By Matthew Cunningham-Cook
&
David Sirota
Read the full article from Lever News, here.
The president promised to halt federal contracts to union busters — but the deal was just re-awarded to Amazon while the company was crushing a union drive.
By Matthew Cunningham-Cook
and Julia Rock
Read the full article from The Lever, here.
The retailer’s anti-labor activities could be violating the terms of multi-million subsidy deals it has scored in New York.
Read the full article from Labor Notes, here.
By Jason Del Rey
Read the full article from Vox, here.
Amazon wanted to make former employee Chris Smalls the face of labor activism. He just handed Amazon its first US union.
By Sudip Bhattacharya
Read the full article from Protean Magazine, here.
Sudip Bhattacharya’s interviews with workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island reveal ruthless conditions, management’s overwhelming power—and how, despite that, they’ve found solidarity in organizing the Amazon Labor Union.
From Democracy Now!
Watch the full interview from Democracy Now! here.
“I want to really emphasize that what makes the history of Alabama unionization important was the role of the left. You know, the fact is, the reason why we have anti-labor legislation, we have violence against labor in Alabama, what appears to be conservatives, the reason we have Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of Black people, the most draconian anti-immigration laws, is precisely because those who rule the South know the potential of an interracial labor movement, because they’ve seen it.”
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Read the full article from The Atlantic here.
“Amazon’s influence is so vast—touching on issues from wealth and income inequality to antitrust policy, the American relationship with China, the omnipotence of workplace surveillance, and the atomizing effect of big business, in its most concentrated and powerful form, on families and communities—that it can scramble ordinary politics…The fight in Bessemer is different because it is so direct. Amazon isn’t a proxy for the future of the economy but its heart.”
By Liz Farmer
Read the series on the gig economy from the Rockefeller Institute here.
“Part One of this series will address the legislative approach to protecting gig workers’ rights in California and other states. Part Two looks at efforts to protect gig companies. Part Three will look at how the COVID-19 economic crisis might influence the gig economy and labor policy going forward.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from The New Yorker here.
“Chicago schools were slated to reopen in the fall, when the school year began, but rising rates of community spread and a lack of proper protections resulted in the continuation of remote learning. Chicago Public Schools then announced that it would plan to reopen in January—just as infection rates and deaths were rising exponentially across the country. Chicago teachers voted with their feet. When they were asked to report to their buildings on January 4th, only forty-nine per cent did.”
By Marc Bayard
Read the full article from The Nation, here.
“These actions and acts of radical defiance by workers have made it clear that systemic racism cannot be separated from the growing and perverse economic inequalities that have devastated Black workers and Black America for generations, and made them much more vulnerable to the current global pandemic. To win the corporate accountability required to rectify this inequality, our labor and worker movement must embrace this racial awakening and elevate and adequately resource Black people in roles of leadership and strategy.”