They why don't you like unions?

Something that is often left out of this conversation is that Republicans often simply fail to fill positions on the NLRB, or the companion state agency, or fill them with anti-worker corporate types or incompetents. I don't believe the Public Employment Relations Commission in NJ was fully staffed the entire time Chris Christie was in office, and these are the people you have to deal with when you have a labor violation. Laws are great until you have no avenue for enforcement, and as someone who's had to start enforcement actions, we're talking months to a year in the better cases. How many employees can happily wait that long, depending on the circumstances?

I kind of value not having to piss into the trash at my workplace. Money is a lot of it, but it's also not everything.

I can't speak for everywhere, but in my state, it's illegal to use union dues for political purposes. Employees have to specifically opt in (which they'd be smart to do, as the working conditions for public sector employment are pretty obviously influenced by politics).

GM's CEO made $14.9M in 2008. It's $21.6M today. Their compensation went up 64% in 2007. 6.4% would be an incredible jump in my own salary.

Seems they had some amount of money to work with.

At my employer, we can't trust the employer to tell the truth about the health of the company. I work for a University, and they have $600M in unrestricted reserves, and managed to sock away more while the pandemic was going on. Meanwhile, they laid off 1000 people and claim to have a financial emergency. They're still paying a football coach $4M a year, and paying a past president a sabbatical of ~$750k, as well as receiving lots of pandemic aid. There are stories like this around the country. Do they have a real emergency? Hard to say. But they certainly don't want unions involved anyplace where any decision-making is going on. What do they have to hide exactly, if they really feel they have financial problems, and why doesn't it jump out in their financial reports?

It's not, actually! This account does its best to track all union elections. Their numbers are 72% wins. It's a lot of small places you'd never hear about though.

https://twitter.com/UnionElect...

This is not an exact science, but I'm really impressed that it happens so often.

"Back in the day unions were important for worker safety..."

Have you been asleep since March 2020?

Most Americans have been sold a bill of goods by propagandists employed generally by large corporations that do better financially if they don't have to split any of the profits with the employees. It's not indicative of anything other than a lot of time and money spent claiming unions are something they are not, and a lot of ineffective unions adding credence to those notions.

The union was trying to organize 1500-1600 people and was confident they had a majority. Amazon fought to have a large number of other employees included, a group that the union hadn't worked to organize and wouldn't have as much of a stake in unionization. Considering how the numbers shook out, that would seem to explain a lot of it.

https://nymag.com/intelligence...

Also bear in mind that there's a lot of anti-union propaganda just floating around in society. People don't really learn bout them in schools anymore, at least not in a positive way. You can read the comments on here, which is pretty uniformly shitty anti-union comments, coming from, I assume, mostly people who feel like unions have no place in the technology sector. Which is weird, because tech workers are plenty mistreated, I guess the boss just tricked them into thinking it was beneath them.

Unionization is an uphill battle. I'm honestly surprised there are so many wins. An account that I read on Twitter that follows elections said that ~70% of elections are won.

They are really excellent at playing the really long game. Judicial appointments, gerrymandering, changes in campaign finance reform, etc. This stuff is doing a lot of damage over a really long time. And the alternative is a party that claims they might give the people what they want, but also don't want to upset rich/corporate donors. There's not really any check on it.

Basically, yes.

Good unions organize workers to work collectively towards goals related to improving the workplace. Better salary, better safety measures, better opportunity for advancement... whatever. That's basically it. It's a lot of effort though, and some are not so good/filled with people in leadership who are burned out/have the wrong philosophy about what results in actual gains at the workplace/think making shitty deals with management are the best they can do.

Most unions are, at least on paper, democratic, and if you don't like the leadership, you can run/vote them out.

What a business heavy/lazy union gets is typically whatever management thinks they need to give up to prevent labor unrest, so somewhat better salaries/working conditions (you can review the statistics for union-heavy areas/industries vs. not). Good democratic/well-organized unions make it clear that what is required to avoid labor unrest is more than the employer would prefer to give up.

Or it could be that the employer put a huge amount of resources into fighting the union, changed the conditions toward the end of the process so that 3x the people as before were voting in the election (which neatly tracks with the results), and that you could actually get fired from your shitty job if Amazon detects that you're part of the effort.

It's unfair that Amazon is permitted to present its case as a condition of employment. You think that's a reasonable balance of power?

The fact of the matter is that the way the normally works out, at least at my workplace, is that the employer then offers the same deal to the non-union employees, making sure that it doesn't foment unrest in the non-union employees or make them want to join a union. Why should the non-union employees benefit from the union's hard work?

Anyhow, the situation as it stands now, post Janus v. AFSCME, is that unions have to represent employees that choose not to be members, and they no longer have to pay any dues. If a member is disciplined, we have to defend them. They get the same contract that the employees who join the union do. Why should THAT be true, exactly?