By overturning Amazon workers’ vote, the NLRB is acting as an extension of the White House, which is handing out favors to political allies.
H eads, I win — tails, I get another flip of the coin. Sound fair to you?
When it comes to its contest with would-be union organizers, Amazon literally cannot win — National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regional director Lisa Y. Henderson is seeing to that, ordering a mulligan for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), providing the union with a second shot at establishing an organized-labor beachhead at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala.
For the union bosses, it’s a can’t-lose proposition — the Biden administration’s buddies at the NLRB simply decree that the union gets another shot. Imagine a referee who keeps a shooter at the free-throw line until, finally, he makes the shot, or who gives a field-goal kicker do-overs when he misses. Now, imagine the referee was someone known to have bet on the game and positioned himself to profit from his calls — that is what we have at Joe Biden’s NLRB. There is a good reason that President Biden is the first chief executive in seven decades to use his political power to force out NRLB executives already in place and replace them with political cronies.
Amazon workers were not exactly on the fence when they were last asked to vote on the question: More than 70 percent of the Amazon workers in Bessemer voted against forming a union chapter. For a point of comparison, consider that the would-be union organizers did substantially worse than the last Republican to run in a regular election for governor of California and the last Democrat to run for governor of Texas. It wasn’t close.
It is not difficult to imagine why Amazon workers might not be interested in a union in general and in this union in particular. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which is only a few years off its last federal corruption indictment. Many American workers have learned the hard way that many unions create very little real value for workers — or for employers, whose interests must surely matter at least a little, too — and mainly serve as a permanent mechanism for transferring money from the paychecks of the people who do the work into the pockets of the people who play golf with the politicians. It may not always involve corruption in the narrow legal sense (though often enough it does), but the politics of the project is, at heart, corrupt. It is a tax on workers and employers for the benefit of Democratic political organizers.
The union bosses’ complaint about the Amazon election was laughable. Local Amazon managers, they complained, installed a new mailbox during the run-up to the election. And this action — God and the NLRB alone know how — somehow successfully intimidated seven out of ten Amazon workers into voting against hooking up with the RWDSU. This is not an exaggeration — Lisa Y. Henderson’s hysterically thin judgment lists a half-dozen complaints from the union, and every one of those complaints touches on some aspect of the nefarious mailbox, installed by the U.S. Postal Service after consultation with Amazon. Amazon put up a sign encouraging its employees to vote in the election: “Speak for yourself,” it read. They did, and the union-organizers lost.
Amazon, understandably, protested that the mailbox served a “perfectly legitimate purpose.” To which Henderson replied: “Whether the mailbox served a ‘perfectly legitimate purpose’ is irrelevant.” Henderson goes on to say that the mailbox violated the pre-election rules imposed on Amazon, even as she admits that the agreement “never explicitly prohibited installation of a ‘general-purpose, USPS-serviced mailbox.’” The NLRB, she argues, could never have foreseen that Amazon would “undertake such an extraordinary measure” as having the USPS install a mailbox to receive its employees’ mail.
And, in 20 pages of legalistic nonsense, that is that.
This is nonsense on stilts and everybody knows it. The NLRB is acting as an extension of the White House, and the White House is handing out favors to labor unions because labor unions provide Democrats with money and manpower.
Legal? Almost certainly. Corrupt? Absolutely.