I was too sentimental this time. In 2014, in these very pages, I noted that a friend had asked me for a prediction as to the vote in the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) effort to organize Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee facility. With a lot of luck, leavened by instincts and decades of experience working in and studying the labor movement, I nailed it exactly: a 53-47 union defeat. In that one you could see that the UAW had a shot — they had been working this campaign for a long time and had won a pledge of company neutrality from the German-based company. It turned out to be not quite enough. But okay, a fairly close loss.

So a couple of weeks ago, as we looked to the results at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the same friend asked me what I thought would happen this time. I said a 55-45 defeat. I agreed with every labor person I had talked to — nobody thought the union had a chance to win. But my own historiographical awareness of the militant organizing of the Mine Mill and Smelter’s union of mostly black workers during the Depression in the same area in Alabama had me yearning for a modern invocation of that memory today.

The result, however, was much worse than I imagined: a 70-30 rout with a terrible 55 percent turnout, indicating that many workers were either too fearful or too alienated to vote at all. The result was born of a combination of the standard union-busting tactics used in the most anti-union nation in the advanced world, refined to a coercive perfection by an enormously sophisticated and powerful company — and also the manifold mistakes, essentially malfeasance, of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), the fairly small union running the campaign. (Jane McAlevey smartly walks through many of these mistakes in her postmortem in the Nation.)