Workers in America’s fast-food and retail sectors who worked on the frontlines through the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic are continuing a trend of strikes and protests over low wages, safety concerns and sexual harassment issues on the job.
The Covid-19 pandemic has incited a resurgence of interest and support for the US labor movement and for low-wage workers who bore the brunt of Covid-19 risks.
The unrest also comes as corporations have often reported record profits and showered executives with pay increases, stock buybacks and bonuses, while workers received minimal pay increases. Workers at billion-dollar corporations from Dollar General to McDonald’s still make on average less than $15 an hour while often being forced to work in unsafe, grueling conditions.
“We live in a broken system, one where the richest 1% of the world population are responsible for more than twice the pollution as the poorest 50%. That’s why we strike.”
#Striketober may be over, but the struggles to organize at Amazon have not been not defeated — in fact, they’re spreading. Three Amazon locations are currently attempting to unionize: two in Staten Island, and one in Bessemer, Alabama.
Ballots went out yesterday to over 6,100 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse for a mail-in election with a March 25 deadline. You may remember the Bessemer unionization effort from March of 2021. Last year, that effort failed in no small part due to Amazon’s union-busting tactics including anti-union text messages and bribes. While forcing their workers to attend mandatory anti-union lectures, they pressured the city into changing the timing of a traffic light in order to disrupt organizing efforts, and even strong-armed the USPS into installing a mailbox that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had explicitly barred, in an Amazon-branded ballot-collecting tent. As a result, the NLRB determined that Amazon used union-busting tactics, and ordered a new union vote.
In Staten Island, New York, two Amazon warehouses are now seeking to unionize. JFK8 workers attempted to unionize last year but withdrew their petition in November, only to refile in December. As the NLRB was forced to admit, the workers have enough signatures for a hearing to be held in mid-February. This meeting will decide how many workers are eligible to vote, as well as the timing of the vote.
Within the past week, workers at the Staten Island warehouse LDJ5 submitted petitions to the NLRB to request a union vote. These two New York City warehouses are not unionizing through an existing union, but filing under a new one, called Amazon Labor Union. Among the leaders of the effort is Chris Smalls, who was fired for protesting Amazon’s lack of safety measures at the height of the pandemic.
Amazon is the country’s second-largest private employer after Walmart, and is notorious for its horrendous working conditions. In the words of Francis Wallace, a worker interviewed by Left Voice inBessemer last year: “It is extremely tiring, I will agree with that. Of course, there’s bending and standing up all the time. There’s a ladder inside my area, ’cause I do stowing. I’m climbing up and down the ladder, bending up and down, picking up the boxes. When you do that for 10 hours straight and you only have three, maybe 15 minute breaks, it gets really tiring.” Another worker reported extremely hot warehouses, without ventilation.
Multiple workers have died on the job at Amazon warehouses over the past year. Six died during a tornado that struck the midwest in December, and two died at the Bessemer location. One worker suffered a stroke after being told by management that he couldn’t leave work. Hours later, another worker died. “There is no shutdown. There is no moment of silence. There is no time to sit and have a prayer,” Perry Connelly explained. “A couple of people that worked directly with him were badly shaken up and wanted to go home and were not allowed to go home.”
These three unionization efforts come on the heels of the important strikes in October and November, popularly known as #Striketober, with stoppages at large employers like Kellogg, John Deere, Columbia University, and hundreds of smaller workplaces. Only a few miles from Bessemer, Alabama miners at Warrior Met Coal have been on strike for nearly ten months. Recently, dozens of Starbucks stores have also filed for union elections. This all comes amidst the so-called “Great Resignation,” with workers quitting their jobs in droves. The pandemic has shifted the spotlight to the working class.
At Amazon, the discontent among the working class is also expressing itself in more direct ways, through mobilization and action. In December, workers at Amazon warehouses in Chicago walked off the job, demanding a wage increase and better working conditions, organized by Amazonians United, a labor network that organizes at Amazon throughout the country.
A success at Amazon may unleash a wave of unionization filings, just as the first successful Starbucks union in Buffalo has inspired similar drives at dozens of other locations.
Amazon is hell bent on making sure no union emerges at their workplaces and they are well aware of the domino effect that one union may create. That is why they will throw everything they have at defeating these efforts.
As the first Bessemer Amazon unionization drive showed, to win a union, it is not enough to rely on Democratic Party politicians and celebrity endorsements. Much criticism has been leveled at the RWDSU for their lack of worker participation, from our own pages as well as from authors like Jane Mcalevey. The Staten Island warehouses must also learn from this.
There is no substitute for the rank and file. If these unions have any chance of winning, they must be organized by and for workers. And these unions should not only be for the purpose of winning a union, but to create a fighting force for the working class. And as the Great Resignation highlights, it’s not enough to be unionized; after all teachers and healthcare workers who are struggling under horrendous work conditions are leaving in droves. Workers must reject top down business unionism and organize fighting unions, organized by and for the rank and file — a union is not an end in itself, but a step in building a fighting working class.
Historian Nate Holdren questions the assumptions about why strikes have risen and fallen over the last century.
This article is a continuation of a previous one titled “Rethinking Revolution for an Age of Resurgent Fascism.” Ella Baker’s work leading the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League (YNCL) from 1930-1933 is here used to further inform today’s anti-fascism. Overall, this article relates Baker’s work to the dissenting views of German Communist Party (KPD) co-founder Clara Zetkin, specifically her views on fascism and the systemic alternative she referred to as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany.” This was a federation of autonomous councils formed in neighborhoods and workplaces for mutual aid, self-defense, and as dual power to succeed in revolution through general strikes in the event of a Nazi coup.
Everyone is desperate for signs of life in the American working class, so the breathless talk of a “Striketober” a few months back made sense. But new Bureau of Labor Statistics data throws cold water on that idea: there was no strike upsurge.
United Auto Workers picket signs tossed on the ground outside a strike at General Motors, 2019. (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)
There was a lot of enthusiastic talk about a wave of labor militancy last year — remember “Striketober”? With the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) preliminary data for December out — it will be slightly revised next month, but not by much — we can now look at the full year in historical perspective. It was a quiet year, even by recent standards.
First, the number of “stoppages” involving a thousand workers or more.*
There were about half as many major strikes in 2021 as there were in 2018 (the year of the teachers’ strikes) and 2019 (which included a five-week strike against GM), and nothing compared to the pre-Reagan decades.
Comparing the number of workers involved in strikes to the labor force yields even less impressive results: 0.02% of total employment, a sixteenth as much as in 2018 and less than a hundredth the average of the 1950s. Even the 1990s, hardly a decade known for class struggle, saw eleven times the share of the workforce walking out.
Yet another view: what the BLS calls, with a touch of moralism, “days of idleness” expressed as a percent of total hours worked. Again, the line is almost indistinguishable from the x-axis, so close it is to 0–0.002%, to be precise.
Here’s a closeup of the idleness measure since 2000 using monthly data. That blip on the right is what was called “Striketober,” even by bourgeois outlets like NPR. Hours of “idleness” during October 2021 were a quarter as many as in October 2019, the month of the strike against General Motors.
I’d love nothing more than a strike wave and an upsurge of militancy. It’s just not here yet.
*Two data notes: First, the BLS combines strikes and employer lockouts into stoppages because exact causes can be hard to tell apart. And second, whenever I write these up, people say there are lots of smaller strikes that fall under the thousand-worker limit. There aren’t really. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) used to publish data on smaller strikes, in an extremely user-unfriendly form. I wrote about that data in 2018 and they followed the same pattern as the larger strikes. The FMCS stopped updating the data in the early Trump years and the historical data has disappeared from their website.
After spending most of 2021 on the picket line, nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are returning to work. Their strike holds two lessons: health care corporations will erode standards infinitely for profit, and worker solidarity is the only way to stop them.
Saint Vincent hospital nurses on strike in Worcester, Massachusetts. (Massachusetts Nurses Association)
After most of a year on the picket line, the nearly seven hundred nurses who struck at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are preparing to return to work. This concludes the longest strike in the United States in 2021 and the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history. According to the nurses’ union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), it was also the longest nurses’ strike the United States has seen in more than fifteen years.
On December 17, 2021, the nurses reached a tentative contract agreement with the hospital and its for-profit owner, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare. On Monday, they voted overwhelmingly to ratify the new contract, which locks in staffing improvements to ensure patients receive better care.
The lessons we can draw from this strike are twofold. First, health care corporations like Tenet will go to every length imaginable to avoid subtracting from their profits to raise standards of care. And second, worker solidarity is the only reliable way to check these corporations’ power.
Unsafe Staffing Levels
Saint Vincent nurses walked out on March 8, 2021, after trying for eighteen months to force their employer to fix serious safety problems at the hospital. Chief among their concerns was a pattern of chronic understaffing that the nurses say endangered patients.
One of the nation’s largest health care systems, Tenet Healthcare has raked in record profits during the pandemic while implementing bare-bones staffing and other cost-cutting measures at its facilities, with results Tenet workers say have been appalling.
The relationship between nurse staffing levels and patient care outcomes is well documented, with research suggesting that the chances of in-patient death jump 7 percent with each additional patient a nurse is assigned to care for.
Back in 2018, the MNA fought for Massachusetts to follow the example set by California, the only state with legally defined nurse-to-patient ratios. California’s nurse staffing law has improved care outcomes, particularly for poor patients. In Massachusetts, the hospital lobby managed to reverse initial public support for the 2018 ballot measure by launching an aggressive campaign to confuse voters that eventually defeated the measure.
After trying and failing to create change through the ballot box and various shop-floor strategies, the MNA nurses hit the picket lines to protest understaffing at Saint Vincent Hospital.
An Arduous Battle
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the hospital and its parent company tried to crush the strike. They unsuccessfully sought to malign the nurses in the eyes of the Worcester public, taking out full-page anti-strike ads in the local paper. They paid Worcester police hefty sums to function as Saint Vincent’s security apparatus. They reduced the hospital’s operations amid a COVID-19 surge, evidently in order to convince the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance that the striking nurses no longer deserved benefits. And for months, they insisted that scabs would replace strikers in high-stakes roles attained through long years of specialized experience.
Steve Striffler, an anthropologist who directs the Labor Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston, told Jacobin that Tenet’s behavior appears designed to convey
that nurses everywhere should think long and hard about striking because companies are going to spend tens of millions of dollars and fight to the end . . . to resist improved wages/conditions, resist improved hospital safety, and to bust unions. [Tenet] didn’t succeed, but they came close and sent a clear message to unions that they are willing to fight hard.
The MNA nurses viewed themselves as the last line of defense for patients against the company’s campaign to erode care. In the end, their collective action forced Tenet to boost staffing and abandon its insistence on displacing strikers from their previously held positions and shifts.
Better Staffing
The nurses’ new contract, ironed out at an in-person mediation session with US secretary of labor Marty Walsh, guarantees specific staffing improvements. These include reduced patient assignments on the cardiac postsurgical unit, the two cardiac telemetry floors, and the behavioral health unit. The contract also limits the hospital’s ability to “flex” nurses, or send them home mid-shift when management deems them superfluous.
While these new policies fall short of the MNA’s original demands, the contract stipulates that all nurses will be recalled to their previous positions and shifts within thirty days. This back-to-work guarantee — standard fare for strike resolutions — resolves the final sticking point in the nurses’ negotiations with Tenet (which has a history of retaliating against employees who call out unsafe care conditions)
Johnnie Kallas, who researches health care labor organizing and directs the Labor Action Tracker at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, told Jacobin:
The nurses’ victory is a huge win for the labor movement because they achieved considerable improvement in their working conditions while facing enormous obstacles. . . . Despite the threat of permanent replacements, MNA nurses won a strong contract that improved staffing in the middle of a global pandemic while maintaining their previous jobs.
A New Attack on Union Power
The MNA nurses voted 487 to 9 in favor of ratification. But without universal, nonprofit health care, for-profit providers will continue to “maximize their cash positions” by trampling over the needs of patients and workers.
Tenet remained indifferent to the pleas and indictments from high-profileelected officials, suggesting that legislators are constrained in their ability to manage health care corporations’ greed. To push back on abusive employers and transform the industry, health sector employees will need to continue gumming up the works of for-profit care by organizing. Wherever they do, they should be ready for pushback.
Just three days after the Saint Vincent nurses reached the tentative agreement with their employer, one of the permanently hired scab nurses filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board in an attempt to decertify the MNA as the union for nurses at the hospital. As local investigative journalist Bill Shaner has reported, the nurse purportedly spearheading the decertification petition is represented pro bono by lawyers from the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
Still, when asked for her thoughts on the campaign to remove the MNA, Saint Vincent nurse and bargaining unit co-chair Marlena Pellegrino brushed the decertification effort off. “We are solely focused on our path ahead. We have been battle tested.”
Joe Biden frequently says that he wants to emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president most revered among American liberals (along with John F. Kennedy and, latterly, Barack Obama). In one way he no doubt laments, Biden has indeed emulated FDR — by seeing a pair of “centrists” from his own party (in this case, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) undermine his agenda. Roosevelt faced some of his fiercest opposition from conservative Democrats, including his own vice president, John Nance Garner, whose nickname really was “Cactus Jack.”
Somewhat like Manchin and Sinema, Garner mouthed platitudes about tradition and limited government to mask his allegiance to what today would be dubbed “the one percent.” For most of Roosevelt’s first term, Garner watched in silent dismay as FDR sloughed off the Democratic Party’s ideologically muddled history and moved sharply to the left, at least on economic policy. Garner had initially supported Roosevelt for the reasons many conservatives did, because he believed that saving democracy depended on easing the social unrest caused by the Great Depression. Once the immediate national distress began to ease, Garner reverted to being as dogmatically pro-business as any modern-day Republican.
In the months after Roosevelt’s landslide re-election in 1936, however, Garner reached his breaking point. There was an issue where FDR took a stand that Garner saw as completely unacceptable, and that ruptured their relationship permanently. Not only was Cactus Jack off the ticket when FDR sought (and won) an unprecedented third term in 1940, Garner actually ran against Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination.
What was the issue? Roosevelt refused to take a strong stand against the “sit-down strike,” a controversial labor tactic that posed a direct challenge to major industrial employers. In a sit-down strike, workers would literally (if only temporarily) seize the means of production, “sitting down” in a factory, for example, and refusing to budge. This made it almost impossible for employers to replace the strikers with scab workers or remove the equipment, at least not without resorting to physical force. Any strike that physically prevents employers from producing or marketing commodities without literally going through their workers could be described as a sit-down strike, but the term is generally used in factories or other large industrial facilities.
The U.S. experienced a wave of sit-down strikes in the 1930s, but the concept seems to have emerged in France, where in June 1936 many workers occupied their factories. This inspired American organized labor as well, and Georgetown history professor Joseph A. McCartin explained by email that a turning point came on Dec. 30, 1936, when workers at General Motors seized control of their complex in Flint, Michigan:
The activists used the tactic in Flint because they knew it was the crucial node in the GM system and they believed they had enough organization in the plants there to pull it off. Everyone was excited by FDR’s recent landslide reelection, which seemed to ratify public support of the Wagner Act [a landmark 1935 labor law] and other New Deal measures. And organizers were growing impatient with GM’s constant stalling and resistance to unionization. So they decided to force the company’s hand.
Conservatives like Garner were intimidated because the strikes both challenged the core concept of industrial capitalism — the sacred character of private property — but also got results. FDR refused to order the workers removed from the Flint plant by force, and the strikers ultimately achieved their primary goal: a union at GM. McCartin again:
Without the Flint sit-down strike, it might have taken many more years to unionize General Motors and the entire industrial union movement might have failed to mature. The breakthrough boosted the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and helped make other victories possible. Indeed, U.S. Steel decided to voluntarily recognize the CIO’s Steelworker Organizing Committee (SWOC) in hopes of avoiding the kind of disruption GM had experienced. Both GM and USS capitulated to the CIO before anyone even knew whether the [Supreme Court] would uphold the constitutionality of the NLRA (Wagner Act), which it later did on April 12, 1937. This was a testament to how [much] leverage the sit-down strike gave workers.
The Flint sit-down strike, McCartin concluded, “was certainly the single most pivotal strike of the era.”
Those were heady times for American labor, but they didn’t last long. By 1939, the political tide had begun to turn against Roosevelt, and the Supreme Court effectively declared sit-down strikes illegal. Internal conflicts among Democrats meant the party could not support a tactic that directly assaulted the private property of wealthy special interests. To use a phrase favored by Richard Wolff, a retired economics professor at UMass Amherst, they had become “hostage to their donors.”
Garner was essentially the leader of the anti-union Democrats — United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis famously described him as “a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man” — but he was not alone. While moderate or conservative Democrats had varying views on FDR’s policies overall, they had zero patience for sit-down strikes, describing them as agents of anarchy and tyranny, redolent of Communist influence. Roosevelt himself was forced to back away, remaining neutral during the “Little Steel Strike” of 1937 out of fear of dividing the party and alienating Democratic voters. (Around this time Garner also went to war over FDR’s attempt to reform the reactionary Supreme Court, which conservatives derided as “court packing” — and that history is a big part of the reason Biden is unwilling to alter the court.)
Sit-down strikes have largely disappeared from the labor movement, partly because a dwindling proportion of Americans work in large industrial facilities. There are conceptual echoes of the tactic, adjusted for the Zoom era, in the current age of the Great Resignation, which also challenges the implicit notion that workers must play by the rules of the game — as set by the owners of capital — and have no power to change them. Like sit-down strikes, the Big Quit challenges the validity of that entire system, which means that experts and pundits respond by pronouncing gravely that it’s a terrible idea.
In an interview with Salon, Wolff observed that the entire idea that there is something special or sacred about private property is ridiculous. Private property, like every other aspect of economics, is a concept created by human beings, who can revise that concept and the social rules around it at any time. Culture and history have trained us to be horrified when workers seek to make fundamental changes in the rules regarding property relations — but Wolff says that the rich and powerful do that all the time.
“Private property is violated every single day here in the United States,” he said. “It’s only a question of who’s violating it and for what purpose. When workers occupy a place and some yowling capitalist tells you about ‘private property,’ [that’s] a ploy. It’s a way to try to solve a problem.” Practices like eminent domain — in which a person can be forced to sell private property if a government body declares it’s needed for an alleged social purpose — have existed for centuries, and are often manipulated by wealthy developers, for instance.
Although it’s unlikely the sit-down strikes of the 1930s will ever be repeated, Wolff suggests those strikers may be remembered for pointing the way forward, toward a more humane way to work. “It was a very profound movement forward that these auto workers did in Michigan by sitting in,” he said. Whether they knew it or not, they were fighting not just for their own employment rights but for something much larger, which Wolff describes as “a displacement of the employee system by a democratization of the workplace where workers run their own businesses.” Sit-down strikes, he said, were “a transitory step from the one to the other.”
Nearly a century later, we’re not much closer to a full “democratization of the workplace.” But workers of the decentered gig economy and the work-from-home COVID economy are arriving at the same realization industrial workers had during the Depression: It’s possible to change the rules, and maybe even the game.
Workers at Kellogg’s went on strike early October for the first time since 1972. It’s now mid-November, snow is falling, and it’s starting to get really cold outside. At the request of the company, workers briefly returned to the negotiating table in what turned out to be a corporate PR stunt for the annual shareholders’ meeting. The Kellogg Company has shut them out, hired scabs, and still refuses to budge from their desire to make every community look more like the maquiladoras or sweatshops in Mexico, where they have been shifting North American production for decades.
