Portside

Labor Notes writer Luis Feliz Leon spoke on April 13 with Joshua Brewer, the BAmazon campaign’s lead organizer, from RWDSU’s Mid-South Council.

Amazon and the other major employers today will not be organized until the left wing does the hard, thankless, exhausting organizing work of patiently building real union structures and real organizational muscle.

What did the campaign look like from the inside? Labor Notes writer Luis Feliz Leon spoke on April 13 with Joshua Brewer, the campaign’s lead organizer, from RWDSU’s Mid-South Council.

The president pledged to require businesses to make workplaces safe from the coronavirus on the campaign trail. Now he may not.

Organizing is sacred work. We’re dealing with the most difficult material to build with: people. If the first person you’re trying to organize rejects you, that’s okay, go to the next person. Know that there are people who want to hear and join.

As destiny would have it, just days after Amazon used illegal tactics to derail a drive by warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama to unionize, journalists in northern New Jersey who work for Gannett are voting on whether or not to form a union.

The annual decline in the number of union members actually slowed after the a right-to-work law in Michigan took effect in 2013. And membership grew to 604,000 in 2020 from 589,000 in 2019. 

The pandemic isn’t the whole story. Many working-class Asian American women have faced mistreatment throughout their working lives over their English language ability, class, gender, race, and immigration status.

Whether or not the union’s challenge in Bessemer fails, Amazon will face labor battles elsewhere.

The union’s loss in Bessemer shows the urgent need for both labor law reform and organizing at a mass scale.