A federal judge in Nebraska issued a temporary restraining order last week to block a December 28 strike by thousands of Union Pacific Railroad (UP) workers over unsafe conditions, the lack of protective gear and the failure to pay workers who are quarantined due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A strike by 8,000 members of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED)—a division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—would have quickly disrupted the operations of the second largest railroad in the US, which employs a total of 32,000 workers. The judge’s restriction lasts until January 8 and will be reviewed for extension on January 5.
The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary. Bart might have had to find $1,000 for the family to go to England, but he didn’t have to worry that his parents would lose their home.
This lifestyle was not fantastical in the slightest—nothing, for example, like the ridiculously large Manhattan apartments in Friends. On the contrary, the Simpsons used to be quite ordinary—they were a lot like my Michigan working-class family in the 1990s.
The 1996 episode “Much Apu About Nothing” shows Homer’s paycheck. He grosses $479.60 per week, making his annual income about $25,000. My parents’ paychecks in the mid-’90s were similar. So were their educational backgrounds. My father had a two-year degree from the local community college, which he paid for while working nights; my mother had no education beyond high school. Until my parents’ divorce, we were a family of three living primarily on my mother’s salary as a physician’s receptionist, a working-class job like Homer’s.
By 1990—the year my father turned 36 and my mother 34—they were divorced. And significantly, they were both homeowners—an enormous feat for two newly single people.
Neither place was particularly fancy. I’d estimate that the combined square footage of both roughly equaled that of the Simpsons’ home. Their houses were their only source of debt; my parents have never carried a credit-card balance. Within 10 years, they had both paid off their mortgage.
Neither of my parents had much wiggle room in the budget. I remember Christmases that, in hindsight, looked a lot like the one portrayed in the first episode of The Simpsons, which aired in December 1989: handmade decorations, burned-out light bulbs, and only a handful of gifts. My parents had no Christmas bonus or savings, so the best gifts usually came from people outside our immediate family.
Most of my friends and classmates lived the way we did—that is, the way the Simpsons did. Some families had more secure budgets, with room for annual family vacations to Disney World. Others lived closer to the edge, with fathers taking second jobs as mall Santas or plow-truck drivers to bridge financial gaps. But we all believed that the ends could meet, with just an average amount of hustle.
Over the years, Homer and his wife, Marge, also face their share of struggles. In the first episode, Homer becomes a mall Santa to bring in some extra cash after Homer learns that he won’t receive a Christmas bonus and the family spends all their Christmas savings to get Bart’s new tattoo removed. They also occasionally get a peek into a different kind of life. In Season 2, Homer buys the hair-restoration product “Dimoxinil.” His full head of hair gets him promoted to the executive level, but he is demoted after Bart accidentally spills the tonic on the floor and Homer loses all of his new hair. Marge finds a vintage Chanel suit at a discount store, and wearing it grants her entrée into the upper echelons of society.
The Simpsons started its 32nd season this past fall. Homer is still the family’s breadwinner. Although he’s had many jobs throughout the show’s run—he was even briefly a roadie for the Rolling Stones—he’s back at the power plant. Marge is still a stay-at-home parent, taking point on raising Bart, Lisa, and Maggie and maintaining the family’s suburban home. But their life no longer resembles reality for many American middle-class families.
Adjusted for inflation, Homer’s 1996 income of $25,000 would be roughly $42,000 today, about 60 percent of the 2019 median U.S. income. But salary aside, the world for someone like Homer Simpson is far less secure. Union membership, which protects wages and benefits for millions of workers in positions like Homer’s, dropped from 14.5 percent in 1996 to 10.3 percent today. With that decline came the loss of income security and many guaranteed benefits, including health insurance and pension plans. In 1993’s episode “Last Exit to Springfield,” Lisa needs braces at the same time that Homer’s dental plan evaporates. Unable to afford Lisa’s orthodontia without that insurance, Homer leads a strike. Mr. Burns, the boss, eventually capitulates to the union’s demand for dental coverage, resulting in shiny new braces for Lisa and one fewer financial headache for her parents. What would Homer have done today without the support of his union?
The purchasing power of Homer’s paycheck, moreover, has shrunk dramatically. The median house costs 2.4 times what it did in the mid-’90s. Health-care expenses for one person are three times what they were 25 years ago. The median tuition for a four-year college is 1.8 times what it was then. In today’s world, Marge would have to get a job too. But even then, they would struggle. Inflation and stagnant wages have led to a rise in two-income households, but to an erosion of economic stability for the people who occupy them.
Last year, my gross income was about $42,000—the amount Homer would be making today. It was the second-highest-earning year of my career. I wanted to buy a home, but no bank was willing to finance a mortgage, especially since I had less than $5,000 to make a down payment. However, my father offered me a zero-down, no-interest contract. Without him, I would not have been able to buy the house.
I finally paid off my medical debt. But after taking into account all of my expenses, my adjusted gross income was only $19. And with the capitalized interest on my student loans adding thousands to the balance, my net worth is still negative.
I don’t have Bart, Lisa, and Maggie to feed or clothe or buy Christmas presents for. I’m not sure how I’d make it if I did.
Someone I follow on Twitter, Erika Chappell, recently encapsulated my feelings about The Simpsons in a tweet: “That a show which was originally about a dysfunctional mess of a family barely clinging to middle class life in the aftermath of the Reagan administration has now become aspirational is frankly the most on the nose manifestations [sic] of capitalist American decline I can think of.”
For many, a life of constant economic uncertainty—in which some of us are one emergency away from losing everything, no matter how much we work—is normal. Second jobs are no longer for extra cash; they are for survival. It wasn’t always this way. When The Simpsons first aired, few would have predicted that Americans would eventually find the family’s life out of reach. But for too many of us now, it is.
We read and reviewed David Ranney’s “Living and dying on the factory
floor”, which was about his decision to put his academic career on hold
and his subsequent experiences as a factory worker. [1] The following
thoughts relate to this decision, which used to be widespread within the
left. Today taking on working class jobs for political reasons is
either ridiculed as an artefact of political militancy or criticised as a
potentially manipulative act of privileged and educated middle-class
politicos who try to convert the workers.
I want to look at my own decision to remain a low-paid manual worker
from various angles. The text is not strictly biographical, but looking
at the subjective side of the decision is personal. It is not an account
of experiences in five dozen or so jobs, although it contains
descriptions. The text is not a ‘salting’ or organising manual, it looks
more broadly at aspects and difficulties of material survival,
intellectual satisfaction, political strategy and revolutionary morale,
including the danger of self-righteousness.
The text picks up issues raised at the end of the article “Profession
and Movement”, an article that looks at the wider consequences of
professionalisation within the left e.g. in terms of pursuing an
academic career or becoming a professional organiser of one sort or the
other.
“You cannot simply proceed in a professional career and be
‘revolutionary’ in your free-time. We need our own structures as a
material alternative to the ‘profession’; we need commonly organised
living arrangements, collectives and (social) centres which would allow
us a different way to approach ‘work’: to kick a shit-job if necessary;
to work for a low-wage, because the job is politically interesting; to
stir up a workplace collectively.” [2]
It is difficult to create such a social and political environment for
a working class existence because, in the end, for most of us,
‘becoming or remaining’ a worker is less of an active choice, but an
outcome of a social process. I would argue that instead of being
individual victims of this process who try to struggle for individual
niche-solutions we should try and find collective ways to deal with it.
The aims of such a conscious and collective effort would be to share and
discuss more of your decisions about work and life with a clearer
political strategy in mind.
I started working in construction in my teens and continued to work
in what is generally labeled as ‘unskilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’ manual
work until today, around three decades later. I left school out of
choice, though not as a result of an elaborate political decision. It
was a mixture of general anger towards the system and self-preservation.
Coming from a family scarred by World War II and influenced by
generally socialist ideas, together with the increase in neo-Nazi
attacks post-1989 and the Gulf War in 1990/91, solidified the idea that
‘the system’ is still alive and killing. The system also killed in other
ways, as I lost three friends and lovers to heroin during that time. At
school the selection process, between those who were willing and able
to cooperate and those who were not, intensified. I felt that I had to
draw a line and guard myself against these forces that make us weak and
destroy our relationships: competitiveness, privileges, corruption, and
arse-licking.
As there was little chance to just ‘drop out’ where I lived, as there
was no big sub-culture in this small shithole of a town, I decided that
I would sell them my body, but not my brain, personality or creativity.
To carry building materials and sweep sites felt like self-defence and a
big ‘fuck you’ to those who want to get into your head. The refusal of a
career is not mainly a subjectivist act of politicos. Most of the
colleagues I met refused to advance to supervisory positions or
white-collar jobs – while many dreamt of a way out through
self-employment or the lottery ticket.
Although I worked with them, my co-workers didn’t actually figure
much on my political horizon – a lot of them were recent migrants from
East Germany or so-called Russian-Germans, most of them pretty
conservative and in favour of the war in Iraq. I quickly learned that
‘workers’ are no holy cows. Many of my local antifascist comrades were
car mechanics, brick layer apprentices, nurses or painter and
decorators, so unlike today it didn’t feel too weird to do manual
labour. And although we made a lot of jokes about the proletarian
culture of CP antifascism in the 1930s this was more of an excuse to be
rowdy and to take the piss, rather than a serious reference to the
working class as a political subject. Still, it felt good to be somehow
part of a tradition and historical class force. In 1992 we travelled
from the West to the East to demonstrate in Rostock [3] after the
fascist attacks. Apart from Berlin I had never been to the East before
and had never seen such huge and dismal concrete tower-block estates.
Local unemployment had just increased from virtually zero to over 20
percent. Thousands of mainly West-German black-block antifascists walked
through the working class areas and shouted ’Shame on you!’ to everyone
around. Something felt wrong to me in this situation. .
Apart from practical antifascism I was more into Tupamaros (a
left-wing urban guerrilla group in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s and
Red Army Faction. However, even with all that teenage fanaticism and
despite RAF’s last and beautiful attack against the prison construction
at Weiterstadt in 1993 [4], it was clear that armed struggle doesn’t
lead anywhere. I started reading more about historical efforts to fuse
direct attacks on bosses and state with a mass base amongst ‘the
people’. I was impressed with the neo-Maoists of the Gauche
Proletarienne in France: they not only realised that the uprising of
1968 would have to spread from the universities deeper into society,
they even followed through on the personal implications to ‘go to the
people’, not to preach, but to learn from them. This seemed much more
radical and equal than what our local Trot group did, which is to stay
outside the class, to both idealise and patronise ‘the working class’.
But then there were no Maoists around, who would most likely have done
the same thing. Still, I felt that the revolutionary moral was right:
who the fuck are we to teach anyone? To be a revolutionary means to cut
your ties and to be on an equal level with the working masses.
I started looking for politics similar to the Gauche Proletarienne in
Germany and stumbled across groups like the Proletarische Front or
Arbeitersache [Workers’ Cause] which were active in the 1970s and
political writers such as Karl Heinz Roth. These groups, although there
were still flirting with Maoist jargon, were largely influenced by the
‘Workerist’ currents in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Class
composition’ replaced ‘the people’. I was intrigued by the concept of
workers (self-)inquiry: finally an approach that allowed you to combine
the subjective and moral attitude of ‘being with the people’ with an
intellectual and empirical effort to understand what the working class
really is and how we can organise struggle under specific conditions –
modern capitalist conditions, not Chinese mountain paths. All of a
sudden everything became interesting and relevant! My construction site,
the collaboration between local university, local industries and the
British army base – and the new migration from the East. As a local
group we were now able to target the construction of a local detention
centre not only with our hatred against the prison system, but with the
strategic insight that it serves to re-structure local class relations.
Migration raids on local construction sites could be explained as an
attack to divide and spread fear. We could draw links between the
prison, the raids and working conditions on site in our leaflets to
workmates.
The only group who shared the historical approach of Italian Marxism
of the 1970s and who expressed similar feelings towards the way the left
dealt with the phenomena of neo-fascism in general and the attacks in
Rostock in particular was Wildcat. To join the collective was important
on many levels: only as part of a collective effort can we reconcile the
existence as worker and the refusal of careers with the desire for and
necessity of intellectual work; only as part of a collective effort can
we stop material hardship and shift-work isolation from grinding us
down. In this sense the collective was my university and family.
After coming across the concept of workers’ inquiry and hanging out
with people who shared this perspective, ‘going to work’ changed
drastically for me. I left the construction job in the small local
company. I was curious to know what bigger sites looked like and how
things were organised in more modern industries. I signed up with an
agency and worked on shopping mall construction sites, suspension
bridges, in bike and carpet factories, in glass manufacturing plants.
Everything became illuminated. Where do my colleagues come from and what
do they think? What type of machines are used and why? How do the
bosses justify and enforce hierarchies? How do we cooperate with each
other and based on this, how can we stir shit up? What is the history of
the industry and how it is organised globally? Of course the question
of social change was the main driving force behind the curiosity, but
even on a solely sociological/scientific level I never got bored of
starting new jobs. It’s still my main hobby. The reasons and focus for
‘staying in the working class’ shifted. It was now less of a subjective
response to the system’s attempts to get hold of your mind and soul.
‘Working class’ became more of strategic location: let’s be in places
where potential mass power and social productivity clashes the hardest
with the collective experiences of impoverishment and systemic
oppression, either through personal bullying or through their mechanical
apparatus.
Another element is perhaps more spiritual. Physical work and having
to cooperate under shitty conditions brings the best and worst in
people. You meet a lot of arseholes for sure! But you also develop a
certain love for people and their fucked-up-ness. It means tons if a
tough guy full of toxic masculinity tells you about his worries about
his trans-daughter while sitting together in a maintenance dock under an
oily freight engine at 5:50am. Or when a face-tattooed welder talks
about the15 years he spent in an East German prison after his shift in a
hostel room that you share with five others. Of course there is a lot
of superficiality in relationships, as well, but it still means
something if, as in my current job, 500 sisters and brothers call you
‘brother’ every week. I am sure these things exist in better jobs, too,
but I guess the higher you go the more status and ambition gets in the
way.
There are a lot of things you learn over time even in un- or
semi-skilled jobs – basic construction skills, repairing things, driving
weird vehicles, using the right cleaning chemicals etc.. Working in
call centres, car factories, on refuse trucks etc. gives you an idea
about how real the threat or promise of ‘total automation’ is. It is
still easier for men to get into these jobs – or to not feel out of
place there. Still, the main thing you can learn is less about the
technical know-how, but more about how to cooperate with people you
don’t know and you might not even like. To get tuned into what is
necessary to do, to react to what others are doing without many words,
as the other guys might not even understand what you are saying. When
you live with people or work with them in political groups you can often
tell if people have learnt how to ‘cooperate’ without many words. Those
with working class experience tend to tune in better.
The other thing you learn on the job is how to understand the meaning
of what people are saying – and to assess the difference between what
people say, think and do. Unlike more professional and self-conscious
office or academic environments, in working class jobs, people say
outrageous things in particular when it comes to the relation between
men and women or racism. People use the wrong language and might have
weird or incoherent explanations for stuff. Over time I learnt how best
to respond and disagree without shutting things down (or to shut things
down if necessary). I would say that having mainly worked in manual jobs
also helped me to integrate more with workers in Delhi, where I stayed
in workers’ colonies for two years. Of course you’re still a privileged
whitey from the north-half of the globe, but knowing what it’s like to
sweep streets or stand at assembly lines means that you actually share
quite significant experiences, despite differences in conditions. It
felt easier to tune in.
Up to this point all this might just be existentialist bullshit and
just an individual way to cope under the current system, amongst a
million other ways to cope individually. I might as well have gone
straight edge. We all just cope, the question is whether our life
choices have a collective and strategical sense. The most joyous
collective moments I had was with comrades who shared a similar working
life, who worked in jobs where they wanted to organise themselves with
their co-workers. To come from work, to share experiences and
conversations you had with people at work, to plan next steps, to
discuss leaflets and newspapers for the workplace. To read some
theoretical or empirical stuff relevant to your work and discuss it. To
cook meals for comrades on the late-shift. To talk about the risks and
potential of bigger actions! That was always the most fun thing to do,
even if the outcome was often modest! There is a certain beauty and
holistic spirit when your work-life is part of your collective strategy.
I never really understood why all revolutionaries wouldn’t want to live
that way!
There are of course political differences: a lot of revolutionaries
would question whether there are (still) ‘strategic’ or particularly
interesting industries and workplaces and whether working there yourself
is the best way to interact and intervene. Others question whether
there can be something like a revolutionary morality and individual
agency at all – are we not all just part of the multitude? Fair enough,
that’s a separate debate. One reason why the ‘centrality’ of work is up
for debate is the fact that during the period in question – from the
early 1990s to the 2000s – the working class was pretty invisible as an
acting force. While working in large and often unionised workplaces for
nearly three decades, from car factories to railways to refuse
collection, I only took part in two token one-day strikes, one
consisting of a building workers’ march for social security, the other
one was a similarly boring symbolic picket about railway reforms. This
is a rather sad balance sheet, but I don’t think it is uncommon, at
least not for workers in western Europe and the US. Given this period of
defeat and restructuring it is not surprising that ‘joining or
remaining within the working class’ was not too attractive an option.
Then there are material and psychological constraints which might
prevent us from just taking any odd low paid job. Here things have
changed a lot over time. In Germany in 1991 you still got 100% sick-pay
and to go on the dole three, four months a year was no problem. In the
UK in 2019 things look different. Things are fine if you are young and
physically fit, but what about when you get older? Will academic or
better paid jobs not give you more time for the political and
theoretical struggle? I would say from the early 1990s up to the
mid-2010s even with minimum wage jobs I always had enough money to take
two months off a year, to travel or to spend more time on other stuff. I
felt that comrades who pursued a professional career either as
academics, journalists, ‘professional organisers’ actually had less time
for political (or other) activities, although they might earn more
money – perhaps because there is more fear of leaving a job temporarily
or to spend time on things that don’t add to your profile. Because in
the end the CV counts. I also felt that I had more ‘intellectual
freedom’ to write and research what I wanted outside of academia. Being
part of a bigger collective meant that we managed to have access to
similar sources as academic researchers had. Perhaps if you are
interested in researching stuff that requires spending a lot of time in
historical archives or laboratories you will have trouble doing this
while being a minimum wage manual worker – these spheres are actually
quite exclusive. Otherwise I still think that much of the stuff that we
managed to write as a collective or as ‘worker intellectuals’ was
actually better than comparable academic texts. If your day-job doesn’t
suck your brain dry, but only your muscles, you might have more capacity
and urge to write the stuff you want.
Again, individual choice has an impact on groups and the left in
general. I remember that even in Wildcat there was a shift at some point
in the late 1990s when more people started to get computer-programmer
jobs, because they were better paid and allowed a more flexible
lifestyle. The collective might have benefitted from that, but the sprit
and direction of the meetings changed. When many of the comrades were
working in hospitals, factories or construction sites there was more
eagerness to make these experiences a central part of discussions and to
come to some practical conclusions. This is true for the left in
general: the atmosphere today is either pretty individualised (“I work
freelance”) or unconsciously competitive (“I just applied for this or
that grant/position/funding” – “Oh, me, too”) or instrumentalist (“You
are gig-economy workers? Great, I support your struggle (and I’m
researching you for my PHD”).). All this cannot be treated merely as
betrayal or expressions of corruption – the justified individual desire
to be acknowledged as an intellectual or political being has to be
addressed.
Did I ever doubt my decision or are there any negative results? I
mean the whole thing is no one-way ticket to proletarian hell, it’s not
necessarily an irreversible decision for life. Being part of a political
movement gave me skills which would still allow me, even without formal
qualifications, to sell myself for bigger money to academia, to the
unions, to the alternative lefty circus. Ex-militants are the most
highly skilled managers. But certain things can’t be undone. Let’s start
with the psychological impact. To slave away, get up earlier, lift
heavier and come home more knackered than most of your comrades, only to
go to the next political meeting where people seem to have all the time
in the world tends to make you a bit of a self-righteous bastard. I
definitely became too judgemental and subjectivistic: why would I expect
anyone to change their life quite fundamentally and go against the
grain of wider society during a historical period that gives you little
hope that fundamental change is coming anytime soon? Self-righteousness
and lack of time doesn’t make you the best friend. There is some
physical damage, too, things start to ache. There are some worries
materially, old age and all – after three decades of work there is
little money, no assets and little to expect in terms of inheritance. I
still feel that there will always be comrades to help out, though. In
the absence of collectives, working class life tends to encourage
couple-hood. You become dependent on your partner materially and
emotionally. Things can become pretty conventional, e.g. in terms of who
is taking on the main responsibility for child-care and stuff.
Despite having had the privilege to be part of a political collective
I think I missed out on the student experience: to be with loads of
other young people who were the same age, to start a new phase of life
together. Being in a concrete builder apprentice class is definitely
less interactive, flirtatious and sociable. And there might have been
certain things to learn at university which are more difficult to learn
yourself or with your friends. Musical theory, archeology, machine
engineering amongst other things. Perhaps my main doubt concerns the
wider political organisation. I feel that if there had been a form of
organisation which was neither purely syndicalist like the IWW nor a
pretty loose collective such as Wildcat, moving from job to job and
meeting interested workers could have fed into something more
structured. Although opportunities for ‘long-lasting organising’ were
pretty rare, I met dozens of workers interested in struggles and debate.
To engage them in a wider organisational process and to keep in touch
even after the job finished would have been great. But then
unfortunately there was and there is still no bigger political
organisation that I think would make a productive contribution towards
revolutionary change. Still, there is a melancholy desire for a
proletarian party in a living and unorthodox sense.
The current UK radical left is pretty middle-class, or rather
‘precariously professional’. This might explain the attraction towards
the Labour Party as a seemingly easy way to bridge the gap between
intellectuals and ‘the workers’. It would need a separate analysis and
article to address the limitations of this type of politics. To
re-ground revolutionary politics within the class will need more than
organising campaigns, food kitchens in working class areas or tenants
unions. It will need two main steps: a collective debate about where
tendencies of self-empowerment and unification are already existing
within the class – e.g. in concentrations dominated by migrant work –
and the decision of organised cores of revolutionaries to practically
engage with these tendencies as workers. Part of this debate must be the
question of our material, intellectual and spiritual reproduction as
workers.
We are currently writing a book about the last six years of working
class political experiences in west-London in which we hope to make all
this more concrete. Stay tuned!
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdowns started in March, a new class of “essential workers” continued to go to work across the United States under new dangerous conditions. As stories came out about workers lacking personal protective equipment, or PPE, and working in crowded workplaces, union workers began to take action. They stopped work, organized sick-outs, won hazard pay, protested employer COVID-19 policies that left them unsafe and negotiated for improvements.
Unions have made workplaces safer, as research has shown that unionized essential workers have had better COVID-19 workplace practices during the pandemic. The presence of unions makes conditions safer for the general public as well. For example, unionized nursing homes in New York were found to have a 30 percent lower COVID-19 mortality rate among residents. When the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, and other government agencies failed to take adequate steps to protect workers, these workers had to take action. But 90 percent of U.S. workers are not union members, and millions of these non-union workers still need help. For too many of them, essential has meant expendable.
There was a clear need to find ways to assist workers in confronting this new unsafe world at work. That’s when the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or EWOC, was born. A joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical workers union, EWOC recruited volunteer organizers to talk with workers who wanted to organize around COVID-19 concerns. It created a request form for workers to fill out, which it spread through social media. Inquiries from workers started coming in every day.
Organizing With EWOC
When EWOC receives the form, there’s an initial intake conversation, and an advanced organizer is assigned to collaborate with the workers on a plan to organize for improvements at work, on COVID-19, or any other issues. This takes the form of a series of phone and Zoom calls where they work through the basics of organizing.
Dawn Tefft is one of the leaders of the EWOC advanced organizers team. She was involved in the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association during the Wisconsin uprising of 2011, the movement that formed in response to Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. However, the massive protests at the capital failed to stop the new law. That experience taught her that protest wasn’t enough, and that workers and union leaders throughout the state should have done more to prepare for a strike wave, as her union did.
She brought this focus on rank-and-file workplace power-building to EWOC, as part of a team that has developed the strategy for organizing with workers. On a recent EWOC call for volunteers and workers, she described that at the beginning of a campaign, an advanced organizer and the workers would rank issues and draft a set of demands. Together, they begin building a list of workers, divide up workers to contact in order to ask them to join an organizing committee or sign a demands petition, and begin planning a first action or a series of escalating actions. The organizing process is built around conversations among coworkers, and throughout these steps, the workers themselves must run the campaign, with EWOC organizers playing an advisory and mentorship role.
Since its launch, EWOC has already racked up a number of significant victories. Taco Bell workers in Michigan won PPE, paid sick leave and hazard pay; Jimmy John’s workers in Utah received better plexiglass barriers and rules allowing fewer customers in the store at any one time; Sprouts grocery store workers in Texas demanded and got PPE and store customer limits; and Good Vibrations store workers in Massachusetts had their concerns with COVID-19 and other issues addressed after a six week strike. While most of these campaigns are organized at fairly small workplaces, they provide lessons for growing and sustaining organizing at larger employers, which is always a tough challenge.
I have been involved as an EWOC organizer for several months, talking with workers to develop their campaigns. It’s clear from these conversations that most workers don’t have a solid understanding of unions or what workplace organizing is about. Rarely do people learn much about the labor movement, and much of what they do hear is distorted and filtered through corporate media. For the workers who want to move forward, it’s been inspiring to see them start to learn the art and science of workplace organizing.
These workers have faced a variety of issues. One university worker wondered why her department couldn’t continue working from home. A retail worker realized that coronavirus issues showed the real need to have a union at her store. A health care clinic worker has started talking with colleagues about the danger of the new surge in COVID-19 cases, and how they could be safer at work.
I worked with one woman who is employed at a small retail store. She organized with her coworkers for a better sick leave policy. “It was extremely empowering, as a low wage worker,” she said. “You often have a sense of powerlessness that there’s nothing you can do. But with organizing, it’s the one thing you can do to actually give yourself the things that you really need in the workplace.” She went on to describe the solidarity developed between her colleagues during their fight for sick leave. “Having conversations with team members really built that sense of comradery and power amongst ourselves. Realizing that we actually wanted the same things was a big deal too.”
I interviewed another worker at an agency that provides social services. The workers there had a number of COVID-19 safety concerns and other issues. She organized with her department to write a letter to their supervisor, and won regular health and safety meetings to design better COVID-19 protocols, more PPE, and paid travel time to their various work sites. She says this process has had a tremendous impact and folks feel more confident in bringing up issues. This has led to broader conversations with workers at other agencies about the systemically bad working conditions and treatment of clients in the industry, and how they can better advocate for, and organize with, their clients.
“[EWOC] has really helped give us a framework to understand how to start making changes about issues and grievances that we have about the care industry and treatment of people by organizing the workplace,” she said.
This work is not complicated, but it is challenging. Organizing is built on something as basic as having conversations with coworkers, but with an eye toward building power. It involves developing relationships, assessing concerns, understanding workplace social networks, identifying leaders and agitating toward collective solutions to the personal problems everyone has at work. It requires forging common demands and building the confidence of the workers with escalating collective actions that may lead to a strike if necessary.
EWOC has developed a training series to teach these organizing skills. It sees this project as not only helping workers to improve working conditions now, but also disseminating an understanding of workplace power and collective action to a large network of non-union workers. They can spread these skills and may want to organize or join more formal unions later on. Some of those workers eventually join EWOC as volunteers.
Now over six months old, EWOC has a few staff coordinators and has grown to involve hundreds of volunteers serving as intake and campaign organizers, media strategists, database administrators, trainers, researchers and other roles. So far over 2,000 workers have reached out to EWOC, and 25 workplace campaigns have won some of their demands, impacting about 1,000 workers. Currently there are 60 campaigns running, and over 500 workers have been through some EWOC organizing training.
Where Does This Go?
EWOC is an experiment in running a labor organizing project through a large network of volunteers outside of formal unions or worker centers. Moreover, during the pandemic this organizing work necessarily occurs on the phone and online. When the pandemic subsides, EWOC will have to coordinate a transition to some in-person conversations and events.
The EWOC approach can be seen as part of a larger effort to bring a class struggle organizing framework back into the labor movement, with similar politics to the United Electrical workers’ Them and Us Unionism. This may look very different from standard workplace organizing campaigns based on government-run union elections. Many workers may win improvements with direct action, but never seek official union recognition or a written contract. Rooted in rank-and-file workplace organizing, the EWOC model is perhaps most similar to the “solidarity unionism” of the Industrial Workers of the World.
As the network of workers involved in EWOC-assisted campaigns grows, organizers face a number of questions about the evolution of the project, including whether this group should evolve into a dues-funded membership organization. We need to ensure that when workers win gains, they maintain an “organized workplace” over time as turnover happens, and possibly solidify their victory through unionization and a contract. We have to find ways to grow linkages of solidarity between all these workplaces and develop the capacity to initiate successful organizing at huge employers with thousands or tens of thousands of workers. Can we distill some lessons from the growing list of campaigns, so we can learn how to win more effectively?
EWOC is exploring ways to incorporate workers from the campaigns directly into these conversations. EWOC has developed an encouraging new model in worker organizing that also draws from militant rank-and-file labor traditions. As we continue through this horrific pandemic, workers are demonstrating that they can save themselves. They just need the tools and training to do it.
New applications for U.S. unemployment benefits leaped in early December to a nearly three-month, likely due to an increase in layoffs after a record coronavirus outbreak as well as the Thanksgiving holiday. Initial jobless claims surged by 137,000 to 853,000.
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On November 26, the biggest one-day general strike in the world happened in India where over 200 million workers paralyzed the country and refused to work. Supported by 10 central trade unions and over 250 farmers organizations, the strike led to a near total shutdown in multiple Indian states.
Tomorrow, Tuesday December 8, Indian farmers plan to strike again. Since November 26, thousands of farmers have occupied several critical borders of Delhi, refusing to leave until the government repeals the three new laws. After the failure of the fifth round of talks, farmers unions have put out a call to shut down the country and escalate the pressure on Delhi. This upcoming strike has been supported by a coalition of opposition parties, ranging from the Congress to Aam Aadmi Party and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, all who see BJP as a threat to their own power. The Left Front, which controls some of the biggest trade unions, has also announced their support for the strike and will be holding demonstrations tomorrow. While the strike will be large, it is limited to farmers unions and a few other sectors and participation is not expected to be as high as it was on November 26th.
The strike has also been endorsed by the ten largest trade unions in the country. Workers in commercial transportation and banking have announced work stoppages and solidarity actions. Public transportation in Delhi, where much of the fire is currently being concentrated, is also likely to take a hit as a sector of transit workers have announced that they’re going on strike.
In order for farmers and workers to win their demands and deal an effective blow to the Modi government, it is essential that the working class enter the scene more actively and force an indefinite strike. Organized workers in strategic sectors, such as transportation, mining, banking, etc., need to once again go on a coordinated strike, bringing the whole country to a standstill. Worker demands including halting the privatization of public services, a more coherent Covid-19 response, and stimulus money and free meals for needy families across the country need to be met. As Modi ramps up nationalist rhetoric and turns a blind eye to violence against minorities — in effect condoning it — while continuing to openly support the interest of capitalists, Indian workers must fight, knowing that the state is not on their side and the only way to affect change is to shut the economy down.
Over the last two weeks, farmers have continued their pressure on the Modi government, refusing to concede their demands as they occupy key borders and roads leading up to the country’s capital. They have refused to accept the empty words offered by Modi and his cronies, and have pledged to continue this pressure until the government rolls back the new agricultural laws. To escalate this pressure, to win the demands not only of the farmers, but much needed relief for all the working and toiling masses, it is imperative that the working masses actively enter the scene with their tools of strikes and pickets and push for an indefinite general strike. Workers need to go beyond the Stalinist trade union leaderships, who continue to act as a conservative force and call for single-day strikes so workers can let off steam, but are unable to force the hand of the state and score real victories.
The current protests by farmers against the Modi regime have been one of the most powerful movements against the Modi regime. The strike on December 8 is the second general strike in India in two weeks, indicating a movement among the worker and peasant masses of a break with the Modi regime. To not only deal it a definitive blow, but also realise their own power, it is imperative that workers and peasants fight together, using the advantages of their strategic position.
The Working People podcast chats with Michele Manco, a clinical social worker in the Bronx with years of experience working in psychiatric emergency and crisis settings. We talk about Michele’s life and the road that led her to being a social worker, the history of social work itself, and the very real struggles and often harsh circumstances that are a daily reality for social workers and the people they serve. (Content warning: This conversation does broach topics involving psychiatric distress and suicide.)
In recent weeks, dizzying statistics have circulated on social media about Amazon’s pandemic-era boom and the obscene wealth accrued by its CEO, and Earth’s richest man, Jeff Bezos. The company reported revenue of $96.1 billion just last quarter, which, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, means Bezos could personally pay Amazon’s 876,000 workers a bonus of $105,000 each — and would still be as filthy rich as he was prior to the pandemic. Warehouse workers in the U.S. and U.K., who have been forced into perilousproximity while dealing with the surge in orders, have been offered a $300 holiday bonus. Many who toil in other areas of Amazon’s vast supply chain will receive far less, if anything at all.
Activists of Sammilito Garments Sramik Federation stage a protest procession against the world’s leading digital retailer Amazon.com, demanding fair wages and union rights for all Amazon supply chain workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Nov. 27, 2020.
Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Numerous business publications framed the trillion-dollar empire’s bonuses as a generous offering. “Amazon spends another $500 million on bonuses. Some of its workers are still going on strike,” read a CNN Business headline. The notion conveyed apparent incredulity that low-wage employees would fight for more from a corporation famed for worker abuses, such as pressure for productivity that saw warehouse employees reportedly urinating in bottles so as to avoid bathroom breaks.
The incredulity is misplaced. Yes, Amazon workers are escalating the ongoing struggle for their rights, protections, as well as fair pay — and, for the first time, the strategy is international.
Black Friday saw the launch of a new wave of organizing by a global coalition of warehouse workers, trade unions, and activists under the banner Make Amazon Pay — the first such coalition of broad international scope. Coordinated strikes, work stoppages, and protests of varying size have taken place in Bangladesh, India, Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, the U.K., the U.S. and beyond. The workers and organizers deserve vigorous support: The stakes of leaving Amazon’s power and practices unchecked — from the further decimation of the global working class, to irreversible environmental degradation — are intolerable.
“Amazon is able to build power by operating on a global level without opposition,” said Casper Gelderblom, a Netherlands-based trade unionist and coordinator with the Progressive International, one of the groups organizing the Make Amazon Pay effort. “We have to match the transnational scope of its organization with an internationalist strategy.”
Make Amazon Pay brings together worker collectives — from hawkers in India to warehouse workers in Poland — with large international union federations. The coalition also includes major nonprofits such as Greenpeace to address stunning facts like the scale of Amazon’s carbon footprint, which is larger than two-thirds of the world’s countries.
On Thursday, the coalition published an open letter signed in solidarity by over 401 politicians from over 34 countries, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y, from the United States. The letter, which pledges support for the Make Amazon Pay effort, is addressed to Bezos. It begins, “We, elected representatives, legislators, and public officials from around the world, hereby put you on notice that Amazon’s days of impunity are over.”
It’s easy to see that Amazon is too powerful, that its carbon footprint is a travesty, that it intimidates workers, lowers wages, busts unions, and ensures precarity. The corporation also pays scant tax bills. In 2019, Amazon paid just 1.2 percent federal tax on its U.S. profits; the prior two years, it paid none. It’s harder to know what a successful multifront, international resistance to Amazon’s hegemonic power would look like.
Make Amazon Pay’s demands to the company are broad but no more than fair: permitting workers to organize; ending surveillance and harassment; improving pay and health and safety conditions; ensuring job security; committing to zero emissions by 2030; ending Amazon Web Services contracts with fossil fuel companies; ending partnerships with the forces of racist state violence, like police and immigration authorities; and paying taxes in full.
Amazon is best understood not as a retailer but a monopolist empire: a 21st century East India Company, and no less colonialist in its practices.
The coalition has developed a robust policy platform, rich in references to existing laws and precedents, intended to guide lawmakers to use legislative tools to make the demands a reality. In the face of Amazon’s might, however, the campaign can, on paper, look like a fair-minded wish list. Anyone who cares about working people and life on this planet can commend it; realizing the proposed changes and diminishing the corporation’s planetary death grip is a different question.
Coalition organizers see a necessary first step in recognizing the expanse of Amazon’s supply chain operations, often obscured to the consumer. The company is best understood not as a retailer but a monopolist empire: a 21st century East India Company, and no less colonialist in its practices of exploitation and resource extraction. Amazon’s infamous warehouses are “the nearest site where customer comfort and worker exploitation come into contact,” wrote political economist David Adler and organizer James Schneider, both members of the Progressive International secretariat. “But,” they argue, the fight against Amazon “must stretch across the global economy and the regulatory archipelago that runs through it.”
While coordinated, the recent worker actions around the world have reflected the current labor concerns specific to different regions of Amazon’s domain. Garment workers in Bangladesh staged a protest outside an Amazon supplier in Dhaka, behind a bright red “Make Amazon Pay” banner. The company has reportedly not paid its Bangladeshi suppliers for completed orders that were canceled in the pandemic. Workers in Germany went on a three-day strike, an escalation in a yearslong battle with Amazon for better pay and working conditions; approximately 2,500 people took part.
In Poznań, in the west of Poland, workers brandished the same “Make Amazon Pay” signs during a coordinated work stoppage. Polish workers have been organizing for weeks — including staging wildcat strikes — to have their minimal holiday bonuses raised to match the amounts workers in other countries will receive. Warehouse workers told me by video conference that employees in Poland had been paid four times less than their counterparts in Germany; through union organizing, that discrepancy has shrunk to three times less, while the cost of living is by no means three times cheaper. In the U.S., workers are taking historic steps just to unionize.
In every jurisdiction, especially at this time of mass unemployment and global economic devastation, organizers are at a disadvantage against Amazon’s ability to attract precarious, unprotected employees ready to take any available work. Contracts are often fixed-term, zero-hour, and unstable. Bogus self-employment contracts for de facto Amazon employees are common, even in countries where many workers are unionized.
“This is Amazon policy, rotating workers. It’s extremely difficult to organize,” said Jan Pękala, a forklift driver and union shop steward from southern Poland. “With every new worker, you have to start again.” His colleague from the warehouse in Poznań, Roman Lupiński, agreed: “It creates fear, people on unstable contracts feeling like they can lose their jobs.”
Amazon relies on the same strategy globally. “Covid has really chilled workers,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, who spoke to me from Ontario, California. “They brought in a lot of people desperate for work. We have to meet people where they’re at, to build a long-term strategy.” Kaoosji organizes in and around San Bernardino, where one of Amazon’s largest facility clusters is expanding. The corporation employs 30,000 in the area alone; the asthma rates in the Amazon-occupied region are twice as high as the national average. “This is the year that Amazon really consolidated power,” Kaoosji said, offering that this made the imperative to organize stronger. “It’s the right time to be doing this.”
Amazon workers participate in the Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft union strike in Werne, Germany, on Nov. 27, 2020.
Photo: Courtesy of Make Amazon Pay Coalition
One of the keys to the Make Amazon Pay policy platform are guidelines to regulate the sort of contracts Amazon offers to workers, like making it more costly for the company to rely on “self-employment” contracts. These precarious agreements have become normalized in the neoliberal labor market, and regulating against Amazon’s use of them would have a knock-on effect for labor rights in general.
“The situation at Amazon is a look into the future of labor, the future of our economy, and the future of the planet,” said Tlaib, the House member from Michigan and letter signatory, told me by email. “The results of the experiment are clear — left to their own devices, giant corporations like Amazon will ruthlessly extract every last dollar from their workers and the communities they exploit, enriching executives while grinding workers to the bone and putting their profits before the livability of the planet.”
“The situation at Amazon is a look into the future of labor, the future of our economy, and the future of the planet.”
Tlaib stressed that it is possible to force Amazon to change its practices, as was evidenced when it raised its minimum wage in the U.S. to $15, following sustained pressure from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., among others. Likewise, the push last year by left-wing lawmakers in New York, working alongside local organizers, thwarted Amazon’s seemingly unstoppable plans to open up a second headquarters in Queens.
Tlaib told me that “there are already bills in Congress that would help us fight back against this staggering corporate greed, and there are some other important interventions that will need to be drafted.” The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, for example, passed the House earlier this year, and would dramatically weaken decades of anti-worker, anti-union labor laws in this country.
Make Amazon Pay’s international lens makes crystal clear the need to empower workers to unionize and enable unions to be effective for workers. “We have a lot more control as unionized workers,” Natalia Skowrońska, a packer in the Poznań warehouse, told me. She noted that while Amazon regularly finds ways to bypass the union, the workers’ “capacities are far greater as an entity that the company has to contend with.”
The success of Amazon workers in France in forcing Amazon to address concerns about Covid-19 safety shows the necessity of pro-worker legislation combined with strong unions. Mass protests, strikes, and union complaints led to a Parisian judging order that Amazon develop improved health and safety measures with the unions. Noncompliance would come with a penalty of over $1 million per day and per violation. The corporation announced in fury that it would suspend all of its French operations, but workers continue to receive full pay and the company says that it plans to follow the judge’s decision.
Piotr Krzyżaniak, a former warehouse worker and a lawyer representing the Polish workers’ union, referenced the French example to stress the importance of permitting workers to strike. In Poland, workers have had to engage in wildcat work stoppages, because formal strike procedures are prohibitively complex. “We need the freedom to strike regulated on a European level,” he told me, “If Amazon workers go on strike in Germany, for example, we need to be able to join them.”
Following revelations in September that Amazon had engaged in widespread surveillance, harassment, and intimidation of workers in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere who had attempted to organize, Amnesty International released a report calling on Amazon to “let workers unionize.” The report also cited how French labor unions and regulations had served to protect Amazon workers during the pandemic. The corporate leviathan should have to reckon with such constraints on its power and its abuses in every country it operates.
A Joe Biden presidency, especially if a Republican-led Senate remains, with a far-right judiciary, does not offer great promise for radical legislative shifts away from the neoliberal norms. Labor-friendly politicians like Tlaib and other members of the Squad are in the minority. The belief that Amazon needs to be reined in, however, is a popular one: Polling agency Survation found that 70 percent of people believe that the company is too powerful.
Amazon, of course, is not capitalism gone wrong, but capitalism doing as it’s supposed to. We don’t need every lawmaker to appreciate this to want to curb the company’s monopolistic control. “Even if you believe in free markets, it’s not healthy,” Gelderblom, of Progressive International, told me.
In October, the House Judiciary Committee antitrust subcommittee — hardly a left-wing body — released a far-reaching report on how Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon capitalize on and abuse their market power to benefit themselves.
The Make Amazon Pay coalition is clear that it wants to shift Amazon’s power structure too: among its demands is a plan to give workers robust voting rights in Amazon management. This is not a far cry from the proposal made by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a believer in so-called “accountable capitalism,” to give workers representation on company boards. This management model, known as “co-determination” is already common in the European bastion of capital, Germany; the coalition argues the Europe’s co-determination models need further strengthening.
Radical and necessary change to the great empire of Amazon is a tall order, but the global plan to Make Amazon Pay should be considered common sense.
