The problem is that, in the US, most peoples’ experiences with unions is with public unions, which are the worst kind of unions: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/10/29/coolidge-and-...
> For decades, that was the mainstream Democratic view, too. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed in 1937.
As a dueling anecdote, I know plenty of libertarian/right-leaning folks who privately tell me that they totally understand that teachers (regardless of unions) should not have to face a highly infectious disease in classrooms just so a bunch of double-income parents want to keep doing their office jobs over Zoom. The current problems have almost nothing to do with unions directly.
In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.
And even if we somehow got to negative universal experiences, those very well could be:
1. Part of a conscious tradeoff (e.g. firms being less profitable due to higher labor costs). A lot of anti-union rhetoric seems to amount to complaining about not being able to have one's cake and eat it too.
2. Artifacts of law (either direct or indirect) that could solved through legal reform. My understanding is that at least some of the "adversarialness" of US unions derives from the requirements of US law, and German unions (for instance) operate very differently (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany).
The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers. Thus you tend to see that the best unions for workers tend to be in large, established, highly profitable firms with little to no competition. A prime example are the American automakers before the 1980s when foreign competition kicked in. Working on the GM assembly line in 1970 was a very good job.
However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability. The only give is either higher consumer prices or deadweight loss, i.e. fewer customer and therefore fewer (but higher-paid) employees. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, especially to the extent that the average Amazon customer is wealthier than the average Amazon warehouse worker. But given Amazon's extremely thin profit margins, I don't really see anyway that consumers won't end up paying for the sizable bulk of the unionization costs.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979399204600...
That's not entirely surprising. Unions aren't optimizing for company productivity, but for the conditions and pay of the workers. And conversely, a company can abuse its employees to a large degree while reaping productivity gains from it.
> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability.
Amazon is "barely profitable" because of clever accounting. They rake in tons of money, and reinvest it into growth. There is plenty of buffer to eat the unionization costs. But of course Amazon may opt to pass these costs to customers instead.
Amazon’s warehouses for example have some serious safety issues which they largely ignore. One example being heavy items being stored in such a way vastly increase the risk of back injury. Stuff can be good for efficiency and a really terrible deal for workers.
It's not large scale or even necessarily generalisable. I don't think a study limited to 83 "Sawmills in the Western U.S." can be presented as an example of unionisation in general.
> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands
Amazon actively avoids profitability... Modern economies do not reward profitability, they increasingly reward the promise of potential future profitability. Amazon is perfectly capable of earning a healthy profit, but it is actively incentivised not to in favour of chasing further growth. Uber, WeWork, and Doordash all exemplify this attitude; although it could be argued that they are incapable of profitability at all.
Companies are actively choosing to remain in the red in order to stack the house of cards that little bit higher, steal a little bit more of their market before they turn around and exploit the fragile and artificially inflated position they've bought their way into.
> The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers.
Surely the most defensible thing is that the workers are fairly compensated and work in humane conditions? We seem unable to convince Western corporations to not use child or slave labour, but at least we don't attempt to justify it by saying "Iphones would be more expensive without Uighur work camps".
It's not unions good or unions bad. The focus should be on how to get unions that don't lead to the abuses people are afraid of. When it comes to unions, the discussion seems to be much more take-it-or-leave-it.
How many union members do you think experience wage theft?
Probably they could do a better job of advertising this to workers. Many workers experiencing wage theft probably are not aware of their options, and that's a problem. But when used, it works. I've seen it work.
There are all kinds of de jure considerations that purport to protect workers, but they fail without an organization by and for workers to actually ensure they're enforced.
Well sometimes a truck is late, that's just the way the world works. In one of those cases, my boss asked us to stay at the plant an hour late; the truck driver was on the phone and said he'd be there shortly, but we had nothing to do but sit around on our asses twiddling our thumbs. One of my coworkers, more experienced than me, asked if we'd get paid while waiting. My account of the conversation that followed:
Boss: "Well uh, we're all just sitting here doing nothing so.."
Coworker: "The Deparment of Labor says..."
Boss: "WHOA WHOA WHOA! I was just kidding of course you'll get paid!"
Immediate backtrack. He turned on a dime as soon as he realized there were workers who knew their rights. I think information is the key. There is no substitute for workers knowing their rights.
As, often, do state labor authorities.
How many union members do you think experience wage theft?
To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of workers by a corporation, the livelihood of individual workers who give witness to the allegations are at stake.
To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of the public weal, customers or the corporation by a union, usually no one's livelihood is threatened by giving witness.
It isn't surprising abuses by unions are easier to publicize and and more commonly substantiated. This dynamic will not change until workers have the equivalent of FU money. Or like in one sci-fi story I read, a genetic mutation causes everyone to fix chlorophyll in their pigmentation and get all their minimum bodily energy requirements by standing around in the sun for a few hours each day, and have to be convinced to work. I suspect a more near-term, practical direction is some solution along the lines of an intentional community co-op.
It's not isolated abuses, it's a feature of unions.
What makes you jump to label that complaint an "anecdote" and an "isolated abuse" rather than evidence of structural rot and public union corruption?
There are plenty of examples of unions being really bad in the US, the burden of proof is now on the other side of the court.
You could argue from personal experience that you went to a bad school therefore all schools are bad, or you had a bad experience with <insert skin color, ethnicity, or religion> therefore all people of that sort are bad.
It's just not very convincing.