We don’t need stronger anti-trust laws. To curb Amazon. We need workers unions.

It appears to me that Louis Brandeis wrote his anti-monopoly opinions at a time when union members were controlled by corporations shooting them dead with the full cooperation of law enforcement and anti-trust could function as a more effective protection to ordinary people.

 

“Khan sees the new antitrust movement, above all, as a revival. Well before Brandeis’s day, Thomas Jefferson sought to add an anti-monopoly clause to the Constitution. Andrew Jackson said Americans should “take a stand against all new grants of monopolies.” And some legal scholars even see an anti-monopoly instinct in the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, since monopolies can assert claims to special protections of the law. “If American democracy was founded on this set of ideas and traditions,” Khan said, “then we just took a knife and lopped off one half of it. It’s just gone.”

This is true, but the most effective way to give representation to workers is through unions:

“That was the insight of Brandeis,” Khan told me. “For most people, their everyday interaction with power is not with their representative in Congress, but with their boss. And if in your day-to-day life you’re treated like a serf in your economic relationships, what does that mean for your civic capabilities—for your experience of democracy?” - Lina Kahn

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The Atlantic

How to Fight Amazon (Before You Turn 29)]

Lina Khan has a novel theory about monopolies—and her sights are set squarely on the company.

ROBINSON MEYER

“In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Brandeis to become a member of the Supreme Court. His nomination was bitterly contested, partly because, as Justice William O. Douglas later wrote, "Brandeis was a militant crusader for social justice whoever his opponent might be. He was dangerous not only because of his brilliance, his arithmetic, his courage. He was dangerous because he was incorruptible ... [and] the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court."^[4] On June 1, 1916, he was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 47 to 22,^[4] to become one of the most famous and influential figures ever to serve on the high court. His opinions were, according to legal scholars, some of the "greatest defenses" of freedom of speech and the right to privacy ever written by a member of the Supreme Court.”

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Louis Brandeis

James A Pitcherella on the 

ladder to his gantry crane 

at Lukens Steel Co.

I didn't work long enough at Lukens Steel Company to join the United Steelworkers Union   

My dad started at Lukens in the 1920s. He worked a 70 hour work week, 12 hours 5 days a week and 10 hours on Saturday. He often worked an "extra", a 12 hour day shift plus a 12 hour night shift and then a 12 hour day shift, 36 hours straight. I could see the pain in his eyes when he talked about the "extra."

“There are unions of Amazon workers in other countries, but no one has gotten this far in organizing the company’s US facilities. Only a fool would presume to know what these workers are capable of, and what their victory might inspire among a working class that has been pushed to the brink.”

JACOBIN

The Clock Is Ticking for the Amazon Union Vote in Bessemer, Alabama

03.12.2021

"One of the conversations I had was with a part-time worker who is also a social worker. He doesn’t make enough from his other job to make ends meet, so he works part-time on the weekends at the warehouse. He is in the drive because he saw the disparities in how people were treated and the disrespect. His parents and his grandparents were union members, so he grew up hearing about the importance of the union and has a deep understanding of the labor movement. So it was a natural fit for him. He wasn’t one of the ones who started the campaign, but he’s showing up all the time now. One of his issues was that as a part-time employee, he makes, I think, $3 an hour more than the full-time employee who’s even doing overtime hours. He was turned off by the unfairness of it and wants to make a difference.

What really stuck with me was that he described the importance of people taking ownership of their own power. One of the union leaders, an older black man who was in the hall listening to all of this, nearly came to tears talking about how excited he was to see this come to fruition. He was hearing this young man and his counterparts in the warehouse finally saying, “We’re not okay with being treated this way, and we’re going to do something about it.” The worker said to me, “It really means something to me to make my dad proud.” There’s solidarity expressed there between the generations and a continuity of the struggle for racial justice, which is the underlying tone of the entire campaign."

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Flight Attendants’ Leader Sara Nelson: “You Have to Look for the Next Fight”

03.19.2021

This week, AFA-CWA president Sara Nelson traveled to Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon workers are now voting on unionization. We spoke to Nelson about the union drive, Amazon’s tone-deafness, and how her members are doing one year into the pandemic.

Interview by

Alex N. Press