Organizing Against Amazon Requires Strategizing Across Global Supply Chains
To build worker power at a mass scale that can challenge Jeff Bezos’s behemoth, worker militancy at Amazon has to be as global and as extensive as the supply chain itself.
Entrance to an Amazon warehouse in Bad Hersfeld, Germany. (Horacio Villalobos / Corbis via Getty Images)
In the wake of the election loss at Bessemer, Alabama, where workers voted 1,798 to 738 against joining a union, postmortems have unpacked a lot: Amazon’s brutal anti-union campaign, the broken state of US labor law, the strategic and tactical failures of the RWDSU campaign, and the what the loss implies for the state of the US labor movement more broadly. These are crucial explanations for the stinging defeat, but one lesson is clear: Amazon workers are up against one of the most voracious corporate giants in the world.
In order for future Amazon campaigns to win, our strategies have to exceed relying on unions running elections warehouse by warehouse. As the global economy develops around a sprawling logistics industry, the vital fight of the next few decades will be to organize workers not only on the shop floor, but across the global supply chain.
The Implications of Supply Chain Flexibility
Amazon’s breakneck expansion has been accompanied by increasing exposure of its brutal working conditions: over the years, workers have reported high injury rates, collapsing from heatstroke, unjust firings, and being treated like robots. Rates of worker speedup have been so demanding that workers report skipping bathroom breaks and peeing into bottles in order to keep their jobs. Thousands require second or third jobs and food stamps to survive.
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