For R14: From the Campus to the Amazon Shop Floor

An Amazon worker in YDSA argues for the passage of R14, which seeks to strengthen the pipeline between YDSA chapters and jobs in Amazon warehouses, critical sites for the future of class struggle. 

The fight to organize at Amazon is the fight of our lifetime. The history of the labor movement is marked by radicals intentionally taking up jobs in the heart of industry in order to confront capital alongside an organized working class. YDSA has the task of continuing this history by educating young radicals on the importance of this fight, and building up the support network needed to strengthen the pipeline from student organizing to the shop floors of Amazon.

Since the 1960s, global capitalism has recomposed itself in the logistics industry–which handles the movement and distribution of products–partially in response to worker organizing in the manufacturing industry. Past are the heydays of textile, steel, and auto. The top private-sector employers in the U.S. today are companies that have built out sophisticated logistical operations–Walmart, Amazon, UPS, and Fedex. Globally, Amazon is the second largest private-sector employer with 1.5 million workers; around 1 million of those workers are in the U.S. Its distribution network has grown exponentially in just the past 6 years, from 84 new warehouses built in 2018 to 299 built in 2020. 79% of large warehouses (sites with more than 1,000 workers) in the U.S. are Amazon warehouses. As capital has concentrated itself into logistics, significant proportions of the working class are found working at Amazon.

Not only are workers highly concentrated in Amazon, but these shop floors are at the conjuncture of various segments of the international working class. Workers that have always known a life of getting by paycheck-to-paycheck, second- and third-generation immigrants, those bouncing around from job to job across firms and industries, college-educated individuals struggling with finding employment in their field, and immigrants fleeing conflict and harsh living conditions labor side by side. Within my own site, I have encountered at least nine languages spoken among workers. A number of these workers are immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, so at this moment it is especially important to build an organization of solidaristic fightback that can be a vehicle for the defense of immigrants.

This is particularly pressing with the current rise of nationalistic sentiment in labor, exemplified by figures like Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters utilizing anti-China rhetoric in workplace campaigns while cozying up with the Republican Party; and even figures like Shawn Fain and the UAW supporting tariffs and a willingness to work alongside Trump to “rebuild U.S. manufacturing” on the terms of American firms. But to fight against the rightward turn of labor (particularly in the Teamsters), we must commit to the rank and file strategy, organize within these unions and radically transform them by bringing in the international working class. 

We can radically change the whole of the labor movement through our organizing at Amazon, where we seek to practice a self-determination from the shop floor that works beyond the state, and in the everyday lives of workers, in a way that breaks down the barriers that previously existed between them. At Amazon we are not organizing the American worker, but workers in America. It is here, at the base, where we can most meaningfully confront Amazon’s international supply chain and build out our network of solidarity with workers at facilities across borders along this supply chain.

As we join this fight of our lifetimes, we must place ourselves in the historical context of an ongoing struggle against Amazon. Committed socialists are needed at every step of the way as we confront the challenges that are the product of previous instances of struggle. Efforts at Amazon lived before our participation in it, and lives through our shop-floor organizing as we set the terrain for those to confront in the next round of struggle. The future of organizing at Amazon depends on our willingness to get involved and subject ourselves to the current terrain of struggle now. 

Class struggle is a process, and it is one in which we as workers use our creativity and initiative to change the balance of power between bosses and workers through our day to day activities alongside our co-workers. If we ourselves do not enter the fight and build a union presence at Amazon, there is no guaranteeing that it will be built. Yet, simultaneously, one cannot view themselves as the singular actor in building the union. What matters is not if we ourselves see firsthand the struggle at our sites from its first committee to a union contract and beyond, but that we get rooted among our co-workers, to borrow a term from another comrade at Amazon. To do so means that even after we are gone, the initial seeds of class struggle that we have planted have outlasted its previous form in only ourselves or a handful of committee members, and has grown into a stronger, wider-reaching network of roots that has the ability to hold itself down and reproduce the class struggle at Amazon.

A significant number of YDSA members are on track to take up careers through which we hope to strengthen the class struggle, such as teaching or nursing. We have a unique opportunity as graduating students to devote time to building the union at Amazon, either for the long haul or before going into the careers we studied for. Many of us have already made the decision to postpone entering the workforce in order to get a degree, strengthen our résumé, and make ourselves more marketable to employers. As socialists, to flip this logic on its head would be to dedicate time in our post-graduation years to enter the class struggle at its most decisive site, at Amazon, and thus helping to strengthen the power of the working class as a whole. 

R14: “From the Campus to the Amazon Shop Floor” seeks to connect YDSA members with local Amazon workers and encourage them to join the struggle at Amazon. It is a do-or-die for the labor movement. It is a daunting, yet liberating realization of the power we have to influence the outcome of the fight at Amazon. As tenant organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis wrote in Abolish Rent, “a view of history as class struggle may be inconvenient. It means the sorry state of things has obtained because we let it…. But it also means we can be the ones to change things. We’re all we’ve got, but we’re also the ones we’ve been waiting for.” In the struggle to organize at Amazon, it is none other than ourselves and each other in YDSA that we have been waiting for.