At the end of last year, Amazon workers across the US went on strike for the first time in the trillion-dollar corporation’s history. With management refusing to recognize the union or negotiate a contract two and a half years after the Amazon Labor Union won a unionization vote at its JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the union finally launched a five-day strike during the peak holiday season, December 19–24.

The action was coordinated by the ALU and the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which the ALU affiliated to in mid-2024.

David versus Goliath

This is a significant milestone in the effort to organize the second-largest employer in the US, after Walmart. Amazon employs a staggering 1.3 million workers across 1,285 facilities, who process over 1.6 million packages a day.

Going up against this corporate giant is a David-versus-Goliath-like task. It will require the utmost courage, determination, and above all, a militant strategy capable of getting large numbers of workers to see this as their struggle.

Amazon has spent over $17 million on union-busting activities, including hiring Pinkerton agents to spy on union organizers between 2022 and 2023, mobilizing armies of lawyers, lobbying politicians, and deploying the best union busters on the planet.

Undoubtedly, rank-and-file organizers have been extremely self-sacrificing in their years-long struggle against Amazon’s union busting. But the number of unionized workers is no more than 10,000 workers so far—less than 1% of the company’s workforce.

Before this strike, the ALU had been fighting Amazon in the courts and through regulatory agencies like the NLRB—comfortable terrain for the capitalists. As an organ of the bourgeois state, the NRLB is an instrument of class rule, and has been utterly ineffective at forcing the bosses to comply.

Until serious pressure is brought against the bosses, they can evade negotiating a settlement with workers at JFK 8. They know that if they give in to the workers’ demands at one warehouse, they will face a massive tide of workers demanding unions in their shops.

A balance sheet of the strike

A strike is certainly a step in the right direction. But calling a strike is easy. Winning is harder.

Delivery workers walked out at eight locations around the country—a drop in the ocean when considering the hundreds of facilities the company has in the US. According to an official statement, the Teamsters were also putting up “primary picket lines at hundreds of Amazon Fulfillment Centers nationwide.” But these pickets were sparsely attended. According to one rank-and-file Teamster:

It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process … We let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket … There were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that. They clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in.

Unfortunately, the pickets at the main locations did not have an impact either. The New York Times reports that outside of JFK8, there were no more than “several dozen” workers. Some said they were only there because they used their time off to be on the picket line. Announcing strike locations in advance also allowed Amazon to reroute shipments and avoid pickets.

At Amazon’s DBK4 warehouse in Queens, New York City, which RCA comrades picketed for two days, there were no more than 100 Amazon workers. On the second day of the picket, the cops arrested and dragged a driver away for stopping his truck in front of the driveway.

The entire time, cops harassed the picketers who were blocking the trucks, so the Teamster organizers made a deal to let three trucks out every minute. The picketers kept counting to make sure the deal was followed, while the Teamster officials played nice with the police and stopped any picketers from blocking the driveway—in other words, they ensured the picket would barely inconvenience management. This, despite Amazon’s dirty tricks to stop the picketters, like flooding the sidewalk with a torrent of water in below-freezing weather.

The Teamsters said the strike was “historic,” and “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.” While technically true, these statements are only relative to five years ago, when Amazon unions were nonexistent, and the possibility of a strike was nothing but a distant dream. We do ourselves no favors by making things seem better than they really are.

The strength of a strike lies precisely in the relation that workers have to production. When they are well organized, workers have the power to shut down production entirely. A victorious strike can give workers a tremendous boost of confidence. A strike that fails to deliver something tangible, regardless of how “historic” it is presented, runs the risk of demoralizing and confusing workers—both unionized and non-unionized.

Picket lines are not just about “sending a message.” Their purpose is to impact the profits of the bosses by paralyzing production and stopping the flow of goods and services in and out of the workplace. Permeable picket lines defeat this purpose.

If wider layers of the labor movement are mobilized to the pickets, cops will have a much harder time intimidating strikers and breaking up the line. Considering the number of Amazon facilities in the US, a wider mobilization and a staunch do-not-cross policy at the picket lines are an absolute necessity if a strike is to have any impact on Amazon.

This mobilization requires a serious attitude and a willingness to not allow the movement to be constrained by the narrow limits of the bosses’ law.

Teamster power?

The Teamsters represent 1.3 million workers across the US—the same amount as Amazon employees. If mobilized fully, this would represent a massive source of support for the pickets. From the beginning, it was clear that with just 1% of workers unionized, the strike against Amazon was going to be an uphill battle. But the entire reason the ALU chose to affiliate with the Teamsters was to have the backing of a large and powerful union.

The Teamsters could have mobilized a much larger portion of its 1.3 million members to ensure victory. In fact, in 2021, the Teamsters passed a resolution affirming that Amazon represented an “existential threat” to the union, affirming that:

Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop-floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;

Further, they stated that a struggle against Amazon would require “unquestioning solidarity from warehousing and delivery Teamsters,” and that “building worker power at Amazon and helping those workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union.”

The Teamsters represent over 300,000 UPS drivers, who have an immediate interest in organizing the entire workforce of the parcel-delivery sector. A victory at Amazon would allow UPS and Amazon workers to face the bosses together, with a much stronger hand.

A victory at Amazon would be a big win for the entire working class. Amazon is fond of utilizing every dystopian measure in the book to squeeze every last drop of value from its workers; from the increasing levels of control and surveillance, automation-driven layoffs, to classifying employees as “independent contractors.” These are all increasingly rampant practices in a time of slim profits and crisis. If workers at Amazon succeed in fighting back against the erosion of the standards of living, this would give an impetus to the rest of the working class movement!

For this to succeed, we would need to return to the militant tactics of the early American labor movement referenced in the resolution. This means mobilizing entire sections of the unionized workforce in a common struggle—and defying anti-labor laws like Taft-Hartley on the streets, not in the courts.

Class independence

None of this is possible without class independence—the understanding that in all respects, the interests of the bosses and workers are mutually opposed. Powerful unions like the Teamsters should be at the forefront of clarifying the class struggle.

Unfortunately, the unions’ role in this has been lamentable so far. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Sean O’Brien was invited to speak at the RNC—a reactionary, capitalist party, like the Democrats. Even though the Teamsters refused to endorse any candidate in this past election, O’Brien lauded Trump’s Labor Secretary pick Chavez-DeRemer, saying she would be a “win for workers.” Trump has demagogically tapped into the seething class anger in the US, but this does not make him or his cabinet picks “worker-friendly.” In fact, Trump has proposed 13 billionaires to be in his administration while threatening to deport millions of our class sisters and brothers.

On the day before the strike, Jeff Bezos himself slithered down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring during a dinner with Trump and Musk. The timing must have been a coincidence! Surely, these three billionaires had nothing to say about what the next administration should do about the pesky union problem brewing in the country!

The US working class desperately needs a class-independent leadership. Even Shawn Fain, who led the UAW to a significant victory, did a photo op with the living corpse of Joe Biden, that wretched warmonger, and then went on to endorse his party, which illegalized the rail workers’ strike in 2022.

We are entering an epoch that is bound to be just as chaotic as the 1930s. The Teamsters leaders would do well to study their own history. Our strength is in our numbers. We can only fight and defeat the capitalists through militant class-war methods. We must study the labor movement’s history—its successes and its failures—and prepare for the great upsurges of class struggle that lay just over the horizon.