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      The Guardian view on Amazon and unions: an unfair fight, but not yet over | Editorial

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      Goliath beats David isn’t half as good a story, but it is the usual way of the world. So last week’s news that Amazon has fended off an attempt by workers to form its first ever US trade union is unsurprising, if sad. What intrigues is the volume and variety of support that the struggle won across the US and the world, from faith leaders to the NFL players association to Republican ever-hopefuls such as Marco Rubio. In that intensity of interest lies the real surprise: the change in popular politics towards both big business and workers.As battles go, it was always ridiculously lopsided. In one corner you had the world’s richest man sitting atop corporate America’s second-largest employer, in perhaps the most anti-union country in the rich world. Opposing him were workers and activists in Alabama, one of the most conservative of all US states, trying something never attempted before in the land of the free: to unionise an entire Amazon warehouse, those hangars full of consumer goods and crushing conditions for workers that together define our way of life. No wonder Jeff Bezos won last week, with workers at the Bessemer warehouse voting more than two to one against forming a union. That result allows Amazon to continue hiring and firing at will. It also brings to a halt perhaps the most watched union drive in the US in years. The future of industrial relations inside a giant warehouse in the Deep South became a subject of debate across Europe, so vast is Amazon’s empire. In the UK, the GMB and Unite are both looking to organise more Amazon employees.Just why the defeat was so large is a question that has prompted much soul-searching among American progressives, with some blaming poor strategic choices by the activists and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union claiming Amazon pursued “egregious and illegal” anti-union tactics, allegations that the company denies. But perhaps the fairest assessment is that from the longstanding labour writer and activist Jane McAlevey: “If the rules for unionization in the US came close to being fair, they [pro-union workers] would have won. But the rules aren’t fair. Quite the opposite: they are outrageously unfair.”But there are two hopeful lessons that America and the rest of the world can take from this story of disappointment. First, it is now convention to argue that societies need strong unions. Last month, Joe Biden gave that message in a video address, but he is only catching up with some of his neighbours in Washington. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund have long pointed out the links between inequality and financial crises, and argued that “restoration of the lower income group’s bargaining power is more effective” than a crash in righting a giant wealth gap. In that battle between the billionaire Mr Bezos and the Alabama workers, it’s clear who those IMF researchers would have rooted for.Second, the excitement around that Alabama ballot shows how far sentiment in the capitalist heartland is moving against big business and towards labour. Opinion polls suggest American public approval for trade unions is the highest it has been in almost 20 years, at 65%. This is not a shift in mood that has been led by Mr Biden; rather, the president is being compelled to channel it, often under the tutelage of politicians and advisers further to the left. This is a very different kind of politics than seen in the era of Barack Obama. Where it goes next will be worth watching. More

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      Amazon won the Alabama union fight. But don’t mourn – organize | Indigo Olivier

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      Nearly a week after Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, cast their ballots to determine whether or not to form a union, a final tally shows workers lost their campaign by a more than two-to-one margin. The results are being contested by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which claims Amazon coerced and intimidated workers with their belligerent anti-union campaign. Even if the results are thrown out and another election is held, the outcome is likely to remain unchanged.During the agonizing week-long vote count, all you could do was wait and hope. Little snippets of information trickled in, followed by more waiting. The loss, while not surprising, is a disappointment to not only the workers and supporters who threw so much into this campaign but to the labor movement as a whole.Postmortems abound about the warning signs of defeat, the tactical errors made by organizers, the urgent need for labor law reform, and the demoralizing effect this outcome might have on other workers. In any case, the final takeaway should always be: don’t mourn. Organize.While there is much to learn from the strategy deployed in Bessemer, the defeat is not so much an indictment of the specifics of this one union drive as it is of the balance of power between labor and capital as a whole.Amazon started off with the upper hand and used every tool it could to not only defeat Bessemer workers but to send a clear message to others who might try to organize at other fulfillment centers: you don’t stand a chance.For weeks, Amazon sent a barrage of anti-union messaging to its employees, posted “vote no” flyers in bathroom stalls, texted workers on a regular basis, waged a social media campaign linking back to the “Do It Without Dues” website, changed traffic lights outside the facility, held “captive audience” meetings with workers to dissuade them from voting “yes,” and spent nearly $10,000 a day on union-busting consulting firms.The company followed a familiar anti-union playbook; in fact, they went even further, pressuring USPS officials to install a private ballot box on company property all while denying the reality of their workers peeing in bottles and defecating in bags to meet merciless delivery quotas – a reality that was quickly confirmed by reporters.With all eyes on Amazon, the entire country has just seen the lengths corporations will go to prevent workers from organizing.While the legality of some of these tactics is being challenged by the RWDSU, the reality is that most of them are commonplace and, in the eyes of America’s lopsided and mostly toothless labor laws, fair game. Even if Amazon is found to have violated workers’ rights in Bessemer, it is unlikely that the company will face any serious consequences.More than anything, this defeat stressed the immediate importance of passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act) which would ban captive audience meetings, severely limit corporate interference, invalidate right-to-work legislation and strengthen collective bargaining as a whole.The Pro Act, which would represent the most significant federal labor legislation in decades, passed the House in early May and is all but certain to be voted down in the evenly split Senate.President Biden has spoken strongly in favor of the legislation, but its passage is unlikely without eliminating the filibuster – an action for which Biden has withheld full commitment.The Pro Act would allow labor to move from the defensive to the offensive which is crucial when workers – especially at giant corporations like Amazon – already have the deck stacked against them.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the war to shift the focus of power from politicians to workersBiden has so far proven to be both the most pro-labor president in modern history and not nearly where we need him to be to deliver the goods. He sent a message of support to workers organizing in Alabama and around the country but stopped short of calling Amazon out by name. He’s encouraged Congress to pass the Pro Act without forging a viable path to follow through. Simply put, he lacks the courage to do what is needed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen”.Unions and other pro-labor groups have taken it upon themselves to move things forward. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has shifted the national organizing infrastructure used for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to make hundreds of thousands of calls convincing people of the urgent necessity of the Pro Act.While the Bessemer vote is devastating, the public attention and enthusiasm that was shown to the organizers there is exactly what is needed to make any significant strides in the labor movement, especially if the Senate is going to stall for as long as it can with Green Eggs and Ham.Bessemer was the most high-profile union election in recent memory and it started a national conversation about organized labor and poor working conditions. This election saturated social media (when was the last time you saw a viral TikTok about the importance of union dues?) and has even prompted talk of organizing other Amazon facilities.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the slow ideological war to shift the public focus of power from politicians to workers. Amazon may have been successful in temporarily exorcising any attempt to organize from within, but the specter still haunts them. More

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      Strong trade unions are vital to the UK’s economic recovery | Letters

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      Martin Kettle’s review of Joe Biden’s approach to economic regeneration (In the US, Joe Biden is backing the unions. Britain can only look on in envy, 7 April) was welcome, but we question whether it went far enough in its endorsement or reach. The success of Franklin D Roosevelt’s original New Deal owed much to the positive role offered by a confident and expanded union movement in governance of the project.Furthermore, there is little doubt that, both in the US and UK, at times of national emergency during two world wars, trade unions made significant contributions to the war effort, politically and on the manufacturing shop floor. After the second world war, it was British unions that encouraged the introduction of worker directors and the co-determination system, which provided the means for reviving the German economy – a system still operating in that country and across Europe, to the benefit of employees and employers.The case for supporting union revival becomes even clearer as we confront not just the consequences of the pandemic but also the emerging climate emergency. There is little doubt that while British industry has done regrettably little in confronting environmental despoliation, trade unions have been actively engaging with other partners in developing the green new deals that will be essential for securing sustainable economic development. These deals can offer tripartite supervision of the economy to oversee progress toward the 2015 Paris accord and the UN’s sustainable development goals; partnership agreements between unions and employers to ensure just transitions to green and secure jobs; and progress towards reducing the growing inequality that blights the UK.Jeff Hyman Professor emeritus, University of AberdeenChris Baldry Professor emeritus, Stirling University Martin Kettle is right that Joe Biden’s decision to promote decent conditions and respect at work, and to tie this into the collective organisation of trade unions, is something that is much-needed in Britain. Ten years of a Tory government should be sufficient reminder that in the present day only a Labour government will do anything on this agenda.However, that is the first, not the last, word. Kettle thinks some unions are stuck in the past, but then criticises those leaders who are critical of Keir Starmer, as if himself wanting a return to the days when unions sometimes represented not so much the interests of their members as the perspectives of the leaders and their desire for political careers.Certainly, many trade unions and trade unionists would hope and work for a Labour government. They’d also expect to shape and influence its policies in relevant areas. That is surely what US unions have successfully done with Biden.Keith FlettTottenham, London More

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      Win the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich

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      The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More

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      What if the most important election of the year is happening right now in Alabama? | Indigo Olivier

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      This month, 5,800 Amazon warehouse employees in Bessemer, Alabama, will be voting on whether or not to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in what could turn out to be the most important election of the year.While the Bessemer fulfillment center itself is a drop in the bucket when compared to Amazon’s roughly 500 facilities around the country, this could be the ballot heard around the world. If successful, this election would mark the first unionized Amazon facility in the US.Over the past 26 years, Jeff Bezos has built himself a private empire. Amazon is now the second largest employer in the US, after Walmart, and the fifth largest in the world. The more than 800,000 Amazon employees across the country represent a population between the size of Maine and Montana. Globally, the company employs more than 1 million workers.Amazon is also the largest online retailer in the world, with a market cap (or value of the company’s shares) at $1.5tn – larger than the GDPs of most countries. The power this company yields is unrivaled.Yet Amazon’s success has been made possible by the labor of the underpaid and overworked employees who keep operations running; by weakened anti-trust laws; by a larger US economic shift from manufacturing to the service and logistics sectors; and, of course, by generous government subsidies, which have seen the company get away with paying no taxes in recent years.Unions alone will not bring Amazon to heel – but without them, all bets are off.The message this election will send to workers is: if we can do it in the anti-labor, “right-to-work” south against one of the most powerful companies in the world – one with no scruples with regards to its anti-union tactics – then workers can unionize anywhere.It would be a marked shift since Ronald Reagan’s mass firing of striking air traffic control workers, which caused a chilling effect on organized labor and ushered in a new pro-business, anti-worker era. Labor organizers are hoping that a victory in Bessemer might turn this tide.The labor movement recognizes the significance of this election. Members of the AFL-CIO and nurses from a recently unionized hospital in North Carolina have been phone banking to speak with Bessemer workers directly about the importance of voting yes on a union. Supporters have also made it clear that the fight at the Bessemer facility, where about 85% of workers are Black, is also a fight for racial justice.Biden’s recent statement in support of workers organizing in Alabama suggests that under this administration significant gains for labor can be won, but only if workers are willing to fight for them.One of the biggest lies sold to the American public has been to convince the vast majority of people that “politics” means showing up to the polls every few years to elect representative officials who will take it from there. Like many aspects of our lives, politics has become something to consume passively. It’s cable news networks, the punditry class, bumper stickers, lawn signs, campaign donations. It’s horse-race journalism and partisan tabloids.A union victory for one workplace is a victory for all workersIt has narrowed the spectrum of the “political” to red and blue, kids in cages or “migrant overflow facilities”, dog whistles over bull horns, an open disdain for working people or a veneer of compassion. Far fewer see the actions they take day-to-day, in the workplaces where we spend the majority of our waking lives, as something worthy of being political.The Bessemer election has the potential to topple this frame in favor of a new horizon. The difference between electoral politics and labor organizing is the difference between voting in a president who says he will phase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next four years – yet surrenders before the battle begins – and taking direct action to ensure that higher wages are guaranteed in your contract immediately.Amazon prides itself on paying its workers $15 an hour – more than double the federal minimum wage – plus benefits. But rather than being a product of the benevolence of an enlightened CEO, we should all understand this to be a Machiavellian tactic used to preempt the serfs from storming the castle.More importantly, workers organizing towards a union must recognize that in the long run, without labor protections, every employee lives under the dictates of an unforgiving and despotic market. These “tides” will only turn when workers see themselves as a unified force and recognize that a union victory for one workplace is a victory for all workers. It favors a rising tide that will lift all boats to the trickle-down economics that have left us in perpetual drought.The Bessemer election is not one in which fulfillment center employees will cast their ballots and abdicate all further responsibilities. Rather, this vote would open the floodgates. More

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      McDonald's spies on union activists – that's how scared they are of workers' rights | Indigo Olivier

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      On 24 February, Vice reported that McDonald’s has, for years, spied on activists and employees engaged in labor organizing and the Fight for $15 campaign. Internal McDonald’s corporate documents obtained by Vice confirmed that the company has been concerned with gathering “strategic intelligence” on workers involved in efforts to secure higher wages, better working conditions and a union. This includes using data collection software to monitor employees and their networks through social media and “a team of intelligence analysts in the Chicago and London offices”.
      This comes after years of reporting on similar efforts by Amazon to prevent the unionization of their own employees. Job postings for intelligence analysts to monitor and report on “labor organizing threats”; social media monitoring; interactive “heat mapping” tools to anticipate and pre-empt strikes or union drives; Pinkerton operatives; and, most recently, coordinated efforts with county officials to change the traffic lights outside Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama to prevent organizers from speaking to workers during shift changes – all have been deployed to secure the company’s bottom line.
      As Vice points out, surveillance against labor organizers is nothing new. What’s new is the use of technology to aid in these efforts, which may also be in violation of federal labor law.
      The surveillance and intimidation of workers is a feature, not a bug, and one that has come to define American capitalism at home and abroad. As Vox noted last June, “the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest.” While police in southern cities are largely a vestigial outgrowth of slave patrols, in northern cities like Chicago, elite businessmen pushed for the development of municipal police forces to suppress labor organizing around demands like an eight-hour workday. The concept of policing as “public safety” came later.
      There is no evidence to suggest government involvement in the surveillance of workers at either Amazon or McDonald’s. Yet the failure on the part of past administrations to condemn these egregious labor violations – or condemn the yawning wealth gap between megacorporations and the underpaid workers whose labor they depend on – amount to tacit approval of business-as-usual by any means necessary.
      This Sunday, Biden broke this awful trend by releasing a surprisingly strong statement in support of unions. While he stopped short of calling out Amazon by name, his video address was directed at “workers in Alabama” and represents the strongest pro-union statement of any president in modern US history.
      “You should remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist, it said we should encourage unions,” Biden said. “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union. The law guarantees that choice.”
      Under an economic system that enriches CEOs by underpaying workers for the value of their time and pocketing the profits, there is a direct connection between the dystopian anti-labor tactics used by the likes of McDonald’s and Amazon and the $1.3tn transfer of wealth to the country’s 664 billionaires over the course of the pandemic. Bezos’s path to becoming the world’s first trillionaire is precisely because of his successful efforts at preventing unions from taking hold in his private empire.
      As Marx put it: capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
      Biden now has a choice to make: Amazon or unions. He can’t fight for both.
      On the campaign trail, Biden sent conflicting messages by cultivating the image of a blue-collar union man and simultaneously promising a room full of corporate donors that under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”
      Biden adopted a $15 minimum wage as one of his few concessions to the left, in an effort to win over Bernie Sanders supporters, and later changed his tone by saying he didn’t believe the provision would last in the most recent Covid-19 stimulus package. The statement amounted to a shrugging off of one among a number of campaign promises that look less likely to be fulfilled by the day. Democrats are now dishonestly pointing the blame at a single and little-known Senate parliamentarian, though Kamala Harris could easily overrule the decision and lift nearly a million people out of poverty.
      We can and should give credit to Biden for his recent statement on unions while also recognizing that words alone are not enough. Biden has the power to immediately pass a federal $15 minimum wage, raise corporate taxes, call on the National Labor Relations Board to investigate companies like McDonald’s and Amazon which unlawfully spy on their employees, and take a trip to Bessemer to show support for the facility’s 5,800 workers.
      This is a David-versus-Goliath fight and the stakes are simply too high to stop short of executive action. Until he proves otherwise, we need to remember Biden’s message to corporate America: nothing will fundamentally change.
      Indigo Olivier is a 2020-2021 Leonard C Goodman investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine More

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      'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

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      Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.
      “Everybody was scared,” said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didn’t know was that he was about to make American history – an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.
      Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next month’s rent. “Everybody was scared about going back to work,” he said. “Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.”
      The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history – but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.
      In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.
      Embed map
      This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.
      For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.
      With a platform to speak, the workers talked about “how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and we’re working for these companies that are making billions”, said Major.
      At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.
      This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. “In our family, with 14 kids, my dad’s wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.”
      In America, “the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world”, he found “[that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work – and still you could barely make it”.
      Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition.
      Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

      Rep. Pramila Jayapal
      (@RepJayapal)
      I’m thrilled to announce that after working with leadership, we’ve secured a $15 minimum wage in the House’s COVID relief bill!This provision would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. It’s long overdue that Congress enacts a minimum wage that is a living wage.

      February 8, 2021

      The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.
      Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.
      That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.
      More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.
      The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.
      Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a “non-starter” in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.
      In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

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      Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.
      For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is “the David and Goliath story of our time”. She puts the public support down to the “pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work”.
      “Every family in America knows somebody that’s trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadn’t noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.”
      The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers’ rights – not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.
      “Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century,” she said.
      “If the US Congress can’t see what the American people are demanding, in terms of ‘Respect us, protect us, pay us’, then they’re going to have a political price to pay in 2022,” she added. “Our nation’s leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now it’s time for our nation’s leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.”
      Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.
      Aldridge was working at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. “It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment,” said Aldridge.
      The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri. More

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      Healthcare to the electoral college: seven ways 2020 left America exposed | Robert Reich

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      If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are seven lessons it should take from 2020:1 Workers keep America going, not billionairesAmerican workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when Covid had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by more than $1tn since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, sheltered in his 165,000-acre west Texas ranch while Amazon warehouse workers toiled in close proximity, often without adequate masks, gloves or sanitizers. The company offered but soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70bn since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186bn as the year came to an end.2 Systemic racism is killing Black and Latino AmericansBlack and Latino Americans account for almost 40% of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard: taking to the streets to protest decades of unjust police killings, only to be met with more police violence.Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but cannot adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.3 If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help peopleThe Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, continues to insist the nation cannot “afford” $2,000 survival checks for every American. But the latest relief legislation doled out more than $220bn to powerful business interests that could have been used for struggling working families.Another way of looking at it: the total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465bn) would be less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1tn).4 Healthcare must be made a rightEven before this crisis struck, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. An additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat Covid-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.5 Our social safety nets are woefully brokenNo other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US. Our unemployment insurance system is more than 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.Other industrialized nations kept unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks. Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing, or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.6 The electoral college must be abolishedJoe Biden won 7m more votes than Trump. But his winning margin in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won those three states, he would have gained 37 electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. This would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been re-elected.The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The electoral college is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.7 Government mattersFor decades, conservatives have told us government is the problem and we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. The coronavirus has shown yet again that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: government is in fact necessary to protect the public.It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions taking to the streets and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: it must be fixed. More