The recently embarrassing wholesale failure by organized labor to unionize Amazon has put Washington Post reporters covering the story in a tricky position. Their hearts, like most in the progressive media, are with anti-capitalist union comrades. But their paychecks come from uber capitalist and newspaper hobbyist Jeff Bezos.
It isn’t every day that Post-deconstruction agrees with multibillionaire monopolist and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. But when it comes to the sore losers at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union who tried and failed miserably to unionize his Amazon facility in right-to-work Alabama, we’re on the same page [“Union is looking to overturn Amazon vote,” A20, Apr. 20].
Crushed more than 2-to-1 in an employee vote opposing unionization, the Marxist crybabies have run off to the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, appealing for a do-over. As though a do-over is going to make their pathetically anachronistic message magically more palatable to 21st-century workers who embrace free agency and want to negotiate their own value with employers.
Good, conscientious workers in today’s private sector are rightly insulted by the early- to mid-20th-century industrial notion of earning exactly the same wages as the lazy no-good bum next to them. And good workers want no part of union rules that protect those free-riding bums from being fired.
Unionization may still be attractive to public sector employees, like excuse-making school teachers in Chicago or slow-motion Postal clerks in cities everywhere. But unions aren’t the answer for modern American businesses, and any help the Biden administration may give corrupt Big Labor bosses will only serve to undermine our economy’s vital competitiveness.
Meanwhile, the RWDSU might want to rethink its organizing poster’s illustration depicting a Rosie the Riveter updated for our era of woke identity politics. Because, perhaps not coincidently, the new Rosie resembles failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate and America-denouncing radical Stacey Abrams, albeit with fewer chins. And such a dilettante ideologue isn’t likely to help the union win friends and influence practical people who actually work for a living.