Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers at seven facilities in the metro areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Southern California, and New York City are out on strike today, in what the union says is the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history. Unionized workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 fulfillment center have also authorized a strike and could soon follow. Workers in all these locations—five delivery stations and two fulfillment centers—have already shown majority support and demanded union recognition.
There are a lot of people out there struggling to put food on the table, to afford rent, and to pay their medical bills. When you have no other options, does it matter whether the pay is great or whether it will break you? When the problem today is surviving, you can ignore the problems it creates for tomorrow.
Yeah, there’s a reason why there’s such a massive resistance to things like public transit and universal healthcare; it’s because desperate plebs are easier to abuse. Someone dependent on their employer-provided health insurance will be less likely to step out of line when their access to important stuff like insulin is threatened.
The problems inherent to the system could be effectively papered over for a few decades by paying wages that outstripped inflation without layoff threats, allowed single-earner households to afford to own a house and two cars, take vacations, provide for several kids if they so chose, and then pensions.
The bootstrap group seems to forget what they had. Health insurance is certainly a major component, but single-payer on its own solves none of the other devolvements.