Under capitalism workers’ lives are expendable. Under communism profits will cease to exist and the collective health of workers will be guarenteed.In Bessemer, Alabama 5,800 Amazon warehouse workers are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This union drive, among a largely Black workforce, has gotten the attention of the U.S. labor movement and the Democratic Party. The campaign has been publicly endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, actor Danny Glover, along with the National Football League and Major League Baseball Players Associations. Even President Joe Biden spoke about the advantage unions provide “for Black and Brown workers.” What is going on?
Amazon hired hundreds of thousands of workers during the pandemic lockdown and grossed a record $386 billion in sales, netting more than $22 billion in profit. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos got much richer during the pandemic while Amazon workers worked in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Many were infected with Covid-19. Amazon has rewarded them by taking back the $2 wage increase with unlimited unpaid time off that workers received during the height of the pandemic.
Crumbs for workers, preparation for world war
Some billionaires and their politician flunkies want to cover up the obscene exploitation, racism and inequality of capitalism. These finance capital imperialists have ruled much of the world since World War II, but now Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging their liberal world order. As they prepare for world war these Big Fascists, led by the Democratic Party, need a working class that has some minimum belief in U.S. capitalism. And they need the Big Tech billionaires to fall in line and get ready to pay up. President Joe Biden is already planning on raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires. War against China and Russia won’t be cheap.
So to win some working-class support, some capitalists want to give us $15 an hour, or a union at Amazon, or a stimulus check, or some controls on the racist cops. These are crumbs and they won’t last. Capitalism will never work for the working class. It has to go. As we fight to support the Amazon workers, let’s organize for workers to run the world. That’s the communist future that we need.
Amazon workers take the lead
The Amazon campaign has become a flashpoint in the struggle of low-wage workers, Black and Latin workers in particular, following the fast-food “Fight for $15” campaign. Following the mass antiracist uprising this past summer, the union drive has been linked to the fight against racism in Alabama, with its bloody racist history.
Amazon has defeated previous unionizing efforts and is waging an all-out effort here. It says its starting wage of $15 an hour is more than double the Alabama minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  Amazon has posted anti-union messages throughout the warehouse, including in bathroom stalls, and uses social media to attack the union. Amazon even asked county officials to change the timing of the traffic light outside the warehouse so that union organizers would have less time to approach workers leaving the plant (NPR, 3/12).
Amazon workers outside of Alabama have also been fighting back, signing petitions for PPE and improved health and safety; striking and taking job actions for more water stations, the rehiring of fired workers and paid time off.  New York City, where Amazon workers deliver 2.5 million packages a day, has seen workers fighting back in the Queens and Staten Island warehouses.
Democratic Party uses unions to control Big Tech
Bezos and his billionaire Big Tech cousins at Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are all heavy contributors to Biden and the Democrats, much more than to the Republicans (Observer.com, 11/2/20). Amazon bought ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. But many in the Democratic Party see the need to reign in and regulate Big Tech more closely. Unionization is one way of regulating them. In addition, fresh from the victories in Georgia that helped elect ‘Jim Crow’ Joe Biden and two Democratic Senators, the Dems are using the unions as a battering ram to win Black workers to take the South away from the violently racist pro-Trump forces.
Communism means workers’ power
The Progressive Labor Party’s strategy for leading the working class to power has always rested on the foundation that Black workers are the key leadership force for revolution. This has led us to focus on organizing in the auto industry, healthcare, and mass transit. Amazon, with more than one million workers in the U.S., is now the single largest concentration of young Black and Latin workers. PLP needs to be there, as much for what our ideas can bring as for what we can learn and the leadership that Amazon workers can give to our movement.
Let us make this a Red Amazon Summer by introducing hundreds of Amazon workers to revolutionary communist ideas of PLP.