Just a quick lil draft because i want to make this right. I also used the advice i got here to help me make it so thank you all!
Just a quick lil draft because i want to make this right. I also used the advice i got here to help me make it so thank you all!
Those absolutely make sense to me, thanks for sharing!
The first two kinda dovetail with something I’ve heard elsewhere - that unions are becoming a service that a worker subscribes to, and not something that they’re actively participating in.
I think a militant minority would definitely get workers more leverage with corporations, but I understand why unions as a legal entity need to do things by the book. I think there’s a balance to strike between the weak “we will follow all laws, regulations, and norms” and the mob-boss “it’d be a shame if something were to happen to production timelines,” and I agree that things currently seem to skew too far towards the former.
I don’t even necessarily mean breaking the law with respect to minority tactics. All of these large (inter)national corporations have choke points that can be shut down by minority walkouts or even concerted slowdowns. If they are the whole production chain withers.
For instance, the Flint sit down strike was impactful not because of how they shut down the operation, but because the factory they occupied was highly specialized and essential to the production of the cars. Even without getting every worker in the industry to join the union, UAW beat the auto industry.
When looking at a corporation like Amazon, we aren’t going to convince the hundreds or even thousands of workers in any given warehouse to be militant and engaged in their union. Even if we could there’s thousands of warehouses that they can just reroute stuff through. That’s tens of thousands of workers that need to be organized.
There are people in each warehouse that are essential though, probably in the unloading and loading of trucks and maybe other roles as well. If these people walk of the job suddenly everything grinds to a halt. If these people walked off the job at every Amazon warehouse at the same time Amazon’s retail operation is fucked for at least a few weeks. Now you’re only looking at organizing hundreds of workers across the US instead of tens of thousands. This is critical because what the labor movement really needs to convince the great mass of workers is big wins they can point to, not one-on-ones or organic leaders or any of that.
The current orthodoxy though is for whole shops to act in concert which is undoubtedly effective when it happens but rarely actually happens.