The following remarks were delivered by ROC DSA Co-Chair Gregory Lebens-Higgins at a vigil for Gregory Kase hosted by the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, and alongside allies including VOCAL-NY. Gregory Kase was shot and killed by Monroe County Sheriff deputies during a wellness check on August 9. Mr. Kase, who was deaf, was killed after responding to officer commands with “I can’t hear you.”

Gregory Kase should be alive right now. All of us, but particularly the disabled, should be able to depend on our community to provide health and support. A wellness check should not be a death sentence. Police were called to help Mr. Kase, but arrived all too ready to do harm. Officers arrived with guns drawn, and pulled the trigger in just 30 seconds.

We see this happen over, and over. We cannot just metabolize these incidents. A disproportionate amount of those killed by police have a disability. But with insufficient resources and a lack of alternatives, families are forced to make the difficult decision to call 911. They are asking for help, and we are letting them down.

It would help to have police trained in deescalation; who are knowledgeable in interacting with the disabled community. But we need to ask ourselves whether the system of policing – its them vs. us mentality, its militarized approach – can be reformed. This incident is symptomatic of how many people are treated by police, particularly vulnerable communities.

We need to provide resources for the disabled community to have the help and support they need, and for appropriate crisis interventions. Hot-headed cops with guns should never be the go-to intervention.

Gregory Kase should be alive right now, but let’s keep his memory alive, and make his life impactful even in death, by making this the moment we say “No More.” We are proud to partner with the disability rights movement to create the conditions for a better world with dignity for all.

The post I Can’t Hear You: Statement on the Killing of Gregory Kase first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Learn how to plan strategic collective actions at work, escalating from initial assessments to marches on the boss.

The post Workplace campaigns and collective action appeared first on EWOC.

Learn how to have effective one-on-one organizing conversations with co-workers. Master the 80/20 listening rule, the discussion framework, and scripts for handling pushback.

The post Organizing conversations: Talking with your co-workers about a union appeared first on EWOC.

By the TDSA Ecosocialism Association

It is widely assumed that the political struggles people pay the least attention to are the ones that are closest to home. AI data centers are changing this. In both red and blue states, people are crowding normally barren local government meetings to stop the plague of large-scale AI data centers from reaching their doorstep.

On August 24th, the data center fight arrived in Durham, North Carolina. At a Monday evening meeting that ran from 7pm until midnight, county commissioners Mike Lee, Michelle Burton, Wendy Jacobs, Nida Allam, and Stephen Valentine appeared aligned on passing a moratorium on data centers, but divided on how comprehensive a ban should be. Despite an overwhelming majority of public comments urging a moratorium without carveouts, the commissioners voted 4-1 for a moratorium that included major loopholes. Allam was the lone dissenting vote.

The most significant of these was a carveout allowing for the construction of new data centers in Durham County, as long as they are less than 100,000 square feet. County commissioners spun this as a reasonable measure to allow for the construction of so-called “enterprise” data centers, and claimed that 100,000 square feet is well short of what counts as “hyperscale.” Yet this is enough space to build a data center with a power draw of up to 100 megawatts, the equivalent of powering 80,000 households or over 63% of City of Durham households. Such a facility could further consume 530,000 or more gallons of water per day, once both on-site and indirect water consumption is accounted for. 

Even though the public supermajority supporting a loophole-free moratorium was largely ignored by the county commissioners this time, we should not rush into the mistaken conclusion that public hearings are unimportant or without value. The opposite is true. In fact, one of the biggest reasons why we’re seeing local governments across the country pass moratoriums on data centers in the first place is because of local communities organizing themselves to make their data center opposition as vociferous as possible inside the halls of local power. However, in places like Loudoun County, the proliferation of data centers despite this resistance belies a dirty truth about local “democracy” that speaks to the need to organize a powerful working-class movement both within and beyond the county commissioner’s chambers.

One moment of the debate is worth focusing on to understand the power dynamics lurking behind what took place. After hours of deliberation and public comment, Commissioner Jacobs invites someone from the audience whom she refers to as “Mr. Levitan” to come up to the microphone to provide more context on a question she raised about the Research Triangle Park (RTP) zoning process. As Mr. Levitan makes his way to the microphone, someone else from the audience interrupts, claiming that if Mr. Levitan will be receiving an extra opportunity to speak, so should every other member of the public. The person who interrupts the meeting is then admonished by Chair Lee for interrupting. This interaction encapsulates the political fissures that underlie both Monday’s contentious meeting and local politics writ large in this country.

City council and county commissioner meetings create a certain temporal illusion. During the timespan of a public hearing, local government bodies give the impression that every member of the public has an equal opportunity to influence the debate at hand by ostensibly granting every member of the public an equal amount of time to speak. The interaction described above shatters this illusion. Mr. (Scott) Levitan is not county staff, or another county commissioner. He is the CEO & President of RTP Foundation, and one of only two out of sixty speakers at the public hearing who urged the commission to vote for a moratorium with carveouts, which is what they ultimately did.

Were the opinions of the two speakers who asked for the moratorium with loopholes more persuasive than all the other sixty or so speakers? Why was a particular member of the public granted extra speaking time? What would’ve happened if the interaction wasn't interrupted?

While the details of exactly what happened behind closed doors are not known, we do know some things. Mike Lee publicly asked for exemptions that allow large 75-80 megawatt data centers. Since local governments in North Carolina cannot directly regulate energy use, the strategy switched to square footage. Scott Levitan was the only supporter of a 100,000 square foot loophole at an earlier work session on August 3rd. The staff who wrote the ordinance only listened to public directions from Lee and Jacobs, both of whom have never faltered to address their “stakeholders” (businesses in RTP and Treyburn) since the beginning of public meetings on this topic.

The cozy relationship capitalists enjoy with many politicians isn’t breaking news. But what happened at the county commissioners meeting was a prime example of just how this undemocratic process works. Capitalists like the CEO of the RTP foundation get increased access to elected officials, shaping “the public hearing” even before “the public hearing” takes place. Furthermore, the AI-funded Trump administration’s federal budget cuts create an extra layer of economic pressure on the shoulders of Durham’s elected officials to cater to the whims of tech companies and their promises of economic development. How this development will materialize equitably from a technology whose main selling point is replacing workers, or at best paying them less to do more, remains a mystery. This is to say nothing of how the data center boom is driving up water and energy bills, sucking up water in drought-stressed areas, and delaying the energy transition.

None of this is anything new in the Triangle. The history of RTP reveals that it has been a top-down, corporation-centric project from its very beginnings in the 1950s. Originally cooked up by a small group of capitalists, academics, and government officials, the “Research Triangle” development strategy was meant to change the face of North Carolina by attracting tech companies and knowledge workers to a state dominated by a few low-wage materials processing industries; namely textiles, tobacco, and furniture. While some have certainly prospered thanks to RTP, this same development strategy has time and time again reinforced class inequalities, gentrified historically black neighborhoods, and facilitated unsustainable, unaffordable, car-centric suburbanization. It also has failed to substantially improve the lot of much of North Carolina’s working class both within and beyond the Triangle, which continues to face low wages, poor working conditions, a degraded environment, and aggressive union busting. This is precisely because RTP did not break with earlier patterns of development in North Carolina so much as supercharge them under the guidance of a detached and dictatorial technocracy.

Despite their long-held sway over regional politics, the movement to oppose the data center boom increasingly has something capitalists do not: public support. A Gallup Poll from March found that seven in ten Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area. This discontent has manifested in grassroots coalitions that have emerged throughout the country. Durham’s Stop Data Centers campaign, of which NC Triangle DSA is a co-sponsor, has played an important role in organizing the community to pack local government meetings and was instrumental in obtaining a recent year-long moratorium at the city level.

Although the county commissioners ultimately sided with Mr. Levitan and RTP’s business elites over the people, the fight is not over. Expected growth trends in both RTP and Duke Health arc towards a probable future of ever more consequential AI data center fights. The degree to which Durham and other cities and towns across the country will be able to thwart the whims of the AI capitalist class is dependent on the degree to which they can organize their communities to stop the rise of the Musks and the Altmans and their machines. Because ultimately, the fight over AI data centers is more than just a technocratic fight over emerging technology and its regulations. At its core, it’s a fight for our democracy, our humanity, and the land, water, and air that we all depend on to survive and to thrive.

An interview with Die Linke’s Berlin vice-chair on the party’s growth, expropriating big landlords, and the developing art of German canvassing.

The post The Left Contends for Leadership in Berlin appeared first on Democratic Left.

Released By: Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA Program Committee

WORCESTER – Massachusetts has some of the most rent-burdened tenants in a country where the crisis is ubiquitous. Every year in Massachusetts, thousands of working-class people are pushed onto the streets, three-quarters of which are families with children, while their landlords continue to raise rents higher and higher. This state of affairs has forced many to leave Massachusetts altogether, but the reality for those most threatened by rent gouging is that leaving their homes, jobs, and lives behind to look elsewhere simply isn’t an option. Even for those of us with a little extra in our paychecks, rent is increasingly eating away at our ability to get by. We should not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of state residents report that the cost of housing is their top concern, and that rent control enjoys considerable support.

History

Rent control has advanced and receded in Massachusetts for over 100 years as fighting tenant movements have ebbed and flowed. The story begins with a housing crisis caused by soldiers returning from the first World War, at a time when the Russian Revolution — which redistributed the great plots of feudal lords amongst those who worked the land — inspired working-class unrest and revolt across Europe and around the world. Although the Massachusetts legislature passed a ban on “unreasonable” rents in 1919, then, as now, landlords and government officials were concerned less with the letter of the law than with capitalists’ ability to maximize profits. The law was never enforced, and was taken off the books several years later.

Rent control made a comeback in Mass as an emergency measure during the Second World War, and, after being deconstructed once again in the 1950s, became the chief demand of a massive tenants’ movement in the late ‘60s. Finally, at the height of this movement, the state legislature caved, passing a law that allowed individual communities to control rent in 1970. By then, organizations like the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee had long been directly attacking capitalism and the institution of landlordship itself.

As the rage of tenant struggle cooled and the movement on the streets dissipated, this policy, too, only lasted a handful of years. In Boston and Cambridge, tenants successfully petitioned the state to continue to allow rent regulation on the basis of “home rule”, meaning local options. But as the Cold War ended, the Soviet enemy of American capitalism was finally destroyed, and the neoliberal consensus was cemented at home and exported worldwide more than ever, the home rule deal wouldn’t last. In the late ‘90s, a concerted effort led by landlord organizations Massachusetts Small Property Owners Association and MassLandlords began to push for the total eradication of all rent control. In the cities, they found little traction with tenants who wouldn’t be able to survive the rent spikes landlords drooled after. One landlord described with great frustration the power that tenants — the hard-working people whose paychecks he looted once a month, every month — still have today: “In Cambridge, tenants outnumber landlords by three to one. It was like three wolves and a chicken deciding what’s going to be for dinner.”

Realizing that local campaigns were a losing strategy, opponents of rent control took to a statewide question, gathering enough signatures to relitigate the issue on the ballot in 1994. Margins were incredibly slim, but ultimately, the influence of suburban property values won out. On New Year’s Day, 1995, rent control was ended in every city across the Commonwealth. 

In recent years, certain organizations, particularly a coalition of nonprofit organizations in Homes for All Massachusetts, have attempted to revive lost tenant protections through a protracted, hitherto unsuccessful lobbying campaign. Some politicians have vocalized support for a local option in individual cities, with yearly rental increase caps as high as 10%, while opposing a statewide solution — more a public relations exercise than a genuine attempt to relieve rent-burdened tenants. All of these efforts, ultimately, culminated in the fiasco of this year.

The 2026 Ballot Initiative

Last year, Homes For All Massachusetts (H4A) announced that it had managed to gather enough signatures necessary to get a rent stabilization proposal on the ballot for the November 2026 election. The initiative would have limited annual rent increases for residential units to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or 5%, whichever lower, with large carveouts and exemptions. This modest proposal was the center of a media storm driven by seething reactions of landlord organizations like Housing For Massachusetts. Politicians like Maura Healey — who publicly brands herself as a champion of affordable housing, yet openly states full-throated opposition to rent control on the basis that it would scare corporate developers — sided with their donors over a crushing supermajority of MA voters who indicated they would “definitely or probably” vote in favor of the measure in one Spring 2026 poll.

Tenants inspired by the ballot initiative, including many DSA members tirelessly committed to working-class struggle, campaigned for it intensely. Many allies understandably expressed betrayal, however, once H4A entered backroom deal-making with property investors to withdraw the question from the ballot. The compromise was a yet weaker proposal for a 10% (or 5% plus CPI, whichever lower) cap that municipalities must opt into, with a limit to the number of apartments the policy could apply to.

The scope of the original initiative’s effect was never certain, and it would have never eliminated tenants’ existing rent burden as wages stagnate and living costs skyrocket. Even so, the compromise represented an enormous step backward, and would have implemented nothing itself. State officials sat quietly on the sidelines, as if to wait for the people in charge — the landlord and business groups H4A was negotiating with — to give them their marching orders.

In the end, the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down the initiative entirely. Ironically, it was the proposal’s exemptions for religious institutions — one of many carveouts written to blunt resistance from moneyed interests — that provided the courts with the legal basis to kill the initiative.

Central Mass & Worcester DSA’s Alternative

H4A has led with solutions they think are most likely to be accepted by the rich and powerful. This is no accident: progressive nonprofits and non-governmental organizations take up worthwhile goals, but often rely on a web of grant funding from foundations and donors that place constraints on their activity. Push the political horizon of a campaign beyond what funding sources find acceptable, and risk the collapse of the entire organization. This forms the basis of many problems, chief among them: a lack of meaningful democratic accountability to the working-class constituencies these agencies set out to help.

We propose a different approach: we believe that by leading with our most radical and class-partisan demands, the working class can best position itself to build an organized, politically conscious movement to coerce concessions through struggle. We want to build that working-class movement — a democratic one, no less, that does not sideline tenants in backroom dealings with their enemy, but welcomes them to join DSA, determine our organization’s strategy, and challenge the rigged system head-on.

Central Mass & Worcester DSA has proposed a policy question which will appear on the ballot in the sixth Worcester State House district that instructs the district’s representative to support a measure using a tax on vacant properties and wealth and inheritances over $5 million to fund a robust, union-constructed, universal social housing program that “eliminates the role of landlords,” caps rent at 10% of household income, and places housing under tenants’ democratic management.

The State House, which itself is filled with profiteers on the human need for shelter, will not consider this proposal for even a moment. But, if landlords and developers are increasingly confronted with a working-class movement that threatens their profits and their role as the dominant class in society, the reader might find that they will become far more open to the comparatively moderate rent control measures they reject now — in fact, they’ll beg the workers of the Commonwealth to take it.

This piece was written and released with the democratic approval of the Program Committee of the Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA chapter, which organizes the working class across the central region of the Commonwealth.

The post OPINION: Where Does MA’s Movement for Affordable Housing Go From Here? appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Matt Wolfinger

With Flock and Axon cameras on every corner, commuting to work for the average American means becoming an unwilling participant in a nationwide web of mass surveillance. Even clocking at work won’t protect them from the all-seeing AI – workplace surveillance systems can track them with even more precision, collecting data on the speed of their work, who they talk to and most importantly, if they’re planning to unionize.

Labor organizing in the United States is growing more popular. A 2025 poll from Gallup found that nearly 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, while recent polling shows labor unions have reached a near-historic high of 72%. Despite their popularity, only 10 percent of workers in the U.S. are union members. This isn’t for lack of trying, as workers across the country fight tooth and nail to unionize their workplace.

But innovations in AI and surveillance technology have made it easier than ever to keep tabs on workers and curtail any union activity — no more so than innovator and supervillain corporation Amazon.

New Frontiers in Exploitation

Workers at e-commerce behemoth Amazon are no stranger to union drives. Numerous warehouses have attempted to unionize but only one – JFK8 in Staten Island, New York – has won its union election. More than four years later, Amazon still refuses to come to the bargaining table. 

The independent Amazon Labor Union at JFK8, now affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), faced fierce opposition from a company infamous for its brutal union-busting campaigns. There’s a seemingly inhuman ability for Amazon to get ahead of union efforts, before most employees are even aware of them, because their methods are inhuman: company-wide mass surveillance tracking workers both on and off the clock.

In 2020, Business Insider uncovered Amazon’s use of algorithm-driven “heat maps” to track which Whole Foods locations were at the highest risk of unionizing, tracking “risk-factors” like local unemployment rates, average wages and the racial diversity of employees.

Amazon makes use of “bossware” tech like cameras, handheld scanners and biometric trackers to monitor each worker’s location, how fast they’re working, and the lengths of their bathroom breaks.

The data collected on each employee gets fed into an algorithm tasked with optimizing efficiency. Internal documents obtained by Vice in 2022 reveal exactly how the algorithm functions. The aforementioned surveillance tech tallies each employee’s daily “time off task” (TOT).

Talk to your coworker on the clock? That’s time off task. Walk to the wrong floor? Also time off task. Take a bathroom break longer than 10 minutes? Unsurprisingly, that’s more time off task. Those 10 minutes include the walk to the bathroom, even if it’s on the other side of the warehouse, placing pregnant and disabled workers at a clear disadvantage.

Whoever accumulates the most TOT that day is crowned the “top offender” and called into an office to be grilled by their manager. If a worker can’t recall what they were doing during a stretch in time, that’s more TOT.

Accumulate more than 120 minutes of TOT in one day, or 30 minutes over 3 days in a single year and the algorithm fires you on the spot, no human oversight needed. The algorithm will auto-trigger warnings and terminations if employees fall behind on their quotas, which are also determined by the algorithm. Bossware lets employers automate the hiring process, generate schedules, conduct layoffs and write performance reviews.

Amazon has touted its advancements in AI, and its implementation stretches far beyond its fulfillment centers.

Amazon delivery vans come fashioned with AI-powered cameras that track the van’s speed, location, and the driver’s biometric data, even as they contract out to third-party vendors who legally operate as separate employers (Delivery Service Partner (DSP)) even though routes and hours are set by Amazon. Small facial expressions, like a driver yawning or looking in the side mirror get flagged and shared with their supervisor. Although done under the pretense of increased safety, drivers under surveillance report feeling pressured to drive more recklessly to keep up with their quotas. The company endangers its communities.

A 2019 investigation from ProPublica found more than 60 DSP-involved accidents occurred over a 4-year span, ten resulting in deaths. Amazon argued that since those drivers are subcontractors, they can’t be held liable for their actions.

The Antiunion Arsenal, Assembled

In 2018, Amazon debuted their new “Just Walk Out” technology at convenience stores, later expanding to Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The company claimed that customers could enter the store, select their items, then walk out the door without stopping at check out – the advanced AI system would simply track what items they left with and bill them later. 

This tech, if implemented, would reduce the number of employees required to run each location, an obvious test run for Amazon’s hundreds of Whole Foods locations.

Reporting from The Information uncovered that this system was largely overseen by underpaid workers in India, who manually reviewed over 70 percent of transactions.

A similar system is used in Amazon’s warehouses. When the AI-powered cameras that track the stowing of packages fail, the footage is sent to thousands of workers in Costa Rica and India to review. They’re also required to report any rulebreaking, training the AI to identify these behaviors in the process. Those workers told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that their quotas are so grueling they try to blink as little as possible, afraid they’ll miss a minute detail or fall behind pace and be punished – watched just as closely as the workers they’re paid to surveil.

Amazon workers who know they’re being watched often feel pressured to work faster, leading to increased rates of burnout and workplace injury, according to a study from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed report taking unpaid time off to recover from constant pain and exhaustion.

Even if workers aren’t under constant surveillance, just knowing it’s possible is enough to instill an overwhelming sense of fear and paranoia. Employees worried that the slightest misstep will cost them their jobs (in the midst of a cost of living crisis) may feel more inclined to keep any prounion opinions to themselves. Throw in steep quotas and your employees have no time to think of anything else, like how a union could improve their working conditions.

Not even off the clock conversations go unseen. Vice obtained documents in late 2020 revealing Amazon had been using a social media surveillance team to infiltrate dozens of private Facebook groups and scan websites, subreddits and Twitter threads to collect intel on employee complaints and “planning for any strike or protest against Amazon.”

The largest amount of Amazon’s antiunion spending comes in the form of “union avoidance” attorneys and consultants, who can earn upwards of $10,000 per day to persuade employees against unionizing. A recent report from LaborLab and the Economic Policy Institute found that U.S. employers spend around $1.7 billion each year on union avoidance consultants and law firms. 

Multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon have more than enough money to burn, spending over $26 million on consultants last year. The amount is likely higher, as companies are only required to disclose spending on consultants who directly interact with employees.

“Amazon’s MO is to lean on consultants pretty hard,” Teke Wiggin, strategic coordinator at LaborLab and a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University researching union-busting told Working Mass. They employ consultants and an in-house “employee relations team” of union busters to collect intel and plant antiunion propaganda in their conversations with workers. Wiggin said:

This all has to be done very subtly, because soliciting grievances, for example, explicitly is illegal. So it’s all done indirectly. It makes workers feel listened to, but they’re also gauging the union support of all these individual employees.

The attorneys, explained Wiggin, help formulate talking points – cherry picking lines from a union’s constitution that sound unfavorable out of context for consultants to parrot at workers on-site.

Wiggin is the author of Weaponizing the Workplace, a study detailing Amazon’s use of “algorithmic management,” automating human relations tasks through algorithms, to disrupt the company’s first ever union election in Bessemer, Alabama.

The 2021 union drive in Bessemer ultimately failed, with roughly 70 percent of workers voting no. Some who began as prounion but switched sides later expressed regret to Wiggin, saying they’d been misled or intimidated by Amazon.

The tactics used in Bessemer became the blueprint for Amazon’s unionbusting efforts moving forward, building what Wiggin calls the “antiunion arsenal.”

Companies like Amazon make employees reliant on in-house apps that automate human resource management. Employees are required to use the company’s A to Z app daily to keep track of their schedule, request time off and view pay stubs. Management exploits this reliance to send employees multiple text blasts per day with the classic antiunion lies: unions are scams, they impede any real progress, employees will lose their benefits, and they’ll drive a wedge between you and the architects of your suffering.

They’ve found a way to circumvent the need for illegal in-person “captive audience” meetings (though Amazon holds those, too) to smother employees with antiunion propaganda at every hour of the day. Bessemer employees reported going to bed thinking they had the next day off, then waking up to find they’d be scheduled for a 7am shift while sleeping. Employees are punished for not refreshing the app 24/7, allowing Amazon to build a case of infractions as pretense for layoffs.

Leading up to the election, Amazon pulled out all the stops to bust the union – literally.

Union organizers would speak to employees at the intersection outside the Bessemer warehouse, making use of the down time at red lights to build a connection and inform them of their right to organize. To retaliate, Amazon asked the county to shorten the duration of red lights at the intersection, making it impossible for anyone to get a word in. This led to at least one car crash that narrowly missed an organizer canvassing outside.

Preemptive Moves and Pinkertons, Back Again

Another tool in the antiunion arsenal is “algorithmic slack-cutting,” where companies improve working conditions ahead of union elections to win back disgruntled employees.

Ahead of Bessemer’s election, management relaxed enforcement of TOT and decreased the volume of packages brought through the warehouse to give workers the impression their demands were being heard. This led some who were prounion to switch sides, believing it was no longer necessary. After the vote failed, Amazon reinstated those policies.

For employees already working in dehumanizing conditions, the slightest improvement can feel like a massive change. “Amazon has more room than traditional employers to rapidly improve working conditions,” said Wiggin, “and because they can rapidly improve working conditions through algorithmic slack-cutting, they have more capacity to sway voters in their direction.”

Amazon has already hired the Pinkertons (yes, those Pinkertons) to collect intel on workers deemed “labor organizing threats.” Although times have changed, their methods have stayed the same – infiltrate the rank-and-file and gather intel the employer can use to their advantage.

Even when workers win their elections, antiunion law firms will stall negotiations for as long as possible by constantly filing appeals on behalf of employers. More than four years after the Staten Island warehouse won their union election, the NLRB only recently ordered Amazon to finally start negotiating. Amazon plans to appeal that decision as well, holding it up in the courts and pushing negotiations back even further.

Workers at Amazon warehouse DCB8 in Bellingham, Massachusetts have been attempting to unionize through the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) for two years. Since then, Amazon has rolled out the same union-busting strategies they used to crush the union in Bessemer.

Bellingham workers announced their intention to unionize in May 2024 by wearing shirts on the floor featuring Amazon’s smile logo and “Union” in bright orange text. Within two hours, management had plastered antiunion messaging in every break room, bathroom and on every TV. The messaging started out as general antiunion talking points, but eventually named the APWU directly.

Amazon’s pervasive antiunion strategy has made it difficult for DCB8 organizers to convince some workers to join the cause. Laurie Masteron, a former DCB8 worker and lead organizer, shared on APWU’s podcast:

It has a huge impact, because when you have a conversation with someone who is new or has been there for a very short span of time, they parrot exactly what they see in here. It’s having that same conversation every single day, banging your head against the wall in hopes of breaking through that.

Management closely surveilled those wearing union shirts to write them up for minor infractions, like forgetting to wear their ring scanner. “It’s a way of intimidating fellow employees into not wearing their shirts and not standing loud and proud,” Masterson explained.

Masterson was fired by Amazon in December after returning from time off she’d taken to recover from a shoulder injury sustained on-site. The company cited moving her hand to unclog a jam on the conveyor belt (which caused the injury) as a fireable offense, a rule Masterson had never heard about. The APWU and AFL-CIO have filed a lawsuit through the NLRB over the firing, one of many Unfair Labor Practice (ULP_ lawsuits brought against Amazon on DCB8’s behalf.

The APWU did not respond to multiple requests for an interview with a representative or DCB8 organizer.

Borrowing Tactics from the Hotel Industry

In June, Business Insider revealed Amazon is testing a new program called “Right Station Link,” taking the form of wearable trackers that “automatically capture check-in and labor-hours data for ‘indirect’ support roles, such as equipment maintenance, safety coordination, and floor management, that have historically been harder to track.” The goal is to increase efficiency and reduce idle time. Unlike the handheld scanners used to track stationary employees, support workers are constantly moving and manually check in throughout their shift. Right Station Link would automate that process.

Amazon plans to implement the program in every North American warehouse by the 2026 holiday season.

A spokesperson for Amazon told Business Insider that the system is similar to those used by hotel workers to log their progress and receive assignments. Although unintentional, it’s a very revealing comparison given the history hospitality workers have with this technology.

Striking Marriott workers in Philadelphia shared in 2018 that these devices, which assigned each cleaner to specific rooms instead of letting them clean each one in order, led to less efficient and more exhausting routes as cleaners jumped randomly from room to room. This also increased the volume of complaints from guests, who assumed their rooms had been skipped.

In 2023, California hotel owners responded to strikes by mass-hiring scabs through the Instawork hiring app. When the temporary workers who unknowingly signed up to cross the picket line decided to join it instead, Instawork automatically slashed their hours and wages to retaliate. 

Beyond opinions on unions, bossware gives employers tools to influence and mobilize their workers for their own political gain. Uber and Lyft flooded employers and riders with in-app reminders to vote “Yes” on Proposition 22 in California, permanently classifying all gig workers as independent contractors, the same loophole barring Amazon’s DSP drivers from unionizing or receiving benefits.

Managers at Amazon’s warehouses have been butting heads with an algorithm progressively given more decision making power, and reducing the ability for human managers to override it, even when the AI makes decisions based on incorrect or out-of-date information.

When the algorithm couldn’t account for managers needing more workers for specific sections of the warehouse, they’d manually reassign them then modify the timesheets to accommodate it. Amazon has since reduced the ability for managers to override the algorithm, despite its many flaws.

Long-term, letting AI take over responsibilities and make decisions in the workplace lessens our ability to think for ourselves and become experts in the field. If we become over-reliant on AI, we’ll grow rusty and “deskilling” will erode our ability to perform tasks, understand the nature of our work and actively problem solve when issues arise.

Workers are provided with little transparency on what data employers collect on them and what it’s used for. There’s an overreliance on AI, a technology infamous for hallucinating false information, to remove humans from the decision-making process. The powers-that-be at Amazon would rather double down and punish those who dare to exercise their own judgment.

These advancements in tech have put the working class in a chokehold, unable to work without engaging with the tools employers exploit to exert their own influence. Clyde, a union activist who spoke to Wiggin, put it in Marxist terms:

New forms of production enable data and attentional captivity [of workers]. If [workers] weren’t as attentive to their monitors and scanners as they are, their workplace would be a lot less efficient and union drives would be a lot easier . . . . The means of production are the means of communication.

As long as the managerial class has access to unregulated AI and algorithmic management tools they pose an existential threat to the working class, whether eliminating jobs through automation or helping suppress unions. The world survived and thrived long before AI, and we can do so again.

Placing guardrails on AI in the workplace and providing transparency on how algorithms work, (removing them from the “black box”) is a good first step to protect the privacy of workers. Long-term, bossware should be excised from the labor market completely, giving unions a fighting chance against the oligarchs who’ve gone all in on technology designed to isolate, exploit and destroy them.

Matt Wolfinger is a data journalist, Northeastern University graduate, and a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post The Amazonopticon and the Antiunion Arsenal appeared first on Working Mass.

DSA has announced its Workers Deserve More program to fight for a better world. Are you interested in DSA? Are you interested in building a better world? Then come to this meeting and help us launch our planning for our Solidarity Initiatives. We would like to hear from you on our planning process, considerations, and your early ideas about how we can strengthen our movement.

Housing Justice, Healthcare for all, Educational for all, labor justice and more are all on the table. But we need your help to get it done. RSVP and join the movement.

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss recent labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the new contract our County employees won by threatening to strike, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028. Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link shortly after completing RSVP.

Monthly Working Session Meeting

The Political Education Working Group is the place to bring your ideas for workshops, educational material, agitprop, and more. Our goal is to bring socialist ideas, DSA messaging and campaigns, and class consciousness to the people of Ventura County. All levels of organizing experience welcome.