Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1382552
18 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D conduct of its anti-union campaign, but, even if the company is eventually found guilty on some or all of these charges, in the best-case plausible scenario, the Labor Board would simply order the vote to be run again. Among other critical updates to the National Labor Relations Act, the PRO Act would institute real penalties for employers that violate em- ployees' rights. Th e d e fe a t h a s a l s o p re c i p i ta te d unprecedented public discussion of the tradecraft of union organizing; in a rash of postmortems published af ter the vote count, commentators opined in the pages of mainstream national outlets about nuts-and-bolts topics usually only addressed in shop talk among organizers — the recruitment and development of internal leadership, one-on-one assess- ments, structure tests, house visits, and the like. I wasn't involved in the campaign in Alabama; like much of the labor movement, I only watched it from a distance. So (unlike a few other armchair quarterbacks) I don't feel it's my place to hold forth on questions of how the union's organizing efforts might have gone differently. I d o, t h o u g h , w a n t t o r e f l e c t o n A m a zo n's a n t i - u n i o n ca m p a i g n a n d the themes raised therein, because, as I've mentioned, they're fully consistent with bosses' union-busting campaigns more generally. If the PRO Act becomes law, companies will have somewhat less latitude to run such campaigns in order to pressure workers not to organize. But passage of the PRO Act is by no means assured. President Biden has announced it as a priority, but at the time of this writ- ing, even three members of the Senate Democratic Caucus have so far declined to pledge support for the bill, meaning the legislation doesn't yet have majority support in the upper chamber, let alone the supermajority needed to withstand a filibuster. Even if the PRO Act is ulti- mately enacted, we can't rely upon any law to prevent employers from peddling anti-union talking points in an effort to derail their employees' exercise of power in the workplace. When the public first got a glimpse of Amazon's anti-union propaganda in mid-January, much snickering ensued. The company may have hoped to get its newly-coined hashtag #DoItWith- outDues trending, but probably hadn't intended for it to be hijacked by outside observers jeering at the ham-handed website the company had set up to push a No vote. Never mind the goofy gif of a cartoon corgi bopping its head along to the beat as a platter spins on a turntable. The messaging itself managed to be both silly and condescending. "DUES MEAN DON'Ts." Don't buy that dinner, don't buy those school supplies, don't buy those gifts because you won't have that almost $500 you paid in dues. WHY NOT save the money and get the books, gifts & things you want? DO IT without dues! O n e p r o m i n e n t l a b o r j o u r n a l i s t opined on social media, "I don't see how this stuff does anything but insult your employees." And, yes, the message was patronizing. But anti-union campaigns almost invariably focus on the topic of dues. I n d e e d , A m a zo n's m e ss a g i n g wa s a near carbon-copy of a bit of anti-union propaganda from Delta Airlines that had gone viral a couple of years previously; Delta's poster told workers "A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union." Of course, neither Amazon nor Delta nor any other union-busting employer actually cares how their employees spend their money; management only sounds the alarm about dues because they realize that unionization will increase the com- pany's labor costs in the form of better pay and benefits. Better for the workers to think about consuming baubles than about taking actual action to improve the quality of their jobs. The condescension, though, doesn't necessarily render the message ineffec- tive. Especially for workers struggling to get by, the prospect of yet another expense to pay can indeed be daunting. And employers also evoke anxieties about dues in ways that are more sophis- ticated than talking about the toys people might spend their money on instead. One time-honored tactic deployed in almost every anti-union campaign, Amazon's included, is to publicize the salaries paid to union organizers or officials. (For the record, pay to union staff is legally a matter of public record, and I'm happy to earn a good living working for our Guild.) It's reasonable for a low-wage worker to wonder why she should be supporting the lifestyle of the union's best-paid em- ployees. And the company always prefers that workers fixate on what a so-called "union boss" earns than on the closely guarded secret of the salaries for the company's actual bosses. Moreover, by focusing on dues and framing union membership as a service that a worker buys, in the same way that she might spend money on anything else, the employer attempts to define the union as a company hawking its wares, rather than as a democratic organization that workers form to wield power in the workplace. Anti-union campaigns' drumbeat on the topic of dues is integral to the bosses' characterization of the union as just another business trying to sell you something you don't need. In fact, the talking points of anti-union campaigns tend to cluster around three Management sounds the alarm about dues because they fear unions.