Union resistance in the US

The timid outbreaks of unionism that the United States is experiencing have met with the active resistance of large companies so that the example does not spread.

In April, a group of workers at an Amazon distribution center in Staten Island, New York, managed to overcome pressure from the company and set up the first works council within the electronic giant.

The victory became a national symbol, but a few weeks later Amazon fired half a dozen bosses at that workplace for failing to abort the birth of the union.

Another giant, Starbucks, has been sued for retaliation against a union movement that already affects dozens of its coffee shops.

Barely 10.3% of workers in the US (about 14 million people) are members of a union.

In the private sector it is 6.1%.

The figures have not stopped falling in the last four decades, but at the beginning of April the Office of Labor Relations assured that in the previous six months the requests to form works councils had grown by 57%.

The most interesting novelty of this incipient union spring is above all in the technological boom that in the last 25 years has transformed the economy and society in the US and around the world.

The current revolution has been built on the total absence of negotiating capacity of the workers at the most mechanical levels, unarmed in the face of the algorithms that demand the mathematical efficiency that guarantees the objectives.

The billionaire leaders of this change of era, like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, are the richest men in the world and at the same time fierce activists against the organization of workers.

The example of Amazon is paradigmatic: it enters 386,000 million dollars a year (2020) and is worth more than 2,000 million on the Stock Market.

At the beginning of the pandemic,

its workers and distributors literally risked their lives to cover the needs of a population locked up at home with their shipments.

However, workers in the most basic tasks of the company in the US denounce exploitative conditions.

The union ferment coincides with the presidency of an old-school Democrat, Joe Biden, who in part carved out his persona as the man in Washington for the metal unions of the industrial Northeast.

Biden has received the union leader of the Amazon plant at the White House and now demands that companies awarded by the Federal Administration have agreements with the unions.

Biden likes to repeat that “Wall Street did not build America.

The middle class is what built America.

And the middle class was built by the unions.”

The generation of workers who aspire to be middle class in the new technological economy needs that same negotiating tool.