Jacob is right about about WCU not being able to organize Amazon on our own. However, I do believe that Amazon matters too much to ignore completely, but we should give ourselves a narrower role for now. We need to build a foothold in important sectors, such as logistics, a way to support workers who are already trying to organize, while not taking on too much work that originates from us since we lack the capacity for that.
Working with the Teamsters
For more background, as both @Jacob and @Englishpete08 pointed out, the Teamsters do have a problem with business unionism, even though the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) caucus has been trying to bring more rank-and-file control to it.
By business unionism I mean a union model that leans on staff, handling grievances, contracts, and the legal process more than worker initiative on the shop floor.
By rank-and-file or class-struggle unionism I mean tactics that build worker leadership, democratic control, and collective action from inside the workplace.[1][2]
It’s not always that simple, of course. The fights inside the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) after the Staten Island win showed that sometimes even independent unions end up requiring reform caucuses.[3] And looking through my notes of TDU from last year, there seems to be a new debate around whether TDU is still functioning as an independent rank-and-file reform caucus or if they had effectively become a junior partner to Sean O’Brien’s leadership (they had endorsed him previously). On one side, the TDU is still organizing anti-Trump efforts and publicly defending immigrant members.[4] On the other side, people are critical because they are not using their independence to critique the more top-down strategy that Teamsters have deployed to organize the UPS contract fight and Amazon organizing.[5] Tempest, which I would regard as overly critical at times, talked about how they are now suppressing internal dissent, barring critics, and generally throwing their support behind O’Brien at its latest convention last year.[6]
Nevertheless! I would stop short of turning these critiques of the unions (and reform caucuses) into abstention with working with them all together. We should not conflate leadership with the actual rank-and-file. A great deal of Amazon organizing is now running through Teamsters structures, and workers there have won real concessions. The recent settlement over Amazon docking workers’ unpaid time off, or UPT, after strike activity illustrates how shop-floor pressure, together with legal and institutional support, can win concrete anti-retaliation protections.[7] So while I do not see the Teamsters as the answer, I do see them as one vehicle on a difficult terrain, useful in some moments, limiting in others.
Why organizing at Amazon is difficult
For folks that have not been a part of these meetings, I’ll summarize notes from there and some others from articles I had saved.
Amazon is hard to organize, but not just because it’s large. Its logistics network runs through differentiated nodes like fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations, inbound cross-docks, and air hubs. That is why some argue that labor should focus on chokepoints and network disruption, rather than a simple site-by-site strategy of trying to organize any and all worksites.[8][9]
Our meetings with local organizers point the same way. There are areas with very high turnover, but the workers that stick around long enough have been there for years. And there are areas where there is less turnover. But we’re also dealing with workers of many different backgrounds, language barriers are real, workers are commuting from very long distances (Yuba City), and all that makes forming any sort of durable committee a long-term process.
The Teamsters and independent organizers are focused on salting, but that only works as a patient practice of inquiry, trust, and long-term shop-floor commitment, not as a shortcut.[10] And that is especially difficult in places like Stockton, where weak working-class institutions make it harder to build durable organization.[11]
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.
Why care about Amazon?
Amazon is expanding. It is reorganizing parcel, grocery, pharmacy, and logistics more broadly, and it is setting patterns in surveillance, deskilling, routing, turnover, and labor fragmentation that other employers will copy.[12][13][9:1] If the left has no one paying attention there, we lose the chance to learn from the place where many of those tactics are being tested first.
Jacob is right to warn against business-union boosterism. He is right to say that WCU should not drop its existing priorities for a fight we are not ready to lead. But I think WCU should keep one toe in Amazon land, not by pretending we can organize it ourselves, but by becoming the local group that Amazon workers, salts, organizing committee members, and rank-and-file reformers know they can come to.
That role is modest but it is not passive and it is one I think we can handle. If we can offer relationships, a place to think, and a way to connect scattered militants, we help the people who are taking on Amazon now and we put better conditions in place for the fights that come next.
Nick French, “Worker-led unionism in the 21st century”, Left Notes, March 31, 2025 ↩︎
Christian CW, “Unions won’t make themselves red”, Red Star, May 9, 2025 ↩︎
Luis Feliz Leon, “Reform Caucus Rises, Sues for Elections in Amazon Labor Union,” LaborNotes, July 10, 2023. ↩︎
Luis Feliz Leon, “Solidarity in retreat,” n+1, February 4, 2025. Solidarity in Retreat | Online Only | n+1 | Luis Feliz Leon ↩︎
Sam Gindin, “Was the Teamsters’ Amazon Strike a Success?,” Jacobin, March 2025. Was the Teamsters’ Amazon Strike a Success? ↩︎
Tim Goulet, “The conservative (d)evolution of Teamsters for a Democratic Union,” Tempest, November 2025. The conservative (d)evolution of Teamsters for a Democratic Union - Tempest ↩︎
Mel Buer, “Amazon Teamsters claim victory over retail supergiant’s strike retaliation”, Words About Work, March 31, 2026. ↩︎
Benjamin Y. Fong, “Organizing Logistics Chokepoints: Hitting Them Where It Hurts”, New Labor Forum, May 14, 2025. ↩︎
Benjamin Y. Fong, “How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?”, Catalyst, December 2023. ↩︎ ↩︎
Mira Lazine, “My McUnion”, Strange Matters, January 1, 2024. ↩︎
as_a_worker, “The Left Undead”, February 20, 2024. ↩︎
Benjamin Y. Fong, “The Labor Movement Must Go All In on Organizing Amazon”, Jacobin, March 8, 2026. ↩︎
Benjamin Y. Fong, “The Apotheosis of Point of Sale Data”, Phenomenal World, February 25, 2026. ↩︎