Behind Union Defeat at Amazon Bessemer
https://socialistaction.org/2021/04/19/behind-union-defeat-at-amazon-bessemer/
April 19, 2021
By Jeff Mackler and Mark Ostapiak
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one
But the union makes us strong
(From the trade union anthem “Solidarity Forever”)
Would it be that the inspiration of the Retail Wholesale, Department
Store Union (RWDSU) flowed through the blood of the defeated 5,800
workers, the great majority Black, at Amazon’s giant packaging plant in
Bessemer, Alabama. “Solidarity forever” was terribly absent. The
early-April National Labor Relations Board-conducted vote tally gave the
RWDSU 29 percent to Amazon’s 71 percent.
Whether or not there was a single defiant mass rally or even a mass
meeting organized by the RWDSU at Bessemer during the campaign is
unknown. Inside the plant? Or in the parking lot or in the community?
Union Defiance Absent
Was there the slightest evidence of union defiance of the near slave
labor speed-up conditions at Bessemer, including high-tech surveillance
devices that marked and monitored the location of every worker every
second in accord with Amazon’s punitive “time on task” accounting? The
lash of the slave master’s whip was replaced with the invisible
handcuffs of his descendant’s technology, enforced to the point where
some intimidated workers felt compelled to urinate in bottles to avoid
being fired or punished for “time off task.” One can only wonder whether
this degrading horror too was video-recorded.
Was the union’s drive ever based on the simple idea of a pledge that the
RWDSU would not tolerate a single worker who signed a union recognition
card being fired or victimized? Some 2,000 Bessemer workers eventually
signed cards to trigger the April union recognition election but RWDSU
officials largely kept this information under wraps to “protect the
workforce” from being fired, they stated.
Did the RWDSU ever organize toward building rank-and-file power? To
date, we have not learned that any of these elementary class struggle
fightback tools were deployed.
The final tally was 1,798 votes in favor of multi-billionaire Jeff
Bezos’ Amazon Corporation that recorded 2020 profits of $21.3 billion.
Bezos himself is worth $179 billion, the richest person in the U.S.
Amazon is valued at $1.43 trillion.
Fearing that a union victory at Bessemer could trigger a cascade of
victories at Amazon’s 110 warehouses across the country, Amazon, the
world’s third largest corporation, came to Bessemer prepared to fight.
The RWDSU didn’t. Just 738 votes were recorded in favor of the RWDSU.
Some 500 votes were challenged during the counting process – mostly by
Amazon – and were kept out of the official tally. Time will tell how
many of these 500 were fired during the election campaign. But even if
all went to the RWDSU, the result would be unchanged. Close to half the
workers didn’t vote.
The union is filing a host of unfair labor practice appeals to the NLRB
detailing the myriad “illegal” horrors committed by Amazon’s hired
top-notch union-busting outfit. The likelihood of success is near zero,
not because Amazon didn’t pull off every dirty, intimidating,
threatening, corrupt move in the book, but because no serious gain for
working people has ever been won via the largess of the capitalist
establishment, whether it be its legislative bodies, labor boards,
courts or posturing politicians. The old maxim holds today more than
ever, “You can’t win in the courts what you can’t win on the picket line!”
The Class Struggle Road
Indeed, the past great gains for working people were won when they
defied all the above and took the class struggle road, marking the early
U.S. labor movement among the most dynamic and powerful on earth. The
RWDSU’s rejection of this road, not its failure to implement the long
list of labor organizing manual collective bargaining election tactics,
was central to its stinging defeat.
Had it done otherwise the outcome could have been different. Had it gone
to the thousands of Bessemer workers with the message that their courage
and collaboration – along with the solidarity of their friends, families
and communities – was critical, a different outcome was more than
possible. This solidarity, combined with all the forces that a fighting
labor movement could muster, in Bessemer, in nearby areas, if not
nationally, could have beaten the behemoth Amazon. An RWDSU strategic
turn to mass action, in time at the plant gate itself should Amazon move
to victimize or fire union activists, was essential. Replacing business
as usual unionism with a confrontation of wills, with tens of thousands
of workers and their allies on one side and a handful of Amazon’s cop
scab-herding squads on the other – at Amazon plant gates and Whole Food
supermarkets everywhere – was on the order of the day. Instead, a single
relatively isolated union chose a single target of perhaps the nation’s
most powerful corporations to open a terribly inadequate
hands-behind-the back recognition fight.
History of U.S. Labor Movement
The long history of labor’s historic successes was recorded when workers
en masse, led by militant, often socialist and communist organizers,
took on the bosses at the point of production and sacrificed life and
limb to prevail. Labor’s greatest gains were never registered when they
won a government-certified collective bargaining election but instead
when they closed down, if not occupied, their struck plants, defied
court injunctions, company-armed Citizen’s Councils, scab-herding cops
and the National Guard. These actions inspired workers around the
country to do the same and to mobilize to defend striking workers in
their own communities. Union power was based on the collective actions
of workers, who democratically and in mass meetings determined the
union’s strategy and tactics. Union solidarity emerged when the
rank-and-file chose its own leaders based on their record of fighting
the boss and their capacity to inspire others, inside and outside the
union ranks, to join them in doing so.
To those who respond to this time-honored organizing perspective with
the refrain that labor is too weak today to do what it did in decades
past we remind them that the biblical David vs. Goliath alternative,
wherein David’s stone and slingshot slayed his stronger opponent, is
both a fairy tale and inapplicable. There is no serious alternative to
the mobilization of labor’s collective power against the power of the
bosses and their state apparatus.
A glimpse of this power was momentarily visible with the anti-racist
millions who mobilized to insist, against the full mobilization of the
police and National Guard, that Black Lives Matter. Sadly, lacking a
decisive independent leadership, most were temporarily detoured into the
dead-end Democratic Party, only to return once again to the streets when
it became clear that the election had changed nothing and that raw
police murder remained the rule regardless of which capitalist party
held the presidency.
Hopefully, the “red state” teachers, whose “illegal” statewide strikes
in 2018-19 exacted major gains for educators and public employees, only
to be momentarily coopted into the Democrats electoral apparatus, will
have learned the critical lesson of working class independence.
Labor’s Historic Low Point
Today’s top-down business unionism has relegated the U.S. labor movement
to its lowest point in the modern era – in the last 100-plus years.
Labor’s parasitic officials, with salaries sometimes matching top
corporate executives, are today on their knees begging Democrats to pass
the latest version of “labor law reform,” this time called Protecting
the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the U.S. House in March.
The Richard Trumka-led AFL-CIO misleaders are lobbying their claimed
Democratic Party “friends of labor” for Senate passage. “Americans want
to organize unions,” said President Trumka, who pulls down an annual
salary of $272,260, not counting another $20,000 in “expenses.” Trumka
added, “It should never be this hard to organize.” Labor’s
legislation-oriented mis-leaders have been pressing for “labor law
reform” to increase union membership since the Jimmy Carter
administration and before – with zero success.
Since when has corporate America and its twin parties ever voluntarily
made it “easy” for its wage slaves to organize to win gains for working
people? The pathetic legislation that does exist on the books today to
legitimize labor organizing and collective bargaining, leaving aside the
myriad reactionary laws that undermine it, was a product of the class
struggle fights that had already forced the corporate elite to recognize
and bend to labor’s power. The bosses never “gave” labor anything that
labor had not already won in combat.
Trumka and his kind, including the AFSCME leadership that tragically
recruits “cop unions” into its ranks, are a far cry from the even the
worst layer of bureaucrats, who in decades past ran roughshod over
organized labor’s federations. Barely 11 percent of U.S. workers are
union members today, less than half the figure more than three decades
ago, with even this figure declining.
Recruiting cops in labor’s ranks, the modern day heirs of the
slavocracy’s patrols that hunted down escaped slaves… and today murder
Blacks with impunity while herding scabs through union picket lines. Shame!
Corporations Always Unite Against Labor
An April 14, 2021 New York Times editorial partially favorable to the
defeated Bessemer workers, entitled “A Big Loss For the Little Guy,”
explained how the corporate elite combined to obliterate even a modest
pro labor law passed by the California state legislature. The editorial
observed, “Faced with the prospect of having to treat their workers as
employees as a result of a California law, Uber pooled more than $200
million last year with Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates and Instacart to
successfully push a ballot initiative known as Prop 22, which overturned
the state law and ensured that drivers would be classified as contract
workers, ineligible for full health benefits, an unemployment lifeline
or the prospect of advancement.”
California’s ruling class pitched in a puny $200 million to redefine
workers as “independent contractors” and thus extract additional
millions and billions of dollars from their labor.
Labor’s Misleadership
Stuart Appelbaum, RWDSU’s president, pulls down an annual salary of
$337,014 plus another $14,441 in union “business expenses.” The annual
before-taxes salary of a Bessemer worker, assuming they work a fulltime
40-hour week for 52 weeks, is $30,000, just slightly over the
government-designated formal poverty level for a family of four in Alabama.
Said Appelbaum, “Working people deserve better than the way Amazon has
conducted itself during our campaign which has proven that the best way
for working people to protect themselves and their families is to join
together in a union. Amazon’s behavior during the election cannot be
ignored and our union will seek remedy to each and every improper action
Amazon took. We won’t rest until workers’ voices are heard fairly under
the law.”
“Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one”
bureaucrat like an Appelbaum or a Trumka? The latter sat on a Donald
Trump-appointed “labor-management” board, tasked with advancing the
interests of U.S. manufacturers. Trumka’s thesis that “What’s good for
General Motors is good for workers,” purports to link labor’s well-being
to the profits of the boss class when in fact, they are diametrically
opposed.
The once-militant UAW membership has been reduced by three-fourths or
more over the decades, with countless union jobs offshored to Mexico or
replaced by robots and automated factories. Once touted UAW pension and
health care benefits are gone or significantly gutted; automatic wage
escalator contract clauses designed to keep up with inflation have been
eliminated, while top wage scales have been obliterated by multi-tier,
low-wage contracts. Today’s starting UAW wages stand at levels less than
75 percent of what they were 50 years ago!
Trump, and now Joseph Biden, claim to advocate bringing back U.S. jobs
that were offshored to China or Mexico or Vietnam, where U.S.
corporations extract super profits at the expense of super-exploited
non-union workers abroad. Capitalism’s global “race-to-the-bottom”
scenario will never be challenged by labor’s ever-deepening
“partnership” with the bosses.
Black Workers and Black Lives Matter
Trumka’s AFL-CIO reported a poll indicating that public support for a
union at Amazon stood at 77 percent, yet the vote in favor of a union at
Amazon was 29 percent. How can we account for this difference? Is it a
matter of indifference on the part of Amazon’s predominantly Black
workforce?
An instant answer to this question thundered across the country last
summer when some 20 million people took to the streets in 2,000 U.S.
cites in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests against the
police murder of George Floyd and countless other innocent, unarmed
Blacks murdered by racist killer cops. Those unprecedented-in-scope,
Black-led mobilizations for the first time ever gave proof that in the
minds of the vast majority, a deeply imbedded or systemic racism
prevailed in the U.S. In a matter of days and weeks the institutional
nature of this racism was marked by the tearing down of the statues,
portraits and even names of longstanding college, university and public
buildings honoring America’s former racist slaveholder and Confederate
secessionist leaders. Led in great part by a new generation of
radicalizing Black youth, the protests were joined by similar millions
of white working class youth. What drove this movement forward was
explicitly its mass anti-racist and working class character coupled with
its defiance of police clubs, tear gas, concussion bombs, mass arrests,
curfews as well as a spirit of solidarity and angry passion that
overcame the threats to life itself in the context of the deadly
COVID-19 pandemic.
Tragically, this fighting spirit was almost absent during the RWDSU’s
formalistic, behind-the-scenes, hands-off effort to unionize Amazon
workers. The union relied more on solidarity statements from movie
stars, elected officials, social media technology and hype than it did
on enlisting the ranks to determine their fate and win their union. The
timid bureaucrats even refrained from the traditional one-on-one “home
visit” door-to-door organizing, citing COVID-19 concerns at a time when
20 million anti-racist youth, Black and white, threw caution to the
winds to make their solidarity open and visible.
Union Dues in “Right-to-Work” States
RWDSU tried to counter Amazon propaganda that warned workers that a
union victory would entail mandatory dues payments. The union’s response
was to deny the charge stating that mandatory dues or “dues check off”
was banned under Alabama’s “right-to-work” laws. Again, the union
bureaucracy proved incapable of explaining that paying union dues was
inseparable from maintaining a powerful union ready 24/7 to defend and
advance workers’ power against a labor-hating corporate empire.
Prior to WWII, dues check-off did not exist in either union contracts or
state or federal law. It was only enacted when the bureaucracy brokered
a deal to have employers collect union dues and send them to the union
in return for the union agreeing to a “no strike pledge” in the name of
ensuring uninterrupted war production. This wartime agreement saw the
boss class’s largely monopolized war profiteering industries rake in
unprecedented billions while workers’ Depression-era wages were frozen.
Indeed, the bureaucracy’s move to extend the no-strike pledge to the
post-war period led in 1946 to the greatest strike wave in the nation’s
history, bypassing large sections of the class-collaborationist union tops.
Prior to WWII, union dues were regularly collected by
democratically-elected shop stewards and workplace union committees that
had won the confidence of the ranks, who were more than willing to
support the strong unions that they themselves had created. The basis of
union power largely rested in a solidarity born in common struggle
against exploiting corporations and in regular, democratic well-attended
union meetings where major decisions were directly in the hands of the
ranks.
Today’s unions are almost entirely lacking in the most elemental
democratic forms. Where union meetings exist at all they are often in
far away locations due to the unions being merged again and again over
sprawling, sometimes statewide jurisdictions. Attendance most often
consists of handfuls of “elected” bureaucrats who the ranks have never
known and who become eligible to run for office, according to revised
union constitutions, only after they have served lengthy years in the
union’s hierarchy. A miniscule percentage of members ever attend.
“They Have Taken Untold Millions…”
Solidarity Forever’s verses remind us of times long past when the
“grasping hand of the ruling rich” more blatantly stole of wealth that
working people created.
“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn
“But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn
“We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
“That the union makes us strong”
and further…
“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold
“Greater than the might of atoms, magnified a thousand fold
“We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong”
Today, “breaking the haughty power” of the bosses is non-existent in the
language of the union tops, who define their traitorous policy in terms
of unconditional support to the boss’s chosen party, the Democrats. The
anti-labor and racist record of Joseph Biden’s decades of service to
capital is obliterated overnight, while some in labor proclaim that
Biden is “the best president labor has ever had.”
Today’s labor fakers play third or fourth fiddle to the Democrats, if
they are allowed even a single non-prime-time televised convention
minute to hail the Democrats’ chosen candidate.
Ousting the Labor Bureaucracy
The present labor bureaucracy notwithstanding, working people today have
the potential power to bring capital to its knees, to close down the
country from one coast to another, to champion every struggle of working
people and the oppressed and exploited, immigrants, women, and LGBTQI
people. That power rests in its capacity to organize a massive fight to
democratize, rebuild and qualitatively expand the present unions and to
establish a new fighting leadership that wins its spurs in the course of
these struggles.
Labor’s future simultaneously rests in its will to build its own
political party, a fighting, independent Labor Party that takes labor’s
battles at the point of production and in the streets into the political
arena with the objective a establishing a government of working people
that aims to construct a socialist society.
Amazon’s victory at Bessemer is far from irreversible. Over time,
serious union fighters will absorb the lessons and return to the
struggle at the head of mass forces that will ensure success.
[Jeff Mackler is a staff writer for Socialist Action newspaper. He can
be reached at socialistaction@xxxxxxx, socialistaction.org. Mark
Ostapiak is a member of SEIU 2121 and a leader/member of the union
caucus, SEIU Drop the Cops.]
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Carl Sagan “It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance
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then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new.
You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the
world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now
and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on
the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being
skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and
either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and
progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility
and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot
distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.” ― Carl Sagan