Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Amazon Crushes Unions

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 261 posts

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#51

Post by comrh »

Chris2048 wrote: post #42
spaetzleesser wrote: post #9

Stuff like this always comes to mind when the media celebrates the richest people in the world. This often comes at the expense of low level employees who do dangerous and underpaid work so a few guys can become very rich. And the worse they treat these employees the more the rich guys get celebrated. That’s why the slogan “run the government like a business” doesn’t work. It would mean to ignore the weakest in socie…

> who do dangerous and underpaid work so a few guys can become very rich If it's underpaid, why do it? If you do it, what makes it "under" paid? By taking the job, you confirm the wage is right.

This naively assumes the person has a choice of other opportunities and that the those other jobs aren't also underpaid.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#52

Post by klaudius »

pc86 wrote: post #32
blinding-streak wrote: post #3

> Amazon managers openly warned recruits that if they liked things comfortable, this would be a difficult, perhaps impossible, job. For customer service representatives, it was difficult to keep up, according to media accounts and labor organizers. Overtime was mandatory. Supervisors sent emails with subject headings like “YOU CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.” Umm, yikes.

Imagine being in a position where you have to choose between putting up with this hostile bullshit or going hungry/evicted. Most of us here could tell our bosses to f off and either have enough savings for months (or even years), or at the very least get another job within weeks or days. Even having grown up lower-middle class with zero, often negative, extra money, going years without vacation, etc., it's hard to wr…

How does someone get into that position? Are public schools so bad that people come out with no marketable unique skills that would give them natural job security?

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#53

Post by Judgmentality »

pc86 wrote: post #18
peer2pay wrote: post #6

I hate Amazon and stories like this make me hate it even more. I stopped ordering anything from them and, if anything, this has actually improved my consumer experience. Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days. Not shopping at either has definitely raised the average life span and quality of goods in my househ…

> Now I only wish I could find a way to move all our infrastructure off AWS If only there were competing cloud/PaaS services.

If only they were competitive.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#54

Post by ldng »

nafizh wrote: post #24
peer2pay wrote: post #6

I hate Amazon and stories like this make me hate it even more. I stopped ordering anything from them and, if anything, this has actually improved my consumer experience. Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days. Not shopping at either has definitely raised the average life span and quality of goods in my househ…

Can you elaborate where do you buy things online from? I want to move away from Amazon, but it's also exhausting to sort through multiple websites for a product, their shipping fees, and make decisions.

Isn't a bit of "exhaustion" worth to fight back terrible practices ?

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#55

Post by adkadskhj »

throwaway53453 wrote: post #25
blinding-streak wrote: post #4

For reference, Amazon's anti-union site: https://www.doitwithoutdues.com/

I have to say, I'm kind of creeped out by union dues. It just feels less about workers helping themselves and more like some workers creating a new power structure and job roles that they can enjoy.

Unions are like governments. I am pro big-government (generally), but it is effectively a coordinated power structure. That power structure, like any, can be corrupt/etc.

So i like unions (and have been a member of one), generally, in the same way i like governments. However they need clarity, visibility, and structures to answer to its members. A god-king union is no better than a god-king government.

Imo, they're work. They require care to exist properly, just like governments. But when done right, they're the only source of citizen power in the workforce. Especially in the modern day of mega corporations.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#56

Post by Rule35 »

TurningCanadian wrote: post #23
glasss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a few small business owners that have said if their staff unionized they would just close the business. These aren't bad bosses or people who don't know how to run a business. They just know if their staff unionized and the rest of their industry didn't, they wouldn't be able to compete on price or keep the necessary number of staff. I think it's easier to pick on Amazon or bezos than it is to deal with the po…

It's in the union's interest to keep the company alive too.

It's in the union organizers interest to pocket as many of the dues as possible. The union isn't an entity to itself, it's a whole other bureaucracy and is no more on your side than your government is in the first place.

In the best case scenario a union is now another level of government you're forced to participate in just to tread water, and at worst it's the literal mafia.

The legal climate has improved significantly since the unions of the early years were needed. Largely because those workers voted (governmentally) to give the benefits to everyone.

Dishonest fake flags. Imagine what the person who flagged this post would be like to work with. Imagine them having power over your career.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#57

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

ldng wrote: post #54
nafizh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate where do you buy things online from? I want to move away from Amazon, but it's also exhausting to sort through multiple websites for a product, their shipping fees, and make decisions.

Isn't a bit of "exhaustion" worth to fight back terrible practices ?

I'm not sure what the term for this is; maybe "quorum problem"?

If too few people sustain a boycott, then they suffer without accomplishing their goal, so a net negative.

If enough people sustain a boycott, they'll suffer but will also accomplish their goal, so a net positive.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#58

Post by tidepod12 »

jtdev wrote: post #48
musingsole wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning to IBM or Oracle for moral reasons is about the funniest thing I've read in a long time. One enabled the holocaust and the other made 90s-era Microsoft seem downright communist.

Amazon is doing some rather creepy stuff with the CIA [0]. Can you elaborate on what Oracle did that was so bad? Is charging for software and enforcing license terms somehow worse than what Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. are doing? [0] https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/22/aclu_amazon_aws_rekog...

I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...

And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#59

Post by nickpp »

cratermoon wrote: post #46
jdasdf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once a union has been certified or recognized, the employer is required to bargain over your terms and conditions of employment with your union representative. Oh. So once again bad laws cause the whole problem...

Those same "bad laws" are why you have a 5-day work week, your retirement plan, overtime (if you are hourly), safe working conditions, sick leave. The list goes on. If you think you'd like to go back before the time when unions didn't exist, let me direct you to the work of photographer Lewis Hine

We have those thanks to the increase of productivity and competition between employees, not some unions hundreds of years ago. Maybe that was the reason initially but time has passed and today's situation favours the employee in most fields.

Re: How Amazon Crushes Unions

#60

Post by Rule35 »

cratermoon wrote: post #46
jdasdf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once a union has been certified or recognized, the employer is required to bargain over your terms and conditions of employment with your union representative. Oh. So once again bad laws cause the whole problem...

Those same "bad laws" are why you have a 5-day work week, your retirement plan, overtime (if you are hourly), safe working conditions, sick leave. The list goes on. If you think you'd like to go back before the time when unions didn't exist, let me direct you to the work of photographer Lewis Hine

Unions have done their job. They were needed when Pinkertons beat up people trying to open new stores in a company town, etc.

Ironically, flagging a post without bad content is just the sort of passive aggressive crap you have to put up with in a union.

Post reply on HN