Original subtitles

Three, two, one, zero.

We have commit, and we have liftoff at 2:13.

A rat done bit my sister Nell,

with Whitey on the moon.

Her face and arms began to swell,

and Whitey's on the moon.

Out of the Protestant ethic

of hard work and sacrifice,

the fact is that capitalism was built

on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves.

I can't pay no doctor bills,

but Whitey's on the moon.

Ten years from now, I'll be paying still,

while Whitey's on the moon.

You know, the man just upped my rent last night,

'cause Whitey's on the moon.

No hot water, no toilets, no lights,

but Whitey's on the moon.

Was all that money I made last year

for Whitey on the moon?

How come I ain't got no money here?

Hm, Whitey's on the moon.

I want to thank every Amazon employee,

and every Amazon customer,

'cause you guys paid for all this.

To Whitey on the moon.

This is The 1619 Project.

It wasn't so long ago

that ships were carrying eager passengers

toward the shores of a new nation.

Our forefathers were constructing

the foundation of this nation by interlocking, inseparably,

the blocks of our political and economic freedom.

♪ There's a war goin' on outside no man is safe from ♪

♪ You could run, but you can't hide forever ♪

Capitalism is complicated.

Even the experts have a hard time giving a digestible definition.

Capitalism is one of those things that we breathe in the air in this country

but I don't feel like most of us actually know what capitalism means.

What is capitalism?

Yeah, it's sort of one of these things

if you looked it up in Webster's Dictionary,

it would say, "A system of private property

in which the free market coordinates buyers and sellers."

- Which means? - Yeah, it's not really clear.

So we need a better definition of capitalism.

♪ In between two worlds trying to get dough ♪

♪ You know when the dough get low, the jewels go ♪

♪ But never that ♪

When I think about capitalism,

I think about the myth versus the reality.

The myth of American capitalism is that our system

is based on individual achievement, and effort.

That you put in individual effort, you'll get something back.

And that is the myth.

The reality is that capitalism is based

on the exploitation of labor.

It's that simple, it's that direct.

- ♪ You better realize ♪ - ♪ Livin' this 'til the day that we die ♪

♪ Survival of the fit, only the strong survive ♪

♪ The strong survive ♪

♪ Livin' this 'til the day that we die ♪

♪ Survival of the fit, only the strong survive ♪

♪ Livin' this 'til the day... ♪

America prides itself

on being an exceptionally free and prosperous nation

built on individual liberty,

and a brand of capitalism that we are taught

makes the American economic system the greatest in the world.

But the truth is, we live in a country rife with inequality.

One defined as much by its poverty, as by its prosperity.

In the last few years,

the pandemic made that harsh reality glaringly clear,

as low-income Americans died in disproportionate numbers,

and millions of so-called unskilled workers

risked their lives on the front lines.

And perhaps it was the death, or the fear,

or the months in isolation, but something shifted.

Americans quit their jobs in unprecedented numbers.

A national fight over labor rights ignited,

and many of us just seem to be questioning

why we have come to accept

this particularly brutal form of American capitalism,

a reality that has been playing out in my own family for generations.

♪ These last two dollars ♪

♪ I'm not gonna lose ♪

♪ I'm not gonna lose ♪

Whenever I go home to Waterloo,

I always try and stop by to see my cousin, Chimiere Tillman.

Not only can she hook up some ribs and collard greens,

but she's also warm, generous, smart,

and the oldest daughter of my uncle, Edward Tillman.

Uncle Eddie, as we called him, was my favorite uncle.

He loved to laugh and play practical jokes,

and maybe it was because he was only 16 years older,

but he never got mad at me, or disciplined me.

As a teenager, I often spent more time at his house

than I did my own.

And at every milestone, he was there,

smiling that proud, toothy grin.

This is Mr. Edward Tillman.

When my dad died when I was just 31 years old,

Uncle Eddie and I grew even closer.

And yet, just three years later, he'd be dead too.

Taken by cancer that had gone undiagnosed.

Like a disproportionate number of Black men in this country,

both Chimiere's dad and my own

died before they were old enough to even qualify

for the social security they'd spent decades paying into.

The deaths of both of our fathers, both so young,

both so close to each other, was devastating to us.

My dad was the oldest living brother.

Mm-hmm.

And your dad and my dad were extremely close,

which is probably why you and I are so close.

Your dad used to live with us

when we lived on Lafayette Street, I remember.

He stayed in the basement,

and he had the red light, or the blue light,

and I always used to think it was so cool.

Your dad never,

except when he would go out of town for work...

Don't start already.

I'm not, I'm good.

Fuck! CHIMIERE: Sorry.

We always do this.

We cannot talk about our dads.

Sorry.

He just never moved far away from my dad, right?

Like even the house, in the white house,

he was always so close.

- We were always in walking distance of each other.

My Uncle Eddie gave his body to the job,

but when he got sick,

he couldn't even get the care his body required,

because like so many other Americans,

the job he was working at the time didn't offer health insurance.

He did a number of jobs.

He worked in Marshalltown.

It was a meat-packing plant.

Dad worked at IFNY.

They were working with steel and stuff,

and he would come home just black,

and just smelt like metal,

and he would just hack up all that stuff.

- I mean, I remember being there when he would get off work,

and he couldn't close his hands sometimes,

because his hands were so swollen and sore.

Would wanna just lay on the hardwood

because his back hurt so much.

Or he would have you rub his feet.

- Not realizing, as a kid, what that type of labor

was doing to his body.

But he did what he had to do, and I think a lot about how,

when we look in, in our community,

a lot of people say we don't work hard,

and that the reason we aren't able to get ahead

is because we don't work hard.

But our parents were like the hardest-working people.

My family story mirrors that of so many other working

and middle-class families in this country.

Today, America stands as one of the most unequal societies

in the history of the world.

In 2019, the top 10% of American families

owned 76% of the nation's wealth.

The middle 40% of families owned 22% of the wealth,

but the bottom 50%?

They own just 1% of the nation's wealth.

In America, capitalism is said to take the low road,

relying on low wages, longer workdays,

and low rates of unionized workers.

And if we promote a capitalism that is uniquely brutal,

a kind of winner-takes-all capitalism

that allows such stunning economic disparities,

it is in part because it was founded

on the lowest road of all, chattel slavery.

Just tell us when.

You doing it now?

I'm rolling.

- Professor Rothman, thank you for taking the time

to speak with me.

You know, the education I received

has long said that slavery wasn't profitable,

which never made sense to me.

How did we come to think about slavery

as not being profitable, as not being capitalist?

Well, we are living in a society

that has very aggressively tried to erase those connections.

But Europeans didn't bring 12 to 15 million Africans

to the New World just to be extra racist to them.

They brought them to the New World

so that they could exploit their labor,

so that they could turn their bodies into commodities

at the same time that they were coercing their work

in order to grow things to sell to people far, far away.

The slavery that developed in the colonies

of British North America, and then would expand

in the new United States of the 19th century

was a slavery whose history can never be separated

from the history of capitalism.

In this country, we tend to think of slavery

as a Southern institution,

but slavery was our nation's first big business.

And it was slave-grown cotton that fueled our early economy,

and helped turn a fledgling nation into a global powerhouse.

On the cusp of the Civil War, the 10 major cotton states

were producing 66% of the world's cotton,

and raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports.

Explain for us how the production of cotton

creates an entire financial industry in the nascent United States.

So if we said, let's start with cotton

and say that this is a world in which cotton

is the equivalent of oil in the 20th century,

it is the thing that employs millions of people

far, far away from the sites of actual cotton production.

New York banks, and New York shipping companies,

and New York insurance companies

are playing a crucial role in the transport

and sale of slave-grown cotton out of New Orleans.

If we think about the labor that's taking place in New England,

in the factories of places like Lowell

that are turning slave-grown cotton into cloth

that is sold throughout the United States.

If you don't have slave-grown cotton,

you don't have an American industrial revolution.

It's as simple as that.

So how does this history of slavery

shape workplace culture in today's America?

- One of the problems we have is the poverty of the English language

when it comes to words for labor exploitation.

We have one really good word, slavery,

and we can oftentimes talk about the actual slavery,

but then we also use that language to talk about other forms of exploitation.

Working for Uber is a new kind of slavery,

or Amazon is the new slavery.

And I'm always very hesitant about that language.

We need to, on the one hand,

be very committed to the specificity of actual enslavement,

while at the same time,

recognizing that future iterations of labor exploitation

owed a great deal to that past.

And we are living in the wake of a system

that has long sought various kinds of coercive mechanisms

to hold people in place, and to extract their labor.

I've been, the past six years, at Amazon.

I was working at various different warehouses,

mostly temp jobs.

Only had a high school diploma,

so it was kind of limited to what jobs I can get.

And my mom, she told me about Amazon.

Amazon is the second-largest employer in the country.

The company began as an upstart online bookstore,

but today, Amazon is part of our everyday lives,

and is worth $1.3 trillion,

making it a shining example of American capitalism.

Our brand of capitalism thrives on extracting labor

for maximum profit.

And perhaps no modern company

has perfected that model better than Amazon.

One of the first roles that I did was pick.

Basically, I'm picking the customer orders.

Tote running, what you have to do is grab a stack of yellow totes,

and wheel this cart into every pick station

so that every picker has totes to use.

I've done it all.

Derrick Palmer works at the JFK8 facility

on Staten Island, and his longevity on the job is rare.

Amazon is known for its high turnover rate

amongst hourly workers, with most warehouse employees

quitting or getting fired within a year.

This high turnover rate exists, in part,

because the work at Amazon is so physically demanding.

In addition, it can also be dangerous.

- An investigation is underway after a deadly accident

at an Amazon fulfillment center in Plainfield.

Workers complained of breathing issues,

and burning in their eyes and throats.

Amazon's serious injury rate is nearly 80% higher

than the rest of the warehouse industry.

In fact, in 2022, a federal agency

opened an investigation into Amazon

after three workers reportedly died in New Jersey

in a span of just three weeks.

The productivity metrics are very high.

It's a very fast-paced environment.

Management is on top of you getting those numbers,

'cause at the end of the day,

it really boils down to the numbers.

Like, what can you do to make sure

that this product is getting out the building?

If you're not performing,

ultimately it's gonna lead to you getting terminated.

Amazon's motto, they say, safety is number one,

but if you are a worker at Amazon,

you know that productivity is number one.

Since this nation's founding,

American capitalism has pushed productivity for profit

at the expense of human beings.

Slaveholders employed unspeakable violence

to increase cotton production,

and when they wanted to grow their operations,

they mortgaged the actual bodies

of their enslaved for capital.

The bodies of Black people became a business asset,

valued alongside a wagon to carry products,

or a mule to help work the land.

At the time of the Civil War,

the value of the four million enslaved people in America

was about seven times the net worth

of all the nation's banks,

and worth more than all of our nation's factories

and railroads combined.

And like any big business owners,

slaveholders made sure to keep track of their most valuable assets.

To do this, they perfected intricate

and sophisticated standardized record-keeping systems.

Tell me where we are right now.

What is the space that we're in?

- Well, we're here in the special collections

at LSU Library in Baton Rouge,

looking at a bunch of materials

about how planters managed cotton-picking on plantations.

So what is this here?

It looks just like the composition books

that we see today that I bought for my daughter

with the little speckled cover, and the, the binding.

What are we looking at?

So, this is one of the first

highly standardized plantation account books,

where you have each person's name down the side,

and then Monday through Saturday, six days a week,

you have the amount of pounds of cotton that they're picking.

So Scott picks 119 pounds, 132 pounds,

137 pounds, 134 pounds,

and that tallies up to 522 pounds

over the course of the week.

But the other thing that's amazing about these records

is that you always know where every person is.

If they're not picking, then you know that they're sick.

Sometimes you see a woman gives birth,

and they're picking almost up until when the child is born.

And the planter knows when they're there, and when they're gone.

Sometimes you see it's marked runaway,

so you know someone has escaped from a plantation.

There's the kind of imaginary version

of the Southern plantation that we've constructed

that's old and kind of slow.

And instead, this is like an assembly line.

I've picked, on an average,

350 to 400 items an hour.

They push you to pick 400.

If you're on the Amazon website,

you put the item in your cart, boom,

literally pops up on your screen as a picker.

But when you're looking at the screen,

it has something called tag time.

How long it takes you to scan this item.

And you're looking at this tag time for the entire shift,

and you have to keep it at seven, seven seconds.

Ultimately, throughout the day, 4,000 items,

I've picked even 5,000 items

in a 10-hour shift.

Not only did enslavers meticulously monitor

the whereabouts and productivity of the enslaved,

they also tracked the monetary value assessed to each enslaved individual.

And what is this tracking here?

It says value of commencement of the year,

and value at the end of the year.

And it looks like for many of these,

the value has gone up?

- So for example, here we have John, who's age 70.

At the beginning of the year, $50.

The end of the year, $75.

This is a sign that the market is going up overall,

but the market isn't the only thing they're taking into account.

They're also taking into account age and skill.

If you look to the bottom of the list,

you see the names of all the children and babies

on the plantation.

So the left side is males, the right side is females.

And here we have the youngest on the plantation,

Rose, six months, $75 at the beginning of the year,

$100 at the end of the year.

- It's an emotional thing to see someone's,

a human being's value, is less than a broodmare.

To actually see it on the, on the page.

And we know that enslaved people

were really well aware of their own values.

Like, they knew that the planters

were thinking of them in these terms.

And, I mean, they also knew that they could

affect their value, um.

That, you know, how they presented themselves

could increase their value or decrease their value.

And so, we know that they used this

to try to shape the course of their lives.

And even today, our value as human beings

is still all too often connected to what our bodies can do for profit.

- You know, if I'm performing at a high level,

you shouldn't come to me and say, "Hey, can you do more?"

I've done what you told me to do.

I've exceeded expectations.

I shouldn't have to be pushed, and pushed, and pushed.

My uncle Eddie desperately wanted

a better life for his kids.

He even scraped together money to send Chimiere

on a high school trip to France one year.

But like so many Black Americans,

no matter how hard my uncle worked,

he could never seem to get ahead.

A leaky roof or a medical bill set the family back,

and drained his meager savings.

And so after high school,

that meant my cousin Chimiere had to make tough choices,

her young dreams snatched away by reality.

- Going to college was something that I wanted to do,

but I decided I couldn't go to college,

and I couldn't work at the same time.

I couldn't deal with both.

I wanted to be independent,

so I couldn't have my mom and dad saying,

"Hey Mom, I need this," or, "Hey Dad, I need this."

I mean, I still have younger siblings

they still had to take care of.

- So let's talk about the work that you have done,

and what kind of income.

I mean, you've had a job as long as, um?

Eighteen years.

I worked at Catherines, it was a plus-size women's store.

I started there in 2002,

and they thought they were doing something when they gave me 5.15.

They didn't have a lot of jobs out there,

so you took what you got, and you work what you have.

After being there 15 years, I still didn't make $10.

- So you were working for 15 years in a job,

but now you have children,

and you're not even making $10 an hour.

What was your paycheck, and what were your bills?

So, I would be happy when I got a

a 900, or a $1,000 check.

That's two weeks.

Mind you, my rent is $700.

I have a old house.

My light bill runs me 240 a month.

Pray that the water bill didn't come out that month.

I didn't get to have anything until the second check.

So that first check of the month

went to every bill that I had,

and I lived off my credit cards.

My cousin Chimiere is hardly alone.

Almost half of the country's workers

between the ages of 18 and 64

are employed in low-wage jobs.

But it is Black Americans that suffer the greatest poverty,

and the lowest wealth.

More than 150 years after the end of slavery,

an average Black family holds about 12 cents of wealth

for every dollar of wealth held by an average white family.

In a country whose economic system

was founded on the buying and selling of Black people,

race and capitalism will always be inseparable.

Okay, B cam marker, take one.

- You said that capitalism is structured through difference.

What do you mean by that?

It means that value

and wages, or how people are compensated,

is determined by differences

by race, by gender, by age.

So capitalism is designed

to exploit labor and human beings,

but all people are not exploited equally.

Right.

- So you call this, and others call this, racial capitalism.

Explain for people

who've never heard that term before what that means.

Racial capitalism is capitalism.

It's one and the same.

It means that there's no such thing

as a race-neutral capitalism in the United States.

It just doesn't exist.

Despite applying multiple times

for management positions,

Derrick was unable to get a promotion

after six years on the job.

I'm looking at my skillset, you know,

what I've brought to the company, what I've done for them,

as far as training other people, learning different roles,

performing at a high level, and not being rewarded for that.

And then having someone who's been with the company

for months compared to my six years

being moved up, and they just so happen to be white.

How could you not look at that

and think that that's not a defining factor

as to why you didn't move up?

At the JFK8 facility on Staten Island,

more than 60% of the warehouse workers like Derrick

are either Black or Latino,

while more than 70% of those in management positions

are white or Asian.

And nationally, it only gets more stark at the top of the ladder.

2021 Amazon workforce data shows

that only 10% of the company's senior leaders

are Black and Latino, while 66.4% are white.

One, two, three.

- We are thrilled that Amazon is doing business in Alabama.

This is their second facility,

and their first fulfillment center.

Amazon broke ground in Bessemer, Alabama, in 2018.

A city just outside of Birmingham,

Bessemer is more than 70% Black,

and more than 25% of the population lives in poverty.

So when the giant arrived offering an hourly rate

that was more than double Alabama's minimum wage

of $7.25 an hour, many in the region saw it

as a much-needed opportunity.

Cell phones are on silent right now,

that would be great.

Ready? Okay. PRODUCER: Yeah.

So, let's talk about when did you first start hearing

that there was going to be an Amazon plant here in Bessemer?

I believe it was maybe early 2019.

My understanding is a lot of people

were just excited, because everyone shops at Amazon,

and you just have this image in your head

of what it might be like.

- Mm-hmm. - What was the reality?

The reality is that it looks pretty.

Um, you shop there, you get packages at the door,

but it's grueling work.

- How quickly did your excitement about this job

turn into regret?

The third day.

Three days?

- When I was walking out, and I was, um, limping.

Why?

- My knees were hurting, my feet were hurting.

When you're working in the store department,

you not only walk the stairs,

but there's a step stool in your station

that you have to walk every day to go up to store items.

I told my sister, "I don't think I'm coming back here."

She said, "Oh, it gets worse."

But eventually, I realized, you know what?

Something needs to take place here, and I'm not gonna leave.

I'm gonna stay and work together

to try to get some resolution.

- Your mother talked to you about independence at work,

and this was something that she wanted to instill in you.

Can you talk about that?

Growing up, my mom used to talk to us about working.

That the world is not free.

You have to work to get your bills paid.

She didn't have enough,

but she made sure that we had what we needed,

and she always told us that we had to work.

- What kind of work did your mother do growing up?

She worked at Mary Manufacturing.

That was one of the jobs.

It was a sewing coat factory.

She also worked at a grocery store.

That was her second job.

- So she worked a lot. - Mm-hmm, she did.

I knew that she had to do it in order for us

to have food on the table, and clothes to wear.

It seems like your mom

was instilling these messages of hard work,

but it also seems like society was sending a message too,

because of course, we're told in America

that if you work hard,

you'll be able to get ahead,

and yet you're seeing your mother working,

and that's not coming true for her.

- And that's the same thing for a lot of us.

As I get older, we talk about this all the time.

Why is it that you work all your life?

And to get to my mother's age, she has to look back and say,

"All the money that I've made in my life,

I'm still not ahead in life."

And it's like, it's an ongoing thing for us all.

So that was the reason why I've been fighting

for a long time,

for a lot of people, and not just immediate.

Because I don't... to me, I'm like, do y'all even see what's happening?

Life for so many Americans is a daily struggle.

And yet, when we question how can there be

so much financial suffering in such a wealthy nation,

we're often told, hey, this is a capitalist society.

But all capitalist societies are not the same.

America has the stingiest social safety net

of the Western democracies

when it comes to benefits like unemployment,

parental leave, and paid time off.

My uncle died, in part, because we are the only

Western industrialized nation without a right to healthcare.

And as a pandemic laid bare

the inequities of an economic system

where low-wage workers were literally dying

to make some corporations record profits,

workers of all races began to unite

in an unprecedented demand for change.

10,000 John Deere workers

are already striking right now,

employees demanding higher wages and better benefits.

- Kellogg's workers in central Pennsylvania

are on the picket line, joining thousands of workers

in Nebraska, Tennessee, and Michigan

as they strike over wage disparities.

- What they doing here? - Nothing!

- Nothing. - They playing us here.

What they doin' 'bout our healthcare?

By March of 2020, Derrick and his colleagues

at JFK8 decided they were risking too much

to not fight back.

As many as 100 employees

at amazon.com's Staten Island fulfillment center

in New York City, known as JFK8,

walk off the job, alleging the company

is mishandling its response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

You know, my heart was pumping,

but I was like, no, we gotta do it.

We have to do this.

We just went on that bullhorn,

and we told them everything that was going on.

We told them how Amazon was hiding the amount of cases

that they had.

They didn't want to tell workers at all what was going on.

And how all they cared about was the productivity.

We're taking the stance against Amazon,

the beast Amazon, just us workers doing it.

I read that the workers in Bessemer

were trying to form a union.

That means they're going through the same thing.

So, it's not like it was a JFK8 problem.

It was an Amazon problem.

- Union! - Now!

Nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse

in Bessemer, Alabama, fighting for the right

to collectively bargain over working conditions.

Alabama, once home to the capital of the Confederacy,

exists in one of the most anti-union regions of the country, the South.

Let's show some love for Ms. Jennifer Bates.

Hello, everybody.

Thank you for coming out to support us on today.

When we began to organize this union,

we had no idea that it would be this large.

We were just a few people trying to start,

um, a union to make a big impact.

In 2020, less than a year

after Amazon opened its fulfillment center in Bessemer,

Jennifer Bates joined the historic effort to unionize the facility.

- Some of the things that they said we already have

is competitive wage, and awesome benefits,

but what I say is,

you just offered us a wheelbarrow and call it a car.

Everything look good...

Amazon employees are not alone

in their push to unionize.

In the last few years,

the country has seen a surge of efforts at big companies

that had never been successfully unionized,

like Starbucks, McDonald's, and Apple.

Unions help to ensure decent pay and benefits,

even for the working class.

They are the primary reason we have a 40-hour work week,

and overtime pay.

And yet, until recently,

union membership had been declining for decades,

leaving workers unprotected,

and unable to negotiate the terms of their labor.

Today, a defining feature of our nation's capitalism

is a relatively low level of union participation

compared to other countries.

In Iceland, more than 90% of wage and salaried workers

belong to trade unions.

In Italy, it's more than 30%.

And in Canada, 27%.

But in America,

only 10% of wage and salaried workers carry union cards.

So when you look at union participation in other countries,

and compare it to America,

we rank near the bottom.

Why is that?

Hasn't always been that way.

We rank near the bottom today because for the last 40 years,

we've experienced a kind of onslaught against labor.

That is, laws passed making it harder to organize,

as well as companies getting support from the government

to suppress unions.

The fact of the matter is that in the 1930s,

the US had one of the highest union rates in the world.

And at the forefront of those union movements in the 1930s,

and into the '40s were often Black workers themselves.

Black Americans who faced rampant labor discrimination

were particularly interested in unionizing.

In the '30s and '40s,

union activism thrived in the state of Alabama.

But those efforts were met with intense violence.

Black Americans were shot and killed,

tarred and feathered, and lynched for trying to organize.

When we know we kind of have this collective memory

of that violence against Black labor,

Black labor organizers,

how does that memory contribute

to the kind of psychology we see

around labor organizing today?

I'm always astounded at the courage,

especially of Black women.

And so, in many ways, it doesn't seem

like the threat of violence has succeeded

in dampening the spirit to organize.

Instead, what we've seen is the use of soft power.

And Amazon is the best example

of the use of soft power

to undermine unionization.

The amount of money that Amazon paid

to fight the union could have increased wages,

but they don't wanna do that, because once you win one place,

you're gonna win everywhere.

At the top of 2021,

the union drive in Bessemer, Alabama,

was gaining momentum,

but the warehouse workers, a group that is 85% Black,

were up against Amazon's strong anti-union campaign.

So, what did Amazon do?

How did they try to counter the efforts

to bring the union to the plant?

They gave little cards, and it tells you

how to fill out your ballot.

But on the back of it, it had vote no.

So, people thinking they're picking up a card

to show them how to fill out their ballot,

but on the flip side of it, it has vote no.

They had what they call captive audience classes

to tell you that you don't need a union.

The union's only here to take your money.

Amazon released videos to help managers

discourage labor organizing efforts.

It is critical that we recognize

the early warning signs of potential organizing,

and escalate concerns promptly.

The most obvious signs would include

use of words associated with unions,

or union-led movements, like "living wage" or "steward."

While Amazon maintains

that holding meetings with employees

is a legally recognized strategy

that helps their workforce understand the facts

about joining a union,

Jennifer says that some of her colleagues felt intimidated.

They were coming to our work stations,

asking us how we felt about the union,

and why is it important that we didn't bring a union in?

Amazon even requested to change the timing

of the traffic lights outside the Bessemer fulfillment center.

And while the company says the request

was to avoid traffic congestion during shift changes,

pro-union workers believed it was to deter them

from canvassing at red lights.

What is it like going up against a big company like Amazon

in a fight like this?

- Well, for me, the size of the company didn't matter.

All I know is that we had to bring light to a situation,

and fight to unionize for better working conditions,

and the betterment of ourselves and our families.

Today is Sunday.

I'm headed to JFK8 Staten Island Amazon

to get more signatures.

We're starting to get closer to our election vote.

After staging a successful walkout

in March of 2020,

Derrick and his coworkers followed Bessemer's lead,

and decided to try and form a union at their facility.

After we get the signatures,

we're gonna file an election

with the National Labor Relations Board.

And once we file, every Amazon worker in Staten Island

can vote on whether or not they want a union

to represent them.

- Hi, how you doing? - Hi.

- Did you hear about the Amazon Labor Union,

or what we're trying to do?

Derrick and his fellow union activists

at JFK8 spent several months

trying to gather enough signatures to earn the right to a vote.

- So this is basically saying that you want an election

to vote on whether or not you want a union.

We're trying to fight for things like more vacation time,

more personal time.

You know, actual sick time.

- Yeah, but we don't have sick time. - Exactly.

I felt like I always had it in me

to do something like this,

but the fact that I'm actually doing it

inspires me to keep going harder

with getting cards signed,

with talking to workers, inspiring them,

letting them know that it's okay to speak out.

The particular brutality of American capitalism

has been playing out for centuries in this country.

And you can't talk about that without talking about land.

The land that Amazon broke ground on in 2018

in Bessemer, Alabama, once belonged to the Creek Nation.

But in the early 1800s,

seeking to expand slavery across the southeast,

the US government stripped the Creek of 23 million acres,

an area that spans roughly half of Alabama

and Southern Georgia,

and sold off parcels of land to white men like James McAdory,

who became one of the wealthiest men in Jefferson County

by selling slave-grown cotton.

After slavery was abolished,

Alabama and other Southern states

simply developed new systems designed to exploit Black labor.

In the decades following the Civil War,

mining became central to the Alabama economy,

and northern-based US Steel, owned by prominent businessmen

including JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie,

dominated the industry.

At the turn of the century,

no other company in the nation was bigger than US Steel.

And when it acquired the most significant iron and steel company in Birmingham,

it also acquired their brutal practice of convict leasing.

- This was a ghastly place, just a ghastly place,

and this was the epicenter of it all right here.

The reason the cemetery was right here

was there were all these mines surrounding it.

Let's talk about convict leasing.

How would you define convict leasing,

and how did it get started?

- So convict leasing, in a kind of objective form,

was just the idea that, okay, somebody breaks the law,

they get sentenced to prison,

or they get sentenced to a fine that they can't pay,

and so the alternative is hard labor.

The selling of the labor of prisoners

became this huge economic force

for local governments and state governments.

After the 13th Amendment legally abolished slavery,

Southern states enacted new laws

aimed at recreating a system of forced bondage.

These laws, called Black Codes,

criminalized the everyday behaviors of Black people.

Black men were arrested for vagrancy,

or walking along a railroad track,

or for talking loudly near white women.

The selling of prisoners' labor

became the single biggest source of revenue

for the state of Alabama.

Bigger than any taxes that were collected,

and it was nearly that way for many Southern states.

But then also, this is a way that these big enterprises

could also make huge amounts of money

because the cost of the labor to them was almost nothing.

- So we are standing in this very innocuous landscape.

Looks like we could be anywhere in America,

just overgrown, brush, wooded area.

But something really sinister happened here.

Talk about where we are.

It's difficult to picture,

but in every direction there were coal mines,

and in several of those mines,

there were thousands of men

who had been forced to work there,

ostensibly as sentences for crimes that they committed.

But in reality, these were not,

on the whole, actual criminals.

They were whipped in the mornings and whipped at night

if each man did not bring out the set amount of coal

that was assigned to him every single day.

The lash was totally ubiquitous in this world.

And so these men were chained together, almost at all times.

And then once deep in the earth, they didn't have water,

they didn't have sufficient food.

Huge numbers of them died in accidents and explosions

down in the mine.

And then when people died, either at work,

or back in the stockade,

they were oftentimes brought back

to basically where we are now,

and dumped in what was not really a cemetery.

This whole area became a burial ground.

- So we are standing at the site of a mass grave.

There's no other thing to call it.

It was a one at a time, month after month,

year after year, decade after decade, mass grave.

And everybody knew that.

People always knew it was there.

As a society, we chose to forget.

But the lives of Black men and boys

who were forced into what's been called

slavery by another name should never be forgotten.

Alabama became the last state

to end the practice of convict leasing in 1928.

Steel production remained a major industry in the region for decades.

In fact, it wasn't until the 1980s

that US Steel's power waned.

And that land in Bessemer

that once belonged to the Creek Nation

that was sold to slaveholder James McAdory,

that was eventually sold to US Steel?

In 2020, US Steel sold it to Amazon.

Government officials in Alabama promised Amazon

more than $50 million in tax breaks to come to Bessemer.

These incentives, some argue, could have been better spent

on desperately needed roads, libraries, parks, and schools.

Meanwhile, Alabama citizens

carry the burden of these types of tax breaks.

The state has the fifth highest sales tax rate in the country,

and even taxes bare necessities like food.

- So it's off of our backs as they become billionaires,

but they treat us like peons.

Our lives matter.

And when we decided that we needed the unions

because we're tired of being mistreated,

we're tired of being ignored.

By the spring of 2021,

Jennifer and her colleagues had begun to cast their ballots

in a historic vote that had the potential

to unionize the first Amazon warehouse in the nation.

So take me to the day in spring 2021

when the vote is finally there.

Eyes all over the country are watching this vote

because people say this is a test, for many things.

You had to have been nervous the night before.

Did you sleep?

I was nervous the whole time,

because I had employees who tried to get their ballots back.

- To switch their vote? - To switch their vote,

because they didn't have enough information about the union.

Because Amazon had told 'em

that you're gonna lose your benefits.

You're gonna get, you can end up with less money.

And they believed 'em.

I was on my break when the news came through.

We saw the news media there in a tent

with some of the anti-union people.

They were all set up in a tent.

So we knew that they was getting ready to make an announcement.

So, we got a message giving us the total,

and it was like a gut punch.

- Tonight, Amazon has officially defeated efforts

to unionize workers at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.

And I went inside off the break,

and most of the people had stopped working in my area.

One of the young ladies, she said, "Did you hear?"

She said, "What happened, what happened?"

It was a sad day.

For me, I felt like I may have let 'em down, you know?

Even though they said no, you didn't, you know?

I felt like because I was fighting, you know,

fighting for 'em, and because they had hoped

that some changes were gonna come.

I really wish we could have brought a victory.

When you saw the the results,

which was very heavily against the union,

were you suspicious of those results when you saw it initially?

We were very suspicious,

because we had a huge following for the union.

We had a huge support.

Amazon benefited from laws

dating back to the late 1940s

that weakened the effectiveness of unions,

and kept workers from organizing.

And Alabama's hardly alone.

For decades, Republican legislatures

have passed anti-union laws across the nation,

eroding workers' rights,

and making it harder for them to unionize,

and negotiate higher wages and benefits.

These efforts have even succeeded outside of the Black belt,

in the once heavily unionized Midwestern states.

But in this country,

laws have not been the only obstacles

working against unionizing.

In Alabama, after the end of convict leasing,

Black workers attempted to create solidarity with white workers

to form multiracial labor unions

that would improve working conditions for all.

But much like the labor organizing efforts

of meat-packing workers in my hometown of Waterloo,

or dock workers in Philadelphia,

the white elite used race to divide interracial organizing.

And some would argue that even today,

as labor fights play out across the country,

too many white workers still choose racial solidarity

over their own economic interests.

Whiteness has its own value,

but as W.E.B. Du Bois says, it's a paltry wage.

That what they get from holding onto whiteness

is so minuscule to what they could get

by holding onto solidarity.

Together, they could take the plant.

They could actually fight and win a living wage.

But by standing apart,

what they end up getting is pride in being white,

pride in not being on welfare,

and pride in not necessarily having to live

in those neighborhoods where Black people live.

But ultimately, they live in neighborhoods that are not so much better.

In April of 2022,

two years after they walked off their jobs in defiant protest,

Derrick and his fellow union activists

had secured enough signatures for a vote,

and their grassroots effort had attracted national media attention.

The defeat in Alabama

had revealed Amazon's crushing anti-union tactics.

So as the ballots were counted in New York,

tensions were high.

All this attention was towards Bessemer,

and then when they lost,

the general consensus about that was it's over.

There will never be another union drive.

So, it's a lot of pressure.

By mid-afternoon, the results were in.

Yeah, let's go!

2,654 votes for the union,

2,131 against.

Today, we make history!

Thank you all, appreciate it.

Oh, we wanna thank Jeff Bezos for going to space,

'cause when he was up there, we were signing the people up.

We just became the first union

for Amazon in the United States of America.

So like, ah, this is one of the proudest moments of my life.

We won.

The Amazon Labor Union win

was an astounding victory

against a notoriously powerful corporation.

But Derrick and his fellow organizers are not alone.

In the first half of 2022,

union activists across the country won more elections

than they had in the last 20 years.

AOU! AOU! AOU!

- Union's in the house! - Hey!

- Unions in the house! - Hey!

- Unions in the house! - Hey!

In the winter of 2022,

almost a year after their first attempt,

Jennifer and her colleagues geared up for a second vote

after the National Labor Board ruled

Amazon had improperly interfered with the election.

- You say power, unions! - Power!

- Unions! - Power!

- Who got the power? - We got the power!

- What kind of power? - Union power!

And up next, we have from the Amazon

Worker Organizing Committee,

Jennifer Bates and Darryl Richardson.

Make some noise!

- My name is Jennifer Bates. Guess what, y'all?

Today, we have so many people who's on fire,

and want to bring unions back.

Who understand the assignment.

Solidarity, union, yes!

Amazon declined our request for an interview.

But in a statement they said,

"The health, safety, and well-being of our employees

"are top priorities.

"We're grateful to all of our employees

"for their time, talent, and hard work every day.

"We've invested billions of dollars

"in new operations, safety measures, technologies,

"and other innovative solutions that protect our employees.

"We're committed to giving our employees

"the resources they need to be successful,

"creating time for regular breaks,

"and a comfortable pace of work,

"and working directly with anyone

who needs additional support to meet their goals."

The truth is, we all know someone

who stayed in a job they hated,

because they needed healthcare,

or because they felt powerless to demand better.

And while Black workers might have it the worst,

we all suffer under this uniquely brutal

and unequal system of capitalism

that was born on the plantation.

For my cousin Chimiere,

the government's effort to relieve that suffering

during the pandemic,

the stimulus checks that paid her more than she earned

when she was working,

only revealed a deeper truth about the country we live in.

- It shouldn't have took the pandemic for me to be able to live.

I've actually lived more comfortable during this pandemic

than I have ever done in my life.

- And what does that say to you about our society?

That it's really, it's jacked up.

Why does, I mean, a lot of people

are losing their family members.

And I feel so bad for 'em, but now I can live.

So you're losing your uncle, your cousin, your friends.

But this is the only way you noticed me.

You spent much of your career

writing about labor struggles, and social movements.

What needs to happen so that we don't have to be

victims of the past,

where race has been used to divide these movements,

really to the harm of most of us in society?

Right, I guess three things.

One, we need to come to grips with the past,

in a serious way.

Two, we actually need a critique of capitalism,

and how capitalism and racism kind of function together

to oppress not just Black people, but all of us.

All of us.

And the third thing, I think,

is that we need to think seriously about solidarity.

What does that mean?

In order to come together in a thoughtful, courageous,

and forthright way means you've got to engage the past.

We've got to know what divides us,

because part of the thing that divides us

makes wealth for other people.

- Mm-hmm.

The reality is, American capitalism requires complicity.

It is hard to imagine regular people

allowing the crime of slavery for a cotton shirt,

or sugar in their tea.

And yet today, we look away from the fact

that workers are being exploited

for the convenience of one-day delivery

that's just a click away.

The movement Jennifer and her coworkers started

helped spark what's been called

the most important moment in recent US labor history.

I think what we did was lit a fire,

and shined a light on something

that's been going on for years and years.

People been standing up for their rights.

They have been taking on their companies,

and they're feeling like, you know what?

I am somebody. We are valuable.

It's hard to tell if the changes

that occurred over the last few years will be lasting.

But perhaps the devastation wreaked by the pandemic,

and the gross inequities it exposed,

helped American workers recognize

that we do have a choice about what we will accept,

and the power to create the country that we want.

Do you think you'll win this fight?

I believe we will.

I believe we will.

And if you don't win, what happens?

We keep fighting.

We keep fighting. We keep fighting.

But fighting for equality in America

has always been dangerous for Black people.

In fact, sometimes just walking down the street

provokes an emotion that results in deadly force.

My client truly was in fear for his life.

In his own words, he feared for his life.

The two officers feared for their lives.

And that fear of Black people,

and Black freedom, dates all the way back to slavery.

- Being a good member of the white community

is to be constantly on the lookout

for any type of suspicious behavior among Black people.

And it has become a type of historical memory, right?

That consciously and unconsciously gets passed down

from generation to generation.