Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.

Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly.

If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.)

Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.

Alabama lost a Toyota plant to Ontario because literacy is so poor they would need to translate their documentation into Ikea-like pictograms.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-m...

The Toyota RAV-4 decision was made back in 2005. In don’t think education has improved in Alabama since. Also, IIRC, the higher Canadian wages were partially offset by not having to provide health benefits.

I cite it as I’m somewhat familiar with it as a friend and colleague worked for a supplier pricing out a in-region facility.

src https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-so...

I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it certainly seemed like the situation with our PNW union sites did not boost support down here.

SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.

Just trying to provide some detail.

>SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there,

>South Carolina has anti-union laws [...] the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there,

Anti-union bias does not fully explain the South Carolina Boeing factory rejection vote because the workers did previously have a union.

Fyi... The original South Carolina aircraft factory (formerly Vought doing subcontract work on Boeing fuselages) was unionized in 2007. Then in 2009, they voted to decertify the union as they no longer wanted IAM (International Association of Machinists) to represent them for collective bargaining. (75% voted to get rid of the union.) This happened around the time Boeing acquired the Vought factory. For various reason(s) (see below), the Vought/Boeing workers didn't feel the ~$1000/year union dues were worth the benefits the IAM union negotiated for them.

Since being being voted out, IAM has repeatedly tried to re-establish union membership at SC but multiple elections have voted against it by wide margins. The last 2017 vote was 74% against. In 2018, IAM tried a new approach of establishing a "micro" union of 175 subset of employees instead of the entire ~3000 employees. The IAM won that micro vote but the Labor Board invalidated the micro union as a collective bargaining unit.

Boeing workers' (current) anti-union stance is based on their real-world experience and not ignorance. The SC workers already know what collective bargaining benefits they had with the union. They got rid of the union anyway. Maybe someday, factors will change and Boeing workers will vote for union representation again.

> Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters?

>, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina"

No, not my calculus. The SC workers reported it. One example: The workers in South Carolina didn't like the IAM directed union strike in Washington. Excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...:

>Another sore point that affected Thursday’s vote was that many in the Charleston [South Carolina] work force were laid off last fall during the two-month IAM strike in the Puget Sound region due to the lack of production in Everett.

South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.

Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".

Hold it there, sparky.

Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.

It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.

It’s currently… 47% pro-union to 53% no-union in Alabama, with over 15% (400+ ballots) challenged by both sides. It could go either way, but “more than 10%” is not backed by any metrics.

Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.