Our Trip to Centralia

Mar 07, 2025 11:00 am | Fellow Workers Enfields

CENTRALIA, WA–As we study IWW history we come across the 1919 Centralia story, which is also called the Centralia Massacre or Conspiracy. We happen to have the 1987 book The Wobbly War: The Centralia Story by John McClelland Jr. With the book in hand we head off to Centralia. While driving into town the first … Continue reading "Our Trip to Centralia"

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CN, IBEW ratify collective agreement

Railway Age / February 18

CN recently announced that on Feb. 14 it has formally ratified a new four-year tentative collective agreement with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which represents approximately 750 Signals and Communications employees at the Class I in Canada.

The new four-year agreement, which includes 3% wage increases annually, expires on Dec. 31, 2028.

“The ratification of this agreement by our employees with the IBEW union represents a mutually beneficial outcome,” said CN Executive Vice-President and Chief Networking Officer Patrick Whitehead. “This is what we strive for in the collective bargaining process, allowing us to continue delivering safe, efficient, and reliable service to our customers and the communities where we operate.

Amazon Stokes Racial Divides in Lead-Up to North Carolina Union Vote

Four thousand workers at a North Carolina Amazon warehouse are voting February 10-15 on whether to unionize with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment.

RDU1, in the town of Garner, outside Raleigh, would be the second unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States.

It’s an ambitious campaign. The workers are organizing across racial and ethnic divides, through constant turnover, in deeply hostile terrain. At 2.4 percent, North Carolina’s union density is the lowest in the country.

They’ll also need to overcome widespread fear of something Amazon is notorious for: retaliation. In January, Amazon abruptly outsourced its entire Quebec operation rather than be forced to accept a contract at one warehouse.

In North Carolina, it has fired several visible union supporters, including CAUSE President Rev. Ryan Brown.

AN ANTI-UNION ARMY

On January 7, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that workers at RDU1 had signed enough union authorization cards to trigger an election.

“Three days later, Amazon mobilized an army,” said Marcela Duron, a stower. (Duron requested a pseudonym for fear of retaliation.) “Holding meetings, handing out pamphlets, all against CAUSE.”

Anti-union posters started showing up all over the building, even in the bathrooms. New faces appeared on the warehouse floor asking how workers felt about the union. Workers received a mailer at home linking to an anti-union website and urging them to vote no.

“If you’re on the floor talking to somebody, they will be there waiting like vultures to get to the person that you just talked to,” said Italo Medelius-Marsano, who has worked there since 2022. “They’ve already figured out who the union leaders are. They have very good intelligence. It’s almost like they’re union organizers, but on the other side.”

One night before the voting began, Garner police arrested an Amazon Labor Union leader who had come from New York to support the union campaign. In December, they arrested two community members and a fired Amazon worker who were flyering at the warehouse door.

“Under the National Labor Relations Act I should have been allowed to flyer on the premises,” said Orin Starn, who had worked at Amazon for six months. “But the police, who in the small town of Garner where Amazon is the biggest employer act as a kind of private security force, didn't care and just took us off to jail.”

SCARCE LOCAL JOBS

The sprawling 2 million-square-foot warehouse is built on the site of a ConAgra Foods plant that was shut down after an explosion in 2009 killed four workers and injured dozens more. At the time, the plant was the largest employer in Garner—but rather than rebuild it, ConAgra opted to shift production to Ohio, putting 600 people out of work.

The space sat idle until Amazon opened this facility in 2020. It’s now one of the largest employers in the county—a fact that isn’t lost on workers.

“Some people in the building are afraid because they’re refugees, so they don’t want to draw attention,” said Duron. Others are afraid of losing hours, or their jobs altogether. Though the work is grueling, many feel it’s the best option available, “and Amazon has taken advantage of that.”

Workers feel that Amazon has seized on racial divisions in the workforce. “It’s mostly the Hispanic community that Amazon has been intimidating, that we could lose our benefits or possibly our jobs,” said Marcos Pedroza, who has worked at the warehouse for three years in a number of roles. (Pedroza, too, requested a pseudonym for fear of retaliation.)

“Many Hispanic workers say they’re against the union so they don’t get harassed, but they’ve told me they’re voting yes,” Pedroza said.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER?

“Amazon’s strategy is very blatantly: get the Latino vote,” said Medelius-Marsano. “What we hear from people in all departments, in all shifts, is that Amazon is painting CAUSE as a Black union and saying, ‘All the Black folks are lazy and the Hispanics are the ones that work the hardest, and the union is only trying to protect lazy people.’” Amazon disputes the allegations.

A week before the union vote, an Amazon manager claimed the union had told workers they could be deported if they vote no—a claim Medelius-Marsano characterized as “absolutely disgusting” and “a complete falsity.”

“They’ve found fractures in this situation, and have capitalized on it well: on the prejudices of [some] Hispanic workers, differences between ethnic groups,” said Duron.

“I tell them, what are your roots?” says Pedroza. “Venezuela has African roots. Puerto Ricans are a mix of Africans, Spaniards, and Taínos. Why are you going to put something racial on a dark-skinned person when we have that in our blood, in our DNA?”

ORGANIZING IN FOUR LANGUAGES

Bosses have been exploiting racial divisions for as long as they’ve been beating back union campaigns. CAUSE can’t win without confronting the division head-on.

But the workplace divides have also helped make the case for the union. “We [functionally] don’t have an HR; there’s no one who consistently speaks Spanish,” Pedroza said. “At the Wellness Center, [too], no one [consistently] speaks Spanish.”

Training materials at the facility are often only available in English, a CAUSE newsletter asserted, “leading to misunderstandings and increased risk of accidents and injuries.” (Amazon says it has bilingual HR staff at the warehouse who help with translations.)

The union newsletters, now available in French, Spanish, and Arabic in addition to English, reflect efforts to build a coalition across language barriers.

The establishment of a Latino organizing committee was a turning point. “The organization boomed after that,” Medelius-Marsano said. “Within three to four months, we had at least 30 really strong Spanish-speaking leaders that were showing up weekly, and we were figuring out how we’re going to achieve full coverage of the warehouse.”

With time, the English-language organizing committee secured a Spanish-English interpreter, helping workers to connect and build relationships across language barriers.

‘NEVER LEARNED MY NAME’

When Amazon removed a statement “in solidarity” with Black employees from its website earlier this year, CAUSE was quick to respond in its newsletter: “Company policy can change at any time. Union contracts only change with our vote.”

One of the most common frustrations workers share is the perception that Amazon is not invested in them for the long haul. “You’re an old timer at RDU1 if you reach six months,” Medelius-Marsano said. “I was working in packing for over a year, and my manager never learned my name. I was just my username on our badge.”

“When you start here, everyone loses weight because of the sheer physical effort,” Duron said. “Amazon is one of the largest companies on the planet, and it has the resources to offer better working conditions.”

“People are going to the [anti-union] meetings just to get a break from work,” Pedroza said. “They can rest for an hour, so people keep going to the meetings. Then when they leave, they tell me, ‘I’m voting for the union.’”

 

 

CPKC, Teamsters MOW division reach tentative 4-year agreement

 

Progressive Railroading / January 29

 

Canadian Pacific Kansas City and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference Maintenance of Way Employees Division (TCRC-MWED) have reached a tentative four-year agreement for engineering service employees, the Class I announced yesterday.

 

Details of the tentative collective agreement will not be public until the agreement has been ratified, CPKC officials said in a press release.

 

"Working together with the TCRC-MWED, we are pleased to have reached an agreement that is good for our railroaders and their families across Canada," said CPKC President and CEO Keith Creel. "With another tentative collective agreement completed at the negotiating table, we can continue our work safely and efficiently serving our customers and delivering for the Canadian economy."

 

CPKC, United Steelworkers reach tentative agreement

 Progressive Railroading / February 5

 Canadian Pacific Kansas City today announced it has reached a tentative four-year collective agreement with United Steelworkers (USW) representing clerical and intermodal employees in Canada.        

USW represents approximately 600 employees in Canada. Details of the tentative collective agreement will not be released publicly until the agreement has been ratified, CPKC officials said in a press release. The tentative agreement is the third the Class I has reached this year in Canada, said CPKC President and CEO Keith Creel.

 

No NLRB? No Problem

 

Last week Trump fired two members of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving the body without quorum and the ability to process cases. Many unions are wallowing in despair because they are so reliant on the government, but there is an elephant in the room here nobody wants to address. Why is the labor movement so dependent on the government in the first place? Can we afford to be in a situation where one orange man can suspend the union process? The moment has opened our imaginations to what labor organizing would be like without the NLRB.  

After being fired, NLRB General Council Jennifer Abruzzo said, “if the Agency does not fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations.” This is interesting because ‘taking matters into your own hands’ is something labor law was designed to prevent.

Taking Matters Out of Our Hands

In the early 1900s, workers across the U.S. faced low wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions, which were made even worse by the Great Depression. Workers responded with militant strikes and sabotage. For example, in 1919, over 65,000 workers in Seattle launched a general strike, and in 1934, the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike brought the whole city to a halt. It was in this context that Congress created the legal framework for ‘collective bargaining’ that eventually consolidated into the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.

The purpose of the act was to derail militant labor activity into more polite bureaucratic avenues. For the government, workers’ self-activity was too uncontrolled. It interfered with “the free flow of commerce” and risked revolutionary destabilization of the class system. If employers would just recognize unions and engage in bargaining away from the shop floor, capitalism could be made more stable and efficient.  It also became obvious to those in power that labor organizations were going to exist whether they liked it or not. What is a government to do? Since they could not beat labor out of existence, the next best thing was to take control over what it meant to be a union. Unions were enshrined in law and given an “acceptable” avenue to express themselves. Union structure and practice were molded to promote ‘industrial peace,’ thereby defanging labor’s more radical tendencies.

Trump’s Childish Statecraft

In this context, Trump has pretentiously sabotaged his government’s own mechanism for containing worker militancy. But it remains to be seen if a dysfunctional NLRB will lead to unions “taking matters into their own hands.” If that were the case, it could be the revival of the labor movement we are looking for. We do not need more of the same labor movement. We need a different direct action movement that operates beyond the control of government – on our own terms – for a world that meets human need and not the profits of the ruling class. Labor’s strength has always been grounded in its control of production, not these arenas of ‘collective bargaining’ we are funneled into by the NLRA. The shopfloor is where class war is waged, while the bargaining table is where labor goes to be tamed, integrated, and defeated.

So however disappointing a dysfunctional NLRB is, it is healthy for labor to think outside the box. Do we even need to be recognized by the NLRB? Are polite negotiations the only way to win? If the General Council of the NLRB can think of an alternative, then we sure as hell better be able to. Although, I stress this should not be a secondary strategy we use when our dear NLRB flounders. It is the only direction that guarantees our power. Regardless of Trump’s shenanigans, the winning strategy for labor has always been to abandon the state’s polite bargaining framework.

Old Habits Die Hard

Taking matters into our own hands will require a great transformation of the labor movement’s habits. In the nine decades since 1935, unions have been shaped to rely on the NLRB. Union leadership will be reluctant to go down any other path; Indeed, that could mean eliminating their own careers since their job is to serve the NLRA’s style of unionism to workers. For this reason, it will be key to develop other kinds of unions, like the IWW, where rank & file committees have control instead of comfy union officials.  

Further, most unions have bargained away their ability to ‘take matters into our own hands’ by signing contracts with no-strike clauses; The law does not allow for direct action if the NLRB can’t make quorum. So the heavy legal consequences remain for workers who have signed away their power. Obviously, the government will be more than willing to use the NLRA to protect capitalists from any contract violations. Again, the contract framework provided by the government is more about maintaining the class system than helping workers. It would be great if labor took action overnight, but due to these contractual traps, undoing labor’s habits is more likely a long term project. Unions need to be rebuilt from the ground up, by the rank & file, in a way that preserves the freedom to strike. Then we will have the freedom to move in situations like this. 

It is not just the contract or the larger union apparatus that is so dependent on the NLRB, but workers themselves. Workers are trained to ask their bureaucrat, to file the grievance or ULP. Even in the IWW, a union that favors direct action over contractualism, we get starry-eyed new members itching to file for recognition without building a functional committee. They arrive to us miseducated by the NLRA regime, the labor press, and general approach of mainstream unions. The NLRA’s culture has weaseled its way into the very intuition and habits of the working class: “Where are you, bureaucrat? Have you seen the form I filed yet? What can you do on my behalf?” So it is not enough to exclaim workers will just do it themselves. Yes, we must, but it will be difficult to change our habits. Like a smoker attempting to quit cigarettes, people will not immediately claim their power. They will crave the old way of doing things, especially if there is no clear understanding of the problem at hand, and no effort to break the dependency. It’ll take a lot of intention and discipline. 

We are at a point in history where the government may not need to channel the labor movement into the NLRB. Labor’s militancy has become so degenerate that Trump can sabotage the board and leave unions hamstrung. The potential absence of the NLRB is a very different scenario compared to the situation prior to the NLRA. Back then unions were more wild and capable. They were just beginning to be led into a cage and still possessed wild traits. But now a sudden removal of the NLRB avenue is like depriving cattle of the farmer’s feed. Perhaps this is giving Trump too much credit, because I doubt the blathering fool is aware of the history of social control, but look at it from the enemy’s perspective: there is a good chance that tossing a softened, polite animal out into the wild will just result in their death. He senses labor’s weakness. 

Perhaps a dysfunctional NLRB will cause rank & file workers to get upset, adapt, and take a different direction. However, once things get rowdy, the government can simply open the floodgates of the NLRB and channel labor into its normal avenues. They’ll remember how to dangle the carrot in front of us. Even Trump will realize his mistake and learn that the NLRA is the most sophisticated technology of capitalist rule. At that point, workers may feel inclined to come home to roost, for their bodies have not forgotten what it’s like for ‘someone else’ to do it. Will any new habits be strong enough to resist old temptations? 

Trump’s gutting of the NLRB is timely. It’s happening at a point where the tameness of the working class is at an all time high, and union membership is rock bottom. It makes sense for them to sabotage the NLRB until unions prove they can ‘take matters into their own hands.’ It’s like a test to see if social control is even required anymore. Perhaps labor is so domesticated everyone will slave away without disrupting anything. But I know we can shake things up.

From: https://industrialworker.org/no-nlrb-no-problem/