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Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

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Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#341

Post by slibhb »

duckfang wrote: post #254
parliament32 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all (the guy doing the bare minimum job description gets the same raises as you), wayyy too much focus on seniority (for promotions, vacation selection, etc), and overall just too many rules (for example, "unlimited vacation" works great with my cur…

> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pil…

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure

Are you a poet?

In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#342

Post by asdff »

cr1pablo wrote: post #148

Why are people in America against unionizing? In Spain and I think in Europe it's pretty normal, most people do it.

People in America have been subjected to nearly 100 years of very successful anti union propaganda. They used to be very strong, but have since been eroded and vilified by capital.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#344

Post by radicalbyte »

specialist wrote: post #268
flavius29663 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$15 an hour is more than you can get in almost any place in Europe or the world for unskilled labor, what are you talking about?

Why are you comparing absolute dollar amounts? Is the cost of living the same every where?

If the post above about average houses costing $90k there are true, then the Amazon workers are earning about $26k a year, that's around 3.5x salary to house cost.

I live in the middle of The Netherlands; the average house price is 360k and the average wage is 36k, that's around 10x salary to house cost.

One important point: in almost all cases in NL both partners work, the general rule is that women work part time and increasingly couples under 40 both work full time. That's how the insane house market is propped up.

Healthcare costs are around 200 EUR / person / month at the limit (you pay ~110 and the deductible is about 900 EUR a year).

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#345

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #318
mixedCase wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no sustainable way to fund it.

I don't get how people keep saying this. A UBI is effectively a tax credit. You fund it with higher nominal rates. These mostly cancel out for working people, netting to zero in the middle. People at the top pay on net so that people at the bottom receive on net. It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means…

The people at the top will move to a tax haven.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#346

Post by syshum »

Loughla wrote: post #218
syshum wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely do not understand why someone would vote to be collectively represented instead of being able to act as as individual in your own best interest You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest, this is simply false The union has supplanted individual choice for collective voting, and…

>You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest No, and that is a pretty far stretch from what I said. Please re-read "your own collective interest". It's easy to win an argument when you misrepresent what is said. Collective interest implies that it is the greatest good for the majority of peop…

While low skill / high supply jobs can be more challenging in some cases to negotiate, I know many many employers that are having problems finding people even for the most entry level jobs.

Further good employees, even in low skill jobs, are very hard to find and even harder to retain. employers want to keep them, unionization often limits their ability to retain these high performing employees because they are not allowed to give bonus, raise or any other incentive beyond what is laid out by collective bargaining.

So I really do not see how it is easier to negotiate as a group. my personal experiences matches what have have observed in employment rations through out my career from when I was in a entry level position to now where I am in a higher skilled position

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#347

Post by slantedview »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #335
aarongray wrote: post #127

Speaking as someone who lives adjacent to Bessemer but who does not work at Amazon, you need to understand that Bessemer is a dying city, a slum. These were the best paying jobs that many of these workers had had in their entire lives, it is no wonder that a majority of them decided not to bite the hand that was feeding them.

What exactly would the retribution from Amazon look like, had this passed? They can't pick up the fulfillment center and move it somewhere else (without inconvenience, time, and expense, of course). They will need workers willing to travel to Bessemer for work, which presumably are people who live near or adjacent to Bessemer.

You're right, but obviously the fear of retribution was enough to influence the vote.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#348

Post by lovecg »

kethinov wrote: post #269
lovecg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, it seems indisputable to you that someone who’s job is on the line and who probably spent quite a bit of time looking into what was being proposed ultimately decided to vote no must be wrong? I’m curious what better information you have (especially to compensate for the lack of skin in the game so to speak) to come to that conclusion.

Aside from the common sense that collective bargaining obviously puts you in a stronger negotiating position than individual bargaining for the same class of job, there is also plenty of data out there showing that unions deliver results. Anti-union people counter that by flooding the discourse with FUD propaganda that is often very persuasive but just because it's persuasive doesn't mean it is true.

That might be true on average, doesn’t mean that specific cases could have vastly different outcomes.

I don’t see how a propaganda campaign can push the vote to 70%, this is not Soviet Russia. Money does help but not on this order of magnitude (see Mike Bloomberg or many failed ballot propositions with tons of money behind them).

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#349

Post by kpennell »

Diederich wrote: post #249
aarongray wrote: post #127

Speaking as someone who lives adjacent to Bessemer but who does not work at Amazon, you need to understand that Bessemer is a dying city, a slum. These were the best paying jobs that many of these workers had had in their entire lives, it is no wonder that a majority of them decided not to bite the hand that was feeding them.

Wow, you're not kidding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer,_Alabama#Economy "Crime increased following the rise in unemployment and social disruption from the decline of manufacturing industries in the area. As of 2019 Bessemer ranks first in terms of violent crimes for US cities with 25,000 or more people." Population has fallen from its peak in 1970 of 33k to 26k today. Thanks for the reference. EDIT: Also hom…

thx for the chicken edit

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#350

Post by pc86 »

regextegrity wrote: post #267
bradleyjg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to believe this isn’t the top reply. You don’t need to go off into some long discussion about the philosophy of collective action. This vote was no because if it had been yes the likely consequence would have been all the voters being out of a job.

> This vote was no because if it had been yes the likely consequence would have been all the voters being out of a job. Isn't that a problem?

Maybe. Maybe not. Let's take for the sake the argument that yes, it's a problem.

Should Amazon be prevented from closing the factory? For how long? Do they have to send as much product there as they did before? Can they open a non-union warehouse in Columbus, MS less than two hours away? Any temporary/sunsetting requirements just get factored in to the new math of how much a union would cost them. So maybe you buy the workers six months but the same thing happens. So if you actually want to "fix" things (again, from the assumed standpoint that shutting down the factory is a Bad Thing) the requirement has to be permanent. So is the requirement then that Amazon has to keep this one warehouse open in perpetuity just because its unionized? What if Amazon goes bankrupt? What if Amazon sells its fulfillment and shipping components to another company? What if that company buys everything except this one warehouse?

The argument of "they shouldn't be able to close the factory" falls apart pretty quickly when you think of how you would have to enforce it.

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