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Bessemer, Alabama, is a city of 27,000 souls and dozens of churches. There are at least six Christian bookstores within a three-mile radius of the Waffle House, and a billboard screaming “When You Die, You Will Meet God!” not far from the local Walmart.
More than a quarter of those souls — about 71 percent of whom are Black — live below the poverty line. Sixteen miles from Birmingham proper, the city’s borders are liminal; Bessemer bleeds into nearby Brighton and Lipscomb to the north and McCalla to the south, and is sandwiched among wildlife refuges, cemeteries, and the Alabama Adventure & Splash Adventure waterpark. The precious few green spaces strain to offset the sprawl crowding the highway that cuts through town. Chain restaurants, car dealerships, and big-box stores line the route to Powder Plant Road, which leads to the former site of a US Steel factory. Now that hilly ground is home to an Amazon fulfillment center, and the site of one of the most important labor battles in America.
The more than 5,000 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse — called BHM1, it is one of more than 100 fulfillment centers across the US — are in the midst of the nation’s first attempt to unionize one of the e-commerce giant’s warehouses, where they spend long hours on their feet picking, packaging, and shipping items as quickly as they can. Their days, workers told Vox, are dictated by algorithms that survey their every move and dole out punishments when targets are not met or workers go over their allotted “time off task” (better known as TOT); workers compare the environment to “a sweatshop,” and have lodged complaints about the excessive heat in the building.
Source: Bessemer, Alabama’s union battle against Amazon is a David and Goliath tale – Vox