New York. Union leaders from various unions and national progressive politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders, celebrated the first union victory against the powerful Amazon company three weeks ago – an event that shook both the business leadership and the traditional union leadership – on the eve of what it could be the second plant of that company to vote to form a union.
Senator and two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist and according to polls is the most popular elected politician in the United States, testified before hundreds of workers and their supporters gathered at one of the entrances of one of the megacenters of distribution of Amazon in Staten Island, New York City – where on April 1 they voted for the unionization of its more than 8 thousand workers – that the victory against one of the most powerful companies here inspires the workers of the rest of the country.
“What you are doing here is sending a message to all working America that the time has come to stand up against our oligarchy, against this excessive corporate greed, and create an economy that works for everyone, not just a few. Working people are fed up with being left further and further behind, while billionaires like Bezos (referring to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men on the planet), get much richer.”
The president of the national flight attendants union, Sara Nelson, spoke of the long history of union struggles and those of now, including the mining strike in Alabama, which is one year old, and emphasized that in this country “there is no fucking labor peace (…) the rich only have control as far as we allow it”. She stated, “I represent 50,000 flight attendants, some of whom are flying planes over us right now, raining solidarity with this event from the skies.”
Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC) exclaimed that this fight reminds billionaires like Bezos that “New York is a pro-union city,” and that the struggles for basic workers’ rights are supported here.
Chris Smalls, the now president of the newly triumphant independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU), dressed in red and black, with a jacket that says on the back: “Eat the rich (Eat the Rich)”, was the host of this “solidarity Sunday”, declaring that “one needs the support of politicians, we need the support of the community, and today was a good example and a good start (…) we could not ask for anything better than have Bernie and AOC.”
Smalls praised the presence of leaders from various unions, including the National Teachers Union (UFT) and Postal Workers Union (APU) as local representatives of the construction unions, the Teamsters and the public transport unions ( TWU), service union workers (SEIU), and food union workers (UFCW), as well as immigrant worker organizations, among others.
The ALU’s victory caught the union leadership by surprise, many of whom ruled out the possibility of winning against Amazon and its multimillion-dollar anti-union efforts, and failed to support the small band of workers, led by Smalls, who had been fired by the company, who employed innovative tactics to build bottom-up solidarity among workers.
Some of the speakers criticized the absence of the big unions and progressive political figures during the initial fight, but the presence of several leaders at the event was not only to right the wrong, but to celebrate what some, including Smalls, called a first step in a revival of the American labor movement. “A revolution begins here,” Smalls declared.
The vote of nearly 2,000 workers to unionize Amazon’s second mega-center across the street from the plant where the first win was made begins Monday, with everyone from the corporate leadership to politicians and unions around the world country are watching to see if they can repeat the miracle and score a second win against one of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet.
“We are not afraid of them,” said one of the young workers organizing the unionization campaign that will culminate this week. He commented that he was reading the grapes of wrath, by John Steinbeck, where he found that the author points out that the key point in any struggle of workers against employers “is the moment when the ‘I’ becomes ‘us’ (…) that is what employers try to stop , but now we can tell Bezos and his colleagues who failed to detect that moment, it’s already too late; we have already become an ‘us’”.
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