Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Is Obsessed With Union-Bashing

Public approval for organized labor stands at a remarkable 71 percent, according to Gallup—its highest level since 1957. Even a 52 percent majority of Republicans approve of labor unions. This November 3, Vermont will likely pass a ballot initiative enshrining in the state constitution the right to join a union, effectively barring legislative passage of a “right-to-work” law (i.e., a law freeing workers from paying non-member fees to unions that negotiate on their behalf). This follows the 2022 passage of a similar measure in Illinois. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a couple of pro-labor measures earlier this year, inducing a panicky conservative counterattack that attempted to re-define labor rights as a stalking horse for sex-change operations. Nobody, it seems, dares attack labor unions the old-fashioned way, as an insupportable financial burden on capital.Well, almost nobody. The Washington Post opinion section, which in February 2025 announced that henceforth it would advocate single-mindedly “personal liberties and free markets,” has spent much of this calendar year denouncing labor unions. Unions in no way contradict “personal liberties and free markets.” They’re market mechanisms that operate through the free enterprise system rather than through government, and serve to increase the personal liberties of workers. But those aren’t the liberties that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, had in mind when he made this change. He was thinking about his own.Bezos is the executive chair of Amazon, the online shopping and cloud storage giant that he founded, and lately he’s been trying very hard to discourage labor organizing there. The company has refused to negotiate a contract with Staten Island’s JFK8, which in 2022 became the first union successfully to organize an Amazon warehouse, and it’s threatening to close a dozen New York City warehouses if Mayor Zohran Mamdani succeeds in passing a common-sense worker misclassification bill. Although Amazon lost a couple of cases at the National Labor Relations Board in June, the NLRB’s general counsel granted it a couple of highly favorable “universal settlement agreements” that were opposed by the plaintiffs. Did I mention that Amazon has sued, unsuccessfully, to establish that the NLRB is an unconstitutional body? (Elon Musk’s SpaceX, making the same argument, secured a favorable ruling in the Fifth Circuit.) Bezos makes a great show of separating his business interests from those of The Washington Post. “I challenge you to find one instance,” Bezos wrote in 2024, “where I have prevailed upon anyone at the Post in favor of my own interests.” Indeed, as of 2024 the Post editorial board was showing little interest in union matters. But during the first ten months of 2026 The Washington Post has published no fewer than 11 unsigned editorials on the subject, all of them anti-labor. If Bezos hasn’t prevailed on the Post editorial board to climb onto his union-busting bandwagon—and I’m not inclined to take him at his word—maybe that’s because the Post editorial board has witnessed two opinion editors and at least half a dozen editorial writers depart since Bezos laid down the law on “personal liberties and free markets.” Perhaps those 11 union-bashing editorials merely reflect an astute observation of what the guy who writes the checks wishes his newspaper to say.The eleven editorials are these:“Unions Quest to Wreck New York Pensions” (March 2) argues against a demand by unspecified “union bosses” to increase pension benefits retroactively. The editorial’s first sentence begins, “New York State’s public pension system is not in terrible shape,” prompting the reader to ask: Why am I reading about this non-problem in a newspaper called The Washington Post? The phrase “union bosses,” incidentally, is a pejorative beloved by labor’s enemies that conjures cigar-chomping power brokers in loud plaids who’ve been extinct for roughly 60 years.“In Defense of the Secret Ballot” (March 12) argues against “card check,” which is the use of informal union authorization cards to vote in a union. The Post undermines its case by conceding that results aren’t notably different when the vote is by secret ballot. A management-side group the editorial cites favorably, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, is disclosed, dutifully, to have petitioned the NLRB to overturn a 2024 decision against Amazon, “which is not a CDW member but was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.”“A Bipartisan Bill That Would Hurt Employers and Unions” (April 8) opposes proposed legislation that would assign contract negotiations to an arbitrator if they drag on longer than 100 days after a union is voted in. This is bad because it “removes power from unions and employers to negotiate,” and because “federal bureaucrats would be able to force a contract.” One thousand six hundred and sixty-three days have passed since Amazon workers in Staten Island voted in their union local, JFK8, and they still have no contract. This goes undisclosed in the editorial.“Seattle Mayor Waves Goodbye to Prosperity” (May 1) blames on newly-elected Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson Starbucks’ establishment, in Nashville, of a southeast corporate office. Wilson’s error was to pledge to boycott Starbucks “until their union got its way” (read: until management started negotiating in good faith over a union contract). Last time I checked, Seattle was not situated in the American southeast, so it’s doubtful anything Wilson said motivated Starbucks’s decision to create the Nashville office. The only reason to publish this editorial was that Bezos lives in Seattle.“Working Overtime to Rip Off Taxpayers” (May 6) argues against repeal of a New York state law that limits “pension spiking,” wherein state employees about to retire “load up on overtime to juice retirement payouts.” Government unions argued for repeal but in the end New York’s state government did not do so (though it loosened the rules a little). Again, why should Washington Post readers care about a possible rollback of pension reforms dating to 2009 and 2012 in a state 225 miles to the north of Washington?“The Federal Government’s Most Efficient Use of $600 Ever?” (May 15) praises improvements to a government website that posts legally-mandated annual reports from unions disclosing their activities. This is an anti-labor editorial because the improved user-friendliness allows the writer to learn various facts that put unions in an unfavorable light, such as that one of the lobbyists for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, makes more money than any of AFSCME’s officers. Of course, if one of the officers made more than the lobbyist, the Post would make a stink about that instead.“Why the NLRB Needs Its Vacancies Filled” (June 9) argues that without a quorum, the NLRB can’t overturn pro-labor Biden precedents. This is a point I’d previously made in February 2025, except I am against overturning these precedents, whereas the Post favors doing so. Last week I observed that Trump has found a workaround to this problem for certain independent agencies, but it doesn’t work for the NLRB.“Government Unions Spend Millions To Save Washington Millionaire’s Tax” (August 10) fulminates that the Washington Federation of State Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Education Association collectively spent nearly $1.5 million to fight a ballot initiative that would repeal the state’s millionaire tax. This editorial doesn’t even pretend to favor anything other than Bezos’s own financial interest. “The Seattle area incubated great American companies like Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon,” the editorial intones, “which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos. But all three companies have shifted significant shares of their operations and staffing to climates that are less hostile to business.” Wait, are these relocated staffers all millionaires? If not, how is the reference to business climate at all relevant?“Americans Approve of Unions. They Just Don’t Want to Join One” (September 6) is the Post’s spin on the Gallup poll cited in the first paragraph of this story. The editorial notes that union density is at an historic low, which is true. It then blames weak union membership numbers on certain individual recent cases of union corruption. But that doesn’t make sense. Why would public approval for unions be 71 percent if the public believed most unions were corrupt? “A Multifront War on Educational Accountability” (September 20) faults the New York State United Teachers union for opposing New York’s opting in to a federal tax-credit program for enrollment in private schools that is not means-tested and therefore amounts to a subsidy for the rich. For Christ’s sake, the Post is more interested in New York state unions than The New York Times!“The NLRB’s Problem Is Bigger Than Who Can Fire Its Members” (October 19) argues that the National Labor Relations Board is illegitimate (also, if you follow the Post’s argument, every other independent agency, including the Federal Reserve, though the editorial doesn’t mention these). That’s because the NLRB “fuses legislative, executive and judicial power and gives it to unelected bureaucrats.” Amazon made this same argument in court. The Post editorial does not disclose this. In “a free economy,” the editorial says, the NLRB “ought to leave … decisions” about worker-management relations “to workers and employers themselves, subject to clear rules enacted by Congress.” But the NLRB is where violations of these rules are adjudicated. When the NLRB is gone, what will take its place? The editorial doesn’t say, because the editorial doesn’t care. Neither does Bezos.I did not include in my survey anti-labor op-eds that the Post published this year like “Unions Are On A Comeback. Americans Are Paying the Price” (C. Jarrett Dieterle, April 2) and “Did Biden Save Unions? Now We Have Numbers” (Dominic Pino, February 20). If the Post published any pro-labor op-eds in 2026 I can’t find them, even though—I repeat—labor unions are market institutions, not a form of government regulation, and therefore shouldn’t run afoul of Bezos’s “personal liberties and free markets” dictum. I suppose the Post could argue that unions are anticompetitive in the same way that monopolies are anticompetitive. That’s a proposition I don’t agree with, but it follows a certain logic. But if the Post is waging a spirited campaign to expand antitrust litigation, I’ve somehow missed it.I must acknowledge that The Post did not exactly love labor unions before Bezos appeared on the scene. That’s mainly because of an unpleasant strike in 1975 in which some pressmen sabotaged the printing presses (situated, in those long-ago days, in the same building). The Post’s last editorial page editor under Graham-family ownership, the late Fred Hiatt, had an animus against teachers’ unions. But neither these nor any other labor unions occupied a great deal of the Post editorial page’s attention. It’s different under Bezos. Pretty obviously Bezos’s financial self-interest drives the editorial pages’ oft-repeated unfavorable opinions about labor. You should therefore discount the paper’s credibility on the issue—and perhaps a few others—accordingly.