One Question: How Can We Use the Pandemic to Organize Workers?

 How Can We Use the Pandemic to Organize Workers?

CHRISTIAN SMALLS

Former Amazon employee and labor activist

This pandemic has exposed the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Let’s start with the good. It showed how people from all corners of the country came together in a time of need, especially our first responders. But this pandemic also highlighted the bad, the lack of preparation by essential businesses to protect their workers. The ugly was that capitalism continued to thrive at the expense of human lives.

Amazon is one example. The company failed to protect its employees, failed to be transparent, and, instead of listening, intimidated us. Amazon’s response to organizers was to silence and discipline them, which proves that the CEO, Jeff Bezos, is incapable of managing a workforce.

Amazon believes in hiring and firing as a way of maintaining its own demands, not the demands of employees or even customers. Creating a union run by employees is exactly what is needed so that something like this never happens again.

TRE KWON

Nurse, socialist, and Left Voice editor

I’m an ICU nurse in New York City. Today, frontline workers like me are bearing the highest costs of the pandemic—and a capitalist system that puts profits over our lives.

But many of us are also recognizing our collective power. We’ve seen direct actions at hospitals, nursing homes, Amazon warehouses, poultry factories, and grocery stores across the country.

Workers are questioning the organization of health care, education, child care—and the egregious consequences of their commodification. They are abandoning any hope they might have had in capitalism, and starting to struggle for a different system.

In our hospitals, we’re trying to protect our health because the executives are primarily looking out for the bottom line. These experiences are forcing us to look for a model of workers’ control, in which those of us doing the work make the main decisions.

MATTHEW TELLES

Organizer with Gig Workers Collective and former Instacart personal shopper

I used to think it would take at least another decade for the major gig companies to completely erode the traditional employment model, but the pandemic has expedited that process.

Instacart hired half a million shoppers using predatory marketing on the recently unemployed. And hundreds of thousands of people are signing up to do essential tasks for low wages and no legal protections because they are uncertain of their future.

But we are also seeing a steep increase in creating a cross-platform community of workers experiencing the same hardship and exploitation. Uber drivers are working with Instacart shoppers. Amazon workers are literally fighting for their lives by striking and reaching out to the media.

Now is the time for workers not only to organize within their own gigs, but to reach out to others. To join together and help create a true path forward that helps all, and doesn’t prey on immigrants, minorities, and the desperate.

We can build that world. We just have to fight for it.