At three-twenty-seven on a recent morning in Bessemer, Alabama, Randy Hadley, a sixty-five-year-old man, was dancing at a traffic light. He wore a fedora and had a trimmed white goatee, and he waved a sign as he shimmied: “Without Change, Nothing Changes.” Beside him, a burly younger man named Curtis Gray held up a different sign: “Don’t Back Down.” Gray watched Hadley, who, in turn, watched workers file out of the nine-hundred-thousand-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center up the hill, near where ancient Native American mounds once stood.
“I don’t know what kind of dance that is,” Gray said, pulling his hood up against the cold. He and Hadley, members of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have been passing out pamphlets and holding up their signs in this spot almost every day since October, in an attempt to unionize a group of Amazon workers in America for the first time. Voting on whether to form a union has already begun. Gray’s earliest successful campaign was at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant, in Russellville, Alabama, a decade ago. Hadley’s been at it longer. He has honed the art of talking through boredom and bad weather.
“You could drive from here to Ohio, he’d talk the whole way,” Gray said.
“Coldest I’ve ever been on a line was in Minnesota,” Hadley said. “Windchill thirty-five below zero. To strike a Hormel factory in fucking February!” He tossed off some of his greatest hits: “I’ve organized a peanut-butter plant in Albany. A dog-food plant in Virginia. Poultry plants in Mississippi. All kinds of nursing homes. Piggly Wigglys.” He added, “I tried to organize a condom plant down in, uh . . . ”
“Eufaula,” Gray said.
“Down in Eufaula, yeah,” Hadley went on.
“That’s the one that Steve Harvey ended up buying,” Gray added.
Around four-fifteen, traffic picked up. Some workers waved as they drove away. Others honked. A few offered a thumbs-up. The majority sped into the dark without a sideward glance.
“She’s gotta drive all the way back to Walker County,” Gray said, reading the license plate of a beat-up Honda. “That’s a long ways.”
“Bless her heart,” Hadley said. He went on, “We’re here this early just in case she rolls her window down and we can lean over there and have a conversation for two minutes.” He added, “Some days you’ll catch fifteen. Some days you’ll catch fifty. It’s just like going fishing.”
Eventually, Hadley was in need of a rest room. “Jeff Bezos just built a house with twenty-five bathrooms,” he said when he returned from the woods.
“They ain’t got twenty-five in there,” Gray said, motioning to the warehouse.
A man drove by and honked affirmatively. “Our president was down here the other day,” Hadley said, “and he goes, ‘Everybody is so friendly. How do you know if they don’t like you?’ I said, ‘Trust me—you’ll get that finger in just a second.’ ”
Traffic picked up again around five. Employees lit their post-work cigarettes and raced away, music cranked. A woman asked Hadley for help adjusting her rearview mirror. A man got out of his car to swear at a driver who’d cut him off. Someone asked Gray when the votes would begin to be tallied. (The end of March.) The sky turned from black to purple to pink and blue. Hadley shared some TikTok videos he’d made with his wife, including one in which the two are dressed as dinosaurs. Gray chuckled at stories he’d heard before and would no doubt hear again.
At one point, a car with three passengers drove by, smoke pouring from the windows. “Let’s go!” one yelled to Hadley and Gray.
“You smell a lot of weed,” Hadley said, as they skidded off.
“He ain’t lying,” Gray said.
A few hundred yards down the road, at another entrance, Jose Aguilar and Mona Darby stood in matching cold-weather jumpsuits, holding union signs. They’d shown up at four. There was less traffic at their post. Darby was listening to Steve Harvey on her phone. Aguilar was watching TikToks.
A woman drove by with her thumb down. They’d seen her before. She belonged to a small group of aggressively anti-union workers.
“Her and the white guy in a silver truck,” Darby said. “He’s crazy.”
Aguilar agreed. “The other day, he stopped and said, ‘You know what, you waste your time. You need to go home.’ I said, ‘You waste your time. You need to go home and get some rest.’ ”
He told a story about two workers who’d opposed the unionizing of a poultry plant. “Since Day One, they said, ‘No union, no union.’ Well, we win the election. And they’re the first people to join the union. I said, ‘O.K., welcome to the family.’ ”
Seven o’clock arrived. The sun felt good. It was time to go to Cracker Barrel. Hadley made a final pronouncement. “When we win,” he said, “I’m gonna buy that building over there, across the street, and make it our union hall. That’ll be Chapter 2.” ♦
