The Labor Movement’s Amazon Imperative

Benjamin Fong’s recent essay makes a case that’s hard to dismiss: the labor movement either organizes Amazon, or it slowly disappears.

The historical analogy is the CIO of the 1930s. After years of decline, the CIO cracked General Motors with the 44-day sit-down strike of 1937 and revitalized American labor. Fong argues that today’s equivalent is Amazon — the largest employer in the U.S. logistics economy and the company that’s setting de facto labor standards across retail, last-mile delivery, and warehousing.

The numbers tell the story. Without organizing Amazon, the UPS contract — the largest private-sector union agreement in America — is structurally vulnerable. UPS now competes against an Amazon delivery network that’s largely non-union and operating at a fraction of UPS labor costs. The Teamsters’ wins at JFK8 (Staten Island) and recent NLRB victories on bargaining orders are meaningful, but Fong’s argument is that they’re a fraction of what’s needed.

Fong cites Chris Bohner’s analysis: unions are sitting on substantial financial reserves and have spent roughly half a billion dollars on election-cycle PAC activity — money that, in Fong’s view, is misallocated relative to the existential threat. The argument is that labor should be willing to spend at CIO-era levels on a single coordinated organizing campaign at Amazon.

For employers — including Amazon’s competitors and customers — three things matter:

1. If Amazon organizes, the labor cost structure across U.S. logistics shifts. Plan for that scenario as part of your strategic forecasting, even if it’s a 10-15 year horizon.

2. The organizing playbook being developed at Amazon — small-unit retail-style petitions, coordinated public pressure, NLRB constitutional challenges — is the playbook that will be used against everyone else in low-density industries.

Whether you support unionization or not, the structural problem Fong identifies is real. Real wages for warehouse workers have been compressed for two decades. The political demand for a response — through unions, sectoral bargaining, or regulation — will keep growing.

The deeper question: is American labor capable of mounting a coordinated, multi-union, multi-year campaign of CIO-scale ambition? The current political fracturing within major unions (see: Teamsters internal opposition) suggests the answer might be no — at least not without significant leadership change.

Is Amazon the make-or-break campaign for American labor — or is the framing itself outdated?