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Historic southern union election coming up at an Amazon plant in Alabama. But all the reporting on it that I've seen skips over the main issue that bears reporting out.
The union was reportedly real strong with the thousand workers they filed for election to represent. But Amazon successfully lawyered the board into expanding the unit, the list of workers who would be represented and can vote, to like 4000.
Typically you barely win union elections, so there is a lot of jockeying around unit size-- the company wants to add workers into the unit who will vote no, the union wants to prevent that.
NLRB increasing your unit size after you file by like 20% would usually be the death notice of your campaign. The unit here was increase FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT. And the union is proceeding to election anyway.
So like... what exactly is happening here? Couple possibilities. Maybe the added workers are overwhelmingly former temps or part timers, that the union doesn't think Amazon can harvest many no votes from. Possible.
Maybe they decided workers in this town are really hot so they'll roll the dice. Mb they ran a fast poll on the e-list when they got it and the new voters weren't majority no votes. That would be a bit shocking (Amazon wanted to add these voters for a reason) but not impossible
Also possible, but nobody wants to talk about it- unions doing major organizing drives in big southern plants in recent years have tanked multiple elections-- known they were going to lose, and went ahead anyway.
That sounds conspiratorial or crazy, but sometimes when there is a dispute between leaders on whether something is winnable, you go ahead with a loss for internal political reasons. You show your organizing committee they tried but didn't have the votes, or you show your org
department decisionmaker that this campaign was a waste of resources and they shouldn't be lighting money on fire down in the south when their are more winnable targets elsewhere.
I have no idea whether the unions rationale for continuing with the election was one of these or something else, but nobody who writes about labor, even/especially the left ones, even asks or tries to figure it out.
Instead its always the same soft-focus stories on the heroism of the masses.
If the union wins here, something amazing happens- shame nobody reported it out beforehand. But in the much more likely situation they lose, labor really needs to have a conversation within itself about this recurring problem of unions filing for huge elections in the south,
sucking up a ton of media airtime on them implying to the public this is a referendum on whether American workers want union, and then INTENTIONALLY PROCEEDING TO A LOSS.
It's really unsustainable that there is no way to get our shit straight on this subject. Everyone's at fault- Trumka's an idiot with no credibility to anyone but like 5 building trades lobbyists, SEIU took half the organizing brainpower out of the AFL and drove it into a ditch,
major manufacturing union leaders that need to fire & renovate organizing departments are too busy stealing anything not nailed down, etc. But someone needs to tell someone else to stop. doing. this. shit.
Having talked all that trash, let me add that obviously if RWDSU wins, they did have a reason, I’ll eat my words, and will be super happy to have been proven wrong. Inshallah, ratio me. We’re all crossing fingers this is the time a big southern election *isn’t* tanked.
Adding to this thread- in wapo's story today, they quote RWDSU prez as saying that they have 3k cards- but they're not sure how many are still current employees. That's great (3k!) and terrible (what do you mean you 'don't know'???)
