Queens and Staten Island, NYC — At two different Amazon locations in New York City (NYC) Black and white workers staged walkouts in solidarity with each other and with fellow workers internationally. The same day, Amazon workers also walked out in Maryland and marched in New Jersey. The class-consciousness that these workers understand exemplifies that under capitalism, control of the means of production = power. So when the working class stops churning the gears, the bosses’ profit machine slows down!
“When we stop production, only then, is when they listen to us.”
“What we did today falls under the same legacy of workers fighting for their power.”
Workers from the Woodside facility walked out to support the workers who walked out at the Long Island City warehouse, chanting,” workers united will never be defeated!” Home-made picket signs read, “We Make Amazon's Profit,” and “This Ain't Just Amazon, This is Capital!”
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) salutes the Amazon workers’ struggle and invites them to join our Party. The rulers are moving closer to yet another imperialist world war and global fascism. Only a mass revolutionary communist movement can lead the working class from this dark night. Our task is to bring the fight against imperialist war and racist police terror to workers on the job, to the shop floor in factories, hospitals, and fields.
Amazon, with millions of workers around the world and a significant number of super exploited Black workers in their ranks, have the potential to bring Bezos, number two on the list of richest bosses in the world, and his blood sucking to a grinding halt.
Thus, Amazon is fertile ground for the kind of class conscious fightback that could be transformed into revolutionary movement for  communism to liberate our class, humanity, and planet from this capitalist inferno.
Battle lines clear for Amazon workers
In 2020, there were 950,000 Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S.: 61 percent (579,500) were Black and Latin and 31 percent (294,500) were women. As the U.S. has shifted from a mainly industrial to a mainly service economy, Amazon represents the old auto and steel industries combined. This is the greatest concentration of young Black, Latin and women workers, and they are everywhere.
Work shifts can last up to 11 hours with only one 45-minute break and two 15-minute breaks. The workers are demanding a $3/hr. raise, longer breaks and respectful treatment from the bosses. The work is hard, the hours are long, and the battle lines are clear. About 40 workers, mostly in their early 20s, Black, Latin and white, women and men, turned in petitions with demands for better working conditions, but the bosses didn't want to accept them or respond to their demands.
The company’s higher ups  called in extra managers to try to intimidate the workers out of taking any action. It was very exciting to see the second group of workers walk out, saying that only because they knew they had each other’s back were they able to stand against their supervisor. You could feel the closeness of their relationships.
Red ideas spreading among Black, Latin workers
Workers complained that now that the holiday rush is over, Amazon is trying to get rid of as many workers as they can to make even more profit. Two workers are doing the work that six workers had been doing. A Latin worker said that Amazon has had him on unpaid ”vacation“ since the beginning of the year, trying to fire him or force him to quit because he injured his back after more than two years of heavy lifting and long hours.
A young Black worker in the walkout said that she originally did not want to work at Amazon. She said that she has no time for anything else besides work and that the paycheck isn’t enough to live on. She was hired with the understanding that she would be paid $18.50/hr but is only getting $16.
But she said that meeting “revolutionary-minded” coworkers and organizing against the boss has changed her life and made the entire experience worthwhile. This is what the Party means when we say build a base! Develop relationships with fellow class sisters and brothers in a way that teaches us to struggle with one another and fight the bosses, side-by-side with one another!
Workers, PL’ers rally for Amazon unionization
Meanwhile a few days later in Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union organized a rally to support the vote for unionization at Amazon. While the ALU (Amazon Labor Union) let all the politicians speak before the workers, PL’ers and friends spoke with several workers and shared copies of CHALLENGE.
One worker at the rally said, “I’ve been working at Amazon for a year. It is not like the average job. Amazon is modern day slavery in America. Everything consists of multi-tasking to get the right items together. When you work inside Amazon, your rights don’t exist. There is no leaving your station to use the restroom, to go get a drink of water or even to shift your legs. The managers and supervisors constantly tell you your time is too much and how much time you wasted.”
Another speaker talked about a worker who wanted to leave because his wife was having a baby, and was told that he must complete his shift or he would be fired. He ended up quitting. In their campaign against the union, Amazon is trying to scare workers about job security, but with a 150 percent turnover of the workforce every year, workers already have no job security at Amazon.
Smash liberal politicians, union misleaders
The limits of union struggles were exemplified by the ALU, which only fights for economic gains and doesn’t seek to unite all workers for workers’ power. This was exemplified by the Teamsters union's lackluster efforts to mobilize more than just a handful of their workers to the rally. A United Parcel Service worker we spoke to expressed resentment towards his union saying it was weakening and failing to organize Amazon.
If union leadership represented the interests of the working class, they would be trying to organize all workers to fight like hell. While unions are important places for workers to organize class struggle and fight back, unions won’t solve workers’ problems, because whatever gains we make are only temporary under capitalism.
PLP fights alongside Amazon workers to win the right to organize so that they have some form of protection from their greedy bosses. But we need a lot more than a raise.
We need a new communist world with no Bezos’, no profits, no racism and no imperialist wars. The only real protection for workers is to seize state power with armed communist revolution. Amazon workers in the U.S. and around the world can help make this next war the last! We invite them all to march with PLP on May Day and make that world a reality.