Union elections at Amazon’s fulfillment center could be a step toward addressing income inequality.

Union elections at Amazon’s fulfillment center could be a step toward addressing income inequality.

(DeSean McClinton-Holland | The New York Times) Union supporters march outside an Amazon warehouse in the New York area of ​​Staten Island, March 20, 2022. A vote for the Amazon union could be a big deal, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes.

Written by Paul Krugman | New York times

| April 7, 2022, 12:00 noon

I grew up in a relatively equal society, at least in terms of income. Obviously there were class differences in 1974, the year I graduated from college; Some paid jobs were much better than others, some people were rich while others were very poor. But for most Americans these differences were much narrower than they are today.

It was an era when many, if not all, jobs of blue-collar workers provided solid incomes and middle-class lifestyles. Labor productivity in the early 1970s was less than half what it is today, but the average hourly wage for unsupervised workers, adjusted for inflation, was as high as it was on the eve of the pandemic. And while the economic elite lived well, it wasn’t like the extravagance we now take for granted. In 1973, CEOs in large corporations were being paid about 23 times the salaries of their workers; Now the ratio is 351 to 1.

At the time, we took broadly middle-class society for granted, and imagined it was the natural condition of an advanced economy. Obviously, however, it wasn’t.

So what made this relative equality possible? A big part of the answer, sure, is that the United States at the time still had a strong union movement. There is compelling evidence that unions in their heyday had a powerful influence in reducing inequality, both by raising the wages of their members and by setting wage standards even for non-union workers.

Which is why what happened in New York on Staten Island last week — when workers at an Amazon fulfillment center voted by a wide margin to join unions — could be so significant.

I often come across people who assume that the decline and fall of America’s private sector unions – which represented 24% of private sector workers in 1973, but only 6% last year – were an inevitable result of economic change. After all, weren’t the powerful large guilds concentrated in manufacturing? Were they not destined to lose their power because manufacturing declined as a share of labor and because international competition drained their bargaining power?

But other countries have remained largely unionized – two-thirds of Danish workers are unionized – even while experiencing deindustrialization compared to what happened here.

After all, why should unionization be limited primarily to manufacturing? If I had to describe a company that would make a particularly good target for unionization, it would be something like this: It would be a large company, with great market power because it does not face strong competition either at home or from abroad. It may also be a company that cannot reliably threaten workers by outsourcing their jobs to lower-cost locations if they join unions, because its business model relies on having most workers close to its customers.

In short, it will be a company very similar to Amazon. Consumers may experience Amazon as a kind of pure, untouched experience: you click a button and things appear at your doorstep. But the truth is that Amazon’s commercial success depends less on the quality of its website than on the huge network of fulfillment centers located near major markets – such as those on Staten Island – that make it possible to quickly deliver a variety of products. The need to maintain this network is the reason why Amazon employs over a million workers in the United States, making it the second largest private employer after Walmart.

So why aren’t Amazon and Walmart workers represented by unions as GM workers were when GM was America’s largest private employer? The answer, of course, is essentially political. The Great Union of American Manufacturing occurred during the New Deal era, when federal policy was pro-union. The US economy’s shift from manufacturing to services occurred during an era of right-wing dominance, with anti-union federal policy willing to turn a blind eye to the hard-line – and sometimes illegal – methods employers used to block union drives. In fact, Amazon fought hard to prevent a pro-union vote on Staten Island.

But it failed.

Now, this victory at work may have been just a coincidence. It comes as Amazon workers in Alabama appear to have narrowly rejected the union. But maybe, just maybe, it marks a turning point.

You don’t have to romanticize unions to realize that a union revival would, in many ways, make America a better society. Unions, as I said, can be a powerful force for equality. They can also reduce the frenzy of American politics.

Not only do I mean that union members are much more inclined to democracy than like-minded voters, although given the QAnization of the Republican Party I think it’s fair to call this a step toward reason.

Moreover, unions appear to be an important source of political information for their members, which may help voters focus on real policy issues rather than the existential threat posed by, say, Disney.

Well, I’m making quite a bit of what is considered a small event so far. But if the United States could orient itself toward becoming a more egalitarian and less insane political system, future historians might say the transformation began on Staten Island.

Paul Krugman | The New York Times (credit: Fred R. Conrad)

Paul Krugman, Nobel Memorial Prize Winner in Economic Sciences, is a columnist for The New York Times.

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