Can someone who works/worked one of these jobs please explain it to me? I am so confused by how lopsided this was.
It also established more rigid pay levels that were better on average but not as good for high performers, and I always got much higher than average raises and bonuses.
To a lesser extent, I didn’t like the idea of union leadership who were paid for things I didn’t think added value.
So my overall take was that it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
This is my fundamental problem with unions—it helps the insiders and hurts everyone else.
Amazon’s working condition are rough (and I really hope that changes), but there are plenty of jobs out there that are much worse and don’t pay nearly as well. They just get all the attention because of their size and impact.
The closer (figuratively speaking) to the big money and political power someone is the more comfortable they are.
And we all want to believe it’s a meritocracy. We’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Labor is subject to markets like many things, and shouldn’t be exploited. But there’s some work that’s hard and doesn’t require specialized training (eg, hauling stuff around warehouses all day). Some people are willing to do this and they do, if they don’t want to they can do other things.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but having the ability to provide more jobs with more options is the solution I think.
I grew up in a small town and it sucks for work. If you think working for Amazon sucks, you should try working in the warehouse of the only grocery store in town. The one run by a racist jerk who knows you have no options.
The current state is optimal for Amazon only. It's far from optimal for society.
It’s easy for you to theorize what Amazon can do and what they can’t. Amazon has competitors with warehouses. People can work there.
As consumers we can also demand more. But Amazon is probably the best for workers when compared to their competitors.
Secondly, what is low skill exactly? Can these people not read, write, use Excel and email, could they not do secretarial and other jobs? I bet quite a few of them have degrees. Some countries have free education / upskilling specifically to avoid people getting trapped in this situation, and to improve overall productivity of the economy.
By unskilled I mean that you can be trained on the job in less than a day. It doesn’t mean that the workers don’t have degrees and skills, it just means the job doesn’t require anything. By all means, they can certainly take other jobs but good luck finding a secretarial job for $15/hour.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has a lot of info on how they classify “low skill” jobs [0] and even tracks overqualified workers who have more skills but work in jobs that require fewer skills.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/wage-and-job-skill...
Amazing. Surely because “that’s how it worked in the past” isn’t the only option for social organization?
Why not stop believing in Bezos and solve our human problems generally?
Why not a mandate to provide education and healthcare and we provide THOSE jobs?
Because Bezos and Musk are able to get real access to politicians, resulting in the rubes being fed fiscal economic policy that continues to protect them.
The circular logic is mesmerizing.
"helps insiders and hurts everyone else" sounds bad, but if the insiders are being exploited by everyone else, it could be a good thing.
In general I'm sympathetic to your point. However I think Amazon is perhaps a special case, or at least occupies a different point on the than most companies.
Amazon is an Aggregator[1], which spins up its flywheel by providing a great experience for consumers, and commoditizing its suppliers. This naturally drives towards a monopoly.
Aggregator monopolies have an interesting property in that unlike historical non-Aggregator monopolies, they are great for consumers, rather than resulting in consumer harm through higher prices (like Comcast, say). US antitrust law is focused on preventing consumer harm, not just preserving competition for its own sake (as the EU laws are). So US antitrust is somewhat less well-equipped to deal with Aggregator monopolies.
If the corporation, consumers, and legal system are all pointing towards exploiting a group of workers, it's hard to see how anyone is going to vote to make things better. So unions could be more appropriate specifically in the case of Aggregators.
(Worth mentioning that you could perhaps just mandate higher minimum wages, and avoid the need for unions; I'd prefer to make the minimum viable change that prevents exploitation, and leave the market free to optimize everything else. But if not unions, who drives the political fight for minimum wages?)
All this mess devalues the manufacturers willing to produce quality items, they are lost in the noise and never make money.
The meme "Amazon is a dumpster fire of counterfeit goods and fake reviews" is popular around here, but I don't think it has much impact/traction with John/Jane MainStreet.
Maybe it would if it was better-known? But I think if folks found counterfeit goods or fake reviews to be a huge problem they would go back to Debenhams/Walmart. But by revealed preferences, we can tell they prefer the value prop of Amazon.
Misesean analysis showed that unions cannot benefit everyone, they always benefit the sr workers at the expense of the jr workers.
I wouldn’t say it was a good job and I certainly don’t do it any more. But I just tried to explain my thinking.
I was one of the few High School employees they had that was reliable and always did what I was asked, this enabled me to get not only higher wages but ever increasing job titles
A good one seems to be that they are afraid unionizing will push Amazon to close the delivery center. This has happened before when other companies (see Walmart [0]) just closed the location once the workers voted to unionize. And unfortunately it's less likely US law will protect the workers to the same degree as Canadian law [1].
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wal-mart-to-close-unionized...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-unionized-wal...
>To a lesser extent, I didn’t like the idea of union leadership who were paid for things I didn’t think added value.
Can you expand on this point, please?
>So my overall take was that it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
That makes a ton of sense.
It may not be rational as maybe they did great stuff and I couldn’t see their value, but I would see them get high salaries compared to workers and serve in positions for very long terms.
The answer is in the article
> Some workers who voted not to unionize said they ultimately didn’t see how a union would improve their pay or working conditions.
They looked at the issue and felt it would not be better. We don't know what the union was promising them, and what they had seen through the process.
I came here to find this comment because the "vote against their interest" argument is very predictable. It assumes that people should have no agency. That they're supposed to be robots that only vote one way on issues because of their demographic, and if they don't, then they must have been hoodwinked. It's condescending.
Look, I get the good intentions on all the discourse about not judging what's in another person's interests because you can't possibly know what they value, but it sure seems indisputable to me that a union would've delivered better pay and working conditions. I'm not sure in what warped universe voting against that isn't a vote against your interests and I don't think it's at all disrespectful to say they were victims of propaganda to get them to vote against their interests because when I look at the facts, that's what I see.
Regardless, it's a decent argument for a nationwide union to avoid race to the bottom effects.
Not if Amazon thought swift action would act as a deterrent in other locations. This specific thing has happened with other companies, so I don't think it's unlikely at all.
> Regardless, it's a decent argument for a nationwide union to avoid race to the bottom effects.
OK, but the question is whether these specific workers could possibly have any reason to vote against unionization. Maybe they don't find it plausible that a nationwide union will form, or maybe they don't want to deal with the interim turmoil that will befall them personally, even if they would support a nationwide effort. All seem like perfectly fine reasons to me.
It's not a 'logical fallacy' to not want to risk disruption of your livelihood, and that's the only relevant question to this thread: is there any set of facts that would reasonably lead the workers to vote against unionization? I think clearly there is, and there's no point arguing over subjective prioritizations. The workers are not 'irrational' for prioritizing their own jobs over the 'national action' that you seem to want. They may even consider that harmful. Not all workers have the same political opinions.
I don’t see how a propaganda campaign can push the vote to 70%, this is not Soviet Russia. Money does help but not on this order of magnitude (see Mike Bloomberg or many failed ballot propositions with tons of money behind them).
Pro-union people have a lot of work to do to restore the reputation of unions more generally. We need to up our propaganda game a lot because we got crushed in the Reagan era and never recovered.
Why can't you just leave them alone?
The unions asked them if they wanted to unionise. They said 'no thanks'. Why isn't that enough for you? If you support workers' right to have a voice then listen to them when they use it. Some individuals are even quoted in the article - they want the unions to leave them in peace!
I don't know your life experiences but I think you've got a funny idea that unions are some kind of perfect good descended from heaven? In reality in most cases unions come with a lot of unpleasant people and politics and aggravation. The workers are already seeing that aggravation with all this unwanted attention. That's one extra problem than they had before, and they don't have any confidence the union will reduce any problems they already had. And the union wants to be paid hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege! What a joke and no wonder people are hostile. I bet people are going to be even more hostile at the next factory these unions turn up at.
From the workers' perspective, there is an endless supply of people who will offer to take their money or the little power they have in return for supposedly 'fighting to improve their lives'.
Most of them do not really share your interests, and many are actively trying to trick you to use your money and power for themselves.
See for example the majority of politicians.
So far this union has uninvitedly hassled these workers for months, and then reacted angrily when they said 'no thanks' in a vote, so I can understand the workers are not buying now even if they were considering it before!
Not all of them will be able to deliver.
Not all of them were genuinely interested in you or your problems in the first place.
But, collective bargaining is only a single aspect of unions. They're not voting against it because they dislike collective bargaining, but because of other reasons. Collective bargaining is likely not a significant motivator for them because their salaries really are fairly high for the area.
I think in many cases unions are good, and in many others they are bad. I disagree that you can point at overall data and use that decide a specific case. Union data likely has severe survivorship bias, since unions likely tend to exist where they are more helpful.
I don't think its as clear cut as "in your interest". I certainly wouldn't vote to unionize my profession and I would even go as far as avoiding unionized fields. I prefer to have a direct relationship with my employer. I stay away from organizations that have a table that will tell you how much you'll make after N years. It's just not a dynamic place to work. Or at least that's my impression when dealing with unionized groups in large banks.
I don't think that's necessarily a characteristic of a union shop and if it is, those are probably minimums.
For example, professional baseball players and are unionized yet individuals can still negotiate salary.
It would more likely be something akin to a teacher union, with teaching being in between performance athletes and uniform workers. And even there I don't think individual teachers have much power to negotiate salary, but I could be wrong.
Unionizing can make sense for other types of jobs as well. The person I responded to mentioned their preference for having a direct relationship with an employer. To me, that means other types of places than warehouses because I doubt very much that many warehouse workers have a relationship with anybody above their direct supervisor.
A warehouse employee is not likely to have any kind of relationship with anybody above their supervisor. They can only bargain collectively.
McDonald's Mr. Floersch the managerial turnover was at 20% globally while that of the crew members averaged between 80 percent and 90 percent. [0]
That high turnover means that low paid employees are much faster to leave. Some don't even show up to their first day of work. It's also selection bias sure. But if you talk to anyone who manages low paid employees, the primary skill set they have is interpersonal relationships with their staff, or at least the good ones. The fixed costs are very high to hire someone, regardless of salary. You have to pay a recruiter or even spend time looking through resumes, running expensive background checks, interviewing etc.
Now consider the Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst. They get paid extremely well and get treated like crap. Do they have a "direct relationship with their employer"? Hardly.
If you're making $10 an hour its a lot easier to find another employer paying you a similar amount than it is if you're making $200k a year.
[0] https://ukdiss.com/examples/high-employee-turnover-at-mcdona...
Hell, I used to be a dishwasher then line cook at a Friendly's (east coast family restaurant, primary PA/NJ/NY/CT/MA) for two years and by the time I left for college I was the most senior person there who didn't have a key to open the building. And two of the three cooks who had keys were still in school, one HS and one college.
Managing a restaurant is super demanding work but it's not that far off from median salary. It's not as much of a dead end as people think it is, especially if you start at the bottom and work up.
It's because unions in America cannot guarantee the existence of the job. Yes, unions can force negotiations but they have no power to force the corporation to keep the factory open. (E.g. workers of Bakers union go on strike and in response, Hostess closes the factory.)
That's the tradeoff of possible negative consequences that many armchair observers totally leave out when they only emphasize benefits of unions such as "higher pay, better work conditions, etc".
I'd contend that observers who are confused why workers would "vote against their self-interest" and being "illogical" -- do not truly empathize with the poor workers' plight. (Or the observers are from Europe where unions work differently than America.)
So the workers (Volkswagen workers in TN, Nissan in TN, Boeing in SC) that voted to reject union representation weighed the game theory tradeoffs of:
(a) jobs continue to exist with better pay and conditions
... or ...
(b) jobs are eliminated leading to layoffs and pay of $0
The possible outcome of (b) becomes even more perverse in that the workers pay dues to have their jobs eliminated!
Yes, but if workers don't form a union -- "it's a race to the bottom!". Well, repeating memes is the currency of pundits rather than real cash that puts food on the table. Workers, understandably, make local decisions because they want a paycheck rather than worry about some global abstraction of "race to the bottom".
Other fields such as NFL, NBA, superstars have leverage in union negotiations. Faceless workers have much less leverage. E.g. baseball umpires (faceless and less leverage) strike but the MLB just accepts their resignations and hires replacements. The unskilled line workers in factories have even less leverage.
Isn't that a problem?
Should Amazon be prevented from closing the factory? For how long? Do they have to send as much product there as they did before? Can they open a non-union warehouse in Columbus, MS less than two hours away? Any temporary/sunsetting requirements just get factored in to the new math of how much a union would cost them. So maybe you buy the workers six months but the same thing happens. So if you actually want to "fix" things (again, from the assumed standpoint that shutting down the factory is a Bad Thing) the requirement has to be permanent. So is the requirement then that Amazon has to keep this one warehouse open in perpetuity just because its unionized? What if Amazon goes bankrupt? What if Amazon sells its fulfillment and shipping components to another company? What if that company buys everything except this one warehouse?
The argument of "they shouldn't be able to close the factory" falls apart pretty quickly when you think of how you would have to enforce it.
Maybe they are not sufficiently confident that the union will act in their interest?
Is that so crazy an idea?
If you're in favour of unions then I guess you're in favour of workers being able to have a say in how they work. And if they don't want to work with a union then I can't understand how you can rationally do anything but say 'ok thank you for saying, if that's what you want no problem we'll do it that way'.
It's a pretty simple calculus. When the company spends twice the yearly payroll of the entire place on preventing the lowest of low workers on the totem pole from forming a union, maybe the company isn't acting in their best interests.
But if that's what they say when asked what else should we do except honour that?
If you think it's absolutely inconceivable they could legitimately vote against it at all... I mean then why have a vote at all? Might as well unionise them by force against their will and impose the union leaders as unelected and unwelcome representatives? That'll empower 'em, right?
(Throwaway because being anti-union is unfortunately taboo)
Digging a two mile tunnel eats half of the state budget? Police refuses to wear body cams? Schools are slow to reopen after covid? Rightly or not, in many people's minds unions are to blame.
Are you talking hypotheticals? Because that hasn't happened, and couldn't have happened since COVID isn't "over" anywhere in the US.
If you were a contractor to a state and you scored a contract worth half the state's budget, would you consider that a success or a failure?
You would consider it a success! The examples you give show exactly how unions work in the self-interest of their members. If the tunnel costs half the state's budget, the tunnel workers are surely well-paid, police officers rather not wear body cams so that they can whack people with their batons without being prosecuted, and teachers rather not return to schools as long as the epidemic is ongoing.
The whole "voting against your own interest" is hugely paternalistic and anti-democratic. People have their own set of values and interests. As an outsider without knowledge of the people to accuse them of voting against their own interest because they did not vote the way you wanted them to is the height of arrogance.
Personally, I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions. It was always the people who only talked, read and wrote about workers that were flabbergasted. Source: worked as a consultant for a union in Europe for a decade.
That's why I asked for someone with direct experience to comment. I am confused, based on my own viewpoint and experience with unions.
>I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions.
I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. What is workers? Who are workers? What group of people would you consider workers? I've been part of two unions, both of which benefited me, personally, immensely. These were knowledge jobs and not hands-on jobs. Am I a worker? My father is very blue-collar manufacturing and he has been both anti- and pro-union, depending on which shop he worked for. Is he a worker?
I don't understand what you're saying. Honestly. It sounds like you're the font of some mystical knowledge about a mythical group of people. What do you mean by your statement? I don't get it.
Workers are people who work in the rougher jobs, blue collar if that's what you prefer. White collar unions are very different in my opinion.
My experience is this: I've worked with people who were workers and then transitioned to working for the union, either because they were natural organizers, or because they had accidents that made it hard to work their job (a surprising amount of them had lost a finger or two). When they spoke about these kinds of things, like votes or organization rates, they were quick to give plenty of reasons why their colleagues would make some decision because they knew all the arguments and feelings.
The other type I met at the union was college educated, usually political science, spoke a lot of class consciousness and collective interests and had never worked the jobs the union represented. When you talked to them, they didn't understand why workers made some choice, it was always some nicely worded version of "they're not smart enough to make the right choice" or "somebody fed them lies".
I didn't intend to be arrogant at all, I am legitimately confused. The two jobs that I was in a union, the union was massively beneficial to my life. That is where my perspective came from.
Just because the union was beneficial does not mean it was better to have it around than not to. You only experienced one side of the coin in those situations.
I know it is just my experience, so it's very anecdotal evidence at best. And that was my point - that is my experience, which is why I'm confused by the massive vote against unionization. I, personally, do not understand it and would like to.
It's a result of how unions are structured in the US. (It's different in Europe from what I understand, and they're more popular there as a result.) In the US unions are structured as a monopoly on labor which then nominally has more negotiating power with the employer.
The problem is that monopolies are inherently an industrial scale fail factory and everything about them makes everything worse.
You then have effectively two possibilities.
The first is that the employer is competing with a hundred other local employers for labor. In this case there isn't really anything for the union to do, because the employer will already have to offer competitive working conditions or employees will go work for somebody else. And the employer in a competitive market won't have thick margins for the union to extract from, implying that the union's overhead will be larger than what they can extract from the employer.
The second is that the employer is, itself, a monopoly. In theory it now has thick margins that the union can extract concessions out of. But then you have two monopolies negotiating with each other. It's a battle of attrition. Can the employer afford to have their facility closed for longer than you can afford to be on strike? You know the answer to this is for large multinational corporations. The corporation will barely even notice the complete shuttering of that facility because they have a thousand more to pick up the slack.
A monopsony employer is still a big problem, of course, it's just not a problem that unions are a solution to. Try antitrust, or lower regulatory barriers to small businesses so that there are more competing local employers etc.
I like your comment, but unions aren't necessarily meant to solve this problem. Amazon imposes terrible working conditions on its warehouse workers, which a union absolutely could address.
How? The union's negotiating power comes from the ability to go on strike. They make a demand, Amazon says no, they go on strike, Amazon closes that warehouse and sends people their cheap junk from a different one.
All the union can get you is the unemployment line, unless you do something to increase local competition for labor. In which case you don't need the union because employers have to compete through better working conditions.
However, I absolutely understand the need, and feel sorry for those stuck in a sitation where union type help is needed. If there was a way to wipe out existing unions and start fresh where nobody from leadership of exisiting unions were allowed to have influence, then maybe just maybe I would start leaning towards unions. But at the current implementation, it's a nope from me.
If you do have elections, then your comment is akin to a republican proclaiming that democracy doesn’t work, but would work in principle but only of the current leadership was replace with Donal Trump.
So does Iran, Russia, etc. Do you feel like those elections are free and fair? I don't feel like union leadership votes are. Again, there's a lot of baggage associated with current unions. New unions are needed, not new leadership of existing unions.
Union execs become a bunch of corrupt fat cats. They are terrible [1][2][3]. The union execs will go on fancy dinners with amazon execs and decide how to "make a deal". You pay dues to a bunch of fat cats (out of your horrible salary), THEN, good luck getting any kind of promotion without fat cat approval. Promotions will quickly be based on seniority. Production will soon slow then the company will decide to shut down these unproductive plants. Read about "flint michigan" to learn how awesome unions are in the US.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/promi...
https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/
https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio...
Maybe work-life at Amazon low end is not as bad as the media sensationlizes. Why should it be your default to consider this as paradoxical rather than evidence?
And at the end of the day, the workers just weren't particularly unhappy, and those weren't palatable risks.
The union takes money out of your pocket, reduces your ability to get paid for performance, and slows the firm's ability to innovate.
If the firm mistreats you, you can leave.
I repeatedly voted against unionization in previous lives of blue collar jobs: bus building, commercial roofing, and sheet metal workers.
First, Union leadership is bought out and pursuing their own interests. They're not "for the people" as repeatedly braindeadly repeated in the comments section ad infinitum. Union leadership is out to benefit themselves first and foremost, and workers might benefit if you contribute to their cause, but it's a fantasy to pretend union leadership has everyone's best intentions in mind.
Inevitably, this leads to the second, which is escalation of costs at the company. This is only partially wages; business decisions get delayed at committee, competitive advantage on market timing goes away, old-timey boomers get mad when something changes, and your company's innovation becomes stagnate. Your company falls behind and wages stagnate, and union leadership blames literally everyone except for themselves.
Finally, the benefits are stupid for the price you pay. If they were measured on charity navigator, they would be listed as some of the worst run. The money gets funneled into union leadership pockets and their golf buddies. Nepotism runs wild; promotions got to whomever is slapping whom's ass or giving it out to their kid. It's a "tax" you can't vote yourself out of except to quit your job.
Advantage: Amazon
You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest, this is simply false
The union has supplanted individual choice for collective voting, and if your interests align with 50.1% of your fellow co workers than great but if your needs to not align with the majority of your co-workers then the union will screw you to serve the collective, and that is the best case.
No, and that is a pretty far stretch from what I said. Please re-read "your own collective interest". It's easy to win an argument when you misrepresent what is said. Collective interest implies that it is the greatest good for the majority of people. Not the most good for you every time.
Question for you:
>I absolutely do not understand why someone would vote to be collectively represented instead of being able to act as as individual in your own best interest
Do you really not see how it may be easier to negotiate as a group, rather than as an individual? In high-skill, high-demand jobs, yes, it is probably much easier to negotiate for individual benefits, because you have the power as the worker. But in low-skill, or high-supply jobs, the employers have all the power. I don't understand what you're saying.
Further good employees, even in low skill jobs, are very hard to find and even harder to retain. employers want to keep them, unionization often limits their ability to retain these high performing employees because they are not allowed to give bonus, raise or any other incentive beyond what is laid out by collective bargaining.
So I really do not see how it is easier to negotiate as a group. my personal experiences matches what have have observed in employment rations through out my career from when I was in a entry level position to now where I am in a higher skilled position
I grabbed a position at a Minnesota warehouse as a post-college graduate with no fulltime job. Kinda just wandered in off some job posting online and they just brought me on.
Feels like people just don't want to mess with a good thing tho? A lot of my friends came from super different walks of life, but almost all unanimously enjoyed coming in for shifts and shooting the shit with their friends. Might just be a perception that change means that things will get worse and no one wants that.
ZipRecruiter shows the average in all states as under $15 [0] so an Amazon worker will likely make more than a worker in other warehouses.
Doesn’t mean that they are rolling in the money, but makes me think higher wages is probably not a motivating factor for unionization.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Wa...
Warehouses are frequently in rural settings and $15 isn’t so bad. I have friends who are doing ok on $12/hour but they only have $300 rent and really low expenses. Rural America doesn’t have many upsides, but being cheap is one.
And my point wasn’t that Amazon was wonderful, just that it pays more than the alternative since the average pay is much lower ($11 vs $15 I think) at other companies.
So then what's worse: $11 an hour at a job you can work indefinitely, or $15 an hour at a job where your body will eventually fail and you may be left with a permanent injury which Amazon will not help you with?
https://coloradosun.com/2020/09/29/amazon-safety-crisis-thor...
I think people can make that decision when they choose to work for orgs.
I’d like to see info on how long warehouse workers last in the job.
But Amazon does provide disability insurance [0] beyond social security, so they do help with permanent injury for all their workers. If it’s on the job there’s also worker’s comp.
[0] https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us
Not a lot of money, but what else to expect from the job that requires minimum skills and no education?
Amazon workers make more than other non-unionized warehouses in the area, but they still make less than unionized warehouses. For example Piggly Wiggly warehouses make $20/hr on top of having vacation days and medical benefits.
Edit: I would be very enthusiastic about a union that stuck to just labor issues, no unrelated issues.
Ignorance of their own reasoning is rooted in the presupposition that the union was in their best interest and the dues were worth it. Obviously, the employees in this case did not agree it was in their interest. People think differently than others and that is OK.
Plus, if unionization makes its way to every Amazon warehouse, then everyone will compete on equal footing vis-a-vis wages.
As to right-to-work itself, yes it does sound very odd on the face of it, and that's because the way unions have been institutionalized is quite odd. It's a very peculiar legal framework, divorced from the "situation on the ground". I recommend https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/uaw-academic-workers-coll... https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/eidlin-united-states-cana... for some background.
Now, one school of thought is "these are the tools we have, use them" another school of thought is "this is self-defeating weirdness", I am not sure. But it certainly isn't so clear cut that "of course right-to-work" is bad. Regardless of everything else, it was an anti-labor cudgel created in bad faith. Any solution that finds union compulsion icky but doesn't do something about the monopsony power of employers is not to be taken seriously.
I'm positive that education was strongly correlated with voting in favor of unionization. This is something the left everywhere struggles with enormously. When poor people are too dumb to vote according to their own self-interest, the left's worldview falls down. The left then claims that poor people are brainwashed by capitalist propaganda. Yeah, maybe, but it can't explain completely disastrous results like this unionization vote.
Misguided people will claim that unionization is not in the self-interest of most workers. Those people are wrong as there are about a billion studies showing that unionization improves both salaries and working conditions. For example: https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/ The science is incredibly clear-cut and these workers who voted against unionization voted against their own self-interest.
The arguments in favor are certain. There's is no mention of downsides; the only talk is of more money and more security with at most a mention that some dues will need to be paid (though on balance the worker will come out ahead).
Microeconomics argument: The only meaningful way unions increase employees wages is by artificially restricting supply. They can only move the point of equilibrium of demand and supply in their favor by restricting supply, thus unions always have in their interests on: increase minimum wages, licensing, closed shops, etc.
Political Economy argument: What is most interesting for unions is to survive as unions, which means that even if sometimes they are adversarial with employers, they are often allies to the structure. This is because at the negotiation table between unions and employers there are some actors missing, namely, the consumer.
Political argument: Unions exhert force only by destruction: by refusing to work, by boycotting, by collecting administration fees to maintain its structure. The proliferation of unions is the proliferation of destruction. Giving special legal status, protections, considerations, rewards to unions, you are proliferating unions and proliferating destruction.
The good economists also sees what is unseen.
There was some great video floating around recently of a forklift operator or something who explained what his union dues got him and he was so informed and unphased by the dues he was paying.
But if the Amazon workers are in that situation then we would need to expand this conversation anyway.
The point remains: under normal income circumstances (i.e. not related to welfare or equity), there is no way for you to get a raise in your real income and have your take home income decrease due to your federal income tax bracket.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071114/can-moving-h...
That said, you are unlikely to be eligible for these benefits at all if you are a full-time warehouse employee. They are aimed mostly at those in genuine poverty.
> "...Most of the folks who vote aren't really the type to sit down and think long-term..."
Why do people call others dumb (and let's not kid ourselves, that's just what these phrases are a cultured, genteel way of saying) and then are surprised when said others don't vote for the causes they believe in?
Don't they realize that casting aspersions on the intelligence of others to their faces is "against their own collective interest"? If you want people to vote for your causes, work harder to prove that it benefits them instead of denigrating them.
Most of these workers slave for long hours. And then they work another job on top of it. And then they wonder why they STILL aren't making enough to pay TODAY's bills. Their mindset is myopic because they live paycheck to paycheck. You tell them they're losing MORE money out of each paycheck, that suddenly makes them worry exponentially more.
I'm friends with people living this dilemma monthly. They don't have the luxury to think what the long-term return on investment is.
And to say they're under-educated isn't calling them dumb. The ones I know are high school dropouts/graduates only. High school doesn't teach you personal finance the way a finance course at a college might introduce you to it. It's just statistical correlation.
How does calling people dumb affect the way they vote? In fact, if me and others calling people who vote against unionization dumb makes them more likely to vote against unionization, it clearly means that they are not primarily considering their self-interest, since whatever I and other leftists say or think is completely irrelevant.
If I say "you're an idiot for voting for Trump" and that makes you more likely to vote for Trump, then, I'm sorry to say, you proved my point.