Use this case to clarify how a pluralist perspective on the employment relationship may or may not correct for some of the blind spots of the neoclassical economics perspective with regard to the balance of power.

Between January and October of last year, Amazon added 427,300 employees globally, making it the second largest private employer in the United States. It reportedly plans on establishing 1,000 new small facilities in suburbs across the U.S. to meet same-day shipping demands, and to hire thousands more grocery workers for Amazon Fresh. No other company in history including Walmart, the largest private employer has ever added so many workers in a single year. As of December, Amazon employed 1.3 million people worldwide. In the fourth quarter of 2020, it generated $125.6 billion in net sales, its largest quarterly revenue of all time.

Many of the jobs are physically demanding with quotas dictating output. Some workers skip bathroom breaks or suffer injuries in order to scan upwards of 300 items per hour. The positions come with health benefits and pension contributions, but employee turnover is so high that many people dont make it long enough to collect. Amazon managers have openly warned recruits that if they liked things comfortable, this would be a difficult, perhaps impossible, job. Supervisors have sent emails with subject headings like You can sleep when youre dead.

A typical employee is a recent immigrant, or someone who has been laid off recently from another retail job due to Covid-19, and has few other options to choose from. Locations in which Amazon sets up shop soon become like the company towns from a century ago, where Amazon exerts a powerful influence over the population in areas of employment, education, local governance and even buying habits. Employees may earn enough to pay for rent and basic necessities, sometimes with the aid of a second job, but not enough to become mobile and seek out other, better options elsewhere.

Long before Covid-19, safety issues proliferated. New hires often take to Facebook message boards seeking help managing the physical toll that comes with repetitive bending, squatting, lifting and trekking miles of warehouse floors. They are reaching down for boxes all day, bending in ways they are not used to, and all of the sudden their neck, their back, their arms something gives out. AmCare, the in-house Amazon first-aid facility, is often filled with employees laid out on their backs, soothing their muscles with menthol pain spray or heating pads, popping ibuprofen or doing stretches.

As warehouse workers started getting sick, conversations online turned fearful, echoing sentiments on the ground. As the number of coronavirus cases in warehouses across the region climbed, concerns about job safety and quality took on a new urgency. Complaints against Amazons failure to screen employees, provide personal protective equipment, enhance sanitation measures or enforce physical distancing escalated. By October, Amazon announced that nearly 20,000 of its workers in U.S. facilities and Whole Foods stores had tested positive or been presumed positive for Covid-19. In Ontario, public health ordered the closure of one Amazon facility for two weeks.

But something unexpected happened, too: Those who might not have complained about working conditions or considered themselves activists started speaking up. Amazon had long fended off workplace organizing, holding anti-union meetings that employees were required to attend. And while Amazon has often acknowledged that workers have the right to unionize, the company has tried to persuade them that doing so would introduce an unnecessary middleman. But Covid-19 proved to be a breaking point. Some workers were no longer willing to make concessions to a company that they felt was jeopardizing their safety and potentially their lives.

The question is: Will the unprecedented unrest caused by Covid-19 turn into a durable movement inside the company? It is unclear whether the surge in organizing will lead to a surge of unionization, because even the companys long-time employees are often one wrong move away from losing their jobs. Workers get fired very easily over small things, or not making quotas, or too much time off task, creating a precariousness within the company, a permanent underclass of working people that are always on the bubble. If you speak up or if you organize, theres a hundred temporary workers right outside the door who would be able to take your job.

The companys own anti-union efforts have become more serious in recent months. Last year, Amazon posted job listings for intelligence analysts who would keep track of labor organizing threats. Claims of unfair labor practices at Amazon have been common enough that the National Labour Relations Board may launch a national investigation. In Virginia, Amazon had to promise the federal labour agency that it would not engage in various acts of surveillance and reprisal for union supporters after having been investigated for violating the US National Labour Relations Act[1] by doing these very actions. Elsewhere, the federal agency has issued several rulings in favour of employees who had their contracts with Amazon terminated for speaking up for various causes, including both worker rights and the companys environmental impact.

Nationwide, many workers are shrugging off anti-union sentiments to express their dissatisfaction with the company. Of particular significance are the union efforts in Alabama, fueled by Amazon workers concerns over the brutal pace of work, the risk of injuries, Covid-19 health and safety concerns and the combined stress and strain of the job. The organizers have made the case in a months-long campaign that Amazons intense monitoring of workers infringes on their dignity, and that its pay is not commensurate with the constant pressure workers feel to produce. Fighting back, the company posted anti-union signs throughout the warehouse even inside bathrooms. They increased the frequency of their mandatory captive audience meetings aimed at convincing workers why the union was a bad idea and reminding them that its starting wage of $15/hr., which exceeds what other employers in the area pay, is well above current minimum wages. Amazon set up an anti-union site DoItWithoutDues.com, distributed Vote No buttons to employees, and encouraged them to cast their vote well before the deadline so they would not be swayed by the unions campaign.

Two big forces have helped drive the unionization effort: the pandemics focus on essential workers and the racial reckoning brought on by Black Lives Matter protests. Amazon opened a warehouse in Bessemer Alabama, a Birmingham suburb, in March 2020 just as the coronavirus was taking hold in the U.S. The pandemic made clear the critical role essential workers, many of whom were Black and paid hourly, played in serving customers and the economy broadly. The unionization push came from a group of largely Black workers who, late last summer, approached a local branch of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which has grown in the South, particularly in poultry, an industry with traditionally dangerous jobs and many Black employees. In early summer, George Floyds killing prompted calls for racial justice, and the union has focused its organizing on issues of racial equality and empowerment. It has a decades-long history of working on civil rights and labor issues in the region. Around the same time, Amazon ended the extra $2/hr. it had given workers earlier in the pandemic. The workers who started the organizing said their pay was not commensurate with the risks they took and the productivity they must maintain.

By late December, more than 2,000 workers signed cards indicating they wanted an election. The National Labor Relations Board determined that those signatures signaled sufficient interest in holding a vote, making it the most closely watched union election in recent history. The election has attracted attention from President Biden, National Football League players and Hollywood actors, making it a high-stakes test of whether a union has a role in one of the countrys biggest employers. Amazon wanted the voting to happen in person, as is typical, but the National Labor Relations Board found that the pandemic made that too risky and ordered a mail-in election. But Amazon convinced the US Postal Service to install a mailbox on site, and encouraged employees to cast their vote via that particular mailbox. On Tuesday March 30, 2020, the vote counting began, and by the end of the week the results were in. The unionization effort failed by a margin of 2:1. No doubt many who cast a vote feared for their jobs in an environment where a global pandemic has made secure jobs hard to come by. The RWDSU plans to appeal this result.

Attention has been focused on Bessemer, but the struggle is increasingly playing out everywhere in Amazons world and showing up in the form of lawsuits, restive workers at other warehouses, Congressional oversight, scrutiny from labor regulators and, most noisily, on Twitter. At its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain its start-up mentality, the company claims that it needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires measuring and tweaking every moment of a workers existence. Both organized labor and Amazon view the Alabama battle as a fight for hearts and minds, not only there, but across the whole country. In short, this union vote is seen widely as a referendum on the future of work. Bessemer was always viewed as a long shot since it pitted the countrys second-largest employer against nearly 6,000 workers in a state where laws dont favour unions. With the unions loss, it will give Amazon confidence that its approach is working. But a major point has already been proven, that workers, even in Alabama where anti-union sentiment is high and right to work legislation prevails, are prepared to stand up and organize and fight for justice.

[1] The NLRA applies to most all private sector companies in the U.S. Unlike in Canada, where labour law has been delegated to provinces (expect for federal employees or employees in federally regulated industries), the NLRA applies nation-wide, with the National Labour Relations Board created to uphold the application of this law.