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posted by martyb on Saturday April 10 2021, @02:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the people-have-spoken dept.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/the-amazon-union-drive-in-alabama-appears-headed-for-defeat/

Update: A majority of workers have voted not to form a union at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Alabama. The result of the NLRB's initial vote count was 1,798 votes against the union and 738 in favor. Hundreds of additional ballots were not counted because their authenticity was disputed. But the "no" side already has a majority of the 3,215 votes cast, making the issue moot.

Original story, April 8: A closely watched effort to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama appears to be headed for defeat. With about half the votes counted, 1,100 workers have voted against forming a union, while only 463 voted in favor.

The National Labor Relations Board is counting the 3,215 votes that were cast by workers at the Bessemer facility. The union needs to win at least half the votes in order to become the official representative of the roughly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer facility. Counting has ended for the evening and is scheduled to resume at 8:30 am Central Time on Friday.

Also at The Washington Post, c|net, and Al Jazeera.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:28PM (8 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:28PM (#1135750) Journal

    As others have pointed out, casting a "no" vote there is rational even if you want the protections the union could theoretically provide. There's too big a chance that the site would just shut down.

    The problems they're up against are too big to solve with a union vote at one plant. You would need political action not only state-wide, but perhaps nation-wide to avoid corporations venue shopping. That's what hollowed out the Rust Belt.

    Not only do you need nation-wide worker protections, you need trade policy that prevents firms from fleeing. It can be tariffs, or it could be keeping the corporate tax low to keep them here, or perhaps a few other things; but it needs to be thought about and it needs to be dynamic in response to changing global conditions.

    That's a tall order, and US unions at this point are basically firms that make money from doing lots of ad-hoc negotiations with employers that are unavoidably captive such as government workers, hotel workers, etc.

    If you supply a steady stream of dues, the unions will represent you; but they will not lobby for the kind of cost-effective low-maintenance legislation that would protect all workers regardless of contract status.

    There's no money in it.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:04PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:04PM (#1135777)

    Parent said:
    "You would need political action not only state-wide, but perhaps nation-wide to avoid corporations venue shopping. That's what hollowed out the Rust Belt."

    The people of Alabama are very aware of why those jobs were moved to the non-union South, and how easily those jobs could leave them too if they get greedy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:12PM (#1136100)

      That's a b.s. rationalization. Being in a union doesn't guarantee that the work becomes expensive. They don't just get to have unlimited demands. Neither of the unions that I'm currently in have delivered much more than a basic wage with basic benefits. I'm better off than without the unions, but I'm hardy going to get rich of it either.

      This is more about Bezos being a psychopath that would rather park an ambulance on site than keep the temperature in the warehouses safe. A union wouldn't tolerate that. It's not like her can't afford safer work conditions, he just chooses not to provide them.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:29PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:29PM (#1135789)

    You would need political action not only state-wide, but perhaps nation-wide to avoid corporations venue shopping.

    There allegedly are nationwide worker protections such as the NLRB and EEOC, but there are various techniques that companies use to avoid being affected by them. And yes, there would have to be and almost definitely should be nationwide and international political action to make horrendous conditions illegal, although for $ome rea$on those political efforts tend to not turn into policy or enforcement regardless of which political party is in charge of which parts of the government.

    ... or it could be keeping the corporate tax low to keep them here ...

    As for international conditions, I'll just point out US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen just went public with another approach to this problem: Work with other countries to make the corporate tax rates standard across all countries, so that corporations can't flee to the lowest tax rate because there isn't one. I'm not optimistic about her chances, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

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    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by istartedi on Saturday April 10 2021, @11:30PM (1 child)

      by istartedi (123) on Saturday April 10 2021, @11:30PM (#1135842) Journal

      I would like her very much to succeed, and not just for the good it would do. It would also be highly amusing to see a former Fed chair become a hero to the working class.

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      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 12 2021, @09:25PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Monday April 12 2021, @09:25PM (#1136679)

        Yellen should in fact be regarded as a hero of working people: As Fed chair, she insisted on keeping the stimulus efforts under her control going until unemployment was back down to pre-crash levels, against a lot of banker-backed opposition that wanted her to stop them and pivot back to improving their interest margins as soon as Wall Street had bounced back. That decision was critical to the economy from about 2012-2016.

        So her sympathies are pretty clear.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:37PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 10 2021, @08:37PM (#1135791) Journal
    Notice that we already have nation-wide worker protection, and it perversely has sabotaged union formation.

    The National Labor Relations Board is counting the 3,215 votes that were cast by workers at the Bessemer facility. The union needs to win at least half the votes in order to become the official representative of the roughly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer facility.

    Already we have an all or nothing nation-wide law intended to protect workers. Either everyone is represented by this union or nobody is, and all it takes is a simple majority. I bet there's a fair number of workers that might be interested in trying out labor union membership without a long term commitment. But they're not going to get that in this election - better to vote no than to take a plunge into something risky and almost impossible to reverse.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:12AM (#1135862)

    "The problems they're up against are too big to solve with a union vote at one plant. You would need political action not only state-wide, but perhaps nation-wide to avoid corporations venue shopping."

    Why shouldn't they venue shop? Why shouldn't the MLB be allowed to say: "These georgian racist pigfuckers are way off the deep end, we're out and they can suck it up with a sump pump." Why shouldn't Planned Parenthood be able to throw up their hands and say: "Good people of Louisiana, we'd love to help you, but those hidebound god-botherers you keep electing have driven us out." Why shouldn't the Bunny Ranch be able to say: "Utah, we'd have set up in Salt Lake City for you to get your rocks off, but the pasty-faced blue-balled closet cases that sock-puppet your government won't let us in the state."

    At some point if you have any kind of differentiation on any dimension of commercial or social policy, you will have corporations with location preferences. Look at the firearms manufacturers eyeing states like Wyoming, or Amazon deciding after AOC banged her wardrum, that HQ2 wasn't going to be in New York, or (as I pointed out above) the MLB deciding that the air in Georgia didn't suit them any more.

    The problem is that the moment you want to solve that by strict regularisation of all commercial and social policy across states, you're effectively abrogating states' rights to a degree incompatible with even the still-twitching mangled remains of the 10th amendment. Policies on treatment of trans/intersex people? All the same now. Policies on voting, including rehabilitation of felons? All the same now. Policies on agricultural practices such as California's laws on farrowing crates? All the same now, all in the cause of trying to feverishly erase any vestige of a reason for a corporation to prefer one location over another for some reason that somebody might attach to a notion of moral rectitude. This is not possible under the federal system as currently constituted.

    To put it another way: until you can get a supermajority of people to think that a federal system is a bad idea, and to enforce top-down, one-size-fits-all policy on the nation, you can't have this.

    "Not only do you need nation-wide worker protections, you need trade policy that prevents firms from fleeing."

    You must be joking. Straight-forward mercantilism is a broken approach, and ideas and cash are not unique to any one nation. If the progressive movement manages to toss out the first amendment so that we can ban hate speech and microaggressions, mandate corporate censorship and sideline religious objections, how long do you think it would take before the likes of Facebook found reasons to transfer people, money and intellectual property to various subsidiaries that just happened to be headquartered elsewhere, finally leaving a sort of symbolic rump in California like a museum piece? And if you genuinely try to imprison their top coders and designers in the US of A, why shouldn't they just fire those guys, and establish ButtBook of Bangalore, and hire a lot of indian programmers and designers? Do you want to prevent all international financial transfers and emigration? That's what it would take.

    As for Yellen's pipe dream, good fucking luck. Countries have absolutely no reason to collaborate on tax rules unless they're bound into some sort of situation the way that Ireland is. Caribbean tax havens know perfectly well that they'd plunge below banana republic status the moment that their rules had to comply with everybody else's everythings. You could have a great big G7 meeting in Brussels with all the heavy hitters and big knobs glad-handing and smiling for the cameras, and signing Letters of Intent and International Understandings and Memoranda of Collaboration or whatever the fancy terms were, but if Notax Island, somewhere east of Nicaragua, decided not to join that party? Good luck - better yet, because of national independence, they'd have plenty of support from every country (such as Liberia) that likes to make it easy to flag your freighters there.

    To bring it closer to home, what if a Mom-and-Pop shop decides to open on Mainstreet, Suburbia, not far from BigCity because BigCity has restrictive rules, exploitative taxes and no parking while Suburbia keeps the sales taxes low, rules lightweight and plenty of parking? Are Mom and Pop now officially Bad People(tm) for venue-shopping? Because that's plainly what it is. "Where we gonna open the pie shop, Momma?" "Suburbia, where the fuckheads can't crawl up my snatch with a wirebrush every week!" Venue-shopping. Eeeeevil.

    But let us know how else you'd envision doing this.

  • (Score: 1) by js290 on Sunday April 11 2021, @02:56AM

    by js290 (14148) on Sunday April 11 2021, @02:56AM (#1135890)