Stultifying toil describes well the conditions workers at Amazon face, driving them to participate in union organizing in multiple states. Employees are compelled to work 10-11 back-breaking hour shifts in the warehouses, with limited time and access to use the bathrooms. The company is exacting the maximum physical time from each person. A majority voted against the union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, after a heroic effort by some Amazon workers.
As written in the New York Times: “Attention has been focused on Bessemer, but the struggle between Day 1 and Day 2 is increasingly playing out everywhere in Amazon’s world. At its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain Day 1, the company needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires measuring and tweaking every moment of a worker’s existence. That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon enterprise. The idea of surrendering it is the company’s greatest horror. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter: ‘Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.’”
In addition to using electronics to monitor employees’ every movement on the job, Amazon has hired former FBI agents for security and intelligence gathering. One of their responsibilities seems to be monitoring the labor-organizing activity of its workers.
Born out of desperation, the struggle at Amazon depicts something new happening in the U.S. and the world. As Amazon and other corporate profits soar during the pandemic, 255 million jobs were lost worldwide. There are close to 500 new billionaires globally who have profited from the crisis. The eight wealthiest people in the world are “worth” one trillion dollars.
The struggle of Amazon workers is a concentrated expression of the whole horror of the deaths from the pandemic and working in unsafe conditions with no protection. The government’s façade of representing the people is stripped away, laying bare the great gulf between the interests of the ruling class and the working class.
The recent $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package gives some measure of help, but it is temporary and limited in scope. As the corporations fasten their grip on society, the new ways of producing things we need expands, replacing jobs in every sector of the economy. Every day more people face the prospect of absolute poverty and homelessness. The police and sanitation workers are employed to sweep away entire encampments of those made homeless.
All of us being pushed out of jobs and those who have jobs essentially being worked into ill health and death make up a revolutionary class that must fight for real change. Fighting for our own interests requires education and strategy to fight a system and a state that protects that system. We have to do more than fight against impoverishment and a declining standard of living. Human labor is stage by stage being replaced by robotic, digital production with little to no human activity involved in producing an abundance of food, housing, and goods.
The means to produce everything is held in private hands and used for private gain. Never have the productive forces been so gigantic, so concentrated, so absolutely necessary to life, that they can no longer remain in private hands. That’s the way our ancestors thought about the bow and arrow — they belonged to the tribe. They were too important to be in private hands.
Published: April 23, 2021
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