Private Sector Presentation Met with Warm Welcome, Overwhelming Solidarity

On Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., the Private Sector Organizing team hosted a presentation to highlight the importance of organizing efforts for postal workers and Amazon workers fighting to form a union. The panel featured Amazon worker Laurie Masterson, sharing her own experiences fighting the trillion-dollar corporation’s aggressive anti-union campaign.

APWU lead field organizer Rich Shelley introduced the presentation with a brief history of private sector organizing in APWU. Shelley, who has firsthand experience with dirty corporate bosses fighting unionization, shared a story about organizing with President Dimondstein in the early 1990s in Greensboro, NC, for a union for truckers who worked for New Breed Logistics – owned by none other than future (now former) Postmaster General Louis DeJoy himself! Dimondstein and Shelley were eventually successful in their efforts in organizing local area private sector truckers and went on to win the next 26 out of 29 union votes for private sector workers.

Next, Organization Director Anna Smith went over the constitutional mandates to organize the private sector in the APWU Constitution and Bylaws, including Articles 2, 4, 9, and 16. Smith emphasized how organizing the private sector is not optional—it is our union’s obligation and central to our mission.  Moreover, she reinforced the fact that it is good for postal workers if we organize in the private sector. Strong wages and conditions in the private sector directly benefit postal workers in our negotiations, stopping the “race to the bottom” that management might like to see.

Lori Cash, an organizer working directly with Amazon workers, then gave a moving update about the current fights in Amazon. Right now, there are two open organizing campaigns in Romulus, MI, and Bellingham, MA. In Michigan, there are 4,000 workers on the floor, and in Massachusetts, almost 100 people out of 300 workers have already committed to unionizing.

Masterson then spoke about her fight in Bellingham, where management has blanketed the facility in anti-union messages. They are directly attacking the APWU, saying we are a “government” union and don’t care about making lives better for Amazon workers, which, she countered, couldn’t be further from the truth. Laurie’s conclusion brought the room to a standing ovation:  the strength and solidarity that APWU is building to help organize Amazon workers makes winning a union there “inevitable.”

The support for private sector organizing was strong in the early hours of Day 2 of All Craft. Laurie Masterson was warmly welcomed in a room packed with attendees standing up to say they have her back and are ready to fight with her. Several members had asked to see how they could support her work or get started organizing Amazon workers in their local areas. Several members even took the microphone in the room just to say that they were ready to stand with her, because no matter who you work for, all workers are in a fight together against bad bosses and billionaires who want to exploit our work and profit off our labor.

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