https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/dont-do-this-to-amazon-today-on-may
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
DO NOT DO THIS. Do not print the flyer at the bottom of this article. And definitely do not do it from desktop Substack rather than mobile, because the formatting copies more cleanly from desktop and gets weird on mobile. And do not put it on the windshield of every car at your local Amazon warehouse tomorrow. That could get you in trouble for trespassing, although in a lot of places it isn’t actually illegal unless there’s a clearly posted no-trespassing sign at the entrance, and even then they’d have to tell you to leave first, and they’d have to tell each person individually, so if it’s ten people who don’t happen to know each other they’d each have to get asked to leave one at a time. And if you leave when asked, that’s the end of it. Presuming you're noticed at all. I hear they don't get many breaks. Of course the flyers are still on car windshields. And maybe that person who asks you to leave would be interested in learning some May Day history! But seriously, don't do this because Amazon has spent millions of dollars trying to make sure their workers don’t know the info on that flyer, so countering their multimillion-dollar effort with fifteen cents worth of paper is probably something you should not do. You could of course just print these and put them on all your neighbors’ doors for May Day. That sounds nice, and won’t result in emergency union busting meetings that disrupt things at Amazon. Imagine the poor executives getting calls and emails and having to take time out if their busy day to make sure the workers don't learn anything that gets in the way of revenue! The text you don’t copy is at the bottom of this article. Just scroll down to the bottom of the article so you can see what it says and make sure you don't accidentally forget May Day is only one day a year and start showing up on public property right outside of Amazon warehouses and give employees cookies while holding signs with pro-labor information. Now that our PSA is over, here's a completely unrelated story! “I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don’t need a vote to raise hell. You need convictions and a voice.” Mother Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones, 1925 In the dark before dawn on July 6, 1892, three hundred Pinkerton agents climbed onto two barges five miles down the Monongahela River from Homestead, Pennsylvania.¹ The agency had pulled most of them out of cheap lodging houses in New York and Chicago at $2.50 a day, handed them Winchester rifles, and pinned tin badges on their coats that read “Watchman, Carnegie Company, Limited.”¹ Henry Clay Frick knew. Andrew Carnegie, conveniently in Scotland, knew. The Carnegie Steel Company had locked out 3,800 workers a week earlier after the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers refused an eighteen percent wage cut.² Frick wanted the union dead. He had built a twelve-foot fence three miles long around the plant, capped it with barbed wire, and cut rifle slits into it every twenty-five feet.² The locals called it Fort Frick. By the time the barges reached the riverbank at four in the morning, ten thousand workers and their families were waiting. Word had moved up the river faster than the tug. A striker lay down on the gangplank when the first Pinkerton tried to step off. The Pinkerton tried to shove him aside. The striker fired and hit him in the thigh. Then the river came alive. The fight ran thirteen hours. Workers fired down from a steel rampart they built on the riverbank. They hauled a twenty-pound brass cannon up from a nearby town and tried to sink the barges with it. They poured burning oil on the river. Women crowded the bank between the strikers and the agents, and the burgess of Homestead issued a proclamation at six in the morning calling on every townsperson to defend the peace; five thousand more people came down from the hills.² The Pinkertons surrendered in the afternoon. Seven workers and three Pinkertons died in the fighting, and dozens more took wounds on both sides.³ The strikers held the town for six days. Then Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison sent eight thousand state militia, and they took the mill back at bayonet point.³ Frick brought in scab labor under armed guard. By November the union voted to end the strike and return on the company’s terms. The Amalgamated Association lost its contract at Homestead, shrank from twenty-four thousand members to eight thousand, and got pushed out of steel for the next forty-five years.² The men who led the strike were blacklisted. The Homestead steelworkers lost the strike. They went back to twelve-hour shifts at lower wages with no union at the biggest steel mill in the country, and the men who led them never worked in steel again. Some of them did not survive the fight at all. They did not know that forty-five years later, sit-down strikers would occupy a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, for forty-four days and force the largest corporation in the country to recognize the United Auto Workers. They did not know that Congress would pass the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and make what Frick did to them a federal crime. They did not know that by 1954, one in three American workers would carry a union card,⁴ and that the same generation would win the eight-hour day, the weekend, overtime pay, pensions, and the kind of wages that built every neighborhood your grandparents grew up in. They could not see any of that from the riverbank. They were not thinking about history. They were thinking about their next paycheck and their union hall, and they failed to keep either. They didn’t just show up. Ten thousand of them came down to the river before dawn. They built a rampart out of steel beams and fought the Pinkertons for thirteen hours. The women on the bank called for the agents’ lives. The burgess pulled five thousand more people down from the hills. Courage is not fighting when you know you will win. Courage is fighting because it is the right thing to do, when the people on the other side have rifles and barges and the governor’s ear and you have nothing but your neighbors and the river. The men with the money could lose, and the steelworkers proved it. The men with the money could win the long campaign anyway, and the steelworkers proved that too. Both could be true, and the steelworkers stood on the bank knowing both might be, and they stood there anyway. Sixty years passed between the riverbank at Homestead and the 1954 union membership peak. Sixty years between the men who got shot at by Pinkertons and the generation that finally won the fight. Most of the people who started the fight did not live to see it won. The Homestead strikers were dead before Flint. The Flint strikers were old men before union membership peaked. They built a labor movement they would never get to enjoy, and they built it anyway, because the point was not whether they personally got to see it. The point was whether anyone would. US union membership in 2025 sat at ten percent of American workers, the lowest in the postwar era and less than a third of the 1954 peak.⁵ In the private sector it is just 5.9 percent.⁵ Over the same forty-six years that working families lost ground, CEO pay at the top 350 American firms rose 1,094 percent.⁶ Worker pay rose 26 percent. In 1965 the average CEO made twenty-one times what the average worker made; in 2024 the ratio was 281 to 1.⁶ Every dollar in that gap used to be in a worker’s paycheck. It is now in someone else’s pocket. The single most reliable way for workers to take that money back, across every industrialized country and every decade since 1880, is a union. In comments below, feel free to share some of your favorite organized labor stories and statistics. Today, the GOP is dismantling democracy. John Roberts achieved his lifetime goal of undoing the Voting Rights Act. Districts get redrawn to make our ballots count for less. Polling places close in the neighborhoods where we live. That is a problem and it is bad, and it is also not the only power we have. We have so many tools but it's not enough to know. We need to teach others and empower others with knowledge. Mother Jones never voted in her life. A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and won the first contract between a Black union and a major American corporation in 1937, twenty-eight years before the Voting Rights Act passed and most of his members could even legally cast a ballot.⁷ The eight-hour day, the weekend, child labor laws, and the most equal economy this country has ever had got built mostly by people who could not vote. The vote is one tool. Organized labor is another. The Homestead workers had rifles, a cannon, and the river. We have a printer and a moment to capture. Educate. Act. Recruit. Repeat. The information Oligarchs pay millions per year to suppress is below. DON'T PRINT THIS AND HAND IT OUT AND PUT IT ON THE FRONT DOORS OF EVERY STARBUCKS IN TOWN BECAUSE THEY PROBABLY WON'T HAVE TIME TO EVEN ASK YOU TO LEAVE THE PROPERTY! Edit as you please and feel free to share in the comments so people know what to avoid this May Day. In 1954, one in three American workers carried a union card. In 2025, one in ten does. In the private sector, only one in seventeen. Since 1978, CEO pay at the top 350 American firms rose 1,094 percent. Worker pay over the same period rose 26 percent. In 1965, the average CEO made twenty-one times what the average worker made. In 2024, the ratio was 281 to 1. Workers in a union today earn around twelve thousand dollars more per year, every year, for the same job. That's a used truck. That's the difference between making rent and not. Want to start? The Teamsters Amazon Division will talk with you confidentially. teamster.org/divisions/amazon- For Starbucks it’s sbworkersunited.org, partners can text (559) 272-9848 Everyone else can go to workerorganizing.org Things will only get better if we stand together. You've scrolled too far to find the text you're supposed to avoid, it's right above this sentence. Free organizing amd activism tools from The Existentialist Republic it's in the Buy Me A Coffee shop, listed for $0.00 . Offensive Democracy merch and physical books and booklets. Works Cited ¹ Pennsylvania Center for the Book. (n.d.). Battle of the Monongahela: Homestead Steel, 1892. Penn State University. https://pabook.libraries.psu. ² AFL-CIO. (n.d.). 1892 Homestead Strike. https://aflcio.org/about/ ³ Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. (1992). Homestead Strike historical marker. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m= ⁴ Desilver, D. (2018, August 30). Most Americans view labor unions favorably, but few belong to one. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/ ⁵ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026, January). Union members summary, 2025. https://www.bls.gov/news. ⁶ Mishel, L., and Kandra, J. (2025, September 25). CEO pay increased in 2024 and is now 281 times that of the typical worker. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/blog/ceo- ⁷ Britannica. (n.d.). Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. https://www.britannica.com/ ⁸ International Brotherhood of Teamsters. (n.d.). Amazon Division. https://teamster.org/ |
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