https://www.indiewire.com/2022/04/the-wobblies-documentary-review-1234720776/

The IWW, whose members were nicknamed “Wobblies” (or “Wobs”), was formed in 1905 with the goal of creating “One Big Union” made up of all workers, regardless of skill level, race, creed, gender, or country of origin (an audacious notion when most unions were off-limits to women and Jim Crow laws were in full-effect). With a philosophy informed by socialist and anarchist thinkers, the IWW was loathed by capitalist crusaders of the time, as well as more “established” union leaders like AFL president Samuel Gompers, who described it as “a radical fungus on the labor movement, those who could not fit in to a normal, rational movement.”

By 1917, the IWW was largely torn apart by internal conflicts, as well as sweeping hostility toward the “Red”-leaning organization and mass arrests for conspiracy and sedition. The organization does still exist today, though with a significantly reduced membership.

An oral history more than an official one, “The Wobblies” is focused more on rank-and-file members and their stories, rather than on creating an authoritative overview of the organization. As a result, the documentary is as unwieldy and imprecise as its name suggests, though this is far from a defect. The chorus of voices who lend their memories to the narrative are as unique and varied as the IWW itself. Bird and Shaffer sought to capture these early Wobblies’ recollections on camera before they were erased from history.

It’s mesmerizing to listen to men and women in their eighties and nineties as they recall detailed evocations of poor working conditions, the camaraderie of striking workers, and the traumatic violence of strike-breakers.

On International Workers’ Day, We’re Still Fighting for the Eight-Hour Day

Amazon workers are fighting for the things we fought for one hundred years ago,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flights Attendants–CWA and a leader of the US labor movement’s left wing, at a rally for Amazon workers on Staten Island last Sunday.

Nelson was referring to Amazon’s warehouse-work scheduling practices, which entail ten- or twelve-hour shifts as well as mandatory overtime during “peak season,” the period around the holidays when customers order more items than ever from Amazon and the company brings on additional temporary workers.

At the time of the first May Day demonstration, twelve- and even sixteen-hour workdays were the norm, leaving the working class with little time for what they pleased. On May 1, 1886, the date that would become known as International Workers’ Day, three hundred thousand workers across the United States demonstrated in a unified demand for an eight-hour day.

Chicago was the heart of the movement, with forty thousand workers walking off the job to join the demonstrations. The actions built over several days. On May 3, police attacked and killed locked-out steelworkers at the McCormick Reaper Works plant — labor leaders called for a protest against the violence the following day in the city’s Haymarket Square. When a bomb was thrown into that crowd, police opened fire. The events provided a pretext for the arrest of eight anarchists, who were then convicted of murder, with four of them hanged on November 11, 1887. The Haymarket affair transformed the date into a class holiday: International Workers’ Day.

US workers eventually won the fight to make eight-hour days the standard, but over time that win eroded. While one still sometimes hears that if you love the weekend, you have unions to thank for it, for many workers weekends no longer exist, if they ever did. From Amazon and the food-manufacturing industry to the world of entertainment and the service sector, workers are scheduled according to what employers deem most profitable and efficient, regardless of their desires.

At many workplaces, this means last-minute scheduling, a just-in-time model applied to the labor force. Many food-service and retail workers receive the coming week’s schedule on a Sunday evening, leaving little time to coordinate childcare or make plans for doctor’s appointments and the like. While some locales, such as New York City, have passed legislation to mandate employers provide schedules in advance and offer premium pay for scheduling changes, in much of the country, scheduling stability is nonexistent, leaving workers to build their lives around the whims of their bosses.

At Amazon’s LDJ5 sorting center, outside of which Nelson was speaking and where workers just finished voting on whether to become the second Amazon facility to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the issue is not too much work but not enough — workers say 80 percent of the center’s employees are part-time, even though many would prefer full-time hours. The company rejects the requests, often repeatedly, bringing in other workers when its algorithm deems it efficient. Such forced part-timing is by no means unique to Amazon, leading workers across industries to cobble together a living with second and third jobs.

Rather than being separate issues — too much work for some, and too little for others — the issue is one and the same: a lack of control over one’s hours. As Karl Marx describes the relationship between overwork and under- or unemployment in Capital, “The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital.”

In this respect, too, Nelson’s statement about Amazon employees waging a fight that was waged a century ago is right: two years into the pandemic, one of the key issues moving workers into collective action is the struggle over the working day.

As the labor market tightened during the pandemic, some employers chose to impose mandatory overtime on existing workers rather than lay out the cash and benefits required to sufficiently staff up. Long work weeks, at times stretching to eighty hours, helped push food-manufacturing workers at Nabisco and Frito-Lay to strike in 2021. Similar frustration led Kellogg’s employees off the job: some of the workers had twelve- and even sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Roughly sixty thousand film and television workers, IATSE members, came unprecedentedly close to a nationwide strike over the same issue, pushed to the brink by workdays that extend long enough to make drowsy driving a regular occurrence in the industry.

With many workers relying on overtime to pay their bills, the demand for shorter hours is inescapably entwined with the need for livable wages. As one recent study finds, many of the country’s largest corporations still pay the majority of their workers less than $15 an hour, and the federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 an hour, an amount that hasn’t budged since 2007. That must change. While Samuel Gompers, the first AFL-CIO president, said of the fight for the eight-hour day, “However much they may differ upon other matters . . . all men of labor . . . can unite upon this,” until wages are sufficiently high, workers will either turn to overtime or second and third jobs to make ends meet, preventing unification behind the demand for less work and more time for living.

Under the pressure of post-COVID labor scarcity, wages for many US workers have been rising — if nowhere near enough to make up for decades of stagnation — and a movement is afoot, if still in its earliest stages, to organize companies where unions have little, or zero, presence. Starbucks workers continue building momentum: more than two hundred of the company’s roughly nine thousand corporate-owned stores have filed for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, and forty have won such votes. The NLRB, while still severely underfunded and thus too slow in its handling of the company’s flagrantly illegal union-busting campaign, is as pro-worker as it has been since the 1930s, and has now sued Starbucks to reinstate illegally terminated workers.

Amazon, too, has become ground zero for a working-class offensive. The company has long been an anti-union stronghold even as many other warehouses are unionized — in keeping unions out, both for warehouse workers and in its delivery operations, Amazon has driven down wages and working conditions elsewhere while pioneering sadistic algorithmic management and high turnover. That the ALU has organized JFK8, a Staten Island warehouse, is an important start — should the efforts spread to other warehouses, either with the ALU or other unions, it will be a breakthrough of enormous significance (and there is little way to imagine the ALU winning a strong contract at JFK8 without such momentum). The company is the United States’ second-largest employer and, in many ways, the pacesetter for working conditions across industries; the excitement building around unionizing Amazon is a sea change in the labor world.

The unionization rate in the United States has not risen during the pandemic: it sits at 10.3 percent. In the private sector, it is a mere 6.3 percent. The working class remains disorganized, and with that disorganization has come continued employer offensives. Dictatorial control of the workplace includes power over the structuring of workers’ days, but recent fights to reclaim control over one’s time, both among unionized workers and by the likes of Amazon’s sprawling workforce, pose a challenge to that arrangement. What first made the labor movement in the United States, the cause of the first International Workers’ Day, may yet remake it once more.

The reality in 🇳🇴:
– Health care is a right
– College is tuition-free
– Guaranteed 28 days of paid vacation
– One year of fully paid parental leave

A government that looks out for the needs of its people — not such a radical idea. pic.twitter.com/SBYzK4hDIy

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 29, 2022

Eugene Debs’s May Day Address to Black Workers

It is more than gratifying to me in looking over the current Messenger to note the high excellence of its contents as a literary periodical and as a propaganda publication. It is edited with marked ability and it contains a variety of matter that would do credit to any magazine in the land.

All my life I have been especially interested in the problem of the Negro race, and I have always had full sympathy with every effort put forth to encourage our colored fellow-workers to join the Socialist movement and to make common cause with all other workers in the international struggle for the overthrow of capitalist despotism and the emancipation of all races from the oppressive and degrading yoke of wage slavery.

Due to the ignorance, prejudice, and unreasoning hatred of the white race in relation to the Negro, the latter has fared cruelly indeed and he has had but little encouragement from the “superior” race to improve his economic, intellectual and moral condition, but on the contrary, almost everything has been done to discourage every tendency on the part of the Negro toward self-improvement and to keep him in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master.

But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him; he has had his experience in the war and especially since the war, and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with the white worker and the worker of every other race, creed and color, and the Messenger is doing its full share to spread the light in dark places and to arouse the Negro masses to the necessity of taking their place and doing their part in the great struggle that is to emancipate the workers of all races and all nations from the insufferable curse of industrial slavery and social degradation.

May Day is now dawning and its spirit prompts me to hail the Messenger as a herald of light and freedom.

On May Day the workers of the world celebrate the beginning of their international solidarity and register the high resolve to clasp hands all around the globe and to move forward in one solid phalanx toward the sunrise and the better day.

On that day we drink deeply at the fountain of proletarian inspiration; we know no nationality to the exclusion of any other, nor any creed, or any color, but we do know that we are all workers, that we are conscious of our interests and our power as a class, and we propose to develop and make use of that power in breaking our fetters and in rising from servitude to the mastery of the world.

Jacobin, which republished this speech, notes the following as context:

In the spring of 1923, the black socialist magazine the Messenger published a May Day greeting from leading US socialist Eugene V. Debs.

The Harlem-based magazine had gotten its start in 1917. Edited by two young radicals, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, it vehemently opposed World War I (both editors were briefly taken into police custody for polemicizing against the war) and relentlessly criticized the “Old Crowd” of moderate black leaders. In place of elite-led, accommodationist “racial uplift,” the Messenger proposed an unrelenting fight against Jim Crow, lynch law, and economic exploitation using the battering ram of mass organization.

Debs was an early friend of the Messenger, and he shared the magazine’s pro-labor, “New Negro” politics. Especially toward the end of his life (he died in 1926), Debs supported a militant struggle for racial equality as part of a broader struggle for worker emancipation. That socialist vision was on full display in his May Day remarks.

Racial domination had kept Africans Americans “in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master,” Debs declared. “But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him . . . and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with . . . the worker of every other race, creed and color.”

BTW, you can show some solidarity with Jacobin by subscribing for only a buck today.

From The Guardian, which supplies May Day weekend pics. Photo is May Queen of the Beltane Fire Fest, Scotland by Jane Barlow.

No matter the industry workers deserve a voice and protection. #Solidarity is beautiful and breaks down divisions. @MineWorkers came to support baristas organizing with @SBWorkersUnited today in Alabama. #UnionYes https://t.co/FHPhDYwFG5 pic.twitter.com/xpmj42or2U

— Haeden Wright (@HaedenWright) April 30, 2022

The Private Equity Giant KKR Bought Hundreds Of Homes For People With Disabilities. Some Vulnerable Residents Suffered Abuse And Neglect

State health inspectors discovered serious injuries that were concealed from families or authorities, and others that went untreated — as in the case of a Texas man whose nose had been broken so many times that a staff member decided it was “beyond repair” and therefore not worth a trip to the hospital.

From the time KKR took over BrightSpring in March 2019 through the end of 2021, its homes were cited for dangerous conditions at a rate well above the average for such facilities, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by BuzzFeed News.

The analysis focused on intermediate care facilities, the type of group home with the most comprehensive state inspection reports, in the seven states with the most for-profit homes. In those states, KKR owns only 16% of the homes but racked up 40% of the serious citations — more than 500 in total.

Meanwhile, the KKR-controlled board approved a plan for BrightSpring to take on more than a billion dollars in debt, secured by the company’s assets, to buy more companies. It now operates in 50 states serving over 350,000 people daily across its different healthcare divisions.

But BrightSpring was left to pay more than $135 million a year in interest on the loans, and millions more to KKR itself for “transaction” and “advisory” fees, money that might otherwise have helped improve conditions in the homes.

In advance of this story, KKR and BrightSpring drew up a crisis response plan that included buying ads on Google, priming legislators for unfavorable revelations, and threatening legal action against BuzzFeed News, according to internal company documents and communications. The companies did not, however, agree to meet with reporters to discuss these issues on the record.

Instead, KKR issued a statement, saying, “We vehemently disagree with the grossly misleading narrative you presented.” BrightSpring sent a similar statement, and called BuzzFeed News’ findings “inaccurate, misleading, and fundamentally flawed.” It said the data analysis was unsound because the underlying government records were unreliable and were collected during a pandemic. Four leading academic experts consulted by reporters said BuzzFeed News’ methodology was sound.

A KKR spokesperson told BuzzFeed News it had invested $200 million per year in “quality first initiatives” at BrightSpring and increased total compensation to frontline workers by 28%. “Over 99.99% of care hours are completely incident-free,” said Leigh White, a BrightSpring spokesperson, and the company has “achieved 98% medication administration documentation compliance.”

She added, “In the comparatively rare case that an incident of inadequate or improper care occurs, we take prompt action and have rigorous and comprehensive policies and procedures in place to address it.”

The challenges of running these group homes were clear to KKR before it bought BrightSpring. During internal discussions about whether to make the purchase, high-level executives were told about instances of abuse, neglect, and staffing shortages under its prior owner, a Canadian private equity firm called Onex, according to a person familiar with the deal. (Onex did not respond to questions from BuzzFeed News.)

Announcing the purchase, BrightSpring CEO Jon Rousseau promised that the KKR deal, which included merging with a pharmacy, would “have valuable benefits to our clients, patients and customers.”

KKR installed its own executives in four of the company’s seven board seats and oversaw BrightSpring’s rapid growth, despite mounting evidence of peril for those in its care.

The conditions in KKR’s BrightSpring homes deteriorated dramatically in West Virginia, where the company controlled more than two-thirds of all the federally certified group home beds in the state.

Regulators called out a “pattern of increased significant and serious deficient practices” over the period since the homes had been taken over by KKR.

The situation in West Virginia spiraled so far that in July 2020, the state forced BrightSpring to stop accepting new clients. After continued failings, West Virginia and BrightSpring reached a settlement in which the company did not admit to wrongdoing but had to close or sell a fifth of its federally certified homes in the state.

For the company, the West Virginia crackdown was just a bump in the road.

BrightSpring went on to purchase hospices and home healthcare companies and moved further into services for “waiver homes” — residences for people with disabilities that are sometimes subject to fewer government inspections.

This expansion is part of a vast transformation in healthcare. KKR and other private equity firms have quietly acquired enormous portions of this sector, from entire hospital chains to addiction treatment centers to women’s health clinics. In 2021 alone, private equity firms invested about $172 billion — more than 10 times the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — in US healthcare companies, according to the industry tracking group PitchBook.

Often, private equity firms promised that their management expertise would make things better for employees and patients. And to be sure, some struggling companies have benefited from being taken private, removed from the quarterly demands of shareholders, and turned around with new leadership.

KKR’s ownership of group homes, however, offers a cautionary tale about what can happen when a private equity firm’s playbook is brought to bear on people whose lives hang in the balance.

Kinder, gentler barbarians

In December 2015, George Roberts, one of the founders of KKR, and others from the firm boarded a plane for Olympia, Washington, to pitch pension fund managers representing the state’s teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

“You’ve had to put up with us at least 100 times during the last 34 years,” Roberts told the group with a chuckle, according to an audio recording. Investments from the pension fund in Washington, as well as those in Oregon and other states, had helped KKR become one of the largest private equity firms in the world.

KKR’s reputation for aggressive tactics was cemented by its 1988 takeover of RJR Nabisco, later chronicled in the book and movie Barbarians at the Gate. More than 1600 RJR Nabisco employees soon lost their jobs, while the company’s ousted CEO got a $50 million “golden parachute.”

In April 2021, in Lubbock, Texas, a 51-year-old man with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia wandered more than 3 miles from a BrightSpring group home, down a road with six lanes of traffic. A car going 45 miles per hour struck him, breaking his leg, his pelvis, and his collarbone. He was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Federal rules required the company to have at least one staff member at the home for every six residents. But the 41st Street Community Home, where the man lived, had been without a single staff member at least seven times in 2021, inspectors found. So the company had been shuttling him and other residents to nearby facilities, where the staff-to-client ratio sometimes rose to as high as 1 to 21.

On this day, one worker had been left to care for 11 residents with severe disabilities.

Staffing shortages have affected the entire healthcare sector, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, but under KKR, BrightSpring’s record has been particularly abysmal. According to reports in the seven states analyzed by BuzzFeed News, inspectors found 118 instances of dangerously low staffing since KKR bought the company — double the rate of all other facilities.

“The staffing issue was the root cause for every problem I encountered while I was there,” said Perry McAfee, a manager who oversaw about 60 homes around Houston. “If you pay $7.50 an hour, you’re not going to get a lot of people when they can go to Walmart and make $10.”

McAfee, who left in September 2020, said the company “was not focused on quality of services, but on the revenue generated each month. I’m not saying that’s not important. But that was the sole focus.”

Staffing is one of BrightSpring’s biggest expenses, accounting for about half the total cost of running some of its group homes. Its nurses and “direct care” staff members give residents their medicine, help them take showers, change their bandages and sometimes their diapers, and cook their meals. It’s hard work that comes with grave responsibility.

Before KKR bought BrightSpring, the company’s wages were low, even by the standards of a notoriously ill-paying industry. KKR said it increased employee compensation by 28%.

McAfee and four other former managers, however, who collectively oversaw nearly 100 homes until as recently as January 2022, said they told executives that they could not safely staff the homes at the rates BrightSpring was offering.

Even when they could get people in the door, keeping them was a challenge. In Texas, BrightSpring lost as many direct care workers in a single year as it employed in these homes in the entire state — 1,500 in 2020 alone. That turnover appears to be confined to a slice of its workforce. (The company said turnover is an industry-wide challenge and that nearly three-quarters of the staff lasted a year or more.)

In 2020, the company reported paying Texas direct care staff a starting wage of just $8 an hour, $1.50 less than most other group home businesses in the state, according to government records. BrightSpring said that compensation is often higher, and “current average pay, including incentives and excluding benefits, for frontline employees in Texas is over $12 an hour.” The company did not explain how it calculated that average or which employees it categorized as frontline.

There’s more, go here.

Amazon ends paid leave for U.S. workers with COVID-19, replacing it with 5 days of excused, unpaid leave – Reuters

— BNO|Medriva Newsroom (@medriva) May 1, 2022

I’m surprised the NRLB hasn’t gotten wind of this.

How to Gerrymander a Fiasco New York Democrats have once again made the state a national laughingstock

here’s still a lot of chaos and confusion surrounding New York’s broken election system, but as of this writing we know that the proposed boundaries of all 61 state senate districts and all 27 congressional districts are null and void: the state’s highest court has ruled that the new lines were created in ways that violated the state constitution and gave an illegal advantage to the Democratic Party, which controls the Assembly and State Senate.

All the districts must be redrawn in the next few weeks by a court-appointed special master. Primaries to select each party’s nominees in the new districts have been moved from June 28 to August 23.

The sudden changes in the maps mean that some candidates — who’d already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and begun knocking on doors and buying ads — might discover it was a lot of wasted effort: they could find themselves drawn into an entirely different district, and might have to begin campaigning all over again.

It’s too soon to know exactly which politicians will benefit from the new court-ordered maps, but two things are clear: 1) New York will retain its unwanted status as a national laughing stock, hopelessly incapable of operating a fair and legal voting system; and 2) Democratic hopes of flipping a few Republican-held districts to help keep control of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections are more distant than ever.

Democratic leaders brazenly violated New York’s laws governing redistricting, set out in detailed amendments to the state Constitution that took effect in 2014. Despite a legal requirement to consider maps submitted by a bipartisan independent commission, the legislature moved ahead without waiting for the commission.

They also aggressively drew congressional districts in ways clearly designed to favor Democrats. The 11th District, which covers all of conservative Staten Island, has long included similarly right-leaning parts of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Bath Beach — but the legislature’s proposed maps snaked the lines northward into liberal parts of Sunset Park and Park Slope in a blatant attempt to make it harder for the Republican incumbent, Nicole Malliotakis, to get re-elected. President Trump won the current district with 52 percent of the vote; the (now illegal) district proposed by the legislature would have been carried by Joe Biden with 54 percent.

Similar changes would have made the District 1 in eastern Long Island (represented by Republican Lee Zeldin) go from 52 percent for Trump to 55 percent for Biden. And upstate, District 22 (represented by Republican John Katko) would have turned a deeper shade of blue, from 53 percent for Biden to 58 percent. Both districts are open seats — Zeldin is running for governor and Katko is retiring — and Dems clearly had their sights set on flipping the districts by stuffing them with pro-Biden voters who might be more likely to vote Democratic for congress.

All the shenanigans drew a firm rebuke from the state’s highest court, instead.

“The enactment of the congressional and senate maps by the legislature was procedurally unconstitutional, and the congressional map is also substantively unconstitutional as drawn with impermissible partisan purpose, leaving the state without constitutional district lines for use in the 2022 primary and general elections,” the Court of Appeals ruled in a sternly worded opinion, later nothing that “we are left in the same predicament as if no maps had been enacted. Prompt judicial intervention is both necessary and appropriate to guarantee the People’s right to a free and fair election.”

In theory, the slippery mapmaking was supposed to yield a greater political good: flipping a few Republican-held congressional districts in order to help embattled congressional Democrats hold onto control of the House of Representatives, where the party currently holds a razor-thin majority of only 221 seats, barely more than the 218 necessary for control. New York’s part in that strategy is considerably less likely to succeed now that the attempted rigging of the game has been exposed and declared illegal. A look at the national scene suggests that the three seats that New York Dems hoped to flip wouldn’t be nearly enough to save the national party from a looming electoral rout.

Since World War II, the President’s Party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House in the midterms — far more than the five-seat margin Dems currently have. There have been 19 midterm elections since 1946, and only twice has the president’s party gained seats: in 1998, when there was a backlash against Republicans following the impeachment of President Clinton, and in 2002 when the nation rallied behind President Bush in the wake of 9/11.

With President Biden fighting low approval numbers and voters telling pollsters they think Republicans can handle key issues better, House Democrats have been looking for help anyplace they can find it. One sign of desperation is that they hoped to get help from New York — where, it turns out, Democrats thought they could make a power grab but all they got their hands on was more embarrassment.

Bernie Sanders Wants Democrats to Make Unions Their Biggest Message

If he found himself sitting across from Jeff Bezos, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) knows exactly what he would tell the second-richest man in the world.

“There’s nothing that I would say to him except, ‘You know what? We’re gonna take you on,’” Sanders said in a phone interview last week. “You could either start responding to the needs of your workers, or we’re gonna fight you ruthlessly.”

It’s not necessarily a new sentiment for Sanders, who has built a 40-plus-year political career, including upstart campaigns in the last two Democratic presidential primaries, on the power of labor unions and, as he puts it, “standing up to corporate greed.” But now the moment has changed, with unionization efforts making headlines in industries from media to retail. The unionization of an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island—a first for the company that Bezos founded, which has harshly fought previous efforts and has vowed to challenge this one—represents a watershed.

Now, he says, as Biden’s sweeping legislative agenda—which Sanders attempted to shepherd through the Senate—looks interminably stalled, and Democrats search for a winning electoral message in the upcoming midterms, it is time for the party to embrace what he has long been arguing for and make backing unions a core part of their pitch to voters. They must decide, Sanders said, whether to “become a party which stands for the working class of this country” or to “remain a corporately controlled party beholden to [their] wealthy campaign contributors and to the corporate media as well.”

“To turn your back on the working class, in general, is political suicide,” Sanders argued, later adding, “It is good politics to become strongly involved in the labor movement [and] support workers in their organizing efforts…I think it’s the right thing to do from a policy position. It is also very, very good politics. And I think if the Democrats don’t do that immediately, they are going to look at a very, very bad 2022.”

The moment is finally meeting the man, as national unionization efforts grow. “To turn your back on the working class, in general, is political suicide,” the senator tells Vanity Fair.

Democrats do acknowledge this political reality, to an extent. In the 2020 presidential primary, most of the Democratic candidates had visited a picket line to show their support. Union organizing is why Democrats win in states like Nevada. So why, Sanders is asking, do Democrats stop there?

On the campaign trail in 2020, Sanders provided a hint of what the labor landscape would look like if he were to win White House, vowing to “double union membership in [his] first term.” That hasn’t quite happened since Biden took office at the start of last year; however, there have been signs the labor movement could be rebounding after decades of stagnation and decline.

The National Labor Relations Board has reported that, during the period from October 2021 to March of this year, petitions for union representation were up 57% from the prior period, reaching the highest level in 10 years. Yet despite the recent high-profile successes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the percentage of workers represented by a union had dropped by 0.5 percentage points between 2020 and 2021.

Sanders urged Biden to do more. “To his credit, Biden has talked more about unions than any other president in my lifetime,” said Sanders at the rally outside the Amazon facility in Staten Island on Sunday. “But talk is not enough. What he has got to do is start inviting these guys to the White House…unions that are organizing all over this country. And make it clear that he is on their side, and that he is going to do what he can to support labor organizing throughout this country.”

In his conversation with V.F., Sanders also trained his ire on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the pair of relatively conservative Democratic senators who have been a main obstacle to much of Biden’s agenda.

“What happened is you had people like [Manchin and Sinema] who sabotaged our efforts, what we were trying to do,” Sanders said, referring to Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which the pair refused to support. “Ever since then, the Democratic Party has stumbled and fallen further and further behind,” he said. “How you handle Manchin, how you handle Sinema and the other conservative Democrats is one of the challenges that the Democrats have got to deal with. But the current strategy is an absolute political failure.” (Spokespeople for Manchin and Sinema did not respond to requests for comment.)

While top White House officials and Democratic leaders in Congress attempt to resurrect the doomed negotiations with Manchin and Sinema, Sanders is focusing his efforts on making the labor movement’s recent momentum last. He said his team has maintained “a nucleus of the campaign,” roughly 10 staffers, who are heavily focused on supporting labor efforts, connecting with workers at a variety of the flash points of unionization, including at companies like John Deere and Kellogg’s and universities across the country where poorly paid adjunct faculty are organizing.

“I think we should move to a system where, if 50% of the workers in a bargaining unit plus one vote to form a union, they have a union. End of discussion,” Sanders said. “And then you have to have the strong legislation that prevents companies from stalling out negotiating a first contract, which is a very serious problem.”

While he is clearly proud of his own efforts, Sanders credited the workers at various companies for driving the movement.

“The energy for all of the labor activity that we are seeing now—and there is a lot of it—is coming from the grassroots, not from the labor establishment,” Sanders said, noting that the Starbucks union is independent and the Amazon union is “completely locally grown.”

Amid the recent unionization movement, no labor effort has reached the prominence of the Amazon drive at the company’s three huge buildings on Staten Island, each christened by Amazon with an impersonal alphanumeric code. A small group of novice organizers employed at JFK8, the fulfillment center, spun a wildcat walkout into a full-bore unionization campaign that ultimately won support from the majority of the workers in the building who voted. This week is their first bid for expansion; they are seeking to organize LDJ5, the sorting facility across the road.

Sanders met privately with Amazon workers before speaking at their rally on Sunday. Activists and members of other unions showed up to that event, which also featured the man who has become the face of the Amazon union push, Chris Smalls, a fired worker who was part of the original walkout. At the rally on Sunday, Smalls had a message for national Democrats.

They have to pass the PRO [Protecting the Right to Organize] Act,” Smalls told V.F. before taking the stage. “If they’re not going to pass the PRO Act, Biden needs to sign an executive order. Simple as that.”

Amazon employees at the event, many of whom declined to be named due to concerns of retaliation, levied a slew of allegations against the company including inadequate COVID protocols, retaliation against union organizers, and improper care for workplace injuries. Activists hung a photo bearing portraits of the six workers who died last December after a tornado hit an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, amplifying concerns about the company’s workplace-safety protocols.

Jordan Flowers, who participated in the original walkout with Smalls, offered a grim description of daily life at JFK8. “It’s slavery. You get out here at seven in the morning, six in the morning. You slave until 11, until your first little 15-minute break and then your lunch. It’s a nonstop facility. This is open 24 hours,” Flowers said.

Asked about the allegations from union activists, Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, insisted the company’s management was dedicated to creating a positive environment for staff. “Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union. They always have. As a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees. Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work,” Nantel said in a written statement.

Of course, Sanders sees the company far less positively. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he dubbed Amazon’s billionaire founder “a manifestation of the oligarchy.”

“This is a guy who’s worth, I think, $180 billion, a guy who, in a given year, pays nothing in taxes. A guy who, in a given year, has Amazon paying nothing in taxes and who has spent millions trying to make it impossible for his workers to join unions,” Sanders said, adding, “He gets richer and richer. He’s very excited, you know, about going off into space.”

After reciting this (only slightly embellished) summary of Bezos’s and Amazon’s outlandish wealth and tax avoidance, Sanders reached the grand finale on his litany of outrages.

“He owns these mansions and yachts. He has a $500 million dollar yacht,” Sanders said. “And yet he’s resisting the ability of his workers to earn decent wages and live and work under decent working conditions.”

I walked in the 1989 Walk for Hunger and I was hoping in 10 years no one in Boston would have to go hungry.

— Benny🌹 (@Benny06) May 1, 2022

It's a different campaign this time – Turner doesn't have surrogates flying in and told me she focused on field very very early.

If she was a non-factor, there wouldn't be this much money sloshing into the race.

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) May 1, 2022

.@AOC in a sea of trade unionists at NYC May Day. pic.twitter.com/SZJOJ1KHaO

— Micah Uetricht (@micahuetricht) May 1, 2022

Nina Turner vs. Shontel Brown – Jordan ON-THE-GROUND in Cleveland Days Before Election https://t.co/qp6js8dAfP

— Status Coup News (@StatusCoup) May 1, 2022