Bernie Sanders Grabbed the Bully Pulpit and Refused to Let Go Until Amazon Hiked Wages

[Hassin Bin Sober]

Bernie Sanders Grabbed the Bully Pulpit and Refused to Let Go Until Amazon Hiked Wages

The senator’s crusade to improve conditions at the online retailer demanded accountability from Jeff Bezos and the billionaire class.
By John Nichols


https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-grabbed-the-bully-pulpit-and-refused-to-let-go-until-amazon-hiked-wages/

The most underestimated tool that a prominent political figure has in times of divided and dysfunctional governance is the bully pulpit. It can be used for good and ill. Donald Trump is, literally, a bully. But Theodore Roosevelt did not intend a sinister meaning when he coined the term. Roosevelt was of the “bully for you”—as in “great for you”—school. A bully pulpit was, to his view, the most excellent platform for popularizing proposals for necessary reforms.

A Republican with an inclination toward progressivism, Roosevelt knew in his time that the corridors of power were packed with corrupted men, and that “Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.” Reformers had to employ the bully pulpit because, the 26th president explained, “The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare.”

The cause of fair wages and fair treatment has always required the rallying of public sentiment on the side of workers. Roosevelt employed the bully pulpit for this purpose in his time. And Bernie Sanders does the same today.

For the past several months, the senator from Vermont has been on a mission to get Jeff Bezos to raise wages for Amazon workers. In July, Sanders held a “CEOs vs. Workers” town-hall meeting, in which he amplified the voices of Amazon employees and declared that: “A significant percentage of workers who work at Amazon [are] working for wages so low they are also dependent upon government programs. But that is only half the story because a lot of people who work for Amazon don’t actually work for Amazon because they are independent contractors.”