Thousands of Amazon workers went on strike this Christmas, but most consumers didn’t notice. Those who experienced delays in shipping were as likely to hear about inclement weather as they were about the warehouse workers walking off the job in cities such as San Francisco, Atlanta, and Skokie, Ill. The Teamsters represent around 7,000 Amazon workers, less than half a percent of the 1.5 million warehouse workers the company employs. A press release from the union touted the effort to apply pressure to the two trillion dollar corporation as “historic,” and in a sense, it was. It showed how little even the recent wave of union activity has managed to achieve. Only 10 percent of workers were unionized in 2023, and of those who were, the majority worked for the state.
When we consider the cause of this decline, we should note the symbolism of this moment. The Christmas strike was the story of how the “most customer-centric company” on earth, the institutional leader of our high-tech push-button utopia, brushed the Teamsters aside and delivered our presents on time with drones and outside contractors.
The Amazon wrecking ball has leveled brick-and-mortar shopping. More broadly, the online retailer’s rise coincided with the decline of civil society, sometimes called “the third place,” made up of institutions that are neither familial nor centered on work but are instead realms of voluntary civic association. Bookstores, cafes, community centers, and churches are all examples of what the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “good” places. These are the spaces where our social and individual identities are developed and affirmed. They are also places that are much fewer and farther between in this age of digital commerce, social media, and Amazon Prime.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Robert Putnam noted that labor unions, along with being “labor cartels” or “modern-day guilds,” were also instances of what Oldenburg called “good places.” They were institutions in which people could develop civic connectedness and social cohesion. Twenty-five years ago, when Putnam’s Bowling Alone was published, it was a bestseller. Readers instantly connected to the author’s nostalgia for the ’50s, the decade when union membership rates peaked.
Putnam’s book stood in a longer line of similar studies. Already in 1947, Max Horkheimer examined the slow erosion of civil society in his book The Eclipse of Reason, which chronicled the rise of authoritarianism globally. For Horkheimer, the triumph of capital over society marked the end of the entrepreneurial phase of capitalism. Horkheimer imagined that the class system had been made permanent, as society was transformed into a permanent managerial project wherein the economic contradictions and irregularities that normally arose through trade and domestic exchange would be ironed out. This control through management came at the expense of independence, autonomy, and reason itself. Instead of living in a culture of individuals, we became a culture of industry. Life was flattened into a financial equation, and compliance and conformity became our highest values.
This transformation affected unions as well as corporations. Unions may have once functioned as “good places,” analogous to church halls and bowling alleys, but increasingly came to be defined by a bureaucratized ethos tied to management and at odds with the working-class membership. One reason that business interests and conservative activists succeeded in turning back union organizing is the apathy that ordinary workers express towards the unions and their federal bureaucratic masters. This indifference is just as significant a factor in unionism’s decline as direct attacks on labor rights.
In 2020, a man named Chris Smalls was fired from his job at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. He’d organized a walkout to protest the unsafe conditions he and his co-workers endured as so-called “essential workers.” What was most inspiring about Smalls at the time was his admission that he was starting from scratch. When I interviewed him that summer, he admitted that he had no experience as an organizer and had not been anticipating becoming a leader or organizer before Covid hit. The task of bringing his co-workers together to issue demands collectively was thrust upon him by circumstance. He couldn’t tolerate being treated as if he and the people he worked with were expendable, so he organized a wildcat strike.
Looking back, it’s clear that one of the reasons Amazon could demand that essential workers risk their lives during the pandemic, put everything on the line to pack water filters, computer chairs, and car air fresheners, was because the working class is as atomized as everyone else. Without any good places, it was thought, these people who worked alongside Amazon’s bots, these people who would pee in bottles to avoid taking breaks if necessary, would never resist. How could they?
The Trump campaign, with its generalized nostalgia (was America great in the ’50s, the ’80s, the 1890s?) and commitment to dismantling the deep state, tapped into a collective longing to revitalize the good places in America and help us overcome our tendency to bowl alone. It’s not surprising or even particularly contradictory that this promise to return us to everyday life, to empower the people, and return politics to society after 75 years of deep-state domination was made by a reality TV star and real-estate tycoon named Donald Trump, a former hedge-fund manager named Vivek Ramaswamy, and embraced by Elon Musk, the richest union buster on the planet. Nothing can happen under capitalism without somebody turning a profit. The question for unions and the workers who need them is how to take advantage of the Trump effort—despite its inevitable contradictions and failures.
“We are going to have to start over from scratch.”
Those of us who want to see Smalls finally have his victory, who want to revitalize not only the unions but the workers who need them as well as civil society as a whole, should not blindly follow any political party, including the one to which union leadership remains tied. We should, instead, follow Smalls’s example and admit that we are at a bit of a loss.
We are going to have to start over from scratch.