Workers Don t Share Dems Nostalgia for Unions jewishworldreview.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishworldreview.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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It wasn’t even close. The final count was 1,798 against and 738 for, 71% to 29%.
The election in question was held over whether the employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, wanted to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union not, as the
Washington Post (owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) put it, a contest of “Big Tech vs. its workers.”
The workers weren’t one of the adversaries. They were the judges. And the overwhelming majority of them, despite biased media coverage and blatant nudges from President Joe Biden, chose against the union.
That has significance far beyond the individuals involved. Amazon is now America’s second largest employer after Walmart, with 950,000 domestic employees. With the increased demand for delivered merchandise during COVID-19 restrictions, Amazon reports that it has hired some 427,300 workers over the past year.
Workers don t share Democrats nostalgia for unions msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.
By Kevin O’Kelly Correspondent
Even before the job losses of the pandemic, many American workers were facing a tough situation. In recent years, fed-up employees – from fast-food workers to university adjunct instructors – have seen little choice but to unionize. The signs of a rising new labor movement makes journalist Edward McClelland’s latest book, “Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class,” remarkably timely.
McClelland details what was arguably the most important strike in American history. On Dec. 30, 1936, a few thousand workers took over one small GM plant in Flint, Michigan, and brought the nation’s leading automaker to a standstill.