Canada Post, union sit down with mediator, but still ‘far apart’ as strike drags on

By Christopher Reynolds, 

The Canadian Press

November 19, 2024 

Pedro Antunes, Conference board of Canada, talks to us and give his take on the postal strike and the potential hit to the economy.

Canada Post and the postal workers union found slivers of consensus Tuesday amid talks with a special mediator, but “a lot of ground” remains between them on the key concerns as a countrywide strike entered its fifth day.

“On smaller issues, we were able to find some progress,” said Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton in a phone interview.

“The special mediator has helped facilitate those discussions. So we’re going to continue to be at it. We’re committed to getting collective agreements,” he said, adding that arbitration is off the table for now.

“There’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

With deliveries at a standstill, the Crown corporation and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers continue to bargain over a pair of contracts — one for rural and suburban mail carriers that was discussed Monday, the other for urban carriers that was under the microscope on Tuesday.

The union said progress was made due in part to the presence of Ottawa’s top mediator, appointed to the task last week. Peter Simpson, director general of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, spent the start of the week at a hotel in Ottawa shuttling between the parties’ conference rooms in a back-and-forth of proposals and potential concessions.

“After 12 months of discussions, the employer finally began to move on the pressing issues. Resolving these issues could pave the way to agreements,” union president Jan Simpson said in an update to members Tuesday.

“The urban unit will find out if there is movement on their side.”

About 55,000 employees represented by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers walked off the job on Friday, shutting down operations and halting deliveries as the busy holiday season kicks off.

The union has called for a cumulative wage hike of 24 per cent over four years, while Canada Post has offered an 11.5 per cent increase.

Other wedge issues include job security, benefits and contract work for parcel delivery on weekends.

Negotiations between Canada Post and its unionized employees began in November 2023.

The talks come as the federal delivery service faces an unprecedented financial crisis.

In the first half of 2024, Canada Post lost nearly a half-billion dollars. It has reported $3 billion in losses since 2018, as Canadians sent fewer letters while competitors gobbled up even more of the parcel market.

Households received seven letters a week on average in 2006, but only two per week last year, according to Canada Post’s latest annual report, which dubbed the trend “the Great Mail Decline.”

Both the union and the Crown corporation have put forward service expansion around parcels as a way to boost revenue, but they differ on how to go about it. The union says full-time employees should deliver package shipments on weekends, while Canada Post hopes to hire contract workers.


“What’s needed there is a new, flexible delivery model that allows us to provide parcel service on weekends and provide prices that are more competitive than the other services that Canadians are looking for when they’re shopping online,” Hamilton said.

According to last year’s annual report, the postal service’s share of the parcel market eroded from 62 per cent before the COVID-19 pandemic to 29 per cent last year, as Amazon and other competitors seized on skyrocketing demand for next-day doorstep deliveries.

On top of weekend work and wage bumps to make up for inflation, the union is seeking higher short-term disability payouts and ten paid sick days per year. It also wants to include corporate vehicles for rural and suburban mail carriers as well as paid meals and breaks.

“Unlike Canada Post’s proposals, our demands offer real solutions: fair wages, health and safety, the right to retire with dignity and expansion of services at the public post office,” said lead negotiator François Senneville in a statement earlier this month.

Amid the sudden halt of Canada Post deliveries — government benefit cheques are among the few exceptions — business has shot up at other shipping outfits.

“We have seen a double-digit increase in volumes week over week as we continue to meet the needs of Canadians at this busy time,” said Purolator — majority-owned by Canada Post — in an email.

FedEx has implemented a “contingency plan” to manage higher volumes, said spokesman James Anderson.

The last postal work stoppage took place starting in late October 2018, when employees carried out rotating strikes lasting 31 days.

Previous postal strikes held in 2011 and 2018 ended when the federal government passed legislation sending employees back to work.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 19, 2024.

Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

Silicon Valley has successfully rebranded military contracting as a proud national duty for the industry.

By Sam Biddle

November 17, 2024

Source: The Intercept




Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known.

During his last term, the U.S. tech sector tiptoed skittishly around Trump; longtime right-winger Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his full-throated support of MAGA politics as other investors and executives largely winced and smiled politely. Back then, Silicon Valley still offered the public peaceful mission statements of improving the human condition, connecting people, and organizing information. Technology was supposed to help, never harm. No more: People like Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, and Marc Andreessen make up a new vanguard of powerful tech figures who have unapologetically merged right-wing politics with a determination to furnish a MAGA-dominated United States with a constant flow of newer, better arms and surveillance tools.


Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech.

These men (as they tend to be) hold much in common beyond their support of Republican candidates: They share the belief that China represents an existential threat to the United States (an increasingly bipartisan belief, to be sure) and must be dominated technologically and militarily at all costs. They are united in their aversion, if not open hostility, to arguments that the pace of invention must be balanced against any moral consideration beyond winning. And they all stand to profit greatly from this new tech-driven arms race.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden. Meta’s recent announcement that its Llama large language model can now be used by defense customers means that Apple is the last of the “Big Five” American tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — not engaged in military or intelligence contracting.

Elon Musk has drawn the lion’s share of media scrutiny (and Trump world credit) for throwing his fortune and digital influence behind the campaign. Over the years, the world’s richest man has become an enormously successful defense contractor via SpaceX, which has reaped billions selling access to rockets that the Pentagon hopes will someday rapidly ferry troops into battle. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has also become an indispensable American military tool, and the company is working on a constellation of bespoke spy satellites for U.S. intelligence agency use.

But Musk is just one part of a broader wave of militarists who will have Trump’s ear on policy matters.

After election day, Musk replied to a celebratory tweet from Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, a $14 billion startup that got its start selling migrant-detecting surveillance towers for the southern border and now manufactures a growing line of lethal drones and missiles. “Very important to open DoD/Intel to entrepreneurial companies like yours,” Musk wrote. Anduril’s rise is inseparable from Trumpism: Luckey founded the firm in 2017 after he was fired by Meta for contributing to a pro-Trump organization. He has been outspoken in his support for Trump as both candidate and president, fundraising for him in both 2020 and 2024.

Big Tech historically worked hard to be viewed by the public as inhabiting the center-left, if not being apolitical altogether. But even that is changing. While Luckey was fired for merely supporting Trump’s first campaign, his former boss (and former liberal) Mark Zuckerberg publicly characterized Trump surviving the June assassination attempt as “bad ass” and quickly congratulated the president-elect on a “decisive victory.” Zuckerberg added that he is “looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

To some extent, none of this is new: Silicon Valley’s origin is one of militarism. The American computer and software economy was nurtured from birth by the explosive growth and endless money of the Cold War arms race and its insatiable appetite for private sector R&D. And despite the popular trope of liberal Google executives, the tech industry has always harbored a strong anti-labor, pro-business instinct that dovetails neatly with conservative politics. It would also be a mistake to think that Silicon Valley was ever truly in lockstep with progressive values. A 2014 political ad by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a defunct effort by Facebook to court the Republican Party, warned that “it’s wrong to have millions of people living in America illegally” and urged lawmakers to “secure our borders so this never happens again.” The notion of the Democrat-friendly wing of Big Tech as dovish is equally wrong: Former Google chair and longtime liberal donor Eric Schmidt is a leading China hawk and defense tech investor. Similarly, the Democratic Party itself hasn’t meaningfully distanced itself from militarism in recent history. The current wave of startups designing smaller, cheaper military drones follows the Obama administration’s eager mass adoption of the technology, and firms like Anduril and Palantir have thrived under Joe Biden.

What has changed is which views the tech industry is now comfortable expressing out loud.

A year after Luckey’s ouster from the virtual reality subsidiary he founded, Google became embroiled in what grew into an industry-wide upheaval over military contracting. After it was reported that the company sought to win Project Maven, a lucrative drone-targeting contract, employees who had come to the internet titan to work on consumer products like Search, Maps, and Gmail found themselves disturbed by the thought of contributing to a system that could kill people. Waves of protests pushed Google to abandon the Pentagon with its tail between its legs. Even Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence and machine learning scientist, described the contract as a source of shame in internal emails obtained by the New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

It’s an exchange that reads deeply quaint today. The notion that the country’s talented engineers should build weapons is becoming fully mainstreamed. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey explained in an on-campus talk about his company’s contributions to the Ukrainian war effort with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

This “warrior class” mentality traces its genealogy to Peter Thiel, whose disciples, like Luckey, spread the gospel of a conservative-led arms race against China. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Luckey told Bloomberg TV in a 2023 interview. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019, Thiel, a lifelong techno-libertarian and Trump’s first major backer in tech, rejected the “ethical framing” of the question of whether to build weapons.” When it’s a choice between the U.S. and China, it is always the ethical decision to work with the U.S. government,” he said. Though Sinophobia is increasingly standard across party affiliations, it’s particularly frothing in the venture-backed warrior class. In 2019, Thiel claimed that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and two years later suggested that bitcoin is “a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”

Thiel often embodies the self-contradiction of Trumpist foreign policy, decrying the use of taxpayer money on “faraway wars” while boosting companies that design weapons for exactly that. Like Trump, Thiel is a vocal opponent of Bush- and Obama-era adventurism in the Middle East as a source of nothing but regional chaos — though Thiel has remained silent on Trump’s large expansion of the Obama administration’s drone program and his assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. In July, asked about the Israeli use of AI in the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Thiel responded, “I defer to Israel.”

Thiel’s gravitational pull is felt across the whole of tech’s realignment toward militarism. Vice President-elect JD Vance worked at Mithril, another of Thiel’s investment firms, and used $15 million from his former boss to fund the 2022 Senate win that secured his national political bona fides. Vance would later go on to invest in Anduril. Founders Fund, Thiel’s main venture capital firm, has seeded the tech sector with influential figures friendly to both Trumpism and the Pentagon. Before, an investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

An earlier adopter of MAGA, Thiel was also investing in and creating military- and intelligence-oriented companies before it was cool. He co-founded Palantir, which got its start helping facilitate spy agency and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now part of the S&P 500, the company helps target military strikes for Ukraine and in January sealed a “strategic partnership for battle tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to a press release.


Before, a tech investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

The ripple effect of Palantir’s success has helped popularize defense tech and solidify its union with the American right. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also an Anduril investor, is reportedly helping Trump staff his new administration. Former Palantir employee and Anduril executive chair Trae Stephens joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has suggested he would serve a second administration. As a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thiel ally Jacob Helberg has been instrumental in whipping up anti-China fervor on Capitol Hill, helping push legislation to ban TikTok, and arguing for military adoption of AI technologies like those sold by his employer, Palantir, which markets itself as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. Although Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a self-described Democrat who said he planned to vote against Trump, he has derided progressivism as a “thin pagan religion” of wokeness, suggested pro-Palestine college protesters leave for North Korea, and continually advocating for an American arms buildup.

“Trump has surrounded himself with ‘techno-optimists’ — people who believe technology is the answer to every problem,” Brianna Rosen, a strategy and policy fellow at the University of Oxford and alumnus of the Obama National Security Council, told The Intercept. “Key members of his inner circle — leading tech executives — describe themselves in this way. The risk of techno-optimism in the military domain is that it focuses on how technology saves lives, rather than the real risks associated with military AI, such as the accelerated pace of targeting.”

The worldview of this corner of the tech industry is loud, if not always consistent. Foreign entanglements are bad, but the United States must be on perpetual war-footing against China. China itself is dangerous in part because it’s rapidly weaponizing AI, a current that threatens global stability, so the United States should do the very same, even harder, absent regulatory meddling.

Stephens’s 2022 admonition that “the business of war is the business of deterrence” argues that “peaceful outcomes are only achievable if we maintain our technological advantage in weapons systems” — an argument that overlooks the fact that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological superiority failed to keep it out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a recent interview with Wired, Stephens both criticized the revolving door between the federal government and Anduril competitors like Boeing while also stating that “it’s important that people come out of private industry to work on civil service projects, and I hope at some point I’ll have the opportunity to go back in and serve the government and American people.”

William Fitzgerald, the founder of Worker Agency, a communications and advocacy firm that has helped tech workers organize against military contracts, said this square is easily circled by right-wing tech hawks, whose pitch is centered on the glacial incompetence of the Department of Defense and blue-chip contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon. “Peter Thiel’s whole thing is to privatize the state,” Fitzgerald explained. Despite all of the rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements, a high-tech arms race is conducive to different kinds of wars, not fewer of them. “This alignment fits this narrative that we can do cheaper wars,” he said. “We won’t lose the men over there because we’ll have these drones.”

In this view, the opposition of Thiel and his ilk isn’t so much to forever wars, then, but rather whose hardware is being purchased forever.

The new conservative tech establishment seems in full agreement about the need for an era of techno-militarism. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the namesakes of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied and successful venture capital firms, poured millions into Trump’s reelection and have pushed hard to reorient the American tech sector toward fighting wars. In a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” published last October, Andreessen wrote of defense contracting as a moral imperative. “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength.” The firm knows full well what it’s evoking through a naked embrace of strength as society’s greatest virtue: Listed among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto.

The venture capitalists’ document offers a clear rebuttal of employees’ moral qualms that pushed Google to ditch Project Maven. The manifesto dismisses basic notions of “ethics,” “safety,” and “social responsibility” as a “demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism” pushed by “the enemy.” This is rhetoric that matches a brand Trump has worked to cultivate: aspirationally hypermasculine, unapologetically jingoistic, and horrified by an America whose potential to dominate the planet is imperiled by meddling foreigners and scolding woke co-workers.

“There’s a lot more volatility in the world, [and] there is more of a revolt against what some would deem ‘woke culture,’” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Compound. “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth because we saw in this past election a bunch of people get very political and make donations from their firms.”


“It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Despite skewing young (by national security standards), many in this rightward, pro-military orbit are cultural and religious traditionalists infused with the libertarian preferences of the Zynternet, a wildly popular online content scene that’s melded apolitical internet bro culture and a general aversion to anything considered vaguely “woke.” A recent Vanity Fair profile of the El Segundo tech scene, a hotbed of the burgeoning “military Zyndustrial complex” commonly known as “the Gundo,” described the city as “California’s freedom-loving, Bible-thumping hub of hard tech.” It paints a vivid scene of young engineers who eschewed the progressive dystopia of San Francisco they read about on Twitter and instead flocked to build “nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China” beneath “an American flag the size of a dumpster” and “a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below.”

The American right’s hold over online culture in the form of podcasts, streamers, and other youth-friendly media has been central to both retaking Washington and bulldozing post-Maven sentiment, according to William Fitzgerald of Worker Agency. “I gotta hand it to the VCs, they’re really good at comms,” said Fitzgerald, who himself is former Google employee who helped leak critical information about the company’s involvement in Project Maven. “They’re really making sure that these Gundo bros are wrapping the American flag around them. It’s been fascinating to see them from 2019 to 2024 completely changing the culture among young tech workers.”

A wave of layoffs and firings of employees engaged in anti-military protests have been a boon for defense evangelists, Fitzgerald added. “The workers have been told to shut up, or they get fired.”

This rhetoric has been matched by a massive push by Andreessen Horowitz (already an Anduril investor) behind the fund’s “American Dynamism” portfolio, a collection of companies that leans heavily into new startups hoping to be the next Raytheon. These investments include ABL Space Systems, already contracting with the Air Force,; Epirus, which makes microwave directed-energy weapons; and Shield AI, which works on autonomous military drones. Following the election, David Ulevitch, who leads the fund’s American Dynamism team, retweeted a celebratory video montage interspersed with men firing flamethrowers, machine guns, jets, Hulk Hogan, and a fist-pumping post-assassination attempt Trump.

Even the appearance of more money and interest in defense tech could have a knock-on effect for startup founders hoping to chase what’s trendy. Dempsey said he expects investors and founder to “pattern-match to companies like Anduril and to a lesser extent SpaceX, believing that their outcomes will be the same.” The increased political and cultural friendliness toward weapons startups also coincides with high interest rates and growing interest in hardware companies, Dempsey explained, as software companies have lost their luster following years of growth driven by little more than cheap venture capital.

There’s every reason to believe a Trump-controlled Washington will give the tech industry, increasingly invested in militarized AI, what it wants. In July, the Washington Post reported the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute was working on a proposal to “Make America First in AI” by undoing regulatory burdens and encouraging military applications. Trump has already indicated he’ll reverse the Biden administration’s executive order on AI safety, which mandated safety testing and risk-based self-reporting by companies. Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer during the first Trump administration and managing director of Air Force contractor Scale AI, is reportedly advising Trump’s transition team on policy matters.

“‘Make America First in AI’ means the United States will move quickly, regardless of the costs, to maintain its competitive edge over China,” Brianna Rosen, the Oxford fellow, explained. “That translates into greater investment and fewer restrictions on military AI. Industry already leads AI development and deployment in the defense and intelligence sectors; that role has now been cemented.”

The mutual embrace of MAGA conservatism and weapons tech seems to already be paying off. After dumping $200 million into the Trump campaign’s terminal phase, Musk was quick to cash his chips in: On Thursday, the New York Times reported that he petitioned Trump SpaceX executives into positions at the Department of Defense before the election had even begun. Musk will also co-lead a nebulous new office dedicated to slashing federal spending. Rep. Matt Gaetz, brother-in-law to Luckey, now stands to be the country’s next attorney general. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Luckey shared that he is already advising the Trump transition team and endorses the current candidates for defense secretary. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”

Vote For The Candidates Endorsed By The Peoples’ Socialist Caucus of The Republican Party

By Phil Wilson

November 15, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




The Democrats and those who inhabit the DNC orbit have been in a rush to skip all five stages of grief.

My Email inbox has more pieces titled, “resist,” “fight back,” “organize” than at any time since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. Those five stages of grief, elucidated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The patient has died. We peeled off the oozing bandages on November 5th and we all witnessed the worms, maggots and gangrene. We stared at the shriveled carcass and breathed in the odor of death. And yet I am asked to donate to the DNC, not for a coffin, but for the naked principle of Three Stooges style absurdity – James Carville wants money that I don’t have to fund something that doesn’t exist.

Do these DNC functionaries really have the temerity to beg me for cash – after I have drained my life savings for Bob Casey, Colin Allred, and Jon Tester? What did those donations get me? That’s obviously a rhetorical question – but to be transparent, I didn’t give a dime to any of these people running on the “Titanic Ticket.” But some of you did. The “Iceberg Collision Party” – the one owned by big tech, big pharma, big bombs, and Wall Street – died like a beached jelly fish due, perhaps, to my unwillingness to part with the price of a Cumberland Farms cup of coffee in a plastic cup. Nancy Pelosi emailed me again – “with your donation we can go back into the past and time-travel our way to defeat Trump last week.”

I wasted roughly six months of my sad, elderly life clicking the delete button on every Email from the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a million surrogate entities that shilled for the Biden/Harris/Walz/Weimar ticket.

The emails I get (by the thousands) proposing that we build a better, more progressive Democratic Party should not be seen as merely the garden-variety denial of Kubler-Ross – rather, we should see such expansiveness as the mirror reflection of MAGA. Both capitalist parties have become psychotic, with members drifting into a perpetually hallucinating state of paranoid fantasy. “Stop the steal” or resurrect the Democratic Party – both of these unhinged notions beg for a national shot of Thorazine.

The Democratic Party is dead – as in decomposing flesh and rigor mortis. Hold a stethoscope to the blue heart. You will hear a living Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock” before you detect a Democratic Party pulse. If you laid the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (the world’s largest radio telescope) on the chest of that decomposing donkey, the silence would make a Buster Keaton Film seem like a primal scream. One can easily argue that the Democratic Party died decades ago, and only a collective and uniquely American variety of mass psychosis has held reality at bay.

The first act of the aspiring progressive movement has to be a funeral. The Democratic Party needs to be put in a cheap pinewood coffin (after driving a wooden stake through its heart as an act of caution), and then interred. Perhaps Liz Cheney, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi can be made to deliver the eulogies. Once that coffin is lowered deep in a suitable crevice (I am fond of the San Andreas Fault) then those of us concerned about corporate crimes, environmental collapse and human rights need to get the fuck out of the earth quake zone, fast! But where do we go?

Is there a home somewhere for people who want to transform the fetid wasteland that is the USA into something at least marginally better? Any Marxist will tell you that you go to the working class, the proletariat, the people who work three jobs to pay rent and get no vacation or sick time, and pay through the nose for private medical insurance with more holes than swiss cheese. Those working people – the ones who we haven’t seen in the Democratic base since Ronald Reagan went brain-dead and the gods of capital resurrected him as Bill Clinton – hold the key to a renewed left wing. There is no other way.

And where will you find working people in vast numbers? Uh, that may seem like a trick question, but it really isn’t. The working class is being held in custody by the Republican Party. Why are they there? you ask. Because they have been offered something to distract themselves from the empty, meaningless, tedious anomie of US life – racism, cruelty and political theatrics. Working people would rather have affordable housing, free dental care, job security, a reduced work week, sick leave, child care, a living wage and paid vacation – but no one is offering them that. When one party offers racism and the other offers nothing at all it is an easy choice. Something is always better than nothing.

And another thing that is absolutely critical – Trump told the truth on the most important issue there is – he correctly opined that life in the US sucks. He may have put that truth in fascist terms, blaming suffering on dark skinned foreigners and trans people, but the Democrats never acknowledge the basic truth. Life in the US, for many working people, teeters on the edge of a self-inflicted gunshot to the skull. On the deepest level, Trump is more honest than most all Democrats.

Some of us think of racism as a terminal, irredeemable affliction. I have an anecdote to address that idea:

In the early nineties, I worked in a group home for teens in Hayward, California. One day I did an intake on a kid I will call Tom. Tom, a white kid, began by telling me his most essential value: “I am hecka racial and if you make me live with a bunch of n*s, I am going to run away.”

Well, Tom was true to his word – he ran away that night, but he didn’t run alone. He ran off with Tony, one of our most defiant residents. The Police found Tom and Tony walking together in downtown Hayward a few days later, and brought them back. We had provided a description – a small, skinny blond kid with a tattoo of a snake winding around his wrist and a heavy set Black teen with low slung pants hanging below his boxers in the style of that era. Tom informed me brashly that he and Tony were “brothers” and that, therefore, he was no longer ‘racial.’ Tom said that Tony had told him just how badly “this place” sucked, and that he and Tony would run again. Both wound up in different programs, and I hadn’t really even thought about them until now. The point is childishly obvious. Racism, for most bigots, hangs by an ephemeral thread.

Let me restate my points thus far:

1) Racism is a place holder for the things working people really want – to be given human rights – housing, nutritious food, medical care, decent wages, security and free time.

2) The Democratic Party of college educated, comfortable suburbanites is as dead as any skunk crossing I – 95 in rush hour.

3) If progressives want to have a meaningful voice they have to migrate to the place inhabited by the working class and join forces with poor and working people.

4) The working class – much of it – can be found at the so called GOP.

5) The GOP/fascist party is an echo chamber with no access to nuance, or basic reality

Therefore????

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that fighting fascism is contingent on a massive influx of progressive voices joining the GOP. After all, the GOP, like the Democratic Party, is owned, shaped and exploited by corporate power. If progressives gained no traction in the Democratic Party, why would they be heard in the Republican/fascist Party?

That question has no good answer – we are tossing a hail Mary – but the Republican Party has just undergone a hostile takeover from without. The neocons gave way to the fascist zombies. The idea that the “establishment” is dirty, vile and profane has been stolen from the left. We have, in some vague form, a rhetorical precedent to exploit. This was never the case inside the dead and departed Democratic Party. The Republican/fascists have torn the wrapper off of America’s secret. Those in power are indeed scoundrels and murderers, but not for allowing a few victimized asylum seekers to sneak in, but for pouring a fortune into weapons, fossil fuels and political lobbying. In the process, the elites have robbed working people to the point of suicidal despair.

Allow me to provide a caveat to my argument that racists – in droves – are eagerly waiting to be humanized, before we go further. The US is a racist nation with more racist politicians dog whistling for white votes than fish in the ocean (these days), but institutional racism and human hearts are not inevitably in sync. The racism that thrives in the human heart needs to be watered by bigoted, fear mongering media like FOX and Newsmax. These propaganda juggernauts have become the driving force of Republican fascism, and they have the ear of the working class. You might argue that the left needs its own counterattacking media sphere, but corporate money will always prevent rational ideas from being platformed on anything larger than “The Young Turks.”.

I am arguing that the most crucial task of a progressive coalition – as we reach the juncture where fascism, the climate apocalypse and nuclear war merge into a sort of narrative certainty – is to go into the mosh pit of fascism and speak to “Zombies” as if they were human beings.

Now it is time to disrupt the Republican echo chamber. Trump and his billionaire pals talk a populist anti-corporate line – Trump accused Hillary Clinton (rightly so) of being a Wall Street stooge, and the Republican choir nodded along. So let us expand the choir – imagine the Republican ranks swollen with me and you. Envision union members, communists, social democrats, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges and tens of millions more of us all suddenly becoming registered Republicans. We need people – passionate Republicans, of course – who can elaborate in detail about what it means to be anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposed to the deep state. Who is putting flesh on the bones of the concept of “the deep state?” Who tells the zombified masses being held hostage in the MAGA Empire that Exxon, Tesla, Amazon, The Heritage Foundation, The New York Times, Facebook, RTX Corporation, FOX News and CNN all sit at the table of the deep state?

Imagine MAGA candidates running in Republican primaries against candidates vowing to fight for a $25 dollar minimum wage. These same anti-MAGA radical Republicans will promise a Draconian reduction in military spending, and the end to corporate campaign lobbying and spending – and how about a fierce vow to pass anti-trust legislation, and universal healthcare. We have always had a one party system – the Dog-on-a-Leash Corporate Party – but now we can have an eclectic party that questions political obedience. We will have a one party system with the complex discourse forbidden in our alleged (now rotten) two party system to date. After all, what the fuck is Trump but a symbol of disobedience – even if Trump’s disobedience is empty and merely a ruse to hide his slavish corporate fidelity.

The position we newly radicalized “Republicans” take will have to be simple, direct and focused on working class aspirations. Do we define disobedience as being nothing more than being a greedy, crass asshole, or does disobedience mean civil disobedience, with the aim of arresting and jailing those who commit environmental crimes, and extort the working class?

I am Phil Wilson and I am running for a senate seat in Massachusetts on the “Republican” ticket with the following platform – a $35 dollar minimum wage, six weeks paid vacation, universal health care, a deal with China to import low cost EV’s to be offered to working families at reduced prices via subsidies. Who will pay for it? The savings from all the bombs, drones and planes that won’t be sent to Israel and Ukraine will be given to working people. Okay, I am not cut out for the senate, but someone else will do it and I’ll knock on doors. Picture every blue state without a single Democratic official, but with “red” replacements – in the rather forgotten shade of red that terrified Joe McCarthy 75 years ago.

The “Republican” candidate that I’ll be supporting will also be introducing the idea of replacing the senate altogether with a “citizen’s assembly.” This would put decision making in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. It ought to play well on the populist right who – now that everyone is a Republican – will be forced to confront life outside of the Trumpian vacuum.

If history is a guide, being anti-capitalist inside of a fascist party will be extremely dangerous. Ask Ernst Rohm what happened to the Nazis who wanted to carry out a socialist revolution. But Rohm’s SA had a confused identity, muddied with all the eugenic nonsense that percolated in every faction of the Nazi movement. As a professional thug specializing in street violence, Rohm had no useful role to play once the Nazis came to power. It may be a stretch to compare the Nazi SA to the US progressive movement, but history provides an imperfect roadmap for political strategy. The radical faction of the Republican Party will have to do what a limited thinker like Ernst Rohm could not do – engage the erstwhile fascist masses in a peaceful, civil dialogue about populism, capitalism and the power of the working class.


Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s Voice.

For more on this topic, consider Lonnie Ray Atkinson’s series, Don’t Think of a Republican: : How I Won A Republican Primary As A Lefty Progressive And You Can Too.


Phil Wilson  is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice https://philmeow.substack.com/

Don’t Follow Sanders Back into the Democratic Party

Sanders is a carnival barker at the graveyard of social movements. He’s spent years cheerleading for Biden — what good is his recent criticism?


Nathaniel Flakin and Otto Fors

November 15, 2024

LEFT VOICE

Photo: Jonathan Ernst

The day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders put out a withering statement placing the blame for that loss squarely on the Democratic Party:


It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

He asks if “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” will ever “understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing.” He wonders if they will take on the “increasingly powerful Oligarchy,” concluding “Probably not.” He finally announces that “very serious discussions” will take place, and ends with an open-ended: “Stay tuned.”

This is the Bernie Sanders people remember from his 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns, who mobilized millions of young people disaffected by the misery wrought by decades of neoliberalism. His language will resonate with the millions of people who did not vote for Harris, and the millions more who cast a ballot while holding their noses, because she ran a campaign in defense of the status quo.

Yet does Sanders think we can just forget the last four years, and everything he said until the day after the election?
Sanders: Biden and the Democrats’ Most Enthusiastic Cheerleader

Just a few months ago, after Biden’s catastrophic performance at the presidential debate, Sanders published a full-throated endorsement of Biden, calling him “the most effective president in the modern history of our country.” Sanders called on Democrats to “stop the bickering and nit-picking” and rally behind their candidate.

Was this just a momentary slip up in the final stretch of a campaign, when the Vermont senator was terrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency? Far from it: Sanders has been an integral part of the Biden administration, first as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, then as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Every time Biden and the Democrats threw workers and the oppressed under the bus, Sanders was there putting his leftist rubber stamp on Biden’s policies. He wrote no scathing rebukes when the Biden administration ran to Trump’s right on immigration, abandoned demands like a $15 minimum wage, ramped up fossil fuel production, and voted to break the railway strike. In fact, Sanders, with his reputation for saying it like it is, repeatedly lies about the president’s supposedly pro-labor record, claiming that “Biden wants to make it easier for workers to form unions.”

But that’s not all: Sanders, along with other progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, was a Biden dead-ender, standing with him even as more and more Democrats called on him to step down. When Biden finally left the stage, Sanders praised him as “the most pro-working class president in modern American history.”

When Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she cozied up to billionaires and made clear that she lacked even Biden’s purely rhetorical commitment to the labor movement. Yet Sanders remained a loyal cheerleader.

In a delusional search for votes from “moderate” Republicans, Harris began campaigning with the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Her father Dick Cheney was the principal architect of the Iraq War, a cynical intriguer whose company was raking in billions from forever wars that killed millions of people. The Cheneys might be the most bloodthirsty war hawks in the rogue’s gallery of U.S. imperialism. And Sanders? He stood with the war hawk — “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy,” allowing Donald Trump, a first-rate imperialist, to present himself as an anti-war candidate.
The Democrats Have Never Been on Our Side

The Intercept has claimed that “Bernie would have won,” given his “credibility” from “spending decades consistently fighting doggedly for the working class.” This is, unfortunately, pure amnesia, as Sanders spent the last four years defending an administration attacking the working class. And he has been plainly dishonest. Was Biden a champion of the working class, as Sanders claimed just half a year ago? Or did the Democrats abandon workers, as Sanders says now?

The Democratic Party has always been a party of the bourgeoisie, and Sanders has been part of it for almost 50 years, even while formally an independent. Despite his left-wing credentials, he has a long track record of supporting almost every U.S. imperialist intervention, while voting for trillions of dollars for weapons. Sanders is nothing but a social democratic fig leaf for a capitalist political machine. He is a carnival barker at the entrance to the graveyard of social movements.

You might also be interested in: Trump is President. Which Way Forward for the Labor Movement?

The tragedy of Sanders campaigns is that he indeed inspired millions of working-class and young people with progressive demands — and then led them into a party that could only betray them. We see Sanders channeling the movement for Palestine into working with the imperialist state as well. Across the country, leftists are rallying Democrats to support Sanders’s arms embargo measure — as if the institutions of the imperialist state could deliver an end to the genocide in Gaza. This is just a microcosm of Sanders’s role in the Democratic party, and how he works to keep outrage from developing into a serious challenge to the system.

Given the astounding failure of the Democratic Party (it’s actually kind of impressive that they managed to convince millions of workers that Donald Trump was less hostile to working people!), huge swaths of people realize we need a political alternative. Unfortunately, many will follow Sanders’s advice, and continue to try to change a party run by billionaires.

It’s not that Democrats lost their connection to working-class voters — the Democrats have never been on our side. Even in the supposed glory days of FDR, the Democratic Party was trying to save capitalism. Sanders, as a more or less official democrat, is part of the problem — even if he founded his own party, it would be a party loyal to U.S. imperialism. Workers in the United States need our own party — one completely independent of billionaires, war hawks, and all their political hacks.



Nathaniel Flakin

Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.

Instagram


Otto Fors

Otto is a college professor in the New York area.

We Won’t Win Until We’re Troublemakers

By Jane Slaughter

November 15, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Service and maintenance workers at Cornell University celebrate after securing an agreement with a two-week strike ending September 2. The first president of their local says that when management called their bargaining tactics “unprofessional,” it meant they were on the right track. Photo: UAW

Unions weren’t strong enough, in numbers or in influence with their members, to make a difference in this election. One sample showed union households at only 54 percent for Kamala Harris vs. 43 percent for the billionaire, with non-union households at 51 percent Trump, 47 percent Harris. If union voters had listened to their officers, Trump’s numbers would have been in single digits.

The Democrats would have been better for working people on a host of issues, but not enough better that they inspired people who are hurting to want to vote for them. In office, they just haven’t delivered. In particular, Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, which cost at least a million U.S. jobs, still rankles strongly, especially in the Midwest.

For many workers, it wasn’t a switch to Trump; it was why bother? Michigan Congressperson Rashida Tlaib said, “People declined to vote at all because they felt it had no impact on their lives.”

Harris lost (compared to Biden 2020) far more voters than Trump gained. In Wayne County, home to Detroit, she lost 61,000 votes; he gained 24,000. Nationally Harris lost 160,000 votes in majority-Black counties, compared to 2020; Trump lost 28,000. Overall, a lot more potential Democratic voters stayed home than switched to Trump.

Of course, as everyone acknowledges now, the Democratic Party strategy in recent campaign cycles has been not to try to campaign toward blue-collar voters or union members but rather to go for the better-off. Perhaps they lacked the arithmetic to know that in the United States the working class is still the majority.

U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer said in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” That didn’t work in 2016, and it didn’t work this year.

NO STATUS QUO

The status quo sucks! The voters that the labor movement should be seeking to influence are looking for candidates who are disruptors. Troublemakers. Working-class voters want a candidate who will put a thumb in the eye of the establishment, like Bernie Sanders. It is supremely ironic that a billionaire was able to adopt that persona.

The sad truth is that union members are just too few to elect national candidates—or to make any politician, regardless of party, listen to workers’ demands. The way out of the electoral mess is to make the labor movement strong and respected, so that not only our own members but others care what we say and do, and look to unions when pulling the lever.

“Strong” means two things: we are big, and we are willing to stand up for ourselves against the bosses. Union researcher Chris Boehner has found that current organizing is one-tenth of what the labor movement accomplished in the 1970s.

“Imagine if labor… started organizing 1 percent of eligible workers [a year] as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of 1 percent rate,” wrote Boehner. “Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.”

People, including voters, are inspired by those who stand up for themselves. Witness the 76 percent public support for the Auto Workers’ Stand-Up Strike against the automakers a year ago. That strike called out the profiteering CEOs, knocked them on their heels with smart tactics, and got both members and bystanders cheering.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to what unions should do in politics. But I know our strategies won’t tip the balance until unions are troublemakers again.

USPS Letter Carriers are Organizing Against an Insulting 1.3 Percent Raise

By Alexandra Bradbury

November 16, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Letter carriers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, voted unanimously to recommend a "no" vote on the tentative agreement. “It doesn’t account for everything we went through with Covid,” said member Saqia Talbert. The branch sent a vanful of members down to D.C. to picket the union's national headquarters. Photo: Gary Pena-Santos.

A wave of anger is cresting at post offices across the country. Letter carriers are looking at the big raises that other union members have won—38 percent over four years at Boeing, 62 percent in six years at the East Coast ports, $7.50 in five years at UPS.

They’re comparing those gains to the tentative agreement their president handed them in October: 1.3 percent a year for three years.

“It doesn’t account for everything we went through with Covid,” said Saqia Talbert, a letter carrier in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We were massively understaffed, and we were working 70 to 80 hours a week, every week, for two years straight.”

The website FinanceBuzz recently found that postal workers had fallen farther behind inflation than any other job it analyzed, including many jobs that are much less unionized.

The deal covers 200,000 people. The National Association of Letter Carriers is the largest of the four postal unions, which together make up the largest union workforce in the U.S.

If ratified, it will be retroactive to May 2023, when the previous contract expired. Many carriers are salty about the long, secretive bargaining process; the union could have moved to binding arbitration as early as July 2023.
500 DAYS LATER

Instead, NALC President Brian Renfroe negotiated with the Postal Service for more than 500 days. At times he promised the end result would be “historic” and would eliminate the entry-level City Carrier Assistant tier (it doesn’t).

In fact, this agreement would intensify speedup by reducing each carrier’s daily guaranteed office time from 33 minutes to 20, which could lead to eliminating routes.

“I just don’t know what he spent two years doing,” Talbert said. “I just truly do not understand.”

A week after the deal was announced, 700 people joined a vote-no Zoom call organized by the rank-and-file network Build a Fighting NALC, with the support of a loose coalition that includes a popular podcaster and two opposition slates for the union’s 2026 leadership election.

Carriers started meeting in the parking lots of their post offices to take group photos with homemade “vote no” signs. Some brought resolutions to their monthly membership meetings recommending a no vote.

In Naples, Florida, 50 people turned out for a union meeting on a Friday night, only to learn that the branch president would not allow their resolution to be heard—he claimed it was unconstitutional. Nonetheless, one member after another gave stirring testimony on why they’re voting no, among them two letter carriers who are homeless.

A few days later, 25 letter carriers joined a contract rally in front of the main Naples post office. Branch officers boycotted, but carriers from as far as Fort Myers, an hour north, drove down to participate.

“The thing we are trying to do is show that no station is alone,” said Michael Still in Allentown. “This is a true grassroots movement on the workroom floor. It goes before any caucus or ideology.” His branch voted unanimously to recommend a no vote, and sent a vanload of members to D.C. to picket the union’s national headquarters.
FEAR OF WORSE

Renfroe argues the 1.3 percent across-the-board isn’t the whole raise. His deal also retains the existing cost-of-living adjustment formula: a penny per 0.4 point increase in the Consumer Price Index, for those at the top of the pay scale, and less for people lower down. It eliminates three early wage steps and shortens the progression to top pay from 13.5 years to 11.5 years.

He presented his overview of the tentative agreement in four regional “rap sessions” in D.C., Minneapolis, Houston, and San Francisco, mainly for branch officers. The format was grueling: a four-hour presentation from Renfroe, followed by questions.

Officially the national union is not recommending a yes or no, but vote-no activists who attended said these events made a fear-based case for yes. The logic goes: we can’t do any better, given that the Postal Service lost $6 billion last year, and an arbitrator could start from scratch and award us a worse deal. Workers don’t get any vote on whatever the arbitrator delivers.

Alison Stankrauff in Detroit was a strong no when she first saw the tentative agreement, but after hearing her branch leaders outline this argument, she was feeling less certain: “I don’t want to say it influenced me entirely, but it gave me pause,” she said.

But Ernest Gonzales, chief steward at a post office in San Antonio, Texas, isn’t buying the “song and dance” that “basically we’re broke.” He points out the Postal Service artificially showed red ink for years because of a mandate to prefund its retiree medical benefits generations into the future, before Congress finally repealed that in 2022.

“You can get very creative in bookkeeping to find a way to ‘lose money’ if that’s your intention,” said Gonzales, who is on the coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC.

In the latest USPS fiscal year report, a line item for an $11 billion “investment” caught his eye. A new fleet of vehicles? No, according to the footnote, USPS was buying one-year treasury bonds. “To add that to the deficiency rating is disingenuous,” he said. “They’re trying to get carriers to accept this based on numbers from USPS that are not exactly telling you the whole truth.”

Besides, why should workers pay the price for management’s questionable investment decisions? “We’re not managers,” Gonzales said. “If you can’t manage this business you shouldn’t be here. Unless they’re going to give us contractual language to hold management accountable when they’re not doing their job, we should not be subsidizing this.”

Jerry Kerner, a letter carrier in Baltimore, had a similar question about Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s $75,000 performance bonus (on top of a $300,000 salary). Just the bonus is “more than most letter carriers make in a year,” he said. “If they’re performing so poorly, and they’re going to record all these losses, why are they paying bonuses to the executives?”
BINDING ARBITRATION

The timeline for the ratification vote hasn’t been announced yet. But if members vote no, the parties must then return to the bargaining table for 15 days. Build a Fighting NALC argues this would be a prime time for more rallies and a public pressure campaign.

From there, the last resort would be binding arbitration with a panel of three arbitrators: one representing the union, one representing the company, and one neutral who would effectively be the decision-maker. Postal strikes are illegal.

Federal law obliges the arbitrator to make sure postal worker pay is comparable to the private sector. One comparison the arbitrator would likely consider is UPS, where drivers reach top pay in four years, not 11—a difference that could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career.

“I don’t think we should sow any illusions that arbitration is this great thing,” said Tyler Vasseur, of Minneapolis, on the coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC. “Ultimately it’s this demobilizing thing. It’s there for a reason: so you don’t strike.

“But at same time, a strong no vote will force both our leadership and the arbitrator to pay attention. And we have to build the infrastructure for a real contract campaign. Our main emphasis should be on building a movement, not just having the best negotiator in there.”
PAYING ATTENTION

Scott Anderson is financial secretary of Branch 79 in Seattle. He said he hasn’t made up his mind how he will vote, but he’s pleased to see so much lively discussion.

“For so many years we’ve only had like 10 percent participation in the vote for our national agreement,” he said. “To me the hope is that they’re not going to just talk about it and be upset about it or like it, either way, but actually going to participate in the democratic life of our union.

“I’m hopeful that people take the energy that they’re feeling on the workroom floor and make their voices heard, and take that energy into getting other people to vote.”

Danielle Smith contributed reporting.

We’re Taking on America’s Most Anti-Union Company and We’re Going to Win

Dori Goldberg

 November 15, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photo by Nico Baum

I work at one of the most profitable companies in the world, yet I’m barely able to get by.

In August 2023, I got hired as a warehouse associate at an Amazon delivery station in San Francisco. Within months, it became clear just how unjust and dysfunctional the workplace was.

I start work at 3:20 a.m. and spend eight hours a day processing thousands of packages. By the end of the shift, my shoulders are sore, I’m lightheaded, and I often feel like I’m running on empty.

Our workplace isn’t safe. Heavy boxes routinely fall on my co-workers’ heads. I’ve seen people get chemical burns from cleaning up hazardous materials. It’s not unusual to sustain long-term injuries from being overworked.

In short, my co-workers and I come to work every day, breaking our backs for a company that treats us as disposable — and refuses to offer living wages or adequate health care plans. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We have the power to demand better.

That’s why my co-workers and I are organizing with the Teamsters Union, standing up to our bosses, and demanding Amazon recognize our union.

Management makes false promises, wanting us to believe that if we just work hard enough, we’ll climb the ranks to become a manager or get a raise. But favoritism is rampant, and consistent understaffing makes us physically, mentally and emotionally stressed, leading to burnout.

We won’t let this company continue to exploit us. We’re demanding union recognition and a Teamsters contract because we know that when we stand together, Amazon will be forced to hear our demands.

Management has tried their best to stop us from talking to each other about workplace issues. They say they can only deal with people’s issues one-on-one, because Amazon knows that when we come together as a group, we have the power to actually change things for the better.

We’re showing our co-workers and the company that we can make our workplace safer and healthier as a union. We are fighting for a living wage, a safe workplace that’s free from harassment, and quality health care and benefits. We’re unionizing in order to have a voice and call out Amazon for their mistreatment of workers.

So at 3:00 a.m. one day this fall, my coworkers and I marched into work and demanded recognition for our union.

Amazon wasted no time in launching their union-busting crusade. We aren’t falling for it. They made $30 billion last year while paying us pennies. Amazon is scared of us. They see we have strength in numbers, and we’re not backing down.

Getting Amazon to recognize our union is going to take considerable community support. The day after we demanded recognition, we rallied outside of our facility with our co-workers, fellow union members, and elected officials. As we continue to fight for recognition and a Teamsters contract, we must continue to show that organized labor, officials, and the community stand with us.

We’re taking on this fight not just at one facility, but around the country. I’m proud to be standing with my fellow Amazon Teamsters in San Bernardino, California; Skokie, Illinois; Queens and Staten Island, New York; and Northern Kentucky. As our numbers grow, our power grows. We must set our sights on forcing Amazon to come to the bargaining table and win a strong contract.

This is our moment. Let’s seize it.

Dori Goldberg is an Amazon DCK6 warehouse worker and Teamster in San Francisco, California.