Reprinted from The Washington Post by on March 12, 2021.
Sanders also invited Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, to testify at the hearing, but Mike Casca, a spokesman for the senator, said Amazon declined the offer Friday. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) …
Sanders Invites Bezos to Testify at Inequality Hearing
Reprinted from The Hill by Chris Mills Rodrigo on March 12, 2021.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced Friday that he has invited Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to testify at a hearing about inequality scheduled for next week.
The Senate Budget Committee chairman has already secured the testimony of one worker at the e-commerce giant’s Bessemer, Alabama, plant, where a unionization vote is in progress.
Jennifer Bates, who trains employees at the warehouse, will appear alongside multiple economists at the hearing titled “The Income and Wealth Inequality Crisis in America.”
A spokesperson for Amazon told The Hill that Bezos will not attend the hearing. …
Radical Anti-Racist Unionism has a History in Bessemer, Alabama
Reprinted from Jacobin by Willem Morris on March 13, 2021.
“Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are holding an important vote right now to become the first group of American workers for the company to unionize their warehouse,” writes Willem Morris in Jacobin. “The fight is a key battle in the long-running and mostly elusive effort of labor to build power in the South. But this isn’t the first such unionization effort in Bessemer.
“In 1949, during the Cold War crackdown on unions with leftist leadership, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), a union with deep ties to the Communist Party and a history of anti-racist organizing, was challenged by a more moderate union, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), which used racism and red-baiting to defeat Mine-Mill in the election.
“Radical Mine-Mill labor organizers in the past confronted white supremacy in order to organize the working class in Bessemer. Mine-Mill’s decades of organizing in Bessemer helped lay the groundwork for today’s effort at Amazon. …
“Mine-Mill [is] perhaps best known today for its production of the film Salt of the Earth, released in 1954. The film used actual Mine-Mill workers and their families as actors to depict a 1951 strike and the resulting police repression against Mexican workers at a zinc mine in New Mexico. It also emphasized the important role that women played in leading the strike. …
