I’m surprised by all of these unions announcing the results of their strike votes. That’s a valuable piece of information, and even if it’s a strong mandate, it can be detrimental to reveal the exact number.
Unions are democratic organizations. It’s not for union leadership to enforce a gag order on it’s membership and these votes have to be transparent to that membership for obvious reasons. All that being the case it’s going to be impossible to keep it secret most of the time anyways, and it’s a public relations win to keep things open to the public so why fight it?
The problem is, even if the number is really high (like say 93%), making it public allows management, the media, and the public to infer trends if it then dips down to a lower number (say 85%) in a subsequent vote.
Those votes dot happen often enough to derive good tactical data. Most of the time it’s one vote, with progressively rare second, third, fourth votes. There’s just too little data to get useful trending.
I don’t disagree, but the three groups I said might try to infer a trend are management, the media, and the public. None of those groups are known for their good understanding of statistics. All of them will happily draw a line between 2 data points and call it a trend.