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Noah Smith 🐇

8 Apr, 14 tweets, 5 min read

@bopinion

1/In today's @bopinion post I talk about why Amazon might help revive the U.S. labor movement, and what Biden could do to assist that revival.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Unions largely fell out of favor in the late 20th century, but people are reevaluating them now.

Here are some economists reevaluating unions:

nber.org/papers/w24587

3/Meanwhile people have been thinking about how to change our collective bargaining system to expand the benefits to more workers:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

4/Politicians have been trying to pass pro-union legislation...

news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-re…

5/And there was an interesting wave of strikes in 2018.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

6/But Amazon could be the big event that kicks off a new wave of unionization and pro-union sentiment in America.

What started at a warehouse in Alabama may now be spreading nationwide.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

7/Amazon, alone among Big Tech companies, has become a huge employer -- the country's second-biggest.

About 1 in 110 employed Americans now work for Amazon.

@TimOBrien

8/And in addition to being a huge mega-employer, Amazon has handled the labor issue in a remarkably cack-handed way. @TimOBrien and @nirkaissar have a good run-down of how badly they've handled the PR.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@kenklippenstein

9/When Amazon denied that its workers have to pee in bottles, muckraking journalists like @kenklippenstein quickly and easily proved that bottle-peeing is real:

theintercept.com/2021/03/25/ama…

10/The sheer cartoonishness of Amazon's response, combined with its vast size as an employer, might galvanize the U.S. labor movement in a way it hasn't been galvanized for a hundred years.

theintercept.com/2021/03/30/ama…

11/And warehouse and delivery workers might provide the paradigmatic, archetypical image of a new working class, giving American culture a new kind of generic "worker" to support in popular culture.

12/So if Biden wants to help this process along, what can he do?

He can do the opposite of what Reagan did. He can simply appoint a lot of pro-union people to the NLRB and other regulatory agencies.

static1.squarespace.com/static/5c8e74c…

13/In the end, even Republicans might get on board for a revival of unions.

prospect.org/blogs/tap/even…

13/All of this is pretty speculative at this point, of course. But now is unions' moment. Supporters of organized labor need to seize the day.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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