Amazon Agonistes: Why So Many Democrats are AWOL on the ALU
Inclusive populism centered on the demands of exploited workers could fire a new social movement, but not if corporate-dependent Dems remain in charge
The most important change agent in the struggling Biden Administration is probably Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, who stepped into that position last summer. As Harold Meyerson explains in The American Prospect, she is using her power to dramatically rebalance the playing field for American workers who are seeking to unionize. Because of her, the NLRB’s lawyers managed to get Amazon—which calls itself “Earth’s Best Employer”—to agree in December to allow warehouse workers to organize inside their mammoth workplaces, pledging, for example, to not threaten workers with discipline or call the police when they engage in union activity in non-work areas during their non-work time. Since October, union petitions filed with the NLRB for certification elections have risen 57%, up to 1,174 from 748 a year ago.
Abruzzo is also pushing the NLRB to ban “captive audience” meetings, where companies compel workers to attend sessions aimed at convincing them to vote against unionizing. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employees are supposed to be able to freely choose whether they want to unionize, and Abruzzo is arguing that means these company-sponsored meetings must be voluntary. The law, she says, “protects employees’ right to listen as well as their right to refrain from listening to employer speech” and “Forcing employees to listen to such employer speech under threat of discipline—directly leveraging the employees’ dependence on their jobs—plainly chills employees’ protected right to refrain from listening to this speech.” (If only the rightwingers in such a froth over their schoolkids being exposed to ideas that might make them uncomfortable cared as much about the rights of workers to not be forced to listen to harangues from bosses.)
It’s hard to imagine Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, appointing someone as aggressively pro-labor to the NLRB. That’s because he, the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review, is a product of the academic-philanthropic-nonprofit industrial complex, not the son of a used-car salesman who was a lousy student that ranked near the bottom of his class at Syracuse Law School. There’s something about not being the smartest kid in the class that makes a person value broad-based organizations meant to lift everyone rather than just reward the most meritorious. (Not only was Obama a darling of the finance sector, which poured a lot of early money into his first presidential campaign, he was an unvarnished fan of Big Tech.) A few days ago, speaking to a conference of building-trades unionists, Biden advertised his pro-labor sympathies with a grin, declaring, in the wake of the victory of the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, “By the way, Amazon, here we come.” But as Sam Adler-Bell notes in a sharp piece for New York magazine, the Democratic party Biden inherited from Obama is riddled with Amazonistas. Not only is Jay Carney, Amazon’s top lobbyist, a former Obama press secretary (who, Adler-Bell reports, used to play in a garage band with current Secretary of State Antony Blinken), at least nine other top Amazon execs are former Obamanauts. Adler-Bell writes, “In an era of populism and anti-elite suspicion, this reality — of an incestuous consulting class that flits back and forth between public and private power — is a profound detriment to the Democratic Party’s legitimacy.”
A few weeks ago, The New York Times published an excerpt from historian Michael Kazin’s new book What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. In it, he argued that the reason Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda has stalled is because Democrats “lack a social movement of working people that could turn passive support for universal social programs into a force large and vocal enough to enact lasting change.” Movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the “Resistance” (sorry, can’t honor whatever the 2017-2020 surge was without putting that word in quotes) failed to win lasting change, Kazin wrote, because they lacked a message that could unite Americans across racial lines. Let’s leave aside whether that claim is true. Kazin was arguing for a different path to Democratic revival, via the young people fighting to unionize the workplaces of the new economy. “Democrats need to grab this opportunity if they intend to birth a new era of progressive change. Without such a movement, hopes for a transformative age of reform are likely to be stillborn. Throughout American history, political elites have never started fundamental policy changes on their own; they need a well-organized force of discontented, determined citizens to make them do it.”
Well, yes to that idea, but then let’s look at the actual Democrats grabbing the opportunity. So far, since the ALU’s unprecedented win at the massive JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, a total of 13 Senators and 52 House members have spoken up publicly to applaud the union, according to More Perfect Union, a news-site that covers labor. (A few additional members signed onto a tough letter criticizing Amazon for unsafe working conditions back in December.) Almost three-quarters of the Democrats currently sitting in Congress have said nothing. Why not? Well, the so-called “party of working people” is mainly funded by wealthy special interests, who dominate the financing of campaigns. Probably a lot more Democrats sympathize with the ALU than feel comfortable saying so, because they worry more about offending corporate interests than labor.
What distinguishes the Democrats who have applauded the ALU and dared to buck Amazon? They are far more likely to get a large portion of their campaign funds in small donations. According to OpenSecrets, there are nine Democrats (and one independent) who raised more than half of their campaign haul in 2020 in small donations (meaning, amounts of $200 or less per donor). Eight of those ten, marked in bold, are ALU fans:
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): 79.5%
Lori Trahan (D-MA): 79.4%
Bernie Sanders (D-VT): 70.3%
Adam Schiff (D-CA): 59.0%
Ilhan Omar (D-MN): 57.7%
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): 56.5%
Cori Bush (D-MO): 55.4%
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA): 55.3%
Jamaal Bowman (D-NY): 52.1%
Katie Porter (D-CA): 52.0%
Of the 40 Democrats who got at least 20% of their money from small donors, 16 have spoken in support of the Amazon union’s victory. So, of the 50 Democrats with substantial small-donor funding bases, 48% have dared to speak out against Amazon. (What’s up with Adam Schiff and Katie Porter? Well, employees of Comcast, AT&T, Alphabet and Facebook ranked high in individual donations to Schiff’s 2020 warchest. Employees of Alphabet and Amazon show up high in Porter’s pool. But the aggregate sums aren’t large.)
The problem for progressives is how few Democrats aren’t beholden to big money. Who knew, right? By the way, if you look at the small group of Democrats who got a substantial portion of their campaign funds in 2020 from labor PACs, so far few of them have said anything about the ALU’s victory. A total of 48 House Democrats got at least 15% of their donations from such PACs in 2020; just 11 of them—Donald Payne (D-NJ), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Chuy Garcia (D-IL), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Andy Levin (D-MI), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Lori Trahan (D-MA), Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), Brendan Boyle (D-PA) and Don Norcross (D-NJ)—have welcomed the upstart union.
(A big thank you to Doug Weber of OpenSecrets for pulling this data together. If you’d like to run your own analyses of small donor and labor PAC money and Members of Congress, here’s the spreadsheet.)
—An update to my post last week about the Amazon Labor Union related to their use of tech. One piece of organizing tech that I failed to mention was the union’s use of NationBuilder to keep track of the workers they were contacting at the Staten Island warehouse complex and manage volunteers. Oh, and in the consumer tech department, they also have a Substack.
—Bonus link: Friday afternoon I drove down to Staten Island to go a press conference held by the worker-organizers of the ALU; here is my reporter’s notebook on what I saw and heard. The next big test for the ALU is the LDJ5 sort center across the road from JFK8, where a certification vote will happen in two weeks. One big question I have is whether the workers there have had enough of the same experience as JFK8—did Amazon’s mishandling of COVID radicalize them? Is there a core of organizers with the same degree of commitment and trust amongst each other as at JFK8? The ALU has shown there is a way to turn Amazon’s draconian management practices into votes for unionizing, but personal experiences and connections still matter a lot.
Slouching Toward 2022
—Rachel Cohen has a must-read piece in the Intercept exploring why Congress appropriated just $75 million for election security in the recently passed $1.5 trillion omnibus bill, less than one-fifth of what it authorized in 2020 and tiny fraction of the $20 billion over ten years that a coalition of leading civil rights groups sought for election infrastructure last summer. What happened? She offers an inside-baseball breakdown of the politics of the voting rights movement as it tried to push comprehensive voting rights legislation over the finish line, and points a finger at the Brennan Center for Justice, a big player in the coalition, which chose not to support the $20 billion ask because it wanted to not undermine the more ambitious For the People Act, and a last-minute change of mind by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who appears to have been moved by similar thinking according to this report by Jessica Huseman of Votebeat. Senator Amy Klobuchar tried to restore $10 billion in funding via the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but her amendment wasn’t voted on. One House staffer told Huseman that Pelosi and Rep. Paul Sarbanes, the lead sponsor of the For the People Act, were intending to “hold election funding hostage” pending the passage of the act. As we all know, it was torpedoed in the Senate.
If you don’t think election infrastructure is a problem, consider these two fun facts: Thousands of counties rely on Windows 7 to run their voting systems, despite the fact that this outdated operating system no longer gets regular security updates. And at least 13 states use voting machines purchased before 2007. The Center for Tech and Civic Life has just announced an $80 million, five-year effort called the US Alliance for Election Excellence to help local election administrators upgrade their systems.
The Brennan Center has not commented publicly on Cohen’s story. It is currently promoting a new survey showing that one in six election officials have experienced threats because of their job, and more than three-quarters saying these threats have increased in recent years.
—Related: The newest version of the Big Lie is being spread by Republicans who claim they have used commercially-available anonymized cell-phone location data to prove that Democratic activists illegally engaged in “ballot harvesting” in 2020, collecting individual ballots and putting them in drop boxes in Wisconsin, Philip Bump reports for The Washington Post. The claim quickly breaks down when you look at the accuracy of cell-phone location data, he notes.
Odds and Ends
—Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the ex-President, has failed upward in a big way, getting a $2 billion sweetheart investment in his new hedge fund from the government of Saudi Arabia (despite big doubts from the Saudi fund’s professional advisers), from which he will earn a 1.5% management fee whether or not his fund makes any investments. The news that the Saudis have arranged tens in millions in ongoing income (aka bribes, payoffs) to the once- and perhaps-future senior advisor to the President has generated all the attention of a zit on a flea on an elephant wandering through a rainforest in the midst of a typhoon.
—Speaking of former Presidents, Barack Obama is starting to step out publicly in the fight against disinformation, Dan Merica and Donie O’Sullivan report for CNN. Apparently he’s had a long private fascination with the problem: “People who have met with the former President describe him as gripped by the issue, showing up to meetings with handwritten notes and questions and often referring to reading he has done on the topic, including reports by the RAND Corporation and the Aspen Institute, and a research study on partisan media by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla.” While there’s no question Obama has been the victim of wanton disinformation going back to the demands for his birth certificate, I can’t be the only person who thinks his involvement on this issue—he headlined a conversation on it last week at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, and he’s giving a keynote later this month at Stanford—won’t help in the slightest. Just reading in the CNN story about Obama trying to justify his false claim in 2013 that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” (which was Politifact’s Lie of the Year) gave me hives. Sure, lying about health policy is different than claiming the election was stolen, but when a politician lies about a policy, they’re also subverting the democratic process because they’re undermining public faith in what leaders say.
—Nora Benavidez and Kate Coyer write for the Boston Globe that Meta/Facebook isn’t doing nearly enough to protect democracy from Russian disinformation about the Ukraine war. They write, “While Moscow has blocked Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram within Russia, its government accounts are still actively spreading pro-Putin, pro-war disinformation to the world. Moscow has activated its global army of bots and trolls to echo and amplify false claims across social-media networks. Former State Department official Ben Scott … reports that the use of the “Z” hashtag and imagery supporting Russian aggression are still proliferating across social media, despite these platforms’ claims that they’re taking actions to curb them. And The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports that on Facebook 80 percent of the false claims around the ‘US bioweapons conspiracy theory’ have gone unflagged.”
—It's looking like the hot tactic of 2022 is going to be “paid relational organizing,” which means hiring people to talk to their friends about politics, Elana Schneider reports for Politico. It worked for the Jon Ossoff runoff push in Georgia last year, and two leaders of that effort, Davis Leonard and Zoe Stein, are now working to spread it to more campaigns. The Progressive Turnout Project (a client of Mothership Strategies) says its going to spend $1 million in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada on a paid relational program and hopes to do more. Gosh, imagine if that money were spent on year-round organizing rather than building sandcastles for campaigns (after consultants bank their take). Or, imagine if the Democratic party did things that were so inspiring that you didn’t have to pay voters to talk to their friends about them.
Deep Thoughts
—Leah Hunt-Hendrix of Way to Win writes for Politico that the reason Democrats lost ground in 2020 is they spent too much time touting their bipartisanship, while Republicans emphasized their opponents’ supposed extremism and “told a clear story with a clear villain.” To respond effectively, she argues, Democrats need to emphasize “an inclusive populism that acknowledges how precarious life has become for far too many, even as those at the top are doing better than ever.”
End Times
—Now I know where everybody’s been for the last two years!
Go Micah!!!!! Love your stuff!!