Joe Biden Should Tell Amazon’s Workers They’re Stronger With a Union
Nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are preparing to vote on unionizing. It's the most important labor battle in the US right now — and Joe Biden should say he stands with the workers.
A worker makes repairs to a wall at a new Amazon fulfillment center in Sacramento, California in August 2017. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
When the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) passed in 1935, organizers took their newfound legal protections and ran with them. Union membership doubled over the next six years and quadrupled by 1945.
“The President Wants You to Join a Union” read signs distributed in coal fields by John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Franklin Delano Roosevelt never said exactly that, but he did say that if he were a factory worker, he’d join a union. Between this and his backing of the NLRA, it was close enough to make for useful organizing agitprop.
Eighty-six years later, the unionization rate in the United States is lower than it was when the NLRA became law. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, 10.8 percent of US workers are union members. Further breaking the numbers down, private-sector union membership is only 6.3 percent, compared to 34.8 percent for public-sector workers.
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