“Doing Bezos’ Bidding for Free”? My Reply to Ira Pollock
By Joe Allen
When I read Ira Pollock’s vitriolic letter to Cosmonaut attacking Jennifer Albert Mann’s Letter Did Amazon Even Go On strike? — where I was also thrown into the mix, I have to say it saddened me. It was another example of the terrible state of discussion and debate in the U.S. Left and labor movement, where Ira sounds like any old guard labor leader — pick your union — shitting on their critics. Jennifer can ably defend herself but I want to point to the final paragraph of Ira’s letter as the most disheartening. He wrote:
We don’t need our allies to do unpaid union-busting for Amazon, even unintentionally. We don’t need our comrades to invalidate the courage and initiative of our shop-floor leaders who are right now shaping the future of the labor movement. I’m all for principled criticism of business unionism and bad strategy. But that’s not what Mann’s letter is, nor Allen’s piece.
Really, Ira? Cosmonaut readers can read my article The Teamsters’ Amazon “Strikes”: a Critical Assessment on my Medium page or on Counterpunch and judge for themselves whether I’m “unintentionally” helping Jeff Bezos’ union-busting campaign or that I’m a “serial crank,” as Ira calls me. I’m a former UPS worker and Teamster. My book The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS is well-regarded even for those who may not agree with everything I say.
My article attempted to explain the huge gap between what the Teamsters were claiming was happening during their five days long “strike” and the reality that most people saw, that a tiny number of Amazon workers were involved. To call it a strike is just dishonest and a disservice to further organizing. My anxiety about the “strategy” being pursued by the Teamsters’ leadership, not the rank and file Amazon activists, was further heightened by the Teamsters’s Amazon Director Randy Korgan’s post-strike analysis with his heavy emphasis on “media dominance” and the popularity of TikTok videos.
During my years as a working Teamster I was a member of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which has travelled very far from its roots in the 1970s, and is in a comfortable partnership with the white nationalist leader of the union, Sean O’Brien. The left in the Teamsters led by TDU, but not only TDU, has followed a disastrous road over the last five years, and now finds itself as the most boisterous defenders of O’Brien’s policies. There’s worse to come from O’Brien and for all intents-and-purposes there is no sizable opposition to his policies in the union.
So, if Ira is reading this letter, I reach out my hand in comradeship and hope we can find the time to talk. I’m easy to reach.
