Amazon: Bessemer (Alabama, USA) – Referendums used against the workers’ struggle

At the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the vote to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (federated with the United Food and Commercial Workers, AFL-CIO) – according to the by no means compulsory practice favored by collaborationist unionism in the US – registered the defeat of the union’s supporters: 1,798 no votes, 738 yes. «The final count showed 1,798 votes against and 738 in favor, with about 55% of the 5,867 eligible workers casting a ballot, according to a tally by the National Labor Relations Board” (CBS News, April 9).

It is certainly no secret that Amazon has “worked” hard to intimidate the workers, and to win some of them over with real or presumed favours. Even The Wall Street Journal writes about it, always ready – like all the bosses’ press – to pretend to ignore such obvious facts when the workers’ struggle takes place within national borders.

First, if a vote is necessary, it should be done by open vote, by show of hands, in an assembly of those who have made the effort to attend, taking responsibility for the choice. It is even better if the meetings take place outside the workplace, more protected from corporate spies. With a secret ballot, on the other hand, individualism prevails, and, almost inevitably, the blackmail of the individual by the boss.

Second, even if the option that is supposed to be favorable to the workers prevails – such as, for example, the rejection of a sellout agreement or, as in the case of Bessemer, the introduction of the union into the workplace – struggle is in any case the necessary next step to actually implement it.

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There is no shortage of cases in which anti-worker agreements rejected by a referendum by the workers were then imposed in substantially the same way in the absence of an adequate strike force to bend the company to the verdict of the vote.

The US is no exception. In 2018, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, representing workers at UPS, overruled a majority of the members who voted down a contract that let the company force drivers to take a pay cut from $36 to $30 per hour as well as increased overtime, hire many more part-time workers, and pull out of a joint pension plan it maintained with the union. The union leadership invoked a provision in the constitution that allowed them to do this if the vote fell below a certain threshold.

Also noteworthy is the corruption scandal that rocked the United Autoworkers. Multiple local and international UAW officers, including members of the UAW executive board, were caught taking millions of dollars in bribes from auto industry officials. These piecards abandoned their members and locals, and have allowed Chrysler, GM, Ford, et al. to ram wage cuts and speedups down the throats of the workers. The companies are allowed to hire many more permatemps and lower-skilled workers at a cut rate, while gradually eliminating the high-paying, skilled tradesmen’s jobs.

In each of these instances, strikes were deliberately averted and contracts forced on the rank-and-file by top-level officials. The contract – the relationship between the piecards and the bosses – not the union, was sacred. We should expect nothing different from RWDSU.

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It is organising and striking more than voting that counts. In other words, it is the strength that counts: the strength of the organisation, of the strike, of the picket line.

The bosses are well aware of this, which is why they try to ensnare the workers in the trap of individual voting. This is helped by all the collaborationist trade unions, as well as the inadequate ideological framework of many leaders of trade unionism, who often invoke the myth of referendums and democracy in the abstract.

This “democracy” – one head, one vote – wants the opinion of the sycophant, the coward, the scab, the individualist to be worth as much as that of the worker with more experience of trade union battles and who fights and has sacrificed themselves for the interests of his comrades and his class. This “democracy” wants the weapon of intimidation to be left to the company and the collaborationist trade unions, who use it in a thousand ways, and never used by the combative workers against the scabs, for example on the picket line. This “democracy” wants the strike, or even just the union organisation proposed by a substantial minority of workers to be denounced by the company and the press as “illegitimate”. It is nearly always the case that it is not the majority of workers who are able to predict the real balance of power in the field and the actual chances of mobilisation and victory. Often, only a minority of the workers, in a factory or in an industry, start to organise or go on strike, counting on having a good chance of quickly convincing the rest to follow suit. Waiting for the prior and formal opinion of the majority means to postpone, maybe for years, the reaction of the workers, guaranteeing the bosses many more years of exploitation and profits.

Sometimes a strike can win by involving the great mass of the exploited even if it is initiated by a minority. For the class struggle is a question of strength, and therefore certainly of numbers, of the great masses, who mobilise, and much less of individual opinions, which may not even rise to consciousness, and that often only with much delay.

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If the workers in Bessemer were not able to organise themselves today using the ineffective and unsuccessful methods of collaborationist unionism, they will do so tomorrow using the very different means of class unionism. In any case, it is certain that one in three Bessemer workers wants to form a trade union: we think this is a very good result, which gives us hope that they will soon build their own trade union, outside the constraints and intimidation of the bosses!