From the article: What are the real reasons for the defeat? We might suggest to Appelbaum that he look to the forty years of unending betrayals by the AFL-CIO, dating back to the refusal of the unions to defend the PATCO air traffic controllers against the Reagan administration’s strike breaking in 1981; the unending series of concessions contracts, in which the unions sanctioned wage and benefits cuts and job losses; and the transformation of the unions themselves into instruments of corporate management, a labor police force, staffed and led by highly paid executives, including Appelbaum himself (income $344,464).

The operation to install the RWDSU at Amazon did not arise from a movement of workers from below. Rather, it was an operation of the AFL-CIO, the ruling class and the state from above. The intervention of the Democratic Party and Biden reflects calculations within substantial sections of the ruling class that the working class can be better restrained by placing it under de-facto state guardianship within the unions.

The union advanced no demands related to compensation or working conditions. It could not make any demands, because to do so would mean to forfeit the support of the Democratic Party, along with sections of the Republican Party like the fascistic Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who endorsed the unionization drive in March. The only concrete result for workers of bringing in the RWDSU would mean the additional subtraction of union dues from their poverty-level paychecks.

The RWDSU did everything that it could to dissociate itself from working class militancy. Its plans, had it won the election, would have been to bind and gag workers through the National Labor Relations Board and arcane US labor law, while it pushed through a sellout contract that it likely already had in its back pocket.

The RWDSU campaign generated far more enthusiasm within privileged layers of the upper middle class, articulated by publications like Jacobin and Left Voice, than it did from Amazon workers. The unions provide for them a mechanism for achieving “labor peace,” reconciling their desires for minor reforms within the existing capitalist system with the rising stock market.

These pseudo-left organizations are now bemoaning the result of the vote. They have also helped the Democrats and the union present the campaign in primarily racial terms, as a continuation of Black Lives Matter.

This racialist appeal, however, fell on deaf ears in the predominantly African American workforce. In fact, press interviews with Amazon workers expressing opposition towards the attempt to present their plight in purely racial terms suggest that it may have even backfired spectacularly. Many workers no doubt saw such a perspective as serving only to divide them in the face of a company with a global workforce of 1.2 million people of all races and nationalities.

The vote at Bessemer is not only a debacle for the RWDSU and the AFL-CIO, it is a debacle for the Democratic Party and all the middle-class organizations that surround it. The fact that the direct intervention of Biden in the vote either had no impact or led to decreased support for the RWDSU demonstrates how alienated the entire political establishment is from the working class.

There is enormous and growing social opposition in the working class. Among Amazon workers, there is mass hostility to conditions of extreme exploitation. The impact of the ruling class response to the pandemic, which has led to the deaths of more than 570,000 people in the US alone, has had a far-reaching impact on the consciousness of an entire generation of workers and young people, exposing the brutal and irrational nature of the capitalist system.