Jacobin boosts Teamsters bureaucracy’s campaign to “organize” Amazon workers

The article’s author, Eli Rose, a DSA member in New York City described as a “UPS driver and Teamsters member,” claims that it is necessary to “organize” Amazon workers under the Teamsters in order to protect the wages of UPS workers and increase the wages of Amazon workers.

{“For example,” he continues, “while a top-paid UPS driver makes around $40 an hour and has full family health care and a pension, most Amazon drivers make less than $20 dollars an hour, with limited (if any) health care and no pension. Amazon warehouse workers likewise lack the health care and pension benefits that Teamsters enjoy, as well as the vacations, holidays, and scheduling perks enshrined in union contracts. How can UPS, whose 260,000 Teamster employees in the United States make up the largest plurality of [International Brotherhood of Teamsters] members, compete with such a low-cost behemoth? In the long run, it can’t.”}

{Rose’s idyllic portrait of the wages and conditions of UPS workers is a deliberate fabrication, aimed at whitewashing the role of the Teamsters bureaucracy, which spent decades helping UPS slash labor costs long before Amazon came onto the scene.}

[wsws.org]

{Jacobin and the DSA are going all out to bring the Teamsters into Amazon, not despite its role in enforcing concessions at UPS, but because of it. The DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party, which sees the strengthening of the corporatist trade union apparatus over the working class, including one million Amazon workers, as a critical strategic imperative.}

{The impact of mass death—more than 700,000 killed in the US over the past 18 months—combined with massive growth in the exploitation of the working class is having a profoundly radicalizing impact on the consciousness of workers and youth.}

I wonder what the numbers are from 700K deaths that could also be effecting the unemployment issues? It's odd we don't get that while the establishment and their MSCM applied a largely false negative narrative about our fellow American's. I heard the other day that unemployment numbers were 4.8 for September. That's not really that high to indicate there's the major problem being spun by the MSCM and workplace community. Quite frankly, it's quite near regular averages. You have to then ask, where are the shortages, what is the cause, why isn't our representation deciphering the issue to address and inform. Are we being fed a manufactured illusion?

(Every one of these struggles pits workers in direct conflict with the corporatist unions, which work to suppress opposition and enforce the demands of the ruling class. When it comes to genuine rank-and-file rebellions, like the Volvo strike, Jacobin has nothing to say. All its energy is devoted to supporting the organizations that workers are rebelling against.}