What does it take to unionize?

Last updated on: December 18, 2013 at 11:30 pm by Jane the Actuary

What does it take to unionize? 2013-12-18T23:30:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This is, in part, a bit of an elaboration on a prior post.

Back in my day, we teenagers didn’t volunteer or join a dozen clubs to pad our college applications; we worked at McDonald’s and the like. And one of my jobs was at Meijer. (If you’ve never been to Meijer, you’re missing out — it’s a local chain; originally just in Michigan, they’ve now spread out to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A full grocery store with pretty good prices and a Target-type discount store with a wide selection of merchandise, though not as trendy as Target, it’s pretty practical to have a regular grocery shopping list but add onto it the toy for a birthday party or the bike helmet or whatever other miscellaneous item you need.) Lucky me — I had to pay union dues, on minimum wage (I think it was minimum wage — in any case, not much more), with no apparent benefit to being in the union.

Now, to be sure, there were full-time employees; this meant not just working 40 hours a week but being hired with a “full time” status (jobs were posted that way), and I imagine that they had benefits, and maybe the union contract provided better pay and benefits than otherwise. But you can bet that, if “right to work” had existed then and I had known about it, I sure would have opted-out of paying those union dues.

Fast forward a decade or so. My mom started working at then-Hudson’s, later Marshall Fields, now Macy’s, after I started college, and — I don’t remember when, sometime in the 1990s, I think — the U.A.W. had an organizing drive there. Employees wore buttons that were either pro- or anti-union; my mom had her “no UAW” button. As far as the practicalities, she didn’t see any way that the UAW would bring any benefits — it was a retail job and paid accordingly. But in addition, this was the Detroit area; people have strong feelings about unions around there — either they deserve support more or less automatically for the benefits they brought to autoworkers, or they’re automatically guilty of destroying the car industry. I don’t think there’s anyone who has neutral feelings about the UAW.

So Megan McArdle posts a piece on attempts to unionize Amazon, “Labor takes the fight to Amazon.” Good or bad? As she points out, the large number of workers in its warehouses make it a better candidate than a McDonald’s, with smaller numbers at multiple restaurants. In trying to dig out more information, I came across a statement that they hire warehouse workes through temp agencies, which would make things considerably more difficult. But imagine that there were a vote, and a campaign in advance.

In the union’s favor would be the promises of, maybe not pay increases, but of work rules to make the days more pleasant, since there are considerable complaints about unreasonable quotas, hot temperatures, lack of breaks, insufficient tolerance of sick days, and the like.

On the other hand, there’s union dues. And the fact that a contract requires negotiation, and the risk of a strike — or, more specifically, the risk that the union could vote for a strike when you’d be just fine with taking the deal, and are stuck with striking when you don’t want to — and there are plenty of instances in which strikes, basically, just fail because the company successfully hires replacement workers, and it’s all for nothing. (Objectively, unions are also famous for ridiculous work rules and demands that set about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg — but I don’t imagine this is necessarily a part of an individual voter’s calculus.)

In many workforces, unionization also strips away the ability to get bonuses and raises based on one’s performance, rather than a schedule of seniority levels — but I don’t imagine this is much of an issue for a generic warehouse worker.

Above this, unionization requires long-term workers, who expect to be there for years, not months, and I would be surprised if this was the perspective of Amazon workers.

Put yourself in the shoes of an Amazon worker. What do you choose?

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