Chris Hedges: Let Us Now Praise Amazon Unionists / Workers in New York Vote to Form Amazon’s First-Ever Union in U.S.

By Dilip -

Let us honor those workers who stood up to Amazon, especially Chris Smalls, described by Amazon’s chief counsel as “not smart, or articulate,” who led a walkout at the Amazon warehouse at Staten Island JFK8 at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago to protest unsafe working conditions. He was immediately fired. Amazon’s high-priced lawyers, however, were in for a surprise. Smalls unionized the first Amazon warehouse in the country. He, along with his co-founder Derrick Palmer, built their union worker by worker with little outside support and no affiliation with a national labor group, raising $120,000 on GoFundMe. Amazon spent more than $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year alone, according to federal filings.

We must not underestimate this victory. It is only by rebuilding unions and carrying out strikes that we will halt the downward spiral of the working class. No politician will do this for us. Neither of the two ruling parties will be our allies. The media will be hostile. The government, beholden to corporations and the rich, will use its resources, no matter which of the two ruling parties is in the White House, to crush worker movements. It will be a long, painful and lonely struggle.

You can tell what the oligarchs fear by what they seek to destroy — unions. Amazon, the country’s second largest employer after Walmart, pours staggering resources into blocking union organizing, like Walmart….

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/04/hedges-let-us-now-praise-courageous-men-and-women/


Workers in New York Vote to Form Amazon’s First-Ever Union in U.S.

Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York won their election Friday to form the retail giant’s first-ever union in the United States, a landmark victory for the labor movement in the face of aggressive union-busting efforts from one of the world’s most powerful companies. According to an initial tally released by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), there were 2,654 votes in favor of recognizing a union and 2,131 against. The number of disputed ballots, 67, is not nearly enough to change the outcome.

The historic unionization drive at the JFK8 fulfillment center was spearheaded by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a worker-led group not affiliated with any established union. Christian Smalls, the president of ALU, was fired by Amazon in 2020 after he led a protest against the company’s poor workplace safety standards in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. “When Covid-19 came into play, Amazon failed us,” Smalls said during a press conference after the union victory was announced. “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up.”…

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/01/david-beats-goliath-workers-in-new-york-vote-to-form-amazons-first-ever-union-in-u-s/


Alessandra Mezzadri: Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics


Bharat Bhushan - Targeting labour laws: On whose behalf do states operate?


Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Migrant labour and the unemployed will be demanding their rights, not our mercy


Subir Sinha: COVID has blurred the lines between waged, coerced and trafficked labour in India


China Labour Bulletin


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