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Laboring Beyond Black Representation

April 6, 2022 Too Black, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Because most of what passes as Black thought nowadays has been criminally captured by white capital (philanthropic foundations, corporate advertising, government funding, academia, business roundtables etc.) it was inevitable that the recent union victory against Amazon would fail to trend in the same spellbounding way as recent stories have in the Blacksphere. As a consequence, a feeble smack from one rich negro onto another and a token "First Black " woman judge appointed to a supreme court that regularly rules against (Black) labor is naturally lifted above the story of the first union to form against the insidiously hostile employer, Amazon, that was led by a working class Black man, Chris Smalls .

Workers Used Amazon’s Captive Audience Meetings Against Amazon

April 5, 2022 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. , , , ,
Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y., astonished the world last week when they voted to form the first-ever U.S. union at the e‑commerce behemoth, which is known for ferociously opposing its workers’ efforts to organize. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won the effort at the JFK8 fulfillment center, had been targeted by such anti-union efforts, and its co-founder, Chris Smalls, had been called “not smart or articulate” by Amazon officials. (Smalls co-founded the union after he was fired for organizing for safer conditions during the pandemic.) Workers and organizers across the country are looking to this campaign for lessons on how to overcome such aggressive tactics from Amazon, which has long proved difficult to organize.

Amazon Workers In Staten Island Clinch A Historic Victory

April 5, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
It’s the magical stuff of Disney movies. But yesterday, the improbable became the most probable when the scrappy band of workers who make up the Amazon Labor Union took the lead in a union election at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, putting within reach a historic labor win at the corporate behemoth. Before the vote count most reporters had dismissed the independent union’s chances, treating the organizing as a curiosity at best. “I think we have been overlooked,” said ALU Treasurer Madeline Wesley Thursday night. “And I think that that ends tomorrow when we are victorious.” The ALU clinched a decisive victory today, winning by a wide margin to create the first unionized workplace in Amazon’s extensive network of fulfillment, delivery, and sortation centers across the U.S.

Let Us Now Praise Courageous Men And Women

April 4, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
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.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Pull Into The Lead

April 1, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , ,
In initial vote tallies today, Amazon warehouse workers in New York are ahead by hundreds of votes in favor of forming a union, while in Alabama the election is too close to call, pending a court hearing. The vote at Amazon’s mammoth warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was a rerun of the election last April that the union lost by more than 2 to 1. The results of that election were thrown out after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered with the vote. This time, out of 2,375 valid ballots, 993 workers at the fulfillment center voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, while 875 workers voted in favor. There are 416 ballots being contested by either the company or the union, and 59 voided ballots.

Our Organizing Must Match The Structure Of Our Target

April 1, 2022 Sam Nelson, The Forge. , ,
In September 2017, Amazon announced its intention to build a second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Over 200 municipalities in the US, Canada, and Mexico submitted proposals to host the site, with offers for everything from tax breaks to infrastructure improvements to promises of partnerships with high schools and universities in order to train a whole workforce for Amazon. Some even offered to rename their town Amazon. In the end, Amazon selected three locations: New York City, Arlington, and Nashville. Labor and community organizations in each location quickly coalesced to oppose the developments and the use of public money to incentivize them. In New York, the coalition organized demonstrations; allied with key elected officials, like Senator Michael Gianaris; and trained community members in Queens — Amazon’s would-be neighbors — to act as spokespeople.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Vote On A Union

March 31, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
New York City (Staten Island), New York - As the country cheers on Starbucks workers organizing, the votes will be counted this week in two big union drives at Amazon warehouses—one in Alabama and one in New York. Voting concluded March 25 in Bessemer, Alabama, after mail-in ballots were sent in early February to more than 6,100 workers who are deciding whether to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. This is a re-vote after Amazon’s interference tainted the first election, a landslide defeat last April. Meanwhile in an in-person election at the sprawling Amazon warehouse known as JFK8 on Staten Island in New York City, more than 8,000 warehouse workers will decide whether to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union, an independent union formed there last year.

How Amazon And Google Made Billions From Israel’s Occupation

March 28, 2022 Ramzy Baroud, Mintpress News. , , , , ,
Seattle, Washington - “We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This sentence was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military. In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government which provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government that “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”. This is called Project Nimbus. The project was announced in 2018 and went into effect in May 2021, in the first week of the Israeli war on besieged Gaza, which killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded many more.

Bessemer Alabama Amazon Workers Continue Struggle To Unionize

March 25, 2022 Saladin Muhammad, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Bessemer, Alabama - The second Bessemer Alabama Amazon workers and Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) labor board union vote will be counted starting on March 28th. It comes as a result of the National Labor Relations Board ruling that Amazon’s anti-union actions in the 2021 union campaign, was in violation of laws in the National Labor Relations Act. When looking at the challenges and meaning of the Bessemer Amazon union campaigns, It’s important to have a long view of organizing labor in the South. Transnational corporations like Amazon are attracted to the South, because of the low wages, its anti-union laws and the racist divisions in the working-class.

Communities Should Not Pay Amazon

March 19, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , ,
It’s meaningful that Amazon‘s head, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, and that the paper sometimes needs to be reminded to disclose that relationship to readers, as they run stories like “Jeff Bezos Blasts Into Space on Own Rocket: ‘Best Day Ever!’”—buttressed by op-eds like “The Billionaires’ Space Efforts May Seem Tone-Deaf, but They’re Important Milestones.” The difficult reality is that Bezos doesn’t need to outright own a news outlet to get coverage that undergirds his worldview that, yes, it makes sense for a man to launch himself into space while some of his employees rely on public assistance to feed themselves, and face every underhanded obstacle if they try to organize, and for a company that contains those contradictions to be labeled a wild economic success.

The Amazon Warehouse Walkout Is Just The Latest Push

March 18, 2022 Caitlin Harrington, Wired. , , ,
In the predawn hours of Wednesday morning, workers at three Amazon warehouses walked off the job. More than 60 employees at two delivery stations in Queens, New York, and one in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC coordinated the first multistate walkout at US Amazon warehouses and demanded a $3 hourly raise. As high-profile union elections in Bessemer, Alabama, and Staten Island, New York, have captured the world’s attention, an informal union named Amazonians United (AU) has been staging actions at facilities across the country—and winning. The worker-led organization began when a handful of Chicago warehouse workers got together in 2019 to protest the company limiting their water access, according to an interview in Jacobin.

Amazon Union Organizers Arrested After Bringing Food To Workers

February 24, 2022 Murjani Rawls, The Root. , , ,
The Biden administration has recently made proposals to strengthen unions–one suggestion includes limiting “barriers to union organizers being able to talk with employees on federal property about the benefits of organizing a union.” However, there’s the issue of what can happen on private property. Amazon has taken a firm anti-union stance and continues that streak with a new development. According to Business Insider, the NYPD arrested three union organizers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. This is not the first time police have been called on this particular warehouse. Insider also reported an incident involving a small open-sided tent pitched across the street of the warehouse in November. Police ordered that the tent be taken down and one organizer was handcuffed and temporarily held in a jail cell.

Workers Power Day – February 26, 2022

February 8, 2022 Support Amazon Workers. , , ,
Starbucks workers are leading an electrifying drive to organize the major coffee chain, with one or often several stores announcing they’re joining this growing movement each day. Amazon workers from coast to coast are organizing to build power at one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations. Workers in Staten Island recently filed to hold union elections at 2 warehouses. The majority Black Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama are engaged in their second union campaign, after the results of the first were tossed out based on Amazon’s egregious union busting campaign – which they continue in earnest in Bessemer, Staten Island, and elsewhere.

After Amazon Tragedy, Workers Demand Safe Working Conditions

February 7, 2022 Rebekah Entralgo, Inequality.org. , , ,
The fight for justice and accountability continues for six Amazon employees who were killed when a warehouse roof collapsed during a tornado in December. Federal officials are investigating possible health and safety violations at the facility in Edwardsville, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis. Illinois lawmakers are considering raising statewide standards for warehouse construction to prevent future tragedies. And family members of one of the employees, Austin McEwen, recently filed a wrongful death suit against the giant retailer. “My daughter was not expendable,” said Jeffrey Hebb at a January rally in front of the Edwardsville facility. Hebb’s daughter, 34-year-old Etheria Hebb, died in the warehouse collapse, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter.

Alabama Amazon Workers Are About To Rerun Their Union Election

January 24, 2022 Alex N. Press, Jacobin. , , ,
It’s a moment of increased bargaining power for the US working class. Workers on the order of millions are quitting their jobs and finding new ones that will pay them better. Those with unions are more willing to fight to begin undoing prior concessions, their confidence bolstered by the realization that employers will have more trouble than usual replacing them should they strike; that these fights do not approach the level of struggle of the 1970s, much less the 1930s, do not make them insignificant. And the momentum is with reformers within unions: see recent efforts to transform the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters, two still mighty organizations even after sustained and systematic decline.
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