We’ve got to talk about what building a real union means and what kind of work it takes to build a real union. We, Amazonians United Chicagoland, are a union. We’re not sitting around waiting for anyone to recognize us as a union in order to be or act as a union. We’re also not interested in the legal processes required to be called a union by the government.
Why aren’t we interested in these processes? Because we’re not interested in playing a game with rules that our oppressors created to limit our ability to fight. We’re gonna continue building up our union through these issue-based campaigns, and through building solidarity and community with our coworkers. The basis of our relationships, of our existence as an organization, is the struggle against our bosses, the struggle against the oppressive and exploitative conditions that we live within.
For us, success isn’t dependent upon a union election, it’s in growing what we have been building step-by-step and for that growth to be led by workers and controlled by workers. We’re a union of workers that is fighting directly. When there are issues, we take them on directly. As we’re expanding and as we’re putting up fights and bringing other coworkers with us from other facilities, it’s helping them also do the same.
When we see bullshit at work, instead of thinking, “Let’s find a union that can help us,” our thinking is, “We have some issues, all right, how are we gonna deal with them? What are we going to do?”
As far as the union election in Alabama, I’m in complete solidarity with our coworkers there, but the union, RWDSU, fucked up from the beginning. It’s a shame that RWDSU is running a campaign whose only outcome can be failure. We all should be more critical of these attempts to “unionize workers.”
Let me try to be more clear. I see that RWDSU staffers and members have been effective at collecting union authorization cards, but a union built out of paper won’t stand. My coworkers in Alabama, as far as I can tell, don’t have a strong organizing committee that is taking on fights within the workplace. RWDSU organizers could be guiding them in how to organize themselves, but they’re not. So I don’t blame the workers, I blame the union staffers for misguiding workers. I’ve heard a few Alabama workers talk about issues within the workplace, but I haven’t heard of them figuring out how to address them directly by taking some sort of collective action. Workers in Alabama were angry about issues, so they decided to reach out to a union for help, and the union told them, “All right. The solution to these issues is that you have to form a union, and the way to do it is through a union election.” So the union staffers started their collection of union authorization cards. They got a lot of cards signed, went through some legal maneuvers and then got the union election with an expanded bargaining unit. They initially filed for a bargaining unit of like 1,500, now it’s a bargaining unit of 5,800.
And now what they’re doing is basically just mobilizing a yes vote, calling or texting workers, “Hey how’s it going, vote yes for the union!” But where is the fighting organization of workers? All I’ve seen is solidarity rallies of non-Amazon workers and a lot of media coverage painting Amazon workers as helpless victims of Amazon’s anti-union campaign.
If workers don’t have solid fighting organizations within the workplace, Amazon’s anti-union campaign is going to be very effective because they don’t have a way of combating it. The solidarity rallies and media coverage are nice, but most workers don’t see them or care about them, and they don’t do much for workers in captive-audience meetings where they’re being convinced that a union would be bad for them. Outside rallies and endless articles on how this is a historic and monumental election simply don’t weigh heavily on how workers make their decisions on whether to vote yes or no for a union. The vast majority of workers make decisions based on what they see and hear directly from people they trust, and based on their assessment of how this is going to directly impact their lives.
If workers, day-in and day-out, are seeing all this anti-union messaging at work and they’re not seeing a strong campaign against it from within, if workers aren’t fighting against it, mocking it, laughing at it, RWDSU is going to lose that vote. But let’s suppose that RWDSU is able to win the election. How will they get Amazon to agree to a collective bargaining agreement? How is a union going to have any sort of negotiating power with Amazon by only having one fulfillment center organized? Amazon has hundreds of facilities in the United States. They built redundancy into their logistics network to be able to handle disruptions, so why would Amazon agree to a contract without being forced into it?
In Europe we have the example of German Amazon workers who have legally recognized unions at their fulfillment centers. Whenever German workers go on strike, Amazon simply reroutes orders through fulfillment centers in Poland to avoid the striking facilities and successfully undercuts the union’s bargaining power because Amazon doesn’t care if the workers are striking, the packages are still getting to the consumers. For this reason, German workers began supporting Polish workers’ organizing efforts, and this was the beginning of
Amazon Workers International. It’s quite simple to see that unionizing Amazon through site-by-site union elections is a failed strategy.
