The ongoing union vote by 5,800 Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, has opened a window into the challenges workers face in unionizing. As the public is learning, the boss gets a big role in the process. It shouldn’t be this way.

As Amazon grew at meteoric rates in 2020, adding almost five hundred thousand new employees worldwide — as well as $75 billion to the fortune of CEO Jeff Bezos — its workers began fighting for more equitable treatment. Some signed petitions demanding specific changes, such as paid sick leave and the end of rate-based write-ups; in Staten Island, workers walked off the job demanding the facility be sanitized. 

The Bessemer workers, fed up with the company’s intense productivity quotas and relentless monitoring (including of their bathroom breaks), went a step further. They signed authorization cards with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), seeking to form a union. At least 30 percent of the workers at a specified facility need to sign such cards to get a vote for a union at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that administers labor law for private sector workers across the United States.