Liberals were downright excited this week over President Biden’s bizarre and unprecedented decision to interfere in a private company’s unionization election.
About 6,000 Amazon employees at an Alabama facility are currently deciding whether they want to be represented by a union. Biden responded to this by releasing a video that quite flagrantly encourages them to do so, using the power of the presidency to harm a private company.
“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Biden said in the video. “Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union. But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers — full stop, full stop.”
That was a very nice-sounding and extremely deceptive comment. After all, if it isn’t up to Biden to decide, then why is he so obviously putting his thumb on the scale in a specific election?
Not only did Biden promote unionism at Amazon, but he also tried to racialize the question. With his comment that this election is taking place amid “a reckoning on race,” he is falsely implying that labor unions are or have been forces for growing racial equality.
In fact, labor unions are increasingly irrelevant to the average worker — especially to younger workers. Their ranks have been thinning for decades, such that they now account for less than 11% of all workers and just 6.3% of private sector workers.
One reason is that state and federal regulations have vastly improved working conditions from what they were in the late 19th century. The worst abuses of workers, the ones that made unions relevant and even attractive in ages past, are now just distant memories.
Another reason is that there are fewer advantages to union membership than there once were. Yes, union workers have higher wages on average — $1,144 per week versus $958 for nonunion workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that difference is largely a statistical artifact — a function of the disproportionate concentration of union members in states that have an extremely high cost of living. Hawaii (23.5% unionized), New York (21% unionized), Alaska (17.1%), New Jersey (15.7%), and California (15.2%), five of the most expensive states to live in, account for 34.2% of all union members but just 20.5% of all U.S. workers. The wage gap in union workers’ favor diminishes still further or even disappears when you factor in the dues members must pay.
Today, with the gig economy opening up an entirely new universe of opportunities, more and more workers are not even bothering with the traditional employment relationship, let alone the extremely rigid version of that relationship that exists in a union shop. A growing number of young people especially have come to value the ability to choose their own hours (and, in some cases, set their own rates) more highly than they value the steadiness and reliability of an established employer bound by a static union contract.
Today, private sector unions mostly exist due to inertia. Less than 10% of the workers who currently belong to them ever had any say in whether to unionize or which national union to choose for representation.
When Biden begs workers to vote for a union and promises to be the most pro-union president in history, he is trying to prop up a moribund institution that has been historically important for the Democratic Party as a source of political muscle. His effort to prop up dying unions with government favors is nothing new, but this interference in a specific workplace decision is both harmful to Amazon’s consumers and deceitful toward workers whose hopes are probably being puffed up for nothing.
