#union busting

December 5, 1928 - On this day in 1928, the United Fruit Company and the Colombian Army, backed by the United States, massacred thousands of workers in Colombia. United Fruit Company workers had been on strike for weeks prior demanding better working conditions, but the company had refused to address their demands.

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

for all my card goblin friends, a newly formed union of 200 jobs is asking for a boycott of TCGplayer to keep their center open

hold the line! if you need to look into the situation yourself but please keep these workers in your mind!

[TOP IMAGE: An alert-style image with the words "Boycott TCGplayer" in large font, underscored by the letters CWA]

"I'm done deleting the drafts of this article. Nothing I write could be a fraction as unreasonable as my white cis property-owning former boss comparing herself to Marsha P Johnson, or as out-of-touch as her making a Harry Potter reference when discussing who took her side in a dispute involving so many trans people. I can't let it slide that our posts on social media are spoken about as if they almost pushed her to suicide, meanwhile there is no introspection into how many of us were pushed towards those same dark thoughts with the loss of our work and housing. I imagined what it would be like to sell sex a few weeks post-partum, not yet healed and with a huge infection risk, and considered how much easier it would be to die."

Happy Labor Day!

In honor of Labor Day, today we’re highlighting more materials from the Morris Fromkin Memorial Collection – which documents, among other things, the labor movement in the United States. This is aimed at you!: an exposé of the Taft Hartley plot to bust the unions and hi-jack the American people, was published in 1948 by the New York State Council of the International Association of Machinists. American labor leader Robert Schrank (1917-2012) wrote the pamphlet’s text, and Jules Brazelton created the cartoons highlighted above.

The Taft-Hartly Act passed in 1947 after major strikes by organized labor in the years following WWII. The law – which passed when Congress overrode President Truman’s veto – placed restrictions on strikes and gave new authority to the President and the National Labor Relations Board to end strikes. The IAM pamphlet reframes the law as union busting legislation by telling a clear narrative of “an evil plot against the American people.”

Check out previous Labor Day posts!

-- Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

Multiple courts have blocked the Office of Personnel Management’s attempt to terminate union contracts for thousands of federal employees—but hey, what if OPM just did it anyway? That’s exactly what they are doing. According to OPM, because President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding union-busting, every agency must follow those orders—and not court orders—and terminate collective bargaining agreements.  It should go without saying that executive orders do not have the force of law, while court orders do, but in the current administration, whatever Trump vomits onto the page outweighs everything else.  The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act exempts certain workers at agencies where the “primary function” is national security, so Trump’s executive order basically declared that nearly all agencies somehow have a national security function and therefore can’t have unions. Fun fact: Agencies with no discernible national security function, like the Food and Drug Administration, are subject to this union-busting, but agencies that actually do involve national security, like the Border Patrol, get to keep their unions. Well, of course, since the Border Patrol union endorsed Trump in 2024. 

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