#The ruling class amazon install
The campaign to install the RWDSU at Amazon did not arise from a movement of workers from below.
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#The ruling class amazon series
What are the real reasons for the defeat? We might suggest to Appelbaum that he look to the forty years of unending betrayals by the AFL-CIO, dating back to the refusal of the unions to defend the PATCO air traffic controllers against the Reagan administration’s strikebreaking in 1981 the endless series of concessions contracts, in which the unions sanctioned wage and benefits cuts and job losses and the transformation of the unions themselves into instruments of corporate management, a labor police force, staffed and led by highly paid executives, including Appelbaum himself (income $344,464). If anything, it would have produced the opposite result. As for the assertion that Amazon misled workers into voting earlier than they had to, this cannot explain the abysmally low turnout of only 50 percent. The vote on the RWDSU had the support of dominant sections of the state apparatus and the media, including dozens of members of Congress and the explicit endorsement of the president of the United States, Joe Biden.Īppelbaum’s claim, moreover, that the RWDSU could only get 13 percent of workers to support the union campaign because Amazon put a “strange mailbox” on their facility is an explanation that could only be given by wealthy executives with no connection to the working class and the class struggle. Alabama was itself the scene of violent class battles against the determined resistance of the capitalist ruling elites.Ĭompared to what the unions confronted in an earlier period, the conditions in which the Bessemer vote was held were practically idyllic. The industrial unions were built in the United States as mass organizations under conditions in which the employers resorted to massacres, the Ku Klux Klan, Pinkertons and other vigilante groups to defeat insurgent workers. First, no genuine workers organization expects that its efforts will have the support of the company. RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum declared that workers were afraid that “they would lose their jobs if they voted for the union.” He said that Amazon worked “very, very hard to get a very strange mailbox on their property” to collect the votes, and that the company said that the deadline for voting was earlier than it actually was.Īppelbaum’s explanation is absurd on its face. The RWDSU is predictably attempting to explain its debacle by citing company intimidation. The results demonstrate that the campaign waged by the RWDSU did not reach the workers, who were either hostile or indifferent. The turnout for the vote was approximately 50 percent, and less than one-third of the votes that were cast went for the RWDSU. In a facility with 5,800 workers, only 738 (less than 13 percent) voted for the union. The crushing defeat for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama plant exposes the extent of workers’ alienation from the pro-corporate trade unions.
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