Event by MIRAC – Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar and MN-Drivers Licenses for All, MN Immigrant Movement-MIM

Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building
Saturday, February 20, 2021 at noon

Friday #InjusticeAtHome Webinar – Ep. 24

The Unjust Imprisonment of Imam Jamil al-Amin

Friday,  February 12 at 2:30 PM EST

Register on Zoom at http://bit.ly/ImamJamil or watch live on Facebook at

Join us for a special screening of “40 Years a Prisoner” with special guest, Mike Africa. We’ll be watching the film together and you can ask Mike Africa questions regarding his experiences, the movie, and his activism today!

REGISTER HERE: http://tinyurl.com/ILPS40Years

#Move9 #PoliticalRepression

A political analyst in the U.S. believes that the Biden administration is “walking a tightrope” on Iran between competing corporate interests.

Bill Dores, a writer for Struggle-La Lucha and longtime antiwar activist, made the comments in an interview with Press TV on Monday.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has said Iran will retrace its nuclear countermeasures once the United States lifts its sanctions in a manner that could be verifiable by Tehran.

“Iran will return to its JCOPA obligations once the U.S. fully lifts its sanctions in action and not in words or on paper, and once the sanction relief is verified by Iran,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, referring by abbreviation to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the official name of the landmark nuclear agreement that Iran signed with the P5+1 group of states — the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and China plus Germany — in Vienna in 2015.

Ayatollah Khamenei made the remarks in Tehran on Sunday during a meeting with commanders, pilots, and staff members of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF).

The meeting was held on the anniversary of a historic development that came days before the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution that deposed the former U.S.-backed Pahlavi regime. The event saw Homafaran, Pahlavi’s air force officers, breaking away from the monarchical regime and pledging allegiance to the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini.

Dores said the U.S. has been waging “hybrid warfare” against Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

“This week marks 42 years since Iran’s great Islamic Revolution shook the entire world. The U.S. military-financial state has been waging hybrid warfare against Iran ever since that day,” he stated.

“Before the tyrant Shah was overthrown, U.S. and British corporations looted Iran for decades. Iran’s oil wealth enriched Wall Street bankers and arms merchants. U.S.-armed soldiers and secret police gunned down thousands of people in the streets for protesting Shah’s rule,” he said.

“As soon as the Revolution took back Iran’s wealth for Iran, the United States provoked confrontation, seized Iran’s assets and imposed a blockade. For 42 years the U.S. has attacked Iran with proxy wars, vicious economic sanctions, covert operations, assassinations and open acts of war,” he noted.

“Washington has no right to impose any conditions on Iran. There are no Iranian warships off the coast of the United States, no Iranian military bases in North America. Iran has not assassinated U.S. generals or scientists or shot down U.S. civilian airliners. Iran is not trying to strangle the U.S. economy. Iran is not denying people in the United States access to medicine and health care in the midst of a pandemic. Rather the U.S. government itself is doing that to people here because its priority is waging endless wars around the world,” he said.

“Iran has a right to sell its oil and gas. Iran has a right to trade with other nations and to develop its economy. Iran also has a right to defend itself and to help its neighbors defend themselves against terrorist attacks and against the illegal attacks by the U.S.-armed Israeli state,” he said.

“The Biden administration is walking a tightrope between competing corporate interests. On one hand, there are U.S. companies, like Boeing, and West European allies that would like access to Iran’s market. On the other, there are U.S. energy interests that want to regain a stranglehold on the world’s oil and gas supply. And bankers who want to keep Wall Street and the dollar at the center of the world economy. And arms companies that profit off endless war. The U.S. war machine has murdered millions in pursuit of their twisted dreams,” he noted.

“So on one hand we see the new administration talk about de-escalating the monstrous war in Yemen and possibly rejoining the JCPOA. On the other, we see it demanding new conditions. We see it keeping troops in Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. We see Israel bombing Syria and openly threatening to attack Iran. That would not be possible without the endless flow of U.S. arms and dollars to the racist settler state,” he said.

“It is time for all this to end. In his foreign policy talk last Thursday, Biden said “every action we take abroad, we must take with the interest of American working families in mind.” Well, you can’t do that and serve the war profiteers and oil companies too. If the new regime in Washington is serious in that goal, it needs to lift all sanctions against Iran and other oppressed countries without conditions, get all its troops, war fleets, war plans and spies out of the region, stop exporting weapons of war and stop arming and funding the racist state of Israel,” said the analyst.

“Sanctions are war. Sanctions are aggression. Sanctions are murder. Ayatollah Seyyid Ali is absolutely right to demand that the U.S. unconditionally end its siege on Iran and end this long and unjust war,” he concluded.

Source: Press TV

The world lost a revered baseball hero and an icon of the Black liberation struggle on Jan. 21: Hank Aaron. In 1974, Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs. At the time, Ruth’s record was the holy grail of baseball. 

A Black man, Aaron was raised in the Jim Crow South. He joined the Major League in 1954. But he was in the game long enough to have played for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues.  

Aaron was already a well-established player by 1974. He was a Most Valuable Player (MVP) winner, an 18-time All Star, and a guaranteed Hall of Famer. 

Nonetheless, as Aaron strode closer and closer to 714 home runs, the level of racism directed towards him intensified to a fever pitch. The racist violence Aaron faced during this stretch can be best described in his own words:

“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks.

“I had to have a police escort with me all the time,” Aaron recalled in a 1994 interview. “I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”

In 1973, Aaron received 930,000 pieces of mail. Most of these letters were hate mail, racist rhetoric and death threats. Even the reporters who gave Aaron positive coverage were met with racist rage and condemnation. 

Amidst this horror, Aaron nevertheless pushed forward. “Hammerin’ Hank,” as he was known, finally broke Ruth’s record on April 8, 1974. This milestone did not quiet the racists, but Aaron would continue on to hit a career total of 755 home runs. 

Still, the experience was so awful that it led Aaron to ignore the game he loved dearly for decades after he retired. 

Aaron made his historic achievement as a member of the Atlanta team that still takes its name from an anti-Indigenous slur. Hammerin’ Hank’s passing has renewed calls to finally do away with that racist name and rechristen the team in his honor as the Atlanta Hammers.

Hank Aaron should be remembered forever as a warrior against racism and a home run champ. Rest in power!

Sometime in the early morning of Feb. 6, the inmates at the St. Louis City Justice Center (CJC) staged an act of civil disobedience because of the inhumane treatment by CJC management concerning COVID-19 along with other issues. 

EXPO (EX-Incarcerated People Organizing) works to end mass incarceration, eliminate all forms of structural discrimination against formerly incarcerated people and restore them to full citizenship. EXPO-St. Louis was made aware that more than 50 inmates participated in a peaceful protest that took place on Dec. 29. Nothing was done to address those issues and this morning’s uprising was the natural evolution of the actions of living and feeling human beings. 

Here now is a communication received from inside the Justice Center itself:

On the morning of Tuesday, December 29, 2020, around 10 a.m. CT, myself (Cortez Easterwood-Bey IMN #6694) and more than 50 other inmates on at least two floors within Missouri’s St. Louis Justice Center stood together in solidarity outside of our cells as a form of peaceful protest to exercise our First Amendment right to free speech in a peaceful attempt to voice our grievances to be heard by CJC management that have gone unanswered after months (anywhere from 2-6 months or more) of following the established procedures for filing complaints and grievances. 

We recently learned from sympathetic guards/correctional officers (hereafter referred to as COs) that these complaint and grievance forms rarely go past the CO whom the form was given to, let alone to their supervisor nor an outside entity or CJC official. Our peaceful protest was unequally matched with resistance by CJC staff akin to the pre-Civil Rights Movement — we were subjected to tear gas, hosed down with strong water, and placed face down in inches of said but now contaminated water in order to be handcuffed, transferred to the known dilapidated Medium Security Institution (MSI) nicknamed the “Workhouse,” and placed “in the hole” without proper heat, dry clothing and new face masks. 

All this because we were trying to tell jail staff and management that we don’t want to DIE, we are hungry, we want proper ventilation, we are tired of being cold without being given winter clothing, we want proper PPE for COVID-19, we are tired of being price gouged in the commissary and vending machines, we want the mandated six “recs” per day, and we want visits from family and friends since there is a glass barrier between them and the inmates. 

How long do we inmates have to go without before one stops adhering to socially acceptable civil norms when they are blatantly and continuously being denied such — not only the ability to live but also other basic [prison] rights such as the ability to breathe uncontaminated air?

Because of this incident, jail staff have threatened to destroy and discard our personal belongings, religious and otherwise, as punishment. Their purported excuse for this action is because the tear gas they used has contaminated said belongings. So, we will no longer have our legal documents nor anything we or our family or friends purchased for us — food, clothing,  toiletries, religious documents/books/items, photos, etc. This is our punishment for asking not to be infected with COVID and to have proper and adequate food, PPE, etc.?

To my knowledge, there are at least 12 lawsuits filed by other inmates due to the outcome and actions of jail staff at CJC for this initially “peaceful protest” that has been quelled by correctional officials so the media and public are kept unaware.

On New Year’s Eve, there were already 51 of us in the hole in one “pod,” which was supposed to hold a maximum of 60 people pre-pandemic, that were healthy and uninfected with COVID. However, prison staff decided to add 11more inmates, some of whom were visibly infected with COVID!

This is genocide.

Inmates deliberately infected

Prior to this peaceful protest that is now being reported as a “riot”, there were 24 inmates in my pod KNOWN TO BE INFECTED with COVID by jail staff, but instead of properly quarantining them, they kept them in the pod and with their cell mates in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell. Twenty-four infected inmates soon turned into almost 50 infected inmates in less than 48 hours!!! That’s over 90% of the inmates housed in ONE pod of 60 persons!!! 

Further, COs are telling us that not only are they NOT going to test us but such testing is voluntary even if the inmate is visibly exhibiting the classic symptoms of a COVID infection. When those of us who are healthy request to be tested for COVID, we are denied and persons from the detention center regardless of their COVID status are continuously mixed in with the uninfected population within the actual jail/CJC, which houses over 800 inmates and more than 60% of those are currently visibly and audibly infected with COVID and are probably not getting proper/adequate medical attention.

Many of us have not yet gone to trial. There is at least one inmate who has been locked up at CJC for FIVE YEARS without going to trial. So how is it that the St. Louis City Justice Center staff are allowed to be our judge, jury and now executioner during this deadly pandemic???

We don’t want to DIE from SARS COVID-19, especially not at the hands of correctional staff. We are tired of being purposely exposed to other inmates and detainees who visibly have COVID. Jail staff won’t test inmates but claim that current pod members have been exposed to COVID even though we have not been tested during the entire arrest and detention process. Yet COs are constantly placing untested people, healthy or infected, in a jail cell, pod or holding area with healthy people.

Even though we are inmates and regardless of whether we have been found guilty of a crime we may or may not have committed, our request is not unreasonable. This IS genocide. We are being treated like the Jews during Hitler’s regime. Instead of Germany we are in America. And the jail is being run much like the concentration camps. But because we are Black and Brown and don’t ft the historical standard of American beauty, we are treated as less than. We are being treated worse than George Floyd. Instead of one officer with his knee on one Black man’s neck for almost 8 minutes, we have several officers and agents of Missouri, and more specifically the CJC, who are knowingly not following the COVID guidelines and protocols set forth by the CDC and U.S. Department of Justice.

Prisoners left hungry and cold

We are HUNGRY. We are pleading for not only proper nutrition but portion sizes that are befitting of an adult male. The lack of proper and adequate sustenance is known to weaken the immune system, thus making any person more susceptible to any disease but especially the highly contagious COVID virus. We get the same chunk of bread-like cake for every meal (breakfast, lunch and dinner). I have been in CJC for almost two months and have yet to be given any fruit, have only once been given a “salad” that consisted of three tightly stuck together pieces of lettuce and one sliver of a shredded carrot. Our vegetables, if we are given them, consist of canned corn or green beans. 

The commissary and vending machines (in the facility or online for purchase by our family and friends to send to us, which is received bi-weekly) consists mostly of highly processed and junk/snack foods that are grossly overpriced compared to the Missouri prisons and normal retail outlets accessible to most American citizens.

We are tired of being COLD when the temperatures outside are also cold. The COs verbally refuse to turn the heat up, even in the detention/holding facility, citing they are trying to keep all from getting COVID. We have not been given proper clothing to deal with such temperatures within the actual facility. Most of the world is struggling financially so there are very few of us who are recently detained during this pandemic whose family can even afford to purchase a thermal top or bottom or thicker socks via the online commissary. The inmates are not working,  and many of us newly detained have not worked during this pandemic, but even if we had we either don’t have access to those funds and/or have depleted them in our attempts to purchase food from the commissary and vending machines after we are given our “trays” (breakfast, lunch or dinner) that barely have portions or nutrients acceptable for a 10-year-old child let alone a grown man.

We need our RECREATION BREAKS to stay mentally and physically healthy.  Per correctional guidelines, inmates are to be given six (6) recreation hours per day. Since I have been detained at CJC, we get less than 3 and it’s mostly at the discretion of the guards with seemingly no set time periods or systematic adherence to the standard CDC guidelines. For example, one or more pods are let out of their cells between 7 a.m.-9 a.m. for 45 minutes, then around 3 p.m. for another 45 minutes, and maybe around 11 p.m. for 15-20 minutes. 

To myself and others, these actions by CJC-MSI staff seem like an effort to not fully perform the duties which they are getting paid to perform in accordance with standard operating procedures and CDC and DOJ COVID guidelines and protocols. I have found that if I want to exercise (push-ups, etc) in my cell or during rec, I must do so in the morning rec so I have enough time to take a shower. I save my commissary/vending and phone calls for the afternoon rec. All this because we’re not given six rec sessions/hours, time is short and we may not get the 3rd/last rec that is much shorter on time and at a time where business calls cannot be made.

We need INFORMATION to research our cases. We have not or only sporadically been given access to the jail’s law library during recs. There are also only six tablets provided to one or more pods housing 60+ people. These tablets are supposed to allow us access to the jail’s law library and also, for a fee, be able to communicate with our family and friends via text messaging who have a SmartJailMail account. Most of the time, said tablets are inoperable because they weren’t charged properly between recs and/or will not hold a charge. Further, the tablets do not allow for video chatting with anyone.

We need to SEE our loved ones. The CJC website says visitation is allowed and special allowances for such may be made to family members or friends who reside out-of-town.  However, this is a lie. All inmates have been told that there is no visitation due to COVID despite the fact that in the visitation area at CJC the inmates are separated from the visitors by a glass partition and wall.

‘We need PPE’

We need but are not given proper PPE. Yet COs are walking around in what appear to be hazmat suits. Inmates are only given a standard face mask bi-weekly. Many don’t have one because it broke, became dirty, wet, etc. Payphones, vending machines, tablets, etc., are not sanitized after each use and tables, common areas, etc., are not sanitized after each rec. We need more types of PPE (gloves, N95 masks, face shields, etc.) to protect us against our cellmate who is infected with COVID whom the COs purposely place in our cells and refuse to remove healthy inmates or quarantine the infected ones in a separate area or facility.

I personally was NEVER tested for COVID during my entire arrest and lockup experience (October 14, 2020, to present). Not given a temperature check, COVID test kit or nose swab, nor blood check. I have been denied my repeated requests for such. After my arrest, I was placed in the detention/holding facility attached to CJC. I was denied access to a shower and clean clothing for at least 2 weeks. It wasn’t until I had an outside person contact my parole officer and a visit was made that I was given a shower, notified of why I was arrested, given a standard jumpsuit and thin (and too small) footwear, and then transferred to the jail-side of CJC. 

During my time in holding, officers were constantly moving detainees in and out of the holding area I was in, especially during the day. The area was not cleaned or sanitized. I was not given any PPE during that time. All of this escalated my exposure to this deadly and highly contagious COVID virus.

My detainment in the jail side of CJC has been, for the most part, no different to my initial detainment as indicated above. How is it that not only do I have to protect myself against violence from much younger inmates, I now have to be strategically conscious of protecting my desire to continue to live and breathe unencumbered by a deadly pandemic-level worldwide virus because correctional staff intentionally place me and others in dangerous and hazardous conditions which further lends us to intentionally get COVID in a short time frame? In some inmates’ cases this happens within 24 hours of their cellmate or they themselves being exposed to another inmate or guard who is handling them after dealing with a previous inmate(s) who’s visibly and knowingly infected. 

We are only given a basic face mask every two weeks. No gloves or other PPE is given nor can we have any mailed to us by our family nor friends. How can we socially distance in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell with no ventilation in an open plan/air facility that is kept cold and we are denied and not provided with additional clothing (jackets, gloves, hats, etc.) or blankets? How can those of us who are not sick stay healthy if we are not given nutrition and portions that sustain us? 

Yes, we are inmates, yet many of us have not yet been tried for our supposed crimes. Many of us also have families that we cannot see, barely are able to talk to because their funds are running low or are non-existent for us to call them collect or message them via SmartJailMail.

We feel like POWs in a foreign land in hostile territory. Because of our Blackness/ancestral ties to Africa or Latin America, we are being treated as less than human. We are dying at CJC in unheard of numbers and being intentionally infected at alarming rates.

In my homeland that is the civilized country of America…THIS IS GENOCIDE!

Source: EXPO

On the eve of the Communist Party of China’s centenary in July 2021, the story of the country’s first women’s military brigade in the 1930s continues to find life in popular culture and the imagination of the Chinese people.

“Are you a proletarian?” asks the brigade commander. Receiving no response, she clarifies her question: “Do you own land?”

Wu Qionghua, a young woman who is dressed in red linen and has a long plaited braid, responds defiantly, “I am a slave girl. I own nothing.” Qionghua was orphaned and enslaved after the local landlord Nan Batian (“Tyrant of the South”) killed her family. As the film plot develops, we discover that Qionghua had just escaped enslavement with the help of Hong Changqing, a Communist cadre.

We turn to the other woman onscreen, Honglian, with her head slightly bowed. “What about you?” asks the commander.

“I’m not sure whether I own land,” she shyly replies. “I was sold at the age of 10.”

“You are certainly a proletarian,” the commander affirms. “Pass.”

With that, the 121st and 122nd members are inducted into the first all-women military brigade of the Chinese Red Army. Or so it goes in this 1961 feature film iteration of the story, “The Red Detachment of Women,” directed by Xie Jin.

A story still necessary to tell

I pass through the park gates. A few minutes late, I quickstep past the snack vendors, gift shops and monumental light displays. The usher hand-signals for me to wait — the show has already started. I watch as the 2,400-capacity stands start shifting next to us, in sync with the epic symphony music blasting from above. 

I’m here for the nightly show of “The Red Detachment of Women” (红色娘子军) production in Sanya, the beach-lined holiday town in the island province of Hainan, China. The Red Detachment was the first all-women military brigade that became a much-mythologized part of Chinese modern history. It has been made and remade into countless socialist—or “red cultural”—productions over the past century.

The stands stop moving, and I am ushered into my seat. Enter stage left into the coconut groves of subtropical China. The story is set in 1931 Hainan, situated in the South China Sea. It is a region long contested and exploited by colonial interests, neighbored then by British Malaya and Singapore, French-controlled Vietnam, Dutch “East Indies” or what is now Indonesia and the United States-occupied Philippines. 

That same year (1931), Manchuria — in northeast China — was annexed by the Japanese, foreboding the fascist imperialism that would dominate the region. What is known in the Western world as World War II was in China a 14-year-long war of resistance, costing more than 35 million Chinese lives. It is in this year where we meet our protagonists Qionghua and Honglian in the founding moments of the Red Detachment brigade. Qionghua, however, is not a fictional character.

Her character is based on Pang Qionghua, who was born in 1911—the year of the Xinhai Revolution that saw the last dynasty fall in China. Arranged to be married from the age of four, Pang Qionghua would escape her fate to join the Red Army in 1930. She became the commander of the 103-strong women’s brigade. They were spies who safeguarded arms arsenals and earned the title of “Red Detachment of Women” after several successful battles against the enemy Nationalist Army. The last surviving member passed away in 2014. 

Since the 1930s, this story has been told and retold, adapted to the needs of a changing China.

First documented by Liu Wenshao in a 1957 news story, then transformed into a local Hainanese opera, the feature film version brought the real-life story to popular audiences. The film turned into a mass-print comic book, before becoming a national ballet led by Jiang Qing — or “Madame Mao” — the very ballet selected to be performed for former U.S. President Nixon in his rapprochement visit to China in 1972. 

During the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the wordless ballet was adopted as one of the “eight model operas” suitable for a nation of 800 million people. It has been performed 4,000 times over the past five-and-a-half decades. It is an important cultural milestone in establishing a post-revolutionary national identity and for bringing modern Chinese culture to the international stage. 

More recently, the story was made into a TV series in 2006 and restaged by the National Ballet of China in 2014. In each era, the story of Qionghua and Honglian stayed contemporary because it was still deemed a story necessary to tell.

A red cultural theme park

The massive audience stands, where I am seated, start moving again to the latest mega-production of this story being staged in Sanya. Artificial bombs rain from the sky into an artificial river. A searchlight shines a red laser hammer and sickle onto the distant mountains. A landlord is paraded into the audience with a paper cone hat. Grandmothers comment aloud as if they were watching a TV drama at home. There are acrobatics, 11 movable stages, and a 300-member cast and crew. And this happens every night, for 99 yuan a ticket ($15).

This project, which is the first of its kind in China, premiered on July 1, 2018, in the Sanya Red Detachment of Women Performing Arts theme park project, which combines arts, culture and red history on one platform. The 1.2 billion yuan (more than $185 million) project stretches across an area of 179 acres and is being jointly organized by state and private actors, including Beijing Chunguang Group and Shaanxi Tourism Group, which has been responsible for many large-scale red cultural productions across the country. It is truly a project of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics.

On May 1, 2020 — International Workers’ Day — Hainan celebrated 70 years since its liberation, when the end of the Battle of Hainan Island in 1950 saw its formal incorporation in the People’s Republic of China. In June 2020, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council released the master plan to turn the entire island into a pilot free trade port. By 2050, Hainan is set to become an unparalleled international financial, tourism, technology and logistics hub. 

In his opening remarks of the 13th National People’s Congress — China’s highest legislative body — Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang highlighted the importance of red culture in this strategic national project: “We need to stimulate the development of the tourism industry, fully use regional tourism potential, develop rural and ‘red’ tourism.”

In an impressive show of post-pandemic recovery, during the October 2020 national holiday week, Sanya received a record 729,000 visitors—more than doubling its permanent resident population—and generated more than 4 billion yuan in revenue (about $600 million), up 39 percent year-on-year. The Red Detachment theme park’s attendance rivaled the city’s top tourist destinations of tropical beaches, resort complexes and fantasy towns. 

The August 2020 “Youth China” Sanya Youth Culture and Art Festival drew 1,000 young people to the park—and 50,000 online participants—over three days, encouraging the country’s future generation to “continually pursue the revolutionary footsteps and carry on the spirit of the Red Detachment of Women.”

Socialist selfies

As the crowds shuffle down the stands, children scurry to take photographs with the young actors, with their parents lagging behind. This is another kind of theme park, another type of heroine story. Some come to see the spectacle, others for family time. I leave with a selfie with one of the young actor-soldiers in their gray-blue tunic suits and red-star caps and a new Red Detachment-branded notebook to write this story in. On the eve of the CPC’s centenary to be celebrated in July 2021, red culture with Chinese characteristics not only is alive but also continues to reinvent itself and find new life.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Tings Chak is the lead designer and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, an editor of Dongsheng, and a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow.

Source: Globetrotter

Open Letter to Jeff Bezos and the Alabama Amazon workers                                                  

From former Baltimore Amazon workers

Dear Bezos and Amazon workers,

We are sending all of our support, love and solidarity to the Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers in their fight for a union and for workers power.  

Trust us we know how brutal warehouse conditions are: the impossible quotas and pressure to keep up; the lack of safety and concern for workers who are risking their lives during this pandemic without hazard pay; the constant monitoring of our every move; breaks that are way too short and bathrooms that are way too far and so much more.

Like Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement, Bessemer workers are leading the way.  

We salute your courage given everything that the company has done to discourage, intimidate and stop workers from having a fair vote.  Shame on you, Amazon, that you would oppose mail in votes.  

Win or lose, no one will forget this battle against workplace injustice.

What will be remembered, Jeff Bezos, is your greed and callousness during this pandemic.  

You made thirteen billion ($13,000,000,000) in one day after the pandemic caused Amazon’s stock price to surge.  This set a record for the largest single day increase in individual wealth ever recorded.  Yes, corona cash has been good for you, Bezos, despite the fact that 20,000 workers have tested positive, and that you withdrew hazard pay while you were cashing in.   

You could have taken that one day, corona windfall and paid all 876,000 Amazon workers a $105,000 bonus each.

The Alabama workers battle is truly a fight between David and Goliath, that is taking place in the birthplace of the civil rights movement. We must all pick a side; as the union song goes “Which side are you on?”  

We urge everyone to pick the side of the Bessemer, Alabama workers!

Yours for United Workers Action,

Sharon Black, Rasika Ruwanpathirana, Steven Ceci
Former Baltimore Amazon warehouse workers