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Amazon, Starbucks, and Other U.S. Workers Fight the Putins at Home, While Ukraine’s Fight for Democracy Rages On
While Americans’ chief worries these days are surging inflation and the fate of global democracy at stake in the Ukraine’s struggle to repel Putin’s barbaric invasion, Americans — and certainly the mainstream media — pay much less attention to recent rumblings in the American labor movement that represent sources of hope on both these fronts, offering at once greater financial stability and also more robust economic and political democracy for Americans.
Last Friday, Amazon workers at a processing facility in Staten Island voted by a significant margin to form the first ever collective bargaining unit at the behemoth corporation. Amazon, of course, has long and strenuously resisted such organizing efforts, apparently believing workers should have no say in workplace conditions, the organization of their work, or their pay and benefits. In short, while we supposedly honor democracy in America, Amazon doesn’t believe democracy belongs in the American workplace or economy at all.
This victory, though, which may prove a springboard for more widespread unionization of the American workforce, highlights the key role unions can and need to play in ensuring economic security for Americans as well as for protecting and realizing democracy…
