Workers say they are allowed two 15-minute bathroom breaks during their 10-hour shifts, which amounts to mere minutes to navigate a warehouse roughly the size of Buckingham Palace and get back to work on time. The center opened in March 2020 workers say that in the intervening months, the $2-an-hour pandemic “hazard pay” lapsed and workers became sick.

A truck leaves Amazon’s BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer. Religion is important in the community, and infuses union organizing. Now that hilly ground is home to an Amazon fulfillment center, and the site of one of the most important labor battles in America.īessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, is a former steel town that has suffered since the industry moved largely overseas. 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. The precious few green spaces strain to offset the sprawl crowding the highway that cuts through town. 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. More than a quarter of those souls - about 71 percent of whom are Black - live below the poverty line.

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. Bessemer, Alabama, is a city of 27,000 souls and dozens of churches.

Radius vs steel faith