Left Reckoning: Amazon, Bessemer and Building Workers' Power

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

 

This is an interesting discussion on labor organizing

 

Overall I think this was a very good discussion about organizing and in particular, organizing a global corporation like Amazon. Left Reckoning talks with Charmaine Chua and Ted, an Amazon worker. Charmaine Chua had written an article for Jacobin on the same subject.

What was refreshing for me about Charmaine Chua's contribution was the absence of arrogance and condescension that is so common with academics that write on labor and working class issues. I have commented many times how irritating it is to hear labor experts, from fancy colleges, many of them ex members of the labor bureaucracy or advisors to the AFL-CIO hierarchy, talk of selecting those workers from the shop floor who they think will make good leaders and so on. Some of them, often members or former members of so-called socialist organizations, slip up and talk of being "sent in" to the workplace. The average worker of course was not "sent" anywhere, we simply need to work to live.

 

Ms. Chua's most profound statement in the interview is, “Always look to the class, not the left”, and both her and the Amazon worker whose name is Ted, stress this in one way or another and it’s important as the left, if by that they mean the self-styled socialist groupings, is in a crisis of its own, having almost no significant influence in the working class at all. This is a product of the left’s petit bourgeois culture, sectarianism, failed approach and somewhat poisonous, undemocratic internal life.

 

What they both refer to is the need to build class unity and solidarity in the workplace where the “rubber meets the road” as I call it. They correctly point out the limits of social networking, that it is a good organizing tool sharing the experiences of workers regionally, nationally and indeed globally but is not a substitute for building working class solidarity and power on the job.

 

The discussion above is a welcome change in the age of identity politics, which is promoted by the US ruling class, and the liberal middle classes, as a means of undermining and obscuring the centrality of class, or more accurately, the existence of a “working” class, in the struggle against capital.

 

The language is somewhat different but language, like anything else, is fluid. The guests talk of “building culture” and Ted mentions “growing culture and the movement” , language that normally tends to make me cringe “growing the business” is a capitalist term that the labor hierarchy and its army of staffers have sort of adopted which is par for the course as they see the unions as employment agencies with them as the CEO’s and staff; business unionism in short. But I have been out of the workplace for 18 years, I’m in my 70’s and cannot claim to understand or be fully aware of the changes that have taken place and how young workers interact. 

 

For me it was clear in the interview that Ted and Ms. Chua were consistent in their arguments, that working class power, unity and solidarity is what has to be built and it is workers ourselves that will build it. Language and terms change and for me, as long as this language arises from and is accepted by the class as a whole, it is enough.  We talked of class unity, international solidarity and the recognition that there is special oppression that other workers have to deal with beyond simply class and that no genuine working class movement can be built without recognizing this and adjusting our approach, strategy and tactics to address it; we are not simply just workers.

 

To paraphrase Marx, the task of emancipating the working class must be the task of the working class itself. If only some of the so-called Marxists around today (and there are multitudes of them) genuinely understood that.

 

The conversation around the stresses reminded me of being in stress groups in the 1980’s with AT&T operators, particularly the 411 operators who were heavily supervised and expected to get a customer off the line in the shortest time possible using the fastest worker as the standard. They also had to hold up cards, a green one to talk and a red for a bathroom break if my memory serves me right.

 

While there is no doubt that class consciousness has been driven back in the US, that does not mean class consciousness doesn’t exist despite the pervasive influence of the liberal petit bourgeois in the workers movement and society as a whole. In my experience, when workers are simply forced in to struggle, when our backs are against wall, there is a very strong tendency to seek class allies, to unite across social divisions and overcome those divide and rule strategies like sexism, racism, fear of immigrants and so on. Naturally, the bosses do all they can, domestically and internationally to break this unity and if goals aren’t met, that unity can fracture. You can’t be on a picket line forever.

 

As far as preventing Amazon from re-routing as the speakers call it, we already have the structures in place to do that domestically and internationally.  Both coasts of the US are organized with the ILA on the east and the ILWU on the west. Workers can refuse to move certain goods. This is what should have been organized during the struggle against Apartheid rather than boycotts but for the labor hierarchy, it’s a confrontation that they dread. Better organize the worker not as part of a class struggle but as consumer than the worker in production and distribution. I wrote a previous commentary after the Defeat at Bessemer.

 

Transportation workers are organized including the airlines. Workers in utilities are organized including energy and water and of course the post office. Water can be cut off so can electricity. Internationally, I recall the PATCO strike when I think it was French air traffic controllers that took support action for PATCO members. The French state intervened. Capital has no borders and they know about class solidarity, look at Michelle Obama hugging her class brother George W Bush, a war criminal. Not an ounce of shame there. They know what class solidarity is about.

 

The problem is that this potential power that “slumbers in the lap of social labor”, these 14 million members of organized labor, are left idle or resistance is passive  relying on celebrities and so-called friends of labor in the Democratic Party. The heads of organized labor refuse to mobilize this potential power, they are terrified of it. For them, as I have stated more than once, it can only lead to chaos.

 

In the strike of oil refineries a few years ago it was completely legal (on paper) for the union to cripple this vital industry, to bring it to a halt. But the union hierarchy only struck a few so as not to hurt the employers. GM was struck by the UAW a couple of years ago despite contracts being up at both Ford and Chrysler/Fiat. There was a strike of crane operatorsat North Western ports a couple of years ago. These workers alone have tremendous power when it comes to the US economy but this power was not used for the class as a whole. So the power is there but the leadership spends most of the time suppressing it.

 

I raise this only to remind us of the fact that we have this power and the rank and file of organized labor have to wrest the control of it from the present pro-market leadership and the army of staff that ensures their concessionary policies are carried out. In the course of doing that, splits at the top will emerge.

 

In the last analysis though as the guests above point out, you don’t have to be in a union or have a union to build working class power and unity, most of us are outside of the union movement. The most crucial aspect of the struggle is class unity and internationalism. US capitalism is our enemy, the force and the individuals that promote it is the source of our oppression that deprives us of dignity and a decent life.

 

Let’s remember the profound statement that has its roots in the U.S. and the Industrial Workers of the World: “An Injury to One is and Injury to all”

 

More from this blog:

 "Work With Capitalism, Not Against It". Why the Labor Leadership Surrenders to the Bosses

A Fighting Union Leadership Will be Built by Rank and File Activists