Step 1: Three companies come to control nearly all of the baby formula market by driving out or buying up competitors.
Step 2: One of the three, which holds 43% of the market, declines to replace its old and failing drying equipment, leading to rapid bacteria growth that resulted in four babies dying from infection after consuming the formula.
Step 3: The company, Abbott Laboratories, recalls its biggest formula brand. This leads to a massive shortage and panic as parents of infants drive hours looking for stores that have any in stock.
Step 4: Babies are gonna die from this, particularly the ones in poor households.
Capitalism will always lead to shit like this, because capitalism requires continuous growth and at some point you can’t grow any more without becoming a monopoly. The system requires the death of infants.
Their unionization push comes amid a wave of unionizing at other retail companies. Last month, the independent Amazon Labor Union won its union election at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York (although a subsequent vote at another nearby warehouse failed). Workers at an REI in Manhattan voted to unionize in March. Union elections have been called at Apple stores in Atlanta and Baltimore. And about 60 Starbucks stores have voted to unionize since December, with dozens more elections filed.
Many of these campaigns have important things in common. These are the kind of low-wage, service-sector workers who seemed so impossible to unionize for so long. Amazon and Starbucks workers aren’t bringing in organizers from big, established unions, but instead workers are leading the way themselves. And they’re going store by store, location by location. It was long thought that such a campaign couldn’t work. “What people didn’t recognize is the contagion factor,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Target Workers Unite is hoping to instigate exactly that kind of national spread.
