Black Struggle is Class Struggle
An important unionization effort against the corporate behemoth Amazon is underway in the town of Bessemer, Alabama. Led by Black workers, a victory could have far-reaching implications for the region and organized labor as a whole.
Whether or not Amazon, a global behemoth and now trillion-dollar corporation, will be forced to eventually collectively bargain with a unionized workforce at its fulfillment center warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama hinges upon the votes of nearly 6,000 workers. Despite its characterization as a Red State in the Deep South, the workers in Alabama are at the forefront of a new effort to revitalize the U.S. labor movement.
If successful, the union drive would mark the first time an Amazon facility in the U.S. is successfully unionized. A pro-union vote would be a win for the entire of the working-class, and particularly in the US South where several states have anti-union “right to work” laws. These anti-union laws are a living example of how the region’s fraction of the capitalist ruling class has traditionally employed both racism and anti-labor legislation to help avert potential class solidarity efforts across racial lines.
An important underlying factor in the Amazon struggle is that the surge of worker-led organizing on the warehouse floor is being led by Black workers, who comprise an estimated 85% of the workforce. This is reflecting the racial composition of nearly 30,000 residents of Bessemer, which is 70% Black and predominantly working class.
An important underlying factor in the Amazon struggle is that the surge of worker-led organizing on the warehouse floor is being led by Black workers
“The south has always been an Achilles heel for American capitalism,” said Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, a UCLA professor and historian, during a recent episode of the weekly talk show, The Valley Labor Report, adding
When you really look at it, from Reconstruction on down, this is where movements will take place…And sure enough, the first place for Amazon, where the corporation will have to deal with a real union is going to be in Alabama.
The Amazon workers are organizing this struggle amid the convergence of several overlapping factors: an on-going pandemic that has disproportionately affected low-wage “essential” workers such as those employed at Amazon, a nationwide Black Lives Matter-inspired rebellion sparked by the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others; and the failure of the Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage which disproportionately keeps Black workers in poverty.
A victory for the workers of Bessemer could ignite and propel a national union drive that is already taking shape in different parts of the country. If successful, the effort would foreground a key component of the history of US labor struggle: the Black worker.
From Reconstruction to Precarious Labor
To understand the central the role that Black labor has played in US capitalist development requires basic working knowledge of this nation’s “peculiar institution,” otherwise known as chattel slavery, where for more than 250 years the hyper-exploitation of Black people was enshrined into law and and maintained through systematic violence and terror.
The US Civil War, fought between the North’s mostly industrial capitalist class and the South’s plantation-owning fraction of the ruling class, led to the abolition of formal slavery when the Confederacy was defeated. Central to the Union’s victory, even in bondage, was Black labor.
In what Marxist sociologist W.E.B. DuBois described as America’s first “general strike” in his book, Black Reconstruction, slaves throughout the South engaged in sabotage, work slowdowns, espionage, and mass desertions from plantations en masse, undermining the Confederate economy and efforts to re-supply its troops.
After the defeat of the South, newly emancipated Black workers, along with the Radical Republicans, helped usher in one of the most progressive political periods in US history known as Radical Reconstruction (1865-1877). This embodied the implementation of radical democratic means to dismantle all forms of racial subjugation, suppress Confederate opposition, and uplift a new Black citizenry. The intransigent opposition from Republican industrialists and landowners to any form of land redistribution or other form of economic reparation from the defeated slaveowners to liberated Black people killed the possibility for any substantive “reconstruction.”
Reconstruction was eventually abandoned altogether through the “The Great Compromise of 1877.” During this tragic episode, the Democrats agreed to allow Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes to become president (after a disputed election) in exchange for: removing federal troops from the South, the implementation of Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, convict leasing, and to no further impede or arrest the racist terror and violence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). These were among the many methods of social control institutionalized in this period to facilitate the further subjugation and super-exploitation of Black labor.
Despite the legal obstacles, which worked hand-in-hand with both state-sanctioned and vigilante-led white supremacist violence, Black labor persisted to wage struggles all throughout the twentieth century.
For instance, the 1925 founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the nation’s first Black led-union, and the first Black union to receive a charter under the American Federation of Labor (AFL), proved to be a watershed moment not only for Black labor, but for laying the groundwork for a larger fight against Jim Crow. Prominent figures from the BSCP such as union founder A. Philip Randolph, and E.D. Nixon, leader of the Montgomery branch of the BSCP, played crucial roles in organizing the landmark Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
The 1930s Alabama Communist Party-led Sharecroppers Union effort relied on Black labor as a catalyst in resisting debt peonage, and towards building interracial solidarity to fight the bosses and KKK terror.
From the Great Depression and formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), to the Civil Rights Movement era of mass struggle and resistance. From the militant unionism of the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement (DRUM) in the sprawling auto industry to the Black Power Movements; these are just some of the important examples of how Black workers initiated, led, or contributed to transformational labor struggles.
Today, frontline working-class movements such as the Fight for $15, the Chicago Teachers strike, and the union drive at Bessemer, are all driven by Black workers and carry forward the labor struggle traditions of the past.
That the historic and asymmetrical fight at Bessemer is being shouldered by Black workers is illustrative of the observations of Revolutionary Marxist CLR James, who wrote in 1948
…independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles…this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation…and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States.
Black Lives Matter at the Point of Production
According to Amazon’s own 2020 data, more than 26% of its U.S. work force are African-American. The vast majority are concentrated in low-wage positions in distribution centers and warehouses, with only ten Black people employed in the corporate headquarters.
While spread throughout the company’s nationwide locations, Black workers are more concentrated in some sites like that of Bessemer and a dozen other locations in the South. A victory at Bessemer could potentially be the opening salvo of a larger drive starting spreading through the region. The timing and determination of the workers coincides and takes confidence from the Black-led rebellion that spread across the country after the police murder of George Floyd.
The Black Lives Matter movement, which at its height last summer, brought an estimated 15 to 26 million people into the streets, offers the potential of fusing anti-racist struggle with workplace struggle. This helps to clarify the connections between economic inequality, police terror, and a myriad of other issues inter-connected between race and class—and how to organize the fight on all fronts.
The Black Lives Matter movement…offers the potential of fusing anti-racist struggle with workplace struggle.
Only through mass mobilization and organization, independent of the Democratic Party and the labor officialdom tied to it, will the working class realize its own social power through its ability to collectively withhold labor—which is responsible for the creation of all of society's wealth.
The March 13 BLM caravan to Bessemer, modest in size, but comprised of the Birmingham chapter of the BLM Global Network and other civil rights organizations, provided a glimpse of how a fight back centering both race and class could look. As Robin D.G. Kelly again explains, “[t]he struggle at the Amazon plant is also an anti-racist movement…And for that, the anti-racist and labor movements can come together to build a stronger challenge.”
The union drive, which went public last October, less than a year after the warehouse opened, was inspired by workers’ grievances regarding safety, scheduling, pay, and hyper-frenetic work requirements to meet hourly goals. Stuart Applebaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) said as much during an interview with National Public Radio (NPR): “The workers described grueling productivity quotas and wanted more say in how people at Amazon work, get disciplined or get fired.”
Workers at the warehouse reached out to the union during summer 2020, at the explosive high point of the Black-led rebellion.
Despite its claim to support BLM, Bezos himself exposed his own racist views after a Black worker named Chris Smalls organized a walkout at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to demand personal protective equipment amid the pandemic—and who was subsequently fired. In a leaked internal memo to the company's executives, Smalls was characterized as “not smart or articulate” and Bezos encouraged an anti-union PR strategy to make Smalls “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” at the onset of the organizing drive.
Furthermore, the company has also been accused by more than a dozen former and current Amazon corporate employees of creating and allowing for a hostile and discriminatory work environment for Black people.
Old-fashioned union bashing
Needless to say, the battle lines between the facility’s workers and Amazon are clearly drawn. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. For Amazon, the world’s 5th largest employer with 1.3 million employees, half of which are based in the U.S., any inkling of an effort to unionize US-based facilities in the past have been defeated with the full weight of the company’s vast resources. These include: throwing up a mix of legal hurdles, targeted firings, and mandating that workers attend company-held meetings where anti-union propaganda is presented.
This time has proven to be no different, as Amazon has employed the same tactics. Company management has set up a anti-union “Do It Without Dues” website, texting anti-union messages to workers several times per day, and posting anti-union materials inside of employee bathroom stalls. The company also coordinated with Jefferson County officials to recalibrate a stop light outside of the Bessemer facility, according to a report by media outlet More Perfect Union, in an attempt to give organizers less time to share information during shift changes.
Amazon’s anti-union activities are undoubtedly motivated by the chance that a successful campaign in Bessemer may be duplicated by other US workers throughout its sprawling logistics and supply chain. Union contracts would mean higher wages, improved working conditions, and more power to make demands—all of which would cut into the company’s immense profits.
In 2020, Amazon doubled its annual profit to a record-breaking $21.3 billion, while evading more than $2 billion in federal income taxes. Former CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, who stepped down from his post in February, added $58 billion to his personal fortune during the past year (including a single-day $13 billion dollar payoff), according to the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index, pushing his total past $200 billion.
While some Democrats have feigned support for the union drive, there has been no substantial support forthcoming. In fact, the policies and practices of the Democrats in power have made this a much more difficult and desperately needed struggle.
Democrats Sell-out Black Workers
When the administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden came to power in 2008, their campaign included a promise to pass card-check legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—with Joe Biden positioned as the point-man to get it done. This would have made union-drives much easier, requiring only a simple majority of workers to indicate their desire to unionize for it to be realized. Instead, once in power, the Democrats abandoned the issue altogether—even when they could have passed it easily without one single Republican vote. They never even introduced legislation into Congress.
During his campaign, Joe Biden pledged to be “the most pro-union president in history”. Nevertheless, he has remained silent throughout most of the current union drive. It wasn't until February that Biden released a video statement acknowledging that workers should have the right to unionize. Far from supporting, this underwhelming statement has amounted to nothing more than empty rhetoric.
This could be because Biden has built a cozy financial relationship with Amazon. In the 2016 elections, the company gave 1.7 million in campaign donations to the Democrats. In 2020 elections, Amazon increased that amount nearly ten-fold, giving $10.4 million dollars to Democratic Party campaigns—including $2.3 million to Joe Biden directly.
Despite Biden offering up tepid rhetorical support for workers, and several delegations led by Democrats visiting Bessemer in the past month, the recent abandonment of the party to fight for a national $15 minimum wage law is yet another devastating betrayal. If passed, the wage hike would have raised the earnings of 32 million people, including a third of all Black workers.
Also telling, is the once promised $2000 one-time relief checks, which Biden said would “go out the door immediately to help people” if voters in Georgia delivered the Senate runoff races to the Democrats. After elected, they were abruptly reduced to $1400. Along with Biden’s opposition to Medicare for all (and the unwillingness of “progressives and socialists” in Congress to actually fight for it), the Democrats in power have once again shown that they have no interest in supporting workers like those in Bessemer.
Democrats in power have once again shown that they have no interest in supporting workers like those in Bessemer.
Struggle strikes a chord and solidarity spreads
The union drive in Bessemer has become one of the more high-profile labor fights in the nation during the past several years, garnering broad attention and support.
Since going public, the union drive has become a sort of cause celebre amongst other sectors of organized labor. It has been taken up by celebrities, and inspired activists to lead actions such as the recent March 20 international day of solidarity. It has produced calls to boycott Amazon and other forms of support.
These examples of solidarity, though welcome, have taken place in the absence of a larger, more concerted mobilization of organized labor. The AFL-CIO, comprised of 12.5 million workers, has failed to move its vast resources behind the union drive. For example, on the AFL-CIO’s homepage, under the “TAKE ACTION” section, there isn’t even a mention of the struggle in Bessemer. Instead, workers are encouraged to lobby their congressperson to vote for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act).
Some of the proposed provisions under the PRO Act, which passed the House but faces an uphill climb in the Senate, contains much-needed labor reforms that could aid future labor struggles. So too—and more concretely—would a victory at Bessemer.
Ultimately, union leaders’ have made it a priority to lobby Democrats instead of organizing more workers into unions, building rank and file power and organization, and engaging in genuine solidarity work with actual struggle. This has had a demobilizing affect. One need look no further than Europe, where Amazon’s workforce across the continent is mostly unionized, to see how effectively organized labor is able to pushback against the worst excesses of the company.
On March 22, three Italian trade unions launched a 24-hour strike against Amazon, stemming from the company unilaterally making changes to workload, shifts, and benefits. This is an example that workers in the US need to emulate. Collective working-class action at the point of production is the only way to win gains in the workplace, not from Democratic Party officials beholden to the interests of capital, or back-room deals made between the labor officialdom and politicians.
Building from Bessemer
As we wait to hear the results of the union vote in Bessemer, one fundamental point is already clear: amid the wider working-class struggle, Black struggle, particularly in the U.S. context, will be an essential component in helping to rebuild a fighting labor movement in the months and years ahead. Whether this particular union drive succeeds or faces a setback, the wheels are in motion.
Building on the outcome of the Bessemer vote will also depend how other sections of the working class learn from this experience. It is imperative that all workers recognize that their collective fates and class interests are bound up with those of the most oppressed. The central role that Black workers occupy in the class struggle in the U.S.—from Black Lives Matter to the BAmazon union drive—will continue to be a motor force that moves all others forward.
According to fired Amazon worker Chris Smalls, speaking on the Benjamin Dixon show,
Right now we have an opportunity for the first time in American history to have an Amazon facility unionized. And I think it will galvanize the rest of the nation…If it's successful, we can also use this news to galvanize and organize facilities all across the nation.
Michael Brown is an independent socialist based in Long Beach, California. He has been engaged in activism-organizing for a decade. Brown is a co-founder of a Black Lives Matter chapter in Long Beach, along with being a co-founder of the Long Beach May Day Coalition. As a revolutionary socialist activist, Brown has taken part in struggles against police terror in southern California; solidarity work alongside both Teamster truckers and warehouse workers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; in addition to doing picket support for the week-long strike by United Teachers Los Angeles. He has also participated in immigrants rights marches, along with working with UNITE-HERE Local 11 in Long Beach to help secure safety regulations for hotel workers in Long Beach.
