This session is about how workers at Amazon in the UK and in the USA are trying to organise against a fiercely anti-union company, and why the fight against Amazon matters for all of us. We will also look at practical organizing models applicable beyond Amazon, offering strategies to engage the workforce, sustain support and develop leadership.
Tom Vickers, associate professor in sociology at Nottingham Trent University and is the author of Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power Under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation which is based on ethnographic research and reflective essays from GMB worker-leaders and organizers in Coventry. Tom is Director of the Work Futures Observatory.
Jonathan Rosenblum is the author of We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics. His book tells the story of how a feisty socialist movement in Seattle, USA took on Amazon and other big businesses, making Seattle the first major city to mandate a $15 minimum wage and the first to implement a payroll tax on Amazon to build affordable housing. Rosenblum, who worked in the city council office of socialist Kshama Sawant, shows how and why a class-struggle approach to political fights succeeded where other progressive outsiders—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have failed.
For political activists searching desperately to make sense of the world after the re-election of Donald Trump and the rise of Reform, the two authors offer a framework for fighting our way out of the despairing miasma of 21st century capitalism.
Refreshments included.
Both books will be offered at a discount on the night.
