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.
