Walmart and Amazon, millions of whose workers and suppliers have struggled to make ends meet amid the pandemic, are flush with cash — and just as virulently anti-union as ever.
Ballots are due by March 29 in the first warehouse-wide union drive at a US Amazon facility. The Alabama workers are up against an avalanche of anti-union propaganda, but if they win a union, it would mark a historic incursion by labor into the heart of a formidable anti-union employer.
Independent unions are a real rarity in the US labor movement. But at multiple stores across the country, Trader Joe’s workers are organizing outside of established unions.
The New York Times recently profiled life on the Amazon shop floor — chaperoned by Amazon management. Perhaps not shockingly, the result was a fawning portrait of work at Amazon that only a boss could love.
Workers in the rapidly transforming logistics industry have potentially enormous political and economic power.
During yesterday's protests against the police murder of George Floyd, Amazon declared that it "stand[s] in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice." But the company is no racial justice ally — not least because it has resolutely attempted to smash its workers' organizing efforts.
The world’s second-richest man is using social media to push back against any hint that corporate greed is stoking inflation — and to send a message about his news preferences in the Washington Post, the paper he owns.
Legendary actor and longtime progressive activist Danny Glover was recently in Bessemer, Alabama, supporting workers’ efforts to organize a union there. In an interview, Glover talks about what brought him to Bessemer, his own labor history, and why the Amazon workers’ “struggle has significance for all of us.”
Unions desperately need labor law reform through the PRO Act. But even if that bill remains off the table in the near future, Joe Biden can take immediate action through executive orders to roll back corporate union-busting like Amazon carried out in Bessemer, Alabama.
At Amazon, big organizing campaigns by established unions — like the one in Bessemer, Alabama, this year — are only the most visible face of labor organizing. The other is Amazonians United, a militant shop-floor group with a presence around the country.
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing yesterday, with Bernie Sanders presiding, economists, labor experts, and the day’s star witness — Jennifer Bates, an Amazon warehouse worker in Bessemer, Alabama — exposed the grim workings of an economy that continues to funnel wealth and power to a tiny capitalist elite.
Amazon is one of the most important companies in the American and global economies. If enough out-of-work socialists and other fed-up workers got jobs at the company and organized, they could build real working-class power in the 21st century economy.
The town of Rugeley, England, once boasted a thriving, unionized coal industry that underpinned the community. Today it is the site of a hyperexploitative Amazon warehouse — typifying the effects of deindustrialization and union decline across the UK.
Amazon may be closing its warehouses in Quebec to send a warning to unions, but it still has to get packages to customers. For a company that thrives on controlling warehouses, this retreat may be more costly than it seems.
Today 4,000 Amazon workers at a North Carolina warehouse will finish voting on a union. Employees say the company “mobilized an army” ahead of the election, siccing local police on organizers and trying to pit black and Hispanic workers against each other.
The historic union victories at Amazon and Starbucks have shattered any illusions that corporate giants are invincible to labor organizing. Let's make Amazon and Starbucks the start of a massive wave of unionization.
The reason Amazon workers lost in Alabama is simple: Employers in the US are allowed to engage in brazen anti-union tactics throughout union elections. The PRO Act would change all of that, finally freeing workers from employer intimidation.
Bill de Blasio is welcoming Amazon to New York City with open arms — proving that his progressive reputation was always a sham.
Amazon plays a key role in the twenty-first-century economy and has shown it’s vulnerable to pressure. Socialists should get jobs there and organize.
Jeff Bezos joined Black Lives Matters' calls for racial justice last year. But Amazon workers in the majority-black town of Bessemer, Alabama are trying to unionize — and Amazon has fought them tooth and nail.