Labor union bosses were so eager to win the battle of Bessemer, Alabama, that they called in a favor from the very top. They got President Joe Biden himself to use the office of the presidency inappropriately to urge Amazon workers in that Alabama city to vote to unionize.
Ahead of the vote, union organizers were making contingency plans in case they came up short. Their plan was to challenge the result based on tedious nitpicking. For example, they accused Amazon management of improperly interfering in the election by (gasp!) having a USPS mailbox installed outside of their facility.
The workers have now had their say, and the result was probably not close enough to overturn based on a mailbox or any other technicality. Seventy-one percent of those voting chose against unionization. Only 29% wanted the union.
One can only wonder what the outcome might have been had Biden not intervened.
Unions face a problem that is much bigger than endorsements or post boxes. Their problem is one of relevance to today’s workers. Unionism in the private sector workforce peaked at 35% in 1954. Today, it stands around 6%. Unions made sense in an era when working conditions were appalling and change was necessary. They continued to make at least some sense into the era when workers still stayed at one company for life.
In today’s workforce, regulation has solved the problem of working conditions. A far more dynamic labor market has solved the second problem, such that workers, depending on the merit of their performance, routinely change jobs every few years. Between this and their ability to negotiate with their own employers for raises, this allows most workers to advance on their own in pay and benefits as the years go by.
The alternative to this, handing over one’s bargaining voice to a labor union, has little appeal nowadays. It is an archaic, outdated model of the workplace. It is little wonder that workers at a forward-thinking tech company like Amazon, which already compensates them quite well, would find unionization irrelevant to their lives.
And if workers at large companies such as Amazon reject unions, the gig economy represents even more hostile territory. If you cannot unionize the nation’s largest companies, you certainly cannot unionize someone who is working for himself.
The ironic result of unions’ catastrophic decline in relevance is that the old left-wing vision of the working man and his union has been turned on its head. Today, factory and assembly-line workers overwhelmingly reject unions, and the ones most likely to unionize are university graduate students, think-tankers at places such as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, and journalists at leftist websites such as Media Matters and Vox.
Between these outfits and the unwilling home care workers that unions have attempted to force to become members, big labor is heading for a starvation diet in the long run. The Biden administration should not be using taxpayer funds or government resources to prop up these labor dinosaurs.
