It sounds like organizers were taught the Socratic Method but decided Socrates was an asshole so they'd do it without the condescension.

I imagine many of you have already seen Erik Loomis's take on Jane McAlevey's take, but if not, it's here. tl;dr he sees possible benefits beyond this particular campaign to nationalizing this fight. The PRO act is the solution but filibuster/Manchin.

It took two tries, some years apart, to win my union. I imagine that a long term campaign will be harder at Amazon because of high turnover - people tend to stay at my institution for years, so plenty of people who were around for the first try were still there at the second.

We have had a couple of basically unsuccessful strikes here that were, IMO, the result of the local overselling the strike. In one instance, they didn't tell us that the union council thought the strike was unwinnable and a bad idea, and I think a lot of people would have voted not to strike if they'd known. During the second strike, management basically sent us back without even any face-saving concessions. There was a total turnover in leadership after this and things have been different since.

We've actually won a lot of concessions (although not a couple of key ones) in the last few negotiation sessions - once we threatened to strike at a critical moment, once the economy was doing well and they had retention issues and my impression is that we've lucked out with new leadership in management - while no leadership is ever going to be truly sympathetic to the union (which is why we haven't got the key things) current leadership does seem to be fairer than in the past and a couple of really egregious problems were corrected.

My takeaway is that what you really need with unions is experienced and pragmatic organizers plus a lot of time. (Unless there's some other pressing issue - I'm sure if there were a war on or I worked in an industry with frequent explosions it would be different) because you're really waiting for your historical moment - without history on your side, you lose, even if you're passionate and objectively right.

For years I thought that the two failed strikes were because our union leadership was captured by [a particular communist organization whose judgement I don't really trust] and that they had rushed us into the strikes out of ideology. But then I recently learned that while those particular people are gone, a lot of the current leadership is also from this org....and I think they actually make very good decisions. There's a bit of a sense that they're too top-down but it's been seven or eight years now (because I'm an Old and have been here forever) and we're in a much, much better place as a union than we were. So it really was the people more than the ideology, I guess.

There's a tendency -- not just on the Left, but a human tendency -- that I think McAlevey sometimes falls prey to here: Blaming a failure on the people on the ground doing the actual work.

Union organizing in 2021 is really, really hard, and it's difficult to separate poor strategy from an unfavorable social/political climate and a lack of willing hands to do the work.

As for the media overhyping the situation -- this seems entirely wrong to me (although I'm not sure exactly what McAlevey means by the "labor media"). The media traditionally ignores labor, and that's bad, full stop.

2 / 4: I also thought the McAlevey summary is likely not fair to the organizers, but I still think it's informative and provides a lot of detail about the difficulties of a successful union drive.

It's a process. The Bessemer process.

5: Oh yeah, absolutely. Haven't read the Klein interview, but the Nation piece is really interesting.

I don't understand why we aren't seeing Amazon unionization drives in regions with more union membership and sympathy, like the Bay or Northeast.

I assume the Volkswagen drive also got hype because "Unions? In the South?" is like dog-bites-man to news editors...

I am amused to find myself defending the vile mainstream media, but of course the Nissan and Volkswagen union efforts were important national news.

The original construction of those plants was national news in large part because they were designed to circumvent organized labor. Any developments concerning labor at those plants are important by any sensible definition. McAlevey's point -- that union failures, or even anticipated failures, should be downplayed in the media -- is both ridiculous from the standpoint of legitimate news judgment and counterproductive for the labor movement.

I do wonder how they chose Alabama -- but with this sort of thing, you fight where you've got the soldiers. I assume the Alabama folks stepped up.

One would like to think that future organizers at Amazon facilities will have learned a lot from this campaign. Certainly getting the number of workers at the facility so wrong was a wake up call, but they've also seen a lot of Amazon's cards, and so the next campaign can perhaps be better situated. And maybe getting some of Amazon's violations acted upon will help. The next campaign won't have pandemic restrictions.

I don't think overly rosy predictions are ever helpful, but the union side has plenty of reasons to avoid gnashing and rending.

11: This. Amazon has almost all the cards, but they also have to win every battle.

There's no justification for putting workers on what organizers call a "death march."

Can I suggest the organizers call it something else regardless of whether or not they try it in a given case.

13: I read something the other day which I thought was a transcription era, but is actually a thing: "Swedish Death Cleaning."

You need Murphy's oil soap to get the death paneling clean.

although I'm not sure exactly what McAlevey means by the "labor media"

She means In These Times and Labor Notes, primarily.

"Death paneling" made me laugh.

Loomis' post flagged at 2 above is definitely worth everyone's time. Two key bits:

"...I usually take McAlevey's critiques with a grain of salt because she comes from the Labor Notes wing of the labor movement, which means that the problem with organized labor is always weak/corrupt/indifferent labor bosses not being radical enough or doing enough organizing to win. She's often not wrong about this to an extent, but she has a huge axe to grind. "

And

"But still, getting Biden on this, having rallies that included Bernie Sanders, Sara Nelson, and other big name leaders of the labor-left, this all made the campaign become a national conversation about work in America and the problems unions face. This has great value in itself. It just didn't make any difference in, you know, actually winning the election. "

I am perhaps over-sensitive to the anti-democratic vibe among some on the US Left, but I find it a bit off-putting that McAlevey advocates against the hype given to union activities as she discusses the national implications and lessons of these same union activities. I read this -- maybe unfairly -- as an assertion that the only proper viewpoint on union issues is hers, and the rest of y'all* need to be quiet about it. (Unlike Loomis, though, I don't actually know anything about McAlevey beyond the Nation piece.)

*This is an Alabama union drive we're talking about here.

I'm not really paying too much attention. Just enough to know I want to buy elsewhere for a while.

Thanks for linking the article. I thought it was good. It really made me feel how viscerally life-changing a successful union campaign would be for workers even peripheral ones.

I do wonder about the home visits though. Most employers aren't in Amazons' position of having cameras on huge numbers of houses.

Everybody is wearing masks.

The hyenas who have taken over our legislature are about to get Right to Work passed. I've been trying to understand what that's going to mean for unionism here, and how labor organizing can adapt to fit the new reality. Right to Work changes the playing field substantially, how should unions respond in terms of shifting their organizational structure, strategy, and tactics?

Defeating a right-to-work bill was one of the approximately four non-evil things the Montana legislature did this session

The heroic cadres of organized labor have no greater friend than myself, and yet... When we're talking about the business unions, what good does it do you to have union representation at your job if, when you get off work, a union cop shoots you in the back 'cause you're Black? I don't think the major unions have engaged enough with the racial question in this country. Which is par for the course, one could even say it's the defining feature of the US labor movement. Having said that, the kind of shoe-leather organizing the fellow in the OP is doing is exactly how you solve for that. Get folx organizing in their own communities and across communities too, there's no reason you can't do both.

|| There is a guy with a van in front of my house stealing the aluminum cans out of my recycling bin. I'm going to go ahead and not mess with him... |>

Can he take my old ladder? It's aluminum, probably unsafe, and I can't figure out how to get it out of my garage.

I myself have been in the market for a perfectly good broken ladder.

Right to Work changes the playing field substantially, how should unions respond in terms of shifting their organizational structure, strategy, and tactics?

Step one is to call it by its proper name, "free rider."

More substantively, a major part of the answer is ABO -- always be organizing. Unions in fair share states can be in the habit of taking union membership (or at least dues) for granted; in free rider states, we have to organize every new hire.

Step one is to call it by its proper name, "free rider."

Having bad flashbacks to my union days in a right-to-work free-rider state. Perfectly nice people didn't see any problem with free-riding, but did object to the correct nomenclature. I'd apologize, but tell them that there was really no other accurate phrase for it.

a major part of the answer is ABO

Coffee is for organizers!

Ohio had a thing where you could file paperwork to get back the part of your union dues that was not used for collective bargaining. I took the question as "are you willing to out yourself as a whiny asshole for $50 a month?"

32: That's called agency fee and it exists in all fair share states based on a Supreme Court decision called Beck v. CWA. It forces all union staff to track how much of their time is spent on bargaining and representation vs. organizing and political activity.

33: I was briefly represented by SEIU, because the Comminwealth of MA broke up all of the State employee unions so they would have less power. SEIU was not super great in standing up for us in administrative stuff and making sure that we had representation. Nurses Union and AFSCME were a lot better. Most of our benefits were through the state, but dental might have been through the Union. I think you could choose not to be in the Union, but you still had to pay your dues if you did that.

I was in AFSCME. My dad was, to his amusement, briefly a Teamster.

Most of our benefits were through the state, but dental might have been through the Union. I think you could choose not to be in the Union, but you still had to pay your dues if you did that.

If you were a private sector employee and you chose not to be in the union, you probably still had to pay an fair share fee, or "agency fee." As Sir Kraab said, this is less than the full member dues -- it's just the portion of the dues that is attributable to the representational functions of the union (such as negotiations and grievance processing) which benefit you as a non-member unit member.

If you are a public sector employee post Janus v. AFSCME (2018), you no longer have to pay a fair share fee. All public sector employees in unionized workplaces who are not themselves union members are free to leech off of their dues-paying coworkers.

Newt was, I believe, a Steelworker for a few weeks last summer through a tutoring job.

I think it was the steelworkers who tried to get the local graduate students.

Anyway, when my dad was a Teamster, Hoffa was in charge and very much under investigation.

36: It was 2014, so before that decision.

I'm currently a Steelworker. Solidarity, Newt! Also, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. isn't running again and it's likely that the Teamster reform faction (Teamsters for a Democratic Union) will win the next election.

39: My husband complained about being in the Union for a summer job with the Ontario provincial government. I think the Union leadership was very explicit that they were unwilling to do anything to support the summer students including support and kind of raises for them, so it burned that they had to pay dues.

Not typically a Jacobin fan, but I know the person who wrote this: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/amazon-global-supply-chains-organizing-unionize-logistics

43: That's very useful information, that Amazon closed the Chicago warehouse where an incipient union got especially powerful. Partly answers my question in 8.

3: "I imagine that a long term campaign will be harder at Amazon because of high turnover"

And how. I knew someone who was working at Amazon. Even if you're outside the warehouses it's pretty clearly a nightmare.

Another post from Loomis in which he advocates for the PRO act: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/labor-law-reform