By Gerry Scoppettuolo
In the recent Teamster union “strike” at Amazon, it is estimated that between 600-1000 Teamster/Amazon workers participated in the job action Christmas week. The number of workers who actually left their trucks and work stations is much smaller based upon the documentation to be found. Modest numbers like this can be deceiving, however. Those who took action represented thousands more who have either signed Teamster union cards in active organizing drives, have a majority card count and are demanding card check recognition, or like workers at Staten Island JFK, have won an election (2022). Additionally, Teamster locals in several states turned out members to bolster numbers. Workers got physical with New York City cops and two were arrested at the Queens facility.
Pickets and rallies were launched from above. The Teamster union sent out paid staff organizers to direct events as well as elected leaders from union locals to help out. Rallies and pickets occurred in at least seven states and likely twenty or more cities and was broadly covered by the media. Pickets hit the bricks at many more Amazon facilities than appeared in media reports. For example, organized actions at seven different locations in Michigan and several in Florida only made local news outlets.
The countless YouTube videos available online clearly showed an active and angry workforce, mostly Black and Brown, and eager to organize. The perception, if not the reality, of a massive national strike at Amazon cannot but affect rank and file workers in a positive direction. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is the only union in the U.S. with anything like the capacity and experience to organize such a giant section of the working class. The ranks of actual Amazon workers who picketed represented less than one tenth of one per cent of the potentially organizable bargaining unit of a million and a half full and part time workers, second only in size to the U.S. Armed Services.
But it is not merely the huge size of the Amazon workforce that would make unionizing them so historic. There would be far-reaching consequences with such a great blow to the capitalists here and in Europe where strikes broke out in Germany and England. Such a struggle would represent an historic movement of the oppressed: the greatest number of low paid workers of color in the U.S. who toil for one single employer, toil for Amazon, 74% of their workforce.
Amazon’s official 2023 data shows this: African American (31.3%), white (29.1%), Latinx (25.8 %), Asian (14.4%), Native American (1.5%), Multi Racial (1.1%),, NHOPI (0.8%) and Other (0.9%). All must endure never stopping robot-driven production and delivery lines. [editor’s note: the Amazon figures add up to almost 105%]
Each of the 250,000 “contract” drivers must deliver 300-400 packages a day. Choosing to work for Amazon is a choice made out of desperation and survival, and not a desire to join the middle class and pay for children’s college education.
Things have changed since the 1960’s when striking down racial/ethnic discrimination in employment, housing and transportation was a foundational demand of the modern civil rights movement. Today, something like the reverse has happened. Yes, there is full employment at Amazon where the 150% annual turnover rate renders racial discrimination a barrier to profits. Jeff Bezos and Amazon are quite happy to hire all the desperate Black and Brown workers whose labor they can exploit. Black and Brown workers must accept the grinding and inhuman working conditions of work in the Bezos empire.
The material conditions of the assembly line have changed since the 1920’s and 30’s bringing a new reality to work, comparable in some respects to tenant farming in the post-Reconstruction South..After the Civil War, when the southern planter class still needed cotton to be picked, tenant farming, “Slavery by another name,” became the new capitalist solution necessary to continue the exploitation of labor, replacing chattel slavery. In the Industrial Revolution cotton manufacturers desperate to exploit labor power were forced to scour the countryside to entice young women to leave home and attend to the incessant drive of cotton mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Today, Amazon constantly needs more and more workers every year to keep up with product demand, wringing historically high unpaid surplus value as measured in wages out of sweated labor power. Then as before objective material conditions produce new forms of exploitation.
The Challenge of Union Organizing at Amazon
The biggest union organizing drive in U.S. history cannot be won with a “business as usual” approach to organizing. As of this moment the National Labor Relations Board with its new Trump majority is ready to strike down union organizing drives. The “joint employer” doctrine holding primary employers responsible for labor violations by their contractors, favored by the Biden board, is likely doomed. This would require the Teamsters to organize tens of thousands of workers at hundreds of work sites with hundreds of different employer contractors. New Amazon “fulfillment” centers and gigantic air bud delivery complexes are popping up all over the continent. A new organizing model that could mobilize external working class community support, allied with the Teamsters, drawn from all oppressed communities is one possible approach.
During the historic 1934 Toledo Auto Lite General Strike, the critical support of thousands of the unemployed at picket lines meant victory for the union. Last fall the Black Caucus of the Teamsters broke with Teamster Union leadership and endorsed Kamala Harris for president despite the Teamster Executive Board voting 13-3 not to make an endorsement. According to a report in The American Prospect “…. within 24 hours of the union proclaiming its neutrality, regions and locals representing more than 500,000 of the Teamsters’ 1.3 million members (of whom a little more than 100,000 are in Canada) announced that they were backing Harris.”
It was not just Black Teamsters with a different view, however, as entire New York State and West Coast Teamster regions also dissented. It would be the height of class irresponsibility to interpret these figures divisively as part of yet another example of the decline of labor. Rather, they should be seen as a harbinger of realistic hope that only a united multi-ethnic working-class, unafraid of being led and rallied by leadership from workers of all colors that cannot be bought or bossed can liberate the masses.
There was a time when communists sought and effectively succeeded in steering organized labor to the Left, especially between 1936 – 1950. The old “boring from within” strategy of the CPUSA, the SWP and other vanguard parties has completely disappeared, crushed by pervasive Red Scares. However, new and changing material conditions have a way of producing new organizational forms and possibilities. Whatever the path to the future, only the masses can build it.
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