Why Amazon workers rejected unionization

Amazon has its problems, to be sure, but it is by the accounts of a great many of the people who work there, a pretty good place to work — a weird one, in many ways, but a pretty good one. Working at Amazon is a little like joining a cult, while being in a union is more like joining a gang. It is easy to imagine a world in which American labor unions performed a valuable service in the labor market, as unions do in some other countries and as ours have at times in the past. But that is not the world in which we live. In our world, a small and declining share of private-sector workers belong to unions, which derive their clout from the fact that so many government functionaries — see the teachers- and police-union officials listed above — belong to unions. These taxpayer-funded workers are numerous, highly paid, and politically committed, which makes them a real force — they effectively run the state of California and enjoy baronial powers in places such as Chicago and Philadelphia. (My former NR colleague Jillian Kay Melchior of the Wall Street Journal has been on the very entertaining Johnny Doc beat for years; props to whoever wrote the headline: “He allegedly embezzled more than $600,000 to buy Q-tips, romance novels, and politicians.”) Public-sector unions exploit a basic agent-principal problem arising from the fact that in cities such as Philadelphia and in states such as California, the union bosses sitting on one side of the negotiating table and the elected Democrats sitting on the other side have complementary interests rather than adversarial ones: The more money going into the union coffers, the more that can be transferred to Democratic campaign committees and super-PACs.