As we await today’s count of the Bessemer Amazon union vote, it’s important to remember what this campaign means regardless of the outcome of the union vote. Bessemer has opened a new period for the labor movement’s opportunity to organize in the US South, and of the important role of Black workers in championing this strategic direction.
Taking on the world’s second largest corporation in a region where all of the Southern states combined have less union members than the state of New York alone, and where the legacy of Black enslavement still divides the working-class in social, political and economic ways, the Bessemer campaign objectively represents a struggle to build workers power against the power of a global corporation and thus against global capitalism.
This campaign must be viewed as an opening battle developing the various components for a strategic concentration to organize labor in the South. The Bessemer solidarity actions that have taken place in more than 50 cities across the US, including elements of international solidarity, has helped to highlight the importance of organizing labor in the South. Expressions of solidarity with the Bessemer workers campaign, were carried out by many local and national trade unions, members of the clergy, and even president Biden had to take a pro-union position because of the popular support generated by Bessemer.
Bessemer shows the potential of the intersection of a mass movement against systemic anti-Black racism that took the form of Black Lives Matter, organizing labor in the South, and the class struggle led by Black workers. Labor and progressive forces must build on this development regardless of the outcome.
The Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) is focusing on building a rank-and-file anchored and led infrastructure in the form of local worker assemblies that unite workers in key industries like Amazon, auto, meatpacking, transportation and hospitals to name a few, to build a framework for a worker’s led social movement in the South.
As was the case during the 1930s, the radical and progressive forces engaged their forces in helping to organize labor in industries that were foundations of industrial capitalism. With the new technology represented by Amazon, organizing labor will require an understanding of how 21st Century capitalism uses technology and artificial intelligence to monitor the speed and set grueling schedules for workers, to maximize profits. Amazon workers in Italy went on a 24- hour strike on March 22, 2021, over the pace of work, job security, fewer work hours for drivers and more stability for temporary workers and other issues.
With the covid-19 pandemic greatly impacting “essential workers” in industries and jobs that heavily employ Black, Brown and women workers, organizing labor across the US will be in great demand. Labor activists and progressive forces must seriously work to help organize workers in the remaining major industries so that the working-class can exercise maximum levels of power in a global economy where workers are struggling around various issues and using varying tactics.
The starting point for worker organization cannot afford to wait for the launch of a union campaign. It must begin by using the same laws under the National Labor Relations Act, that unions use to protect their right to organize. Workers must use these laws to help begin the process of building a workers movement infrastructure inside key industries and workplaces.
Yes, Amazon using its billions to go all out to defeat the union, hopes that a defeat will not only stop efforts to organize Amazon, but seeks to be a champion in trying to defeat the development of a national and international movement to organize labor in the South. Bessemer Amazon is the beginning, not the end of awakening workers in the South and the national and international labor movement of the strategic role of the South in the global economy and for creating a global labor movement as a necessary base and force for changing the power relations favorable to a radical social transformation of society.
If you organized solidarity actions in the South for Bessemer Amazon workers – Come to the Southern Workers School Series Starting April 18, 2021!
Victory to the Bessemer Amazon Workers and the sentiment and organizing components fostered by their courageous labor campaign!
Black Workers for Justice
www.bwfj.org
March 29, 2021
