I'd be really curious if any anti-union person or company has ever been completely honest in public about their stance. Has an executive or owner ever come out and said "I'm against the workers unionizing because it will mean less money for me."
Owners and managers, including shareholders, are often dishonest about unions because their material interests are in opposition to those of workers and unions. It's class conflict. But there are some working class people (those who work for their money, rather than their money working for them) who are honestly confused about their own material interests. A small number of them had a bad experience with an unresponsive union, but more of them just honestly believe the anti-union propaganda from authoritarians, big corporations and the religiously orthodox.
Or they were at union sites that were unable to protect their jobs from eventual offshoring (see my post below). To call them "confused" is bullshit - I've experienced union failures in a very personal way.
"But historically, as unions have developed in this country, they have mostly just been divisive. They have put management on one side of the fence, employees on the other, and themselves in the middle as almost a separate business, one that depends on division between the other two camps."
What a bunch of mendacious bourgeois drivel. Uh, no Sam, pretty sure that owners/executives created the dividing line between manager and worker.
I'm writing this a now-retired IAM member. It pains me to say it - but unions are no longer an adequate tool for most workers.
In my opinion you article is poorly-resarched. That seems harsh, but in my experience (which spans four union and non-union sites over nearly 30 years) none of the four reasons you cited heavily influences whether a worker at a site will vote for a union or not.
Here's what does: concerns about job security.
Of course management can't explictly-threaten to close down a facility that unionizes or move work to another non-union site (i.e. "Ruanway Shop") - but it's strongly implied. And here is the problem: existing NLRB regs were crafted with the intent of preventing movement of jobs from a large, unionized, vertically-integrated manufacturing site located in the USA to a non-unionized-but-otherwise-identical site in the USA. As such, those regs predate globalization and highly-sepcialized work functions. As a result, unions in many sectors simply cannot offer adequate worker protections in a globalized economic setting without additional worker protections. These currently do not exist...at least outisde of the public sector.
OK, it's not easy to offshore warehouses or coffee shops - but there is nothing that will prevent Amazon or Starbucks from employing (for example) arguments that the end of the pandemic or the rise of inflation or *something* is forcing them to close a number of their work sites - which just happen to include their unioinized sites. And the NLRB really wouldn't be able to do anything in the absence of whistleblower accounts.
Do these make the above suggestions any less true? I would say if anything this just adds to conversation but doesn’t substantially disprove the above points. I’ve worked in a union for 10 years now and all of the above has been discussed many times with either my colleagues or non-union folks. Typically these are the driver for why people don’t want to unionize. Maybe not the material conditions.
I'm not disputing that corporate management doesn't make those 4 points repeatedly when trying to defeat an attempt to unionize a site.
I'm saying that what *actually* defeats the attempt is that when they are broadcasting their messaging concerning those 4 points they are also broadcasting on a low-frequency/high-amplitude carrier wave indicating "we won't let this go against us - you've been warned". It's the implied threat of lost jobs (which is a threat that they can make stick) that defeats the attempt to unionize.
It's equally important to understand how much *harder* it is to organize a large site vs. a small site. So it's not at all surprising to me that the attempts to unionize Starbucks locations are spreading like wildfire vs. attempts at Amazon sites.
It's going to get even harder for the Amazon movement to continue. Last Thursday Amazon announced dreadful earnings - particularly for its core eCom business (the unit that the warehouses support). This absolutely will be used as a basis to close distro. facilities and nobody should be surprised if both Staten Island and Bessemer are among them (see my original post). That's going to be a killing frost for the unionization movement.
The Starbucks effort will probably not be similarly-affected in the short-term. The number of organized facilities is sufficiently-large that it will be much harder for Starbucks to shut them down in a fashion that doesn't telegraph to the NLRB that they are targeting union sites. That said, Starbucks is a "consumer discretionary" business and they are going to be seeing lots of site closures if we really are in a stagflationary period. The last stagflationary period was not beneficial for organized labor.
“But most people don’t like to view themselves as the mean” this hits so close to home. Everyone would benefit so much from seeing the expectation of their condition based on the mean quality of life and try to raise that.
I'd be really curious if any anti-union person or company has ever been completely honest in public about their stance. Has an executive or owner ever come out and said "I'm against the workers unionizing because it will mean less money for me."
I recommend reading Confessions of a Union Buster. Fascinating stuff, though not for anyone with a weak stomach.
Owners and managers, including shareholders, are often dishonest about unions because their material interests are in opposition to those of workers and unions. It's class conflict. But there are some working class people (those who work for their money, rather than their money working for them) who are honestly confused about their own material interests. A small number of them had a bad experience with an unresponsive union, but more of them just honestly believe the anti-union propaganda from authoritarians, big corporations and the religiously orthodox.
Or they were at union sites that were unable to protect their jobs from eventual offshoring (see my post below). To call them "confused" is bullshit - I've experienced union failures in a very personal way.
https://www.ilwu.org/history/the-ilwu-story/
"But historically, as unions have developed in this country, they have mostly just been divisive. They have put management on one side of the fence, employees on the other, and themselves in the middle as almost a separate business, one that depends on division between the other two camps."
What a bunch of mendacious bourgeois drivel. Uh, no Sam, pretty sure that owners/executives created the dividing line between manager and worker.
I'm writing this a now-retired IAM member. It pains me to say it - but unions are no longer an adequate tool for most workers.
In my opinion you article is poorly-resarched. That seems harsh, but in my experience (which spans four union and non-union sites over nearly 30 years) none of the four reasons you cited heavily influences whether a worker at a site will vote for a union or not.
Here's what does: concerns about job security.
Of course management can't explictly-threaten to close down a facility that unionizes or move work to another non-union site (i.e. "Ruanway Shop") - but it's strongly implied. And here is the problem: existing NLRB regs were crafted with the intent of preventing movement of jobs from a large, unionized, vertically-integrated manufacturing site located in the USA to a non-unionized-but-otherwise-identical site in the USA. As such, those regs predate globalization and highly-sepcialized work functions. As a result, unions in many sectors simply cannot offer adequate worker protections in a globalized economic setting without additional worker protections. These currently do not exist...at least outisde of the public sector.
OK, it's not easy to offshore warehouses or coffee shops - but there is nothing that will prevent Amazon or Starbucks from employing (for example) arguments that the end of the pandemic or the rise of inflation or *something* is forcing them to close a number of their work sites - which just happen to include their unioinized sites. And the NLRB really wouldn't be able to do anything in the absence of whistleblower accounts.
Do these make the above suggestions any less true? I would say if anything this just adds to conversation but doesn’t substantially disprove the above points. I’ve worked in a union for 10 years now and all of the above has been discussed many times with either my colleagues or non-union folks. Typically these are the driver for why people don’t want to unionize. Maybe not the material conditions.
I'm not disputing that corporate management doesn't make those 4 points repeatedly when trying to defeat an attempt to unionize a site.
I'm saying that what *actually* defeats the attempt is that when they are broadcasting their messaging concerning those 4 points they are also broadcasting on a low-frequency/high-amplitude carrier wave indicating "we won't let this go against us - you've been warned". It's the implied threat of lost jobs (which is a threat that they can make stick) that defeats the attempt to unionize.
It's equally important to understand how much *harder* it is to organize a large site vs. a small site. So it's not at all surprising to me that the attempts to unionize Starbucks locations are spreading like wildfire vs. attempts at Amazon sites.
It's going to get even harder for the Amazon movement to continue. Last Thursday Amazon announced dreadful earnings - particularly for its core eCom business (the unit that the warehouses support). This absolutely will be used as a basis to close distro. facilities and nobody should be surprised if both Staten Island and Bessemer are among them (see my original post). That's going to be a killing frost for the unionization movement.
The Starbucks effort will probably not be similarly-affected in the short-term. The number of organized facilities is sufficiently-large that it will be much harder for Starbucks to shut them down in a fashion that doesn't telegraph to the NLRB that they are targeting union sites. That said, Starbucks is a "consumer discretionary" business and they are going to be seeing lots of site closures if we really are in a stagflationary period. The last stagflationary period was not beneficial for organized labor.
#4 especially. Thank you for this!
“But most people don’t like to view themselves as the mean” this hits so close to home. Everyone would benefit so much from seeing the expectation of their condition based on the mean quality of life and try to raise that.