Departments

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Amazon

  • SOURCE: New Labor Forum
    4/28/2023

    Wins at Amazon and Starbucks Shouldn't Obscure the Hard Road Independent Unions Face

    by Erik Loomis

    The improvised and worker-led efforts to organize the new economy giants has led some commenters to proclaim the end of big labor. A labor historian says that workers still need the resources and support of legacy unions – if they commit to organizing new workplaces – to win against employers more determined than ever to bust unions. 

  • 6/12/2022

    Should the USPS Honor the Sabbath, or Amazon?

    by Rebecca Brenner Graham

    A Pennsylvania postal worker's lawsuit claims religious discrimination because he was scheduled to deliver Amazon packages on Sunday. The history of Sunday mail service shows the case is about anxiety over power in society as much as religious obligation. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/6/2022

    Three Paths for Labor after Amazon

    by Harmony Goldberg and Erica Smiley

    The organizers of the Staten Island Amazon union mobilized a broad sense of justice politics not limited to the workplace. It remains to be seen how they can win allies in labor and the government to continue to organize against a wealthy and hostile company. 

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    4/4/2022

    The Amazon Union Vote is a Win for Hope

    by Ian Rocksborough-Smith

    "Despite historically low unionization rates, recent polls suggest at least 2/3 of Americans approve of labor unions – the highest approval rating since 1965. The ALU seems to have come along at exactly the right moment."

  • SOURCE: NBC News
    4/4/2022

    How Did Amazon Workers Win a Union? Look Back 100 Years

    by Kim Kelly

    The radical Black waterfront worker and organizer Ben Fletcher established a model of a democratic, antiracist, integrated labor union on Philadelphia's waterfront that echoes in the worker-led victory in establishing a union at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse. 

  • SOURCE: NPR
    11/29/2021

    The Rise and Fall (And Rise?) of Labor

    Historian Erik Loomis discusses whether the wave of labor activism will start to reverse a half-century of successful union busting by big business. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    4/15/2021

    Why the Amazon Workers Never Stood a Chance

    by Erik Loomis

    "We may be in a period where economic justice concerns are more central to our politics than any time since the mid-20th century. But without a new round of labor law reform, organized labor cannot succeed."

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    4/13/2021

    The Union Battle at Amazon Is Far from Over

    by Alec MacGillis

    The effort to organize Amazon's Alabama warehouse workers has failed. In this, it resembles the early stages of other organizing efforts that led to the brief golden era of American labor. Unexpected contingencies helped push management of American industry to accept unions by the 1940s despite their violent opposition decades before. 

  • SOURCE: Financial Times
    3/29/2021

    The Ultimate David and Goliath Fight in Alabama

    The effort to organize Amazon Workers in Bessemer, Alabama may succeed if it connects the cause of labor to broader civil rights issues that resonate with the local Black community and echo the involvement of Martin Luther King in struggles for workers and economic justice, say historians Keri Leigh Merritt and Michael Innis-Jiménez. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/12/2021

    Aruká Juma, Last Man of His Tribe, Is Dead

    As the last fluent speaker of the tribe’s language, Mr. Juma’s death means that much of the tribe’s language and many of its traditions and rituals will be forever lost.