Confronting Capitalism: This Century’s Biggest Labor Battle

Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. How's it going, B? It's going really well, Melissa. We are sitting here in the midst of a collapsing empire and we we get to watch it in slow motion.

It's just the dog on fire meme, like everything is fine. Okay, well, quick reminder before we start our discussion, we have our live show coming up on April 6th. We'll be in Brooklyn along with special guests Crystal Ball and Matt Carp to discuss the left's relationship with the Democratic Party. If you're interested in coming, there will be a link in the show description where you can buy tickets. Today V and I are really excited to be joined by Benjamin Fong.

Ben is the Associate Director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, and he keeps a substack on labor and logistics at ontheams.substack dot com. So in today's episode, we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about the research that Ben has done on the logistics industry and especially on Amazon. But before we get into that discussion,

I just wanted to mention that Ben is also the co editor of a new book, Rustin's Challenge. Ben, can you tell us a bit about the book? Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So Bayard Rustin was a civil rights organizer and socialist strategist. He was in the peace movement for many years, uh worked for peace organizations for two decades, in fact. And then he went on to become the executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and to become very influential in the labor world.

I would say that maybe more than even a decade ago, Rustin's more of a known figure. There was a Netflix biopic about him, uh, not so long ago that was executive produced by the Obamas and I think that that represents the typical picture of Rustin pretty well. In that picture, uh Rustin was a civil rights organizer. He was a close confidant of uh Martin Luther King Jr. And uh most famously he organized the march on Washington for jobs and freedom in August nineteen sixty three.

And I think that's where most accounts of his life end, in the most sort of popular liberal accounts, most of what he did that was important ended in nineteen sixty three. The book focuses on the later Rustin. So he remained politically active in the sixties and seventies. And at this time he launched what I think is a very exacting critique of new developments on the left, in the New Left, in Black Power and other kinds of social movements.

He lamented the rise of a new maximalism and moralism on the left. And at the same time, he also offered a substantive program in the form of the freedom budget. It's essentially a beefed up Bernie Sanders platform introduced Sixty years before the fact that we're going to be able to do And there's a lot of interesting things about Rustin.

And I would say that uh the puzzle that most people might confront when reading the book is, well, if he said all these interesting things, why isn't he remembered later in life? Like why in the popular account does his life end in nineteen sixty three? And I think that on the left there's a narrative that he betrayed the movement, that he turned to the right, that he was co opted by the Democratic Party. And while I think that there's a lot of things.

Certainly legitimate criticisms to be made of Rustin, they don't add up to cause for dismissal. And so I think that the rejection of Rustin on the left after nineteen sixty three is more symptomatic of the left's unwillingness to confront the many critiques that he launches that we cover in the book.

I I think Rustin is an absolutely central figure, not just for the American left generally, but for race politics in particular. Rustin's entire argument, his line was that in order for race justice to go down to the black working class and the Latino working class at the time, which were the two largest non white communities at the time within the working class, it's going to require tremendous

economic redistribution and it'll have to center on the expansion of jobs and economic opportunities for them. But if that's going to happen, It's going to have to require massive political pressure on the government to do this. And that pressure is not gonna come just from mobilizing American blacks. It's gonna have to be a class wide movement, and that's why it'll have to be what King called a poor people's movement. And Rustin, of course, agreed with this.

But I think to his credit, what he really offers us today was a concrete economic and political program in what was called the Freedom Budget, which was an actionable program and not just an abstract call for racial justice. on this particular issue, there is no more important figure in the history of American racial struggles and racial rights than Rustin, because he found a way Of marrying the cause of racial justice to the struggle for universal justice within the American political economy.

bringing the civil rights movement and the movement for racial demands in line with the broader movement for justice. And if there's anything that we need today to recover on the left, It's to come back from the splintering of the left into all these different sectional struggles together under the umbrella of one broad struggle for justice. And there's I think there's nobody more important than Rustin for that. And to preview the topic we're talking about just in a bit.

Labor was a late entrant, I think, into the civil rights movement in its iconic period. George Meany's AFL CIO famously did not support, did not sponsor the march on Washington, even though Walter Ruther paid for the sound system. And after the fact, Meanie was very apologetic about that. I think that he saw that it was a mistake. And very quickly they turned and supported the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, the voting rights act of nineteen sixty five.

And even in accounts from people at the NAACP, for instance, they would say stuff like, Yeah, we had a few lobbyists on the Hill, but the AFL-CIO had one in every congressperson's office. Um and so they really lent uh weight to the civil rights movement at the key moment. And I think Rustin saw that there was a chance to better embed the labor movement and the civil rights movement organizations together.

So Ben, while you were also like finishing and publishing this book you've also been working a lot on studying Amazon in particular, along with, you know, developments in the logistics industry and Specifically this question of why Amazon is so important in today's labor movement. Why do you think that's the case? So I tend to make great hay of the CIO, which was the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It was a breakaway labor federation that started in nineteen thirty five.

And the CIO organized all the basic industries in the country, auto, steel, electrical manufacturing. Pretty quickly by 1938, many of the core industries were organized. I think this moment is the closest thing to a working class revolution that we've seen in this country. And what the CIO did was to strategize from the beginning in saying that they wouldn't have a seat at the political table in America until the big corporations of the day were organized.

And then it was GM, General Motors, Ford, uh, US Steel, companies like this, GE. And in a very short amount of time they organized these companies and these industries, and it again amounted to something of a revolution. I would say that if there's going to be a similar labor upsurge today, The labor movement also needs to have its sights set on the big corporate targets, so the big employers in the country, in order that's Walmart, Amazon, Target, Home Depot, and Kroger.

But all these are big retailers with sophisticated logistical operations. And I think that if the labor movement wants to see big gains, it needs to take on big targets. But that's just uh general conception. Uh one might question, okay, so Walmart actually employs more people than Amazon, so why not Walmart? What about Home Depot? What about Target? These are all very viciously anti-union employers.

And I would say three things uh make Amazon a special case. The first is that it's the largest company in the country by revenue and it's growing at a phenomenal rate for a company of its size. It's set to be the first trillion dollar company in annual revenue by twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight, I think.

So it's on a trajectory, uh, I would say that's very similar to General Motors, which was by far the largest employer in the country when the CIO was organizing. So when you say like on a similar trajectory to General Motors, you mean in the nineteen thirties? Insofar as a it is a template organization of the capitalism of the day, General Motors represented manufacturing dominance of the day in the way that Amazon, I think, represents logistical dominance.

Second, it's a very unwieldy company. It's the second largest retailer by revenue. It's the largest cloud computing company by revenue. It's the largest parcel carrier, period. It was Recently only the largest private parcel carrier, but it recently passed the United States Postal Service in terms of parcel volume, which is kind of shocking.

And as a result of all of these tentacles in different industries, it impinges upon a lot of different union jurisdictions. So the Teamsters obviously care about organizing Amazon warehouses. But in grocery, Amazon's becoming an increasingly big player. It's a threat to UFCW or the United Food and Commercial Workers.

In healthcare, it's got a new pharmacy division, it's got one medical, it's a threat to SCIU, NNU. In so many different realms, Amazon is threatening union jurisdictions. When you say it's a threat, what does that mean? Uh it's a non-union employer. It's a non-union employer in industries where there is some union density. So UFCW is strong at Safeway, Albertson's Kroger companies like this, and in Amazon's play and grocery, it's threatening there.

So the fear is that by Amazon continuing to expand that it will threaten the power of existing unions or just that it poses like a potential new ground for members? Yeah. I mean, whenever there's a new non union entrant into a particular industry, it threatens union dominance and their ability to have strong wages and working conditions in that industry. And again, the unique thing about Amazon is that it's doing it in so many different industries at the same time. If there was ever a moment for

labor movement unity around a particular target, I think Amazon's gotta be it. And the last thing I'll mention is that there's an existing organizing effort already in place at Amazon in a way that there's not at these other companies. when UFCW took on Walmart and the R Walmart campaign in the mid twenty tens.

There was some worker activity, but I would say that there's nothing compared to what exists now. There's a lot going on in the Amazon world, and I think any big Amazon campaign needn't start from scratch.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's not just that it's a large company that employs a lot of people. There are two other dimensions to it that I think are worth keeping in mind. One is that if we just stick with the theme of racial justice, If you look at the labor force, the demographic facts about the people who work for Amazon, for Walmart, for Target and places like that, it's the most multiracial working class you'll see in America.

workers of every ethnicity and every race. And so to unionize them. To bring them together under contracts that are generous with decent conditions is not only a massive step forward for working people generally, in particular for the

sections of the working class that are of color, this is the biggest step towards racial justice and not just economic justice that you can imagine. So if we're committed as we all are to racial justice, it has to take labor organizing at its core because the Latino and black minorities are overwhelmingly of working class conditions.

And for them, this encompasses every important dimension of their life. And they're not just of color, it's also women. So immediately, if you take up this struggle, you're taking up all the key components of social justice. The second thing is that these have become the nerve centers of American accumulation now, because they're vertically integrated. They're not just retailers.

If you unionize them, you're automatically creating an opportunity to sink deeper into the manufacturing and to the agricultural sectors that they're connected to. And you're going to change working conditions and the conditions for organizing there. So like Ben was saying,

They are like GM, the one of the largest employers that the way GM used to be and the auto industry used to be in the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties. It's also the place where you find workers of color and that immediately connects to their lives. But then the third thing is that just like those industries back then in the forties and fifties, if you organize here, it has linkage effects. to all the different industries that go backward and forward from this particular one.

Now the dilemma, of course, as Ben will I think talk about is it's easier said than done. Because they're trillion-dollar employers, they also have virtually unlimited union busting operatives.

and techniques available to them. And really I think that unless the existing unions pour money into organizing these people And showing them that they're not on their own, dangling in the wind, taking on corporations with revenues bigger than most countries' GDPs, unless you do that, it's gonna be a very uphill struggle.

Just one last thing. You mentioned the blue collar warehousing workforce, probably on the order of a million people in total for Amazon in the country. That's an addition to probably three to four hundred thousand contracted third party delivery service drivers. But there's also the corporate workforce of about two hundred to three hundred thousand people. They just experienced some pretty drastic layoffs. About ten percent of the corporate f workforce was laid off since November.

And from the corporate workers that I've talked to, they're in dire strait. They've lost a lot of their previous motivations to work at Amazon. And I think they're ripe for organizing at a moment when Amazon's a bit ahead of its skis in terms of its AI deployment. Yeah, so both of you kinda touched on the fact that Amazon is a multi dimensional company, right? On the one hand it's a retailer, on the other it's

a delivery service. It's part tech company and I mean they frickin' make movies now. Like you know, they are very varied.

I think probably one of the most important roles they play in the kind of social division of labor is as a logistics organizer. Um, and Ben, you mentioned that now they are officially the single largest parcel delivery company. Um, you know, even outstripping the USPS, which is crazy and very concerning.

What do you think are some of the most important developments happening in the logistics industry, especially developments that are impacting the workers there and uh the labor movement's prospects there? Let me just define what logistics is first. It's originally a term from the military. It's talking about the deployment of goods to battle sites that you need like weapons, arms, shelter, like very food. I would argue the kitchen is a battleground.

But you know, just like getting the kind of things that you need to fight a war beyond just military strategy. And in this context, it just means the movement of goods around the country, getting things where they need to be in order to be sold. It used to be a pretty simple industry. If you procured something from a supplier or a vendor,

You'd store it in a warehouse for a while. It was a very manual operation. And I think one defining feature of the retail revolution, wherein companies like Walmart and Home Depot and Amazon eventually came to dominate is that they have really perfected the logistics process. They've uh made it tremendously sophisticated compared to what it was in the post war period.

I've tried to track Amazon's automation game, just its deployment of different robotics technologies, in order to combat a dominant narrative that you hear in the organizing world and the business world. that Amazon and other logistics companies are on the cusp of what they call dark warehouses, which is to say warehouses where packages are primarily sorted by

robotics technology and you've got like a skeleton crew of maintenance people, but for the most part, human workers are not part of the equation. Yeah, it sounds a lot like how AI is being discussed. Yeah, precisely. And it's treated as this existential threat for warehousing and transportation more generally. I would say that it's overwrought.

If there's going to be one company where this is happening, it's definitely Amazon. They're spending way more on automation and robotics upgrades than any other company. your average third party logistics company with just a normal warehouse, they're not really incentivized to automate in the same way. They have pretty thin margins and so they're not going to spend the kind of capex that Amazon does on improving their warehousing operations.

And by CapEx I mean capital expenditure, which refers to the amount that a company spends on investing in its own business. And uh in an article for Jacobin last year, I tried to do a comprehensive analysis of Amazon's robotics game. And really their one big win was with the Kivas. These are the mobile units that are used to store inventory.

They basically completely reorganized inventory management at Amazon, made a whole bunch of warehousing worker roles much more productive than they were before. Some estimates say they were three to four times more productive after the introduction of the Kivas. It was a huge win. And starting around 2021, when Amazon's package volume really started to grow pretty significantly with the pandemic, they basically rolled out Kivas to every sortable fulfillment center in their network.

And this did involve a tremendous amount of worker displacement, but it was masked mostly by company growth. Which is to say Amazon's been displacing work, automating away work all the time. It's just growing so fast that we don't really see it in the numbers. That's interesting'cause that I mean, that was pretty much V your argument about

why the total doom and gloom predictions about AI are probably overstated. Yeah. Well there's AI writ large, and then there's gonna be AI in particular sectors and in particular establishments like Amazon has. And The more specific you get in what you're examining, the harder it is to predict

what the effects are going to be. There are going to be some establishments and some parts of the economy that I think will experience significant job loss because of AI. And then in the economy as a whole, though, if you look at it, that's I'm much more cautious about the gloom and doom because the people who get displaced will almost certainly find jobs elsewhere.

The question is what the quality of those jobs is going to be and what the the ability to organize them is going to be. Right. So I think this is where Ben's insights into this are really interesting because I do think Amazon is going to try to bring in AI robotics and is already doing it as much as possible. And through experimentation, it's going to see what the limits to that are.

We don't know. We simply don't know how far it's gonna go. What is pretty I think obvious is that they're not going to even in Amazon be able to displace human labor to the point where organizing becomes a non issue for them. That hasn't happened anywhere, as far as I know, anytime. All that does is change the terrain of organizing for us. Another really big issue about Amazon.

is not the extent to which it's displacing human labor with robots, but how it's using AI to monitor those workers and make organizing especially difficult. because it ensnares them in this this matrix of monitoring and information and using all kinds of force against them, which

just ramps up the obstacles by ramping up the risks and the exposure to managerial interference. That is really not being examined very carefully right now because the number of labor journalists in the country is now vanishingly small, almost nonexistent.

So who's going into these establishments, these warehouses, and really doing the important work of figuring out how information technology is being used, not just to displace labor, but to control labor. That's where I think a lot of the action is gonna be.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think in terms of the the question about the ways in which technology is being deployed to impact workers. I think the much bigger problem is the way in which new automation at fulfillment centers in particular is constraining work processes. In such a way that workers don't have any contact with each other. So your standard picker, packer, stower roles at Amazon Fulfillment Centers.

They're literally locked in place for 95% of their work day. They're twenty feet away from the closest coworker. They have no interactions with them whatsoever. This presents a huge organizing problem. If you're like organizing relies on talking to other people. If you just don't talk to any of your coworkers all day, if you've got your headphones on the whole day, there's no chances for that organizing opportunity.

Vivek mentioned that there's all of these ways in which work has been organized at Amazon or technology has been introduced in order to curb organizing. Are there other sorts of you know, methods or technologies that they've deployed that are do you think are significant in that regard? Oh for sure. One of my favorites uh is the Netrodyne system, which every Amazon delivery driver knows about. So when every sound good Yeah, it's it's it's very uh yeah post apocalyptic.

Every Amazon DSP van is fitted with a netrodyne system with cameras all over it. And it judges things like how long uh you spend at each stop delivering a package, how long on the breaks you take. Literally if your eyes leave the road for six seconds while you're driving, you get written up for that as well. Wow. Almost every aspect of your job is

analyzed through the system. And then not only that, but Amazon produces reports about these companies' drivers to them and then ranks them in order of their efficiency on the road. That's crazy. Yeah. It's a way of intensifying competition between the drivers and putting the fear of God into them. Right. But if you're on the bottom of this list, you're gonna be the first one out the door.

Right. And so then it it's like workers who you've probably never even met before are pushing you to conform to be the most perfect worker you could possibly be within I mean probably trying to push it even beyond like what is humanly possible. I mean it's the newest version of the oldest trick that there is in management, which is that

You have kind of a rabbit inside every part of the shop or every shop inside the establishment who is setting a kind of a goal for all the other workers. And then you judge the other workers against the pace. and against the speed that the rabbit is working at. And the idea is you rank them just like this. And then the threat, the ever present threat is the ones who were towards the bottom of it of it are gonna be

They laid off at some point. And obviously most people hate it, right? They don't they don't actually believe in the kind of self optimism. I I've I'm involved in an Amazon worker research project where we're talking to workers. I think some people do believe that um the company can be made more efficient and they believe in the mantra of efficiency. Okay. Um and so I would say that there's a select few who internalize this self-optimization stuff.

But I think most people hate it, but you don't actually have to believe it for it to work. Right. Um, you could still see the list and want to avoid being in the bottom ten percent, so you're just not fired. Right. So we we've covered you know, a lot of the dangerous technologies that Amazon is introducing that are going to make things a lot more difficult to organize there. Are there any positive developments that could be good for labor?

There's actually been an interesting reorganization in the logistics field that's actually become a something of a boon for organizing that wasn't there in the nineteen nineties, let's say. So traditionally, big retailers like Walmart, Target, they would third party their distribution centers. So They would have their distribution centers run by a third-party logistics company. That third-party logistics company would then hire workers from other three PLs, third-party logistics companies.

or temp agencies and the whole thing was very fishered. David Weill has his term workplace fishering. that makes it really difficult to organize when you've got all these temps working at these warehouses. Right. And so then you have all of these companies that are effectively part of the same entity but legally are separate, which poses specific organizing challenges. Precisely. I mean, it's been a huge problem for labor all through the neoliberal period.

And one interesting th thing about Amazon, but increasingly also of Walmart and Target as well, is that they have re internalized those operations into the company. So when you go to an average Amazon warehouse, most of the people there are directly employed workers, which is to say they work for Amazon and not for some third party. And this is a new dynamic, and you might wonder why Amazon wants to do it.

It's because they want precise control over every part of their operation. If you third party something, it tends to be cheaper, but you lose quality control, you lose the efficiency gains that you can have over a directly employed workforce.

And because Amazon's done it, Walmart has increasingly re internalized some of its third party operations, same with Target. And it's a new moment of possibility, I would say, for warehouse organizing. Well, let's just lay out exactly how. So Ben If you were to compare these two scenarios where you have these retailers who in their warehousing and transportation rely on third parties, and now that they're internalizing it so that everybody is now working for them.

How concretely does this change the landscape for organizing them? Well, within the constraints of existing American labor law, you have to organize the company that directly employs people. And so part of the problem for labor as this workplace fishering dynamic has developed is that they're organizing increasingly small shops.

Because the third parties hire fewer people than the larger companies, whereas the average Amazon fulfillment center employs three, four thousand people. And that's just a much larger shop to be organized than the s smaller third party providers. Hey listeners, we'll be right back with the conversation, but I wanted to let you know that you can subscribe to Catalyst Journal for half off and get a full year of issues for only$20 by using the code Confronting Capitalism, all one word in checkout.

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So Ben, we've talked a lot about technology and to some extent the internal organization of work within these Amazon warehouses. But in some of your other pieces, you talk about a lot of other factors that impact what working at Amazon is like and the conditions for organizing at Amazon. And one thing that really caught my attention was your discussion about geographic and spatial distribution of the warehouses themselves.

So how are other conditions like these sort of similar or different in these mega corporations now compared to, you know, you mentioned GM, compared to the GMs of the past, especially when labor was a sense. We're obviously in a very different moment than the postwar period. And that geographic decentralization that you spoke of, it's very it's a very important organizing factor, but I would argue that it doesn't fate organizing to uh failure because of that.

So in the CIO period, again, the period of labor upsurge in the nineteen thirties and forties. Most of the unions were focused overwhelmingly on place. And this made sense at a time when you had tremendous fixed capital investments in large manufacturing facilities. So Again, GM, Ford, GE, US Steel. They had these huge plants employing thousands of workers, sometimes tens of thousands of workers.

And if you could organize those places, you would essentially have control over the company. Right. And I and I say organized not just in terms of organize the workers and withdraw their labor. They wanted to seize control of the means of production in order to shut down the operations to show that they had actual physical leverage over the company. And they did it for the most part. These were operations that didn't just strike but shut down their operations for a certain amount of time.

This kind of focus made a lot of sense in the post-war period, where manufacturing dominance was built on these centers, on these places. And as a result, because unions were successful in this period, I think many labor organizations internalize this idea that you have to focus on the four walls of a particular facility and say you organize the workers there.

Mm-hmm. This made a lot of sense. This is also codified in in labor law as well, that you focus on place, that you run elections through individual places. Mm-hmm. And this made a lot of sense in the post-war period, where the dominance of the big corporations was focused on these very important manufacturing facilities. It makes much less sense today. I mean outside of its two or three key air hubs. There is no place in the US that Amazon would not cut bait on.

if there were union organizing present at it. They would immediately abandon the facility. Right. I think in one of your pieces you talked about what happened in Quebec, if I'm remembering in Quebec, yeah. So in Quebec, which has much better labor law than the US. They organized a warehouse, uh one warehouse in the province.

And because labor law forced Amazon to the table, uh they were set to negotiate, but before they did so, they not only closed that one warehouse, but they shuttered their operations in the entire province of Quebec. It's real Kaiser Sozet kind of. Yeah, that's pretty that's pretty stunning. I mean it goes to show why we talk about it as class war, you know.

But it's the kind of thing they can do because they don't have manufacturing facilities. They have warehouses, which are sometimes quite capital intensive, but sometimes quite cheap operations where If there's a problem there, they don't need to move big heavy equipment. They don't need to move all this investment in this one place. They can just say, well, there's a warehouse down the street and we can just go over there.

So Ben, if what you've described as being the the kind of the typical organizing strategy that came out of the manufacturing era is no longer sustainable or even sensible. in the kinds of workplaces that we see today in not just Amazon, but in the Walmarts and the logistics sector and in warehousing in general. So what kinds of organizing principles and strategies do you think are emerging Which are adjusting to this new reality in which might work.

I think key to formulating any successful strategy on a corporation is to understand what they care about, what they really care about and what would upset them enough to bring them to the table. In the case of Amazon, but not just Amazon, Walmart, Target, et cetera, what they care about is the efficient flow of inventory goods and packages through their distribution networks. That's what they care about.

And any particular node in that chain is not as important as the overall flow. And they've built redundancies into their system to make sure that there's no disruption. And so what labor needs to do is to map out where these facilities are, to understand their relation, and to maximize its disruptive impact, not over particular facilities, but over the overall flow of inventory through these systems.

And I think it can be done. I think that the knowledge is there as to where these facilities are and how they're related, but the organizing needs to be different in order to maximize disruptive impacts. In what way do you think it needs to change? So I'll give you an example. The Teamsters are very focused on delivery stations right now. Delivery stations are the last link in their supply chain. Packages are fulfilled at fulfillment centers. They generally go to sortation centers.

And then they end up at delivery stations where they're picked up to go to your lobby or doorstep. Delivery stations are interesting because they're a mix of drivers operating out of the facility and warehouse workers. They tend to be located in or near urban settings. Drivers tend to share associational networks with other drivers at USPS, at UPS, these are unionized workforces.

And so there's just a lot of beneficial factors for organizing involved at delivery stations. Yeah, the description you just laid out stands in stark contrast to the earlier one of people working silently with headphones on. Also it's it sounds like there's this web of all these different arteries that these giant corporations like Amazon and Walmart have

any one of which is no more important than the other, but they all eventually have to meet at the delivery station. Everything has to go the delivery station is the final node. And it's a center of these networks so that if you clog up the delivery station and stop things there. Everything else stops as well. It has a kind of a strategic centrality, right? That's the idea. The problem is that if you uh organize a delivery station and go on strike

you're impacting a very limited geographical area, which Amazon will get around by sending drivers from other delivery stations to that location just for the day, right? They have the capacity to staff up on any given day in order to build in that redundancy to their system.

What delivery station organizing can do and what I where the the direction I think it's headed is in thinking about upstream facilities that one could organize at or picket in order to maximize disruptive impacts across a broader geographical area.

And this is something that can be done under existing labor law even. And it's a kind of strategic thinking throughout the network that I think could be extended all the way up to inbound facilities. I think that's the kind of North Star of this kind of logistics organizing, thinking about organizing not just at particular nodes, but maximizing disruptive impacts through the entire supply chain.

And I think this is something true of all the big retailers. Walmart, Home Depot, Target, all of these companies have very sophisticated logistical operations that are very efficient. And if you can figure out how to maximize disruptive impacts across their entire supply chain, you have some degree of leverage over them that's greater than organizing at particular facilities.

There's an important point here to keep in mind because Melissa brought up the historical perspective on uh strategies that were useful and discovered during the heyday of manufacturing and the smokestacks versus the ones today. When These place-based strategies came about that Ben has talked about, like the in Flint, Michigan with the sit-down strike, but they literally just took over the factory.

And you couldn't replace them with scabs because they were inside the factory. And so management had no choice but to negotiate. These strategies were stumbled upon. Essentially, once the energy to do something and to organize came in, workers kind of stumbled into these strategies almost by accident. The key here for us is that if the labor movement pours the resources and the energies into organizing, They'll find it because no matter what,

It is still capital and it still has to make its profits and it's still got to go through the people who are doing the work. In some way or form, I'm pretty confident they're gonna come up with the right strategy if they are committed to doing the organizing.

One final point. In the nineteen thirties and forties, when these gigantic mills and these factories were established, which employed 10, 20, sometimes 40,000 people, it's interesting that the labor movement looked at that and said, We don't know how we're gonna organize. Because when the labor movement was born in Europe in the eighteen eighties and nineties, they were organizing small establishments, small shops of the kind we've had under neoliberalism.

That's where they cut their organizing teeth. And when these new technologies came about that created these gigantic factories and establishments, they looked at them and said, we don't have the know-how, the skills, and the knowledge to know how to navigate this. Until they figured it out. And now when we look back, we say, well, that was easy.

We could do that. Now in this new landscape of the fissured workplace and small shops and just in time and all that, how are we gonna organize it? The interesting thing is you're sort of going back to a kind of small shop capitalism, which is where the labor movement was born. All of which is to say It's been done before. It's just a question of figuring out, as Ben is saying, where do the key nodes lie which make them vulnerable? And then you go about doing it.

I should add one gloomier point, uh which is a lot then. When uh in the winter of nineteen thirty seven when GM workers were occupying the key strategic places within the Flint facility. The company wanted to send in the police.

And it was because uh Governor Frank Murphy held them back that that didn't happen. They eventually reached a settlement in February, right? This is one of the things that credited with the success of the CIO, that there were generally friendly political administrations, uh, which we do not have right now, of course. And I think it speaks to the except in New York. Except uh at the federal level, let's say. Uh you walked right into that one. But I do I do think it speaks to a kind of violence.

that the labor movement hasn't encountered for a long time and which the kind of disruption along supply chains would most assuredly bring. I think that any moment of labor upsurge right now when we effectively don't have a functioning labor law in the country would incite these kinds of things. And it's worth just mentioning. Yeah, well I wanted to bring up something that could be a gloomy point. It could be an optimistic point, but it it's something else that you talk about in your pieces.

which is some research that has come out in the last few years showing that actually the labor movement has a massive reserve of cash right now. But they don't seem to be using So are there hopeful signs that they will use this money to tackle these huge organizing projects like Amazon? Well, I can't speak to that directly. Fair enough. But yeah, there is a lot of money out there. Chris Boehner with Radish Research is the relevant reference. Uh he's done a lot of good work on union finances.

In that article that you mentioned, I talk about the other side of the ledger. Union expenditures, basically every two years, unions spend on the order of half a billion dollars on elections.

And I would argue that in this upcoming midterm, where they're about to spend five hundred million dollars in election where A, the political wins are in their favor, and B where their influence has been severely diminished because of an overall rise in individual contributions, that they don't probably need to spend that whole chunk of money on just the election and could maybe prioritize some other campaign. Right. I think you cited some statistic about labor's diminishing share of

essentially like added financial value to electoral campaigns right now. Yeah, this was from a a recent report from the Center for Working Class Politics about union candidates. And it's mostly about why unions should run their own members for office and how to do so. There's some very interesting examples out there.

But there's a kind of uh prefatory section in the report about the impact of unions contributions. And unions have spent about the same amount over the last decade, but because of the rise of other PAC and individual contributions. their influence over particular candidates has been severely diminished. In the 1990s, it was something like 15% of candidates' contributions, and today it's on the order of two percent.

I think it's understandable why there is this inclination to spend so much on elections because unions feel that the labor law as it exists right now is so hostile. And creates a landscape that's so difficult, almost impossible to navigate, that unless they have some assistance, some help from the legal angle,

when they take on a UPS or a Walmart or a Amazon, it's just really, really, really up against it. And so they'd like to see some help from the labor law angle to to make it a workable situation. The difficulty is this, that while it's totally understandable, it's also the case that That if you look at how much money would have to be poured into organizing, even with Friendly labor laws.

It's just orders of magnitude more than what they're spending now. And I think the essential lesson is that whatever else they do. They have to start really strategically prioritizing these organizing drives. Otherwise the law itself, even if it's changed, isn't gonna help them very much. This order of magnitude question I think is very, very important.

In an average year, let's say under under Biden, if that's average, and in the last couple of years of the Biden administration, unions were doing very well in terms of NLRB elections. There were more workers going through elections, there were more wins. But even in those good days, there was something like 100 to 120,000 workers every year voting in NLRB elections. In order for a 1% increase in union density, we need to organize somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 million workers.

Wow. It's just uh you know, we're just not not up to the task right now. So Ben, how optimistic are you that the labor movement will successfully organize these new mega corporations like Amazon?

Well, it takes the institutional will and if unions can see the writing on the wall that this is a real existential threat and that real resources need to be committed in order to make it successful, then I think it can be. But that requires very hard conversations within institutions that are threatened from all sides. And in that kind of situation.

it makes sense that unions would be very protective over what they do. It makes sense that union members would not necessarily want to spend a whole bunch on organizing, but rather want their union to service them. So there's all sorts of countervailing pressures here, but if the political will is there and if the money is there, I think a campaign can be very

I think there's another thing to keep in mind, which is that unions always are affected by the broader political culture because it instills in them a sense of how isolated they are or how much support they're gonna have. Because every strike requires support outside the workplace.

This is true in the thirties and it's true now. And we're living in in a moment when public opinion has never been as favorably disposed towards unions as it is today. It's remarkable that when union density in the private sector is in the single digits Public support for unions, the last I saw was over seventy percent. Which means that there is a kind of background condition which will make them more optimistic, more hopeful, and more inclined.

to take on these behemoths than you had in say the nineties and early aughts when there was this sense of pessimism and isolation on their part because in fact the overall culture was so much more hostile to them. I really do think with a younger generation of trade union organizers, with these currents inside the left that are s finally starting to see the centrality of labor to get anything going again.

And with the change in the broader culture, you know, one used to say that with labor that you used to joke that you should be optimistic of will but pessimistic of intellect. I'm actually moving to the point where I'm becoming optimistic of intellect as well. You're not seeing it yet, but all the conditions are lining up where labor organizing would take off. And there's another historical point to note. When unions were growing in the late 19th, early 20th century, it was never bit by bit.

You went from situations where virtually no one was organized. to five years later, you've got twenty percent of the labor force organized. It's explosive when it happens. And that's because Morale is so important in labor organizing. And when people see the effect, the possibility of successful organizing here or there, they take it up.

And I think that with all the conditions the way they are now, a general real understanding on the part of the culture that unions were the reason anything improved in the twentieth century. The understanding on the part of the workers that the bosses are just out to get us. And with the changes that Ben has talked about inside the ecology of these organizations, these corporations, where it looks like

things might be shifting to where the conditions for organizing are becoming friendlier. I think it's possible, I really do think it's possible that something like an explosive growth in unions might be on the agenda in the not too distant future.

Things changed very fast in the world of labor. After GM was organized, uh they got a one page contract which basically said GM recognizes the UAW as a bargaining representative of certain sectors of workers. That's all it said. It did with no wage gains or anything. But after that, I think Myron Taylor from US Steel was so scared by this that he was

sat down with John Lewis and said, Let's get this organized. And then you saw sit down strikes throughout the country and industries unconnected from auto. It was a radial crisis in America. There was a a lot of fear from the corporate class. And I think that if Amazon were organized today, you'd see something just like that. It would change the political calculus in America and you'd see a spark of union activity all over the country.

Confronting Capitalism is produced by Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy, and published by Jacobin. Connor Gillies is our audio editor. Our music is provided by Zonki. Thanks for listening.