Liu Yufeng
In the heart of global capitalism, the wheels of history are rolling forward.
On April 1, at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse center on Staten Island at new York City's southern tip, thousands of warehouse workers voted to form Amazon's first union in U.S. history. Also on the same day in downtown New York, the Starbucks Reserve Bakery in Manhattan's Chelsea Market also won a big vote to form a union, becoming the tenth starbucks store in the United States and the most employee-owned Starbucks store with the largest number of employees – just four kilometers from Wall Street.
On April 1, 2022, local time, in New York, USA, Christian Smalls, founder of the Amazon union, celebrated and spoke with Amazon workers.
The labor movement in the United States has been around for a century and a half, but by the end of the last century and the first decade of the century, the vast majority of unions have fallen into a trough: membership has clearly declined year by year, the political influence on labor policy has waned, and the basic function of collective bargaining on behalf of workers has often been carried out on a very limited scale. Many local unions have become a business. Union leaders in suits hold millions of workers' dues, pensions, and health insurance in their hands, pay themselves huge salaries, hire lawyers and managers with gorgeous degrees in law or business administration, and collude with the political machine to extort their employers, and ignore the real demands of workers, focusing only on how many members they have developed and how much they have received. This generalization may be exaggerated, but many of these ills can still be found in the traditional national trade unions that are still deeply rooted today.
Under the background of traditional trade union counterparts, the new generation of trade unions that are now growing tenaciously from the ground like grassroots is particularly exciting. Amazon unions are independent organizations that are not affiliated with any traditional unions, Starbucks unions are highly decentralized because of their small and scattered stores, and may one day grow into bloated and inefficient organizations, but today, these new unions have set their own milestones - a new generation of workers and organizers challenge the bureaucratic and even institutional monopoly of traditional union machines in the workplace. It regains the working-class autonomy that has been lost in the United States for half a century.
Only observers who are on the sidelines sigh and cite the tortuous history and ills of traditional trade unions to argue their pessimistic judgment of the current workers' movement, because as soon as they talk to the new generation of organizers who are willing to work at the grass-roots level day and night without much pay, they will immediately feel a vigorous status quo. Of course, the younger generation of unionists still faces a difficult dilemma: On April 8, Amazon filed a complaint with the federal National Labor Relations Board, accusing the April 1 vote of "unfairly and inappropriately favoring the union side" and demanding a re-election; The Economist simply asserted that "The success of Staten Island cannot be replicated." But on the other hand, the new trade union movement is closely linked to the democratic socialist movement that has also emerged in recent years, reversing the gradual separation of trade unions from left-wing politics since the 1950s, which undoubtedly poses a new threat to the monopoly giants who were already at ease.
At the moment of history, we have no way of knowing whether the emerging left-wing trade union movement since the 2020 pandemic, the 2016 election, or even the 2008 financial crisis will be a watershed in the history of American labor. But there is no doubt that after more than half a century of lows, the distant possibility ahead of a new generation of grassroots organizers is once again ahead: "it will be the whole world" that they can win.
"Unions are like small government, workers are like taxpayers"
The decay of traditional unions owes much to the painstaking management of the U.S. government over a long period of time. Passed in 1947 with the support of conservative factions in the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, the Taft-Hartley Act reversed the lax legal environment for labor organizations since the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal, and incorporated the political intent of suppressing left-wing movements under the haze of the Cold War. Under the banner of cracking down on "misworking," the "Wildcat Strike" (i.e., spontaneous strike action by workers without the consent of the trade union leadership) and many commonly used collective action tactics were banned, and more importantly, labor organizations were forced to depoliticize. Political "solidarity strikes" became illegal, trade unions were not allowed to provide political contributions to candidates for federal elections, and the leaders of the major trade unions were asked to distance themselves from the Communists.
The act went hand in hand with the Political Persecution of McCarthyism during the Cold War, with a large number of left-wing cadres who were necessarily mainstays of the past, if not fully controlling the trade unions, marginalized or even imprisoned, and left-wing workers at the grassroots level often voluntarily ceased to be active under pressure or out of disappointment. There is always a considerable part of the working class in the United States composed of new immigrants, and new immigrants often breed crime and gang activities because of the difficulty of integrating into local society, so there are many elements of the underworld in the union. The only force that can curb the control of trade unions by gangs and mafias is the same well-organized left-wing political group that is also committed to solving the problems of workers' real lives, so when the iron fist of the US government smashes the latter, the underworld naturally enters the union with ease.
Stills from The Irishman
The 2019 film The Irishman depicts the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), one of the largest and most influential unions in the United States, under the control of Jimmy Hoffa in the mid-twentieth century. At that time, the IBT was a huge organized criminal gang: strongman politics, power and violent means controlled a huge organization of one and a half million members, used bribes and threats to deal with the government and employers, made a windfall in criminal activities such as extortion, extortion and even direct robbery, and even colluded with the real mafia to eliminate dissidents and maintain control over grass-roots unions. Large sums of members' pensions were invested by Hoffa in mafia industries, and famous casinos and luxury hotels such as Stardust and Caesar Palace in Las Vegas were nourished by workers' hard-earned money.
Although Jimmy Hoffa and other gangster union strongmen shouted about the interests of labor, and continued to promote the expansion of the union for their own interests, more workers joined, but even if the time passed, these strongmen and their successors were removed from leadership positions, they also left a long-term damage to the atmosphere and organizational structure of the union. The decay of traditional trade unions and the repression of the workers' movement in American politics have led to the degeneration of the main body of the labor movement, the workers themselves, from a self-sufficient class "united forever" in the 1920s and 1930s to a situation in which "they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented by others." In Rick's words, an old, traditional union like the IBT is like a small government.
Rick asked me to write down his identity in the article: He is a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, a worker at a local UPS warehouse center, and a member of IBT's 355 branch in Baltimore. In 2019 before the epidemic, the total expenditure of the 355 branches was only 3.7 million US dollars, and 88% of its income came from the membership dues paid by members, but the local trade union chairman and secretary general were paid 130,000 and 140,000 US dollars respectively, and the local 16 full-time cadres and employees enjoyed a total of 1.6 million salaries, an average of nearly 100,000 yuan per person - to know that the average income of Maryland in that year was about 63,000 US dollars, and the average salary of civil servants was about 74,000 US dollars. The average income of a slightly wealthier financial practitioner is only $98,000. Working in a traditional union is such a fat mess!
For grassroots workers, unions like IBT do make jobs very stable, and employers dare not fire workers or violate labor contracts at will, but Rick feels that there is a certain "complacency and inertia" in local unions. In fact, the 355 branch can ensure the stability of the work of local union members only because it spends one-third of its annual expenditure on hiring lawyers and purchasing legal services. In other words, the political economy of traditional trade unions is nothing more than a simple mathematical formula: large dues are levied on workers, and a small part of them are outsourced to professionals what is left of the facts such as litigation, legal aid, and negotiations with employers, and the rest is either lost in endless "administrative work" or laughed at by the workers' leaders. This mode of operation is a miniature version of the U.S. government, where workers are like taxpayers, and unions are taxed like the government, but only a part of the wealth is used for the public utilities expected by taxpayers, and most of it becomes the oil and water that bureaucratic machines and interest groups divide up on their own.
On the employer's side, the response is simple: spend more money and bring in better lawyers and union-busters. As a result, small and medium-sized enterprises that lack money and newcomers to foreign businessmen are often as helpless as Cao Dewang in the documentary "American Factory" and regard unions as hooligans, while the giant monopolies that are too big to fall do not have to worry about unions, as long as they spend money to raise a professional anti-union team. According to statistics, a total of $340 million is used by employers to hire anti-union consultants in the United States every year, not counting the legal departments that are already well-versed in various laws related to labor relations in large enterprises and can also fight lawsuits with unions.
The deformed traditional trade unions and the large enterprises that have money to grind can be said to be the best of the American system, which in turn constitute the economic basis of capitalist politics, and often only the working class and small and micro enterprises bear the cost. This is the mystery of the monopoly giants such as Amazon in the past, which are full of profits and have been criticized for their employee treatment, and the mystery that the social contradictions in the United States are becoming increasingly acute and the gap between rich and poor is becoming more and more serious, but it still maintains relative stability.
"Millennial Socialism"
Where inequality is, however, there is resistance – and the most intense moments of this resistance are often when inequality seems to be the most solid and when the profiteers behind it are soaring.
At the start of the second decade of the century, Amazon's net profit exceeded the billion-dollar mark for the first time, with 33,000 employees; Apple's iPad was just launched, selling 300,000 units on the first day of release; and Facebook acquired nine companies with similar businesses in one year, monopolizing the "social media" industry that people still have. The new giants gladly carved up high-tech industries such as the Internet and e-commerce, which were once vibrant and supposedly able to challenge the traditional economic model, and copied the monopoly capitalism in the traditional industries unchanged in this blue ocean. The myth of "born out of the garage" is getting farther and farther away from reality, and the tech stars who once vowed to say that "technology makes life better" ultimately either rely on capital operation, or rely on unfair competition, or honestly squeeze a large number of anonymous workers to work overtime to maintain high profits.
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement
But less than a year later, in 2011, Protesters on Wall Street put up signs that read, "We are the 99 percent." Rolling Stone magazine considered the slogan to be the creation of anthropologist David Graeber, but Graeber said it was "a collective invention." The backbone of the protests that graber "occupied" Wall Street for nearly two months was the post-80s and post-90s generations commonly referred to in English as "Millennials." These young people in their twenties and thirties have just left college or just started their careers, growing up enjoying the peaceful atmosphere of the United States in the nineties, and catching the first train of the information age, but showing a much more radical political mood than their parents' generation.
In the older generation of Americans who were born, raised, worked, and started families in the Cold War, "communism" and "socialism" are almost worse humiliating than foul language, and contain a meaning that subverts everything they cherish and take for granted. Some of them had fought in the anti-war or civil rights movements of the turbulent sixties, but after saying goodbye to radicalism, they returned to the middle age of starting a family. For industrial workers and wage earners, the trade union organization is becoming more and more dysfunctional, the labor-management contradictions are not so sharp, and the long-term payment of not much but not a lot of membership fees, although there are still some opportunities to participate in the labor movement, but where is the comfort and happiness of these street politics full of small and fortunate family life?
But the premise of this stable life is a good economic situation. The defense pressures of the Cold War and the various proxy wars supported by the United States abroad provided a steady stream of orders for the military-industrial complex and its upstream and downstream industries; in order to win the ideological competition with the Soviet Union, the U.S. government, like the Western European welfare states, established a sound social security system and promoted moderate wealth redistribution to alleviate social contradictions. But as the oil crisis exposed the rigidity of Western economies, the 1980s ushered in a so-called "neoliberal turn" that reduced government regulation and restricted social welfare, in the defense of economists. If Reagan was still in the throes of the Cold War and could not drastically cut welfare, the collapse of the Soviet Union completely eliminated all resistance to reform: the United States completely bid farewell to the good old-time welfare society.
Before the 1992 election, Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." Ironically, his nemesis, the Republican-dominated Congress elected in the 1994 midterm election, "happened" to coincide" with the issue of welfare reform, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was born in private talks between Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Since then, U.S. Social Security spending and average monthly benefits have been falling almost year after year, and the burden on ordinary people in areas such as education and health care has also risen. To make matters worse, globalization also reached a small climax at the turn of the century, with U.S. industry deadlocked and a large number of manufacturing industries shifting from developed countries to the fast-growing Third World.
Millennial Americans are entering the job market at the wrong time and in the wrong place. They are often saddled with student loans from years of rising college tuition, shrinking unemployment benefits and social security, doubling home prices in the fifteen years between 1990 and 2005, and young people have no choice but to find work as quickly as possible; but the market for low- and middle-end jobs is becoming more and more limited, and even if they can find a job, they are treated much worse than their parents' generation under fierce job competition. What is more fatal for American political stability is that this generation of young people has not been immersed in the anti-communist propaganda and education of the past for long, the Cold War is over, and they will no longer regard wealth redistribution as an unacceptable "socialist" policy as their parents did—even many in the younger generation feel that "socialism" is no longer a derogatory term, but increasingly finds that many of its ideas are in line with the actual situation they face.
This is the political trend known as "Millennial socialism." In universities, communities and workplaces, young people are beginning to engage, learn and even embrace left-wing ideas.
Chinese first-hand information about American society on the Internet often comes from international students and newcomers, because these groups are often in the upper middle class of society, and there are few intuitive, individual perspectives on this trend. But as long as you talk to the younger American socialists for a while, it is not difficult to sketch a group portrait for them: their parents are laid-off workers in rust belts or other traditional industrial cities, or low-level employees in the service industry of large cities, who dare not get sick or retire because of their poor pensions; they cannot afford a good education, and they can only study in public schools that lack funds and poor quality, and finally go to relatively cheap community colleges or state universities, but they still carry student loans that they cannot repay for several years Income barely supports the family, but cannot afford any accidents such as illness, and may also encounter bad luck such as wage arrears or illegal dismissals when the economic situation is poor. So naturally, as long as there are some opportunities, the young working class will join the struggle.
The red undertone of the new union
A clear signal is that at the scene of the amazon union's founding on April 1, organizers are no longer afraid of some symbols rare in traditional unions: the amazon union logo uses a fist representing the labor struggle, the uniformly printed cultural shirt is a conspicuous red background, and the slogan that appears on the scene also contains the words "class struggle". Although the Starbucks Union uses the dark green base of the Starbucks brand, its logo also uses the symbol of the fist. Amazon and starbucks unions have also launched a series of propaganda campaigns with prominent democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and openly cooperated with left-wing organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In statements and on social media, the new unions are not shy about political rhetoric such as "99 percent" and "workers fighting big business."
On March 25, 2022, local time, employees of a warehouse in New York, Usa, Amazon's Staten Island will participate in the election vote to decide whether to form a union. Amazon is preparing for a tough labor struggle.
In traditional unions, it is not unthinkable to express radical tendencies, but they are often careful to avoid any official gestures. Eight of the ten largest unions in the United States are dominated by blue, with one green and one yellow; most of their logos represent the industry (such as the IBT logo representing freight workers with horses and wheels), or simply the english abbreviation of the name. These traditional unions also tend to choose their language carefully in their official statements, mentioning only economic rights such as job security and wages, and occasionally adding today's almost clichéd social justice rhetoric in the United States, avoiding ideological overtones.
It can be seen that after more than half a century of depoliticization promoted by the U.S. government, gangster leaders, and big business, the trade union movement has regained its distinct political attributes today. This process is to change from a "comfortable class" that is only aware of its own economic demands and the similar situation among workers to a "self-made class" that is more politically mobilized and has the will and ability to take the initiative to carry out collective struggle.
For the average working-class individual, this process of political socialization requires opportunities that have been provided by American politics, which has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. When Obama was elected, conservatives slammed his health care policies as "socialist," and even his repeated denials prompted people to seriously consider the political proposition, and searches for the word "socialism" on the Internet climbed sharply at that time; the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 made people think about whether they also belonged to the "99 percent" that the capitalist system did not get, and spread the words questioning the huge wealth of the oligarchs; the 2016 Election campaign of Bernie Sanders launched a real political mobilization. Many future union activists were involved in political practice for the first time at this time, and the size of the DSA's membership has since risen rapidly.
The last straw came from the pandemic. The economic situation of more people has become intolerable, and the lack of social security systems has been magnified by the epidemic. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, also taking place in 2020, further exposed the rigidity of traditional unions: workers' organizations played a key role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but at the time of the BLM outbreak, the mainstream unions in the United States only made statements such as painlessness and remembrance of the deceased. This is because traditional trade unions tend to concentrate their power in the leadership, lack the political participation of grass-roots workers, and it is difficult to mobilize trade unions, no matter how popular social movements are resisted by trade union leaders; and it is precisely the police unions that occupy a very important position in the organizational network of traditional trade unions, and their influence eventually silences the leaders of traditional trade unions.
This is the process of the birth of a new generation of trade union movements and the convergence of the labor movement with political struggles, and thus the red background.
Of course, traditional unions themselves face reform pressure from grassroots workers and activists, and some of the movements to promote traditional union reform have been successful. Last November, a team of candidates supported by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which works to promote democracy within the IBT and expand the political participation of grassroots workers, defeated Jimmy Hoffa's son, James F. Kennedy. James P. Hoffa won the IBT leadership election. Because IBT primarily represents workers in the freight industry, the unions affiliated with IBT are organized in Amazon's major warehouses as one of the priorities identified by the new leadership.
But clues still hint at the inefficiency of traditional unions. In 2020-2021, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) attempted to form unions at Amazon's warehouse center in Bethmore, Alabama. RWDSU, a veteran union founded in 1937 with more than 50,000 members and more than $40 million in assets, should be able to mobilize more political resources, and even got biden's support in a video speech, and a number of members of Congress participated, but the final vote to form the union failed with an absolute disadvantage of 738 votes in favor and 1798 votes against. IBT, which also intends to form a union at Amazon, has concluded that it must not be too hasty, and that reforming its own organizational work and striving for more rights and interests in the existing collective bargaining is the top priority, so that the majority of workers can realize the meaning of unions and support the establishment of unions.
In contrast, Chris Smalls, the leader of the Amazon union on Staten Island, learned that traditional unions are still unreliable, and only grassroots workers who organize themselves and participate in the movement are more dynamic and resilient. He proved right: The Amazon union, which was formed on April 1, is an independent union that is not attached to any traditional trade union, and the next day Smalls said in an interview, "If the traditional union is really useful, Amazon should have established a union organization a long time ago."
We can't predict the way forward, but at least on Staten Island, at least this April, American workers have gotten rid of the situation where "they can't represent themselves, they have to be represented by someone else." It seems that the so-called subjectivity of the working class is not an empty theoretical rhetoric.
Epilogue: "Forever United"
If you have participated in the popular "Socialist Night School" in recent years, it is not difficult to find that in the narrative of today's grassroots labor organizers, the history of trade unions in the United States seems to have jumped from the twenties and thirties to the twenty-first century, and in the long years it seems that only the anti-war civil rights movement of the sixties is worth mentioning, and the history of trade unions that was institutionalized, depoliticized and dominated by strongmen during the Cold War described above has been intentionally or unintentionally ignored. Jacobin magazine's call of the formation of the Amazon union "the most important victory for American labor since the 1930s" also reflects this strange view of history at first glance, which is a portrayal of the political color of the new union.
Participants in the new trade union movement saw themselves as the direct successors of the spirit of the left-wing trade unions of the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, radical left-wing ideology was quite common in the trade union movement: the limited but influential Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) openly promoted communism and syndical ideas; the larger American Federation of Labor (AFL), though it had no official political stance, was popular within it, especially at the grassroots level The Communist Labor Party of America (the predecessor of the Communist Party of America), founded by John Reid and others, urged all of its nearly 60,000 members to join unions. From the folk song "Solidarity", which was composed in 1915 and used as a meeting song by both the IWW and the AFL, it is not difficult to feel the atmosphere:
"The power in our hands is stronger than the gold mines they have hidden,
This force is a thousand times stronger than a thousand armies and horses,
We will build a new society on the ruins,
Only because the union gives me strength.
Unity forever, unity forever,
Unity forever, because the union gives me strength! ”
Blood-stained flags, clenched fists, class struggle and the words of the working masses against the capitalists, the hope of a new world born in the workers' movement, and the song itself, all the mantle of a hundred years ago, has been inherited by the young trade union activists of our time – and, of course, the ideas and ideas behind it all. In December 2021, the organizers of amazon unions celebrated Christmas by singing the song in New York's Times Square, when they didn't know if what awaited them would be another failure.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Ding Xiao