The Amazon workers’ in Bessemer, Alabama, wanting to unionize is a bigger thing than just what is obvious on the surface. The workers want the right to collectively bargain their hours, wages, and conditions of employment and having some of the profits made from their work go to the workers who made the profits possible rather than their going to those who do not work but benefit off of those who do.
Jeff Bezos makes thousands of dollars per minute, while his workers squeak by on the wages they get and the requirements of the workplace.
While this is a labor issue, it is also a major attack on the historic attitude the Southern states like Alabama have toward the working people verses their evolved Ante-bellum elites.
Any profits from cotton plantations went to the plantation owners who divided them among himself, his debtors, and his white employees, with some going to minimally addressing the needs of the slaves, without paying any slave for his or her work. The purpose of labor as firmly established was to spend his or her life working for the benefit of the “master” to be easily replaced upon age, infirmity, and death.
This arrangement kept wages away from the free, White Southerner who had to subsist on his own work either for someone who did not use slaves as employees receiving low wages or on what they could raise on their own farms. So, while they lived near the huge plantations with the giant mansions, fancy livery, fancy balls, clothing and other privileges the locals could only dream of owning, it never dawned on them that this was only possible because the owner had free labor so that no profits went to workers’ salaries, the locals being those locked into poverty potential salaried employees.
A minimalistic summary of the Civil War would be poor people fighting to the death to make sure the rich stayed rich by their staying poor.
After the civil war, the former plantation owners were in the position to keep control of the now free states by controlling the government and businesses, and while having to free their slaves would design a system that, as it required people be paid for their work, that pay would be low enough for the workers to be happy and the profits kept close.
The South is very anti-union because unions threaten the system the elite have found ways to benefit from. Unions give dignity to workers and has that dignity recognized through the collective bargaining process, wherein the workers help create the working conditions that acknowledge that dignity.
Had the Confederacy won and seceded, the ante-bellum system would have just continued with no benefit to those who fought to maintain the Southern way of life who, zombie-like, returned to how it had been – poverty for them and a potential source of earning a wage eliminated by free labor.
Because of collective bargaining, employees and management behavior in the workplace is by contract nondiscriminatory with equal treatment and pay for all employees regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity and all the other characteristics and groups contained in the standard list of protected classes.
Employees are equally protected from illicit, illegal, and demeaning treatment, and from being subjected to management’s political, religious, or personal beliefs.
There are some work places whose employment there calls for all employees to join the union and others places where people who choose not to join the union for whatever reason still pay a “fee” to help pay for the collective bargaining and legal protections that cost money and which they and those who work where the option is join or not join with nothing between can use under penalty to the union if protection by the union is denied. They are essentially not only getting everything for free, better working conditions, better salaries and benefits, but they are using money paid by others to protect them in case a contract provision has been violated to their detriment.
They take from their fellow workers.
The fewer the union members the weaker the union, and with that the less favorable hours, wages, and conditions of employment because legal fees to fight an injustice are just not there. Management can slowly reduce the Trinity, hours, wages, and conditions of employment, with action from which the worker will have no protection.
It is no wonder then that the laws called “Right to Work” mislead people into thinking unions are keeping jobs away from them rather than the reality that a worker should be glad they have a job at all and should, therefore, just be glad they are getting whatever crumbs come their way, or they can go elsewhere to find the work they have a right to.
Slaves have a right to work, but little else.
Just as churches benefit from taxpayer infrastructure without paying the taxes that support it, in right to work states people can refuse to join a union or pay a shop fee (the small percentage of annual dues to help cover the costs of any legal procedures the non-union member calls on the union to provide) yet avail themselves of what others are paying for. You order the food at the counter and pay for it while someone waits for you to sit down and then takes your fries because they have a right to eat something, a right they obviously exercise often judging from the effects.
States that relied on free labor and fought to keep that system going and would most likely retain that attitude as the owners of the unpaid laborers kept themselves in power are the states from which Right to Work laws originated which made it more possible that without unions, the costs of salaries and benefits could be kept by the “masters” as profit and denied the workers.
The law spread from those states desperately clinging to some form of the old order to many mostly Western ranching states with little industry and little call for unions. A typical action of imposing a cure on a nonexistent problem.
For those who want a quick sequence of events:
- Slavery
- Dying to keep it.
- Using Black men as the builders of Southern state infrastructure as part of unpaid chain gangs having been given major sentences for minor or fictitious crimes.
- Convinced the ways of the Anti-Bellum South was a treasured heritage, Southerners once again failed to see that free labor kept them from the jobs that could bring them wages.
- When this practice was revealed and eliminated to some degree and people had begun to work in factories that had moved South to be closer to the raw materials they needed and could thus avoid the expense of shipment, more profits could be kept if the hours, wages, and conditions of employment were kept such that benefits to workers could be minimized. Northern factories had unions, and, if this were to come South with the factories, profits would have to be spread out and shared with those who produced them.
- Presenting unions as something evil and somehow against God and country prevented their having acceptance among those from whom the Southern plantation class still benefits at their expense.
- The right to work laws spread from the former slave states out into states where the top few can benefit from the right to work scheme. Those states, so far, are:
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North and South Carolina, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming of which 8 are considered among the top 15 poorest states.
There is a reason certain states and certain areas of the country want to keep the unions out, and some who have them had to accept them in order to get the company in to the state that could employ many people. Just look at the history of management to labor in the South, observe how Right to Work laws spread from there, and follow the money to see who this system benefits.
Now with Amazon’s Bessemer employees having voted with ballot counting being meticulous and slow, the resurgence of unions as people become more informed and begin to catch on to how they have been played by Southern royalty may very well grow to replace the misleading and abusive right to work boondoggle.
Remember this as in the attempt to build back better, the support of unions expressed by the president will meet with opposition especially from the states of which I write and the politicians who are the heirs to the self-beneficial ante-bellum culture.