WASHINGTON, D.C., March 20—There is no better way to spend the first day of spring than in solidarity with the international working class! Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called on workers to join in solidarity with the mainly Black Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama who were fighting (ultimately unsuccessfully) for union recognition.
Over 35 workers and students responded to PLP’s call with a militant picket line outside Whole Foods grocery store. Billionaire Jeff Bezos owns both Whole Foods and Amazon and fights tooth and nail to bust union organizing efforts at both places. The picket line was followed by a march to the Washington Post newspaper headquarters, a leading propaganda outlet for the capitalists, also owned by the disgusting Bezos.
PLP speakers declared that capitalists like Bezos always block efforts by workers to unionize and improve their lives. But pro-capitalist  politicians like President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders “support” unions, mainly because they can control the union misleaders and those misleaders do their best to control the workers. Ultimately these union misleaders want a few crumbs for the workers while they live well off their inflated salaries.
Yes, we want to join unions, turning them into antiracist, fighting organizations for the working class. But to get off the treadmill of reform, we must advance the goal of communist revolution – working-class power. Join us in the fight for communism, a permanent victory for the working class by joining and building the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Unfortunately, Bezos and other Amazon bosses beat the union drive in a vote of 738 to 1,798. Why the 2-1 vote against joining the union? Amazon used lots of tricks to win and the union response was ineffective. And in this capitalist system, the government serves the interests of business and unions function within that system. So Amazon got the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees union recognition elections, to expand the definition of the Bessemer warehouse bargaining unit to include office staff, part-time and occasional workers, swelling it to over 5,900 workers, instead of the 1,500 workers who actually work in the warehouse who were seeking recognition.
Amazon bosses connived with the U.S. Postal Service to set up a drop box for the mail balloting on company property, intimidating workers by spying on them as they voted. In their cleverest trick, they arranged with local government for the traffic lights to change to green whenever a worker left the warehouse, minimizing the time that union organizers had to chat with workers. Then they even paid incentives to workers fed up with Amazon to quit before the union election to reduce the pro-union vote. The union is now filing unfair labor practices complaints with the NLRB, but that will take many months before a decision is made and the outcome is uncertain. How weak is that?
For communists, life and death organizing requires going to the homes of workers to have conversations about union misleaders, about how to fight company exploitation and racism, and about the worldwide fightback of workers. It means talking about the coming world war and how that’s related to fighting for better conditions and pay at Amazon. Relying on movie stars and politicians (like Biden) to influence workers is similar to the losing strategy of trying to elect “progressive” politicians, who generally end up doing the bosses’ dirty work.
Historically, unions gain recognition by closing down production like they did in the famous Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936 (see CHALLENGE, 12/22/18) . Those communist organizers won some gains for the working class in the 1930s but failed to organize for a communist revolution. So here we are in 2021 with unions horribly weak and we are still on that reform treadmill. As we fight reform battles such as unionization, let’s make them schools for communism, a system that workers run. Let’s get rid of capitalism where we must constantly battle for our survival. Until capitalism is destroyed with communist revolution, all workers, including union workers, will continue to be oppressed by racism and exploitation.