Harold Meyerson had the best postmortem I've seen on the failed union drive at the Bessemer, AL Amazon warehouse. There's a lot in his article but I was particularly struck by this trenchant observation:
"Ironically, the failure at Bessemer comes at a time when unions are more popular than they’ve been in several decades. In each of the most recent Gallup and Pew polls, unions’ approval ratings stood at 65 percent. And in workplaces where employees know they can’t easily be replaced, unions have been having a pretty fair run over the past several years. Media outlets new and old (including the historically anti-union Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune) have seen their workers unionize, as have the grad student teaching and research assistants on a range of campuses, and the employees of a host of nonprofit organizations. Throw teachers and nurses (who continue to unionize) into the mix, and the membership of unions is tilting more and more toward professionals, while working-class Americans, whose forebears began trade unionism and whose current members desperately need them, constitute a steadily smaller share of the unionized workforce."
Sad! As Meyeron notes, this situation is unlikely change without big shifts in public policy including, but not limited to, labor law.
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