Sipa via AP Images
Amazon’s warehouse in Saran, France, reopened on May 19 after a monthlong shutdown.
With the Trump administration encouraging states to deny unemployment insurance to workers who decline to return to work, no matter how unsafe their workplace, it’s a nerve-wracking time for our imperiled proletariat. At the root of the problem is the power our nation vests in employers and the absence of such power vested in employees (an absence even more glaring among gig workers).
Such is not the case in France. There, earlier this month, Amazon reached an agreement with its unions specifying the safety augmentations it would undertake in order to reopen its warehouses. The unions were abetted in these deliberations by French courts, which ordered Amazon to stop delivering “nonessential” items as a way of decreasing the density of, and danger to, its workforce.
In the United States, of course, Amazon is resolutely non-union and has fired workers who’ve endeavored to form employee organizations. The Republican-dominated courts have repeatedly delivered judgments every bit as hostile to worker organization as Amazon and its ilk.
Plainly, what American workers need is bargaining power—something that our dysfunctional labor law no longer holds out as an option to the 94 percent of private-sector workers whose bosses deny them the right to unionize. One more reason why rewriting that law must be a top priority for the next Democratic administration and Congress.
Until then, the plight of frontline American workers, particularly since the administration has called for withholding UI from those not returning to work, calls to mind the famous interchange between the great radio comedian Jack Benny (whose character was a notorious tightwad) and the holdup man who approached him, stuck a gun in his ribs, and demanded, “Your money or your life.”
A long silence followed. The holdup man repeated, louder, “Your money or your life!”
“I’m thinking it over,” Benny finally replied.
So, in anything but a comic context, are millions of American workers.
