Despite Big Labor’s unionization push nationwide, Amazon workers just dealt another blow to organizers.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reports 66% of Amazon workers at an Albany, New York-area warehouse voted against unionizing their shop. The final vote tally was 406-206 against unionization from a pool of 949 eligible workers.
This isn’t the first time Amazon workers have rejected these attempts.
The Bessemer, Alabama Amazon plant—a target of Amazon Union League—twice rejected unionization as recently as March 2022. In May, a Staten Island warehouse similarly voted against unionization after a nearby facility became the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S. a month earlier.
Amazon has worked to improve relations with its workers by offering added employee perks.
The company’s Upskilling 2025 campaign, a $1.2 billion fund giving 300,000 Amazon employees access to education and skills training programs, offers a prepaid tuition benefit for hourly employees.
The program will soon expand to the University of the District of Columbia—a historically Black public university—allowing “roughly 5,000 local employees who have worked for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) for 90 days [to] take courses at UDC each year to help earn a bachelor’s degree, a GED diploma, to build English language skills or complete industry certifications.”
In addition to UDC, Northern Virginia Community College and University of Maryland Global Campus will enter partnerships with the campaign by March 2023.
As I recently noted at IWF, non-union workers saw noticeable wage increases compared to unionized workers:
The BLS’s June 2022 Employment Cost Index revealed total wage and benefits costs for private sector jobs rose 5.5% from June 2021 to June 2022. Non-unionized workers saw their wages and salaries increase 6%, compared to a 3.4% wage increase for unionized workers. So much for the argument that union workers are better paid.
Private companies can successfully compete with union outfits by cutting the middleman out and offering better worker benefits. Perhaps that’s why Big Labor is being dealt blow after blow.
Unfortunately, now they are pushing legislators and regulators to pass or regulate restrictions that would undercut non-unionizable alternative work arrangements, which Americans prefer over traditional jobs, or pro-union policies.