There were two developments in the labor sphere last week, one favorable to workers and one not. Both workers and Democrats should take note.
First, the good news: The bootstrapped effort at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse to join an upstart union at the mega-retailer was outspent by millions of dollars. Yet workers won Friday’s vote by a large margin.
Meanwhile, another vote got significantly less attention: Three Democratic senators — Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III (the perennial killjoy to the left’s wish list) — voted against the Biden administration’s nominee to head the Labor Department’s wage and hour division. David Weil headed the same department during the Obama administration, and his defense of workers made business interests unhappy.
There’s a warning for Democrats — the party long aligned with labor interests — in the unexpected success at Amazon. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post.) Workers are organizing without them. More and more workers might be thinking they can help themselves more than Washington helps them. And, in an election year, they’re unlikely to look favorably on the political party that doesn’t deliver on promises to improve pay and working conditions.
The labor-force changes that many call the Great Resignation are more of a Great Upgrade. Many people are quitting jobs for better-paying positions and conditions. They’re also organizing for those things: At Starbucks, the...
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