This week on CounterSpin: Amazon, the seemingly insatiable megacorporation, still refuses to acknowledge the union at its Staten Island facility known as JFK8, even as the National Labor Relations Board has rebuffed its attempt to overturn that union victory. Now Amazon has suspended dozens of JFK8 workers who refused to go to work after a fire that left the air smelling of chemicals and many feeling unsafe; 10 of those suspended were union workers.
The reality that workers around the country are, first of all, simply suffering too much to not feel a need to fight, however scary that is, and then many of them taking to hand the existing tool of worker organizing—through unions and outside of them—is something that corporate media can't plausibly deny. They can, however, underplay this movement, or patronize it, or try and confuse it by presenting it as "emotional" and irrational.
But with tens of thousands of nurses, teachers, timber workers and nursing home attendants walking out around the country, the notion that this is somehow not meaningful, not about fundamental questions of human rights, and not worthy of the most serious, sustained, thoughtful attention journalists can provide, should be hard to maintain.
We'll talk with John Logan; he's been reporting on organizing in media-friendly corporate behemoths like Amazon and Starbucks for Jacobin. He's professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Azov Battalion.
