Amazon Workers Can Win. But The Union's Strategy Must Change

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By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED

 

"The enemy was the collective spirit.  I got hold of that spirit while it was still a seedling; I poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to, anything to be sure it would never blossom into a united workforce...."  Confessions of a Union Buster: Martin Jay Levitt

Stuart Applebaum is the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and is running the union’s organizing drive at the Amazon plant in Bessemer Alabama. Applebaum, like many of the officers and staff that head organized labor, is a lawyer, a graduate of a fancy (Brandeis) university and has a resume that any head of a major corporation would be proud of. He’s deeply embedded in the anti-worker Democratic Party sitting on its Democratic National Committee, a friend of Barak Obama and NY Governor Cuomo and has been a member of the notoriously antidemocratic Electoral College. That’s the short list. You can check out this labor fighter’s resume here.

 

Taking on Amazon is not an easy task and the global giant will ruthlessly resist even though the union is demanding nothing as far as I can see except a vote on whether to unionize or not. In these unionizing drives, the impetus behind them on the part of the trade union hierarchy of which Applebaum is a part, is dues money; increased revenue for the business, as people like Applebaum see the unions as employment agencies with themselves as the CEO’s.

 

In addition, it has the potential to add a little more electoral clout for the Democratic Party come election time. Demanding any more than a vote to allow a union would anger the employers too much. Once brought in, Applebaum and co. will use their positions and their army of full-time staff to ensure that the ranks are kept out of the picture and that any movement from below that threatens the relationship they will build with the Amazon management based on labor peace and cooperation will be held back.

 

According to Business Week, President Applebaum says that “even getting a vote is a union victory for labor because it sets examples for other unions.”. I just love the way he throws the word “labor” around. What does he have to do with labor really?  A friend, whose father worked some 40 years as a unionized warehouseman commented to me that it looks from his resume he went straight from Harvard to a top union job. There’s a number of them like that taking the university to union bureaucrat pipeline

But winning the vote is not so easy as the employer will orchestrate numerous delaying tactics and use that time to terrorize workers in to submission. I saw a picture of a protestor at the plant, either an Amazon worker or union staffer, with the sign saying, “RWDSU: On Your Side”. In the midst of a battle with a ruthless violent enemy, being on your side has to mean something other than getting worker Joe Biden to make a public statement saying he likes unions. Being on our side means hitting employers twice as hard as they hit us. It means shutting down production; it means having your back in a real sense.

 

Come March 30^th, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will be counting the votes of the 5,800 workers eligible to vote and if a majority vote for the union, then the next step will be for the two sides to enter negotiations.  But Amazon management, as they all do, will use every trick up their sleeves to delay even talking to the union; the object is to wear the workers down. They can contest the election and file charges against the union with the very same NLRB; “You can get six months to a year out of that sometimes, if you’re really good”, Sally Klingel, an instructor in labor management relations at Cornell tells Business Week. In that year they will wage a relentless campaign to get workers to back off or even hold another vote.

 

Relying on the NLRB and the courts is a disaster. The NLRB was a 1930’s New Deal creation that arose out of the National Industrial Relations Act passed in 1933, specifically section 7a. It was touted as the legislation that gave the workers the right to organize. But as Art Preis points out in his book, Labor’s Giant Step about the formation of the CIO, “…Labor already had that right to organize----whenever it exercised the right and fought to maintain it.” And numerous labor historians have made it clear that the 7a language was almost an afterthought, inserted after pressure from John L Lewis and other labor leaders as a direct result of the increase in worker militancy and strikes that were on the rise.

 

Workers have achieved the greatest successes not appealing to so called friendly politicians or relying on government or the courts but relying on our own strength. The NLRB is just another government hoop that is designed for us to jump through and glosses over the huge chasm that exists between the corporation and the worker. Much of the social legislation passed in the 1930’s that we benefit from today was simply codifying rights already won in the streets and workplaces of the US; “It’s usually not labor law but solidarity and public pressure that make collective bargaining work.” Kate Andrias, a law professor at the University of Michigan tells Bloomberg Business Week. Union heads like Applebaum know this too and are terrified of it.

 

A 2009 study published by the Economic Policy Institute  found that,”…. one year after voting to unionize, in 52% of cases workers hadn’t yet won a collective bargaining agreement.” This is all time when the boss is actively campaigning against the workers and unionism and the folks at the NLRB know it as do top officials like Applebaum. And as this graphic shows and every worker knows, there is no such thing as neutrality no matter what pieces of paper declaring such say. The boss is never neutral and nor should we be.

 

Back in 2005, the US Supreme Court in a landmark 5-4 ruling, Kelo vs City of New London CT, upheld a state Supreme Court ruling that allowed the city of New London and a nonprofit called the New London Development Corp. to seize the homes of working class families so that the drug manufacturer Pfizer could construct a research facility. Eminent Domain was allowed on the basis of encouraging economic development which is a “public good”. The case is called the Kelo case and back then I spoke to Ms Kelo about it.

 

As far as I know, the land still sits empty. I also just found out that there is a movie made in 2017 about this case; it’s called The Little Pink House and it’s on Netflix. I intend to watch it.

 

What made me think of this is that in the case of Amazon here, all the legal cards are in the company’s hands. Amazon can simply decide to shut down the plant and move. The courts will not deny a corporation and the capitalists that control it, the right to move their capital and production wherever they want. This has been settled many times including in auto when Ypsilanti Michigan was attempting to prevent a plant from closing and moving to Arlington Texas.

 

If he were truly on the workers side, President Applebaum and the entire leadership of the AFL-CIO should, even before Amazon raises the possibility of shutting down or moving the plant, call for the taking over of the Amazon plant under the Eminent Domain law; the Keto case shows that the capitalist state and its legal institutions has no problem with taking our homes when business demands it. Five million people had their homes (shelter) stolen from them when the 2008 crash hit. Surely it serves the “public good” to keep some 6000 workers employed and taking Amazon, or any corporation, in to public ownership when jobs or a community is threatened with economic hardship because the bosses seek a better profit is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

 

Of course, this will not happen as things stand. But the demand for public ownership of critical industries has to be raised more and more as private corporations and industries necessary to the functioning of society destroy our communities as investors seek more lucrative climes and cheaper labor for profit making whether it is in the unionized US South or abroad.

 

The labor hierarchy is incapable of taking the steps necessary to confront the capitalist offensive that has driven wages, working conditions and the living standards of US workers back to conditions that existed prior to the rise of the CIO and industrial unionism in the 1930’s.

There are 14 million of us organized in unions in the US. This is real potential power. I know there are staffers and lower level officials within organized labor that are genuine but are afraid to speak out, but as they say about racism, silence is assent. The trade union hierarchy, people like Applebaum, are overwhelmingly agents of big business in our organizations; putting it bluntly, they are class traitors. But they recognize and fear the power of those 14 million members and the working class as a whole, so their job is to suppress it on behalf of the folks in Wall Street and both political parties. They know that with the unleashing of that power they will lose their lucrative lifetime jobs.

 

All rank and file union members must re-learn our own history particularly the 1930’s when the US working class took on some of the world’s most powerful companies. The mass strikes, occupations, organizing all workers very much like the teachers/educators did in 2018 with great success and especially building a political party of our own, a party that we can join and fight in rather than just voting for a Republican or Democrat and then going home.

 

The Black Lives Matter Movement is a lesson for us also. In its wake, huge capitalist enterprises, from moneylending outfits like Blackrock, social parasites if there ever was such a thing, to Apple, Google, Facebook and others have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at Black Colleges, businesses, and even banks in order to strengthen the Black middle class as a buffer against revolutionary potential of the Black workers and youth. This money will not be used to change the conditions affecting most Black workers.

 

Mass direct action and returning to the methods of the 1930’s is what will bring results. Relying on our own strength rather than the courts or so-called friends of labor is the answer, that’s why organized labor supporting Black Lives Matter, (positive, genuine criticism is not wrong) is so important, calling out sexism and misogyny is important. Racism is the single most powerful weapon US capitalism has to divide workers and keep us all down. If you’re a white worker in the South, you will earn less money and have fewer rights on the job and the reason for that is racism; workers are more divided, unions weaker or non-existent and the boss then has more power of your life.

 

It’s a positive thing the workers at the Amazon plant in Bessemer are stepping up whether the vote passes or not. But the labor hierarchy is very adept at plucking defeat from the jaws of victory and still calling it a victory. The numerous defeats the UAW leadership orchestrated attempting to organize the workers at the VW plant in Tennessee is an example of how pathetic the present leadership of organized labor is.

 

Unfortunately we are in a war on two fronts, against the bosses, and changing the present pro-management leadership of our unions that were built by ordinary working class men and women at great sacrifice. We owe it to them not to walk away from that fight. No one said it would be easy.