"Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories."

-Amilcar Cabral

Socialists have a responsibility to our class and our movement, a responsibility to speak honestly about the state of the movement, to recognize our defeats, and to learn from them. To portray a defeat as a victory is foolish and irresponsible. The failed certification vote at RDU1 was a defeat for our class. It will demobilize thousands of workers in North Carolina, and tens of thousands across the country. Now is it necessary to pick ourselves up and ask how we can use what we learned to win the next fight.

First, we must recognize that independent unionism is a failed project at Amazon. The company brought in an army of union busters and spent vast sums of money to crush the movement at RDU1. If we are going to win, we need similar resources at our disposal. That means that Amazon worker organizing must be integrated into the wider labor movement and draw on the immense resources available to established unions like the Teamsters. Organizers from Amazonians United onward have cherished the dream of building a new or independent union that avoids the limitations of the established labor movement, but it’s time to let it go and embrace the labor movement as it is, complications and all. Independent unions simply do not possess the necessary capacity (staff organizers, money, lawyers, offices, etc) to take on Amazon’s union-busting machine and win.

Letting go of independent unionism isn’t simply a question of resources. As Jonthan Rosenblum writes, “Amazon is simply too large to beat through site-by-site organizing and striking… To build enough worker power to compel Amazon to bargain, organizing will need to happen at dozens if not hundreds of worksites simultaneously, escalating to majority strike actions on a scale that can truly disrupt the company’s operations.” Of all the unions that have taken an interest in organizing at Amazon, only the Teamsters possess the necessary scale to take on Amazon in a system-wide struggle. It might sound nice to talk about coordination between committees affiliated with different unions or the whole labor movement coming together around a campaign, but that isn’t realistically going to happen in a reasonable timeframe without the catalyst of a system-wide Teamster campaign.

The Teamsters have a serious problem organizing at Amazon, however. The IBT has struggled to free itself from the perception that it’s a union for old white guys, and the Amazon workforce is disproportionately young, queer, immigrant, and non-white. Amazon relied on stoking racial divisions to break down worker solidarity at RDU1, and the IBT could learn much from CAUSE’s efforts to fight racism with solidarity. Again from Rosenblum’s article, “Managers told Latino workers that the union was just for Black workers, and they cynically highlighted the Trump deportation machine to further intimidate immigrant workers, who constitute a quarter or more of the RDU1 workforce.” Amazon is a white supremacist company, and exists in the context of a capitalist system that has oppression built into it at every level. Organizers must counter this by making the liberation struggle a key part of our movement. We cannot fight simply over general economic demands, but must build a movement based on the solidarity of all oppressed and exploited workers in the struggle for liberation. Amazon Teamsters have been instrumental in the fight for Juneteenth as a paid holiday, and can take the lead in fighting for the rights of Haitian workers threatened with deportation. Amazon organizers must act as tribunes of the people, taking up the struggles of queer, Black, immigrant, and otherwise oppressed workers, and the IBT must take those concerns seriously at every level. It cannot afford not to.

This unification of liberation struggles with union organizing campaigns can only fully take place under the leadership of workers recruited from the shop floor. The organizers behind Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment are some of the most talented people in the movement, but too great a role in the campaign was played by salts. In other circumstances, the dominant role is played by union staffers or members of organizations like Socialist Alternative who become salts to support a campaign. Staff and salts must recognize that their role is to recruit, train, and advise workers from the warehouse floor. Worker leadership and shop floor committees must be brought from the margin to the center if we are to build the power and trust necessary for a successful organizing campaign at Amazon.

Organizing moves at the speed of trust, and workers will trust other workers most. This is the primary reason for the initial success of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon could not successfully portray the ALU as something separate from workers because everybody knew who was involved and what they were about. For a more established union like the Teamsters, building this necessary trust means prioritizing democracy in new organizing and being as transparent as possible about what’s going on. We need to be organizing workers into sustainable shop floor committees and preparing for majority strikes, not simply mobilizing them for singular actions, and workers will not make the necessary commitment if we don’t strongly feel that the union is us and is under our control.

Organizers from the socialist and independent union movements also need to build trust with the Teamsters. The example of Farrell Dobbs and his comrades in the Minneapolis Teamster Rebellion comes to mind. Dobbs and his fellows didn’t show up in the Teamster local demanding to fix all its weaknesses before organizing; rather, they started organizing and let their successful organizing campaigns and strike victories translate into union leadership. One aspect of Dobbs’ approach to internal union conflicts is absolutely central for building trust: Dobbs never started by clashing with other organizers or union members. Instead, he concentrated all his fire on the bosses and gave everyone else the opportunity to either join in or step out of the way. Democracy, transparency, shop floor leadership, and a united front against the employer are the essential ingredients for building the trust and power we need to organize Amazon.

Even in our strongest moments, however, we must not be uncritically confident of our own victory. The first rule any successful drug dealer learns is ‘don’t get high on your own supply.’ Translated into organizing terms by the revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, this means that we must cultivate an optimism of the will but a pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will calls on organizers not to back down from a fight and to act with confidence in ourselves and our movement. Pessimism of the intellect means that our actions must be based on strategic assessments and hard-nosed realism. Too often union organizers champion minority actions as if they represented the majority of workers or let social media hype take precedence over concrete structure tests. We can’t afford that luxury at Amazon.

As William Z Foster once wrote,

The question of organizing the many millions of unorganized workers is the most vital matter now before the American labor movement. The future progress of the working class depends upon the solution of this great problem. The organization of the unorganized is a life and death question for the labor movement. To bring the millions into the unions is necessary not only for the protection of the unorganized workers, and to further class ends in general, but also to safeguard the life of the existing organizations.

For both Amazon workers and the labor movement as a whole, organizing Amazon is a matter of life and death. It’s time we acted like it.

-Raya Dunayevskaya