Why Amazon Workers Rejected Unionization

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 11, 2021

 

‘Thanks, but no thanks.”

 

So said Amazon employees — by a two-to-one margin — to the self-serving union bosses at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The members of the disproportionately African-American work force at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., facility were not sold on the union’s proposal to dip into their pockets while linking their effort to the Black Lives Matter movement and decided that they didn’t need a team of highly paid political operatives to skim their paychecks.

 

Is this another one of those What’s the Matter with Kansas? episodes in which workers “vote against their own interests”? Why would any worker not want to be represented by a labor union?

 

To answer that question, we might turn to Frank Giovinco, recently sentenced to four years in prison for managing the Genovese crime syndicate’s control of two labor unions in Brooklyn. If Giovinco is unavailable for comment, we might ask Charles Farris Jr., the former president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) affiliate in New Castle, Pa., who has been indicted on five felony counts of theft and five felony counts of “access device” fraud, which is what they call it when you steal money using an ATM card; Cathy Byers, the former treasurer of the AFT affiliate in Ronceverte, W. Va., convicted of wire fraud; James Young, the former president of the AFT’s Philadelphia affiliate, convicted of embezzling; Joseph Ashton, the former vice president of the United Auto Workers and former director of the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources in Detroit, convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money-laundering in connection with his receipt of kickbacks on a multi-million-dollar vendor contract; Angel Luis Garcia, the former financial secretary of the Amalgamated Transit Union local in Dover, N.J., convicted on embezzling charges; Michael Johnson, the former president and business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1658 (Pine Bluff, Ark.), convicted of embezzling; Tyrone Johnson, the former president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3374 (Baltimore), indicted on theft and embezzling charges; Brenda Wilson, the former president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3841 (Columbia, S.C.), indicted on a charge of making false statements to federal investigators; Sandra King, the former president of the Federation of Police and Security and former president of the Alliance of Independent Workers (both locals in Maryland), sentenced for embezzling; Aja Jasmin, the former president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 350C (Ontario, Calif.), charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in an embezzling scheme; or Michael Oldham, the former president of AFGE Local 1900 (Taunton, Mass.), indicted on 29 counts of wire fraud along with making false statements to investigators and tax charges.

 

A few bad apples, you say? All these cases are from 2020, and there are many, many more from the same year. That’s a whole peck of bad apples.

 

Other than the Genovese captain, the cream of last year’s crop is probably former UAW president Dennis Williams, convicted of conspiracy to embezzle in a scheme involving a villa in Palm Springs and thousands of dollars in golf-club fees: a genuine blue-collar working man, right there. One bad apple? Not according to the Department of Labor: “Throughout the conspiracy, which included many other top UAW officials, including Williams’ successor, Gary Jones, Williams and his co-conspirators embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the UAW for the personal benefit of themselves and other high-ranking UAW officers.”

 

Did you catch that? Williams is the second former UAW president convicted in the same case.

 

That’s not a labor movement — that’s a crime wave.

 

The union that proposed to represent Amazon’s employees has not been without troubles of its own. In 2018, RWDSU business manager Angela Parrish-Wilson was sentenced in federal court on embezzling charges.

 

These are maybe not the people you want handling your money.

 

Amazon has its problems, to be sure, but it is by the accounts of a great many of the people who work there, a pretty good place to work — a weird one, in many ways, but a pretty good one. Working at Amazon is a little like joining a cult, while being in a union is more like joining a gang.

 

It is easy to imagine a world in which American labor unions performed a valuable service in the labor market, as unions do in some other countries and as ours have at times in the past. But that is not the world in which we live. In our world, a small and declining share of private-sector workers belong to unions, which derive their clout from the fact that so many government functionaries — see the teachers- and police-union officials listed above — belong to unions. These taxpayer-funded workers are numerous, highly paid, and politically committed, which makes them a real force — they effectively run the state of California and enjoy baronial powers in places such as Chicago and Philadelphia. (My former NR colleague Jillian Kay Melchior of the Wall Street Journal has been on the very entertaining Johnny Doc beat for years; props to whoever wrote the headline: “He allegedly embezzled more than $600,000 to buy Q-tips, romance novels, and politicians.”) Public-sector unions exploit a basic agent-principal problem arising from the fact that in cities such as Philadelphia and in states such as California, the union bosses sitting on one side of the negotiating table and the elected Democrats sitting on the other side have complementary interests rather than adversarial ones: The more money going into the union coffers, the more that can be transferred to Democratic campaign committees and super-PACs.

 

That’s a lot of foxes watching a lot of henhouses.

 

The third-rate plunderers trying to insinuate themselves into Amazon and similar businesses would have you believe that they are the second coming of the Molly Maguires, saving an exploited workforce from Jeff Bezos’s sweatshops, where the median pay is . . . between $15 and $20 an hour in the warehouses, with delivery drivers making around $70,000 a year and getting nice benefits. That is not big money compared to what a software developer makes, at Amazon or anywhere else — but it is pretty good money compared to what workers typically make in warehouse jobs.

 

And that is always the most important question in these cases: Compared to what? Amazon’s people in Alabama seem to have answered that question pretty well for themselves. And there’s a reason for that.

 

Amazon needs people. It has been hiring as fast as it can. With online shopping booming because of the coronavirus, Amazon hired 427,300 new workers in less than a year. At the end of 2020, it was hiring 1,400 workers a day. Sure, companies respond to social pressure, and Amazon is easier to push around than most, but Amazon isn’t hiring all those people out of charity: Labor is valuable, and good labor is very valuable. When it comes to raising the price of labor, supply and demand work a lot better than carping and regulation. A thriving Amazon offers its workers a better shot at upward mobility than a stagnant and unionized Amazon would.

 

The Amazon workers in Alabama decided that it is better to have the market on your side than to have a cartel on your side. Smart call. The rest of the country should take note.