Amazon workers in New York City have two words for Jeff Bezos: Ha ha
The first Amazon union was always going to be a big fucking deal. But it’s hard to imagine how it could have been any sweeter than this one was. When it became official on Saturday morning that more than 8,000 workers in an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island had voted to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union, it meant that America’s most powerful non-union company has just been cracked open not by some deep-pocketed institutional force, but instead by a former employee, with no real experience or budget, who started organizing just because he saw that it needed to be done.
Before we plumb the analytical depths of the import of this for the future of the American working class, we must just say, to Amazon founder and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, recently returned to earth from a short trip to space in a personal luxury rocket: Ha. Hahahaha.
From the perspective of labor power, Amazon warehouse employees are the most important kind of workers in America. By this I mean that whatever wages and working conditions these workers are able to win at this company will have ripple effects that change the lives of an enormous number of other workers across this country. Amazon is not just building warehouses; it is in the process of changing the service sector-dominated economy that has characterized America since the 90s into an on-demand online shopping-based economy in which Amazon itself becomes a sort of utility of the retail industry, enabled by a coast-to-coast network of warehouses staffed by low-paid workers with little power over their own destinies.
The last generation of low wage American jobs was shaped by Walmart, a place that unions never managed to organize. The result of that failure by the labor movement
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