Unionize Amazon with Class Struggle!

Bring Out All Labor to Win
Amazon Teamster Strikes!

Scabherding cops, enforcers for the bosses, enemies of the workers.  Police out in force on Day One of the Teamsters Amazon strike to stop pickets from blocking exit from DBK4 facility in Maspeth, Queens, New York.  (Internationalist photo)

DECEMBER 20 – Yesterday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) launched strikes at seven Amazon facilities around the U.S. after giving the company a December 15 deadline to agree to begin negotiations for a union contract. Amazon is the world’s third largest corporation whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, is the third richest man in the world. The e-commerce giant is a hardline anti-union employer. It has refused to bargain with the Teamsters-affiliated Amazon Labor Union (ALU) after the ALU won a representation election in April 2022 at the massive JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, NY. Overcoming the Amazon bosses’ opposition will take hard class struggle, mobilizing the power of the entire labor movement.

The strike was kicked off at 6 a.m. Thursday by drivers at the DBK4 facility in Maspeth, Queens, New York, and then by Amazon workers at three locations in southern California, as well as in Atlanta, San Francisco and Skokie, Illinois. Tonight, it will extend to JFK8 and other facilities, at the peak of the holiday delivery season. Having invested millions in union-busting and surveilling workers, Amazon is unlikely to fold anytime soon. What’s posed is a showdown between labor and capital that could influence the future of unions for years to come. It is urgent that all labor – as well as students, immigrants and other union supporters – come out in large numbers to build mass picket lines to shut down the warehouses and stop the deliveries!

Internationalists and class-struggle trade unionists from UPS joined picket line at DBK4, December 19. (Internationalist photo)

A real show of labor’s power will inspire workers at Amazon and elsewhere. Supporters of the Internationalist Group reported from several strike locations yesterday. At DBK4 in New York, there were upwards of 200 people on the picket lines, including a number of drivers in their blue vests. There was also a large and heavy-handed police presence, to prevent picketers from stopping Amazon vans. At one point, the scabherding cops prevented a driver leaving the warehouse from getting out of his van to join the pickets, shoving him back in from both doors, and then yanking him out to arrest him. They also arrested Anthony Rosario, a Teamster organizer and activist, for “blocking a roadway.”

At the DCK6 facility in San Francisco, delivery vans were only stopped for a couple of minutes, tops, more often stopped for a few seconds and then waved through. Several workers we spoke with were quite upset with this, but others said that legally they couldn’t stop fellow workers from scabbing. But that depends on the balance of class forces. At one point, the company tried to open up a second gate from vans to drive out, but we joined a squad of picketers who showed up at the gate. For a few minutes there was a standoff, and then the vans turned around.

At DAX5 in City of Industry, Los Angeles, at the main gate the Amazon 18-wheelers were held up, sometimes for 30 minutes, as sheriff’s deputies at one point saw there weren’t enough of them compared to 75 militant Teamsters and drove off. This put a crimp in Amazon’s operations, but at another entrance, picket leaders just let scabs go through. A militant L.A. transit worker from ATU Local 1277 spoke on the picket line saying that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is not neutral, you can’t trust capitalist politicians and we need to “make Teamsters like 1934 again,” referring to the historic Minneapolis strikes, led by Trotskyists, that laid the basis for Teamster power. A key lesson for today: to win a strike, picket lines mean don’t cross – period!

In San Francisco, IG and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth on the picket line at DCK6.  (Internationalist photo)

From coast to coast, we’re hearing a lot of illusions in the NLRB, which many workers are looking to for support. Yes, a 2023 ruling by the Labor Board established that when an overall employer sets essential conditions for workers, they can be considered “joint employers” and their employees have the right to unionize. Last August, the NLRB recognized Amazon’s 280,000 drivers – formally hired by Amazon’s “Delivery Service Partners” – as Amazon employees. But the Board is an agency of the capitalist government. It was set up in 1935 to regulate and stifle class struggle. Companies like Amazon rely on the NLRB to crush, postpone or hogtie union organizing with a web of bureaucratic processes.

Recently various liberals and reformists, like the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA), campaigned for people to call Senate majority leader Democrat Chuck Schumer to fast-track Democrat Joe Biden’s nominations to the NLRB before Trump gets into office. It failed. Looking to Biden, who banned a rail strike in 2022, to appoint “labor-friendly” members to a board that was set up to keep labor in check is a dead end. Democrats are not “friends of labor,” but enemies who are in Wall Street’s pocket. Strikes, unions and contract gains are not won by relying on the bosses’ government or the bosses’ parties. Class-struggle trade unionists oppose all government control of the workers movement.

As for Donald Trump, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien sought to play both sides in this past presidential election, speaking at the Republican National Convention. This is not something new. After being targeted by Democrat Robert Kennedy, who went after Jimmy Hoffa in the 1950s and ’60s (because Hoffa won the first nationwide Master Freight Agreement), the IBT endorsed war criminal Richard Nixon in 1972, and supported Republicans for years. But this is self-defeating. It should be obvious to everyone that Trump will be very bad news for labor, and now he has brought in Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, for the dirty work of mass firings and busting unions.

At Amazon's DAX5 facility in City of Industry, Los Angeles, California, on December 19. All of labor should mobilize to bring unionists to the Teamsters picket lines.  (Internationalist photo)

A key focus for labor in the coming months must be to fight Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations, the biggest in U.S. history, of millions of immigrants, and not only those who lack the documents the government demands of them even as the employers viciously exploit their labor. Immigrant workers are a backbone of key sectors of the working class, from agriculture and packing houses to restaurants, taxis, health care and construction. Recently, on the West Coast, Class Struggle Workers – Portland (CSWP) has won approval for motions in a number of area unions to mobilize union memberships to defend immigrants against deportations and racist attacks.

In Trump’s first presidency, hundreds of unionists came out to a June 2017 Portland Labor Against Fascists mobilization, initiated by the CSWP, to stop a fascist provocation. Recently, several of these unions, including in the construction trades, have passed resolutions for workers actions against the U.S.-Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. This underlines the need for labor, in its defense of union rights, to defend all the downtrodden, from immigrants to transgender people, and to oppose U.S. imperialist wars abroad. For all his rhetoric against a “Deep State,” and posturing as a champion of peace in Ukraine, Trump’s plans to build more concentration camps for immigrants, to use the military to carry out deportations are a threat to all.

The same military using the same police-state laws will be used to arrest “rioters,” whether pro-Palestinian demonstrators or striking unionists. His vow to be a “dictator” on “day one” and to issue hundreds of executive orders is a further escalation of the actions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who also governed by executive orders, used the courts to go after opponents and built up the immigration police. Trump’s threats cap a decades-long drive by both bosses’ parties in the direction of a strong state to roll back social gains and basic democratic rights in sweeping repressive fashion. The Internationalists call to break with all capitalist parties and to build a workers party to fight for a workers government.

Amazon workers walk out during strike at the Amazon air hub KSBD in San Bernardino, Southern California, on Saturday, December 21.  For a joint union drive, including Teamsters, ILWU and others, to organize the warehouse and transportation corridor of the Inland Empire! 
(Internationalist photo)

Amazon strikers are going up against a giant corporation with 1.5 million employees worldwide, headed by labor-hating mega boss Jeff Bezos (net worth: $246 billion), and will soon face a government of billionaires, with Elon Musk ($454 billion) as hatchet man who revels in breaking strikes and busting unions. The present strike may be intended as a time-limited action, but to take on and defeat these powerful forces will take a lot more than business-as-usual unionism. It will require the kind of class-struggle methods – flying pickets, plant occupations and workers defense guards – which built the industrial unions in the 1930s.

This poses the need for a concerted national effort of a major union or coalition of unions. The Teamsters are in a strong position to lead such a drive, but to win will take solidarity action by key sectors of the working class. In particular, dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the East and Gulf Coasts and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) on the West Coast are key. The ILA shut down the ports in a three-day strike in October, and is fighting the threat of automation that also faces warehouse workers. The largely immigrant and un-unionized port truckers are another vital link in the supply chain, which if joining in common union action can shut down the profit-greedy bosses.

Labor needs to use its muscle in the Amazon strike as part of defending our basic rights against the coming onslaught from the White House against our rights on the job and those of all the groups on Trump’s hit list. The working class has the power. The issue is to use it or lose it, now more than ever. Victory to the Amazon Teamsters Strike! Unionize Amazon with class struggle! Organize the unorganized!  ■

The Strike Steps Up

At 12:01 a.m. Saturday, December 21, picketing began at the giant JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the largest Amazon facility in New York City and hone of the Amazon Labor Union. To take on the worldl’s third largest corporation, it is vital to extend the strike from distribution centers to warehouses and air transport hubs.   (Photos: [above] Dakota Santiago for The New York Times; [below]  Internationalist photo)