The truth is I don't think I know what it's like to live as an Amazon warehouse worker. When I grew up in California I didn't learn anything about unions until I was like 30 years old. Now to me unionization makes perfect rational sense, so I had assumed the union vote failed due to a lack of knowledge about unions amongst the workers. Like if you're a busy worker who needs their job and is afraid of company retaliation and you really don't have time to go to meetings and learn about the law and you can't really take a risk, then the "safe" thing is to vote no. Until I really learned about worker power, I probably would have done the same.
So actually yes I can see how Amazon removing literature could have impacted the vote. Looking at the original count:
"The result of the NLRB's initial vote count was 1,798 votes against the union and 738 in favor." [1]
The article also says are 6000 workers at the plant. So the question is, could the literature have helped 531 people change their mind, or brought more in from the non voting crowd? Seems perfectly plausible.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/the-amazon-union...
If Amazon weren't an awful employer maybe they'd actually let their employees decide what they wanted instead of hiring union busting private security like Pinkertons.
Not that I think this union drive will succeed any time soon.
Well, what do you expect?
If Amazon was innocent here they could just let people vote whenever they want and people would most likely not vote for union (because they would not have reason).
Instead they chose to fight against the vote which is not exactly inspiring confidence in their innocence, especially when they bend and break the law in the process.
If you don't show up and present your case, the other side could win by default, not because they make the best case.
You're basically advocating for presenting a one-sided view to people and having them make a decision that way. This would imply that the union has a morally higher ground but I find that hard to believe as a union is just composed of people who are going to just employ the same tactics as Amazon if they could (albeit more limited at this time due to financial & structural reasons).
But the point is that in a sufficiently large corporation people mean shit and the company has disproportionate power over individual employees.
For example, in a small town with one large company there might just not be any other jobs.
The whole point of unions is to discriminate against the employer, to provide some leverage to employees to not be completely treated like shit.
If you are sufficiently large company you need to take correspondingly large responsibility and costs of maintaining that workforce.
In my view Amazon falls into both "sufficiently large" category as well as history of being shitty employer.
It is not a one-sided process, Amazon has already had great many chances to show they can do better but they chose to not use those chances to correct their behavior.
Like I said, the weakness in this argument is it presumes that forming a union is strictly better. Maybe it is in this case. Maybe it’s not. Muzzling any speech to the contrary isn’t great though. Both sides should be able to be full throated advocates of their position as long as they do so fairly and within the limits of the law.
They don't even need to do that. It's far smarter to set a policy forbidding that, then set up the incentives so some lower level guy feels a lot of pressure to break it. If he does, he's your fall guy. That way you can have your cake and eat it too: unethical conduct to support your objectives, muddy enough waters to shield you from blame, and a nice little PR show about how ethical you are and how much you care.
if they weren't strategically ordered to break the law, they were perhaps strategically not ordered to not break the law.
erroneously or maliciously, the law has still been broken, and the organization bears responsibility.
I think the accusation that Amazon "gave workers the impression that their organizing activity was being surveilled" makes it clear the union believes people were afraid to vote.
Except that's not the only thing that happened, which is clear in the opening paragraph of the article. Their were multiple infractions, one of which (giving "workers the impression that their organizing activity was being surveilled") would definitely without a question would cause people to vote against a union and be fearful of getting involved or gathering more information. And regardless of how many times it happened, it was illegal.
What's the alternative? When corporations violate labor law and interfere with union elections, do nothing about it? More broadly, if Amazon trusted the employees to research and vote of their own volition, why interfere (as determined by the NLRB) at all?
Does anyone really believe that the Amazon employees voted against the union because Amazon removed some union material from the break room one day? Of course not. The employees knew what they were voting for and were fully capable of researching it themselves.
The real question is what does the union plan on doing differently to sway the employees to vote differently next time? Repeatedly trying to overrule the employees about their own voted decisions isn't likely to be popular among those who voted against the union, which is most of them. They'll need a better narrative on top of this if they want to get anywhere.
Or alternatively, maybe they don't care so much about this election as they do about making Amazon look bad. Maybe they know these workers don't want to unionize, but they're going to use this opportunity to try to convince the public that the workers were misled by Amazon. If they can't win the workers at this location, maybe they can try to win the public on a wave of anti-Amazon publicity for a do-over in another location.