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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same.

It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.

So it can have the opposite effect. The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. The last voting count was 74% against the union.

We have to wait and see what the union can "win" from Amazon.

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> maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center

Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.

Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities?

> Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities?

Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly.

If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.)

Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.

Presumably you still need to fulfill shipping needs in New York because people still buy things there.

It’s a last-mile facility for service to NYC.

It's expensive to do business in those sorts of places.

Alabama lost a Toyota plant to Ontario because literacy is so poor they would need to translate their documentation into Ikea-like pictograms.

That’s false. That decision had to do with currency values not literacy.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-m...

That’s Honda.

The Toyota RAV-4 decision was made back in 2005. In don’t think education has improved in Alabama since. Also, IIRC, the higher Canadian wages were partially offset by not having to provide health benefits.

I cite it as I’m somewhat familiar with it as a friend and colleague worked for a supplier pricing out a in-region facility.

Given SC rejected the union is interesting, given the quality issues that resulted in Boeing's plant in SC. The reports of managers putting defective parts back into service was horrifying (this was reported by a whistleblower).

As somebody that works in an office in this factory, the micro-union votes down have been very contentious.

I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it certainly seemed like the situation with our PNW union sites did not boost support down here.

The SC quality issues were so severe, some customers were rejecting product created there.

src https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-so...

Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters?

SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.

I work in an office in the SC factory, that comment does indeed reflect the truth. Of course, SC unions are weak and relatively unpopular but that isn’t the whole story here.

Just trying to provide some detail.

but how?

[Replying to multiple commenters with the same questions]

>SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there,

>South Carolina has anti-union laws [...] the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there,

Anti-union bias does not fully explain the South Carolina Boeing factory rejection vote because the workers did previously have a union.

Fyi... The original South Carolina aircraft factory (formerly Vought doing subcontract work on Boeing fuselages) was unionized in 2007. Then in 2009, they voted to decertify the union as they no longer wanted IAM (International Association of Machinists) to represent them for collective bargaining. (75% voted to get rid of the union.) This happened around the time Boeing acquired the Vought factory. For various reason(s) (see below), the Vought/Boeing workers didn't feel the ~$1000/year union dues were worth the benefits the IAM union negotiated for them.

Since being being voted out, IAM has repeatedly tried to re-establish union membership at SC but multiple elections have voted against it by wide margins. The last 2017 vote was 74% against. In 2018, IAM tried a new approach of establishing a "micro" union of 175 subset of employees instead of the entire ~3000 employees. The IAM won that micro vote but the Labor Board invalidated the micro union as a collective bargaining unit.

Boeing workers' (current) anti-union stance is based on their real-world experience and not ignorance. The SC workers already know what collective bargaining benefits they had with the union. They got rid of the union anyway. Maybe someday, factors will change and Boeing workers will vote for union representation again.

> Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters?

>, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina"

No, not my calculus. The SC workers reported it. One example: The workers in South Carolina didn't like the IAM directed union strike in Washington. Excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...:

>Another sore point that affected Thursday’s vote was that many in the Charleston [South Carolina] work force were laid off last fall during the two-month IAM strike in the Puget Sound region due to the lack of production in Everett.

> ...Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union.

South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.

Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".

I think it has more to do with politics. Conservative SC politicians have made it clear that they would rather not have good jobs if they are unionized, they don't wont workers getting ideas

Woah, woah, woah.

Hold it there, sparky.

Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.

> Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.

It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.

The other vote in Alabama failed, by more than 10%.

New York had a long history of powerful unions. Alabama had a long history of not having unions.

"facilities in that region"

The final decision is not here yet. Resolving the contested ballots could still swing it either way (as of this moment).

https://www.reuters.com/business/amazons-union-vote-counts-s...

It’s currently… 47% pro-union to 53% no-union in Alabama, with over 15% (400+ ballots) challenged by both sides. It could go either way, but “more than 10%” is not backed by any metrics.

From the article I read in the NY Times it was a gap of over 10% https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/technology/amazon-union-e...

> Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.

Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.

Maybe the union can win Amazon warehouse workers more bathroom breaks.

You shouldn't have to wear adult diapers to work to avoid getting fired because you need to go to the bathroom twice during a shift and they're a 10 minute walk away, & good luck hitting your performance targets with that chunk of time lost.

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