On April 9, the National Labor Relations Board announced the results of the vote on whether workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., would join a union. The vote was 738 in favor to 1,798 against. It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.
To stand a chance at winning the hardest campaigns, the best methods must be deployed from the earliest days of a campaign and followed throughout the election. Wishful thinking and inexperienced hunches have no place in a campaign against an employer as sophisticated and well-resourced as Amazon.
Every worker in the Bessemer campaign deserved to win. And if the rules for unionization in the United States came close to being fair, they would have won. But the rules aren’t fair. Quite the opposite: They are outrageously unfair. What workers trying to form unions against immoral employers do deserve is the kind of effort that stands a chance of winning. There’s plenty of evidence of what works. Social media and shortcut digital approaches don’t work when fear and division is the central weapon.