Recently, the news broke that Amazon workers in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, voted to reject forming a union after months of speculation. The news surprised many media commentators, as the union drive had gotten quite a bit of national news attention. On the Left, many labor activists felt like the growing frustration with Big Tech (at least in elite discourse) would give this union drive a chance to succeed where other drivers and efforts at Amazon had failed. On the right, the union drive got the unexpected endorsement of GOP senator Marco Rubio, who in part did so as retaliation for Amazon’s general left-of-center politics:
Amazon has waged a war against working-class values. The Silicon Valley titan uses anticompetitive strategies to crush small businesses, bans conservative books, and blocks traditional charities from participating in its AmazonSmile program. Not surprisingly, it has also bowed to China's censorship demands.
I have seen many in left-of-center media assume that much of this result can be explained by Amazon’s hardball tactics towards the unionization effort. It is common to see stories or headlines about “How Amazon Won'' or “How Amazon Defeated the Union.” The union organizers are claiming Amazon may have violated labor law to discourage unionization, and there will probably be lawsuits about this for some time to come. So while there is, of course, a need to cover the Amazon angle to this story, I think it is a poor way to portray the issue to place the actions of Amazon at the center.
This tendency is a common trope in left-discourse: outcomes that go against progressive aspirations can be blamed on disinformation, corporate meddling, or voters deceived into voting against their interests. Whether it's a failed union drive or the election of Donald Trump, the agents are never those who vote but those who influence their vote. I worry this tendency undermines democracy: just like it is harmful to cast doubt on an election process as fraudulent because you did not like the outcome, it is also detrimental to believe that voters are deceived or incapable of voting in their interest. Both beliefs create a kind of postmodern unfalsifiable feedback loop, where disagreement with your politics is attributed to “false consciousness” rather than genuinely held views, which makes you less motivated to do the hard work of persuasion in the wake of defeat.
After all, the union did not lose a closely contested vote: the union failed by a considerable margin, a more significant gap than would seem to be easily explained by intimidation:
When one excludes the disputed votes (and of course, the ~2600 workers who decided not to vote), 71% of workers voted against unionization, while 29% voted for it. For context: that means the unionization effort ran massively behind Joe Biden, who won 55% of the vote in Jefferson County, Alabama, in 2020. Naive math would imply that the unionization effort ran 26 points behind the candidate on the substantially pro-union side of the presidential election.
Why do many American workers believe it is not in their self-interest to join a union? After all, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, unions were a broadly popular tool for working-class empowerment. Any reading of America’s economic history will give you some degree of appreciation for the good that unions have done. After all, as recently as the 1930s, coal miners and union organizers had to resort to armed resistance because companies got the de-facto support of local law enforcement against their right to organize. Many believe it is no coincidence that the decline of unions has been, on the whole, bad for workers: the share of national income flowing to workers has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, while returns to capital and land have generally gone up. Unions do not tell the whole story, but they are a part of the story.
In recent years, America’s private-sector unions have declined to only 6.2% of workers, down from a high of 35% in 1954. While Unions are currently popular (65% approval), their popularity as recently as 2009 was as low as 48%. Unions are not making a comeback unless people understand and diagnose what has happened here. I think two key liabilities currently hold the labor movement in the US back, which need to be addressed.
The Problem of Oppositional Unions
It is common for labor activists to cite two significant forces that have killed unions:
Right to work laws in Conservative states, which have made it harder for unions to get universal buy-in
Globalization, which has made it easier for companies to respond to union pressure by taking production elsewhere.
Both of these should not be discounted as fundamental factors in making unions less powerful. That said, they alone cannot explain the whole story:
Right-to-Work laws have to be approved politically, and given that workers have much more votes than capitalists, if workers found them harmful, there should be evidence of electoral backlash to their passage. But polling shows that Americans tend to have mixed to positive views of these laws, even in union stronghold states like Michigan. So it seems that the passage of these laws may be downstream from the lack of popular support of unions. If unions were popular, it would not be easy to imagine them passing or being politically sustainable.
Globalization is also a real threat to the bargaining power of unions. But again, it has not destroyed all unions worldwide. Many countries in Northern Europe (Germany, Denmark) have union membership covering well over 60% of workers. Contrary to popular opinion, many of these countries are more globalized than the US economy because of their relatively small size. So the failure of American unions also has to be explained by US-specific factors, not just globalization.
If we take the American South as a test case, I think we can see why the US is unique. The American South had never had high union membership rates, even when the rest of the country did, so its unique dynamics may lend insight into unions’ problems. Many organizers have cited racism historically in the US as a significant factor that makes union solidarity hard. This reality is certainly very true in the American South, which has only been desegregated within the last 50-60 years. There is a long history in the South, going back to slavery, wealthy southerners pitting working-class white people against African Americans in the struggle for resources and status. Many traditional unions, both in the north and south, excluded African-American workers. So we should not be shocked that race will continue to be a problem here.
But again, that alone cannot explain what is going in. At the Alabama Amazon factory, Union organizers had estimated that 80% of Amazon workers at the warehouse were African American. Presumably, even had there been an enormous racial divide between White and Black workers, solidarity among Black workers should have overcome racial conflict.
It's essential to recognize that the South is an impoverished region within the United States, which has struggled to develop economically. Many working-class residents (especially African-Americans) have long been denied ANY good jobs, let alone union jobs. For many working people, having a job that pays pretty well and is secure is better than having a job that pays well but could disappear. After all, much of the manufacturing hubs in the American South relocated from the Northeast or the Industrial Midwest, where relationships between more traditional American unions and corporations had gone sour and forced the plants to move elsewhere. These workers know that the existence of these jobs.
But this kind of capital mobility does not necessarily preclude unions: after all, Scandanavian countries have maintained high union membership without losing large numbers of companies to globalization. After all: in most sectors, there are significant productivity gains to companies investing in one particular factory and both the physical and human capital within that facility. Unions should be able to leverage this to come to win-win agreements with companies to stay local. So why doesn’t it happen?
The US is relatively unique in the Western World for the oppositional negotiations between unions and corporations. Most Western Europe and East Asia have a more collaborative relationship between unions and their bosses. One can use the analogy of a pizza: rather than fighting over distribution alone (how many slices of pizza does labor get vs. and how many does capital get), you can focus on making bigger and bigger pies. Bigger pies mean that, in theory, both sides can benefit as long as some attention is still given to the distribution of slices. On the flip side, overly oppositional relationships focus only on distribution serve neither side in the long run. Famously, this oppositional fight is part of what drove the US auto industry into the ground in the 2000s, coinciding with a significant drop in popularity for unions. I suspect that many workers see this and prefer to take their chances of being underpaid without a union rather than having their jobs move away.
But this is not necessarily the destiny of all labor relationships. Toyota tried to break the oppositional American mold when they established a joint venture with General Motors at the famous NUMMI Plant in Fremont, California. Before Toyota came, it was considered one of the worst-performing in the country, but Toyota had a great deal of success in establishing a more collaborative relationship with employees:
Business schools have long studied the NUMMI experiment in part because of how rich the story is in now well-documented anecdotes. Toyota took over management of NUMMI from the start, and hired the shop leaders from the old plant against the advice of GM. Stories were legion of how these union leaders tolerated and even promoted drug and alcohol use in the Fremont factory before it was NUMMI, and how workers sabotaged cars to guarantee overtime pay fixing them in the factory yards. Absenteeism was rampant because workers hated their jobs and management. But Toyota transformed the workers by showing them respect and teaching them how it was vital, for example, to stop the assembly line if they saw a problem. To let a problem go down the line to be fixed later was a quality and productivity killer. The workers understood and they responded. And when they returned from Japan to Fremont, they carried the message to skeptical workers that "The Toyota Way" was better and would save their jobs.
But despite individual breakthroughs, this overly oppositional labor mentality is still the norm in US labor relationships. As labor advocate David Rolf freely admits:
Unions, meanwhile, faced their own set of perverse incentives. Only union members vote in union officer elections and only union members pay dues, so many unions tended to focus only on extracting short-term economic gains for their existing members from existing employers and not on organizing the competition or making long-term partnerships with industry to improve quality and productivity along with compensation, in turn creating even more disincentive for firms to tolerate unions, at least if they had any other choice. And America’s unions never had a real seat at any table beyond the workplace – not in the boardroom, much less at an industry-wide or economy-wide level.
I have seen this very clearly here in California’s labor unions and their approach to public policy. California’s building and trade unions have repeatedly shown a desire to torpedo housing bills that would allow for more affordable housing production -- unless those bills require very high union wages: entry-level wages of $36+/hour (or $75,000 a year). Of course, these high wages mean that the state can build less housing, so fewer jobs are available in the long run. These wages contribute to the average unit of affordable housing in California costs almost $600,000, a price tag that makes it practically impossible to produce subsidized housing on a scale that can solve our affordability crisis.
But for existing members of the building and trades who are already in the union, the exclusion of new jobs is not a concern. New jobs would primarily go to new workers, not those with more seniority. Affordable housing developers, who tend to be very progressive people, are increasingly so frustrated that they refuse to work with the unions in California housing legislation. This has led many cities to increasingly turn to manufactured housing solutions, which involve far less labor and a fraction of the cost. Of course, if this is adopted on a broad scale, building and trade members would find themselves without jobs.
Police and teacher’s unions, in many ways, fall into the same traps. Through the years, many economists have observed that both the general public and public servants would be better off if we could pay teachers and police more. But, in exchange, we should also encourage higher standards for accountability and conduct. After all, both are demanding jobs that can have incredibly positive or incredibly negative effects on the community. But those proposals have always been met with stiff resistance from both teachers and police unions. The unions seem to be more concerned with not giving an inch rather than agreeing to common-sense measures to make life better for most of their members. The LA county sheriff has repeatedly refused to engage the LA Board of Supervisors’ efforts at essential oversight. The Los Angeles Teachers Union is currently demanding free childcare for their children, while their opposition to in-person learning has meant that FAR more parents have been deprived of their childcare, even as they still pay for it through taxes. Both of these are nothing if not shameful behavior in my book. It should not surprise the unions when we see populist uprisings to divest from police departments or parents who take their children out of public schools, both of which pose far more existential threats to their existence than the common-sense reforms.
My argument is not against public-sector unions writ-large having a right to exist (though that argument was actively made by FDR, who believed that the existence of public-sector unions threatened progressive goals). I think public-sector unions should exist as a way for workers to gain fundamental rights, voice, and protections. However, given they are negotiating with the general public and not a narrow corporate interest, we need to limit tools like strikes that hold the public interest hostage.
The real problem here is downstream of this oppositional character of unions. We should not be shocked that unaffiliated workers are hesitant to join when this is a defining characteristic. Despite all of the questions about labor practices, the fact is that Amazon warehouse jobs are good jobs in Alabama. As of last May, the median wage in Alabama was a little over $17/hour. Amazon warehouses start workers at $15/hour, with full health insurance on Day 1, which is excellent pay for someone without any formal higher education. One worker interviewed by the New York Times shared that he made $1.55 more an hour at Amazon than he did at the local paper and believed he could work his way up in the company. When your alternative is unstable or low-wage work, should it surprise us that many workers are eager to work in those conditions and do not want to jeopardize their jobs?
Unrepresentative Activists
But I don’t think opposition in and of itself is the only problem with modern unions. If all of the current labor activism in the US was confrontational but all focused on concrete improvements for workers, I think it would likely have more of a hearing with the working-class. But for some (not all) labor advocates, organizing is more about supporting a broad swath of progressive causes, not just concrete improvements in labor standards and pay. Consider how the United Teachers of Los Angeles approached the reopening of schools last summer, asking for Medicare-for-all, police defunding, and eliminating all charter schools. Now teachers are generally progressive and college-educated, so they may not mind having part of their union’s efforts to “generic” progressive causes. But working-class people may not appreciate their political capital going to causes so removed from their working conditions.
On top of that, it is unclear whether working-class Americans support these causes as widely as many activists assume they do. Matt Yglesias wrote a recent interesting article ($ paywall), where he nails something that I think is still somehow poorly understood. There is increasingly a divergence between the political views of professional activists and the less politically involved members of the community that the activists try to represent. He points out that Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro, who spent a lot of time cultivating the endorsements of activists of color, did very poorly. The voters they did win were progressive white college-educated liberals. Currently, Andrew Yang is handily leading the polls to become New York’s next mayor with massive support from almost half of Asian-Americans in the city. He is doing so even though prominent Asian progressive activists oppose him for not being vocal enough about intersectional issues.
We can see this disconnect on other specific issues: defund the police became a famous slogan last summer, despite being very unpopular with Black and Latino voters:
We should not be surprised to learn that the elite progressive activists who dislike Amazon are a tiny proportion of the population. Yet, they are wildly overrepresented in the activists and organizers cheering on Amazon unionization. As recently as March 2020, Amazon commanded a whopping 91% approval rating with the American public, higher than any other tech company and possibly higher than any other American institution. 70% of Americans see Amazon as good for society, while only 5% saw it as harmful. 81% said they would be disappointed if Amazon disappeared. Does consumer sentiment mean that people have no issues with Amazon? Almost certainly not. Do all of its workers have as positive a view of the company as consumers? Certainly not, and there are reasons why many workers are interested in unionizing. But it should alert us that the concept of widespread anti-Amazon sentiment is deeply misguided.
Remember when Amazon tried to move a new headquarters into New York but pulled out because of opposition by activists worried about gentrification? At the time, HQ2 polled positively with the vast majority of New Yorkers. Many were excited to have the opportunity to work there and have Amazon invest in the neighborhood. But Amazon ended up facing political pressure from activists and elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and pulled out of the city. Only 12% of voters thought the efforts of AOC and others were “heroic.” This stance n Amazon played a significant role in her primary challenge the following year, which she eventually won. Some argue she did so because her district has become heavily gentrified by young progressive college graduates who are more in tune with her politics than rank and file working-class voters. I am not saying that I disagree with the critics of Amazon: I am merely pointing out that they are not as large a voice as you might think.
Not all unions are affected by this divergence between activists and working-class people. But there is reason to think that some are. A couple of weeks back, a group of college-educated left-wing activists on Twitter started a movement to boycott Amazon to show solidarity for the workers. The union organizers in Alabama quickly moved to disassociate themselves from the boycott effort, saying they had no part in this movement. After all, the workers at the plant, like working for Amazon, want better working conditions, something they felt a boycott would not help achieve.
There were several examples where the union organizers seem to have failed at effectively communicating with workers. As the New York Times reported:
When a union representative called her about the vote, Ms. Johnson said, he couldn’t answer a pointed question about what the union could promise to deliver.“He hung up on me,” she said. “If you try to sell me something, I need you to be able to sell that product.”
Organizers in Alabama did not do a good job connecting with workers on how the union would benefit them in concrete, material ways:
William and Lavonette Stokes, who started work at the Bessemer warehouse in July, said the union had failed to convince them how it could improve their working conditions. Amazon already provides good benefits, relatively high pay that starts at $15 an hour and opportunities to advance, said the couple, who have five children.
Instead, organizers chose to use more abstract, social justice messaging that failed to connect in a meaningful way:
She added that she had been turned off by how organizers tried to cast the union drive as an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement because most of the workers are Black.
“This was not an African-American issue,’’ said Ms. Stokes, who is Black. “I feel you can work there comfortably without being harassed.”
To be clear, workers had specific issues they wanted to see improved at the warehouse by Amazon. However, those workers also felt the union was not the best mechanism to negotiate with Amazon to solve those issues:
In a news conference organized by Amazon on Friday, Mr. Stokes and other workers said they had concerns that they wanted the company to address, like better training and anti-bias coaching for managers.
“We just feel like we can do it without the union,” he said. “Why pay the union to do what we can do ourselves?”
From where I sit, it seems essential that labor organizers keep in mind that most working-class people are not primarily concerned with abstract progressive fights: they would rather have a good job. It is hard to seek direct feedback from rank and file, working-class voters. It is much easier to talk to activists or pontificators (like myself). But you will be limited in how much you will learn or understand. I firmly believe it is worth the investment to be skeptical of those who speak on behalf of others (like myself). Instead, go get to know those people yourself. Any organizing that doesn’t center on that concern is probably going to fail. We need to include all classes in our discourse, either directly or indirectly.
A Case for Policy Reform
So what can be done to make union organizing less oppositional and more focused on the concrete material needs of workers?
I think the Toyota NUMMI story is illustrative. While NUMMI is a well-studied business case, what is under-explored is the reasons why it failed to transform the structure of labor and management relationships on a broader scale. After all, GM tried to create a plant at Saturn Hill Tennessee modeled after the Toyota approach:
Flexible work rules were adopted. "Team" was at the heart of the Saturn mantra: empowering workers to stop the production line if a problem needed to be fixed; rewarding workers for solving problems in production and adding to quality. These were all tenets that Toyota brought to NUMMI and that GM NUMMI managers took to Spring Hill—and that managers and workers took from Spring Hill to other GM plants.
But as Sam Hammond points out, this arrangement was ultimately undone by the structure of American labor law:
Saturn’s assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, was governed by an innovative labor contract that made employees owners, and exchanged profit-sharing for job flexibility and rigorous, results-oriented accountability. Despite enormous success in the 1990s, enthusiasm from UAW leadership quickly gave way to jealousy. UAW International requested they sign a standard labor contract three times and were thrice rejected. Saturn ultimately acceded to the UAW and GM in 2004 under threat of closure, yet the reverse was true. Finally, back in the UAW fold, GM reallocated Saturn’s production outside of Spring Hill in 2007, not because the experiment failed, but because it was too much of a success.
Workers could not make the work arrangement sustainable, primarily because US Labor law heavily favors all negotiations going through established labor unions, which may or may not have the particular interests of a given plant’s workers in mind. As Hammond points out, when Volkswagen started an auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, it ran into similar issues:
Chattanooga is home to the only Volkswagen plant in the world outside of China without worker representation. Volkswagen can hardly be blamed. The company hoped to bring the Germany-style work councils familiar to its other factories to its only American location, and was reportedly caught off-guard by the region’s intense hostility to anything resembling a union...Like Volkswagen, workers at the Chattanooga plant primarily wished to establish a work council: a shop-floor organization meant to represent workers on issues like workplace safety, scheduling, and ways to improve production. In contrast, a trade union provides exclusive representation to workers in multiple companies and locations across an industry. Nonetheless, U.S. labor law—specifically, Section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act—makes it all but impossible to elect a work council without first joining a union. Joining the UAW was thus a means to an end, but one which the majority of workers ultimately deemed too costly.
Hammond’s diagnosis of the problem is that, in the void of weak unions, the federal labor regulations have tried to step in and manage the issue in a centralized fashion by dictating strict workplace rules. The problem with this kind of instinct is that while it ensures that workers have specific standards that they must be protected from, it also makes labor law a one-size-fits-all policy regime. As I talked about in my post on the minimum wage, the best approach for workers in California will seldom be the best approach for workers in Alabama. Having the same regulations in both is not optimal.
But more to the point of these conversations, strict centralized labor law also removes any ability for more decentralized negotiations between unions and companies to find mutually beneficial approaches to structuring the workplace. One can see the Catholic Social principle of subsidiarity at work here: that social and political matters should be devolved to the most local level to solve the problem effectively. Now subsidiarity is a tricky principle: on the right, it has been historically used to argue against centralized welfare states and federal efforts to enforce civil rights. Therefore on the Left, it has been broadly ignored under the belief that it’s a way to block progress and maximize utilitarian efforts to help the largest number of people possible. I interpret the value as cutting against both of these. On the one hand, many Conservative invocations of Subsidiarity do not fully account for the ways that localized decision-making can fail. Historically, a localized charity-based social safety net has not performed adequately in times of crisis, nor historically have protections of civil rights worked out well under local control (or, for that matter, local control over zoning). But the wholesale ignoring of the benefits of local decision making also comes with peril. Often the primary advocates for local decision-making are members of marginalized communities who have seen how centralized bureaucracies are often deaf to their petitions. As a recent participant in the COVID vaccine rollout in a marginalized community, I can attest how frustrating this can be! Subsidiarity’s proper application is not a blanket embrace of centralization or localism. Rather critically thinking what the appropriate institution to use to solve this particular problem?
I believe that think labor law is an area where subsidiarity can and should be invoked: if unions and companies were allowed to have more autonomy in how they approached labor law, there would be more of an incentive to see if they could come to a mutually beneficial agreement, instead of companies trying to undermine unions existence at every turn, and unions taking an oppositional stance to employers.
One particular proposal that is broadly used in Northern Europe is “sectoral bargaining. In sectoral bargaining, the government asks all employers and workers in a specific industry to come together and negotiate terms of employment across the industry. Sectoral bargaining is a popular idea on the left; however, they generally want to layer sectoral bargaining on top of the existing federal labor standards, plus enhancements of current law to make national standards even stronger for workers. I tend to be skeptical of this approach and prefer to look at how sectoral bargaining works in successful economies like Denmark, which is a far more Centrist vision than most realize.
In Denmark, federal governments allow the sectoral bargaining process to function as labor law for that sector, which is why Denmark has one of the least regulated labor markets globally while also having one of most unionized and well-paid. Instead of government-mandated minimum wages, companies have the flexibility to agree with unions on starting wage scales (which are often much higher than minimum wage in the US). The government’s main job is to ensure that negotiations do not break down while also providing some safety net to workers in the form of generous spending on worker retraining programs. While it is wrong to think that the US can replicate the Danish system, it is worth considering if exploring this option would broader help workers while also undermining the overly oppositional character of many unions. Bad-faith negotiations by unions under sectoral bargaining put the whole economy under the threat of going insolvent, so there is more incentive to seek the common good.
I believe this model would be helpful to the current debates over gig work in the ride-hailing industry. On the one hand, drivers often complain about the parts of gig work they do not benefit from: no benefits, no minimum wage, no transparency about how much they will get paid on any given ride. But riders also like aspects of gig work, like the ease of getting started, being flexible about their hours, and working on multiple platforms simultaneously. In California, we tried to manage this issue through AB 5, which banned gig-work with dire consequences, only to be repealed in the also poorly written Proposition 22. Sectoral bargaining along the lines of Denmark would give companies and drivers the flexibility to create their unique labor arrangement that can seek mutually beneficial agreement. One could easily imagine such negotiations leading to Uber and Lyft promising drivers a minimum payment per ride, and access to benefits, preserving flexibility for both sides. While many on both sides of this dispute would not be happy with the outcome, it seems like a better compromise will emerge than any of the bad legislative fixes passed by both sides in recent years.
Sectoral Bargaining is just one idea, and it by no means is perfect. It could make the US less dynamic and create more incentive for companies and labor unions to try to extract rents from the general public jointly. But if sectoral bargaining gives you pause, know that there has been a proliferation, including on the right of center in the post-Trump years, in proposals on ways to create different and better approaches to unions. Giving unions the ability to administer job training and unemployment insurance is one idea. Making it easier for unions to function as worker cooperatives is another. But what all of these ideas have in common is an essential trade-off broader union coverage in exchange for collaboration and flexibility. I believe policies that can find a way to move in both of these directions at the same time will find that the end product is much better than our current equilibrium.