“Amazon, pay attention, we’re coming!” Who made this provocation for a concentration of workers in the USA? The young version of a Lula on an American ABC? No, who made the passionate speech, this Wednesday (6), was the almost octogenarian gentleman who punches daily at the White House. Joe Biden was speaking to a conference of construction workers at a Washington hotel.
In 2020, he said he would be the most pro-union president in American history. The recent historic vote to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island borough comes on the heels of the pandemic that has disproportionately penalized blue-collar workers without the privilege of remote work.
But could it also signal an inflection, after decades of declining bargaining power for workers? The unionized labor segment fell from 34% in the 1950s to 10% last year. Today, 68% of Americans say they support unions, the highest number since 1965.
On campaign, Biden hammered out a case for “a well-paying union job.” The Democrat’s age and folksy verbal mannerisms distract cynics from the fact that he defends labor rights more than his predecessors Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even the man whose presidency he studied and tries to emulate, Franklin Roosevelt, the creator of the New Deal.
Steven Greenhouse confirms the comparison. He is the author of the lauded “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor,” an in-depth examination of the downturn in the US workers’ organization.
talking to the sheet before the vote in New York, Greenhouse predicted that the symbolism of victory would be important because Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, replaced the first, Walmart, as the icon of commerce in the popular consciousness.
Walmart, recalls Greenhouse, remains a relevant landmark in anti-union aggression tactics. Perhaps it helps that most Americans wouldn’t know how to name the family that controls Walmart, but they have Jeff Bezos on the tip of their tongue and know that he is the second richest man in the world.
The fight in the New York warehouse took off when Amazon fired the now-elected first president of the new union, Christian Smalls, for leading a walkout for better working conditions in the first weeks of the pandemic in March 2020. Smalls reveals he’s been getting countless numbers. union organizing advice requests from other Amazon warehouses.
Hours after the Staten Island vote, employees at one of the largest Starbucks stores in Manhattan voted to form a union. It’s not the first vote at a chain store, but New York’s visibility, organizers say, translates into national stimulus.
Without a large majority in the Senate, there’s not much an American president can do to protect workers’ rights from systematic — and perfectly legal — intimidation in private companies. But Biden can use his megaphone, as he did last December, blasting a note of condemnation at food giant Kellogg for threatening to hire workers to break a strike.
