the Staten Island Amazon Fulfillment Center made history when they voted to join the Amazon Labor Union and became the first unionized group of Amazon workers in the United States.
They weren’t the first Amazon workers to vote on unionization, though. In February 2021, Amazon workers in the suburban town of Bessemer, Alabama held a vote that ended in the majority voting against unionization.
While the first union drive in Bessemer was unsuccessful, the outcome was contested by the National Labor Relation Board due to unsurprising findings of Amazon’s interference with the polling process.
The Bessemer facility held a second vote last month, and over 400 remaining ballots are still in contention due to more interference that has been submitted to the NLRB again. The results of this second election were closer, but it seems to be trending in the same direction as the previous election.
The recent union drives of 2021 garnered a lot of media attention, but are not reflective of the larger trend of organized labor in the U.S. Since the 1980s, unionization rates in the U.S. have been dropping steadily.
Union organizers can and should blame corporations like Amazon for their union-busting actions, but there is a larger issue at play all across the country that gets in the way of unionization.
American culture, to a large extent, is defined by individualism. The exaltation of the single-family home, rise and grind mindset and our comparative lack of social safety nets are examples of this.
Small town living provides an opportunity for more closely-knit communities, but in the worldview of an American suburbanite, moving out of the city is more about getting away from crowds and owning private space rather than the ability to know the names of all your neighbors.
Since moving to Boston, I have noticed this culture of individualism more prominently in the Boston University social ecosystem. My roommate, who is an international student, found it particularly interesting, as most other countries do not share the U.S.’s emphasis on individuality.
Despite the statistics that union membership brings higher pay that offsets the cost of organizational dues, many American workers don’t want to feel restrained by their membership in a larger group.
It’s the mindset of American individualism that makes anti-union propaganda so effective in this country. If citizens are more willing to accept that collective action brings them individual benefits, unionization drives will be more successful.
The individuality of the U.S. also replicates itself throughout the built environment. Car dependency of sprawling suburbs means that you and your personal vehicle alone are responsible for your livelihood. There is no room for collectivism when you dodge your neighbors at 70 miles an hour on the freeway.
Perhaps that’s why the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island found its success first. Living in a larger city requires you to become more comfortable with a collective. High density living and public transportation teach urban citizens to work alongside others in order to reach individual goals.
Additionally, the Staten Island workers formed their own independent worker’s union, while employees in Bessemer were voting to join the well-established Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. While the RWDSU has much more experience with collective bargaining, the sense of individuality feels much less compromised when starting a brand new organization, and likely contributed to the willingness of voters to form the Amazon Labor Union in New York.
In this column, I tend to write about what makes small towns great, and how bigger cities can learn from their best practices. However, in the case of labor organization, and learning collective freedom over individualistic behavior in the U.S., larger cities are better at encouraging those values.
As with many social and political issues, the difficulty of labor relations is tied up in a multitude of contributing factors. Union busting practices, job security and economic volatility all play a role in the decision making process of a warehouse worker, but the social conditioning of American individualism should not be dismissed.
