Wow Wow Wow

I have to say that I did not expect this:

Current Vote Totals:
1518 Yes
1154 No

364 votes in ALU’s favor to wrap up today’s count. Counting will resume at 10am tomorrow. #UnionYes #ALUForTheWin

— Amazon Labor Union (@amazonlabor) March 31, 2022

Friends, Amazon is going to lose a union election to a group of upstart workers who aren’t even organized by an established union. This is groundbreaking. This would be the biggest union win in decades, possibly since the Postal Workers strike in 1970. Of course, there’s a long way to go. Even if they do win, the first contract is going to be brutal and Amazon will go all in to stop it from happening. But this will certainly spawn a whole bunch of other facilities to unionize very quickly. The biggest problem with unionization at this point is that workers are scared. The more colleagues that unionize, the easier it is to overcome that fear. Moreover, the Biden administration is going to be putting pressure on Amazon here–if just through the NLRB if nothing else. If it was Trump, the NLRB would be on Amazon’s side. And that matters a lot in the details.

I have to also say that whereas last year’s union vote in Alabama fell by a 2-1 margin, right now, the union has 47 percent of the vote. It’s quite rare in these revote situations where the NLRB finds election violations by the company that it makes that big of a difference. Already we are seeing about 15 percent of workers move toward the union. Moreover, the employer usually contests most of the contested ballots in any given election and in this election there are a lot of them. It’s entirely possible that the Retail Workers will squeeze this one out narrowly, but it will be decided in the courts.

Either way, this is an extremely significant moment.