Hear how worker leaders and organizers are using workplace safety issues to build worker power on the shop floor at Amazon. Learn about different models that union and not-yet-union workers can use to challenge abusive workplace practices and improve safety conditions. We’ll explore strategies for comprehensively addressing worker demands around health and safety, the structures and tools that work best, and how to make health and safety campaigning effective across industries and workplaces.
Authoritarianism and corporate power converge through the system of courts and prisons to keep wages low, undermine organizing, and make profit. A clip from the award-winning documentary "The Alabama Solution" opens this session, spotlighting incarcerated organizers who are leading work stoppages against brutal repression inside Alabama prisons. Panelists will discuss the continuum from prison labor on the inside to sub-minimum wage temp work on the outside. Hear why organizing criminalized workers—in and after prison—is essential to building working-class power.
Management attorneys' strategy in a first contract is to delay with multiple counters for each proposal, refuse to bargain more than two to three hours a week, and propose frustratingly long management rights clauses. After an exhausting organizing drive, what's a newly organized group to do? We'll get into different strategies such as transparent and participatory bargaining, doing a power analysis during the organizing drive, having most proposals ready to go right away, and planning communications and actions.
When we build power on the job, we’re taking power from those who already have it—so it’s no surprise they tend to fight back! Learn how to “inoculate” your co-workers, that is, prepare them for a crackdown and help them interpret the boss fight as it goes along. This training is relevant for anyone who is forming a union, but also for anyone who is stepping up the level of activity in an existing union.
With facilities on every continent except Antarctica and more than 1.5 million employees, Amazon is the infrastructure that makes the global economy move, from the virtual to the physical world. One click can set in motion a vast network of warehouses, cargo ships, planes, and delivery vans. Get a glimpse of how Amazon workers in Spain, Germany, Poland and France are organizing against a corporate giant.
Strategic corporate research is a powerful tool, but it can't be used on its own. Union victories depend on developing a serious analysis of a company, and using that information to build a comprehensive, multifaceted, escalating campaign. Bring your knowledge of your company, union, and allies, and we'll work from there to learn how to move from research to a winning campaign.
How can you build any lasting organization in a workplace where the annual turnover is 150 percent? This panel is about sharing and developing strategies to organize with our co-workers at large employers like Amazon, despite the churn.
Most Amazon delivery drivers are employed by third-party subcontractors. In a typical last-mile warehouse, the workforce is divided among several of these small companies, plus some Flex drivers using their personal vehicles and a phone app. How do you organize under these conditions? We'll hear from drivers who are doing it, and strategize how to hold Amazon accountable through collective action.
Frequent collective action builds power. In this participatory workshop for Amazon workers, learn how to evaluate workplace problems to find which ones are ripe for organizing, and how to involve more members and build union power.
Labor movement membership is at 10% of the workforce and shrinking nearly every year. Unions do a good job of winning NLRB elections, but not nearly at the scale we need to grow. We need more ways to organize and reach the millions of workers who want to join a union. One way is where workers without official recognition and a contract form a union and fight for improvements on the job - what EWOC calls Pre-Majority unions. This form of organizing is available to any group of workers now—whether they can't get legal union recognition, or they feel that winning an election may be years away, or they don't necessarily want a contract, but simply want to organize for immediate improvements. Panelists from several pre-majority unions will discuss challenges and successes in their campaigns.
