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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

It seems that union politics is swinging back. If we choose 1980 as a nominal endpoint for the union pendulum, it feels like 2020-ish may be the other one.

Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... 40 years is a long time, considering the "pendulum" took a long time getting to 1980. I'm not sure what from past experience transposes to the present and how. The world is very different.

What does an amazon union even look like? How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.

I feel like most discussions fall into generic "for" and "against" union points. Realistically, unionisations is a wide space. Sports league unions. Newspaper Guilds. Germany's DGB. America's Teamsters. Teachers unions... all very different, and different in different eras.

What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?

View on HN

Agree on the pendulum analogy. Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020. A balance is needed, so you're seeing the shift back to protecting workers. But 40 years of anti-workers-rights propaganda is a tough line to break through

> What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?

Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]:

"""Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks."""

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...

re: Amazon's union-busting efforts.

This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.

The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.

I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?

Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.

Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?

It'd mean that working rules are set according to what feels fair rather than the minimum standards of the law. The security line thing is I think emblematic of the problem; anyone can see you ought to be paid during the time you're stuck on company property and not allowed to leave, but Amazon contractors (with Supreme Court support: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-433) say they're not legally obligated to pay so they won't.

There is no law that says you have to enter a contract that only gives you the minimum requirements of the law. (ianal, though).

If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.

That’s essentially what a union is: a mechanism for collective negotiation of employment contracts.

I agree with what you're saying, and I'm very skeptical of the argument you sometimes see that everyone ought to unionize out of solidarity. But some workers don't feel they can get a contract they're happy with on their own, and for people in that situation unionization makes sense.

Law of nature says people have to eat. Amazon warehouse worker is a low-skill, low-education job - how much bargaining leverage do you think an individual has in this situation?

People don't necessarily have a choice. If that's the best contract that you can get then there is not much that you can do about it.

This is exactly what these workers are doing. They're unhappy with their contracts, so they're trying to negotiate better terms.

Normally, you negotiate your contract because your company wants you, and finding someone else that would agree to the contract is a non-trivial amount of effort, so they'll hear you out. In these people's cases, all they'd hear is "lol, no" if they tried to negotiate individually, because they'd have virtually no power. As a result they're trying to find leverage in numbers: We want the freedom to negotiate all our contracts to our advantage, otherwise we're striking.

Allow me to put things differently: There is no law that says that Amazon must accept whatever terms are put forth by these unions. Amazon can, if they wish, outright refuse their terms and tell them that the contract is as-is and will not be altered.

While I'm not saying this is your case, I am puzzled at people who argue against unions with your last line, because it really does cut both ways. "If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it". Well, a union is a form of negotiating said contract, and to the companies being proposed those terms: "If you are unhappy with the terms, don't sign it". Makes sense, right?

I believe there is no law if you cant finance legal action. Nowadays we have tons of flexible and temporary contracts. These people have just about the right to do as they are told. If you have a contract for a fixed number of hours and unlimited duration that doesn't mean the employer has to stick to the rules. It really doesn't matter what laws or contracts there are. In some companies (hard to tell how many) it's a game of looking what they can get away with. For a union there is prestige in court over [say] a 30 euro pay cut or a few unpaid hours.

> Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020

The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this.

Here’s the most recent instance:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...

Embezzlement to use union funds for personal expenses? That’s pretty low grade corruption. This sort of thing happens in private corporations and it rarely gets prosecuted unless it’s huge.

We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.

Embezzlement by a union official does more to hurt unions than embezzlement by some random public official hurts public perception of the govt.

Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you.

When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.

I wouldn’t call “ex-president of the union being 15th person charged in conspiracy embezzlement” a low grade corruption: if that’s low grade, what would high grade corruption look like?

I'd say the PPP loans offered to large corporations for "Covid relief" are high-grade corruption due to the sums involved, the explicit removal of traditional oversight processes and funneling it through the US banking system even though the banks were only responsible for collating paperwork and not providing any sort of risk-assessment or capital for the loans themselves.

Perhaps. There's lots of corruption in the world. Consistent and unrelenting corruption of American Unions contributed significantly to their downfall, whether or not other forms of corruption exist.

One of my first jobs was working part-time in a grocery store: collecting shopping carts, "clean up in aisle 7", stocking shelves, etc. I was 16 and forced to pay dues to a union. The dues were deducted from my minimum-wage paycheck. I had NO opt-out option. I worked maybe 10 hours per week? I was a high school student. I got ZERO benefit by paying union dues. This extortion was corruption in itself, nevermind the executive-level corruption that makes headlines every few years.

How much was that? Prices seem to vary wildly around the world.

The PPP loans were meant to go to those corporations. Congress wanted to incentivize Shake Shack to not lay off their employees. It wasn't their own idea.

How is this relevant to Union corruption? Are you denying there is significant corruption or just offering a red herring (PPP loans) to distract me?

I'm not responding to you? If anything, I'm on your "side," since the question of "what is high grade corruption" has not been answered yet.

Regardless of merits of your PPP loans as corruption argument, what I’m more interested in is what “high grade” corruption would look like in context of a trade union. Is an organization like UAW, of half a million members, and $200M of annual revenue capable of “high grade” corruption? What does it look like, if indicting 15 members including ex president ain’t it?

I know more than a few people who received large PPP loans (>$6M) and they had no legitimate need for them. They just filled out the applications and got the money just because they could. Knowing that, I'm sure there are much more egregious examples.

This is just one example of hundreds over the decades, painting a consistent thread of corruption.

The most famous example is Jimmy Hoffa, whose story has been made into films... including one in 1992 with Jack Nicholson.

“ Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials.”

One example of many.

> This sort of thing happens in private corporations

Private corporations have a mission to make money. Unions have a completely different mission.

Netflix just made a 3 hour movie about this - The Irishman.

I had to keep pausing and checking if something was real as I couldn't believe how bad things got

Private corporations have a mission of generating wealth for the people that make it up, their stockholders. Unions have the same mission just for their members. Its pretty comparable.

Private corporations also have a pretty consistent thread of corruption, a similar example to the one you gave being HSBC laundering money for drug cartels. Again, pretty comparable.

This isn't to say corruption in unions hasn't been part of why they've declined, its almost definitely part of it. While a corrupt corporate leader generally creates more money for its stockholders a corrupt union rep often costs the rank-and-file members which can greatly sour their opinions of unions as a whole. But there's nothing inherent to unions with regard to corruption, people in power often take advantage of their position no matter what type of structure they have that power in, and the point that it appears, at least to some people, that unions are held to a different standard than other types of organizations is worthy of being discussed.

The weird twist to this tale is that the teamster's pensions didn't disappear or get cut when they were invested through the mob.

However, after that corruption was cleared up and the pensions moved to Goldman and Northern Trust, the funds were destroyed and benefits to retireeswere deeply cut.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-teamsters-pension-...

Please don’t use AMP links.

Sorry about that. I’ve not found a way to convert those to non-AMP on an iPhone.

click on the 'i' button on the top of the page, you will get the full URL.

There’s a little up-arrow for sharing on the top right next to the real domain name, clicking that gives a Copy option with the actual URL. Annoying but handy once you find it.

non-AMP in the meantime for those who want to avoid AMP without fiddling around on mobile to edit the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-willi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/01/why...

San Fra public employee payroll takes the cake.

Average compensations (total headcount)

Nurse $293,000 (1471) Firefighter $192,000 (902) Police officer 3 $216,500 (821) Sergeant 3 $265,188 (500) EMT/Paramedic $194,344 (419)

"A fire prevention lieutenant made $415,111 – more than double their $184,791 base salary with a whopping $230,320 in overtime"

I'm all for competitive pay, but this is clearly out of whack.

Recall the Spanish airtraffic controller strike of 2010. On average, they were making $400k/year with some double that, yet had the balls to go on strike. Federal gov't and military stepped in and took over, ending the gravy train.

I wonder when the tipping is point is going to come for the U.S.

Is it out of whack? San Francisco has one of the highest costs of living in the country - I'd say the pay is correct in that it allows those middle-class professionals to live comfortably in the city where they work.

In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.

Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.

In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.

Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.

Yet this very site thinks paying these wages to Google interns is just fine. I have 4 decades of experience and deliver products that make $100M a year and I don't get paid these salaries because I don't work for a FAANG company, nor live in NY or SF, and am quite happy with what I make because the cost of living is reasonable and I like it here.

The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.

Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.

I doubt that Google interns are making $200K-300K/yr.

Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.

The only thing that needs to happen for government workers is removal of defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Once those fudge-able numbers are removed from the equation, the overpaying by promising future taxpayer money will automatically stop.

Honest question: how does removing pensions and retirement healthcare eliminate overpaid salaries? I don’t see the connection.

The real cost of those benefits decades into the future aren’t properly reflected in government budgets. It allows politicians to promise lavish benefits who need the votes from the government employee unions, and then the costs get understated, or just straight up ignored since who is going to force the government to set aside money for the future? End result is people today paying for labor performed decades ago, and not allowing for proper pricing of government labor compared to private sector.

For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).

Unions are not why building things in America is expensive. Its orders of magnitude cheaper to build things in France, a country with extremely strong unions.

Unions as implemented in the US are absolutely part of the problem. They have an adversarial relationship with management and are frequently (seemingly always) corrupt.

Wow. Is it opposite day where you’re at, or what?

Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.

French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)

Given that it's a relatively small number of employees, you're saving what, a couple cents a year by putting all these workers at minimum wage or lower and forcing them to work for tips?

19,000 is a small number?

> In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.

Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.

> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.

Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.

> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.

Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up

Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.

> Government usually pays well-below-market salaries

That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.

> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.

You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.

> > Government usually pays well-below-market salaries

> That may be true for base salaries,

That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.

> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.

It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.

> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse

No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.

Something you may not have considered - in countries where public servants are paid poorly, the result is widespread government corruption. In Nicaragua, for example, the police are so badly underfunded that if you want their help, you may be asked to pay for the gasoline to run their cars. If you can't pay, you don't get help.

This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.

The average compensation for a nurse should be a whisker shy of $300K? That does seem to me to be unreasonable on its face, even in Monaco, let alone San Francisco.

Seems reasonable to me. In the private sector, the CEO just makes 250k more for each nurse? The US has silly expensive healthcare, and the workers might as well gain some benefits

Wait until you find out what the typical Google L6 makes.

With that said I'm always skeptical of these numbers - you don't exactly see SFPD officers vacationing in Marakesh and flying first class, but that's typical for stripe new grads.

>What does an amazon union even look like?

There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts.

> How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms?

They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread.

>What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.

Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.

Agreed on europe.

In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here.

Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.

In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.

> Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.

Not really. If every Amazon warehouse organized, you would still need Walmart, Target, etc warehouse workers to organize to achieve something comparable. And in the U.S., they still wouldn’t have the same bargaining power because solidarity strikes and similar tactics are illegal. But I agree that labor laws are not deterministic, as the teacher strikes in red states have recently demonstrated.

We’ll also have to see what extent states will further block organizing activities if this starts gaining traction in places like Alabama. Given things like the extremely violent police response to protests, I’d wager “pretty far.”

Similar, not identical. For example, the amount of goods sold by amazon or people employed might be a lot larger than many national sectors of many such-unionaised european nations. So similar, or much larger scale.

Not gonna look up the actual figures, but safe to assume that amazon US is bigger than all retail (certainly online retail) in the netherlands, belgium or whatnot.

Usually those who advocate unions now are the ones who would be on board with it in all its forms. So far too left to have success in today's Western politics. That's convenient for the people on the other side.

But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.

This is kind of what I meant by pendulum swing.

In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.

Union politics in the west in the post WWII period started looking more like guilds and less like the pre-WWII left wing unions that dominated the 20s and 30s. Those unions were far more concerned with broader social transformation than those that came after, who were primarily interested in protecting only their workers and locking down seniority-based privileges. Corruption and conservativism ran through the labour movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and led in many cases to anti-union sentiment from the people they were supposed to be organizing. It will take significant rebuilding and rethinking of what a union is before they can have broad resurgence. Organizing in individual workplaces and industries means little when the vast majority of workers are working odd hours in multiple service industry jobs among several employers.

I think the biggest thing working against unionization is automation. At some point it just becomes cheaper to use software and robots.

Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage.

My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks.

Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.

So... two points.

One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions.

Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living.

Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers.

There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.

> Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages."

They basically are. They negotiate the minimum benefits the company can offer for a particular set of workers, which includes benefits and salary, ie. total wages.

> One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization.

True, but it is hastened by unionization. Automation always has a cost involved. Sometimes it's worth the cost, and sometimes it's not based on the cost of the human labor that is being replaced. If the cost of the human labor goes up for any reason (such as unionization) then the cost of automation looks more attractive.

>>it is hastened by unionization

True in a technical sense, but misses the point. Sure, there's technically a price point at which automation is "worth it." If labour costs more, demand for labour is lower. That might be because of automation, or any of many ways that demand reacts to price: efficiency, decreased production, increased capital expenditure, outsourcing, whatever.

So really, the true generality is not that "the biggest thing working against unionization is automation." The biggest thing working against labour is wages. Higher wages, less demand for labour. This is also true about anything, not just labour and it's somewhat banal. If cornflakes or netflix cost more, people will buy less. That doesn't mean you always have to price to lose money as a business. Same for labour/unions.

In any case, the bigger point is that if some job is almost "worth automating" at minimum, market or union wage... That's not worth defending. It will probably be automated soon anyway, and there's little to gain by defending it.

>> Unions are about minimum wages.

This is very far from true. For one thing, most people don't earn minimum wage. Most union workers don't. No one wants to. In fact, neglecting the lowest rungs is a habitual mistake of unions.

Starting from the premise that unions are about minimum wages misses most of why the current amazon stuff is even interesting. Depending on what kind of union(s) they form (getting back to my original point) unionisation could mean a pretty wide range of outcomes. Amazon has a big pay scale. There's nothing to say that unionisation means nothing for those at the $200k point on that scale.

The basic premise of an amazon union is (1) amazon is very profitable (2) Negotiation power/leverage is always relative to the size of the pie. A union is what you negotiate with, profit is what you negotiate for.

Bluntly, amazon have $100bn in profits and 1 million employees = $100k per employee. Rarely has a plumper prize been seen on the horizon.

I didn't say the union was about minimum wage. I said it was about minimum wages. ie. What is the lowest you can pay a specific worker. For example, the actor's labor union has set the minimum pay at $750 a day. That's far more than the legal minimum wage, but it is the lowest a movie studio is allowed to pay an actor.

Therefore they have now negotiated the minimum wage for an actor. It's still higher than the legal minimum wage, but it's still a minimum wage. The studio would pay less if they could.

That's what unions are all about. Setting the minimum compensation for a particular worker.

I think this is the right time.

Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees.

I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.

Another way of thinking of it might be "good times." Industrial unions had their success decades when the sector was growing fast. It's always easier negotiating a growing pie.

Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more.

That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.

Let’s not forget: Bar associations (law). American Medical Association (MDs).

Bar associations are licensors that act as an ethical constraint and competence check on lawyers — and being kicked out of one (being disbarred) has direct impacts. The AMA is more of a professional organization — it publishes materials relevant to the profession (JAMA) and advocates and lobbies on behalf of medical professionals, but it doesn’t issue licenses or doctorates.

That used to be the role a union played as well. Before unions got all corrupt and self-serving, there used to be a better than market guarantee of quality and conduct when hiring union labor. Unions would train and discipline their members to meet the standards promised to the employer. That's why they were able to command better pay and benefits.

The last 40 years have seen information asymmetry decline like in no other era. Until now, that mostly benefited the rich. Workers are just catching up on the same phenomenon that led to the new Gilded Age.

I hope we can avoid massacres this time.

Amazon has already hired the Pinkertons, so that's not a foregone conclusion. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...

Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

Come on now. The Homestead strike involved a firefight between the union and strike-breakers. Do you really think that's a plausible outcome of Amazon's anti-union efforts?

Asking questions like that in 2020 is cursed, why invite the devil inside?

Look at what the cops did to protestors throughout the past year. What makes you think they wouldn’t do the same in the context of labor unrest?

It's not pure science, but Always an interesting read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...

I think that’s true. But I fear the swing back is going to be cut short if unions stick to the current strategy of a unified front between public and private unions. My rough impression is that public opinion is swinging in favor of private unions and against public unions. I’m already hearing liberals get grumbly over rising taxes and declining services due to unsustainable public employee benefits, and that situation is going to get much worse before it gets better.

And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...

The evidence you're presenting that federal public sector unions writ-large joined the "resistance" is pretty thin.

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