[A reborn workers’ movement needs both organized workplace
militancy and left-wing politicians that back them. Sunday’s Staten
Island Amazon rallies — attended by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and other elected officials — featured both.]
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WHY POLITICS MATTERS FOR AMAZON WORKERS  
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Eric Blanc
April 25, 2022
Labor Politics
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_ A reborn workers’ movement needs both organized workplace
militancy and left-wing politicians that back them. Sunday’s Staten
Island Amazon rallies — attended by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and other elected officials — featured both. _

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History moves very quickly when workers take action. After two years
of unrelenting working-class defeats and demoralization, hope was back
in the air in Staten Island on Sunday as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and a slew of national labor leaders rallied in
support of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).  

Less than a month after workers shocked the world by making JKF8 the
United States’ first unionized Amazon warehouse, yesterday’s
convergence took place in front of the LDJ5 warehouse where workers
this week are voting to unionize. The mood was electric, in many ways
resembling the October 2019 Queensbridge mass rally in New York City
that brought together Bernie, AOC, and tens of thousands of their
supporters.

Though smaller in number, this Sunday’s event was perhaps even more
significant in content. If Queensbridge reflected the emergence of a
fight for anti-billionaire, pro-worker transformation in the electoral
arena, Staten Island shows that this movement is finally popping off
at workplaces across the country. As ALU president Chris Smalls put
it: “The revolution is here.”

Bernie bringing down the house in support of Amazon workers
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/S8tA1DV20x [[link removed]]

— Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc) April 24, 2022
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Sanders
[[link removed]] laid out
the national stakes of the ALU’s victory: “You have been an
inspiration for millions of workers all across this country —
because they have looked at you and they’ve said, ‘These guys in
Staten Island, New York stood up to an extraordinarily powerful
corporation. If they can do it in Staten Island, we can do it
throughout this country.’”

Ocasio-Cortez not only pledged support, but threatened
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Amazon’s hundreds of millions in subsidies and tax breaks unless
they recognize the ALU and stop its illegal union busting: “New
York, it’s time to step up for our workers, because we’re going to
make sure that they go all the way. . . . New York City is a union
town and we’re not going to stop until the United States of America
is union made.”

🔥🔥🔥 from @aoc [[link removed]]
in support of @amazonlabor
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pic.twitter.com/JCFirt2sgo [[link removed]]

— Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc) April 24, 2022
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Sunday’s rally came as a disappointment to both Fox News and the
crankier corners of left media, both of which have been doing their
best to stoke a fruitless antagonism between the ALU and
Ocasio-Cortez, who last year did not show up to an ALU action, citing
a scheduling conflict. It is a testament to the ALU leadership’s
serious commitment to building mass power that it pivoted
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from such fruitless controversies. Faced with a ruthless,
union-busting corporation hell-bent on maintaining authoritarian
control of its workplace, the ALU needs all the allies it can get. And
because the United States’ broken labor relations system makes
winning a first contract even more difficult than winning an initial
union vote, its biggest struggles still lie ahead.  

The point is not that Amazon workers should start relying on
politicians, a dead-end approach that has aided organized labor’s
decades-long decline. It took systematic, bottom-up worker-to-worker
organizing to make possible the victory at JKF8 — and without
deepening and spreading this workplace upsurge, including by
getting ready to strike
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win a first contract, no forward progress will be possible, even with
the most dedicated support from state actors.  

But when it comes to workplace militancy and class-struggle politics,
ALU is showing that it _is _possible to walk and chew gum at the
same time. As ALU vice president Derrick Palmer told
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crowd, “Shout out to Bernie Sanders man, you’re a legend bro,
seriously. Shout out to AOC, thank you, thank you. Shout out to the
community — _we _did this shit. Workers, _workers _did this.”

.@DerrickPalmer_
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@amazonlabor [[link removed]]
thanks Bernie, AOC, the community, and—above all—the workers 🙏
pic.twitter.com/qevpT46i1Y [[link removed]]

— Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc) April 24, 2022
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Combining Labor and Legislative Action

It is no coincidence that many young worker leaders at Amazon that
I’ve spoken to — like at Starbucks
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in the Red for Ed
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movement — cite the inspiration of Sanders as a significant source
of their activism. Labor and political organizing, at their best, are
mutually reinforcing. And experience at home and abroad shows that
militancy from below is most effective when it receives support from
— but does not subordinate itself to — pro-worker elected
officials and state actors.

Fortunately, we’ve seen more and more of the latter in recent weeks.
In New York, Assemblyman Ron Kim has recently announced
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he is introducing legislation to claw back all state subsidies and tax
breaks for companies like Amazon that are engaged in illegal union
busting.

“If we do not stop subsidizing Amazon’s warehouses,”
he underscored
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“New York state becomes complicit in subsidizing union-busting
practices with taxpayer money.”

Things are moving on a federal level, too. Very much unlike the rest
of the administration, Joe Biden’s National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) has dramatically exceeded expectations. By filing injunctions
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Starbucks to rehire illegal fired worker leaders and by pushing
to overturn
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elements of US labor law that allow employers to stall most union
drives to death, this is unquestionably the most pro-worker NLRB since
the Left was purged
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its ranks after 1938.

Elected officials have a key role to play not only in passing
pro-worker policies and helping make union organization
become _the _single most important national issue of our period, but
directly encouraging their constituents to unionize. As labor
organizer Jonah Furman notes
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main thing politicians and big organizations can do right now to
support the Amazon union drive is find ways to identify Amazon workers
in their network who might want to organize. The ALU is going to need
‘cover fire’ while the company tries to isolate them on Staten
Island.”

Pro-worker legal and political efforts are no substitute for worker
organizing. But such legal and political efforts _can_ play
significant roles in facilitating labor upsurges and making them more
effective.

Consider the last great US labor upsurge, which won unions for
millions in the 1930s. Contrary to simplistic
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stress only bottom-up militancy, the most serious
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of this period stress
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consistent interaction between shop-floor action and state-level
policy. As historian David Brody explains
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“Contributions from the political sector probably amounted to a
necessary condition for the growth of industrial unionism.”

Without massive, disruptive strikes and risky, militant union drives,
labor’s great leap forward would not have been possible. But the
emergence and fate of these actions was always inseparable from the
raised working-class expectations generated by the New Deal; the
Roosevelt government’s 1933 proclamation of labor rights in Section
7(a); the 1935 passage of the pro-union Wagner Act; the refusal by FDR
and most Democratic governors to smash strikes through armed
repression; the congressional investigations of union busting by the
La Follette Committee; and the legal efforts of the left-leaning
“Madden Board” NLRB from 1935 through 1938.

Like in the Great Depression, today’s nationwide surge in workplace
organizing, from Amazon to Starbucks and beyond, might be a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild a powerful, militant labor
movement and to reverse decades of one-sided class war against the
multiracial working class.

The stakes could hardly be higher. A reinvigorated labor movement is
needed not only to give workers a real say at their workplaces, but
also to defend democracy and pass the transformative reforms
that _all_ working people urgently need. Had such a movement existed
in 2016 or 2020, Bernie could have won
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Had it existed last year, our side might have had enough power to
force Congress to pass a robust Build Back Better. And unless we seize
this moment to rebuild workers’ organized power, there’s no reason
to expect we’ll ever see a Green New Deal or Medicare for All —
let alone a full democratization of this country’s political and
economic system.

We’re in an all-hands-on-deck
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for labor and the Left. This means immediately scaling up new
workplace organizing [[link removed]] efforts and
getting strike-ready in all industries — and it means fighting to
transform existing unions to play a central role in these efforts. But
for these efforts to win, we also need to extend class struggle into
the political arena. Sunday’s ALU rally at Staten Island gave us a
brilliant glimpse of what this can look like.

“They have the money & the control, but we have the power”
—@FlyingWithSara
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with @amazonlabor
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pic.twitter.com/8MIG818Eb0 [[link removed]]

— Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc) April 24, 2022
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* Bernie Sanders [[link removed]]
* Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* Amazon Labor Union [[link removed]]
* Labor politics [[link removed]]

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