Another worker has fallen victim to the brutality of the capitalist regime. On June 2nd 2023, a worker at the Joliet, Illinois Amazon warehouse MDW2 died onsite, after being found laying on a pallet, unresponsive. Rather than calling an ambulance, he was taken to Amcare, Amazon’s private, onsite emergency treatment center. In response, Amazon launched an internal investigation — a common tool of self-exoneration by the perpetrators of the worst institutional abuses — and issued a statement claiming that the death was not a result of the worker’s job duties. They have refused to release any details about the incident: the worker’s name, the conditions in the warehouse, and the cause of death have all been kept under tight seal. In contrast, Warehouse Workers for Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to the rights of warehouse workers, issued a statement in which they indicated that this incident points to the intolerable and dangerous levels of heat common in Amazon warehouses.
Let us be perfectly clear: this tragic loss of life is directly attributable to the brutality inflicted on workers by arch-capitalist Jeff Bezos. For years, Amazon workers have been organizing around the truly inhumane working conditions in warehouses, including harsh temperatures, toxic air quality, insecure heavy machinery, and the notorious “time off task” policy that has led to workers being penalized for using the bathroom. Workers are constantly surveilled, denied breaks, forced to attend “all hands” union-busting meetings, and subject to hazardous working conditions on a regular basis. In fact, a few years ago, there was another case of a worker, Thomas Becker, dying on-site at this very warehouse, after security again refused to call 911 for half an hour. AEDs on site were nonfunctional, and when paramedics finally arrived, they were directed to go through security at the opposite end of the warehouse. Becker was pronounced dead once he finally arrived at the hospital.
These two deaths are but a drop in the bucket among the thousands of annual workplace deaths and millions of workplace injuries in the U.S. alone. The scale of this senseless brutality can hardly be understood by those of us who have become accustomed to the unrelenting abuses of the capitalist system. We might be tempted to shrug it off, and say “these things just happen.” But they don’t just happen. They are the result of deliberate policy decisions, made by those who value profit over everything. When given the option, capitalists put short-term gains over the safety of their workers, the stability of the environment, and the common good of society at large.
To do anything less — to place the accumulation of capital in any position other than the top priority — is death for the capitalist. Locked as they are in constant competition with other capitalists, every drop of profit must be squeezed from the workers, like trying to wring water from a stone. They must maintain their position in the market at all costs, even the cost of human health. Some even go so far as to hire consultants to appraise the likelihood of workplace accidents, how much the resulting lawsuits and fees will cost them, and compare to the cost of maintaining a safe and dignified workplace. If there is even a penny’s difference between them, they will defer to the tyranny of the market, and consign their workers to death, mutilation, and psychological torment. To the capitalist, unmitigated suffering is simply the cost of doing business.
Every workplace protection we have, as insufficient as they may be, has been a concession wrested from the iron grip of capital by a united, militant working class. Whether enshrined in statute or encoded in union contracts, the health and safety of the worker is never assured under capitalism but for the strength of the working class itself. We have spent centuries at war with our bosses, and as many fights as we have won, we have lost many more. This war — the class war — has real life and death stakes. The ruling class is constantly engaged in an active assault on the lives of the working class, and workplace safety is a key battleground. Each victory on this front has come with a hit to the capitalists’ profits exactly as big as the gain to the workers’ safety. And in the wake of such gains, the reaction from the capitalists has been to immediately mobilize to regain lost ground.
Through the countless measures at their disposal — the media they control, the capitols they occupy, the courts they buy off, the union-busting firms they employ — capitalists have been able to invest immense sums of money into the project of ripping away every worker and environmental protection they can find. In recent decades, taking advantage of the retreat of union militancy, capitalists have steadily stripped away regulations, hollowed out the legal standing of unions, and laundered the otherwise-toxic notion that safety is secondary to economy. The brutalization of workers has only ever expanded in recent years, from the prevalence of workplaces run like prison camps by petty tyrants, to the violent resurgence of child labor. The bosses are winning, precisely because the working class has abandoned militancy and failed to uphold solidarity.
Injustices like the one at MDW2, while all too common under the harsh rule of capital, must never be accepted as inevitable. They are aberrations, assaults on human dignity that cannot be suffered any longer. Our only option is to strike back: to rally our ranks into a united working class army, riposte the capitalist aggressor, and destroy the very system that empowers them to destroy us. As long as the power to set working conditions rests in the hands of capitalists, tragedies like this will continue to rend our communities. How long will we be content to be sacrificed upon the altar of profit?
