In response to a recent Cosmopod episode featuring Amazonians United organizers from NYC and Chicago, a listener David Thayer wrote in to criticize AU, and particularly panelist Zama’s dismissal of the importance of the PRO Act and hostility toward business unionism. Aside from being condescending, this letter restates many of the lines that make leftist formations such as DSA so unattractive to workers and organizers engaged in mass work. These lines are not just off-putting because they are condescending; they are off-putting because they are ahistorical and simply not valid critiques.
Let’s start with the advocacy for the PRO Act. In the podcast, AU organizers Zama and Jonathan correctly point out that the PRO Act isn’t even on their coworkers’ radars. Zama goes so far as to dismiss its importance entirely. Our listener, David Thayer, insists that “the Pro Act if passed would indeed favorably change the conditions under which we organize.” That’s a mighty big if.
In his masterpiece on the political economic history of the US working class, Mike Davis details the “Fall of the House of Labor”. Parallel the erosion of class power since its pre-War zenith came the fraying of labor protections and the weakening of the hard-won reforms of the NLRA. Davis details ways in which labor bureaucrats substituted ongoing attempts at labor reform for ambitious organizing programs. For instance, in 1977 the AFL-CIO put all its eggs in the same basket as today. Major labor reform appeared imminent. “Friendly” Democrats controlled Congress and unions had a strong ally in the White House. But the reform failed spectacularly. Davis explains,
“the AFL-CIO and its academic allies overestimated their influence in the Carter Administration and Congress. It was delusive to believe that labor could dramatically reassert its clout within the political system without any significant reinvigoration of its own grassroots. On the other hand, they drastically underestimated the lobbying power of business.”
Replace “Carter” with “Biden” and this passage could have been written today, except today the delusion is even more remarkable. In 1977 union density was over twice as high and the rank-and-file was coming out of an era of historic upsurge. Labor today has, by every possible metric, a tiny fraction of the grassroots power to back up any bureaucratic moves for political power. Meanwhile corporate consolidation of the economy and our political institutions is spectacularly greater. As Jonathan says in the podcast, “If we have enough power as workers in the US that politicians feel compelled to pass things that are supposed to work in our favor then that’s great. I don’t have any illusions though…If the PRO Act passes, it’s because there’s a sufficient amount of working-class power in the US to make it pass. If it doesn’t, then that’s a reflection of our lack of working-class power.” We didn’t have enough power to pass major labor reforms in 1977. We have even less power now. Yet we are to believe that volunteer phone bankers from DSA can replace systematic efforts on the shop floor.
Furthermore, simply telling workers and workplace militants what they should care about rather than listening to what they do care about simply isn’t Marxism. Whether it’s worker inquiries or mass line, Marxism requires learning from the working class. It requires learning their stories, their troubles, their joys, and their concerns and developing a program, a plan of action that is informed by that learning. What worker inquiry has DSA done before throwing its full weight behind the PRO Act? Did the demand come from the masses before returning to the masses? Is there any other Marxist principle by which leftists such as Thayer feel justified in telling us what to prioritize? This doesn’t mean we should be populists that simply tail the masses. We aren’t demagogues. But it does mean if something doesn’t resonate with our coworkers as an organizing issue, if something fails to gain traction in developing working-class protagonism, then it isn’t a good workplace organizing issue. Thus far, the PRO Act has failed this metric.
Phonebanking for the PRO Act is a red herring. It’s perfectly plausible for socialists to not just support, but lead such shop floor efforts, to not just tail unions, but to take our own initiative as has been shown by initiatives like EWOC. DSA is approaching 100,000 members. If even 1% of those members were unemployed (the national unemployment rate is 6%), and just 10% of those unemployed DSAers were willing to salt at Amazon, DSA would have the biggest salting program in logistics. It could probably even do this and continue lobbying Democrats for a bill that in my opinion has precisely 0% chance of passing., There is no shortage of socialists willing to do electoral or reform work. DSA has teams of volunteers pounding the pavement and phone banking for the PRO Act, not to mention the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and countless progressive politicians. What we emphatically do not have enough of is committed, disciplined socialists toiling away at working-class jobs, the type that millions (if not billions) of workers have to work to survive, and organizing on these jobs to build the class power capable of winning any major reform. So when leftists come at us to chastise us for taking on precisely this type of much-needed organizing, forgive us for not coming to the next meeting.
Thayer also insists that building class power requires a united front with business unions. AU recognizes the importance of uniting with rank-and-file movements of all kinds. Indeed, such unity is absolutely crucial. We do oppose uniting with the bureaucracies that sell out workers. We aren’t the first to recognize these class enemies. Over one hundred years ago, Trotsky identified union bureaucrats as the most reactionary of our so-called allies, referring to them as “a petrified mass which history has been unable hitherto either to digest or reject.” Anyone who has spent any time in the labor movement knows this is as true now as ever. Why some leftists think we should try to anchor ourselves to this petrified mass is beyond me. Again, AU supports unity with other unions. We simply don’t need bureaucrats to mediate and limit our solidarity.
Thayers also expresses mistaken views about AU. For instance, he accuses AU’s organizing of being “local” and “economistic.” This despite the fact that on the podcast to which his letter responds, there are AU organizers from cities one thousand miles apart. Or the fact that AU is just the US affiliate of Amazon Workers International, which organizes in Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. Indeed, the song played for the intro and outro of the podcast is an original piece written for AU by Christian Krähling, a radical shop steward and close comrade of AU in Germany, whose recent tragic death was mourned by Amazon organizers across multiple continents. Thayer also overlooks AUs efforts to build ties with non-Amazon worker and social justice movements at home and abroad, such as with comrades fighting facsism in the Philippines. He also misses the fact that AU organizes against issues such as police violence, has rallies commemorating Juneteenth, calls out Amazon’s ties to Border Patrol and the police state, and considers political education to be one of our most valuable organizing tools.
A further misconceptions is captured by this passage: “The emphasis of Amazonians United on building shopfloor support is correct, but my concern is that their approach is too hostile to using labor law and the NLRB as a tool…My worry is that sectarianism towards the broader left and a narrow focus on the shopfloor without engaging with the realities of labor law will lead to some of the same problems that IWW campaigns have come into.” These are misconceptions. During the first year of the pandemic, Amazon had nearly quadruple the number of Unfair Labor Practice complaints filed against it with the NLRB as the second worst corporate offender. Approximately a quarter of those came from AU organizers, including both of the organizers featured on the podcast. Indeed, AU has been told by NLRB lawyers that they were the first Amazon workers to file complaints that the NLRB found to have merit.
Finally, moving away from the historical and factual errors, there are also strategic errors in Thayer’s letter. In the podcast, Zama relates his attempts to engage with DSA and other leftists and extrapolates that organized left formations don’t offer much to AU. Jonathan validates but qualifies these concerns, pointing out that he was, in fact, co-chair of Queens DSA, one of the biggest DSA formations in the country. Thayer takes from this exchange that AU is actively hostile to collaboration with leftist organizations. He states that AU is “content with local economic projects which believe the world will change without emphasis on the need for the working class to organize a party and seize political power does not lead to our victory.” So is DSA this party? As the experience of both Zama and Jonathan (and many other AU organizers) show, it’s not that AU is hostile toward DSA, but that in many interactions DSA has been hostile towards AU. This is of course not universally the case. Many DSA comrades have been very supportive and helpful, and some formations within DSA have explicitly taken on the task of supporting worker organizing and steering the rest of DSA in a better direction (my own experience in NYC DSA Emerge Caucus and Labor Branch has been largely positive). Our collaboration with comrades from YDSA remains a boon for expanding our organizing capacity. Help has also come from dedicated comrades at LaborNotes. Some AU organizers also benefit from informal, personal relationships with leftist union staffers. We’ve also worked closely with brilliant Marxist academics whose contributions to this work can’t be overstated.
However, despite these fruitful relationships many of us have with comrades on the organized left, we have, in my experience, many more characterized by hostility, paternalism, or attempts at cooptation. For instance, I have lost count of the times I’ve experienced the exact same thing Zama relates with DSAers furiously telling me if I really want to organize Amazon workers, I should get with the program and go work at UPS and join TDU (despite the fact that before working at Amazon I was, in fact, a shop steward at UPS and member of TDU when we organized for the 2018 strike authorization vote).
Most people at AU aren’t opposed or hostile to groups like DSA. Many of us are members. But that doesn’t mean DSA is remotely capable of being a political home to our coworkers. This isn’t to say it couldn’t be. I’ll withhold judgement on that point. But if DSA wants to be the party of the working class, the onus is on DSA to deserve that mantle. It’s not enough for leftists to castigate workers about what they should prioritize. It won’t do for an outside organization to hand down a program prefabricated by bureaucrats and professionals and tell workers to get onboard. It’s not the burden of workers to pledge our loyalty to the left. It’s the burden of the left to deserve the working class.
Ira Pollock
