5,800 Amazon workers in Alabama are voting by mail on Feb 8 for union certification with RWDSU. That's 2+ months of intimidation and ratfucking after the union went public. This is why employers hate card check and love 2-stage certification: it buys them time to break the union.

"Card check" just means if you hit a threshold of union membership cards signed, the union is automatically certified by the labour board (eg: 50 percent +1). Most jurisdictions in N.America require a card signing threshold to trigger a union certification vote at a later date.

Once certified, employers are legally required to recognize the union, at which point collective bargaining can begin. However, there usually no requirements that an employer settle a 1st contract, leading to first contract strikes.

This highly legalistic system of union cert & recognition was developed in N.America first in US in 1930s, then Canada in 1940s in response to huge strike actions. Since then, these systems have become so restrictive for organizing the unorganized, they now need to be overthrown.

Mass union breakthroughs in unorganized sectors, especially strategic chokepoints in the circulation of money and product, never comes from obeying the existing legal architecture of labour relations. It always comes from within the workplaces but outside the existing laws.

Mass production, mining, oil, forestry, marine workers proved this in 1st half of 20th century, public sector workers in 60s-70s (eg 1965 Cdn postal wildcat). It took decades to win breakthroughs, but workers' power has been rolled back, unions busted. Dig in for the long war.