Beaten Biden Botches Amazon Union Vote

Once a card carrying Teamster or UAW member always one … a couple of trucker jobs was one way I was able to work my way through college & law school. (Minimum wage jobs they were not.)

So, it’s with mixed feelings this lawyer who once aspired becoming a labor specialist read the WSJ’s “Amazon Vote Deals Blow to Expanding Labor Union Membership.” Despite a big push by President Biden & the DNC, workers rejected a union at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse, thereby extending, rather than reversing, “a decades long decline in private-sector membership nationally.” How bad is that decline? In today’s private sector, unions now represent “just 6.3% of workers, down from 24.2% in 1973,” according to data from Georgia State U.

As the WSJ noted, you’d think the massive pandemic job losses & Amazon’s adding a gazillion blue-collar jobs to the economy made the union effort “ripe” for a sustained turnaround. Indeed, rebuilding unions has been the Dems’ “Holy Grail” alluded to in every DNC platform since FDR. What went wrong in Mr. Biden et al’s calculations? In my younger days, the unions may often have been corrupt, but they usually delivered improved pay & benefits. As one source told the WSJ, however, today’s big companies like Amazon & Wal-Mart have the economic muscle to beat union organizers to the sugar daddy punch. Who needs a corrupt union official to collect dues to pay for their mansions, when a company executive can sit in his mansion, push a button, and, hello pay raise?

Davd Soul