People are *obsessed* with the idea that they're going to be the victim of a crime.

Or I could just carry right on "not monitoring my property," because I'm not so delusional to think there's anything especially attractive about it to other people, or to think danger lurks around every corner.

*letters

I understand how I make mistakes when tired, but I can't figure out how I came up with "lettings." :-D

Also, you are not correct, about either private sector workers, re: being required to represent non-members:

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlr...

Public sector workers are typically governed by the state, but there's at least one case that was heard and decided very recently on this:

https://law.justia.com/cases/f...

Local 150 screwed this up, but frankly, the Court's argument is sort of nonsense. Of course if the union has members sending lettings saying "BTW, you still need to represent me even though I'm not joining your union/paying dues," and members are allowed to resign their membership and not pay anything towards that representation, how is it not completely obvious that injury results? I guess the only chance is that not a single person that's a non-member asks for representation. So I guess that union or a different one has to wait for a non-member to ask for representation, spend a whole bunch of money on that non-member's representation, and then file a lawsuit.

And using that logic, once you asked someone out and they said no, you could never ask them out again (which might be a good idea/fine), nor anyone else. That would lead to a dead-end of the lineage of most people on this site.

Also, one side has all of the money, almost all of the power, and hasn't given much of a shit about protecting its workers all year long during a pandemic. What part of the union is resulting in employees pissing in trash cans and whatnot?

While you're technically right, what's wrong with you that you don't like one side better?

I can only comment on my own union, but our reason for wanting everyone to be a part of the union is because the existence of the non-union labor actively undercuts the union's ability to fight for fair working conditions, just by virtue of the fact that we'd represent a smaller number of people. There is power in numbers. I don't know where people got this obsession with unions raking in money and why that concern somehow doesn't extend to corporations who have a way lousier track record, and funnel it all to a handful of people.

Yeah, special privileges and pay for being someplace for a long time are so silly. So is protecting people who've worked someplace a long time, are now earning a decent living, and might otherwise be targeted for layoff because they can find someone to do the work more cheaply. Who benefits exactly by needing to come up with a separate system to collect dues from employees who've already chosen to join the union?

The union is attempting to prevent work from being outsourced to unskilled labor, management, etc. What it sounds to me like you're talking about is a situation where you were not in a union and are unhappy with what the union negotiated for its members. In most cases at work, I would not go throwing circuit breakers if I didn't know why they tripped, and I wouldn't be tripping circuit breakers with anything I'm doing. In some parts of my workplace, I don't have access to breaker panels anyway.

This is hard to get good/concise information about, but my understanding is that Amazon was very interested in having the temporary employees part of the vote, and that's what ultimately happened, and I assume the original 1600 didn't include them. I mean to look this up at some point, just haven't had time.

I'd personally rather work in a union job, and would vote for that even if it would happen after I was gone, but I can understand why it might be much less interesting to other people; there's this rabidly individualistic streak in this country, even though when some employees do better, it raises the bar for others. Presumably these folks might find themselves working again in a temporary role at some point, Amazon or elsewhere.

I've lost track of the parallel that people are attempting to draw, but has Amazon gotten people killed this year? Arguably, yes:

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17...

Is that close enough?

It's a bullshit argument that you're making. This is not a case of the union trying to make it so 1500-1600 people vote on behalf of 5000, they were trying to form a bargaining unit of people who wanted there to be a union.

Public sector you mean, yes. And I disagree that every discussion is inherently political. And I'm a member of a public sector union at a University, and my employer is not the government. Ditto for the hospital whose employees we represent.

I'm not sure where you're talking about, as far as not being required to defend non members, but it's the law where I am.

Hey, no argument there.

WTF are you talking about? The union does concentrate on the people it represents. Why should non-union employees automatically be entitled to the same thing? I personally don't care one way or the other, and workers benefitting is workers benefitting, but it's anti-worker nonsense to claim that everyone should get what the union gets without participating.

*Citation needed.

I think it's pretty obvious that, no, Amazon did not do the right thing here, they tried to include as many people that they thought would not give them the vote as possible.

In the long run, sure, unionizing all workers is a better deal, but I can understand why temporary workers might not be invested.

I'm a union president. It's not common in the tech field though. Have been attending a DevOps conference over the past couple of years though where there's always a labor open space. Seems tech workers are getting tired of being exploited too, though it's funny that many of them really really don't want to call themselves interested in a union, but then describe wanting to form an organization that does all the same things. The anti-union propaganda runs deep, I guess? Maybe it's just savvy to avoid the stigma? Don't know.

Unions aren't perfect, they're run by humans, and this has been a particularly hard year for anyone in union leadership I have to imagine (for me, more than 2000 regular office jobs became dangerous almost overnight). Too many people fail to understand what unions are though: they're not a service organization you pay into, they're a collective you're a part of and if you don't show up, nothing happens. I can't win a fight against the employer if the answer to what happens if we don't get our way is "nothing."

We just fought for a modest victory at my employer, basically to settle their declaration of a fiscal emergency brought on by the pandemic. We won't receive our raises on schedule, but we'll ever get them and we'll fight on next time and in the meantime, the employer can't lay people off for awhile.

What did the employer do next? Turn around and say that it would renegotiate with other unions that took deals that are worse than that. I have to assume that it's to keep the peace, and to try to drive a wedge between the unions that fought and those that didn't. But the end result is that everyone will benefit from our fight. They haven't said whether they'll also do the same for the non-union employees, but typically they do roughly the same for them. Would they if we weren't fighting? I'm inclined to doubt it. The statistics bear this out. I forget whether it's right to work states, or just areas or industries where union density is high, but it has an impact on the floor for non-union wages in the area as well.