I get that a lot of the workers could’ve been scared of retaliation. Between some of the de-industrialization that’s hit small towns so hard, the pandemic, and Amazon credibly able to just move towns if they did unionize, I get that it would’ve been… scary to vote yes. People are so precarious now, what’s left in Bessemer? Driving for uber or working at walmart? No one is really watching out for them in Alabama or at the Federal level. I know people formed unions under worse circumstances, like the coal miners back in the 1900s, but in some ways things are even more precarious for workers now then they were then. There’s high technology and pinkertons aren’t out to literally crack skulls but there’s no community resiliance, like if Amazon shuddered the warehouse in response people wouldn’t have been able to survive off the limited retail jobs and/or community gardens and no one would show up to protect you from bankruptcy like they did during the '30s.

I dunno, kind of seems like people just don’t have hope or faith that anything can change - or worse, that change is possible but if anything changes it’ll only be worse. So the status quo is uncomfortable but even if we’re pissing in bottles, even if I get docked 1 hours pay for being late 5 minutes, even if we have no say in how the workplace is run and get no respect from management or ownership, at least it’s a stable-ish gig with some benefits if you can withstand the bullshit. I don’t know how to break through that, that those workers deserve so much more than just getting by and that if they team up anything is possible.

Just getting people to believe that change for the better is possible seems like such an insurmountable task, never mind that we have such a limited horizon of action before climate change fucks everything up.