The Nation, April 27, 2021
What Next for Amazon Workers?
How labor can leverage the current antitrust revival to advance
unionization at Amazon and other giant corporations.
By Nelson Lichtenstein
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Adefeat is a defeat, but the failure of the Retail, Wholesale, and
Department Store Union to win a certification election at Amazon’s
Bessemer, Ala., warehouse last month seems far more a confirmation of
that giant corporation’s overweening power than a referendum on the
willingness of its employees to organize for collective action.
In the aftermath of the National Labor Relations Board vote, even Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos says his company needs to “do a better job for our
employees.” In a country where a recent Gallup poll shows union
favorability at 65 percent, a 207-year high, the fact that only 10.3
percent of all workers are enrolled in a union demonstrates that
something is gravely amiss.
Fixing America’s utterly dysfunctional labor laws would help, but that
seems out of sight in a closely divided Congress. Though a working-class
upheaval along the lines of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter
would be transformative, even the most skilled organizers struggle to
achieve that at a single worksite, let alone across the entire country.
But unionists and liberals do have another weapon. Today we are in the
midst of a radical recasting of antitrust law, sentiment, and
administration. On one thing, both Trump partisans and their opponents
can agree: Silicon Valley has too much power. It is not just that these
companies are old-fashioned monopolies, like John D. Rockefeller’s
Standard Oil, capable of eliminating competition and jacking up the
price of the services or goods they sell. Companies like Amazon and
Apple—and Walmart too—are monopsonies, buyers who are so large and
powerful that they have a vast influence over both the wages paid in an
entire industry and the “vendors” from whom they purchase goods and
services in their globe-spanning supply chains. And then there is the
vast cultural and political influence they command. Their website
portals edit contemporary and historical reality, not exactly the 21st
century equivalent of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” but close enough to
send a chill down the spine.
Nearly half a century ago, Robert Bork and a generation of Chicago
School economists captured the ideological and legal high ground when it
came to the meaning of antitrust and the propagation of business
regulations. In a merger, the only issue that the government need
consider was: Would it lower prices for consumers? When companies merge,
or just grow to gargantuan size, their very scale creates new
efficiencies, thereby enabling them to pass lower operating costs on to
consumers as lower prices.
The Reagan administration turned Bork’s theory into official Department
of Justice policy, largely unaltered by subsequent Democratic
presidencies. In 1985, there were about 2,300 corporate mergers in the
United States. By 2017 there were more than 15,300. Silicon Valley firms
have become notorious for buying fledging competitors to snuff out any
real competition. And Wall Street takes notice. When Amazon purchased
Whole Foods, its market cap rose by $15.6 billion—$2 billion more than
it paid for the chain. Meanwhile, the rest of the grocery industry
immediately lost $37 billion in market value.
Today, a new generation of antitrust advocates are reviving the
radically democratic impulse that gave rise to trust-busting and
government regulation during the Progressive and New Deal eras.
Thirty-two-year-old Lina Khan, whom President Biden has just nominated
to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, could easily have taken a
similar post in an Elizabeth Warren administration; likewise, Tim Wu,
nominated for a seat on the National Economic Council, has been a fierce
advocate of net neutrality, fighting Silicon Valley efforts to
monopolize new communication technologies. Meanwhile, Senate Banking
Committee Chair Sherrod Brown and other Democrats are asking the Biden
Justice Department why the feds have not challenged a major bank merger
in 35 years.
In her celebrated Yale Law Review essay “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,”
Khan argued that “focusing antitrust exclusively on consumer welfare is
a mistake.” Instead she offered a spirited critique of corporate power,
wielded against both business rivals and workers alike, with Amazon as a
prime example of a Big Business autocracy that the original antitrust
impulse was designed to counter. When Congress passed the Sherman
Antitrust Act in 1890, its author, Senator John Sherman, declared, “If
we will not endure a king as political power, we should not endure a
king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the
necessities of life.” Forty-five years later President Franklin
Roosevelt would echo Sherman when, in his speech accepting renomination
at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, FDR denounced “economic
royalists” who had “created a new despotism.” Decrying the pervasive
influence of the corporations and banks, FDR saw concentrated industrial
and financial power as a threat to democracy itself. “The hours men and
women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their
labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were
imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.”
So how can labor partisans leverage the current antitrust revival to
advance unionization at Amazon and other giant corporations? Just
breaking up big companies, forcing Amazon to spin off Amazon Web
Services for example, is not going to help unionization or improve
working conditions. Even at half their current size, Amazon and the
other corporate behemoths will still be powerful, multibillion-dollar
corporations.
But the threat of antitrust action could prove just as potent as the
actuality. If there is one thing that executives like Bezos, Google’s
Sundar Pichai, and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi hate more than unionism, it
is regulatory disruption of a successful business model. This is what
happened back in the 1930s when congressional efforts to curb the growth
of chain stores like A&P induced retail executives to cut a deal with
the unions seeking to organize grocery workers. Likewise, at the start
of World War II, it was not mere patriotism that persuaded many
corporations to make peace with the unions and facilitate their further
growth. Companies like Ford and Montgomery Ward feared that if they
continued their hard line against the unions, even more government
regulation, or an actual takeover, might be in the offing. And in the
early postwar era, liberals and unionists favored aggressive enforcement
of the antitrust laws in order to curb corporate power. For example,
General Motors, always fearful of antitrust action, maintained a price
umbrella high enough to allow Ford and Chrysler to flourish, thereby
enabling the United Automobile Workers to negotiate wage increases of a
high and uniform standard.
Like the great automobile, shipbuilding, and aviation companies in World
War II, Amazon’s sensational growth during the Covid shutdown is a
product of a government-led recasting of the entire economy. Just as the
auto industry converted to production of planes, tanks, and artillery,
so too has the pandemic channeled retail dollars toward Amazon, in the
process swelling the company workforce by nearly half a million employees.
And this brings us to another element of the new anti-trust impulse. In
the Progressive era, the courts ruled that a wide variety of
corporations and industries “affected with a public interest” might be
subject to the kind of governmental regulation—covering prices,
products, and even labor standards—that in recent decades have been
restricted largely to electrical utilities and transport companies.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon have effectively become utilities,
essential to commerce and civic life, and should therefore be subject to
the same kind of regulation imposed in the railroad, telephone, and
electrical industries more than a century ago. During World War I, the
government seized a dysfunctional railroad network that had failed to
deliver vital war supplies, in the process facilitating unionism and
better working conditions for more than a million workers.
On its own even a progressive antitrust regime cannot create a new union
movement. Energy and activism among millions of ordinary workers is
essential. But an aggressive Biden administration effort to curtain
corporate power would open a new front in the campaign to democratize
the world of work—and ensure workers a fair share of the wealth they
create. It might even convince America’s new captains of industry that
their decades-long war on their own employees only furnishes more
ammunition to those seeking a radical deconstruction of their digital
empires.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, is writing a history of economic policy during the Clinton era.
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