Cosmonaut recently published a letter “Did Amazon Workers Even Go On Strike?” by book author Jennifer Albert Mann. Though Mann says she is simply posing the question, her implications are clear. A separate piece by serial crank Joe Allen is much more explicit. His “critical assessment” notably fails to interview a single Amazon worker, Teamster organizer, or anyone with any connection to the campaign. These pieces take aim at the Teamsters’ intentions and competence.
I’m an Amazon worker. I’ve been working at the company and organizing a union for over five years, first as a founder of Amazonians United NYC and now with the Teamsters. Last month I went on strike with over 200 coworkers from my warehouse. My warehouse was not the only site to participate in the strike. A handful of locations across the country did as well. Of course the strike ended. Most do. This multi-day strike did not bring Amazon to the table. We knew it wouldn’t. So did the Teamster organizers we work closely with. But it was a logical escalation from where we were before. There will be more, and they will be bigger. This strike paved the way for what is to come, just as previous actions paved the way for this strike.
But defending our strike or giving an in-depth answer to Mann’s question is not my purpose here. Others have already done that, even before she wrote her letter. Multiple labor journalists wondered whether the strike was real, went to some picket lines, counted heads, interviewed workers, and found out. Then, after doing their due diligence, they published their findings.
Not everyone who writes on the labor movement needs to put in the effort to find out where workers are striking and travel there to get the details. Fortunately, plenty of labor journalists do and they publish their work in well-known labor publications for our benefit. These include an account of the numbers and locations involved in the Amazon strike (published in LaborNotes and Portside). In These Times and Labor on the Line also reported from the strikes. The Call published an excellent piece detailing the strike by a worker at my warehouse. The Amazon Teamsters social media also publishes abundant footage of the strikes and interviews with many of the workers participating. Someone who gets paid for writing on the history of the labor movement should at least hop on Google or skim well-known labor publications before publicly criticizing a strike involving hundreds of workers who put their jobs on the line during the holidays.
Amidst all the media hype, it’s understandable why someone might ask if the strike was real. But someone who is plugged-in enough to send a letter to Cosmonaut is probably also plugged-in enough to read LaborNotes or watch Labor on the Line. They might even be plugged-in enough to connect to people involved in the organizing. If they did any of this, they could very easily have found answers to their questions without parroting Amazon’s anti-union talking points in an online publication.
Amazon already tries to discredit our union at work. Their official line is that the strike was fake and that the Teamsters are conspirators who lie to us. Workers in my warehouse know Amazon is full of shit, but workers in many warehouses do not have the benefit of a union shop committee to set the record straight.
We don’t need our allies to do unpaid union-busting for Amazon, even unintentionally. We don’t need our comrades to invalidate the courage and initiative of our shop-floor leaders who are right now shaping the future of the labor movement. I’m all for principled criticism of business unionism and bad strategy. But that’s not what Mann’s letter is, nor Allen’s piece.
-Ira Pollock
