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Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

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Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#281

Post by kieselguhr_kid »

txsoftwaredev wrote: post #278
kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go work there and then tell me they're not exploited. Edit: This was flippant because I was annoyed. There are a lot of people who work in well-paying jobs and have never really experienced what the labor that enables their relatively privileged lifestyle actually feels like. They often weigh in with "well, get a better job" but not only is that not an option for everyone, it means you're devaluing absolutely critica…

I've worked painting dorm rooms. Worked cleaning out freezers in an ice cream factory. I've done plenty of crappy manual jobs. But I knew that's what I would get at the time as I was uneducated and unskilled. I was happy to have an income that relied on not needing any skills. Sorry you are annoyed, it's my opinion.

"I've had crappy manual jobs" and "I've been in a situation where crappy manual jobs were my only viable option" are very different situations. But also, why didn't you want more money at the time? Why were you so happy to have a crappy job cleaning out freezers when you could have organized and got a better paying job cleaning out freezers?

This future millionaire mindset, where you were "happy to have an income" because you anticipated better future returns, is ugly and detrimental to everyone around you. Every job that needs doing should be done for decent pay and with dignity, at a minimum.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#282

Post by ianai »

joshe wrote: post #275
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we get european style unions here in america? How is it that they are able to avoid those issues and what lessons can we take that aren't "america just can't do unions right."

It would be great. I sometimes think that something like a "credible threat of peace" would be useful. "We are forming a union. If you vote for this union, we will allow workers here to chose other unions. We will never get in the way of firing someone. We will never create job roles that don't let workers move laterally or up. You can lay people off. We will not use our members money for political campaigns. Our wor…

Pretty sure that union would be so weak as to be worth disbanding.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#283

Post by j_walter »

ryanmercer wrote: post #277
j_walter wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how math works. My kids day care has a government mandated 8 to 1 ratio. That teacher doesn't get paid 8x the average wage to watch kids. I don't pay $25/hr for my 2 kids to be at daycare. A local babysitter can watch more than 1 kid for that $12.75 an hour as well...it's not per kid. Nice try. Also, continued education is a requirement as it should be for such a career, but don't forget that her pay will…

>A local babysitter can watch more than 1 kid for that $12.75 an hour as well...it's not per kid. You're just massaging the data to benefit your point. Go find a babysitter that'll find 5 parents an go "yes, I'll watch all 5 of your children if you all chip in and give me 12.75 total".

I'd be happy to pass you on to anyone that works at a daycare. They don't make much more than minimum wage in many cases. That's how daycare can remain somewhat affordable...economies of scale.

Even your own source of care.com has a "Nanny Share" program that reduces the cost more. Without sharing, full time care (40 hrs a week) for 2 kids in my area is $16 an hour...which is less than 2 bucks more than minimum wage. $17.65 an hour if its 3 kids. Certainly not three times the $14.65 an hour that is for a single kid.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#284

Post by wincy »

WalterBright wrote: post #202
ibudiallo wrote: post #64

Unions were proponents for worker safety, fair wages, anti-discrimination. They are the reason why such thing as OSHA exists today. They are the reason some laws were passed to protect workers in the US. But once these mandates became law, corporations used the arguments of "why do we need unions if the law already protects workers?" This and following Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers changed the image…

> Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers It was illegal for the controllers to strike.

It’s pretty smart to make the things that benefit the weak and hurt the powerful illegal.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#285

Post by dcolkitt »

pmoriarty wrote: post #104
random5634 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The propaganda unfortunately also comes from folks direct experience with unions. In the US, most unions are public sector. So folks see that Police unions may protect bad apples via union. Teachers unions may care more about teachers including bad ones then teaching kids. We had a famously terrible teacher at my school - unfirable - as kids we thought it was hilarious. As a parent now - not so cool. Non unionized sc…

The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses are used to reject unions outright rather than looking at whether unions as a whole would benefit society. You could argue from personal experience that you went to a bad school therefore all schools are bad, or you had a bad experience with therefore all people of that sort are bad. It's just not very convincing.

Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1]

The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers. Thus you tend to see that the best unions for workers tend to be in large, established, highly profitable firms with little to no competition. A prime example are the American automakers before the 1980s when foreign competition kicked in. Working on the GM assembly line in 1970 was a very good job.

However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability. The only give is either higher consumer prices or deadweight loss, i.e. fewer customer and therefore fewer (but higher-paid) employees. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, especially to the extent that the average Amazon customer is wealthier than the average Amazon warehouse worker. But given Amazon's extremely thin profit margins, I don't really see anyway that consumers won't end up paying for the sizable bulk of the unionization costs.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979399204600...

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#286

Post by stretchcat »

kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #271
stretchcat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Department of Labor takes wage theft very seriously. If you report it to them, at no cost to yourself, they will investigate it and almost certainly scare your boss shitless so he'll never try it again. Probably they could do a better job of advertising this to workers. Many workers experiencing wage theft probably are not aware of their options, and that's a problem. But when used, it works. I've seen it work…

If they take it so seriously, why is it so underused? I don't think this is a lack of information; people who are highly precarious can't take these kinds of risks, even if they're just percevied. There are all kinds of de jure considerations that purport to protect workers, but they fail without an organization by and for workers to actually ensure they're enforced.

The first real job I had was the first time I saw the efficacy of the Department of Labor. I was working at a bean processing plant; semi trucks with trailers full of fresh green beans from the fields dropped beans off at the plant where they were cleaned (my job was to pick out the bits of small animals the harvesters chewed up), chopped, cooled, and loaded onto another truck. The entire operation hinges on the trucks arriving just in time.

Well sometimes a truck is late, that's just the way the world works. In one of those cases, my boss asked us to stay at the plant an hour late; the truck driver was on the phone and said he'd be there shortly, but we had nothing to do but sit around on our asses twiddling our thumbs. One of my coworkers, more experienced than me, asked if we'd get paid while waiting. My account of the conversation that followed:

Boss: "Well uh, we're all just sitting here doing nothing so.."

Coworker: "The Deparment of Labor says..."

Boss: "WHOA WHOA WHOA! I was just kidding of course you'll get paid!"

Immediate backtrack. He turned on a dime as soon as he realized there were workers who knew their rights. I think information is the key. There is no substitute for workers knowing their rights.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#287

Post by dumbfoundded »

tehjoker wrote: post #280
random5634 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The propaganda unfortunately also comes from folks direct experience with unions. In the US, most unions are public sector. So folks see that Police unions may protect bad apples via union. Teachers unions may care more about teachers including bad ones then teaching kids. We had a famously terrible teacher at my school - unfirable - as kids we thought it was hilarious. As a parent now - not so cool. Non unionized sc…

All workers should be in unions. With few exceptions, workers collaborating forms the basis of their power vs management. Management has money and the ability to wait out vs an individual that needs a job. Only groups of employees can successfully negotiate for major concessions outside of rare circumstances. An older tradition that would be even better is unionization on an industrial/sectoral scale so you don't eve…

Unions are absolutely necessary but I think the situation is more complicated. From the perspective of the company, dealing with unions is expensive and time consuming. It'd be better just to give employees fair benefits and pay without dealing with a union. But if there's no union, only the threat of unionization incentivizes actually following through.

Similarly for workers, no one wants to have to work harder to be treated fairly along with paying the overhead of unionization. What you end up with is an unstable equilibrium for the creation and destruction of unions.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#288

Post by offtop5 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #132
j_walter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never fully understood public unions to be honest. Unions used to be the best way to protect yourself from a bad employer...but the employer is the government (and to some extent the people). It used to be that public sector workers made less in exchange for better benefits, but in the last few years the war was waged on the public to increase wages to that of "private companies". Now teachers in my state make m…

>Now teachers in my state make more than an average BS degree and work 9 months of the year...along with better medical and retirement benefits. They still claim they are underpaid They are. A few years ago I still thought they were oeverpaid and then I married a teacher. She's absolutely underpaid. It is very much not a 9-5 job and, that time off during the summer - some of it get used for required continued educati…

Also worth mentioning teachers have to deal with almost every societal issue. Having a kid tell you him and his mom sleep in a car this weekend is a heavy burden to carry.

We treat teachers like these magicians who should find a way to make economically stressed kids fantastic students.

I myself went through tons of housing instability , and an eviction while in high school. In no universe was I going to get into some type of premiere college.

But you just keep seeing more and more pressure to make kids college ready. Kids who can barely read English are now told to take a foreign language( I've always hated foreign language requirements because I think it gives a big leg up to people growing in bilingual homes).

Your wife is a saint. I can't imagine how much stress this reopening drive is causing your home.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#289

Post by TeMPOraL »

dcolkitt wrote: post #285
pmoriarty wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses are used to reject unions outright rather than looking at whether unions as a whole would benefit society. You could argue from personal experience that you went to a bad school therefore all schools are bad, or you had a bad experience with therefore all people of that sort are bad. It's just not very convincing.

Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1] The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers. Thus you tend to see that the best unions for workers tend to be in large, established, highly profitable firms with little to no…

> unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts

That's not entirely surprising. Unions aren't optimizing for company productivity, but for the conditions and pay of the workers. And conversely, a company can abuse its employees to a large degree while reaping productivity gains from it.

> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability.

Amazon is "barely profitable" because of clever accounting. They rake in tons of money, and reinvest it into growth. There is plenty of buffer to eat the unionization costs. But of course Amazon may opt to pass these costs to customers instead.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's First U.S. Union

#290

Post by mitchdaily »

schoolornot wrote: post #238
ibudiallo wrote: post #64

Unions were proponents for worker safety, fair wages, anti-discrimination. They are the reason why such thing as OSHA exists today. They are the reason some laws were passed to protect workers in the US. But once these mandates became law, corporations used the arguments of "why do we need unions if the law already protects workers?" This and following Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers changed the image…

Grew up in a union family where I benefited greatly from the protections provided. But it seems to me that they really only help blue collar workers get higher, some would say reasonable, wages. As someone who worked their ass off for 10 years since graduating and negotiated my way to a senior role, I haven't seen one compelling reason to let someone negotiate on my behalf. Think of the smartest engineer you know. Ar…

I make way more in my unionised engineering role than I did previously working at a multinational software firm, and more importantly when I have problems with the company I have access to support and legal advice. Making bank working on software is great until the company starts to stuff you around, or some executive takes a dislike to you
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