JEFF BEZOS HAS LONG BEEN AN ADVOCATE FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S DOCTRINE OF OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
Amazon Faces Another New York Unionization Vote
E-commerce giant Amazon is facing yet another union vote, this time at a facility directly across the street from the Staten Island warehouse that recently voted to unionize.
Business Insider reports that Amazon is facing another union vote this month following high-profile elections at its Alabama and New York facilities. Last month, the company’s Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize under the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), now the union is hoping to have the facility just across the street vote in favor of unionization as well.
People hold placards during a protest in support of Amazon workers in Union Square, New York on February 20, 2021. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)
Approximately 1,500 workers at the LDJ5 Staten Island Amazon sorting center will be eligible to vote on unionization from April 25 to 29, with vote counting to begin on May 2. Workers at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted in recent weeks to join the Amazon Labor Union.
The vote decision was made following an election that saw 2,654 votes in favor of unionization and 2,131 opposed to it. Around 8,000 people work at the JFK8 facility. In Bessemer, Alabama, workers at an Amazon facility called BHM1 began voting in February on whether to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
The union vote failed 993 – 875, but more than 400 ballots remain contested which could tip the scales in favor of unionization. The same warehouse voted against unionization in 2021 but the National Labor Relations Board ordered a second election after finding that Amazon interfered in the first vote.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated during a recent interview that he doesn’t believe union representation would benefit the company’s workers. “It’s employees’ choice whether or not they want to join a union, we happen to think they’re better off not doing so for a couple of reasons at least,” Jassy stated.
Read more at Business Insider here.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Claims Workers ‘Better Off’ Without a Union, Company’s High Injury Rate ‘Misunderstood’
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated in a recent interview that he believes his workers are “better off” without a union and that the company’s high injury rate is “misunderstood.”
Business Insider reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated during an interview with CNBC this week that he doesn’t believe union representation would benefit the company’s workers. “It’s employees’ choice whether or not they want to join a union, we happen to think they’re better off not doing so for a couple of reasons at least,” Jassy stated.
Jassy stated that Amazon “empowers” its employees and that he believes that a union could have a negative effect on a worker’s relationship with their manager. Jassy stated: “[At Amazon] if they see something they can do better for customers or for themselves, they can go meet in a room, decide how to change it and change it. That type of empowerment doesn’t happen when you have unions. It’s much more bureaucratic, it’s much slower.”
(Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Jeff Bezos/Instagram
Amazon has faced scrutiny for its high injury rates at its warehouses in recent months. This week, the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) released a report showing that Amazon employees suffer injuries at a rate two times higher than other competitors.
In a letter to shareholders, Jassy addressed this stating: “Our injury rates are sometimes misunderstood.” He said that the company has roles that apply to “warehousing” as well as “courier and delivery” categories and that the firm’s injury rate is higher than other warehousing firms but lower than delivery companies.
“When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team, and hoped there might be a silver bullet that could change the numbers quickly,” Jassy said. “I didn’t find that.”
Breitbart News recently reported that Amazon is claiming that New York union organizers provided free marijuana to workers in an effort to convince them to vote in favor of the union. The objection is just one of many made by Amazon on Friday as the company aims to overturn a recent vote that created the first union in the history of the tech giant.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced on April 1 that a majority of workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, voted to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). Amazon is now challenging the vote and claims that the ALU and NLRB suppressed voter turnout.
Amazon made a filing on Friday in which it questioned the ALU’s methods to win the unionization vote. Amazon’s lawyers state that ALU organizers distributed cannabis to workers ahead of the vote and that the NLRB “cannot condone such a practice as a legitimate method of obtaining support for a labor organization.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
Life and Death in the Warehouse: A gruesome depiction of relentless exploitation
Screen writer and author Helen Black’s drama Life and Death in the Warehouse (available on BBC iPlayer) shines a light on conditions for workers in the UK (and global) warehouse industry.
Director Joseph Bullman’s inspiration for the drama came through a discussion with a group of workers in Wales while working on another documentary. He realized the workers were waiting for text messages to confirm if they would be given a shift at the warehouse at the bottom of the hill. Some were unable to get to the warehouse quickly enough, losing out on a day’s work. Their solution was to sleep at the local bus shelter to respond quicker to the call to work.
The drama is based on real-life events and real workers’ experiences. The BAFTA-winning team have previously created Killed by My Debt (2018) and Murdered by My Father (2016). Black grew up in Yorkshire in a working-class family. Her father was a miner and her mother worked in local shops. In a BBC interview, she commented, “There aren’t many working class writers, there aren’t many working class directors, there aren’t many working class producers. So it’s rare that you get a team together that wants to tell working class stories.”
Following extensive research with UK warehouse workers, the drama for the most part successfully brings these experiences to life.
The story is told chiefly from the vantage point of a junior manager rather than an order picker. This decision provides the opportunity to see the company’s relentless drive for profits at the expense of a high turnover of—and physical damage to—workers. The perspective also reveals the ideological brutality of capitalism on those it elevates and deploys to administer its exploitation. This is best captured in the post-incident debrief exchange for the junior management team: “We need to be desperate to please our customers”—“I am 100 percent desperate…”
Alys (Poppy Lee Friar) and Megan (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) lived on the same street in Wales in their younger years, meeting up again as they are waiting to go into work. Alys is a permanent picker with a long-standing record and Megan is starting on the management training programme. Both actors manage to invoke feelings of sympathy for their individual situations, despite the worker/manager conflict existing between them.
The opening scenes show the horror of Alys miscarrying her pregnancy in the warehouse toilets with Megan looking on in a state of shock. This quickly moves back to the beginning of the story as staff line up to enter the warehouse through the various security protocols, more akin to entering a secure prison than a place of work. The “Temporary work desk” deals with desperate workers seeking daily employment, refusing to offer shifts if workers have previously failed to meet picking targets.
Megan quickly learns the company’s Orwellian “customer fixated” mantra means management will go to any lengths to dehumanise the pickers to meet ever-more demanding targets. No consideration is to be given to a picker’s height, age or health conditions, including pregnancy. Failure to meet targets results in the loss of a job.
Despite Alys advising the company of her pregnancy, her request for lighter duties is declined and she is placed on “Personal Enhancement Plan” when she cannot meet her daily pick rate. This is a euphemism for being “managed out” of the business.
Under pressure to perform and keep her job, Alys continues working despite suffering with high blood pressure (due to the pregnancy) and at one stage passes out. Megan, concerned for her wellbeing, calls an ambulance. She is reprimanded by her manager colleagues and superiors for “taking the easy way out, not what is best for the team.” Danny (Craig Parkinson), the Senior Manager, and his junior sidekick Donna (Kimberly Nixon) are droid-like characters, seeming to lack any empathy for the workers. They are the smiling assassins in Megan’s work-life. Despite her best efforts to remain “human,” she must meet the requirements of the corporation. Her evolution into a replica of Danny and Donna is evident by the end of the drama.
Megan, from a working-class background and bringing in the only income in her family, is as desperate to keep her job as Alys, so continues pushing Alys to improve her performance. In a similar manner to call centers, every second of the pickers’ day is monitored. Idle time, which includes toilet breaks, should be kept to the minimum, which results in male employee urinating in bottles and leaving them around the warehouse rather than lose time using the toilet facilities. Female workers unable to do the same and managing monthly cycles and pregnancy must race to use toilet facilities as quickly as possible and are then publicly humiliated in front of the entire team when they take longer than 10 minutes.
These vast distribution centers have often sprung up in depressed areas such as ex-mining villages. This creates the conditions for super-exploitation, with low numbers of jobs and high reserves of labour. Desperate temporary workers are eager to earn the “green vest” of permanent employment, pushing themselves to exhaustion to prove their “worth”—with one temporary worker consuming dangerously high levels of energy drinks pumped with sugar and caffeine, as well as taking energy supplements.
COVID-19 comes up briefly during a team meeting. While the writers have selected the issue of pregnancy rights as the main narrative, it is unfortunate that more attention was not given to this issue. Warehouse staff have been on the frontline of the pandemic. Designated as “key workers,” they continued working in enclosed spaces with COVID running rife in distribution centers. This has been a fundamental experience of the broader working class in “key worker” roles and more could have been made of this.
The script points to the hostility of the company to union activity. This has to do with management’s resistance to any self-organisation on the part of the workers and is about maintaining a workforce of individuals rather than a collective force. However, the recent drive to unionise Amazon workers, supported by US President Joe Biden, shows the turn being made by the ruling class to utilize the corporatist unions to control this increasingly critical section of the working class.
Once the unions are in place, as the broader experiences of supermarket distribution and warehouse workers in the UK shows, low wages, terrible working conditions and exploitation remain the norm.
White House: Open Borders Will Reduce Migration Numbers
Pro-migration advocates are telling Democrats and reporters that fewer migrants will be registered at the border each month once the Title 42 anti-disease border rule is removed.
The implausible claims come as President Joe Biden is being tugged in two directions. Democratic legislators and the voters want him to keep the Title 42 border barrier past its scheduled expiration date of May 23 — but his business and progressive allies want him to remove the barrier.
“The administration’s decision to roll back Title 42 is wrong and reckless,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) told Politico on April 20. His voice is important because he is the likely Democratic candidate in the Ohio Senate race this year.
Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkjas, is using the Title 42 barrier to exclude only about one-half of the economic migrants who arrive at the U.S. southern border. But he busses most of the rejected migrants back to Mexico, instead of flying them home. This lax policy allows the rejected migrants to try again and again to sneak past the border guards.
Mayorkas’s repeat crossers inflate the monthly numbers, which reached 221,000 in March 2022, officials say.
Mayorkas’s inflated numbers create a PR problem for Biden, say the pro-migration activists who want to admit all the migrants. They argue that Biden and the Democrats would be in less political trouble if they open the border to nearly all the migrants the first time they appear at the border.
“It is deceptive to suggest that the numbers of administration numbers are so high simply because of Title 42 and the so-called double-counting of repeat attempts,” countered Robert Law, a pro-enforcement advocate who worked for President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
“The [monthly] numbers are high because the Biden administration [welcoming] policies are encouraging these numbers,” Law told Breitbart News. Law now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.
At least one former Biden official publicly agrees the numbers will go up: “I do think that numbers will increase when Title 42 is taken down,” Tyler Moran, a former immigration official in Biden’s administration, told Slate.com.
Moreover, Mayorkas’s 115-page plan for responding to the end of Title 42 projects a massive spike in migration.
The White House has announced that Title 42 will be lifted on May 23. But a growing number of Democratic legislators, and apparently some White House officials, are looking for ways to extend the barrier because they fear a November rejection by many swing voters.
In reaction, pro-migration administration officials and their allies are making the open-is-less claim.
“Once Title 42 is lifted … if they try again, they will be committing a crime,” an official told Fox News, which also reported:
The White House cited February numbers, noting that in February, under the Title 42 order, more than 90,000 individuals were expelled for attempting to cross the border, and warned that they have “no legal barrier to trying again and again.”
Axios got the same open-is-less pitch from “Biden administration officials,” perhaps from Mayorkas’s deputies:
Once Title 42 is lifted, they say, the administration will properly process migrants. People who are removed after being processed would face more serious consequences than those being rapidly expelled under the current system.
Officials did not tell reporters that the deportation “process” takes several years.
During that processing time, the migrants can get jobs, pay off their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels, import their wives and children, file for green cards, and also hide from federal deportation agents when they are ordered home. So the much-touted “process” is expanding the existing population of illegal immigrants that is used by investors to push down wages and drive up housing prices.
In effect, the legal process provides a legal facade for the bipartisan economic policy of extraction migration that stimulates the U.S. economy with more foreign consumers, renters, and workers.
Progressives who are backed by business and investor groups echo the more-is-less claim.
“More delay to “buy time” to continue Trump policy that will cause more cruelty, repeat entries & inflated border stats would be a political miscalculation … [and] a moral and legal miscalculation.,” tweeted Eleanor Acer, a director at Human Rights First.
It makes things worse. This is self-defeating. Last month, 2 of every 5 people apprehended by the Border Patrol had already been apprehended and expelled at least once already. The average repeat crosser is now caught 3+ times! Title 42 is responsible.
Pro-migration advocates are also trying to portray supporters of the Title 42 policy as immoral acolytes of Stephen Miller, Trump’s former aide, a man who is hated by many progressives. “Just absolutely wild to see some Democrats embracing a policy implemented by Stephen Miller,” said Mario Carrillo, an activist with the progressive American’s Voice group. “Will never understand what voters they’re trying to win by essentially admitting that Stephen Miller’s assault on asylum is okay with them.”
The [migrants] are rational thinkers, and they have an economic incentive [to cross the border] if they see that Title 42 has been lifted. If they think they are more likely than ever to be allowed into the interior of the country ….We’ll gain 10 new arrivals [for every reduced repeat crosser] and they’ll be coming from farther and farther away.
Biden’s team should return to Trump’s policies, he said. Economic migrants who arrive at the border should be refused entry, not released to take jobs, he said. “They need to be returned to their home countries … that makes the [economic] calculus from the alien’s perspective that much more challenging.”
Some pro-migration advocates admit Law’s prediction.
“On the border. I do think that numbers will increase when Title 42 is taken down,” Tyler Moran, a former immigration official in Biden’s administration, told Slate.com. She continued:
There’s been a lot of reporting about the high apprehension numbers at the border. But [each] apprehension means the system is working. It means that Border Patrol is apprehending or catching people at the border. And some of those people will ask for asylum and they will have a right to do so. And some of those people will be removed. In fact, if you look at just like the general percentage of people who ask for asylum, it’s only about 30.5 percent of people … [So] one can stand for secure and well-managed borders and also for the right of people to seek asylum. It’s not an either-or.
“When Title 42 is taken down, anyone [in the world] will have the right to ask for asylum,” she added.
Besides, “Immigrants have always been a huge benefit to our country economically but also culturally … We need immigrants to keep our economy afloat,” she claimed.
Overall, Mayorkas’s team has released 840,000 migrants into the United States since January 2021, despite a federal law mandating the detention of migrants.
The self-serving economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.
The extraction migration policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the United States from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-led empire of competing identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he insisted.
Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls.
The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
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