This commentary is by Ashley Smith of Burlington, a member of the Champlain Valley Democratic Socialists of America and the Tempest Collective.
Amazon workers in New York City have scored an enormous victory. Led by an insurgent, independent union, Amazon Labor Union, they won a vote for union recognition at one warehouse in Staten Island and await the results of a vote at another.
They have inspired workers across the country and sent shivers down the spines of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the rest of the modern-day robber barons who run U.S. capitalism.
Bezos and his henchmen had treated the Amazon Labor Union, its interim president Chris Smalls, and the company’s multiracial workforce with contempt. One leaked memo exposed their overconfidence and racism; its PR department encouraged the media to focus on Smalls, who it described as “not smart or articulate” and labeled him and his organizing team as “thugs.”
Assured the organizing drive would end in defeat, Bezos returned to his self-indulgent preoccupation with space travel. In announcing the union victory, Smalls declared, “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up.”
The union won by using class struggle strategies, long abandoned by the U.S.’s bureaucratized unions. It built a rank-and-file organizing team rooted in the warehouse, organized meetings in parking lots and at bus stops, and became the tribune for all the workers’ anger against their bosses. This victory was won by workers organizing workers from below, independent of any national union.
It has encouraged similar unionizing efforts at other Amazon warehouses as well as at Starbucks, Apple and Google. Whether these fights for union recognition win and, even more importantly, secure improved wages, benefits and working conditions in their first contracts depends on what rank-and-file leaders, unions and socialists do in the coming months.
Workers have won recognition elections. Now they will have to build unions with strong workplace organization capable of taking job actions, including strikes. That will be necessary to confront absolutely intransigent bosses.
Already, Amazon has launched a vicious counteroffensive. It has defeated a second attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, mounted a legal challenge against the union victory in Staten Island, and is redoubling its anti-union propaganda and intimidation to stop drives at other warehouses.
The bosses are determined to keep workers unorganized. Only 10.3 percent of workers are in unions and a mere 7 percent in the private sector, and those rates vary dramatically by city, state and region, with little to no organization in so-called right-to-work states, especially in the South.
The U.S. ruling class, the Republicans, and Democrats imposed these conditions through an unrelenting one-sided class war since the late 1970s. The bosses restored their profitability and growth out of that decade’s crisis through union-busting, lean production and globalization, while their parties slashed the welfare state, deregulated the economy and scapegoated oppressed people, especially people of color and migrants, to divide and conquer the working class.
The labor officialdom’s business unionist strategy of labor/management collaboration, undemocratic methods of organizing, and preoccupation with electing and lobbying Democrats proved incapable of resisting this employer’s offensive. As a result, the U.S. developed the deepest class and social inequalities of all the advanced capitalist states.
The Great Recession, weak recovery, the pandemic, another sharp recession, and another weak recovery have made these even deeper. While U.S. billionaires multiply their number and pile up their fortunes, workers scrape by just to meet their needs as 140 million contracted Covid and over a million lost their lives.
These conditions have produced episodic outbursts of social and class struggle from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, teachers and nurses strikes, political expressions of this explosive militancy in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, and further rounds of essential workers struggles amid the pandemic. But activists in these explosions have yet to build new organizations, unions and sustained momentum up to the task of reversing the one-sided class and social war on workers and the oppressed.
Nevertheless, conditions are ripe today for workers to build on the victory at Amazon. Unemployment is low, labor markets are tight, and high inflation is putting enormous pressure on workers to pay for the increased cost of gas, food and housing. This volatile combination can give workers confidence and also pressure them to fight for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
Unorganized workers, inspired by the victory at Amazon, could launch even more extensive drives at Starbucks and Apple, and organized workers in several key industries whose contracts are up may have to strike to win any of their demands. But, for this potential to be realized, unions, working-class militants and the socialist left will have to break with the failed strategies of business unionism.
We must rebuild the class-struggle unionism with its focus on rank-and-file organizing, union democracy, solidarity against all divisions, militant tactics like striking even when it breaks the law, and independence from both parties of capital. Class-struggle unionism will be necessary to seize the opportunity of this moment and rebuild the labor movement.
