With the union drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama, over for the time being, there are other places that have been working to organize, including Amazon in Staten Island, New York.

The union in Bessemer has filed charges against Amazon for allegedly violating federal labor law and the National Labor Relations Board is investigating. Even if successful, the charges are not going to change the lopsided vote in favor of the company, but the union-backing workers are not going to quit.

The majority of the workers at Bessemer Amazon are black, but the long history of black workers of militant unionism in the former steel industry didn’t carry over to face Amazon, simply because of the generally poor condition of the economy in the U.S. The response of Amazon was typical of any corporation in modern America. Using high-cost union-busting companies (often incorporated in law firms), they threaten, cajole, and propagandize their workers and force them to attend anti-union meetings and watch anti-union films on company time. They have access to their workers that unions do not have under current labor law.

There have been many analyses of the campaign in Bessemer in the short time since the vote that Jeff Bezos and his corporation won over the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, a small union that is part of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. The critiques have come from the right and the left, but few bear any indications that they have ever been involved in a union organizing drive or involved in a union in any way. In fact, most show themselves to be utterly bereft of any knowledge of labor history in the U.S.

Such a one is the analysis of Oren Cass, writing in the April 19 issue of Politico, an online and print journal of politics from a Washington perspective. Cass is a product of the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, and is the executive director of American Compass, whose mission, it is “to restore an economic orthodoxy that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.”

The headline on the Politico essay is, “What American Workers Really Want Instead of a Union at Amazon.” Cass explains that workers really want a cooperative situation with management, especially where working conditions are tolerable and wages and benefits are adequate. It’s the definition of “adequate” that never is approached by capital or its adherents and attendants. Let’s start off immediately by saying that $15 an hour in the American economy of 2021 is not adequate to support a family of four. Perhaps two of those jobs might do the trick, but who takes care of the two children in that family of four, if two parents are working? And, if it’s a one-parent household, how does one hold down two, or even one-and-a-half jobs, and pay all of the bills? Who cares for the children?

These are questions that Cass and others who were born into affluence don’t ever have to ask. For them, it’s a given that the money will just flow into the family for upper middle-class families. Usually, they don’t have to give a thought to “how do we pay six bills this month?” Since these people never have to think about paying their bills, they have time to keep squeezing workers through the corporate structure and through legislation (Congress) and the courts at every level. The rich and Corporate America can, and have, consolidated their money and power over a century, to the extent that there is such disparity in wealth and income that workers are becoming restive.

In Solidarity America, you might have read that workers are becoming as restive as a century ago and the rich are somewhat worried and really don’t know what to do about it, because a restive working class is not something to be ignored. Some of the suggestions put forth by Cass and others, through American Compass and other organizations, intend to address the economic imbalance that tends to upset the societal order. The suggested methods to address what they are beginning to see as a problem for them and for the country are everything but encouraging workers to form unions. Corporations and the rich have painted the union movement as something foreign to the U.S. for so long that they can’t change the mantra now. They continue to refer to “big labor,” as if these were still the days when more than one-third of American workers had the benefit of working under a union contract. Even then, most of the power in the workplace rested in the corporate offices.

Here’s Cass on the crux of the union problem: “In 2017, MIT professor Thomas Kochan conducted a similar survey and found that interest in joining a union had grown and workers wanted a wide range of services that a union could provide to them, including: collective bargaining; health, unemployment, and training benefits; legal assistance; input into work processes; and representation in management decision-making. On the long menu of options, the two that stood out as making workers less likely to join are exact the ones that seem to get union activists most excited: politics and strikes.” He points to other western democracies in which there is cooperation between labor and capital, but doesn’t dwell on the differences in the politics, which tend to equalize the power in the workplace. There is not a strong labor party in the U.S. and there is not likely to be one.

Cass also brings up the vote a few years ago in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where, he says, Volkswagen even favored a union, but that support was like damning with faint praise. Also, there was then-Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn., whose vicious anti-union presence might just as well have made him a part of the paid professional union-busters. The union lost there and Cass insists that workers are looking at something in between the adversarial relationship that must exist between capital and labor. Even so, the trade unions in America provided some of the most peaceful of relationships in the workplace. The overwhelming percentage of negotiations (some 97 percent) have ended in agreement without strikes.

The rich and powerful will go to the ends of the earth to find ways to make things more equitable in the workplace for the workers and never admit that a union provides all of the things they think the workers need. They will find systems and procedures that will attempt to provide what unions provide. They will continue, however, to propagandize workers into believing that a union is somehow a “third party,” or an outside influence, when clearly the union is the workers, themselves, in a particular workplace. There is no entity better at determining what workers want and need than the workers, themselves and that’s what they have in their own local union.

Nothing that corporations and their politicians come up with to mollify workers will replace workers having their own union and meeting management at the bargaining table. That’s why the PRO Act that is before Congress is so important. It has passed the House, but likely does not have enough Republican support in the Senate to pass at this time. The GOP opposes it because it effectively cancels the power of the right-to-work (for less) laws that now exist in half the states. It makes employer captive-audience meetings that propagandize workers against unions illegal, and it will establish monetary penalties for companies and executives that violate workers’ rights. Corporate directors and other officers of the company could also be held liable. It has other provisions, but that’s just a start.

The great majority of workers would join a union, but the laws and the courts have laid down one of the most oppressive systems of work that only free workers and their unions can overcome.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Contact Mr. Funiciello and BC.