Amazon union election should be run again, labor board official says
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What if those workers who wanted to join a union did so, and the union collectively bargained on their behalf. Those who did not want to join could continue to negotiate with their employer on a 1-1 basis. This outcome is also more efficient for the employer since some % of the workforce is choosing to work through a single representative, lightening the load for HR.
Shareholders in a business can associate freely and vote as a bloc if so inclined, so I see no reason why workers should not do the same. For that matter, I often think unions would have an increased bargaining position by holding one share of stock per represented worker.
The existing approach is clearly not working that well (as evidenced by plummeting union membership over the years, and the use of tactics by employers to influence union elections) so perhaps it's time to try a different approach.
What does that mean? Are you proposing that employers cannot say no to any proposal put forth by the union representative? If yes, that seems rediculously over powered on the union side. If no, i don't see how it helps the situation.
I think this union trope of 'the boss needs us, we don't need a boss' is silly and childish. Not that people need to be bossed around, but that people obviously need employers in the sense that they provide capital and organization to some extent (I'll revisit this below). Otherwise you could just get a bunch of workers together in an empty lot and bang, functioning business.
A business starts because someone has an idea and invests or obtains (by loan or outside investor) some capital. If the capital is provided by an investor, they're taking some risk that the business might fail and lose money. In many contexts this can lead to fair outcomes, eg I enjoy and am good at making lemonade, you have $100 doing nothing so we team up and I spend the $100 on a table, sign, glassware, and some ingredients to run a lemonade stand. We take in a few hundred $ and split the money evenly, everyone wins.
Now I can either buy out the table, sign, glassware (ie return your original investment and own the lemonade stand outright), or you might decide to put in more money and make a bigger stand, or open a second one a few blocks away. I always have the buyout option because now that I have some money, I could just go and buy new materials if you didn't want to do that. You'd then be left with the original lemonade stand, but you are no good at or don't like making and selling lemonade so it's probably a better deal to sell them to me.
If we open a new lemonade stand elsewhere, we're gonna need someone to run it. At this point I need to hire workers. They're going to be doing the same work of selling the lemonade as I am, but maybe the production of the lemonade will be centralized in a kitchen. Even if not, I still have to train them in everything about running the lemonade stand, and now that I'm an employer, I have some administration work to do for each employee. So, how much should I pay the lemonade stand worker, given the work that I do on top of theirs?
What I'm getting at here is that investors bosses don't just bully and exploit employees, although many definitely do. Investors provide capital, and this is valuable, ie deserving of some reward in return for their risk. I think investment turns into 'capitalism' when the investors get swelled heads and start to argue that their contribution is the only one that matters and therefore they should get all the profits of investing in a business. Bosses can often be the people who come up with an idea and do the work of getting it off the ground (perhaps failing repeatedly), plus they provide organization and take care of administration. Again, if they decide that this is the only part of the business that matters it's easy for them to become greedy and that's bad. Workers provide labor to perform a job that's already defined but which is too much for one person to start, and many workers then have ideas for how to improve or expand the business. If workers get too carried away with their own greatness, they begin thinking they brought the business into existence, which they usually didn't.
What I'm getting at here is that you can have healthy relationships where different parties in a business recognize each others' valuable contributions, and then share out profits accordingly. The most ideal form of this is a co-op or worker-owned business, where every new worker has the opportunity to buy into the coop and can then take on some of the administration and management overhead as they see fit, ie every worker is also a shareholder and/or a manager.
I'm big on coops, and to my mind the larger a business is the more likely it can be run on a cooperative basis. But It hink this requires a different model of business as a system with inputs and growth patterns that goes through a few different phase transitions, as opposed to the simplistic model of workers v bosses. It's not that bosses don't exist and create adversarial situations with the workforce, that absolutely happens. I'm arguing it's just one possible direction business can go in, and if we want businesses to go in different and more equitable/sustainable directions, we need to look past the dysfunctional model as if it were the only game in town.
In a normal situation if both sides can't come to an agreement both sides part ways. What does a negotiation where one side can't be fired (and hence the other side cannot walk away) look like?
It looks irrelevant, because what I proposed was that people couldn't be fired just for joining a union/delegating their bargaining rights, which is something people were saying would pre-empt even the possibility of negotiation or collective bargaining.
Most negotiations are going to employ more reasonable positions on both sides (eg likely within one or two standard deviations from median wages) because good faith negotiations involve a degree of mutuality. If one side is being unreasonable then external mediation or a grievance process might arise.
I am not claiming that my proposal is the perfect solution for all situations and has no failure points. I don't really appreciate your use of maximal edge cases to break it like it was a theorem assertion. That just seems like you're more interested in negating the idea than exploring it.
I'm not saying it fails in edge cases, i'm saying it fails in every case.
There's two possibilities:
A) the employer acts in good faith.
In which case, why would you need this? Firing someone for unionizing is the ultimate example of acting in bad faith, so if they are acting in good faith, no problem to solve.
B) the employer acts in bad faith. We're assuming the employer wants to fire the employee - why would they be reasonable? The rational thing to do would be to be unreasonable until the employee walks away.
I'm not saying that a solution has to fix everything, but it should fix something in some reasonable scenario where parties are behaving towards their interests. Otherwise we might as well simplify it to: instead of unions, employers should just stop exploiting their employees.
I'm proposing a change to the law and you're arguing it won't work even though I'm including legal language to forbid the specific abuse you describe.
Weakening collective bargaining isn't a solution to low unionization.
It depends. When a union renounces its revolutionary ideals and becomes a pawn of the bosses, then it's really counter-productive. For example in France, the CFDT and CGT used to be pretty radical, but nowadays despite some local section still practicing sabotage, nation-wide these two unions are pretty reactionary and will want to peacefully talk to the boss about getting slightly better improvements, instead of organizing workers with the explicit goal of the social revolution and self-organization of all aspects of life.
How could an anarchist union (see Émile Pouget for example, about the history of the CGT TV won't tell you about) become a counter-revolutionary force whose security service is well-known (and documented) to attack undocumented folks and other protesters in demonstrations, siding with the cops against the people?!
Back to the point, yes i believe diversity is useful for unions, though not competition. If only, because when your union turns bad you're free to make your own.
These are not unions per se, but partly cover the same role (discuss and negotiate on behalf of individual employees) and there is no opting out of that representation.
First, because the boss has no idea whether you're gonna join an union before you're actually employed, unless you tell them to their face. Second, because having a single major union goes against workers best interests by adding gatekeepers (the union leaders) who have interests in keeping the status quo and putting away proposals deemed too radical.
Second, because it's a useful construct to demonize unions. As you can see here on HN, lots of people in the US (i don't think this is true elsewhere) have examples of stupid union-mandated rules that apply to everybody. As long as the boss makes the rules, we're all happy to be against the boss for their soulless management. But when stupid rules are proposed and enforced by the single union, it's very convenient to keep everyone divided and not looking at who's profiting from the situation.
All in all, the single union appears to be a manipulation by the bosses themselves, or by the more authoritarian stalinist components of the workforce, and i don't see any benefits to it. Maybe i'm being a bit conspirational about it, but it sounds really at odds with the history of unionism all across the planet, for example the IWW in the USA which was the biggest union for i reckon a few decades, promoting sabotage and expropriation of the bosses alongside workers self-organization.
Voting for some stuff can be useful, though. In France it's common for people as individuals to go on a strike, but when it's part of a more global social movement, "joining the general strike" is usually put to a vote, as a measurement of the workers agreeing that everything needs to change and production should be entirely halted, and the workplace blocked. But voting or having a majority should never prevent people to struggle for emancipation.
The main distinction is not whether membership of a union is required - closed shops is illegal both in the US (since the Taft-Hartley Act 1947) and in all countries bound by the European Court of Human Rights (which is basically every country eligible for Council of Europe membership apart from Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Vatican) - but whether or not non-members are required to pay dues towards a recognised union.
However, shareholders cannot opt-out of being represented by a slate of directors, and choose to interface with the company's management on a 1-1 basis. If a shareholder abstains from voting for directors, or if their preferred candidate(s) lose, they still get represented by the board that was voted-in by the majority.
The vast majority are not in that position.
> What if those workers who wanted to join a union did so, and the union collectively bargained on their behalf. Those who did not want to join could continue to negotiate with their employer on a 1-1 basis.
Then management would fire anyone who joined a union.
I present this thread as counter-evidence:
I didn't say all.
> are a rare class of workers
Apparently commonplace. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-many-jobs-signing-bonuses-o...
Always look at the dark side of life.
Next time you're offered one of those meaningless bonuses, just send it to me. I promise to enjoy it!
If you want to talk meaningfully about whether employees are in a strong or weak position relative to employers, look at the labour income share.
You've conceded it does have value to you, as you want something in return.
> If you want to talk meaningfully
I'm afraid it's not up to you to define meaningfully. People in a free market are paid according to the value they produce, not some average of what other people produce. Anyone paid less than that is in a stronger negotiating position than one who is paid more than that.
If you feel you are underpaid, take a good hard look at what value you are bringing to the business. If that's looking good, take that to your boss, show the evidence, and negotiate for a raise.
A signing bonus is significantly less valuable than salary; that signing bonuses are substituting for salary increases is a sign that employees are losing leverage in negotiations, i.e. the complete opposite of what you originally claimed.
> People in a free market are paid according to the value they produce
Indeed, and thus the fact that the labour income share is so much lower than it was 30-40 years ago is an indication that the current market is deeply distorted (e.g. by the famous "anti-poaching agreement", and no doubt more recent equivalents).
That depends on their relative magnitudes. Nevertheless, signing bonuses means workers have negotiating power.
> labour income share
Let's say you and Bob work for Evil Corp. Bob gets replaced by a robot that is twice as productive as Bob was. Your job hasn't changed. The overall productivity of Evil Corp has gone up because of the robot.
The robot makers and investors get the income share from the increased productivity of the robot.
Maybe they mean workers have nonzero negotiating power. But they don't mean that workers have more negotiating power than in the past.
> The robot makers and investors get the income share from the increased productivity of the robot.
If that income share went to the workers who made the robot, it would show up in the labour income share and the overall labour income share would stay high. (But what actually tends to happen is it gets captured by a rentier instead).
Then your counter-evidence doesn't prove anything.
No, then management would just not agree to contract terms, let people strike, and hire non-union replacements.
That is the reason for the voting process as an option to somewhat address a power imbalance.
> For that matter, I often think unions would have an increased bargaining position by holding one share of stock per represented worker.
Say what now? Usually the number of shares is much much greater than the number employees. What good does owning a miniscule part of the business do?
It is not necessary per se. Here in Czechia, you need just 3 employees to start a union and there can be multiple unions in the same company.
I just don't buy it.
1. The evidence seems to be based on the word of a single employee. If that's enough evidence to overturn an election, it will be hard to have one that isn't overturned.
2. The final total was 70-30. It would be impractical for Amazon to change the outcome because the size of the manipulation would have to be massive compared to the vote total, and would be easily detected.
3. It makes sense that the union lost the election because Amazon pays way above market in wages + benefits for the region. The union would be unlikely to have the leverage to increase compensation and might even be forced to take a cut, so it would be a hard sell to workers to pay dues.
If it’s shown they broke the rules (your point on 1 is fair), then they have to redo the election. If Amazon wins again, then fair’s fair.
"The labor board has the authority to invalidate election results in response to conduct that could have changed the outcome"
If a single amazon manager who wasn't eligible to vote submitted a single vote, it isn't reasonable to redo the whole election over that. You would be in a never-ending cycle of voting with each side finding tiny errors and demanding revotes.
I’d be curious how they decide whether or not any given bad acting potentially changed the outcome. I can certainly say that firing Union activists and monitoring voting activity would have a chilling effect, but proving the magnitude of that would be hard to do.
And yes, Trump didn’t prove anything. He’s just a sore loser.
As for this:
> The evidence seems to be based on the word of a single employee. If that's enough evidence to overturn an election, it will be hard to have one that isn't overturned.
You are reading this very myopically, ignoring crucial context with a sliver of the article (and not being helped by some weak writing). The snippet should be read as this:
> Myers’ recommendation centers on the mailbox [which was unquestionably on Amazon’s headquarters and which Amazon management unquestionably pressured employees to use for voting], according to one of the people familiar with it. During the NLRB hearing, an employee said Amazon security guards used keys to open the mailbox, testimony that former NLRB chair Wilma Liebman said could be reason enough to overturn the result.
So there was plenty of direct evidence suggesting improper behavior, which not even Amazon contested. That was not enough to overturn the result. But just the one piece of deeply serious eyewitness testimony on top of the documentary evidence would be enough. And of course there was far more evidence than just that one employee: Liebman’s comments are obviously a rhetorical device used to illustrate the severity of Amazon’s transgressions and not a literal description of the merits of the case.
Claim "Moral victory" and move on for a while.
A small story about Amazon cheating doesn't really generate much buzz. Voting again, if nothing else, makes the story more public, there will be a lot of talk about why the vote is happening again and what happened the first time.
The median household income in Bessemer, AL, is $32,301 per household per year (~$15.50 per household per hour) [0] and the per capita annual income is $19,420 (~$9.34/hour) [0]. Considering Amazon's minimum wage is FAR above the wages at least 50% of residents in Bessemer, AL, earn, I think it will be another blowout, as most of those workers would be afraid that Amazon would just shut down that distribution center and open another one in another Birmingham, AL suburb or exurb.
My understanding is the particular area had a long history of unionization, maybe particularly by African Americans.
I read about it elsewhere, but here's the first source I could find that speaks to that:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/03/16/the-ama...
> In the South, anti-labor laws are inextricably linked to the historic suppression of Black workers. Racism in the form of no- or low-wage Black labor has been part of the growth model of racialized capitalism. And when workers are unable to collectively bargain and demand their fair share, economic growth becomes concentrated in the hands of a few.
> Fortunately, the Birmingham metropolitan area—home to Bessemer—has already proven that unionized Black workers can create economic growth and shared prosperity. At the turn of the 20th century, Birmingham labor unions facilitated the establishment of a Black middle class. Black and white miners organized to form the United Mine Workers (UMW) union and, together, secured better wages. Following UMW’s success, what was then known as the Alabama Federation of Labor (AFL) followed the same strategy of a racially integrated membership—in part out of fear that nonunionized Black workers would replace striking workers. As a result, Black Alabamians earned leadership positions and spots in every committee of the AFL, and the union’s first five vice presidents were Black. This inclusive labor movement continued until the 1930s, when U.S. Steel—rife with Ku Klux Klan members—began to restrict job promotions for unionized Black workers, limiting access to senior positions they previously occupied.
Do you have any evidence of this? Seems libellous to me and it directly contradicts all of the reliable media reports I've heard on the subject, which state that ballots were deposited in the mail including an official USPS box on-site.
"Their voice should be heard above all else, so we'll ignore reports that we silenced their voice and prevent them from having another opportunity to let out their voice." Just an absurd PR spin.
> they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers
What exactly is this garbage? They’re implying you’ll somehow be alienated from your manager. I’ve worked in both Union and non-Union jobs and a union has literally nothing to do with your relationship with your manager beyond a shitty one can’t completely ruin your career in a union shop.
If you have a good manager your relationship will be great regardless of a Union. It’ll just be more obvious in certain situations they represent the company first.
From previous reporting about this testimony:
> Jackson, who was testifying via Zoom after just getting out of the hospital, said that he was leaving work one morning when he saw security guards approach the mailbox. He proceeded to watch them open a large box at the bottom of the mailbox labeled “1P.” While it was dark at the time, Jackson said his headlights illuminated the area, so he was able to clearly see what they were doing.
Anyone who's lived in an apartment building would know this was a box for incoming mail, but I wouldn't be surprised if single family housing was the norm around the warehouse.
If you wanted to spook people into not voting or make them regret it later, how would you do it?
I'd make them feel like the only safe thing to do was not to vote. I'd put up more security cameras pointed towards the voting areas, put up fake boxes then make it look like the bosses had access to the votes, and let them psych each other out so they never went anywhere near it. I might also pass out some small bonuses, hold off on some layoffs, and remind them what good money $15/hr is when $19k/yr is typical for the area.
And none of that is really even playing dirty, like getting managers to pay people to drum up the fear and anti-union sentiment.
>Myers has recommended the election be run again, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the recommendation isn’t yet public. The recommendation will be considered by a labor board regional director and Amazon has the right to appeal the ruling to an NLRB panel in Washington. If a new election is called, it could happen later this year.
"Should" is being used because it is the recommendation of a single official and not yet a final decision.
The messaging seemed to be generic arguments in favor of unions combined with some general Amazon and Bezos criticisms. Even reading through the linked reports, didn't seem to provide a particularly convincing argument. E.g., they begin their concerns about workplace safety with
> The report notes that between 2013 and the time of publication earlier this year, seven workers had died at Amazon facilities. According to the report, two were crushed by forklifts in the warehouses, one was run over by a truck, one was killed by a driver in its parking lot, one suffered a fatal heart-related event during an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was killed and crushed by a pallet loader. Two more Amazon workers were killed just weeks ago when a warehouse in Maryland partially collapsed during a storm.
While workplace deaths are certainly concerning, nine deaths in eight years for a workforce that is now up to 876,000 workers [0] suggests these deaths are exceedingly rare and may not be something most workers are thinking about. Further, there’s already OSHA requirements for workplace safety and I’d imagine all firms, including Amazon, want to avoid worker deaths and will make the necessary changes.
I think a union will need to address the specific demands of the workers they will be representing rather than generic arguments for unionization. Further, Amazon may be a particularly challenging workplace to organize since they already pay exceedingly well for unskilled labor, with a starting minimum rate of $15/hour and surprisingly good health benefits. [1] For many workers, Amazon may be the best job they’ve ever had and these workers may be concerned about risking the situation.
This includes risks like Amazon shutting down a unionized warehouse, which should be illegal, but there are workarounds. More likely, Amazon would just not grow a unionized warehouse and instead grow nearby ones to control labor costs. This would include building new warehouses if necessary.
Amazon may also be particularly aggressive in automation investments for a unionized warehouse, which would allow them to justify layoffs for redundant workers. Some analysts have even proposed that Amazon may be able to have “dark warehouses” (i.e., warehouses that keep the lights off) with full automation within 10 years. [2] Union concerns may lead them to invest even more aggressively in automation tech.
In general, I want to see workers' concerns addressed at all firms, and unionizing may be the best approach for this Amazon warehouse, but I think this will be challenging and will require organizers to put a lot of thought into the specific demands that the majority of workers want.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-number-of-employees-w...
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits
[2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-automated-warehouses-10...
This is witness testimony under oath. That doesn't make it true, but it does make it perjury for the mentioned act to have not happened.
Additionally, this isn't just someone's word. Witnesses will be cross examined. Their testimony will be compared with others, along with records. Ultimately the trier of fact will determine if they're credible or not.
My understanding is the deck is pretty stacked in favor of the company during those votes. The documentary American Factory was pretty eye opening: the workers in that factory were trying to form a union, and in response the company hired anti-union consultants and had all workers sit through all kinds of mandatory propaganda sessions.
It's like if the in the month leading up to a federal election, every registered voter was required to watch an hour of Fox News opinion programming every day. Sure it won't influence everyone, but it will definitely tip the scales.
Irritatingly, once the vote is corrupted, then that's basically the end of the democratic process. We know this from studying over a century of modern totalitarian states.