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12/24/2024 “I Got Your Back!” Reflections from the Teamsters’ Amazon Picket Line By: Kobit Cujie and Danny ShawRead Now
In an effort to bring the behemoth capitalist giant, Amazon, to the bargaining table for a contract, seven Amazon facilities went on strike on Thursday, December 19th at 6 AM. Workers at DBK4 in New York City; DGT8 in Atlanta; DFX4, DAX5, DAX8 in Southern California; DCK6 in San Francisco and DIL7 in Skokie, Illinois initiated the strike. Teamster President Sean O’Brien addressed Amazon owner Jeff Bezos: “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.” Bezos is worth $238 billion dollars. The average Amazon worker takes home under $30,000 per year. Amazon generated over $620 billion dollars in revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024, a 11.93% increase from last year, yet they refuse to recognize the workers’ unionizing efforts. The workers erected a giant pig to symbolize Bezos and the billionaires' anti-worker greed.
If ever there was one, this is a David versus Goliath struggle. A Sociological Snapshot of the New York City Proletariat The workers are a snapshot of the proletariat of NYC. They are West Indian, Mexican, Dominican, Dominican American, Trinidadian, American etc. Many came here from one of the countries occupied by the United States, searching for a dream. What they found was more class struggle. This is Sunnyside, where Queens blends into Brooklyn. The workers all have other jobs or side hustles. This is New York Motherfucking City. You survive or you don’t. Under capitalism, no one gives a fuck about you. The workers’ social media reflects this economic reality. Desmond sings calypso at clubs on the weekends. Others work security or drive Uber eats. Steve bounces at clubs on the side. Juan Luis is a Dominican hip hop artist. They invent ever more creative hustles to make ends meet. They need better salaries. They need insurance. They need sick days. They need workers’ comp. They need job security. As Pedro Pietri’s immortal poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” lays out: these workers have been fighting their whole lives and never got a break. They have family members to maintain here and others back in their home countries. Remittances are the lifeblood for their homelands, still in the grip of U.S. imperialism. There are mothers and fathers on the picket line by day who bring their children and families. The children chant as enthusiastically as their fearless parents. The night crew has its own aesthetic. They pass the holiday coquito (rum-based eggnog) and spicy home-cooked food as the dembow (Dominican rap) and Bruce Springsteen blare out. Juan Carlos, Belinda and a crew crowd around small space heaters trading war stories from the inside of the Amazon facility which towers over us. They share music, chants and coffee. After sundown, Ramón passes out hot chocolate. Upon being released from jail, Tony, the most beloved of the Teamster organizers, starts dancing with a worker leader, Stacey. We chant: “Who are we? Teamsters!” and “What do we want? A union. When do we want it? Now!” Only the NYC proletariat could maintain a certain level of Caribbean enthusiasm on a 20°F Queens night. Many daydream about being back home in 87°F lands with their families and fight the nostalgia, huddling closer to one another. And here we were, on just another night in the N Y C, marching with working-class people of every skin complexion and accent, fighting to survive... Survival until revolution...
On the Picket Line
On the first day of the strike, the police carted off workers in handcuffs who attempted to engage the scabs. A Dominican worker yells that the monos azules (the blue monkeys, Dominican slang for pigs) are closing in. We attempted to prevent the arrests but the phalanx of jakes (Queen’s slang for the pigs) and paddy wagons. Gustavo starts a chant, echoed by hundreds: “Fuck Be-zos! Fuck Be-zos!” At the DBK-4 Amazon delivery facility located in Maspeth, Queens, the strikebreakers drove by, protected by the police. Some cover their faces because they feel shame; others because no one ever taught them to believe in themselves or the working class. Some told us they understand the need for this strike but they have to send back money to El Salvador or Barbados for the holidays. This is realpolitik. Objective facts are dogged; identity politics are dogmatic. This is Queens, the borough of “Get Rich or Die Trying.” Some workers are looking to be the next Nicki Minaj or 50 Cent, far fewer the next Joe Hill or Mother Jones. In Marxist lingo, we call this False Consciousness. This is individualist and consumer heaven, an anti-worker paradise. The workers’ breath is visible as they condemn the elevation of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and other oligarchs above us in this caste society. The fluorescent blue letters A M A Z O N light up the street. They blast dancehall reggae and a local DJ who moonlights as Amazon delivery driver pumps out music from every corner of the Americas. On Saturday, mysteriously there was a massive flood when giant hoses dumped an avalanche of streaming, freezing water on the sidewalk where workers were picketing. Thousands of UPS drivers, teachers, and community members, including the American Communist Party, Infrared and Midwestern Marx, have come out across the country in support and stood on the picket lines. One NY state ACP member and labor organizer laid out the strategy: “As American Communists we aspire to be Tribunes or Defenders of the American People. We have supported the workers in whatever material ways, with food, heaters etc. We broadcast their raw and unfiltered voices out into the public through our media arms. We learned from them and got deeper insights into their concerns and about the character of the proletariat in our respective areas. For us as a young party this was a victory. We aspire to organize American workers, regardless of their political views, liberal or conservative. The union struggles were the school of organizing that Lenin highlighted.”
Buildup to the Strike
As both the bourgeois press and the Teamsters have emphasized, this is “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.” The first recorded Amazon strike occurred in Minnesota in 2018 during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Awood Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Minnesota for East African immigrants, organized the strike. Demands were for reduced workloads, better safety measures, higher wages, and improved job security, a running theme for the strikes that followed. The strike did not affect production because not enough workers participated out of fear and indifference. However, it did receive enormous attention from the bourgeois press, as it was the first significant protest at an Amazon site in the US. Since then there have been small waves of protest, with Chris Smalls at the JFK-8 warehouse leading a strike in March 2020, due to the spread of COVID-19 at the warehouse. After this, due to the spread of information by social media and the bourgeois press, workers in several other locations, often with “the help” of nonprofits, launched small scale actions. The next major action was in April 2021, at the DIL3 Delivery Stations in Gage Park, Chicago. Delivery drivers walked out during the shift. This was followed in December 2021 by a walkout at the DIL3 and DLN2 delivery stations in Cicero, Illinois. The latter was the first multi-site walkout at Amazon and both were organized by Amazonians United. This was followed by the unionization of the JFK-8 facility in Staten Island, with the newly formed Amazon Labor Union(ALU) in April 2022. We see a pattern here. There is hysteria from the bourgeois press with no major impact on output. Bernie Sanders and faux leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gave it their full support, fawning over such victories. Liberals specialize in celebrating hollow, symbolic victories. Workers fight in the spirit of James Connolly: “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth...” The ALU decided in June 2024 to affiliate with the Teamsters union. After internal struggle, the Amazon Labor Union split with Chris Smalls as leader and reorganized itself in late July 2024. With the partnership of the Teamsters and the ALU set, the Teamsters moved forward in their initiative to organize Amazon facilities. This introduced a large union with lots of organizers and funding into this struggle and led to the unionization of thousands of additional workers. Despite hundreds of thousands of Teamster dollars poured into this organizational effort, the results have been subpar to say the least. The true test of a union is its ability to organize the masses in collective action and thus far they have fallen short. The hope of the organizers is that these actions will wake up the slumbering masses of Amazon workers into action and generate enough momentum to bring Amazon to the table. At a closing rally before a holiday break, the labor organizers informed workers of their Weingarten rights in case there is retaliation against them on the job.
Late-Stage Capitalism: Its Challenges and Lessons
Marxist-Leninist Amilcar Cabral always said: “Tell no lies, Claim no easy victories...: Output has barely been affected. In DBK4, where we were, most workers crossed the picket line, despite the incredible media attention that this effort had received from the bourgeois press. At midnight, Friday, December 21st, at the Staten Island facility where the Teamsters represent 5,500 workers, few workers came out to walk the picket line. There were significantly more leftists than workers, showing the disconnect at the heart of this struggle. This is a minority strike against a capitalist behemoth that is hidden behind layers of legal subterfuges and subcontracting tricks. Bezos even claims the delivery drivers are not “his workers,” but are rather employees of Cornucopia and other subcontractors. The billionaires can now hide behind subsidiaries to distance themselves from the exploitation of the hundreds of thousands of workers who enrich them. The key problem with this strike and the organization of transient workers like Amazon and Starbucks workers, is that the lead organizers, the paid staff of the union, have yet to listen to the wisdom of the masses. They attempt to inject a fighting spirit into the working class and substitute themselves for labor. Temporary workers don’t want to work for Amazon for the rest of their lives, stuck in this boring, repetitive, backbreaking work. As even Forbes, a chief mouthpiece of the billionaires admits, a high percentage of all workplace injuries in the U.S. occur at Amazon. The turnover rate is an astonishing 150 percent per year. These are some of the reasons there is little loyalty to the profession. The Teamsters are attempting to bring Bezos to the bargaining table but there is a lack of unity among the base of the movement, the 750,000 workers, who are easily replaced and constantly moving in and out of the job. Over the past three days, Bezos’ The Washington Post, has run at least six different articles covering the strike from the perspective of the shareholders. They continue to pop champagne as their stocks go up and their own media companies glorify a struggle doomed to fail. Labor analysts explain the logic of the ruling class. They prop up unwinnable struggles, complementary to their aims of the continued occupation of the American people and the peoples of the world. The bourgeois press is the enemy’s weapon and is used to mislead and misdirect revolutionary forces. Twitter, or X, is enemy territory designed to sap our militant energies. We cannot rely on social media to discover our duties to the American worker. We must deepen our independent investigation, utilizing our own forces, and become the decisive factor that ensures that workers not only fight, but win. It is incumbent on us as communists to determine the concrete realities and the balance of forces within each particular labor struggle that emerges. It is not enough to simply support the striking workers, but we must also consider why it is that the vast majority did not strike, without simply writing them off as “scabs and traitors.” We must continue to reach out to them and hear their voices. The ACP is engaging in more thorough investigation of labor in our regions and nationally. We seek to understand: What is the character of the proletariat in our particular areas? What are the most critical industries and where are the workers the strongest? What are the struggles that the bourgeois press is hiding? Which struggles are most likely to win and which ones need the most support? Which struggles advance the overall interests of the American proletariat and push them closer to the seizure of power? How can we drive up the “sensuous” immersion and practical participation of all cadres, particularly the terminally-online? The ACP sees social investigation and active community involvement as absolutely essential to answer these questions and as the most honest measurement of who the emerging leaders are.
“I Got Your Back!”
For all the naysayers, who say the Bezos, Musks, Clintons and Trumps are untouchable, we proletarians do not feel defeated. 24 hours before the most sacred of family holidays, workers stood their ground. These five days in December have taught us a great deal about the American proletariat, ourselves and our relationship to the working class. Over and over, those of us in the heat of class struggle, heard how much the Amazon workers had grown as friends, sisters and brothers and most importantly as comrades. A worker leader removed his Teamster Amazon skully to pledge his support for anyone who needed help moving forward. In this simple gesture, he was injecting optimism where the billionaires insisted on division, sectarianism and pessimism. Dozens of delivery men and women remarked how they had never spent so much time with their coworkers. Huddled around space heaters, they promised to have one another's backs moving forward, determined to bring more of their coworkers onto the picket lines. Teamster organizer Tony closed a final rally before Christmas Eve exclaiming: “This is just the beginning. None of us as individuals are heroes. Together we are all heroes. We are the spark. We will inspire tens of thousands of others to strike!”
AuthorKobit Cujie ArchivesDecember 2024
3 Comments
SELF denied Holy Warrior for Jesus
12/25/2024 09:58:25 pm
NO LGBTQiA via Holy Bible Genesis 19: God set the example & Worse coming long before Jesus returns; see list of my social media profile's as I have them all or minimally individually listed & shown at TOP of-on at sovren DOT media/u/lonehuman - https://sovren.media/u/lonehuman
Jon
12/31/2024 06:02:50 pm
You know it's one thing to live in a net exploited imperialized country and state that the labor aristocracy doesn't exist and that all workers under capitalism are exploited. Like in this instance one is just wrong.
Jon
1/2/2025 07:36:48 am
Here's Mao saying not to wage armed struggle until the First World's bourgeoisie is weak: Leave a Reply. |
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