201–210 of 416 posts
Assuming they did leak private company information or try to organize a massive social gathering during the pandemic, the response was valid. They were probably targets, but as a target you shouldn't be breaking rules at work.
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you seem to think that the mines would have lasted longer had unions not been against shutting mines? At the time, the average ton of coal was costing double to extract than it was worth. Closing the loss making mines was inevitable but the viable mines could have remained open, and would have as there was still the demand for coal. The Germans do this right, their unions want their workers to have fair share of the…
> "British union leaders simply play workers against management for their own gain, then leave both workers and management worse off, but workers get the worst of it." Again, you're buying into nonsense anti-union propaganda.
I'm not buying into anything. I see Germany with strong unions and a strong industrial sector and I want that here. Just there is something in the British union movement that makes it destructive instead.
If I'm to be honest, I'm a little surprised at the responses I'm seeing posted. This site is probably >80% men, many of whom are college educated and far more wealthy than most Americans, but are still somewhat anti-Amazon?
I feel like this is a weird statement. Unless I'm personally involved in the abuses of Amazon, I can't feel bad for the victims? I've never been murdered but I feel bad for murder victims as well.
The unionization efforts seem like events that could disrupt Amazon outside of anti-monopoly legislation. To me, that seems like a good thing for most tech workers working outside of FAANG (as long as they don't hold Amazon stock).
They both got what they deserved, and Amazon's only mistake was not putting them on a PIP and firing them for performance reasons, which would have been a lot more defensible than a policy violation. I'm sure in all their time spent organizing their job duties suffered demonstrably. Can you imagine the collateral damage they caused to their department in all of this? Imagine just trying to do your job and having to deal with these two on your team.
> After Amazon told them that they had violated its external communications policy by speaking publicly about the business, their group organized 400 employees to also speak out, purposely violating the policy to make a point. I get that Amazon and big tech hate posts are a daily thing on HN these days, but this seems simple enough to me. They broke Amazons policies and organized other employees to also break policy.…
Companies tell employees not to discuss their salaries, this causes an information asymmetry where employees can't accurately ascertain the free market value of their labor.
Workers try to pool their power together to get more of the value that they produce, they are evil. Corporate mergers and acquisitions that pool the corporations power so they can maximize profits, just the market at work.
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Unfortunately it's not physically possible to be neutral on this issue. It's not analogous to never giving people change on the street because you donate to soup kitchens and mutual aid orgs (or whatever). If you don't support unionization, you are effectively undermining it. This isn't meant to be some kind of woke purity test. It's just the facts of how a market operates. Every individual that is willing to work wi…
JFC talk about a "you're with us or against us" mentality. I tend to be somewhat neutral on unions (depending on the context I think they're sometimes good and sometimes bad), but your rhetoric has pushed me further towards unions being bad.
> your rhetoric has pushed me further towards unions being bad.
This sounds vindictive and selfish to me. I wish it wasn't this way. Personally I'd rather just play video games and screw around with Idris than get involved in labor disputes. But to turn against unions because someone who is vaguely pro-union said something that kinda offended you? Come on.
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Well they are doing some of it for just that reason, like they raised the minimum wage to $15 (which is actually pretty good) and wave that around in their anti-union propaganda. I bet they’ve done all kinds of risk calculations around increasing benefits and decided they could stop there. Personally, I hope their calculations are wrong and the workers unionize anyways.
"minimum wage" should be for jobs that are minimum work - jobs were you stand around doing nothing (cashier at a slow store), or are apprenticing a skill. Amazon warehouse jobs are physically demanding and damaging (which should carry a premium) and extremely optimized to negative downtime (which should carry a premium). (Employees are required to do work while off the clock, walking between work area and break area,…
There is a push to raise federal minimum wage to match Amazon's minimum wage, but for now they are paying a hefty premium everywhere in the US except Washington D.C., the only US state-like entity to yet match it.
Sometimes we forget that all these amazon warehouse employees could take jobs as cashiers at slow stores and similar such easier opportunities, but choose not to.
Activist employees are the worst. Instead of focusing on their job duties, these workers clearly were focused on their campaign to make Amazon, their employer, look bad publicly. When one tactic (climate justice) wasn't getting them enough attention, they switched their tactics to pandemic safety. It's the switch of agendas here that is telling as to their true motives. They both got what they deserved, and Amazon's…
Labor activism ([edit] to be read as 'a healthy tension between labor and capital') is good for everyone -- in fact you're a beneficiary. Weekends exist because of organized labor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
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I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.
In business environment terms, I see anyone who takes a "you're either with us or against us" position as promoting a "mostly-cheating-allowed game." You're gonna let things slide for people on "your team" much more than you would if everyone is for themselves. That's one of the more convincing arguments against traditional unions, to me.
My point was supposed to be that a workplace full of selfish people would not necessarily be a deterrent to other selfish people, because the opportunity to be freely selfish might be worth more than the (estimated) risk due to being surrounded by selfish people.
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It's effectively the same thing as Cunningham and Costa themselves saying they would pursue a ULP charge. It's just that in labor cases, the NLRB screens complaints first and then steps in to represent the complainant for complaints that are credible. That is not a final determination, though: the piece of paper that Cunningham and Costa held does not say that the NLRB will find that Amazon did engage in a ULP and ex…
"the NLRB screens complaints first and then steps in to represent the complainant for complaints that are credible" That's a pretty big difference.