Amazon Workers Union Can Usher in a New Era. With Your Help

 

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Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

4-12-22

 

The victory of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at the Staten Island facility will bring a ferocious response from Bezos and the Amazon Bosses, but not just them. Big business in the US is not happy about this development and will respond with the carrot and the stick. Last year Amazon spent $4 million on “labor relations consultants” and they weren’t hired to educate workers on the benefit of organization.

 

Writing in Michael Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek Magazine, Josh Eidelson stresses the importance of the ALU’s victory writing that “…Smalls pulled off a shocking triumph.” Christian Smalls is the Amazon worker fired a couple of years ago for demanding improved safety protections during the pandemic; he has been a major factor in the rise of the ALU. Readers might recall the case of Cliff Willmeng, the ER nurse who was fired from his hospital in Minneapolis for demanding better PPE’s.

 

In addition to labor consultants, Amazon will use the forces it has at its disposal to derail this organizing drive. After winning the election comes the long haul to get an agreement with Amazon. Once a union wins an NLRB election, the company is supposed to negotiate in good faith. But getting to that point is a minefield. As BusinessWeek points out, “Most often the worst penalty a company can expect for not bargaining in good faith is being told by the government that it should bargain in good faith.”  Isn’t democracy swell!

 

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.”. The US Supreme Court is like a Politburo for the US capitalist class and workers will not find much relief there.

 

All this is a reminder 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. The new leadership of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, considers Biden a pro-labor politician. The reality is that 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. This doesn’t mean we don’t negotiate with the bosses, but we do so as an independent force and from a position of strength. What will ensure a victory for the AWL and all future attempts to organize workplaces like Amazon and Starbucks, is for working class people, the rank and file of organized labor and workers in our communities join their  struggle and support them in any way possible. They are fighting for all of us.

 

In his Business Week article Eidelson implies that the big union-hating firms and their strategists have misjudged the situation: “If Amazon, the consummate on-top-of-things company, can get bested after spending $4 million last year on labor relations consultants, then other companies may be more vulnerable to organizing than they have seemed.”  He reckons that this victory from an upstart group of rank and file workers with “no track record” means that, “old-school union leaders……have some soul-searching to do.”

 

Leaving aside that Christian Smalls and others have track records. Eidelson is completely off the mark here. These companies have always been vulnerable to organizing but the established trade union leadership, many with fancy degrees from fancy colleges, with fancy consultants, and friendly lawyers have a disastrous track record, one that has brought us defeat after defeat. As an example of the disastrous way to run a strike and the restrictive rules that union officials place on strikers, read this article about the Crane Operators Strike in 2018. Why would any worker be interested in joining a union with this as an example. Power attracts and the union leadership to date are terrified of that.

 

There is a reason that only 14% of Teamsters turned out for the recent leadership change and it’s to be found in poor leadership with class collaborationist policies. It has nothing to do with souls. Also see Takeover at the Teamsters.

 

The failed UAW organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga Tennessee, I think it was the fourth attempt, was described by some Labor Notes writers as a union strategy. But this is inaccurate, it was the union leadership’s failed strategy. We all know the bosses’ will try to undermine union organization, we don’t need union officials with Phd’s to tell us that. The reason these organizing drives fail is that the union hierarchy does not have a strategy to win. Wedded to the employers through the Team Concept, the view that workers and bosses have the same interests, their organizing drives are doomed to fail and when dues go up and wages and benefits decline, why pay dues? For the differences myself and others have with the Labor Notes approach to unions and organizing read: UPS/Teamster Contract: Two Strategies, Labor Notes and FFWP

 

The reason the ALU prevailed was because it is rank and file led, because it is dominated by workers on the shop floor. Because it doesn’t have the disastrous track record and pro-management policies of the present union leadership atop the AFL-CIO. The teachers/educators had significant victories against right wing Republican legislatures in 2018-19 because of the rank and file leadership, because the present union hierarchy were either weak or not present at all; if they had had a strong presence, those strikes and protests would most likely never have happened.

 

Sara Nelson, the president of the American Association of Flight Attendants (CWA) tells Business Week, “The Workers are ahead of us, and we’ve got to run to catch up to them”. I’m sorry Sister, that doesn’t impress me, workers have heard all this before. Whenever someone like Sara Nelson arises, the big business press publishes articles with titles referring to this or that “powerful labor leader” and the rhetoric is intense.

Anyone that’s been around for a while has seen this all before. Go look up Amy Dean. She was former head of the South Bay Labor Council CA. She was called a firebrand. Some referred to her and young leaders like her as the Young Turks and so on. Andy Stern former SEIU president, (I think he went to an Ivy League college) who is now a hedge fund manager I believe, was also featured all the time in the mass media as some sort of change for organized labor. The AFL-CIO split that led to the Change To Win Coalition had nothing to do with program, strategy or tactics and everything about increasing membership and votes for the Democratic Party.

 

The big business press promotes them; they’re not afraid or threatened by them at all. Christian Smalls, the ALU and Laila Dalton and the future Christian Smalls and Laila Daltons are a different kettle of fish. They will try to coopt them but the pandemic and the savage assault on workers of all backgrounds, a consequence of the unraveling of capitalism, makes that task a little harder.

 

I recently finished Tauré Reed’s book Toward Freedom, Against Race Reductionism and I recommend it to all workers as a useful tool in today’s world. At the end of it he talked of working for a year as a public utility worker in Louisiana and what a great education that was for him.

I am not against a university education, we can acquire important skills there. But it’s important to remind ourselves that universities are capitalist think tanks; the workplace and the workers’ daily struggle for power in it, is the best educator of all.