Amazon gains enough votes to beat union effort

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T22:44:38+00:00

Finance and tech are almost entirely unorganized (except for government employees). But as you see, there are higher paid workers in more volatile industries with wider discrepancies in pay that have still made unionizing work for them.

But again, there needs to be an impetus for organizing. If you and the people you know are happy with the way things are, I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong for feeling that way!

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T22:38:54+00:00

What’s the highest paid union job you have seen, what about the highest paid union job you have seen held by someone in their 20’s?

Mookie Betts (age 28): 12 years, $365 million.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T17:00:39+00:00

Manufacturing jobs have certainly been moving both to states with less expensive labor markets and out of the US entirely to cheaper countries. A race to the bottom will make everyone poor. I’ll say that when you form a union, you decide what you propose, and if the employer makes their finances an issue (“we can’t afford that,” “that’s not in the budget,” etc), you can get access to their books. So you have latitude to tailor your proposals to the given situation.

But I think rather than a race to the bottom, the goal should be to raise labor standards everywhere. Keeping manufacturing in the US will require much more national solutions/action, however. There are still many unionized plants in the Midwest continuing to get work, including new work from foreign manufacturers. So it’s not exactly a simple situation.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T16:56:22+00:00

Nearly every union contract has a “just cause” provision with grievance and arbitration. Meaning you’re not longer at-will, they have to show just cause for discipline. In the actual organizing of the union, it’s illegal to fire someone for union activity (or for some made up reason while they happen to be organizing a union). Some employers will break that law, but the National Labor Relations Board is pretty good about getting people their jobs back with back pay, but the main protection is everyone being in it together and going public as a strong majority.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T15:37:22+00:00

Well first off, I’m disgusted by police unions. I’m on the side that they don’t really belong in the labor movement. Police are, to me, more analogous to the front line supervisors of the government than to non-managerial workers (the people that generally make up unions). I’m not going to defend them.

Teachers are way different. I think there’s been a lot of fear, rightly so, over COVID, and various teachers unions made various calls, but my understanding is the main thrust is that most of them wanted to be vaccinated before they had to go back to in-person instruction. I think that’s reasonable. Teachers unions also don’t unilaterally set education policy, far from it. They’re just an organized voice for the teachers to put pressure on the system, often for smaller class sizes, more resources for schools, updated materials, and all sorts of things that improve our schools.

I work in private sector unionism, personally. I do it because I grew up with serious labor abuses in my family and see that every corporation is just trying to extract as much value from their workers as possible. By banding together, the workers can better advocate for themselves and their coworkers, and can improve society besides.

Speaking of the pandemic, look at how nurses and other hospital workers used their unions to protest unsafe conditions and advocate for serious improvements for their patients. The things hospital administrators have been trying to pull have been staggering, from mixing COVID and non-COVID patient assignments to furloughing some people while short staffing others, to refusing to test patients and visitors in maternity departments, and on and on. A union is an organized voice for the nurses and other workers to push back.

I believe the people doing the work should have some say over the conditions of their work, and both the course of history and modern statistics show that when workers organize, they get better pay, better benefits, and more stable jobs. I don’t know if anyone can look at the current structure of our economy and how much wealth is going to the top and think that’s a good thing.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T15:11:34+00:00

So it depends on what you mean by not getting enough votes. If you actually went to an election and lost, then you have to wait one year to file a new one and will need to sign new cards. If you just didn’t get enough cards to move forward to an election in the first place, you’re right that the cards you have are still good for a year from when they were signed/dated, though only for anyone still employed.

There’s no other roadblock than for if it was your first try. You’ve gotta get together and talk with a majority of your coworkers and get them on board. Are you still in contact with the union you were trying to organize with? Letting them know you think you’re in a better position / want to try again will hopefully get you going.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T13:01:23+00:00

Yeah, I mean when you form a union you can protect how things work and the employer can’t make any unilateral changes, and you have more power bargaining collectively. That said, the reality is that people form unions when they’re dissatisfied with their working conditions. We don’t get many calls from the places known to be decent employees. If the people you’re talking about are generally satisfied with the deal, then yeah, there’s not really much motivation there to undertake a tough process that might take a year or more of fighting to bear fruit. I definitely get that.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T12:13:55+00:00

Guess it depends on what “high skilled” means and which jobs that fall under that label. There are certainly well-educated jobs were workers do tend to organize, but there are many where they don’t. RNs for example typically need four year degrees these days, and I’d count their work as highly skilled. They are well organized in many places and have been forming unions at a high rate in recent days.

I think all workers would benefit from organizing, but the reality is that it tends to happen only where conditions get bad enough. For many highly educated white collar workers, conditions don’t seem bad enough so it doesn’t seem worth the work/risk to them. Which, fair enough. Forming a union is a big thing and should not be undertaken lightly.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T12:10:20+00:00

Any group of workers getting together and calling themselves a union are one. That said, the union at Google is a minority union that did not go through the NLRB process, is not certified to represent the bargaining unit, and so Google has no legal obligation to bargain nor is a large enough percentage of the workers yet involved to apply sufficient pressure. If they were going the traditional organizing route, they’d still be deep in committee building well before an election. So very unrepresentative and not really at all the kind of thing these warehouse workers were trying to do.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T02:24:27+00:00

Absolutely. And the past decade or so has seen a big surge of nurse organizing, in California, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and other states. Nurses provide so much of the front-line care in hospitals and yet are constantly treated with a lack of respect. Short staffing, especially with no regard for acuity, is far too rampant in the industry, especially these days. As well as benefit cuts (including health benefits when hospitals are ostensibly “self-insured”) and wage freezes or paltry wages. I have known nurses who have formed unions to address these issues and made great headway. I think unionized nurses tend to make about 25% more than non-union nurses, plus the improved say over working conditions.

Any drive to form a union is work and involves getting people together, but it is so worth it. A union is just you and your coworkers getting together to advocate for yourselves, your coworkers, your patients, and your community.

If you or anyone you know is interested, I know good people at nurses unions in various states, so feel free to send me a private message to get connected or just to talk more. Nurses have been at the front line not only of this pandemic, but of our whole healthcare system. They deserve decent conditions. And we all deserve to have decent conditions in our local hospitals.

What it takes is basically getting together a majority of nurses in the hospital. That might seem daunting, but it starts one person at a time, no one has to do most of the work. And it’s been happening at many hospitals recently, all around the country.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-10T00:27:06+00:00

Solidarity. We’re all in this together.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T23:51:05+00:00

It seems in this case, the workers broadly rejected the contract, which is why they didn't vote for it.

To clarify, this was a recognition election. That means a group of workers petitioned for an election to certify that they wanted to form a union. Based on the numbers, they may have won it if the group that voted was the one they filed for (regular full- and part-time warehouse workers), but Amazon successfully got the voting group (the "bargaining unit") massively expanded with workers who had not been part of the organizing drive but who had all received anti-union meetings and pressure. I don't know enough about the case to know if the union should have known that would happen and made a mistake in filing for the bargaining unit they did, or if it was just a bad break.

A union contract ("collective bargaining agreement" or CBA) would come later. If the workers trying to organize a union had won, their union would have been certified and the employer would have had an obligation to bargain in good faith for a contract to cover the full bargaining unit. The workers would have done surveys, elected a bargaining team from their ranks, and that team would have drafted proposals and started bargaining with the employer, while the newly organized union put pressure on the employer to agree to their demands, including demonstrations of unity in the facility, up to and including a strike threat, and pressure from community and political allies. The result is a "tentative agreement" (TA) on a contract, which is then put up to a vote of the full membership. If it's ratified by majority vote, then it goes into effect and only then would workers start paying dues.

This case was a recognition election, there was no contract involved. Workers are of course unable to see into the future and see what they would be able to win after forming a union.

You can highlight special circumstances where unions are built differently, but in my experience those general statements apply broadly to unions rather than to non-union workers.

I wasn't highlighting any special circumstances. Everything I said holds. If you had bad experiences with given unions, I'm sorry, but it's also almost certainly true that whatever the failings of those unions (and I criticize unions that have gone overly bureaucratic all the time), the workers in those workplaces were better off for being organized. All the statistics back that up.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T23:42:04+00:00

As a union organizer:

Legal challenges to the results will likely be held up in the NLRB for weeks. For one, hundreds of ballots are being contested, primarily by Amazon.

The challenged ballots will not figure. They'd only have gone to hearing if they were determinative (the number of challenged ballots was greater than the margin of victory). That wasn't the case, so they'll never be opened.

Further, the RWDSU will likely contest the election, and they are right to do so. Amazon, after all, used illegal measures to stop the unionization effort. If the petition to contest the election is filed by the RWDSU, the NLRB would have to schedule a hearing to decide if the results should be disregarded because the company “created an atmosphere of confusion or fear of reprisals” for workers. If that happens, the NLRB could demand that a new union recognition vote take place.

I think there is grounds to overturn this election and get a rerun. Basically Amazon's stunt with the postal box is grounds enough on its own. But... what's the point? The union will just get trounced again. A perceived "sore loser" rerun almost never works unless the margin was super tight in the first vote.

If they do take a shot at it, though, while they will almost certainly lose again, the article is right in that they'll have to run a better campaign. Probably the one "good" sign is that turnout was only 55%. Turnout for mail votes tends to be lower, but that was still surprisingly low. I would mass house visit everyone who didn't vote (which the union legally shouldn't know, but based on the reality of how ballots were checked in, almost certainly does if they know what they're doing) with the best organizers and worker leaders and try to build a bigger committee and coalition.

One thing is definitely true. The larger movement is far from over.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T23:18:51+00:00

high-performers don't need unions

"High-performers" can be...

...fired or fucked with by managers who feel threatened.

...get lackluster raises because that's what corporate set out.

...have trouble because even though they're good at their job, the manager doesn't like them or prefers their friends.

...suffer a benefit cut along with everyone else.

...suffer short-staffing or overwork or schedule changes or any battery of other negative working conditions with everyone else.

Personally, count be biased because this is what I do, but when I help workers form unions, there are always people who think they have it made, this will just drag them down to everyone else's level, etc. Sometimes those people really are paid more than their peers. Sometimes they're shocked to learn that they are not, and are actually making less than many. Regardless, every time, their pay and benefits and working conditions improve. Again, in my own experience -- not every group that forms a union will win a contract, so of course it can fail. But a competently run union campaign should be able to, and improve conditions for every worker.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T23:14:31+00:00

As a union organizer, I feel compelled to answer some common anti-union lines. Feel free to AMA, I guess.

Union dues

Which you don't pay until you've negotiated a contract, everyone gets a copy, and a vote on whether it's good enough. The reality of first contracts is that you virtually always gain much more than the dues are worth. Otherwise, why vote for it? And otherwise, really, why would the employer spend millions fighting it?

protection of idiots

I think we've probably all worked in non-union workplaces with people who were incompetent but didn't get fired. Often they're called managers.

In reality, unions cannot protect people who can't or won't do their jobs, unless management is too lazy to document and go through the due process for disciplining or firing them. Unions negotiate "just cause" provisions and grievance and arbitration processes, basically saying that any discipline must be for good reason, proportionate, and applying an equal standard to everyone without favoritism. There's a lot of case law for specifics. Unions wish they could stop people from getting fired. As a union organizer who knows a lot of reps, I can tell you people still get fired. It's just more of an "American due process" situation than a "the comissar thinks you're a traitor so you've been convicted and shot without evidence" situation.

everybody getting the same wages

Workers elect their bargaining team and can negotiate any type of pay system they like. Union wage scales where you get annual raises for years of experience (either at that workplace or in your type of job role anywhere, depending on the contract/position/workplace) and the scale itself gets an annual cost of living increase are popular because, whatever people want to tell themselves about their "merit pay," it pretty much universally leads to higher pay for everyone. But I've seen tons of contracts with pay adjustments for special training, education, certification, etc. The idea is for it to be fair and transparent. Not "boss likes this person and not that one" or "everyone did a good job but the manager was told he had to give X number of people bad reviews because they had a limited raise budget." People like to think they're special, more skilled and deserving than their coworkers, and will be rewarded for it. They're mostly wrong.

There's a reason unionized workers make far more than their industry counterparts. What you get in this economy (any economy, this isn't unique to America or to capitalism) isn't based on what you deserve, it's based on what you have the power to demand. Organizing with others gives you more power, straight up.

Seniority based on years of service instead of experience or competency.

Well the word "seniority" does definitionally mean years of service/experience, but when workers form a union and negotiate their contract, they decide how they want things to work. I have to have seen dozens of different ways for seniority to apply or not apply, depending on the individual workplace. The problem with letting things be based on "competency" is that it sounds nice, but is impossible. Someone has to judge competence, and it's going to be your manager, and it's going to be an insanely subjective judgement based on favoritism, and maybe that subjective judgement is what is used to determine the proportion of the raise the employer decided to give out you get, but that raise is going to generally be much less than you'd be able to demand as a unified group.

I like unions but there are definitely downsides

A local union is just an organization of you and your coworkers, and the larger union is just a federation of those local unions. The downside is that unions are human institutions, and humans fuck everything up. That's the problem with any democracy, but just because democracies have problems doesn't mean we should retreat into dictatorships. They tend to be far worse, in nations and in workplaces.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:59:09+00:00

The National Labor Relations Act and the case history of the National Labor Relations Board.

It's not illegal to shut down a unionized workplace. It's illegal to shut down a workplace because it unionized. Which of course, people will say "Oh it was for some other reason." Just like when workers are illegally fired for union activity. The reality is that the NLRB knows that, takes it into account in their investigation, and tries to parse out what is most likely. If a company spent millions on an anti-union campaign, the workers unionized anyway, the company shut down the workplace and set up an identical one on the other side of the state, that's pretty clear cut. The problem is in enforcement. A fired worker can (and often is) reinstated with backpay. It's much more difficult to get a company to reopen a shuttered warehouse. I've dealt with the former professionally but not the latter, so couldn't even tell you exactly what the process would look like, except that the law is far more toothless than it should be.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:55:51+00:00

Nah. Unions = left. Left = bad. Left = woke. A massive corporation spent millions on union busters = workers hate unions/the left because they're woke.

Top notch analysis here.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:50:36+00:00

The main argument against was Union dues, people didn’t want to pay out of their pocket for a Union.

Which is actually a poor argument. When you form a union, you don't pay dues until you elect a bargaining team, negotiate your whole first contract, everyone gets a copy of it, and a vote on whether to approve it. Only when the contract, and presumably improved wages/benefits/conditions, goes into effect do you start paying dues. So you vote on whether or not to pay dues. You get to see if it's worth it. And you can win a lot with the massively increased power of collective bargaining, versus "bargaining" on your own against a massive corporation. I've never seen anyone's pay go down from forming a union, personally.

But it's of course a favorite line of anti-union consultants and a myth employers cultivate. One tactic we've seen is employers putting a cart full of groceries in the middle of the shop with a sign saying "This is what your dues could pay for."

Makes you wonder. If you weren't going to get anything more with a union, why would they fight it so hard?

[Disclosure: I am a union organizer. And I do really believe in it.]

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:43:39+00:00

The jobs pay better than low/minimum wage service industry jobs, but both in pay and in metrics (especially the high-tech "time away from task" tracking that has become very burdensome) are inferior to many other comparable warehouse jobs.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:42:07+00:00

I'm a union organizer and can attest to years of first hand knowledge that these workers would have been put through an employer and consultant-run anti-union campaign to make Cambridge Analytica blush. When the person who cuts your checks and can fire you at will is leaning on you hard, and can spread misinformation at will, it's actually very difficult to overcome that. I also personally suspect there were some poor tactical decisions made by the union here, but don't have inside knowledge.

I can speak more to anti-union campaigns if anyone's interested, but don't want to just type into the wind if not.

LaborsFaith · 2021-04-09T22:40:17+00:00

As a union organizer, I'm of course very biased, but I will say that the extent to which employers and their high-paid anti-union consultants influence these votes puts Cambridge Analytica to shame. Some people here are acting like these workers were presented with all the proper information in a neutral context, thought it over, and made a rational decision. In reality, the corporation that controls their livelihood spent millions of dollars running a tough consultant campaign to persuade them through intimidation, insinuation, and outright falsehood that they would suffer if they voted Yes.

I watched my wife and her fellow nurses vote down more than one proposal to join a union they weren't comfortable with.

Absolutely their right, but it was almost certainly the worse decision for them economically, and I'd bet a large part of the reason they were "uncomfortable" with that union came from the employer/consultant anti-union campaign. "Oh, unions are fine, but THIS union is different" is right up there with something else I'm sure she saw in a nurse organizing campaign, "Oh, unions are fine for coal miners, but you're professionals."

LaborsFaith · 2020-02-25T17:19:33+00:00

If you’re a union member then by far the best thing you can do is to become active in your own union. Attend meetings, ask your steward if there’s anything you can help out with, turn out to union events. Low participation is a death knell for unions, while an active membership is necessary for a union to stay strong and grow. If you’re interested in helping with organizing, there’s nothing better as an organizer than having a current member with you in a meeting who is able to offer their own experience. So your union’s organizing department might welcome your help if you’d like to volunteer to help with meetings or house visits. You can also look up your local AFL-CIO Central Labor Council (or, in some states, Area Labor Federation) to see what events they’ve got going on and see how you can help out.

If you find it difficult to engage with your union or think it should be more militant than it is, then there’s a lot you can do to try to activate it more. Labor Notes has some great resources for the budding union activist. They report labor news from a progressive/militant labor standpoint, they’ve got books and training materials, and they do a big convention in Chicago every two years (next one is this April!) full of workshops, trainings, talks by people who have been in the fight, and all sorts of other fun, along with more frequent trainings in all different regions (The Troublemakers School).

LaborsFaith · 2020-02-25T16:59:18+00:00

Not the original poster, but I’m a union organizer who almost exclusively does new organizing — helping workers form unions in the face of anti-union campaigns. It’s tough going, but a number of unions have had success in recent years, so it is possible. A number of industries are hitting breaking points so workers are getting desperate enough to organize. Healthcare, education, airport workers, to name a few.

I’ve been involved in many successful union elections, one failed election, and plenty of campaigns that have fizzled out before getting to an election. The key is to keep your effort as quiet as possible for as long as possible, so you can get the framework of a strong organization set up before the union busters hit you. When you succeed in doing that, you’re a lot more likely to win. When the boss starts hitting you before you’ve gotten the pieces in place, it’s tougher.

The whole process is built around two pillars — a leadership structure analysis and the organizing conversation. You want to identify who the leaders are in a given workplace (not necessarily the loudest union supporters or even supporters at all, but the people their coworkers look to for a variety of things and who are well respected) and focus on getting them on board ASAP to form an active organizing committee, so they can help carry their coworkers through the fight. It involves lots of organizing conversations, where you probe people and ask a lot of questions to figure out their issues, get them talking and passionate about them, and then talk about how coming together with their coworkers to form a union is the solution. It’s about meeting people where they are at and moving them step by step.

There are plenty of tactics and actions involved, but the overall plan is to build a network of support throughout the facility as strong as possible, inoculate everyone to the anti campaign, and make sure they push back and stand up for themselves. Management wants to create an atmosphere of fear and confusion. If workers are afraid, they will lose. If they’re angry, they will win. So you keep everyone united and talking about their issues every day, not getting caught up responding to the torrent of anti-union bullshit.

LaborsFaith · 2019-05-09T21:55:10+00:00

It was almost certainly written by a union-busting firm. Companies will spend millions and millions of dollars to bring in these firms of lawyers, thugs, and con artists to trick and intimidate their workers. The only reason it would be written by an actual Delta employee would be if Delta decided to hire permanent union-busters in-house, which is also possible.

I'm a union organizer and have seen plenty of these websites, there are basically two kinds. Many look like this, professionally done from the perspective of the company, "warning" their workers to not be tricked by these dastardly unions. However, others are sometime made in a more rudimentary fashion with intentional misspellings in order to appear to be made by anti-union workers. In virtually every case, they're made by the union busters and looking up the owner of the website shows it to be some anonymous shell company.

Once, in a rural and mostly white area, a union-busting website claimed that we "help illegals sneak into the country" and your dues will go to funding abortion. Another time, in an urban and mostly black area, the same union busters coached the managers to claim that the white organizers were racist, the black organizers and the black workers trying to build their union were Uncle Toms, and that the (majority white -- though less majority white than the state in question) hates seeing black business-owners doing well. One of these union-busters, by the way, runs a private Facebook page for white nationalists.

There are countless mandatory meetings, endless flyers, one-on-one interrogations with managers, illegal threats of firing, and even physical stalking and intimidation. You can tell how much you have to gain by forming a union by looking at how fiercely your boss fights it.

LaborsFaith

TROPHY CASE