What WCU can do now
All of that pushes me toward a narrow answer, but not a passive one. WCU should not lead a formal Amazon drive. WCU should not launch a National Labor Relations Board election campaign. WCU should not encourage untrained members to salt Amazon sites and hope they learn on the fly. Tenant work is still our main engine in 2026, and any workplace role we take on has to stay subordinate to that rather than slowly becoming a second strategic focus that we can’t really take on.
What WCU can do is become a local political home with some basic infrastructure for the workers and organizers we actually meet. That includes Amazon workers, prospective salts, and people trying to organize on logistics terrain, but I think the point should be broader than Amazon alone. WCU can be a home in San Joaquin County for worker-organizers and salts across unions and sectors who need somewhere local to think, compare notes, and stay connected without pretending WCU is the command center for their campaigns.
That still leaves real work for us. If WCU meets Amazon workers or prospective salts, we can connect them to the people already doing that organizing and, when useful, to union contacts. But we should not hand people off and disappear. The real task is to keep a local relationship with them, invite them into WCU’s public events, and make sure they have somewhere nearby to return to as do their organizing work.
We can also offer low-cost forms of support that fit our actual capacity: a place to meet outside work, political discussion, help making materials, a chance to compare lessons with people from other shops or sectors, and forums or social spaces where people can think strategically without every conversation being trapped inside one workplace. If this is going to be a real home, it also has to be usable in ordinary workers’ lives, which means we continue using plain language in our work, have flexible scheduling, start incorporating more family friendly events, and translation where we can manage it well.
Some of this can be signaled publicly, but without a lot of unearned hype. Through tabling/flyers, publications (eventually), After Hours with WCU, and our broader social events, we can make it known that warehouse workers, salts, and union reformers can join and get some help. That is different from advertising ourselves as the people organizing Amazon.
The test of this role is not whether WCU looks more present in labor politics. The test is whether workers and organizers in Stockton and the wider county actually stay in touch with us and deepen local relationships over time. If this work starts pulling resources away from the tenant work, or if it starts turning WCU into a pseudo rapid-response network for every labor flare-up, then we are no longer playing the bounded role we can actually sustain and we should reevaluate.