Rob Rogers for April 13, 2021

Yeah. There are some interesting analyses of how that played out. Besemer WAS a steel town, and there was a way for people to work their way up within the mill(s). There were a variety of wage levels.

Then there was nothing.

Then Amazon came along. Most of the jobs pay $15, which is better than federal minimum wage, but there aren’t upward paths through the system. And even $15 isn’t very much, compared to what they or their parents were making at the mills. But: $15 in the hand versus maybe being fired for being a little too .. insistent … about unionizing.

It’s no wonder Amazon won.

About 1917 my grandfather worked 10 hour days as a coal miner for $1 a day. The miners joined the union and fought for an 8 hour day plus wash houses to clean up before going home. They had to buy everything from the company store and many weeks owed more than than their wages.

Interesting that here democracy doesnt count when the free vote goes a certain way. The vote went against joining the union. Why pay union dues when things are fine?

Also note that Amazon’s minimum wage for everyone is $15.00 per hour.

Back in the early 90’s, Walmart was the “evil threat”. Regardless of the fact they were creating jobs, they were putting small shops out of business, etc., etc. Times change and the economy with it. Amazon is creating more and more jobs and until there is a national minimum hourly wage law, $15/hour is more than many workers get doing comparable work.Unions are just not popular in the 21st century.

A few things seem to be missing from this discussion.

1. Workers were almost daily subjected to mandatory assemblies where anti-union assertions were made, including threats to shut down the Besemer warehouse should the union be voted in. Workers were also repeatedly lied to and told that they would have to pay union dues, despite Alabama being a “right to work” state.

2. The annual turnover rate at the Besemer warehouse is 100%. Many workers who were there at the start of the union effort were gone by the end of the voting.

3. Bezos spent millions on union busting “consultants”.

I guess they will enjoy not having any of the protections and benefits they might have gotten, but then again it’s “right to work” (for less). At some point they may have to pay for the privilege of being employed.

The question that I’d like answered is why they almost never discourage unionization by treating workers like human beings and partners, instead of like hostile replaceable labor units? Maybe treat them the way they’d like to be treated themselves? Isn’t there some sort of ancient rule, common to nearly every culture, about this?

maybe we should charge amazon to install broadband in rural areas, instead of charging the taxpayer

Have worked at companies that were heavily unionized and that rejected unionism – the only difference was which master you had taking advantage of you…

I recently ran across the one-too-manieth occurrence of the phrase “union bosses” that tipped me over the brink from annoyance to outrage.

Here are things that a real boss can do: hire you, fire you, promote you, demote you, reassign you (including to a different city), tell you when you can or can’t take vacation days you’ve supposedly “earned”, tell you what to do during half of your waking life, make you pee in a cup, change your pay, publicly ridicule or belittle you, tell you what kind of clothes you can or cannot or must wear, order you to work overtime (regardless of what other plans you may have had), make you listen to their jokes (including the racist and sexist ones), and ignore you whenever they feel like it. Your only recourse? Quit.

How many of those things can a union leader do? None. None of them. Not a one.

As Bob Black wrote in The Libertarian as Conservative (1984), “Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.” Conversely, union leaders never give you an or-else order. That’s because they work for you, not the other way around.

Union leaders come from the rank and file, not from on high, are elected by the union’s members, and continue to be responsible to them. Can you imagine the look on the face of a real boss if you were to stroll into his office and announce that you intended to run against him for ownership of the company next year because you thot he was doing a crappy job? Yet that’s exactly how it works with unions. They’re democracies, not monarchies.

In brief, any time you hear some right-wing hack mindlessly parroting the phrase “union bosses”, you can safely assume that either his brain isn’t engaged or he doesn’t have one to begin with. And feel free to ignore everything else he has to say, too, considering the source.

At the risk of having people scream at me for ,Cancel culture’, boycott Amazon and any other companies who are anti union and therefore, anti worker. There other ways to purchase whatever Amazon sells, surely?

They Lied, they Cheated, they Intimidated …

They reportedly spent close to $10,000,000 paying for “Anti-Union Consultants”.

Do you think they got that way being magnanimous?

Actress sisters and long-time rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had a bitter relationship. When the latter died, the former remarked “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Bernie Madoff is dead.