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Are we holding the leash or wearing the collar? (TBD)

Philadelphia Protest at Amazon’s union-busting law firm Morgan & Lewis in solidarity with Alabama Amazon Workers on this national day of action! February 20, 2021. Photo by Joe Piette via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Amazon workers on Staten Island voted on Friday to unionize, a first for the “fulfillment” behemoth. (There’s a textbook corporate euphemism.) Amazon has pushed back against unionization efforts before. This time it lost. The vote was 2,654 to 2,131. A “do over” election ordered by the National Labor Relations Board at another Amazon facility in Alabama was too close to call and is being recounted.

Farther north, workers on Staten Island celebrated (NPR):

The workers, who pick and package items for customer orders at the facility will be represented by the Amazon Labor Union, an upstart group formed by Christian Smalls after he was fired from Amazon in March 2020. At the time a supervisor at the fulfillment center, he staged a walkout over the lack of worker protections against the coronavirus. Amazon says Smalls violated safety protocols by showing up after he’d been told to quarantine due to a COVID exposure.

Shortly after being fired, Smalls formed the Amazon Labor Union, relying on GoFundMe to finance the operation. The ALU is not affiliated with any national union, leading many to wonder early on whether it could even gather enough employee signatures to petition for a vote. Indeed, a first attempt failed, but Smalls persevered, eventually meeting the 30% threshold necessary to hold a vote.

Amazon mounted a robust anti-union campaign. Inside the warehouse, management hung “Vote No” banners and held mandatory meetings at which workers were urged to reject the ALU, which it referred to as a third party. The company has maintained that it prefers to work directly with its employees to make Amazon a great place to work.

Chris Hayes stated the obvious and, well, set me off:

Dan Price, founder and CEO of Gravity Payments, decided seven years ago that the new minimum wage at his Seattle-based credit card processing company would be $70,000 a year. He slashed his own million-dollar paycheck to $70,000 to make it happen and it cut profits in half. By September last year he had doubled the number of employees and his business has tripled. He’s still paying himself $70,000 a year. Turnover was cut in half. CBS reported, “To repay Price for his sacrifices and for the dreams he has made possible, his employees decided to all chip in and buy him a car.”

Price offered a lengthy tweet thread on Friday (over 40 tweets) chronicling Amazon’s very different business model. A sampling:

2. Amazon paid a 6% tax rate last year, which is up from 0% a few years prior.

So one of the richest companies in the world pays a lower tax rate than their warehouse workers making $31k a year.

Were those saved taxes used to help workers or profits?

3. Amazon pays its workers so little that they often qualify for food stamps. It is among the top 3 employers (along with Walmart and McDonald’s) whose employees are on public assistance in virtually every state

4. Amazon just flat-out stole $60 million in tips from drivers. For real.

Its punishment:
*No one goes to jail
*No fine
*Just pay back the $60 million – which Amazon makes every hour and 15 minutes

5. After Amazon announced a $15 min wage, it came out later (to much less fanfare) that it ended worker bonuses and stock options.

Altogether, a lot of workers actually got a pay cut. Yet Amazon still touts its $15/wage to this day as if it was a gift

6. In July, Jeff Bezos went to space and added $1.745 billion to his net worth. So he literally could have dumped a billion dollars out of his space ship and still gained more money than 23,000 Amazon warehouse workers will make all year combined.

7. Amazon’s turnover rate is 150% a year. Seriously. 150%. They’re so desperate for labor they cut off disability benefits for a worker who got brain damage on the job and pressured him to come back.

Price has much, much more. I’ve written about this again and again.

Just because, here’s something I wrote in December 2014 on how screwed up our corporate business model is:


Why you … you want to punish success!
by Tom Sullivan

I wanted to follow up on Steve Fraser’s comments to Bill Moyers. Fraser is wondering when people in this new Gilded Age age will rise up to oppose the robber barons, as our forebears did 100 years ago. He spoke of how, out of the social upheavals that ended the Gilded Age, Americans created a social safety net, a “civilized capitalism that protects people against the worst vicissitudes of the free market.” But the wealth worshipers of the second Gilded Age have shredded it, and an even deeper, more pervasive corruption has overtaken Washington, and with a direct line to Wall Street:

It is the consummate all embracing expression of the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom. In other words, it used to be you could talk about freedom and the free market as distinct notions. Now, and for some time, since the age of Reagan began free market capitalism and freedom are conflated. They are completely married to each other. And we have, as a culture, bought into that idea. It’s part of what I mean when I say the attenuating of any alternatives.

That is, TINA. (There Is No Alternative.) Yet that’s just what many jobless Millennials are searching for.

“It is axiomatic in our current political culture,” says Fraser, “that when we say freedom we mean capitalism.” I would add, that when we say capitalism, we mean, principally, one particular style for organizing a business: the modern corporation.

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Kudzu invasion, by FrenchKheldar via Creative Commons

Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”

Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.

We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

* h/t Robert Nozick


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