Support the Unions

 

Labor unions are the single most effective way organized workers can counter the power of the bosses. Amazon currently employs over half a million workers in the United States. Not  one has the protections of a union contract.

At Amazon’s gigantic warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama,  workers urge their fellow Amazon workers to vote “yes” in the mail voting that’s going to decide whether they all get a union. Having a union at Amazon, they deeply believe, could make a  difference in their lives.

Nor is it just Amazon workers who will benefit from the outcome at Bessemer. What makes the union vote at Amazon so crucial is it could lead to the narrowing of America’s vast economic divide. The votes that Amazon’s Bessemer workers are casting could change the economic trajectory that has turned the United States — over the past half-century — into the world’s most unequal wealthy nation. Nothing that happens the rest of this year will likely do more to impact America’s unconscionably wide gap between rich and poor than how the Bessemer voting plays out. Unionization and the struggle here in Bessemer is important because it has the possibility of not only changing the lives of these workers here, but also of providing the courage to foster other battles and other struggles.

In the late 1930s, the American labor movement successfully organized with  dramatic sit-down strikes and those triggered a huge increase in the unionized share of the American workforce. By the mid-1950s, some 35 percent of workers nationwide carried union cards. Union contracts came to set the wage standard, with many major non-union employers  paying workers at going union rates.  In a union labor environment, firms that don’t pay at levels that at least approach union rates simply can’t hire and keep all the workers they need. A vibrant labor movement, in effect, directly and indirectly “levels up” incomes of a society’s working population. The American labor movement has suffered an equally devastating statistical collapse. The share of private-sector workers who carry union cards has now dropped under 7 percent. Over large areas of the United States, the union movement has essentially no pulse.

CEO pay at major corporations, the Economic Policy Institute points out, has soared a stunning 1,167 percent since 1978. Over that same four decades, typical worker compensation has inched up a microscopic 13.7 percent, on average just a fraction of 1 percent per year.

 If the labor movement, here in the 21st century, regained a vigorous national presence. That presence could begin in Bessemer.

Taken from here

The Crucial Amazon Union Vote in Alabama – Consortiumnews