Struggle and Bargaining in Italia
By Emanuele Barosselli
Historic agreement for Amazon workers is the result of struggle and trade union organization
“Trade union activity in Amazon Italia began in 2016 in a parking lot in the Milan area where Filt of Milan and Lombardy met the first group of contracted drivers who were operating in the first Amazon sites in Milan and Varese.”
On the 15th of September, the first historic national agreement with the Seattle giant, Amazon, was signed at the Italian Ministry of Labor. The agreement, signed with Filt Cgil[1], Fit Cisl[2] and Uilt[3] together with the allied representatives of temporary workers, represents a first concrete result for thousands of Italian workers, as well as a decisive step for the national and international trade union movement.
For the first time, Amazon agreed to enter into trade union bargaining according to the contractual disciplines in force. Amazon has signed an agreement in which collective representation, the role of the trade union and the national collective agreement for Logistics and Freight have been agreed to. The agreement recognizes the subjects of bargaining at a national and regional level and further the pact makes concrete commitments towards the general improvement of workers’ conditions.
We have reached this milestone through a long and difficult negotiation process, thanks to the determination and struggle of the workers who on March 22 gave life to a first historic national strike that involved direct and contract employees. In some areas of the country with the highest union membership the participation peaked at over 90%. However it is an oversimplification to say that this result is solely because of the national mobilization of March 22.
Breaking the “glass bubble”
Trade union activity in Amazon Italia began in 2016 in a parking lot in the Milan area where Filt of Milan and Lombardy met the first group of contracted drivers who were operating in the first Amazon sites in Milan and Varese. Since that first meeting our activity has never stopped and was characterized in subsequent years by the constant presence of the union and of the union delegates of the CGIL in the warehouses and in the parking lots. We organized the workers and commenced a battle that resulted in several territorial strikes that involved the procurement chain and led to a gradual improvement in working conditions and wages. In five years we have regulated the work of couriers, moving from the most disparate and often pirated contractual applications to the full application of the Ccnl Logistica[4] and to improvements on top of the same national contract, which have led to an increase in wages of several hundred euros. In the context of this national organzing, Amazon has grown dramatically in our country, the number of direct and contract workers has increased tenfold and dozens of new delivery stations have sprung up throughout the country.
We have always encountered great difficulty in meeting up with and organizing the direct employees of the e-commerce giant. They are too often harnessed to an apparently “golden” personnel management system that masks a model of the disintegration of collective representation. This personnel system attempts to replace everything that is traditionally the role of the trade union and its national representatives.
The September 15 agreement breaks the “glass bubble” in which Amazon had imprisoned its employees and makes it clear and evident to all workers the importance of organizing to improve their conditions. Following the framework agreement on industrial relations, the first concrete results of this new chapter in he trade union movement at Amazon were seen.
In fact, on the 23rd of September, a second agreement was signed with Conftrasporto, a trade association to which Amazon adheres. This agreeemnt gives life to the national protocol in which the need for important wage increases is identified for all workers, employees and contractors, of the multinational in Italy. The agreement, ratified territorially by the RSA[5] of the Filt CGIL, provides for a salary increase of 8% in the CCNL, defines a progressive plan of permanent employment for more than a thousand workers and initiates local negotiations for the organization of work in warehouses. In a sector like e-Commerce, which is experiencing exponential growth and aims at deregulation and maximum precariousness and flexibility, too often enticing local and political institutions with the promise of new employment, the union represents the only real barrier. to a system that would otherwise lead to unacceptable steps backwards with respect to the standards of the workers’ movement in Italia and in the world.
This article originally appeared, in Italian, in the October 11 edition of “Sinistra Sindacale”
[1] Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Trasporti – Italian Transport Workers Federation of the CGIL – the General Federation of Italian Workers – the largest trade union federation in Italy with over 5 million members
[2] Federazione Italiana Trasporti (Fit)– Transport division of the CISL – Confederazione Italiana Sindicati Lavoratori – 2ndlargest Italian confederation with over 4 million memebrs
[3] Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti (Uilt) part of the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL)– the third national trade union federation with over 2 million members
[4] Contratto Collectivo nazionale di Lavoro (Ccnl) for Logistics is the basic agreement covering all applicable logistics firms in Italy.
[5] Rappresentanza Sindacale Aziendale (RSA) – A company specific organization of workers who are members of a particular union federation , in this case the Filt CGIL.
Is it Possible to Fight for Biden in 2024, Defend Manchin and win?
By Stewart Acuff

The reason for Joe Manchin’s treason against Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and the people of America is not politics. Manchin hasn’t almost single-handedly derailed Biden’s plan AND MANDATE so he can continue getting re-elected in a red state. Most of Biden’s biggest infrastructure plan, the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is as popular in West Virginia as it is across the country.
Sen. Manchin has held up, debated, negotiated against, watered down, and tried to suffocate the $3.5 trillion plan for the sake of his benefactors–his coal interests: his symbiotic relationship with oil, natural gas and fracking, and to the broader corporate agenda.
That is why he is in the Senate. His only personal agenda is family wealth from corporations that treat West Virginia as a despised colony.
If Manchin were using a political lens to plot his position against Biden and the nation, he would pick through Biden’s reconciliation bill carefully, selecting elements most popular in West Virginia that could easily be defended on conservative country radio.
Then he could oppose what’s unpopular but still bring home the bacon like Sen. Byrd did for decades.
Those popular programs that could frame a Senate campaign are all improvements to Veteran’s Affairs especially hospitals in this state so proud of our vets, childcare for working families so both parents can work for poverty wages, home care for our disabled and elderly to keep us in our homes amongst our natural beauty, coal field reclamation, paid sick and family leave, extending child tax credit and expanding Medicare–all popular and desperately needed in a state of poverty wages.
FIGHTING FOR FEDERAL SPENDING TO HELP WEST VIRGINIA AND WORKING FAMILIES IS WHAT MADE SEN. BYRD UNBEATABLE.
Carving out popular programs and fighting hard for West Virginia needs is what Sen. Byrd would have done and what Sen. Manchin would do is he viewed the Biden plan through a political lens.
No.
Manchin is trying to blow up the Biden Presidency and deal the Democratic Party a vicious body blow on behalf of his corporate interests and income. According to Open Secrets, Manchin’s biggest contributors by industry are coal mining, other mining, for-profit education, natural gas pipelines, fossil fuels and electric utilities.
A murderer’s row of enemies of a healthy and clean climate.
Sen. Joe Manchin is not anybody the Democratic Party can afford to protect in the gentle folds of our big tent.
He has had a long symbiotic relationship with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council formed by the Koch Brothers to force rightwing, plutocratic policy through state legislatures across America. In 1994 Manchin was the West Virginia state chairman of ALEC and a national director.
Manchin’s consistent, transparent effort to destroy Biden’s Presidency is a reaffirmation of his slavish devotion to the worst elements of corporate America, especially the dangerous fossil fuel industry responsible for activities and policies destroying Earth’s climate.
Sen. Joe Manchin is an enemy of the agenda that powered the Democratic Party to win the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, and we must fight him.
Democratic activists and organizers are mobilizing to pressure Manchin in these crucial legislative fights.
We must fight him publicly to defend our policies and our vision, to begin to raise money nationally to oppose him now and in the next election, and to prepare and till the soil for a real Democratic leader to beat him in the 2024 primary.
West Virginians are mobilizing against Joe Manchin and for the Biden plan. Local folks have been and continue to march on and assemble for raucous rallies at his state offices in Charleston and Martinsburg. Faith leaders are speaking out against Manchin’s intransigence. Democratic activists are calling his offices. Op-eds written by Democrats against him appear in newspapers across the state.
There is a seething anger amongst Democratic activists as questions about moving Manchin take over every political discussion.
Bishop William Barber has helped elevate the anger against Manchin to a moral imperative with mobilizations in Charleston, the West Virginia capital and largest city.
Never before has Manchin so strained the impulses of the base: loyalty to a great Democratic President carrying out his mandate frustrated by our Democratic Senator.
What would it mean all over America for a kitchen table economics Democrat to beat Joe Manchin with a heavy economic agenda of lifting everyone’s life instead of the neo-liberal corporate policies of the past?
How could we ever fight for Joe Biden and defend Joe Manchin in 2024?
Why can’t we rural Democrats design an economic agenda that is based on the unique and un-unique needs of rural and country voters?
Why cede rural America to corporate colonialists?
…
Amid Give-Back Demands: Workers Can Still Safeguard Pensions
By Steve Early
In recent decades, a top management priority has been reducing the cost of retirement benefits. The pandemic and its economic fallout have generated a new round of employer demands for pension freezes, benefit cuts, plan conversions, and two-tier coverage. The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans (Monthly Review Press), a newly published book by Oregon union activist JIm Russell, shows why and how private and public sector workers should be mobilizing against such concessions.
This book will be a critical resource for defending retirement security at the bargaining table and in the political arena. The Labor Guide is not only a highly readable account of retirement plan financing and administration, with a handy glossary of layperson explanations of sometimes confusing technical terms. It’s also a call for labor action to strengthen “our national pension plan,” aka Social Security, which is the sole source of retirement income for 1 out of 4 recipients and a perennial target of privatization efforts.
Now a professor at Portland State, the author first got involved in pension struggles when his own individual retirement account, as a Connecticut public employee, took a hit in the Great Recession of 2008. Russell helped lead a successful campaign to allow state workers, with inferior 401(k)-style coverage, make a rare switch to a defined-benefit plan with better benefits. (For more on that fight, see Russell’s previous book, Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis, (Beacon Press, 2015).
A Riskier Bet
Most workers still lucky enough to have an employer-sponsored plan have been pushed in the other direction—from traditional pensions, with group coverage and guaranteed benefits, to riskier individual retirement accounts with defined contributions and widely varying payouts. One secondary issue in the current five state strike by 1,000 workers at Nabisco is their company’s unpopular switch to 401(k) coverage three years ago.
The public sector is becoming the last redoubt of better pensions. As Russell notes, “Republicans and a not insignificant number of Democratic politicians” have been doing “an excellent job of convincing much of the public that traditional plans are a costly burden on taxpayers, overly generous, threaten to bankrupt governments, and reduce funds for needed public services such as education.”
Underlying this Wall Street-backed propaganda campaign is the promotion of what Russell calls “pension envy” among private sector workers “now looking forward to an insecure retirement with insufficient 401(k) savings.” In The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans, Russell does a good job of recounting the 40-year growth of these individual retirement accounts, with their appeal of greater portability for employees and lower costs for their employers.
In union bargaining units, 401(k)s were initially welcomed as a supplement to traditional pension coverage. In non-union settings with only 401(k) coverage, it was assumed that retirees would convert their accumulated individual savings into commercial annuities, providing pension-like incomes.
This did not occur on a large scale because purchasing such annuities became increasingly expensive, making them unaffordable for 401(k) account holders with savings, at retirement age, that were far too small. As one General Accounting Office study found, in 48 percent of U.S. households inhabited by adults age 55 or older, the median amount saved for retirement was $109,000. The other 52 percent of such households had no retirement account money, since many jobs offer neither traditional group pension coverage nor a 401(k).
Despite their critical shortcomings, 401(k) accounts became a widespread replacement for defined benefit plans, which Russell calls the “pension gold standard.”
The Pension Gold Standard
Russell provides sound advice for those negotiating about the terms of these defined benefit plans, which still number 50,000 and have 60 million participants among active or retired workers. As he notes, in the current bargaining environment, “participants and their union representatives are more likely to be thinking defensively” because “they want to ward off attacks that would decrease or eliminate benefits and, in many cases, end the pension plans entirely.”
Nevertheless, he urges unions to take the offensive with demands for improved cost-of-living adjustments and benefit calculation formulas, plus the opportunity (which some plans provide) to purchase additional service credits. Russell recommends that union members with cash balance plans—a hybrid model of retirement coverage—seek the option of rolling over “their 401(k) or similar accounts, if they have them, into their cash balance plan to be able to increase the size of their pension annuities.”
Russell also warns about the disadvantages of converting to cash balance plans in the first place, even if these increasingly common retirement vehicles are preferable to 401(k) coverage because they still provide guaranteed pensions from professionally managed collective trust funds.
He cites in particular the retirement plan changes foisted on employees of the Washington Post after the paper was purchased in 2013 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The world’s richest man “froze a highly successful overfunded pension plan” and replaced it with an inferior model. Some retirees lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement income.
Rank-and-file Activism
In the world of multi-employer pension trusts, Russell reports on proactive organizing by groups like Musicians for Pension Security, started by American Federation of Musicians Local 802 President Adam Krauthamer when trustees of his union’s industry-wide pension plan threatened to reduce benefits.
MPS supporters launched an educational newsletter, set up an informational website for the plan’s 50,000 participants, and held local fundraisers to hire actuarial, legal, and investment experts who could assist the rank and file in challenging their trustees’ bid for federal approval for pension cuts. Their struggle became part of the larger effort by Teamsters and other union members to pass the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act, which earlier this year allocated $86 billion in grants to distressed multi-employer plans.
Russell acknowledges that workplace organizing around pension issues can be a hard slog among younger workers, who may be part of a high-turnover workforce with more immediate job concerns and “a thousand reasons not to think about retirement.” He argues, nonetheless, that it’s never too early to tackle issues like retirement fund financing, eligibility rules, and benefit levels. Playing catch up later becomes only more difficult, if not impossible, as a bargaining unit gets older.
Union stewards, bargaining committee members, local officers, and national staff involved in contract campaigns to defend pensions should get a copy of The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans before their next round of bargaining starts. It belongs on the shelf of every local union library and in the curriculum of every surviving labor studies program in the country.
…
Think Bigger: New possibilities for building workers’ power at Amazon
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
Two years ago, we proposed a broad conceptual strategy for labor organizing at Amazon in The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy. Our chapter drew on the experience of the massive CIO organizing drives in U.S. basic industry in the 1930s when unions and the left worked closely together to build dynamic new organizations. To succeed at Amazon, we envisioned a similar organizing collaboration between committed left-wing workplace organizers and one or several unions.[1]
Since writing that essay, much has happened to both deepen — and challenge — our earlier ideas:
- Amazon has continued to grow significantly, achieving record profits — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Independent worker organizations like Amazonians United and established unions have expanded their organizing initiatives;
- The NLRB supervised election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama Fulfillment Center illustrated the need for labor law reform and the folly of taking on Amazon in one location;
- President Biden’s explicit support for the Bessemer workers set an example for the power of political intervention;
- At its 2021 convention, the largest logistics union in the country, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, passed a resolution committing the union to organizing at Amazon;
- Labor-backed community efforts to block tax subsidies and win concessions from Amazon have started to take root, showing the promise of wielding local and state regulatory power.
In addition to the other chapters in The Cost of Free Shipping, two other books have informed our thinking. The first was Wade Rathke’s Nuts and Bolts; The ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing.[2] It’s well worth reading for anyone thinking about taking on the second largest employer in America: Amazon.
As a longtime ACORN and union organizer, Rathke is no stranger to taking on large employers. ACORN, in partnership with SEIU, initiated a campaign in 2004 to organize workers at Wal-Mart, America’s largest employer. There were three prongs to Acorn’s campaign:
- Blocking the establishment of new Wal-Mart stores;
- Organizing workers into the Wal-Mart Workers Association;
- Building international solidarity.
Rathke observes that, “By most reckonings we had categorically established that, yes, Wal-Mart workers would join a worker-run and worker-led organization that publicly advocated for improvements in hours, wages, and working conditions and fought those issues with some success on the floor of the stores. We had achieved a de facto détente with the company that allowed stewards to represent other workers on grievances and that allowed Wal-Mart Workers Association (WWA) leaders to deal directly with store management.” [3]
The WWA succeeded in signing up about 1,000 members in 35 stores — mostly in south Florida. Rathke attributes the group’s dissolution in 2008 to institutional conflicts between the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial workers (UFCW), the largest national union representing grocery and retail workers. Wade’s reflections are a must read for today’s organizers taking on Amazon.
Also shaping our thinking is Alec MacGillis’ 2021 book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, a comprehensive portrait of Amazon’s penetration into every aspect of American life.[4] MacGillis writes not only of Amazon’s mistreatment of its workforce, but of Amazon’s ubiquitous role in information services, food, publishing, and entertainment. One compelling chapter follows a former steelworker at Bethlehem Steel’s giant Sparrows Point mill in Baltimore for thirty years. In retirement, he takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center built on the very site of the shuttered mill. Although one of the warehouse’s best workers, after talking with coworkers about unions, he was targeted by management — and then fired.
Rathke and MacGillis, along with so many other great writers have contributed to a growing body of critical work about Amazon.[5] As our national understanding about the impact of Amazon deepens, many people are concluding that reforms to its business model are needed. If the government takes anti-trust measures, it’s essential that Amazon workers gain a strong democratic voice in the company’s future.
Now we turn to the developments outlined above that have improved the landscape for organizing at Amazon.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Base Building on the Rise
Prior to the pandemic, organizing at Amazon facilities was already underway; principally at delivery stations in Sacramento, Chicago, and Queens, New York.[6] But the pandemic has radicalized many more Amazon workers, leading to a welcome increase in worker-led walkouts and protests that garnered substantial media attention and public support.[7]In many situations these confrontations with local management have led to significant concessions on workplace issues while building workers’ confidence that unity on the job can win tangible results.
While Amazon clearly cares about its public image, management’s willingness to make quick concessions to workers’ demands shows how it is attuned to, and concerned about, any disruption in its promise of “next day” delivery to its Prime customers. However, when workers sought to win actual collective bargaining rights in Bessemer, it brought on an enormous effort coordinated at the top levels of Amazon leading to a crushing union busting campaign. Labor organizers would do well to remember Sun Tzu’s maxim in The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”[8]
National Spotlight on the Election at Bessemer BHM1
In November 2020, the Retail Wholesale Department Store Union (RWDSU) petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union election in Bessemer, Alabama. It seemed like the whole labor movement, progressive organizations and many Amazon workers were watching and rooting for success.[9] No union election in our lifetime has ever attracted the public attention, glamorous movie stars, and support from the left than this government supervised union election. In the five months before the vote, it brought increased scrutiny to the reality of working conditions at Amazon in Bessemer, across the country and around the world. Critical, in-depth reporting on the inner workings of Amazon also increased as the drive gained national interest. Organizations like the Southern Workers Assembly moved to make Amazon a major focus of their organizing.[10] Young cadres from socialist organizations were inspired to take jobs at Amazon.
While at the time we expressed our reservations about the limitations of a “one-facility-at-a-time” organizing strategy, there could be no doubt that a victory in Bessemer would have been a victory for all Amazon workers and a credit to the RWDSU and its members.[11] Ultimately, as predicted by many, the union drive was soundly defeated.[12]
The national attention and support for the Bessemer campaign, undoubtedly increased the number of Amazon workers willing to consider the possibility of organizing and the benefits of collective bargaining. But for far too many Amazon workers, the union’s defeat only affirmed the futility of uniting to take on their powerful employer. In our experience, even pro-union workers won’t come forward to support a union unless they see credible leadership and a viable strategy to win. While there is no single model for success at Amazon, we hope the lessons from the campaign in Bessemer will encourage Amazon workers throughout the company (and any unions supporting them) to consider alternative organizing strategies.[13]
Bearing in mind the national and international reach of Amazon, its sophisticated logistics capacity, and its vast resources to oppose worker organization, building workers’ power and sustaining a viable workplace organization must ultimately be national and international in scope. It must also contend with the flexibility built into the Amazon business model. Same-day delivery, and the efficiency of the last mile, is also flexibility that can be used to thwart worker organization if it remains isolated at single facilities.
The election also showed the clear limitations of pursuing union certification through a broken NLRB election process – although it did help increase the support for the PRO Act.[14]
“President Biden Wants You to Join a Union.”
Students of labor history will remember that John L. Lewis and the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) promoted the slogan that “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union.” In fact Roosevelt never made such a public statement on the record. Evidently Lewis, in a private conversation, heard FDR state his support for unions and decided to run with it publicly — angering the President no end.[15] Biden’s statement of support for the Amazon workers on video[16] was therefore unprecedented, but political support for large scale organizing is not new. In 1937 when the Flint workers sat down in GM’s car body production facility (a key strategic production choke point), management attempted to get Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan to call in troops to dislodge the strikers. The governor refused to do so, effectively forcing the company to negotiate with the fledgling UAW.[17]
Union rank and file have potential to become an organizing colossus
The Amazon effort will ultimately require the dovetailing of internal worker organization at multiple facilities—like what Amazonians United[18] is already doing—with the power and resources of one or several national unions: Teamsters, RWDSU, SEIU, and UFCW; all of whom have shown interest in the Amazon project.
Essential to the future success of any organizing at Amazon will be engaging rank and file union members whose wages and working conditions are thrown into competition with Amazon’s business model. As the Amazon “octopus” grows, it is fundamentally undermining wages and working conditions of more than one million Teamsters, postal, longshore, and grocery store workers. For example, more than 300,000 Teamsters are employed at UPS and hundreds of thousands United Food and Commercial Workers members work at unionized grocery stores.[19]
A resolution passed at the 2021 Teamsters Convention is a welcome development along these lines. It resolves to maintain standards in Teamster core industries against the threat posed by Amazon and support Amazon workers as they build power across the country. Randy Korgan, the Teamsters’ National Director for Amazon, summed up the importance of the convention resolution:
“For Teamsters, and the labor movement as a whole, Amazon poses an existential threat to the rights and standards our members have fought for and won. But it also poses a tremendous opportunity for us to engage our members, build large volunteer organizing committees, build even stronger community labor alliances, more deeply integrate racial and other social justice struggles into our work and more. Standing on the shoulders of proud working people, who built our union for more than 100 years, the Teamsters will build the types of worker and community power necessary to take on one of the most powerful corporations in the world and win.”[20]
Union leaders like Korgan recognize the obvious: There will never be enough union resources to hire sufficient professional staff to organize Amazon. However, if only a small percentage of union members who have a self-interest in protecting their wages and working standards begin to actively engage Amazon workers, that “worker-to-worker” organizing will lead to an upsurge. The task for the labor movement is to train and support rank and file organizers who are in a position to find receptive Amazon workers through their family and friends, co-workers’ or neighbors.
Building support for workers power in the community and on main street
Drawing from the lessons of ACORN’s Wal-Mart organizing, future workplace organizing must also be accompanied by campaigns (preferably union-backed) to stop Amazon from securing any tax breaks and win Community Benefit Agreements around the siting of future Amazon facilities. These community-based campaigns can complement union efforts by raising issues with local elected officials about Amazon’s poor wages, benefits, and dangerous working conditions. The campaigns could foster strong relationships between local community activists and Amazon workers that will be essential when workplace actions need community support.
Good Jobs First, a national resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, is tracking the subsidies that Amazon receives and promoting increased accountability to the communities where facilities are located.[21] Good Jobs First has documented how Amazon follows a highly predictable pattern in locating its distribution facilities. It needs to have hundreds of warehouses in metro areas where the greatest number of Prime subscribers live. And it locates them near highways and airports with quick access to affluent Prime neighborhoods.
The massive subsidies state and local governments have given Amazon for these warehouses have been wasted — because the evolution of the Prime business model, to rapid delivery, required Amazon to build them.[22]
An example of effective collaboration between the Teamsters and community activists took place recently in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There, Fort Wayne’s Republican-majority city council turned the tables on Amazon’s usual quick – and surreptitious – coercion of public subsidies from municipal authorities. As community concerns were raised about pay, employee safety, and the adverse impact on already established employers and their employees, the city council called into question the real benefits the company’s jobs would bring. With the previous lack of transparency where Amazon won a $16 million abatement, the council blocked Amazon’s bid for an additional $7 million in tax breaks.[23]
Another avenue that could help strengthen Amazon workers is the growing concern about the company’s monopoly power. The Athena coalition, organized to fight Amazon’s growing grip over our economy, marks a significant broadening of the anti-monopoly movement to grassroots organizations beyond the Beltway.
Athena is an alliance of more than forty organizations that believe that, “The control over our communities and our democracy should be in our hands. We’ve come together to fight for people whose lives are affected by Amazon including working people, small business owners, people of color and immigrants.”[24]
Regional Power Pods
Organizations like Amazonians United, the Awood Center in the Twin Cities, the Teamsters, and the Warehouse Workers Resource Center in Southern California’s Inland Empire are building a significant base of community and worker support that could emerge as “Regional Power Pods.” Building a strategic base at “last mile” delivery stations is where Amazon is most vulnerable. These facilities are essential to 24-hour turnaround deliveries but have debilitating schedules for front line workers.[25] They are also facilities with a relatively smaller workforce that, under current labor law, are easier to organize. A regional strategy to paralyze deliveries from these last mile sites could give workers real leverage with Amazon.
As Good Jobs First has pointed out, Amazon needs to site these facilities close to its generally urban and affluent markets. Local communities, working in an alliance with labor, have an obvious opportunity to block Amazon’s expansion and extract “Community Benefit Agreements.” Amazon’s location strategy cannot employ the threat that manufacturers use to blackmail communities for tax breaks and other concessions in order to avoid the factory packing up and leaving for Mexico or the Far East.
Building regional power doesn’t need to happen everywhere. It only needs to happen in six to eight metro areas. In these areas, unions could mentor and support Amazon workers, organize actions on issues, and build a base of support for collective bargaining. At the same time, community and political support could be marshaled for siting agreements that address workers issues. Combined, it could create the context for coordinated direct action at multiple facilities, backed by logistics unions, with significant community and political support.
The importance of community support and mentoring cannot be overestimated. The workers who are doing the on-the-job organizing face inhumane shift schedules and dangerous ergonomic conditions. Sustaining their long-term employment in a high turnover environment is a challenge for the whole movement. However, these challenges are not insurmountable. The turnover at Ford’s Highland Park, Michigan assembly in 1913 was over 300 percent! Yet unions supported by the socialist left and other allies, were able to build power and organize the auto industry at the pinnacle of its industrial prominence.[26]
Amazon workers can achieve collective bargaining and win good jobs if unions provide sufficient resources and employ a comprehensive strategy. It’s an imperative for workers in competing industries and for meaningful accountability in the communities Amazon exploits. Building a strategic and powerful campaign will require a lot of humility and openness to experimentation. Recent developments have refined our vision of labor engaged in a deep and enduring collaboration with the left for successful workplace organization. Indeed, such collaboration is required to build a vibrant labor movement among Amazon workers; a key component to “make another Amazon possible.”
…
Please take a look at Social Policy which is running this article and many more pieces on social justice and organizing of interest to our readers.
[1] “Think Big: Organizing a Successful Amazon Workers’ Movement in the United States by Combining the Strengths of the Left and Organized Labor,” by Peter Olney and Rand Wilson, in The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, Edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Ellen Reese, 2019, https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341484/the-cost-of-free-shipping/
[2] Nuts and Bolts; The ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing, by Wade Rathe, Social Policy Press, 2018, https://www.socialpolicy.org/books.html
[3] Nuts and Bolts; The ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing, page 488; see also, “Amazon? There Has to be a Better Way,” by Wade Rathe, Stansbury Forum, August 11, 2021, https://stansburyforum.com/2021/08/11/amazon-there-has-to-be-a-better-way
[4] Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159276
[5] “AMAZON WORKERS DEMAND TO BE TREATED LIKE HUMAN BEINGS,” By Maximillian Alverez, The Real News,
March 8, 2021, https://therealnews.com/amazon-workers-demand-to-be-treated-like-human-beings; and
“Amazon fires worker who led New York strike over coronavirus safety worries,” By Josh Eidelson, Luke Kawa, and
Bloomberg, March 31, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/03/31/amazon-fires-worker-new-york-strike-coronavirus-safety-worries; and https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/opinion/bezos-amazon-bessmer-labor.html
[6] “The Hard Fight at Amazon,” by Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, November 27, 2019, https://labornotes.org/blogs/2019/11/hard-fight-amazon
[7] “Coronavirus is the leverage Amazon workers need,” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/coronavirus-is-the-leverage-amazon-workers-need
[8] The Art of War, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War and “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” by Jessica Bruder, Wired, 11.12.2019, https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-immigrants-who-took-on-amazon/
[9] “An Amazon warehouse worker talks about the impact of the Bessemer union election,” by Rand Wilson, Medium.com, https://rand-wilson.medium.com/an-amazon-warehouse-worker-talks-about-the-impact-of-the-bessemer-union-election-40f34cc6fdc6
[10] Solidarity with Bessemer, Alabama Amazon Workers!, https://southernworker.org/amazon/
[11] “BAmazon Union: Anticipating the Battle in Bessemer, Alabama,” by Peter Olney and Rand Wilson, Labor Notes, December 21, 2020, https://labornotes.org/2020/12/bamazon-union-anticipating-battle-bessemer-alabama
[12] The NLRB recently upheld RWDSU’s objections to the conduct of the election, making an election re-run possible. See, “Union: NLRB officer recommends new vote for Amazon workers,” by The Associated Press, August 2, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-c17604ab207b56f5b110a6ca63bb5f09
[13] “The Message from the Amazon Union Defeat in Alabama Is Clear: Keep Organizing,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, In These Times, April 9, 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-union-defeat-alabama-bessemer-rwdsu-pro-act
[14] Protect Our Right to Organize Act, for specifics, see https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Fact%20Sheet%20-%20PRO%20Act.pdf. As of August 2021, it passed the House of Representatives, but was stalled in the 50-50 Senate.
[15] However FDR is on record as having said: “If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do is join a union.”
[16] “President Biden On Workers’ Rights to Organize & Unionize,” Feb 28, 2021, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4
[17] “The Flint Sit Down Strike Audio Gallery,” HistoricalVoices.org, Walter Reuther Library, http://flint.matrix.msu.edu/aftermath.php
[18] Amazonians United, https://www.amazoniansunited.org/
[19] Calculation by the authors on current union membership whose standards are put into competition with Amazon. See also, “Building Its Own Delivery Network, Amazon Puts the Squeeze On Drivers,” by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Labor Notes, December 17, 2020, https://labornotes.org/2020/12/building-its-own-delivery-network-amazon-puts-squeeze-drivers; and “The Amazon Threat: Meeting the Challenge,” TDU, https://www.tdu.org/video_the_amazon_threat_meeting_the_challenge
[20] “Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon,” https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/62421CONVENTIONRESOLUTIONAMAZON.pdf and https://teamster.org/2021/06/teamsters-pass-amazon-resolution/ and “The Teamsters Are Taking On Amazon, And here’s how they plan to do it.” By Steven Greenhouse, American Prospect, June 28, 2021, https://prospect.org/labor/teamsters-union-taking-on-amazon/
[21] “Mapping Amazon: Where the Online Giant Locates Its Warehouses and Why,” Good Jobs First, February 9, 2021, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/adc5ff253a3643f88d39e7f3ef1a09ee
[22] “Subsidies Awarded to Amazon: at least $4,117,000,000… and Counting!” Good Jobs First, https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker
[23] “Fort Wayne City Council denies Amazon tax break,” Devan Filchak, The Journal Gazette, July 28, 2021, https://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/20210728/council-denies-amazon-tax-break
[24] “What We’re Fighting For,” Athena, https://athenaforall.org/#s1
[25] Megacycle schedules are 1:20 to 11:50 AM, see: “Amazon Forces Warehouse Workers into 10-Hour ‘Megacycle’ Shifts,” by Ben Cope, Liberty Sword, February 7, 2021, https://libertysword.com/amazon-forces-warehouse-workers-into-10-hour-megacycle-shifts
[26] “Automobile in American Life and Society, The Degradation of Work Revisited: Workers and Technology in the American Auto Industry, 1900-2000,” by Stephen Meyer, http://autolife.umd.umich.edu/Labor/L_Overview/L_Overview.htm
The Need for Labor to Push Beyond
By Kurt Stand
“What we won’t allow is for anyone to strip us of our value, our dignity, our worth.”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka died suddenly last month at age 72. At this moment of transition — marked by the election of Liz Shuler, the first woman to serve as the head of the AFL-CIO — it is important to keep in mind how Trumka’s legacy can inform efforts underway to continue labor’s revival. Below are some reflections on the connection he made to building worker’s political strength while fighting for democratic rights that is relevant to work of DSA.
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In 1986, I was working for the National Association of Letter Carriers, covering the NALC’s Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul as part of the union’s publications department. Amongst the invited speakers was Richard Trumka, elected president of the United Mine Workers only four years prior. Trumka’s election was the culmination of the work of Miners for Democracy, a rank-and-file movement formed in 1970 in response to the assassination of coal mine reformer Jock Yablonski, who was murdered along with his wife and daughter. Trumka’s invitation reflected a kinship borne from the fact that NALC’s leadership also emerged from a rank-and-file movement, growing out of the postal workers 1970 illegal wildcat strike. Vince Sombrotto — who had been a working letter carrier for over 20 years — was elected NALC President in the union’s first all-membership direct vote in 1978. Perhaps acknowledgement of that shared background was behind the enthusiastic applause for Trumka as he spoke, especially when he made explicit his call for labor to organize its own political party, independent of Democrats and Republicans, to represent working people, not the bosses.
Representative Bill Gray, a Democratic Congressman from Philadelphia, also spoke at the Convention. Gray had been elected Chair of the House Budget Committee in 1985, the first African American to hold that position. His speech focused on the importance for letter carriers specifically, and for federal workers overall, to have Congressional allies in leadership roles as then President Ronald Reagan used attacks on government employees as the nexus for attacks on unionism and social insurance programs. Following the 1970 strike, postal workers had gained, for the first time, collective bargaining rights through the creation of the United States Postal Service as a hybrid public service/private corporation. In consequence, the role of Congress in regulating, rate setting, and budgets had grown. Gray stressed that this made Democratic control of Congress even more important, arguing that even a weak Democrat was better than a good Republican if it meant maintaining that majority. The NALC had developed a powerful political action program involving rank-and-file members and locals across the country. Convention delegates rightly saw Gray’s speech as vindication of their hard work and they gave him applause every bit as rousing, every bit as sincere, as the applause given to Trumka.
At the time, I viewed the contradiction between the two audience responses as reflecting the difference between workers’ aspirations and workers’ need for a practical approach to real-world problems. But that was a superficial way of thinking; aspirations and hopes for what could be are part and parcel of practical decisions we make every day of our lives — union politics neither can nor should divide the two. Trumka’s leadership of the then ongoing Pittston strike in western Pennsylvania demonstrated a grasp of the needs of the moment that never lost sight of the larger issues at stake. So while he and Gray each spoke to Convention delegates’ desire for a degree of real power over forces impacting on their lives, Trumka’s perspective was deeper, pointing to the need for labor to push beyond the limits imposed by our political system.
Although fairly soon thereafter Trumka stepped back from advocating a new labor party, he never retreated from a notion of workers using politics rather than being used by politicians. During his years as president of the AFL-CIO he developed an approach toward defining what independent working-class politics can be, leaving a legacy from which we all can learn and build.
I. Working with Enemies Without Forgetting They’re Enemies
For many years most unions have supported Democrats. Although in the past some labor leaders demonstrated “independence” by supporting Republicans, the room to do so has virtually vanished as the extreme right-wing of Republican politics becomes more pronounced. The 2016 election brought this to a head — the danger Trump posed to working people, to labor rights and to civil liberties was so great that every layer of union leadership (other than a few police unions) pulled out all stops in an effort to elect Hillary Clinton, notwithstanding hesitations or questions about her stance on trade and other policies. As we know, that opposition was not successful — Trump was elected president, not least because many union members (not a majority, but indeed, a very large minority) disregarded their respective leaders’ admonitions and voted for him.
It is now well understood that an underlying or explicit racism lay behind that, as did a more general sense of dislocation which led many to embrace or disregard Trump’s similarly contemptuous attitude towards women, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled and society’s “losers.” The vain hope was that somehow a strong authoritative voice could crack through elite power and set the United States on a course of stability and improved living standards that have not been seen for decades. Into the general mix of incoherent and contradictory ideas Trump put forth, he signaled willingness to act on two particular issues of concern to trade unionists: pushing through infrastructure spending to create good paying jobs; and pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA, initiated by the Bush Sr. administration and completed by the Clinton administration, stood as a prime example of politician’s indifference to popular need. The so-called free trade pact between the US, Mexico and Canada contributed to loss of jobs, loss of wages and environmental destruction, providing working people no favors in any of the three countries.
So Trumka, without retracting any of his anti-Trump statements, without any promise of political or electoral support, committed to supporting any infrastructure bill that the Trump administration proposed if it included genuine job guarantees and labor protections. Rather than relying on denunciation without content, Trumka recognized divisions amongst working people and focused on those areas where a shared agenda could be advanced. A shared agenda not with Trump but with fellow workers. In taking this position, Trumka helped to expose the administration’s lies; as, with so many of Trump’s promises, nothing materialized.
For unionists the point was made: Labor’s program must address worker needs, no matter who is in office. Working-class interests, however, would not be sacrificed in the name of “access” to the powerful; there would be no pretense that something was gained when the table was, in fact, bare.
Following that logic, Trumka supported the Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA. The AFL-CIO took part in those talks, rejecting an initial draft, while supporting the subsequent United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) Agreement only when greater labor rights were included within it. Trumka called for a “yes” vote when it was brought before the Senate; though he made clear that while it was a step forward, the agreement was not a final solution to run-away jobs, environmental destruction, and inequality. Labor seized an opening created by the Trump administration, but there was never a pretense of a shared agenda, and there were no words of praise for the administration. Instead, Trumka’s praise was for “working people [who] are responsible for a deal that is a vast improvement over both the original NAFTA and the flawed proposal brought forward in 2017.”
II. Disagreements Among Friends That Don’t Create Enemies
Meanwhile in New York, for self-defined pragmatic reasons, many union leaders supported former Governor Andrew Cuomo against more progressive Democratic challengers during primaries in 2014 and 2018. The abject loss of independence by those union leaders lay not so much in the calculated decision to support him — but in demanding that others do so as well, attacking organizations they had worked with in the past rather than respect disagreement. Numerous other union leaders have taken a similar parochial view of political activity – demanding that supporters march in lockstep over a candidate endorsement or a legislative campaign. The implication of doing so is that debate is a weakness because members are incapable of understanding nuance or complexity.
However, Trumka pointed to a different way of engaging in politics that treated working people and broader social movement advocates with the respect democracy demands.
By way of example, many people active in progressive and union circles believed that the flaws in the USMCA outweighed any of its virtues and therefore opposed the agreement. Prominent among them was Bernie Sanders, who voted against the USMCA in the Senate despite the AFL-CIO’s call for support. But opposition to the positioning of the Federation did not lead Trumka to accuse a longtime allies as being anti-labor. Independent working-class politics means nothing if it doesn’t allow space for friends, allies and members to differ, even sharply.
Perhaps the clearest expressions of that approach was evident in one of Trumka’s last public statements. He had developed a close, positive working relation with Joe Biden and publicly declared that Biden had a deeper appreciation for working people and respect and understanding of unions than any of his Democratic predecessors. But that support was not unconditional. When Representative Cori Bush criticized Biden for his failure to extend anti-eviction protections in place for renters because of the impact of Covid-19, Trumka didn’t react with fear that this might damage labor’s relationship with a friend in the White House — that it might jeopardize “access”. Rather, he stated in the AFL-CIO’s Daily Brief: “I especially want to recognize the leadership of Rep. Cori Bush, who organized lawmakers and activists for five days on the steps of the Capitol. She pushed Congress and the nation to see the struggle of people who are currently unhoused or facing eviction. In her words, Today, our movement moved mountains.”
Cori Bush had experienced homelessness, a reality many working people have faced one time or another — including many from Trumka’s western Pennsylvania hometown. To allow a relation with an elected official to outweigh solidarity with those who are or may be forced to experience living without a roof over their head would mean sacrificing workers’ trust for a momentary gain.
III. Drawing a Line
Trumka’s sudden death just at the moment when Rep. Bush and other progressive House members are showing real power in crafting budget and infrastructure bills is a significant loss. Yet his legacy points a way forward. To the end, Trumka’s focus remained on the realities of the lives working people face and their need for answers that have direct and immediate impact. It is a way of maintaining a substantive political independence that works within the reality of our electoral system but is not trapped by it.
Of necessity, that political independence must work within our trade union movement as it is presently structured. The AFL-CIO is an organization composed of affiliates (rather than of individual members), each equal and independent, each with its particular strengths and weaknesses, histories and internal culture, all confronting an ever-changing workplace, social and political environment. The Federation itself is only one part (albeit the largest part) of the trade union movements, while union members remain a minority within the working class.
The challenge for Trumka was to find a path that would acknowledge the result of diversity — multiple competing understandings — in order to forge a degree of unity through which working-class power can be expressed. Although some critics of union leadership imagine that there can be shortcuts — that challenging existing corporate power can be proclaimed absent meaningful support and engagement built through patient organizing — the reality is that no such short cut has ever been found. Working-class political independence will only be made a reality when a common bond is built that recognizes and respects the various conclusions union members come to as to how best to defend their immediate interests and create a more secure life built upon respect as the basis of a genuine freedom.
Noting this, however, is not to say that all points of view are equally acceptable. A scab may be a worker, but a scab’s opinion is due no respect, unlike the opinion of unionists arguing over a more-or-less confrontational course of action, arguing over the merits or demerits of a particular contract or endorsement. By definition, a scab is a force for working-class disunity and subservience. And, as Trumka repeatedly made clear, the same can be said of those who wear their racism on their sleeve. The logic that led him to support the USMCA or to support a sit-in to preserve a moratorium on evictions, the same logic he expressed in the strikes he led as Mine Workers president and those he supported at home and abroad led by other unionists, led him to unequivocally oppose anyone or any idea that denigrated or attacked the humanity of a fellow worker, of a fellow human being.
That translated into a clear, stated, uncompromising opposition to racism, not as an abstraction, but in the concrete meaning of opposition to police brutality and mass incarceration. He called out those whose fear and hatred of people with a different skin color led them to cut off their nose to spite their face – those who voted for Bush, Trump or any of the state and local candidates who similarly rise to office by a politics of division. Trumka took an equally clear stance in support for immigrants and immigrant rights, and in recognizing that sexual harassment has no place in the workplace or in the labor movement.
Of course, just saying that racism, sexism, and fear-mongering have no place doesn’t make inequity go away, doesn’t erase overnight an outlook that took root in a society built on the premise that some people are less human than others. But calling it out publicly is a necessary part of defining working-class perspective and building a genuine working-class unity that is the only path toward independent working-class politics.
A speech Trumka gave (alongside Poor People’s Campaign leader Rev. William Barber) at a memorial in Alabama honoring four children killed in a bomb detonated during a Sunday Service in 1963 — the murder of Black children worshipping being the Klan’s answer to the March on Washington only a few weeks earlier — gives a sense of the principles that underlay his vision of unionism:
Every time a union leader calls for equal pay, every time a shop steward says to the boss ‘you can’t do that, it’s discrimination,’ every time we cast a vote, we honor the memory of Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole and Denise [the four martyred children].
But our debt as a labor movement to this community is greater than that. On the day the Ku Klux Klan set off the bomb, parts of the labor movement were racially segregated including in Birmingham. The divisions and hatred that landowners and employers had been sowing since the founding of this country infected our own movement.
And so, when the AFL-CIO fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we were fighting to end discrimination and racism not just by employers, but by our own unions, our own institutions. We were fighting to change ourselves. We believe that people can change and grow and overcome so that history can be made right. We believe that people — and we, the people — don’t stay in the same place forever. We can be moved forward. After all, that is why it is called a movement.
America’s labor movement stands with every union member and every person in this country who is demanding justice and striving for the end of racism.
IV. A Connecting Link
Knowing what policies to advocate, what forms of political action to engage in, how to build a labor movement that is true to itself and true to the larger movement for social justice of which it is a part, requires understanding who or what stands in the way of worker rights. After a strike is over, win or lose, unions must bring those scabs back into the fold or else remained permanently divided.
Similarly, those workers blinded by racism still have to be represented when an employer violates their contractual rights, still deserve health care and pensions. Abhorrent views must be rejected without losing sight of the need for universal rights and protections for all working people. Moreover, being the tools of the wealthy and powerful doesn’t change the fact that tools remain the tools of others.
Particular employers are often the direct source of workers’ grievances, as those striking Nabisco or trying to organize Amazon are currently experiencing, as workers anywhere asserting rights against a recalcitrant employer know all too well. Those fights, however, generally take place apart from each other and though solidarity does have meaning in a practical sense, Nabisco workers can’t organize Amazon, Amazon workers can’t win Nabisco workers’ strike. Unions often engage such foes of human rights piecemeal because that is how the conflict manifests itself — and is the basis for horse-trading politics or even the kind of politics that Bill Gray spoke to at that NALC Convention, in which electing Democrats was more important than holding them accountable, apart from narrowly defined aims.
Our political system is structured so as to undermine the power of working people and reinforce divides among them. Thus, while the need for political independence — meaning the ability of working people and their organizations to advance their interests and the goal of popular rights and genuine equality over and against corporate interests — is evident, the pathway forward is murky and requires identifying where barriers are placed by those who profit from worker divides.
Trumka used his legal training to develop a systemic critique of the way our institutions are failing us. His analysis of the direction of the Supreme Court over the past decades hinged on demonstrating how even the fig leaf of precedent is removed in the way rulings have attacked one labor right after another. Far from isolated attacks, these rulings are itself part and parcel of a broader attack on democracy. And that is the territory on which he staked out a framework for building workers’ political independence — by organizing on behalf of a genuine democracy in the face of a legal system that is serving to entrench an ever more oligarchical economic and political system. A speech Trumka gave to law students at Yale when arguing against Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court can serve as an example:
“Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” Those are lyrics from a song about a bitter struggle between my union, the United Mine Workers of America, and mine owners in southeastern Kentucky. The song continues, “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.”
Unfortunately, today those lyrics could serve as the fight song for the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate, activist wing of justices who wax poetic about precedent and judicial restraint, yet regularly bend over backwards to serve the interests of the wealthy, the powerful and the privileged. There are no neutrals there. …
The [Supreme] Court has used its authority to entrench economic and political power in the hands of the elites against a growing number of Americans and increasingly to foster division on racial, religious and ethnic lines. It is impossible to read the Court’s decisions in major cases over the past two decades without coming to the conclusion that they amount to deck stacking … an effort by the Court in tandem with reactionary political forces to ensure that justice is only available to the wealthy and well-connected.
V. Building on a Legacy
This kind of understanding is shared by the House Progressive Caucus. To an extent not seen in decades, the caucus is taking shape as a cohesive force forging a progressive agenda distinct from — and when need be, in opposition to — mainstream liberalism without ever losing sight of the greater danger to democracy and human rights posed by right-wing Republican policies. The strength the caucus has demonstrated, and the popular movement that led to the election of so many principled progressives to federal, state and municipal offices across the country, is the reason the Biden administration has taken the steps it has to date to advance working people’s interests. As the Congressional battle over voting rights and labor law reform (and the continued fight to protect renters from eviction) indicate, so much more can be done. In that respect, we see the shape of a genuine political independence that Trumka advocated his entire life. And that potential can be further realized if organized labor as a whole builds on the perspective Trumka put forward.
We should remember that the wildcat 1970 postal workers strike and the subsequent rank-and-file movement that brought new leadership to a transformed NALC and created the American Postal Workers not only led to improved pay and benefits; it created powerful vehicles that have resisted every effort of the Postal Service to use technological change and changes in communication technology to destroy or privatize the postal system itself. The victory of Miners for Democracy gave miners back their union, which has consistently fought for better wages, stronger safety protocols and pensions, even as the industry has gone into freefall. The current months-long strike of over 1,000 miners in Alabama is testament to that continued determination.
Yet it would be hard to deny that the hopes of those renewed rank-and-file movements have not been realized, that postal workers, miners, all working people, have been locked in a defensive fight for over four decades. For all the heroism and power demonstrated in workplace struggles, progress requires the political strength of a united movement. By the same token, only through a united labor movement rooted in membership engagement and ideas, such as those postal workers and miners expressed and acted upon decades ago, will political action have the power to be and remain genuinely independent of corporate wealth and blandishments. This returns us to the connection between responding to practical needs and deeply held aspirations as the core of unionism at the workplace and in society.
With that in mind, it is fitting to remember the values which underscore our engagement. So we close with remarks provided by Trumka in a speech memorializing Joe Rauh, who represented rank-and-file miners seeking justice for Yablonski:
“You see, workers are willing to endure hardship. We are the most resilient group of people the world has ever known. But what we won’t accept is the feeling of being unnecessary. What we won’t allow is for anyone to strip us of our value, our dignity, our worth.”
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Joe Manchin, the Republican’s Trojan Horse
By Stewart Acuff

Joe Manchin fights hard against what the Democratic Party most needs to do: show Americans that government can improve the lives and futures of average working families, that an empowered Democratic Party can take on corporate masters of greed for economic justice, higher living standards and quality of life for our working class.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s September 1 speech to the Chamber of Commerce reaffirmed the truth that he won’t help pass any legislation his corporate masters oppose. In that speech and in an op-ed in the next day’s Wall Street Journal he announced his opposition to President Biden’s $3.5 trillion human infrastructure reconciliation plan.
For labor, progressives and all Democrats fighting for economic justice, Joe Manchin is worse than a Republican. He will never support viable legislation for economic justice, and he prevents the Democratic Party from achieving it.
“Inside the Democratic Party Manchin does much more harm than any Republican could. He both weakens and kills Democratic priorities for everyday Americans, thus stopping Democrats from the change voters crave, locking in top-down failed policies and politics.”
Manchin is proud of his support for the smaller steel and concrete infrastructure that was supported by all corporate America. All those 1.2 trillion dollars of concrete and steel work are critical as are the good paying, family sustaining union jobs.
But the bigger, broader $3.5 trillion Biden and Democratic plan is about shoring up human infrastructure for working families. It would enact and fund policies to strengthen working families including childcare, home care, green energy investment, expanded healthcare, free community college, DACA, Native Nation health and well-being, upgrades to Veterans Affairs facilities.
In other words, Biden’s full plan would begin to shift resources allocated from the top down for 40 years for massive corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the rich for the health and well-being of working families. The package would strengthen our country and our economy from the ground up.
This $3.5 trillion human infrastructure plan is, of course, anathema to the masters of Joe Manchin who’ve been the masters of misery and a failed American economy for four decades.
Manchin does this on issue after issue, legislation after legislation: minimum wage, Covid relief, voting rights, infrastructure.
He bargains Democrats down in the legislative process, opposes any and all measures to address economic inequality and justice. Then he pleads and wheedles Democrats with the theme of his career: he is the best you can get, like a particularly cruel abuser.
Inside the Democratic Party Manchin does much more harm than any Republican could. He both weakens and kills Democratic priorities for everyday Americans, thus stopping Democrats from the change voters crave, locking in top-down failed policies and politics.
Long ago, back in 1994 Joe Manchin made his bed with the oligarchy. He became the West Virginia State Chairman of ALEC, the Koch brothers’ vehicle to take over state legislatures. Manchin still appears on the ALEC website. It’s no wonder as governor he refused union recognition and collective bargaining with AFSCME for state employees. His career long symbiotic relationships with coal colonialists and all fossil fuel corporations have made him the enemy of the future. He is the most powerful defender and friend of fossil fuels in Congress.
The only reliable predictor of Manchin’s legislative decisions is his own most naked and immediate financial well-being. For Joe Manchin, government is just another way to make money. He and his family have lived well off the largesse of a senator’s contacts and payoffs.
Tragically, Joe Manchin fights hard against what the Democratic Party most needs to do: show Americans that government can improve the lives and futures of average working families, that an empowered Democratic Party can take on corporate masters of greed for economic justice, higher living standards and quality of life for our working class.
By refusing to act in the interests of working people in this historic moment of possibility, Joe Manchin assures us nothing can change, nothing will get better, the status quo is the most we can hope for.
That’s enough damage to Democrats and our agenda, but there is more.
Joe Manchin controls the West Virginia Democratic Party, ensuring all decisions are based on what is best for him, making the entire state apparatus a vehicle for only one man who doesn’t even share Democratic values.
Finally, Joe Manchin has convinced too many Democrats that he is the best we can do, that we could never win that Senate seat with any Democrat except Joe Manchin.
That is the worst effect of Joe Manchin.
By killing our agenda, Joe Manchin condemns us to lose.
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Alan Fisher
By Len Shindel
Remembrances of Alan Fisher
February 7, 1947 – September 16, 2021
I met Alan Fisher so many years ago, in the 1970s, after we both began working at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point Plant in Maryland. For a few years, we weren’t close personally or politically. Chance, greater maturity and a well-respected common friend, Paul Revell, brought us to the realization that we had always been fighting the same battle.
The three of us worked together with a group of co-workers to develop a more united union in our corner of the immense mill as challenges facing steelworkers grew ever more acute. Paul died of pancreatic cancer a decade ago. And now, Alan is gone, too.
Alan was a great writer. He edited the ’09 Express, our local union’s newspaper and squeezed inconvenient truths into its pages. He invited my contributions as he established constructive relationships across the local union. I’m so grateful that Alan also opened a door for me to submit copy, as he did, to the Baltimore Evening Sun. We were both encouraged andmentored by a great editor, Mike Bowler, yet another victim of cancer.
For many years, Alan and I exchanged phone calls. We met a few times when his work with the California Reinvestment Coalition brought him to Washington. I was proud of my buddy and the relationships he was building with such skilled and talented people who were dedicating their lives to empowering poor and working people.
A few years before he died, Alan came for a visit to my cabin in the mountains of Western Maryland. It was just the two of us. We played our memories like on a board game, taking pieces and giving pieces of our formative days, trading stories of inspirational souls, opportunities seized and opportunities squandered. We drove to Thomas, the old West Virginia coal and coke town, now gentrified, then walked among the bee-hive ovens, talking the whole way, pondering how we came to work in a steel mill together—two sons of relative privilege. What did it all mean for us? Better still for those in our union, those in our family, those in our movement? Alan was my big brother at some big moments, always the wiser, more conscious actor in the play.
Later on, we met in New Orleans at the Jazz and Blues Festival. We took in all we could of the food, music and pathos, honing an aging friendship.
Alan offered great support and encouragement to me in my post-retirement work. And, as my wife, Maxine, continued to struggle with metastatic cancer, Alan was always there to listen and care on our long, rambling conversations. A cure for this horrific disease cannot come too soon.
I loved the guy. I will think of him often as my own time wears thinner, as our mutual hopes for the future are both affirmed and dashed on the voyage I was so fortunate to travel, with him and Paul and so many others, through a steel mill that is no more.
Thanks to my friend, Peter Olney, for standing by Alan and for inviting our remembrances.
Sharon, David, Ben and Lisa, you and your families are in my thoughts. I’m wishing you great strength at this difficult time.
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9/11 + 20 Years – Worker Safety and Health Today
By Earl Dotter and Scott Schneider

One year after the attack on the Twin Towers, I was invited by Phil Landrigan, M.D. and Steven M. Levin, M.D. to photograph the new Mount Sinai 9/11 Emergency Responder Medical Monitoring Program. By 2002, the Program had begun evaluating the health of the Responders. They included construction workers who had been lifted by baskets into the still smoking pile and rebuilt the damaged infrastructure there, fire fighters who had recovered human remains, truck divers who hauled away the mountain of debris, city employees who had cleared the dust laden wreckage from the streets, and police officers who secured the site. All needed medical attention for toxic dust exposures and related respiratory issues, cancers, and post-traumatic stress disorders.
Years of political pressure resulted in the enactment of the Federal World Trade Center Health Program in 2011. The Act expired in 2015, and only after the well-known TV personality Jon Stewart advocated in a sustained campaign, was the coverage reauthorized by Congress for 75 years. That program now provides treatment for certified WTC-related health conditions that responders not only sustained in NYC, but also at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, PA.
Earl Dotter, Occupational and Enviromental Health Photojournalist
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Twenty years ago, close to 3,000 people died from the terrorist attacks on 9/11. There are memorials in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and many commemorations will occur of this tragic event. What has been and will likely continue to be ignored are the thousands of others who didn’t die in the attack but died or suffered as an aftermath of the attack. According to NIOSH there are over 105,000 people enrolled in the 9/11 health surveillance system, 79,000 of who were rescue workers, who are being treated for respiratory illnesses, reflux, asthma, cancer, PTSD and other illnesses.
In sum, 35 times as many people are suffering from the incident as were killed on that day. Yet their stories will likely be ignored because worker safety is often relegated to the back burner in this country. Many people assume that the government guarantees a safe place of work (at least since the OSHA Act was passed 50 years ago) and that workers who get hurt on the job were careless or at fault. Even though the OSHA Act makes it the employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace, each year about 5,300 workers are killed on the job. Things have improved over the past 50 years, but it’s not enough. Sadly, those 5,300 deaths are just the tip of the iceberg.
“We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites.”
An estimated 10 times as many workers die each year as those who perished on 9-11 from occupational diseases which are often not counted (in part because the long latency often makes it hard to associate the disease with a particular workplace and in part because the workers compensation system was never designed to count and compensate such illnesses). The system set up by the OSHA Act 50 years ago is largely intact and hasn’t changed much. We still have a disturbingly insufficient number of inspectors — less than 2,000 — to cover over 10 million workplaces. The AFL-CIO estimates that it would take 162 years to just inspect every workplace once.
New hazards such as COVID-19 have emerged for which OSHA has promulgated no enforceable standards (except in 3-4 states that have issued emergency rules this year). The federal OSHA standard that has been issued only applies to health-care workers. New OSHA standards take 7-20 years to issue because of all the regulatory hurdles Congress and the White House impose. The Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL) that OSHA set for toxic chemicals mostly haven’t changed in 50 years and have been disavowed by the agency. States are now struggling to issue new standards to protect workers from heat on the job as the climate crisis has caused the hottest summer on record.
The system is antiquated and broken. We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites. Other places, like the UK, require full time worker health and safety representatives on each jobsite, paid for by the company. Ontario workers have a much stronger right to refuse unsafe work and require joint health and safety committees.
Now, 50 years after the founding of OSHA and 20 years after 9/11, we need a much more robust approach to protecting workers from both injuries and illnesses at work.
Scott Schneider
Former Director for Occupational Safety and Health for the
Laborers Health & Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA)
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UNITE HERE, THE 2020 ELECTIONS AND BEYOND
By Marty Bennett
Many weeks after Democrats swept the Georgia Senate runoff elections, the right-wing extremists’ January 6th assault on Congress saturated the news cycle. The Capitol insurrection and the debate about an independent and nonpartisan investigation overshadowed the compelling story of how Democrats prevailed in both the November 2020 election and the Georgia runoffs. The lessons of the elections are most relevant for the 2022 mid-terms-–notably, the impact of UNITE HERE’s “safe and contactless” door-to-door canvassing to turn out Democratic voters.
UNITE HERE is a union representing 300,000 North American hotel, gaming, food service, airport, and sports arena workers. UNITE HERE members are predominantly immigrants, youth, women, and people of color. The union played an outsized role in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania–critical swing states for the Biden-Harris Electoral College victory.Building the union’s electoral capacity has taken many years. It is a model other unions, progressive organizations, and the Democratic Party can replicate in 2022 and beyond.
The UNITE HERE Electoral Strategy: Lost Timers and the Ground Game
Four pillars anchor UNITE HERE’s electoral achievements:
- Aggressive organizing in the private sector, which exceeded all other unions by adding more than 63,000 new members between 2014-2019;
- Encouraging new union members to register and turn out to vote during each election cycle;
- Negotiating with employers to permit members to leave the workplace during the election cycle, and work as paid precinct walkers (aka “lost timers”). After an election, lost timers can return to work and retain their same job and seniority.
- Recruiting and mobilizing workers to take union leaves-of-absence. To recruit sufficient lost-timers the union taps into many workers’ commitments to urge voters at the door to make change for a better world by participating in the electoral process.
The union is strongly committed to precinct organizing and door-to-door canvassing. D. Taylor, President of UNITE HERE international claims: “I don’t think there is any replacement for it.”
Over the last two decades, field experiments by researchers at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politicshave demonstrated that face-to-face contact at the door is the best way to turn out voters. Their research shows that voters identified and mobilized by canvassers can often provide the needed margin of victory in close elections.
The union provides lost timers extensive training to become effective canvassers and to develop their leadership skills. When they return to the workplace, many serve as shop stewards, on contract bargaining teams, and in other leadership positions.
Max Bell Alper, former Organizing Director with UNITE HERE International Union and current Executive Director with North Bay Jobs with Justice, is an experienced canvasser who served as a trainer in Reno for the November elections. Alper stated, “Our goal for the campaign was not only to deliver Nevada for the Biden-Harris ticket but also to ensure that rank and file canvassers become stronger leaders and organizers after the elections.”
The union’s ground game has become more sophisticated over time, using massive databases, tablets and smartphones to identify, track, and turn out voters. In addition, lost timers and union volunteers supplement walkers by phoning and texting most voters who receive a knock at the door.
Nevada as Laboratory for the Ground Game
By the late 1990s, after two decades of bottom-up organizing, most of the large Las Vegas casinos and hotels were organized by the union. The 60,000 UNITE HERE members of Culinary 226 in Las Vegas and Reno are the union’s political backbone in the Silver State. Nevada has been a laboratory for the union’s ground game: the state has flipped from red to blue since Barack Obama carried Nevada in 2008 and 2012; Hillary Clinton won Nevada in 2016, followed by Joe Biden in 2020. Presently the Governor, both Senators, and three of the four Congressional Representatives are Democrats, and Democrats control both chambers of the Nevada legislature.
Preparations for the 2020 Presidential Elections
According to a report by the union, How UNITE HERE Delivered for Biden, the union began to prepare for the 2020 elections in 2016 by building coalitions and electoral infrastructure in such crucial swing states as Arizona. In response to Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070, passed in 2010, UNITE HERE Local 11, based in Los Angeles and Phoenix, was one of the founders of One Arizona, a coalition of twenty-eight labor, faith-based, environmental justice, civil, and immigrant rights organizations. One Arizona focused on voter registration and engagement of youth, Latinx, African-American, Native American, and immigrant voters, particularly in Maricopa County that includes Phoenix and surrounding suburbs home to 60 percent of the state’s population. In 2016 the coalition registered more than 100,000 new voters.
That fall, UNITE HERE Local 11 and its sister economic justice organization, CASE Action (Central Arizonians for A Sustainable Economy), joined with a broad coalition of labor, environmental justice, immigrant and civil rights organizations to launch the most extensive canvassing effort in the state’s history to defeat racist sheriff Joe Arpaio, who for decades had terrorized and violated the legal and human rights of Maricopa County immigrants and black and brown residents. The coalition also supported a successful statewide ballot initiative that lifted Arizona’s minimum wage to $12 an hour and provided five paid sick days for all residents.
These victories marked the coming of age of a progressive electoral coalition that in 2018 became “Mi AZ” and helped elect Democrat Krysten Sinema to a Senate seat long held by Republicans by a slender 2.3 percent margin. According to a report by the Latino Voter Project, 75 percent of Arizona Latinos voted Democratic in 2018, up 22 percent from 2014.
In 2019, UNITE HERE Local 11 also worked to elect former housekeeper and UNITE HERE Organizing Director Betty Guardado to the Phoenix City Council. Progressive Democrats now comprise a majority on the Phoenix City Council.
In June 2019, hundreds of delegates to the UNITE HERE convention in Las Vegas pledged to walk precincts for Democrats in 2020. Even though 98 percent of members were laid off or furloughed after COVID-19 began in March 2020, ultimately 1700 rank and file members, many still unemployed, would participate in the ground game. Daily socially distanced canvassing began in Phoenix in July, Reno and Las Vegas in August, Miami and Orlando in September. In Philadelphia, the fifty who began canvassing on October 1st grew to 500 by Election Day.
The Democratic Party and other unions had abandoned door-to-door campaigning when the COVID-19 public health emergency began, relying instead on the phone and digital outreach to voters. UNITE HERE was the first union to organize a canvas in these swing states for the November general election and UNITE HERE had the biggest union canvassing operation in these four states.
COVID-19 and Safe, ‘Contactless’ Canvassing
All UNITE HERE precinct walkers participated in a one-day training, and lead canvassers—who had completed a comprehensive one-week training—supervised both paid and volunteer canvassers. Precinct walkers were required to strictly adhere to epidemiologists’ safety protocols at all times—both at the door and off-hours, when they could not go to bars, restaurants, health clubs, malls, or restaurants. Lost timers and canvassers far away from home were housed at extended-stay motels and prepared meals in their rooms.
Having a conversation at the door required that voters were willing to wear masks (that canvassers provided), handing them to the voter using tongs. Canvassers took daily temperature checks, wore masks (or masks and visors), remained six feet from voters at all times, and participated in meetings held outdoors or on Zoom. No canvassers contracted Covid-19 as a result of their participation in the ground game.
The field operation focused on Democratic, independent, black and brown, low-income, and infrequent voters. Canvassers were expected to hit 70-80 doors each eight-hour shift and have extended conversations with at least 15-20 voters, asking them at the door to publicly commit to voting for Biden-Harris and also making a voting plan with each voter. The union estimates that one in four door knocks yielded a conversation with a voter.
Most voters at the door were receptive to the union’s message. However, some were not. In open carry states like Nevada and Arizona, residents could answer a knock on the door with a gun holstered on their hip. Canvassers also experienced racist and sexist taunts, aggressive dogs let loose and some physical assaults. Despite fears about contracting the disease and confrontations with hostile residents, canvassers did not give up.
At the end of each shift, rank and file members checked in with their supervisors to discuss their tallies, challenges in the field, and how they could improve the next shift.
Phone Banks and Social Media to Targeted Voters
Simultaneously, UNITE HERE mobilized members and community allies to phone voters in those swing states. The union claims that one in five calls led to a brief conversation with a voter. Bilingual callers spoke to voters in their native languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Amharic (Ethiopia), and Hausa (Nigeria).
Callers used the “ThruTalk” phone bank system that automatically dials landline and cell phone numbers (via a computer or another device) and can ‘call through’ disconnected numbers and answering machines until a live body answers the phone.
The phone banks grew to 1000 participants a day by late October. Callers identified Biden voters, made a voting plan with each, and encouraged voters to vote by mail or vote early. Callers also provided voters information about hours and locations for early voting, Election Day voting, and mail-in drop boxes. The information obtained on the phone was then transmitted to tablets that canvassers carried in the field and was invaluable during the pre-election GOTV days. UNITE HERE GOTV phone bankers conducted targeted calls in all of the above languages as well.
Beyond voter outreach by canvassing and phone banks the union designed and implemented a paid digital media program directed at unlikely or infrequent voters in these swing states that included 15 second video ads in English and Spanish viewed more than 38 million times.
UNITE HERE and the November 2020 Presidential Victory
In the November 2020 Nevada election, 41 percent of voters cast their vote early, and 48 percent voted by mail, electing Biden-Harris by just under 33,596 votes (2.4%). The UNITE HERE ground campaign had canvassed the doors of 745,000 voters and turned out more than 61,000 Biden voters through face-to-face conversations. Nevada retained a blue and female majority in the state legislature.
In Arizona, the ground game also delivered: Biden-Harris won Maricopa County by more than forty-five thousand votes, and bested Trump statewide by just under 10,457 votes (0.3%). The union delivered not only for Biden-Harris but also campaigned for Democrat Mark Kelly who won a Senate seat. Canvassers also helped to flip one Arizona House seat and another State Senate seat to bring Democrats within one seat of a majority in both chambers. Predominantly Latino and African-American precincts in Maricopa County supported Democrats by a three-to-one margin.
In July UNITE HERE Local 11 and CASE Action formed the federal Worker Power super-PAC that coordinated the Maricopa ground game. By election day the union’s canvassers knocked on 800,000 doors and made 2.5 million phone calls, boosting overall turnout in the primary and general election record levels. Their ranks of 500 canvassers included more than 100 volunteers from the national organization Seed the Vote, as well as other small groups of volunteers from across the United States who wanted to make history as part of Local 11’s electoral effort. The union estimates that its canvassers turned out 48,364 Arizona residents at the door who did not vote in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, 200 canvassers hit the streets on October 1st, joined by 300 more for the GOTV during the final week of the election. The union’s precinct walkers knocked on 575,000 doors in Philadelphia, and 67,000 voters pledged to support Biden and Harris—including 34,863 who did not vote in 2016. According to UNITE HERE, it was the largest union-based GOTV operation in the state’s history. Turnout from Philadelphia voters ultimately pushed Biden over the top by an 80,555 margin (1.1%).
“We believe we made a critical difference in Pennsylvania by focusing our efforts in the disenfranchised Black and Brown communities where most of our members live,” said UNITE HERE Local 274 President Rosslyn Wuchinich. “And despite a pandemic that has devastated our industries and our communities we did just that. That is a testament to how our union brings together those from all walks of life to harness our collective power and win for working people.”
All together during the November 2020 Presidential election UNITE HERE precinct walkers in the key swing states of Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida knocked on 3 million doors while hundreds of phone bankers made 10 million phone calls to voters. The union contacted 440,000 infrequent voters in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, of whom 125,000 had not voted in 2016 but pledged to vote for Biden and Harris in 2020—two-thirds were voters of color.
UNITE HERE and the Georgia Run-Offs
Just after the Thanksgiving holidays five hundred UNITE HERE canvassers started to walk precincts in three counties in metro Atlanta just to support Democratic Senate candidates Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
Canvassers included three-dozen African-born union members and community allies from such nations as Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon, Liberia, and Nigeria. These workers, part of the union’s ‘Get Out the African Vote Initiative,’ knocked on doors in suburban Atlanta’s DeKalb County—home to most of Georgia’s 40,000 African immigrants who are naturalized citizens and are eligible to vote.
In Georgia, the union collaborated with Stacey Abrams, who had lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin. Abrams founded both the nonpartisan New Georgia Majority, focused on voter registration and engagement, targeting youth, immigrant voters, and voters of color, and Fair Fight, which monitors election practices and organizes to thwart voter suppression.
The Georgia runoff partnership, coordinated by the national America Votes coalition, also included Black Voters Matter, Black PAC, the Poor People’s Campaign, Peoples Action, Georgia Stand-Up, Georgia AFL-CIO, Mijente, and SEIU. Many of these organizations had already established a robust socially-distanced ground game in Georgia, which was essential to flipping the state for Democrats by 12,670 votes (0.25%) in the November Presidential election.
By Election Day on January 5th, UNITE HERE locals had deployed more than a thousand union housekeepers, cooks, and airport concession workers to canvass low-income and black and brown precincts in the Atlanta metro region and the City of Columbus (GA). UNITE HERE canvassers knocked on 1.6 million doors, and two-thirds were black and brown voters. Altogether, the America Votes coalition knocked on the doors of over 10 million Georgia voters.
Historically voter turnout in Georgia runoffs had been 40-60 percent of previous November general elections. But in the January 2021 runoff, turnout soared to 90 percent of the total November election turnout, fueled by opposition to the racist Trump’s administration policies, popular demands for massive federal assistance to address the Covid-19 and economic crisis, and the largest ground operation in Georgia history, to give the Democrats a narrow victory.
Tony Evans, a member of UNITE HERE 2850 in Oakland who canvassed African-American voters in both Reno and Atlanta said, “We made this happen ‘on the doors’, we’re the people in the background who did the heavy lifting.”
Black voters, energized by black women like Felicia Davis, convener of the Clayton County (GA) Black Woman’s Roundtable, comprised one-third of the Georgia electorate and were decisive in the Georgia run-off; 93 percent of Black voters cast their ballots for Warnock and Ossoff.
Davis told the New York Times, “I am unapologetically Black, my agenda is Black, my community is Black, my county is Black. So, what I do is Black. And for 20 years we’ve been trying to tell people what was possible.”
Towards the 2022 Mid-terms and a New Democratic Majority
UNITE HERE’s experience in the 2020 election cycle points to several critical takeaways if Democrats are to increase their majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House in 2022.
First, the ground game is essential to prevailing in close elections, even during a public health crisis like COVID-19. Democrats and labor unions must make year-round investments to build training and organizational infrastructures as UNITE HERE and allied community based-organizations have done. Ongoing digital organizing is vital as well but should not be substituted for the knock on the door and phone calls by volunteers.
Democrats must begin immediately to prepare for the 2022 ground game to win Senate seats in swing states, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Ohio where incumbent Republican Senators are retiring. In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson is up for re-election, but Democrats could flip that seat. Georgia US Senator Raphael Warnock and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly will run for full terms in 2022, and the Democrats must retain these two seats.
Second, by large margins, voters of color, women, youth, labor, LGBTQ, poor, low-income, and infrequent voters in major metro regions supported Biden-Harris and Warnock-Ossoff. It is also essential to continue making inroads into the ever more diverse suburbs where Democrats prevailed, such as in the Phoenix and Philadelphia metro regions—with an emphasis on voter registration, engagement, and turnout of these core Democratic constituencies in both the inner city and suburbs. To forge an enduring Democratic new majority, the electorate must be continuously expanded and lower propensity voters within these constituencies must become likely voters.
A progressive electoral organizational infrastructure must become permanent in every state but independent of the Democratic Party and anchored in the constituencies comprising the new Democratic majority.
Moreover, it is crucial to combat voter suppression at the state level by passing the “For the People Act”, HR 1, in the House and S1 in the Senate to consolidate the new Democratic majority. Blocking voter suppression in Texas and North Carolina could enable Democrats to flip those states.
Third, the labor movement must hold Democrats accountable for implementing the party’s most progressive platform for any Presidential candidate—which is in large part a byproduct of Bernie Sander’s 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns and the progressive resistance to the Trump regime after 2016. The recently enacted $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package is a historic step forward, as the two pending infrastructure bills totaling $4.5 trillion could also be—but much more must be done.
To win the loyalty of core constituencies and to build an enduring new majority, Democrats must implement a progressive agenda that includes: a $15 minimum wage; canceling student debt; creating good green jobs and a just transition to a clean energy economy; approving the Protect the Right to Organize Act; winning comprehensive immigration reform (including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented); legislating paid sick and family leave; expanding access to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, and curbing police violence and transforming the racist criminal justice system.
Such a progressive agenda is now moving from the margins to the mainstream within the Democratic Party. The approval of Proposition 208 in Arizona in November 2020 that raised taxes on the wealthy to fund public education and Florida voters’ approval of $15 minimum wage by 60 percent of the vote indicates the popularity, in red and blue states alike, of a multi-racial economic populist agenda.
Moreover, this progressive agenda will enable Democrats to make further inroads with non-college educated white voters who decisively supported Trump. Many of these voters deserted the Democratic Party due to NAFTA, job loss, and deindustrialization, the stagnation of their wages and household incomes, the shredding of the social safety net, and never-ending wars in the Middle East.
According to UNITE HERE Secretary-Treasurer Gwen Mills, “The key takeaway from the election is that workers saved our democracy—workers did the essential door-to-door canvassing and everyday working voters turned out. With their votes comes a mandate for change to help working and low-wealth people.”
There is no guarantee that the current Democratic coalition is stable. The path to victory in 2022 runs through the ground game as demonstrated by UNITE HERE, broadening the electorate, and achieving concrete policy victories that directly address the needs of the emerging Democratic majority.
UNITE HERE is now meeting with other unions and community-based organizations to develop an even more robust ground game for the critical 2022 mid-term elections. As union President D.Taylor told the American Prospect, “I need to urge all labor unions to get on the doors.”
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For UNITE HERE 2020 elections data references, please go here
This piece originally ran in Beyond Chron
Two Poems
By Stewart Acuff
Freedom
Freedom ain’t fruit pie to slice in slender pieces stretched for too many mouths
Or biscuits split in half covered with thin gravy to fill hungry bellies needing eggs, going without
Freedom refuses to be a scarcity available only to the most powerful
Fake freedom, freedom for the few dries on its vines shrinking in hot sun withering to husks
Full freedom must be watered and guarded so it flourishes stretching to cover everyone
Real freedom is as big and bright as the West Texas sky even at night shining in star light
Those who spend lives fighting freedom for others lose the little liberty of their tiny lives
Fighting freedom begins the end of humanity and its promise of harmony
Fighting freedom is the start of all atrocities
Freedom squeezed by the white men of Texas dries to seeds ready to rise.
.
Hunger
What is hunger?
Is it three days of peanut butter?
And saltine crackers?
A steady diet of ramen noodles?
No money for fresh vegetables
Or is it only children of war and famine?
Stomachs stuck out from malnutrition’s sickness
What about the kids of only one parent?
Working two part time jobs no benefits
A caregiver, cashier, hotel maid
Starvation and poverty pay
Never paid a living wage
Kids at home subsisting on cereal
Hunger now as American as corporate power
And greed great enough to destroy us and earth.
…