This Woman’s Work

 "Nobody's free until everybody's free."-Fannie Lou Hamer

Across the South, we have seen explosive growth in a number of sectors that employ thousands of workers.  As the pandemic abates somewhat, even more businesses will open, and job growth in this region will likely continue to soar. But economic growth in the South can come at a cost to workers and their communities, because company profits are often put before investment in local infrastructure and benefits to local communities. Due to weak US labor laws, employers are given wide discretion to create barriers that exploit workers’ basic rights and block paths to broader prosperity.

With ever more businesses moving and expanding into the South, it is urgent that workers in underserved communities come together and demand broad communal prosperity in the form of strengthened workers’ rights through unions; community benefits agreements; and investments in more climate-resilient public infrastructure such as clean transportation, clean air, clean water, and modern school facilities.  On March 28, in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon warehouse workers will have an opportunity to do just that. 

Eight months after employees there voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU),  the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon improperly pressured Bessemer workers to vote against unionizing.

But in Bessemer, a part of the Black Belt region of Alabama where many of the most significant events in civil rights history took place, the legacy of oppression still remains. Many of the struggles for civil rights that were so visible during the 1960s still exist today, and these long-fought barriers are still limiting paths to broad communal prosperity. 

Recently, I caught up with Erica Iheme, one of the leaders at Jobs to Move America (JMA). JMA is helping to coordinate the “Bamazon” union organizing campaign alongside RWDSU. JMA is a policy center that focuses on comprehensive public spending reform using a racial and economic justice lens. The organization has operations across the country, but their work in the South is especially critical at a time where we are witnessing generational investments in infrastructure and jobs. Erica and I discussed what a win like the Amazon warehouse workers campaign could mean for the workers and communities in Bessemer and across the region. 

Erica is JMA’s Deputy Director. She grew up in north Birmingham and attended college at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Huntsville, Alabama.  Erica has spent over 17 years organizing workers across the country, enjoying stints in the West Coast, Midwest, South, and Southeast. 

Derrick: Erica, how are members of the Black community responding to your Amazon organizing efforts? 

Erica: JMA is a part of a statewide coalition called the Alabama Coalition for Community Benefits. Our coalition has played a key role in the community campaign for both union elections. We started a community education strategy focused on communal institutions such as barber shops, hair salons, and churches. The education piece focused on the importance of base-building organizing and the impacts it could have on the broader community. In partnership with the leaders of these institutions, the strategy included regular faith and community canvasses of over 500 institutions. 

The overwhelming majority of the institutions are supportive. And within these institutional settings we sought to open the door to intimate conversations about workers’ rights and the Amazon organizing as a whole, much like the “ kitchen table” conversations that started the Civil Rights movement.

Derrick: As a Black woman, what has being an activist in this effort meant to you, your family, and your community?

Erica: As far as I can remember, I have always been an activist. My dad was a political activist and engaged in a number of voter engagement campaigns when I was much younger. I recall canvassing as a child as young as three years old. I remember being not big enough to carry my own fliers. But I still tried to participate in the valuable lessons my dad was instilling in me at such an early time in my life. 

My father died when I was 12 years old, leaving my mother to care for six of us as a single mom.  So being an activist became a necessity, and it involved the significant sacrifice of leaving my family behind to pursue a career and opportunities that I could bring back home.  Had I not pursued my calling as a social justice activist, supports such as access to adequate and affordable healthcare and other benefits that my family and I now have might not have been  available to me because of the region I grew up in. 

But, as you well know, many Black people are communal, and coming from a family as large as mine, I regularly came back home to stay grounded in my community and to help give my community a voice. 

To your question about Black women, as Black women, we have to force our way in. We are important in our family spaces, external spaces, and in many cases neglect our own selves.  All the while constantly being doubted, having our skill sets challenged, and knowing that when s*** blows up, they call me…

Back in the day, you couldn't be an organizer and a mother, but I have three children who are nine, seven, and two years old, all born in different states where I was organizing. Not many realize how creative women can be while balancing the challenges of life and work. My experiences are a testament to the burden and depth of understanding and commitment required to organize around worker and broader social justice issues in the South while carrying new life (or lives). Being an activist goes beyond the issues you’re fighting to address. It goes to having the full lived experience of the people you’re advocating for.  The best people to move the community forward are the people from that community.

Ultimately, I hit synergy in my work when I hooked up with an organization that valued me as a Black woman and a talented strategist. Being in a place that I love, which is home, is the key to finding that synergy. 

Derrick: Can you talk a bit about who you see as the winners as businesses continue to drive their operations to the South? 

Erica: The winners are the community leaders who have been doing the justice work in the South but didn’t quit–and then getting to a place where they’re connecting with other organizations that have been doing the work and coordinating to address the issues of the collective. Worker justice and civil rights has to be at the center of that meeting place.  

Because you find solutions to the challenges around food access, safe and affordable housing, access to healthcare, parent availability for children’s educational and developmental experiences, and ways to address the correlations between poverty and violence. That is why the Alabama Coalition for Community Benefits has been so important. 

Derrick: Thank you, Erica. I appreciate your time and I look forward to diving deeper into these issues in the coming months.

It is no coincidence that the business expansion and job growth has been concentrated in the Southern region, where legislatures have developed policies that are anti-democratic, anti-worker, and anti-climate. But in Bessemer and around the country, workers are coming together to build power, win better wages and working conditions, and narrow the racial wealth gap. Building on this momentum is critical for those of us who want to create a more just and sustainable world.  

Over the past several months, numerous local and national organizations, labor councils and unions, worker and community organizations (including the Sierra Club), and activists have joined in solidarity with Bessemer Amazon workers to help them join a union. Regardless of the outcome, there is work to be done across the South and many other parts of the country to close racial equity gaps and improve conditions for America’s working families. The efforts that Erica Iheme, the Alabama Coalition for Community Benefits, JMA, RWDSU (United Food and Commercial Workers), and other labor leaders are involved in are beacons of hope and promise for closing racial equity gaps across the region and the country.