In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/12/in-the-wake-of-protest-one-womans-attempt-to-unionize-amazon/249853/?google_editors_picks=true

Dec 12 2011, 2:55 PM ET 172

Inspired by the WTO protests, a demonstrator took a job in an Amazon warehouse to try and unionize the workers there



Occupy demonstrators are shutting down ports along the West Coast today. For a movement that needs to show its strength and expand beyond city parks, it is a dramatic step that has many watching the news with bated breath. And yet, it has echoes in the past. In 1999, during the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union threatened to shut every port from Hawaii to Alaska if the city of Seattle didn't let the protesters they had arrested out of jail. It worked. And for people like me, unions suddenly became relevant.

I had been at the WTO protests. I had watched hundreds of UPS Teamsters wearing shirts that said "Kicking Ass for the Working Class" march into the pepper spray and concussion grenades. The people I knew seemed unable to organize in groups larger than twenty-five, so the organization union actions made an impression.

I don't know precisely what's going to come out of the Occupy protests of the last few months. But I know what I did after the "Battle for Seattle." I decided to get a job working in the Amazon warehouse solely for the purpose of unionizing it. No one asked me to do it. No one paid me. I took the task on out of a newfound zeal and a belief in what unionizing could do.

Up until then my ideas about unions were vague. I was pro-union in orientation, not experience. I had seen John Sayles' Matewan and knew that "Solidarity Forever" was a song, but that was about it. What ideas I did have were steeped in nostalgia and rooted in a desire for working class authenticity. I found ethical simplicity of a world in which the boss is the guy in the office, and the worker is the guy in the coal pit very appealing, but it wasn't all that relevant.

FULL story at link.

[Cal Carpenter]

1. Pretty interesting article

A couple important things are brought up. The need for protestors to understand the role that unions play in social change. The need for more people to organize in their workplaces. The reasons unions have been squashed and neutered in the last several decades. The need for people in 'service' or cubicle-type jobs to get over notions of bourgeois attitudes and realize they are the working class. The fact that 'freedom' of lifestyle choices is meaningless when you can't make a living wage.

We are all struggling. We are not alone. We need to get together. There are more of us than there are of them.

Our power is in our work, in our 'productivity'. Understanding and using our ability to withhold that work, in an organized fashion, in SOLIDARITY, is how we make change.