Amazon and Unions, teacher's unions and unions in general... Game over!

 Today Jeff Bezos and Amazon released their annual letter to shareholders. This comes hot on the heals of the recent vote in Alabama by Amazon workers to NOT form a union and on the back of a 41% annual rise in AMZN stock price which helped vault Bezos' wealth to the stratosphere (despite a relatively expensive divorce last year). I thought today might be a good time to talk about unions. 

As I was looking to become a teacher, I had to make a decision whether to go into the public or independent school systems. I'm not going to hide here, one of the key deciding factors was that I had no interest in being par of a union. Hence my tilt towards independent schools and a most excellent decision to join Milken Community School. 

Union membership has dropped by 1/2 over the past 40 years to just around 10.5% of the US workforce. Events of the last few months most likely will not have helped to change that trend.  Rather than try to convince anyone about the merits of union membership, here are a couple of thoughts on the union news of the last few months:

1. They have had a bad stretch of PR over the past few months and this won't help reverse the long decline in union membership that has been in place for decades.
2. Companies will look to squash any union drives but may actually provide better working conditions after neglecting their workers for a number of years
3. The ability of workers to get training/education from alternative sources (see my post on how to reform college education from a few days ago) should help to empower workers, especially the 50+% or so that do not obtain college degrees.

Firstly, let's focus Amazon. The Alabama vote was not particularly close as 70% voted against forming a union. It's hard to find 70% of people to agree on anything, much less on something quite as polarizing as unions. This is a sign that if a company does the right thing (and mind you Amazon still has a lot of work to do) workers can be happy. From a wage perspective (which is generally either the most important, and if not atop 3 consideration for workers) Amazon has done good by their Alabama workers, who make more than the $15 minimum wage that has been touted by certain politicians for years. Bezos, in his letter to shareholders this year actually stated that they will continue to try to improve and "we need a better vision for how we create value for employees—a vision for their success.” Let's see if they do that. But it is better for him to say that than to bask in the glow of the no vote. I think other major companies will look to do the same.

Secondly, teacher unions have taken many missteps lately. Of course Covid has been a pandemic and a very serious health issue. That being said it's also pretty clear that for healthy individuals and those under the age of 40, the risks are severely minimized. We know that parenting, working and dealing with restless children at home, can cause a lot of stress and prevent parents (especially women) from returning to work. Once the pandemic started to subside in many states, and vaccines availability increased, the hard line stance of not returning to school by many teacher unions around the country was a poke in the eye to parents across the country. Couldn't some common sense decisions have been made to help communities across the country begin to return to normal at a slightly faster pace? Schools would have been a logical place to start. The butterfly effects across the economy would have been felt relatively quickly. To be honest, part of the blame also rests on state and local governments which were slow to prioritize teachers in the vaccine queue. But that is for another blog post...