GROUND CONTROL: Three, two, one, zero.
We have commit, and we have liftoff at 2:13.
♪ percussive music ♪
[people cheering]
GIL SCOTT-HERON: 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.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: 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.
SCOTT-HERON: 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.
Jeff Bezos: I want to thank every Amazon employee,
and every Amazon customer,
'cause you guys paid for all this. [laughter]
SCOTT-HERON: To Whitey on the moon.
♪ somber music ♪
♪
[wood creaking]
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: This is The 1619 Project.
[waves crashing]
NARRATOR: 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.
♪ plucky music ♪
♪ hip-hop music ♪
♪ There's a war goin' on outside no man is safe from ♪
♪ You could run, but you can't hide forever ♪
NIKOLE: 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."
- NIKOLE: 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 ♪
NIKOLE: When I think about capitalism,
I think about the myth versus the reality.
ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: 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... ♪
♪ tense music ♪
NIKOLE: 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.
[people shouting]
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.
[crossing clanging]
[train horn blares]
[train rattling]
[bus rumbling]
♪ These last two dollars ♪
♪ I'm not gonna lose ♪
NIKOLE: 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.
MAN: This is Mr. Edward Tillman.
NIKOLE: 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.
CHIMIERE TILLMAN: 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.
[Chimiere crying]
- Fuck! CHIMIERE: Sorry.
We always do this.
NIKOLE: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
CHIMIERE: 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.
♪
[clears throat] Just tell us when.
You doing it now?
DIRECTOR: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
[indistinct chatter]
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.
[machinery clanging]
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.
♪ tense music ♪
[alarm ringing]
DERRICK PALMER: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
[truck rumbling]
[box rattling]
DERRICK: 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.
[scanner beeping]
I've done it all.
NIKOLE: 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.
REPORTER: Workers complained of breathing issues,
and burning in their eyes and throats.
NIKOLE: 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.
[scanner beeps]
DERRICK: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
[train rattling]
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?
CAITLIN ROSENTHAL: 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.
[belt rattling]
DERRICK: 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.
[birds chirping]
NIKOLE: 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.
♪
NIKOLE: 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.
[train rattling]
NIKOLE: 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?
[Chimiere chuckles]
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.
♪
NIKOLE: 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.
♪
DIRECTOR: 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.
ROBIN: 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.
♪
NIKOLE: Despite applying multiple times
for management positions,
Derrick was unable to get a promotion
after six years on the job.
DERRICK: 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?
[bus rumbling]
NIKOLE: 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.
PHOTOGRAPHER: One, two, three.
[people applauding]
- We are thrilled that Amazon is doing business in Alabama.
This is their second facility,
and their first fulfillment center.
♪
NIKOLE: 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.
PRODUCER: 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?
JENNIFER BATES: 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?
JENNIFER: 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?
♪ somber music ♪
NIKOLE: 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.
REPORTER: 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?
NIKOLE: 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!
REPORTER: Nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse
in Bessemer, Alabama, fighting for the right
to collectively bargain over working conditions.
♪
NIKOLE: Alabama, once home to the capital of the Confederacy,
exists in one of the most anti-union regions of the country, the South.
ORGANIZER: Let's show some love for Ms. Jennifer Bates.
[people cheering]
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.
NIKOLE: 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...
NIKOLE: 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.
[traffic rumbling]
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.
NIKOLE: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
NIKOLE: Amazon released videos to help managers
discourage labor organizing efforts.
NARRATOR: 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."
NIKOLE: 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?
NIKOLE: 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.
♪
DERRICK: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
♪
[traffic rumbling]
- Hi, how you doing? - Hi.
- Did you hear about the Amazon Labor Union,
or what we're trying to do?
NIKOLE: 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.
♪
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ somber music ♪
- 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ somber music ♪
NIKOLE: 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.
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ somber music ♪
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.
NIKOLE: 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.
KELLEY: 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.
♪ somber music ♪
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ tense music ♪
NIKOLE: By mid-afternoon, the results were in.
[people cheering]
Yeah, let's go!
NIKOLE: 2,654 votes for the union,
2,131 against.
Today, we make history!
[people cheering]
♪ upbeat music ♪
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.
[people cheering]
NIKOLE: 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.
CROWD: AOU! AOU! AOU!
[train horn blaring]
♪
- Union's in the house! - Hey!
- Unions in the house! - Hey!
NIKOLE: 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!
[people cheering]
ORGANIZER: And up next, we have from the Amazon
Worker Organizing Committee,
Jennifer Bates and Darryl Richardson.
Make some noise! [people cheering]
- My name is Jennifer Bates. Guess what, y'all?
♪ Second time around ♪
Today, we have so many people who's on fire,
and want to bring unions back.
Who understand the assignment.
ORGANIZER: Solidarity, union, yes!
[people cheering]
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ gospel music ♪
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.
NIKOLE: 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.
And if you don't win, what happens?
We keep fighting.
We keep fighting. We keep fighting.
[people chanting]
NIKOLE: 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.
LAWYER: My client truly was in fear for his life.
REPORTER 1: In his own words, he feared for his life.
REPORTER 2: The two officers feared for their lives.
NIKOLE: 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.
♪ spiritual music ♪
♪