Alexa, What The Hell Happened?

Current ALU president Chris Smalls with BTWD activists at a Bessemer solidarity rally in Harlem. March 20, 2021

No one deserves a union in the sense that the right to form a union is not one immediately given to people the moment they engage in labor, but as the result of struggle against the forces of capital that seek to dictate the terms of such labor. Anyone seeking to organize a union has to be willing to fight such forces at the point of production. However, the social character of production requires this fight not be carried out as individual or spontaneous acts of disobedience, but as a coordinated effort in which the mass of workers at a shop take up the fight on behalf of their collective interests. To put it briefly, a union is not something workers just deserve, it is a power that must be won through class struggle. 

The recent union victory of the Amazon Labor Union at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island took most of the labor movement by surprise - we at Building Trades for Workers’ Democracy were expecting a victory after fighting alongside Chris Smalls and his comrades over the last year. The ALU’s win stands in stark contrast to the failure of an established union, RWDSU, to carry out a successful union election. Their victory isn’t too surprising if one pays attention to the particularities of their unionization efforts. Top down, professional organizing techniques that have dominated the union movement in the collaborationist labor-management paradigm didn’t win the day. The ALU was successful because it ran a worker-led campaign that took the experiences of the masses of workers at the facility and concentrated their desires into an action plan. Organizers engaged with workers at the only bus stop, brought them food and educational materials, disrupted anti-union captive audience meetings by the company, mapped out the workforce and won over sections of the workers strategically by departments, and most importantly they carried out these efforts every day. 

The Amazon Labor Union gives us an example of what mass leadership should look like in the labor movement of the 21st century. The victory is an exhortation to evolve from stale leftist as well as business unionist organizing models, to instead carry out the arduous task of organizing the masses of workers through protracted class struggle at the point of production. This observation might seem very simple considering the significance of what they accomplished, but experience indicates that many in the labor movement are either unwilling or unable to put resources into a sustained fight against capital. 

Mass leadership, leadership stemming from the will of the masses, is essential in the union movement. Lack of mass leadership retards class struggle and leads to defeat of  unionization campaigns, let alone winning any concession from capital. The decline of the union movement in the recent decades originates, among other factors, from unions abandoning their mass character as a people’s movement in favor of promoting labor peace and partnering with capital. At the same time, stale leftist practices that fetishize spectacular action rather than shop level organizations of workers to wage power won’t advance the interest of our class in a meaningful way. 

A technological dystopia 

The secret to Amazon’s retail success is its ability to quickly fulfill the electronic orders of their customers the second they visit the online store. Of course, this efficiency is built on the backs of their workers who have to work under a grueling environment where every single part of their work activity is monitored and rated by an omnipresent computer algorithm. Bathroom times are limited. Horror stories from inside Amazon facilities tell of workers having to pee inside bottles so that they wouldn’t have to abandon their post and upset the system. 

Workers are rated by how fast they are able to process the orders. These many times lead to ergonomic injuries as workers' bodies break down in their attempt to keep up with the fast pace of the orders. Speaking with an ALU member at one of the rallies, he told us that sometimes human management would remain blameless for firing workers. If a worker slows down during their processing of orders, the computer system will issue the worker a write-out. Enough write-outs and the computer would tell the human management to fire the worker. This repressive control of worker’s activities is one of the factors Amazon, and especially the facility at JFK8, had an annual turnover rate of 150%. Amazon constantly burns through workers faster than what they can replace them. 

The advent of these new technologies represent a new frontier for the labor movement. Just like with app based services such as Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, etc., Amazon attempts to atomize the work environment so that it is the computer system, not human management, in charge of handling the exploitation of workers. This is not a barrier, however, when the union campaign takes a mass character, and its leadership is informed by the needs and demands of the masses of workers. Human activity, at the end of day, can defeat any computer algorithm. 

A mass leader 

A lot of the ALU's success is credited to the personality and dedication of its current interim president and main organizer, Chris Smalls. Smalls is quite the unconventional labor leader: a tall, lean Black man who wears durags, shades, hoodies, and sweatpants. An aspiring rapper who had to cut his career short due to parenthood (a very common theme among the proletariat), Smalls is someone the workers at Amazon could easily identify with. 

But Smalls is much more than the persona he has built around himself. While in Amazon, Smalls was a dedicated worker who quickly rose through the ranks of the company training new staff as well as management. His career aspirations within Amazon were the reason the company entrusted him with the training of new staff at newly opened facilities. A lot of the management in JFK8 knew and were trained by Smalls. 

As a feature of the company, his walk-out at the beginning of the COVID19 health crisis surely caused quite an impact inside the facility. At a panel, Smalls candidly confessed he hadn't really organized a walk-out but had called for the media at a time when workers came out to eat, and having them there, he expressed his grievances, an action for which he was later terminated. 

He used his new found platform to form the The Congress of Essential Workers, and was later invited to Bessemer, Alabama, to help with the organizing efforts of the RWDSU. His experience there served to shape the type of organizing (or lack thereof) he didn't want to see in Staten Island. It is ultimately the rejection of the organizing practices of the RWDSU which brought ALU their victory. 

Mass organizing vs. business unionism 

Business unionism empowers employers by removing agency from workers at the level of work, instead instrumentalizing the machinery of unions for labor peace and cooperation with management. It often ends up treating the union as a service provider for workers seeking representation at the jobsite; something akin to an attorney. The organizing activity that flows from this orientation is often a top down approach to signing up workers with authorization cards to trigger NLRB elections. Companies combat this through what is known as “third-partying” the union; this means the company engages in a campaign to make the union unpopular by characterizing it as an outside entity divorced from their day-to-day activity of the workers. 

The failure of RWDSU to organize the Bessemer warehouse demonstrated the flaws of this approach, in comparison to the victory of the ALU campaign which relied on worker-led coordination inside and outside of the workplace to achieve the same goal. There was an over-emphasis on popularizing the campaign throughout the country rather than relying on the organization of the workers inside the facility themselves. The objective of using public attention to sway workers in favor of the campaign not only didn’t work, it backfired, with the union scrambling to stop supporters from calling for a boycott of Amazon for fear of scaring off workers right before the first vote. 

The union is responsible for familiarizing itself with the workers in order to not to be third-partied by the company. This is difficult if the union is obviously outside the day-to-day life of the workers. This was observed by Smalls during the RWDSU campaign in Bessemer. He recalls the organizers of the RWDSU asking him to clarify some of the company’s particular lingo. This convinced Smalls that the only way to organize Amazon was through the actions of the Amazon workers themselves, for they knew the workplace and the particular working conditions of the facility. 

Synthesizing the will of the masses 

The build up to the unionization campaign shows us that the campaign was the logical outgrowth from the different concerns Amazon workers raised over the years. Chris Smalls original intention was not to form a union when he walked out back in 2020, but to bring attention to the different safety concerns at the height of the COVID19 health crisis. It is through the experience of the walkout and later his contact with other unionization efforts that he and others saw the need to organize their facility. 

In the course of the unionization campaign, the ALU did not limit itself to just asking people to sign authorization cards. Their efforts required them to act like a union even before their official recognition. They used their capacity to mobilize workers to fight on behalf of victims of sexual harassment inside of the facility, by demanding that management pay attention to this issue and provide relief for the people affected. 

The repression that came as a result of their organizing was met with legal challenges that in December culminated with a settlement between them and Amazon. They were now able to maintain a permanent presence at the non-work areas of the facility from which organizers could talk to workers about the campaign. They were able to recruit organizers skilled in different languages to reflect the multilingual aspect of the city’s working class, as well as recruiting organizers from the different shifts of the facility. 

From a tent near the bus stop in front of the Amazon parking lot, the ALU organizers spoked to workers on their way home about their working conditions. Then they spoke about how a union would allow them the representation to fight to improve those working conditions. This process of social investigation is what fuels the mass character of a union campaign; if you speak to workers about their conditions, then you can generate a program that addresses those conditions. In the case of Amazon, the concerns are for longer break times, a wage increase, and health insurance, and that’s what the ALU seeks to implement when the negotiations start this May. 

What appears in the media as a spontaneous outburst of union sentiment, is actually a well planned coordinated effort by organizers inside of the facility to bring the mass support of their coworkers for a union. The ALU has a core and executive committee with which they centralize and synthesize the will of Amazon workers into a political program. Their reach within the facility allows them to bring that program directly to their coworkers. Their organizers trained themselves in methods of organization by studying the works of figures like William Z. Foster. Some of them started to work at Amazon with the sole purpose to organize the facility. Perhaps there is surprise, even among the organizers themselves, about the effectiveness of their efforts, but there is nothing spontaneous about the way they brought about victory. Theirs is a textbook example of how you organize a union. 

Incorrect methods of organization 

The activist Left leans towards a defeatist position in which they believe they are not able to confront the forces of capital on their own terms. They instead reductively rely on spectacular acts of performative activism: rallies, marches, banner drops, flash mobs, art displays, etc. Many believe these actions represent an actual confrontation against the forces of capital in the class war. The frontlines of the class war are not sympathetic rallies and marches, but in the shop floors themselves, the points of production where the capitalist extract value from the labor of the workers. 

It is quite disheartening when sometimes these performance activists attempt to organize actual workers. Their world view then gets reflected in the way they organize. Their methods of organization rely on performance activism rather than an actual disruption of capital. A good example of this is the methodology of Amazonians United, which organizes Amazon delivery drivers. They are limited to responding to the attacks of capital by using direct action tactics such as walk-outs to get their point across. They then try to engage their coworkers by bringing them to be part of their collective within the facility and thus plan their next action. 

This mode of organization is detached from the masses of workers, and solely focused on organizing a committee of activists, not about instituting class power within the shop. Amazonians United, however, do claim that by doing so they are acting as a real union. In one article for Labor Notes on which they explain their methods, they wrote: 

Remember this crucial fact: a union is nothing more than you and your coworkers coming together to make change. By building the union together with our coworkers, we aim to have control over our organization, our workplaces, and our lives, ensuring a future where we are respected as people and thrive together. Amazon bosses will do everything in their power to keep us separated and feeling powerless. But together we keep us safe. (Labor Notes, May 11 2020)

Their reasoning for this approach is that they are teaching the masses how to fight. However, unions are not simple organizations through which workers engage in activism. Unions are primarily institutions  through which workers are represented to collectively bargain with the capitalist over work conditions. Instead of trying to form that institutional power in service of their coworkers, they want to push their coworkers into direct action, which opens them up for repression. Any militancy has to first be based on the needs of the masses of working people. A strong core of activists is not as strong as the support and trust of the masses of workers.

Amazonians United believes that organizing these direct actions in response to attacks by capital is more important than founding a proper union, with the legal footing and institutional backing to negotiate with capital. This is why Amazonians United is limited to simply responding to capital rather than actually setting the terms to capital. Among some of the things they want to win for the workers at Amazon  is a modest $3 wage increase, as opposed to the ALU which (with their newly acquired institutional footing) is asking for a minimum wage of $30 an hour at their facility. 

We should be encouraging the Amazonians United comrades to embrace the methods of mass organization of the ALU, and start a campaign to unionize their workplace. This means organizing to gather the backing of the majority of workers at their shops by learning about their needs as workers and creating the institution capable of addressing those needs. Not simply training activists to respond to the attacks of capital, but building a formal organization capable of imposing workers power on the jobsite

On to the next victory 

The ALU’s victory can be easily reproduced if Amazon workers in other parts of the country are able to successfully transplant the methods of organization of the ALU to their particular localities. It is their actions within the facilities themselves that can bring about multiple victories and plant the seeds for a massive unionization drive across the country, of not only Amazon but also of infamous retailers like Walmart, auto plants like Tesla, and even of the app based car and delivery services. A unionization drive of this magnitude will fundamentally change labor relations in this country across industries and bring about a new age of class struggle. 

ALU teaches us working class organizers to listen attentively to the concerns of our coworkers, and to provide leadership to them in the form of a political program to address those concerns. It teaches us that whereas cementing working class power through the formation of a union is important, at times it is important to also address the immediate concerns of workers as they come. It teaches us not to simply react to the attacks of capital but to provide leadership to the masses of workers by thinking out political programs to counteract such attacks, and even sometimes go on the offensive. These lessons are the core of class struggle, and essential in the formation of institutions of working class power: unions. 

The existing union movement can provide much needed support for these efforts by providing the resources that help the organizers at the shop carry out the agitation within. Unions can also help in the legal front by mobilizing to fight for legislation that makes it easier for people to organize their work place, such as the PRO Act. Most forward thinking forces in the labor movement are not optimistic about the PRO Act passing because of a lack of willpower coming forward from unions and the AFL-CIO to actually fight for it. Remedying this means CLCs and state labor federations need to be willing to organize the unions in their jurisdiction to fight for our collective interest as a class, and not solely to provide a voting bloc for spineless Democratic politicians. 

Unions are organizations of collective bargaining, but they must also be institutions of power for the working class. That power can only be enforced by the union maintaining a mass character in their organization. That means constantly being receptive to the feedback from their members, and using that feedback to generate a program through which they can address the concerns of workers. But as working class institutions, they are also responsible for the waging of the class struggle on behalf of working people, and going beyond their immediate concerns to eventually obtain total control of society.