The US labour movement has an unfortunate practice of failing to publicly draw lessons from our setbacks. Yet it’s important that labour and the left learn from the Bessemer Amazon experience. After all, we’ve seen a series of defeats in the South from Volkswagen to Nissan and now Amazon. [On 29 March a government-mandated ballot on union recognition at the Amazon Bessemer distribution centre returned a clear anti-recognition majority].
In this article we want to focus a bit on problems with the strategies and tactics used in the campaign by the organisers; and especially what we need to do differently to win.