Election votes are anonymous by nature. Card signing is not.

I'm not opposed to unionizing but I take issue with the idea that getting 50% support means "it is obvious that they don't need an election."

It seems like you’re saying the lack of anonymity will inflate support for a union. I.e. organizers will be able to pressure people who would otherwise vote no on a union. Frankly, I’d be worried about the opposite. Knowing how aggressively amazon is fighting unions, if I worked there i’d hesitate to put my name down on paper - when I wouldn’t hesitate to vote in a secret ballot. If that’s the case, 50% support implies a stronger majority.

Maybe that’s not always the case, but that’s what I’d guess is happening in this case.

Historically, there have been times when intimidation came from the union. There have also been times when intimidation came from management. So, yeah. Secret ballot.

> People call the current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election system a secret ballot election—but in fact it's not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. It's really a management-controlled election process because corporations have all the power. They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions.

(via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check)

Without reforming the secret ballot process, you’re just handing power to the companies by advocating against card-checks

(That quote comes from the AFL-CIO, not Wikipedia editors, for the curious.)

Almost put that in, but it seemed like it was clear from the tone that it’s a quote. If that felt misleading I apologize

There have indeed, historically, been cases where a union threw its weight around, bullied, and abused people.

However, a huge percentage of companies today are actively doing these things to their workers, and if you selected 10 companies at random where there were unionization efforts, I'd bet you money that in at least 9 of them, management was doing everything they could legally, and probably some things that are questionable or outright illegal, to try to prevent unionization.

Stop the "both sides"-ism. It's disingenuous and detrimental to genuine understanding of the situation.

The vast majority of union elections result in more votes for the union than cards signed. It is extremely rare for the number of cards signed to be a higher share than the vote.

Probably both! That's why we shouldn't guess, and votes are secret for a reason.

Ah yes, let’s make a rule that makes a difficult process (unionization) for a vulnerable group (workers) more difficult, based on a vague theory about imagined pressure being applied. Sounds like solid reasoning to me.

I am 100% behind Amazon employees unionizing, and I wish unionization was far more widespread. I wasn’t trying to impugn unions using the legitimate process to achieve legitimate ends.