In the wake of 2020’s protests following the brutal police murder of George Floyd, Amazon was quick to join the chorus of corporate behemoths proclaiming their solidarity with black Americans. As labor activists and others didn’t fail to point out, the gesture carried an obvious and pungent whiff of hypocrisy. The company, for one thing, has a documented history of selling its facial recognition technology to police departments — something it’s openly alluded to in its marketing materials. Both before and since its various 2020 statements, it has also worked hard to suppress unionization efforts within its workforce: a workforce that is more than 26 percent black.

Perhaps nothing has made the chasm between Amazon’s professed racial-justice commitment and its actual behavior more obvious than recent developments in Bessemer, Alabama — where workers will vote once again this month on whether to form a union. Located in the state’s Jefferson County, Bessemer is home to about twenty-seven thousand people, nearly three-quarters of whom are black and more than a quarter of whom live below the poverty line.

During its campaign to dissuade the same workers from unionizing last year, the company mandated anti-union meetings for warehouse employees, pressured the United States Postal Service to install a special box so workers would feel surveilled, and even changed the timing of local traffic lights to disadvantage labor organizers (these tactics proved so Orwellian that the vote was ultimately thrown out by a judge and a second election was scheduled). In an especially cynical move, Amazon has even used the Black Lives Matter logo on its anti-union literature in the past.