Bad Unionism
By 
Among the many things that drive me crazy about the contemporary left is its inherently distrust in all institutions. When it comes to the labor movement, this can mean fetishizing the idea of the independent union, which as I have written about extensively, rarely work.
Amazon workers voted overwhelmingly against a bid to unionize their North Carolina warehouse, the National Labor Relations Board said on Saturday, the latest setback in labor organizing efforts at the e-commerce giant.
Workers at the RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, outside of Raleigh, voted 2,447 to 829 against unionizing with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, an upstart union founded by warehouse workers in 2022.
Organizers at the warehouse, which employs more than 4,000 people, sought starting wages of $30 an hour. The current pay range is about $18 to $24, Amazon said. The union also demanded longer lunch breaks and increased vacation time.
In a statement, leaders of CAUSE said the election outcome was the result of Amazon’s “relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us.” They did not say whether they would challenge the outcome, but vowed to keep trying to organize.
Friends, they got 25 percent of the vote. 25%!!!!!
Look, I am sure that Amazon did some nasty anti-union stuff here, but that is not what explains this. First, no responsible union goes ahead with a vote when it is going to lose that badly. The standard union strategy is not vote until you have 65-70% of workers with a signed card because you know that in the end, 10-15% are going to slip away on you. To lose a union election is a bad thing anyway. Note that the UAW’s stated drive to organize the South came to a screeching halt after losing one election, as they weren’t going to lose more without figuring out just went wrong and how to stop that from happening and making sure that they were going to win in the future. That’s called responsible unionism. This? This just tells workers not to try to form a union, that it’s pointless, that there’s no way we can win. It makes Amazon look impossible to organize.
What I really expect was going on here is that there were some self-styled leftists in the plant who got some of their friends together and some other angry workers (angry no doubt for very good reasons) and they had ideology running ahead of real organizing and they never realized that and they went ahead with the vote because they were going to show the bosses in the end and instead they got thrown out on their asses.
Embarrassing. Irresponsible. And will make no difference for those who will believe that independent unions are the only way to go because those Big Union Bosses are also bad.
Moreover, it doesn’t help when outside actors with huge followings take any grain of something going on and hope it is the next Flint.
You might have missed it, but Amazon warehouse workers in Raleigh, NC are voting this week on whether to form a union.
If they win, they'll be the first unionized Amazon facility in the South.
Remember that we can always find hope in the labor movement.
— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
This dynamic doesn’t really exist with other social movements. But the labor movement? It’s always everyone hoping it is 1937 again. I hope it’s 1937 again too, but I like to see evidence for things before making pronouncements that end up biting me back.