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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.
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      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

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      Unions discussing general strike if Trump refuses to accept Biden victory

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      US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election results showing a Joe Biden victory.
      Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.
      The local labor federation in Rochester, New York, was the first union group to officially support the idea. Union federations in Seattle and in western Massachusetts have followed suit, approving resolutions saying a general strike should be considered if Trump seeks to subvert the election outcome.
      Dan Maloney, president of the Rochester-Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation, said his 100,000-member group adopted the resolution to get people discussing the idea – from local unions to the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation which represents more than 12.5 million people.
      On 8 October, the Rochester federation voted to support preparing for and holding “a general strike of all working people, if necessary, to ensure a constitutionally mandated peaceful transition of power as a result of the 2020 presidential elections.”. The union leaders voted to stand “firmly in opposition to any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard the final outcome” of the election.
      The Rochester move spurred discussion and debate of a possible general strike in union after union, even though some labor leaders see it as a drastic, hard-to-pull-off action. “The idea has gotten a lot more legs than I ever thought it would,” Maloney told the Guardian. “Our democracy is in jeopardy of a wannabe dictator. It’s time to be counted and do whatever it takes to remove him from office if he attempts to retain power against the will of the American people.”
      Maloney acknowledged that a general strike would be an extraordinary measure. “In drastic times, you need drastic measures,” he said.
      The Rochester federation’s resolution states: “The extreme risk currently posed to the historic institutions of democracy in our nation may require more widespread and vigorous resistance than at any time in recent history.”
      Maloney said that in a 22 October call with labor leaders, Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s president, stressed that until 3 November, unions should overwhelmingly focus on maximizing voter turnout for Biden. After that, Trumka said, unions can focus on what to do if Trump resists a peaceful transition.
      The AFL-CIO’s executive council, approved a resolution on October 19 saying: “Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers. The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America’s labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic.”
      [embedded content]
      Michael Podhorzer, a senior Trumka adviser, said: “We believe democracy is stronger than Trump. We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We’re getting ready if they’re not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters.”
      Podhorzer, who used to be the AFL-CIO’s political director, said: “The thing that is really striking is that Joe Biden and the labor movement are doing everything they can to win the election, and Donald Trump is doing everything he can to defeat the election.”
      Podhorzer added that at the moment, “a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy”.
      But for many it is an inspiring slogan. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, helped put the idea of a general strike idea into the national conversation after the federal government shut down in December 2018 because of a standoff between Trump and Congress over funding for his border wall. In a speech on 20 January 2019, Nelson called for a general strike to end the shutdown, and many people credit her call for helping get Trump to end the 35-day shutdown and relent about wall funding.
      Nelson said a general strike could definitely be useful if Trump refuses to respect the election results. “What we’ve seen is people going about our business during the day and conducting mass protests at night, and that’s not going to be enough to make this president move,” Nelson said. “He will use those protests to further divide the country. We will have to do the one thing that takes all power and control from the government or anyone with corporate interests in keeping this person in office, and that is withholding our labor.”
      Nelson said a strike to make sure Trump honors the election results will “improve our jobs” including “our job security and safety at work”. “Donald Trump remaining in office puts all of us in jeopardy,” she said. “This directly relates to our basic safety and financial security.” Nelson has repeatedly criticized Trump for doing too little to help unemployed workers and the ailing airline industry. Such a general strike, she said, would be “firmly grounded” in what’s best for workers.
      Nicole Grant, who heads MLK Labor, the Seattle-area federation of 150 local unions with nearly 200,000 members, said her group approved its resolution to spur internal discussion and planning in response to the “chaos and anxiety” she said Trump has spurred. Her federation’s resolution said we “will take whatever nonviolent actions are necessary up to and including a general strike to protect our democracy, the constitution, the law and our nation’s democratic traditions.”
      “This is a break-in-case-of-emergency kind of demand,” Grand explained. She said labor leaders hope they do not have to reach such a point, “but at the same time, when we consider the potential of a coup, that’s not something we’re going to stand for”.
      Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, said: “So much of the conversation on the left about general strikes in this country is kind of a romanticized, people are going to rise up.” But Loomis added: “If there is ever any general strike in this country, it’s probably going to come out of the established labor movement. The only group capable of running the thing is the established labor movement.” If there is a general strike, union leaders say, they hope college students, Blacks Lives Matter activists, women’s and environmental groups and many others will join in.
      Nelson acknowledged that pulling off a successful general strike might not be easy. There needs to be “a spark that lights the fire”, she said, as well as “people to lead the fight”. “Do I think the labor movement is prepared to conduct a general strike? No,” Nelson said. “Can we do it, though? Can we organize quickly? Can we define the urgency of the moment? Absolutely.” More

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      ‘I regret voting for him': Ohioans hit by GM plant closure reflect on Trump

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      Before Covid-19 hit, Trisha Amato spent her weekdays behind a modest, ebony-colored desk, running the “transition center” that helps laid-off General Motors workers pick up the shards of their lives. GM announced it was closing its mammoth plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in November 2018 and ever since Amato has been ladling out advice to the 1,700 laid-off workers on such matters as how to obtain jobless benefits and how to qualify for government assistance to pay for college courses.The GM plant, the size of more than 100 football fields, had long been the heart of Lordstown – as recently as 2016, it employed 4,500 workers, and in its 53-year history, it produced 16m vehicles. Built alongside I-80, the hulking plant has long been a monument to America’s industrial might, or perhaps one should say its fading industrial might.Deep-voiced, with long, auburn hair and broad shoulders – she, too, had worked at the plant – Amato has problems of her own, saying that she can no longer afford health insurance for herself and her two daughters on her transition center salary. Amato, who is divorced, felt betrayed when GM said it would shut the plant – the company had received $60m in state subsidies, and had promised in return to keep the plant open through 2027.Many of the GM workers were also angry at Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly proclaimed that he would make American manufacturing great again and would bring back jobs that had gone overseas. That message resonated in Lordstown and nearby Youngstown, part of the Mahoning Valley area that has been dragged down for decades by one factory and steel mill closing after another. Trump’s repeated promise to bring back factory jobs played well not only in Ohio, but also in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, helping win over many blue-collar voters, who were key to his narrow victories in those states. Blue-collar workers in those states could again play a decisive role in this year’s election, with many still supporting Trump, but some souring on him – perhaps enough to flip those states to Joe Biden.In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!” More

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      Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death | Robert Reich

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      Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death Robert Reich No other advanced nation denies healthcare and work protections, or loosens lockdown while fatalities mount Donald Trump listens during a meeting with Republican members of Congress on Friday. Photograph: Tom Brenner/Reuters No other nation has endured as much death from Covid-19 nor nearly as […] More