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| Union organizer Christian Smalls (center, in red) celebrates as he speaks following a vote for the unionization of the Amazon Staten Island warehouse in New York City, United States. Photo: Andrea Renault/ AFP Source |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
4-27-22
In previous commentaries I wrote about the success of the workers at the Staten Island Amazon facility and their union, the Amazon Labor Union. I stressed that this is a very positive development for the US working class as is the increasing trend toward unionization among the unorganized workers. These developments have the potential to transform the balance of class forces in the US and introduce a new era for US workers but, as I wrote before, there are real dangers.
Winning an NLRB election is just the beginning and as I wrote on April 12th, “Amazon can institute court action to challenge the legitimacy of the election itself and use other legal avenues. During this time of course, the company will have a massive in-house anti-union campaign using threats, coercion and treats and hopefully force another election. Amazon could refuse to negotiate at all which could force the NLRB to file a complaint that the company would appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.”.
This is standard practice in these situations and knowing this, learning it from history, it is important to stress that workers cannot rely on the courts, so-called labor friendly politicians, or the Democratic Party that is a home to many of them; they write all the laws. Unions were built by relying on our own strength and using the only power that we have that works, our ability to withdraw our labor power and shut down production.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a capitalist institution, a governmental panel that was a result of the Wagner Act of 1935, more commonly known as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRB is governed by a five-person panel with its own legal counsel. All of the participants are appointed by the US president and have to be confirmed by the US Senate; it is a tightly controlled bourgeois body staffed by representatives of corporate America. The standard explanation as to why the US government was so generous in passing the NLRA at all was to make it easier for the US working class to form and belong to trade unions in the face of decades of employer resistance and violence. The lie is that it was created by the state to aid workers.
President “worker Joe” Biden, who most top labor officials claim is a good union man, stressed this point last year saying, that since the NLRA, “….the policy of the federal government has been to encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining, not to merely allow or tolerate them.”
Why would the most ruthless, violent ruling class in history “encourage” workers to form unions if it wasn’t in their interest to do so? After all, only 60 years or so prior to the NLRA, workers even discussing such an idea could be charged with conspiracy and could be tried in a court of law and not by a jury of their peers as there were property qualifications required to sit on juries.
In order to understand any social event it is useful to scrutinize the objective conditions under which they arise. In 1934, one year prior to the NLRA legislation, there were three general strikes in the US. The dock workers of San Francisco struck in a move that led to the institution of the hiring hall system that undermined the power of the shipping bosses over hiring. There was the Toledo Auto-lite Strike where AJ Muste, a radical Dutch minister organized the unemployed undermining the bosses’ efforts to hire strikebreakers. And the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis that successfully organized truck drivers and the working-class community against the anti-union trucking bosses. An excellent account of this strike can be found in Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs. A chapter covering all three of these strikes is in Art Preis’ account of the rise of the CIO, Labor’s Giant Step. There are many other sources but I found these very inspiring.
In these three strikes there were pitched battles in the streets with the national Guard and the police, some 40,000 in downtown Minneapolis and in all three, workers were killed. Even earlier, in response to the great Depression that hit in 1929, there were strikes, riots, and the Communist Party organized rent strikes and homeless protests. The legislation passed in this period, and what is known as the New Deal, was a response to the rising militancy of the US working class, its independent nature and the influence of communists, socialists, anarchist and other radical movements that were threatening capitalism and profit taking. The NLRA and the NLRB as part of it, was intended to take the movement from the workplaces and streets in to the courts and legislative bodies that capital controls. The same approach was used in response to the Civil Rights movement and the Black Revolt of the 1950’s and 60’s.
In response to the ALU victory in Staten Island, Amazon is making use of the institutions capital creates that can derail union drives and at least give bosses more time to threaten, coerce and fire union supporters, namely, the NLRB. In this case Amazon is not simply challenging the validity of the election as I mention above, it is challenging the intent of the board itself. It is claiming that the NLRB is not neutral but biased in favor of the unions and this was not the intent of the NLRA. It’s forcing “their” justice system to determine whether the NLRB’s role is to “advocate for unionization or to enforce the National Labor Relations Act neutrally”. Amazon Takes On the Labor Board, Wall Street Journal 4-26-22
Amazon claims that the NLRB’s actions prevented “….a, free and fair election”.
We should not fool ourselves here, we are not in agreement with the labor officials who claim victory when they get employers to sign neutrality agreements or promote the capitalist parties or institutions as favorable to workers; this does not mean we never the courts or the law, we just don’t depend on it. Neutrality agreements disarm the worker or our unions not the boss. The boss is never neutral nor should we be, we have different class interests. And we should not fool ourselves in to thinking the courts or the NLRB can defend the interests of the US working class.
I went here to read more about the Wagner Act and it says with reference to workers’ rights that the Act guarantees us:
“the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.”
As with all social gains, the massive upsurge after the 1929 depression forced the politicians of capitalism to recognize our right to organize, they simply wrote in legal code, rights already we had already exercised through our own independent, and more often than not “illegal” activity.
However, the NLRA also states:
It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.
And there is the catch. We are allowed to engage in concerted activities as long as commerce and trade (economic activity therefore profits) is not obstructed. The NLRA and its board is there to protect business and profits. We all witness this when injunctions are brought against strikes the minute they appear to be effective or harmful to the economy. This comes up every few years during transit strikes here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The NLRB is about as useful as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) when it comes to protecting workers from injury or sickness on the job. OSHA by the way was opposed on the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest and most powerful gang in the US. A strike that hinders commerce, disrupts profit taking, is terrorism as far as the owners of capital are concerned and their courts will uphold that. They want us to bargain like gentlemen and women over the few crumbs we are thrown from capitalism’s table. To ensure this is process works is the purpose of the NLRB.
This legal manoeuvring suits the present heads of organized labor to a T. Rather than allowing Amazon to use the courts to give it time to work on its employees, the union hierarchy could be bringing the power of 14 million members in to the fray linking with the new fresh layers fighting for the future. We know they won’t do this of course though they have the resources to do so. Historically, their whole orientation as this blog as stressed before is to “work with capitalism not against it”. We witness this when the union hierarchy calls for a “cooling off” period in the middle of a strike that looks like it might hurt the business. Who calls for the troops to “cool off” in the heat of a battle they look like they might be winning?
But this doesn’t mean if we are a member of a union, we do nothing. Sarah Nelson, the leader of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA- AFL-CIO has raised the issue of a General Strike more than once apparently. The Vermont AFL-CIO called for a General Strike in support of Joe Biden when Trump suggested he might not leave office if he lost the election.
Those of us that have been active in the labor movement for any period of time know this is simply hot air. Walter Johnson former president of the Retail Clerks Local 1100, then head of the San Francisco Labor Council, talked of the need for a General Strike on many occasions but never used his position as a prominent labor leader to make it happen, just the opposite.
Now we have a new leadership of the Teamsters union, a coalition that includes the Teamsters For a Democratic Union (TDU) that it describes as “militant”.
The very least that any active member can do is discuss this situation in the workplace and introduce a resolution at the local level. We can raise the General Strike and the importance of building it as it has been thrown around of late. We can point to the huge army of full-time staff organized labor has that can organize visits to workplaces and unions around the country instead of carrying out the concessionary policies of the hierarchy, organizing rallies to prepare and setting a date for a one-day work stoppage for starters. Activity like this can also be part of building a rank and file caucus at the shop floor/local union level.
Resolutions or appeals demanding leaders of the organized labor movement, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win groups, build stronger links with the AWU and the Starbucks workers and offer them the resources that the heads of organized labor have at their disposal can help to raise these important issues forcing debate and discussion in the workplaces and union halls.
Many union members have given up, they think that the leadership cannot be moved or removed but history shows otherwise; either way, we should not abandon the struggle against the union hierarchy for the consciousness of the membership. It is the duty of every serious activist to counter their concessionary policies and build an alternative.
It is not an easy task but it is a necessary one on the road to transforming the relationship between organized workers and the bosses.
We know that the entrenched bureaucracy atop organized labor will resist taking any such action and instead point to the courts and the NLRB, so they can blame them for their own failings. “We need to get more pro-labor folks on the NLRB”, they will argue, but workers don’t get to choose the members of the NLRB, the bosses’ politicians do.
There are many locals where the hierarchy has less influence and that becomes somewhat secondary. Pointing out a way forward, making the arguments for it, explaining the dangers of the NLRB trap and the importance of relying instead on our own strength is what matters. In other words where we have the ability to lead we should. Where we don’t, we can help clarify where the obstacle lies and help overcome the dominant view among so many workers that we can’t change things, that nothing can be done. The AWU victory at Amazon and gains at non-union workplaces like Starbucks are small but important steps that prove otherwise.
Further reading
Amazon Labor Union Victory Also Brings Dangers
Amazon Workers’ Union Can Usher in a New Era
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