131–140 of 339 posts
Happy to hear workers are standing up for themselves. The anti-union FUD campaign in the US has contributed significantly to the erosion of middle class wages over the past 50 years (check out Thomas Piketty's work if you're curious about this).
> The company said salaries paid to its workers were among the highest in the logistic sector and that it also provided some benefits such as private medical insurance or money to pay for training programs. I don't understand how you can strike if this is true.
Besides, things like "private medical insurance" are meaningless in Northern Italy, where the regional health service is either free or very low-cost and delivers excellent levels of care. I'm surprised they are even mentioned as important benefits; either the person speaking to reporters is not Italian, or they are trying to target the story to non-Italian audiences.
More meaningful benefits in Italy would be guaranteed bonuses ("tredicesima", "quattordicesima") or short hours.
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How about we change the laws so that people who support the union are free to join, and people who DON'T are free to leave? If unions are so great, then they should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to join them.
Nobody's forcing you to work for a union shop. Find a place that isn't unionized if you don't want to be part of a union.
Why? Because as soon as they get a foothold, it is done. Over. Can't get rid of them. There are literally rules where they can fire you for trying to end the union.
If it weren't for attitudes like yours, I wouldn't be opposing unions. But your attitude DOES exist, so my only option is all out war.
Fortunately, the rest of my industry (tech) agrees with me and does not support unions. And fortunately, union support is going down massively all across the US.
Great way to make sure in the near future Amazon will send packages to Italy from France, Austria, Slovenia or Switzerland - the countries sharing a border with them. (Same happened - and is happening - in Germany. Staff at logistics centers started to strike (in small numbers). Totally unrelated Amazon started shipping from Poland and Czech Republic)
France has strikes too.. ;-)
I would guess Slovenia is the most probably "solution".
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And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery. Also, I don't know wether Italy has sane strike laws or not, but in Germany amazon would not be allowed to just fire the strikers, and there is and was non-negligible PR fallout from the strikes. Just to present the full picture. In the end, either there will be a price found. But I'd say good for Italian workers for making the labour market more of a market
Just to make clear, I am not on either ones side here. Striking is a right in Italy and Germany, so the employees sure can do it. But the reality is how it is as well :/ > And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery. Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and simil…
Incidentally, that's not exactly true. It's about a 6-8 hour drive from Berlin to the southwest by car, that would be around 10 hours or more by track, and only if you're not stuck in traffic and the place is right on the autobahn. Distance to the polish border adds an extra hour or two. This does not include any delay for handling packages in a distribution center. Next-day delivery would be very hard to achieve consistently from any location in the border-regions of Germany. There's a reason why one of the largest of Amazons German distribution centers is located in Bad Hersfeld, right here https://www.google.de/maps/place/Amazon+Logistik+GmbH+-+FRA1...
It's very much THE central point when it comes to traffic in Germany: Intersection of the A4, A7, A5/A6 giving you excellent routes into each part of Germany and close vicinity to the population centers in the Rhine and Ruhr valley
Black friday is a thing in Italy??
The joint declaration from the unions (scanned, italian, pdf): http://www.cgilpiacenza.it/imgportfolio/14/img_6/img_767969....
The economy in Italy is really bad, most of my friends don't have jobs and those who do usually have ones who are just average pay (18k euros/year). From what I read here (an Italian newspaper: http://www.lastampa.it/2017/03/14/edizioni/vercelli/qui-ad-a...) salaries are 1100-1200/month AFTER taxes. My dad delivers fresh fish to restaurants, he starts working at 4am every day until 1pm the next day. He works Monday through Saturday. His pay is slightly higher than that simply because he's been there for 20+ years and is now responsible for a few other things.
At least once a month there would be a strike while I was in high school, whether that was the professors, the bus drivers, the school janitors, the delivery people, etc. I don't think this is gonna be any more useful than those strikes; the difference is that Amazon can fire them, while those other strikes were "safe" because they are all state jobs which you can not be removed from. Curious to see how this plays out.
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Neoliberalism has tried to structure the economy in order to render strikes impossible by guaranteeing that they can't cause any real inconvenience. The "sharing economy" is merely the next generation of that: there's no workplace to picket and a "flexible" supply of labour willing to cross the picket anyway.
Which is why Foodora and Uber are seriously pissed in Germany/UK about the resident Gigsters unionizing (source in german) http://www.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2017-04/crowdworking-click... As a human who is also an employer, I take great second hand pleasure in seeing people refuse to take that shit
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> I think union membership rates have been dropping due to the fact that companies have been increasinly more anti union. Contrary to popular belief, companies have incredibly little power in that regard, especially when you're talking about an already-unionized closed shop (as opposed to a company that wants to prevent its workers from unionizing in the first place). Legally and practically, it's incredibly difficul…
Aren't closed shops illegal?
You're thinking of union shops, not closed shops. Union shops are nominally illegal, but in practice, many large unionized workplaces are effectively union shops, because the NLRB chooses to enforce a very narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court case that they lost.