It seems eons ago, the youth-led climate strike of September 20, 2019 that brought four million people onto the streets worldwide. I was on the sidewalk outside Seattle City Hall, watching thousands of school-skippers march by. And then behind the teens came waves of exuberant people, no more than a decade or two older, their homemade signs held aloft: tech workers, including hundreds of Amazon workers who had stepped out of their comfortable cubicles and palatial glass towers to join the global walkout.

It seems eons ago, the youth-led climate strike of September 20, 2019 that brought four million people onto the streets worldwide. I was on the sidewalk outside Seattle City Hall, watching thousands of school-skippers march by. And then behind the teens came waves of exuberant people, no more than a decade or two older, their homemade signs held aloft: tech workers, including hundreds of Amazon workers who had stepped out of their comfortable cubicles and palatial glass towers to join the global walkout.

They had every right to step lightly. Just a day earlier, the budding Amazon Employees for Climate Justice had forced CEO Jeff Bezos into an extraordinary concession, pledging to move the company to 100 percent renewable energy and net-zero carbon emissions. The tech workers were celebrating their power even though their numbers represented a minuscule fraction of the company’s fifty thousand Seattle workers. Imagine what power they would have if tech, logistics, and warehouse workers united and organized global majority unions at Amazon.

That’s daunting to conceive. Amazon is huge. It plays the central role in American capitalism’s distribution and logistics web and also in technology and its control of the internet through Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s worldwide employee head count is 1.2 million and growing every day. Its market valuation exceeds the national GDPs of more than 90 percent of the world’s nations.

The company also transplanted Walmart’s predatory pricing strategies from Main Street to the internet to drive out competitors, build scale, and gain monopoly control. As Jason Struna and Ellen Reese describe in the book, Amazon upgraded the century-and-a-half-old Taylorist system of scientific management methods with modern electronic surveillance to drive old-school speedups in the warehouses and throttle incipient organizing efforts.

There are some hopeful examples in Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese’s book. Jörn Boewe and Johannes Shulten describe how Polish workers resisted mandatory overtime that the company tried to impose in response to a strike four hundred miles away in a German warehouse. Notably, the German-Polish worker solidarity had been built through radical rank-and-file activists, not via established union institutional channels, according to the chapter authors.

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