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

Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#581

Post by _-david-_ »

slantedview wrote: post #371
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…

That unions can be bad is not news to anyone. But what's clear is not having unions is much, much worse. A simple comparison of wealth vs union membership tells it all: https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo...

Do you have any proof that the lack of unions is causing the top 10% to make more? There are variety of different things that started in the 50s such as outsourcing to cheaper countries.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#582

Post by standardUser »

hintymad wrote: post #372
duckfang wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, wel…

"It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers."

That sounds like an entitled viewpoint. Imagine how it feels to be someone of a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living in a society where, as a middling performer, any boss you have can fire you for "poor performance" with no other explanation required. Without that life experience, perhaps it is hard to view that situation as problematic. But for people with those experiences, they would prefer a system that has some insulation between them and the whims of their (mostly white, male, higher class) bosses.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#583

Post by luckylion »

Loughla wrote: post #209
luckylion wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's paternalistic, isn't it? "They voted against their interest" implies that OP knows/decides what their interests are. Personally, I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions. It was always the people who only talked, read and wrote about workers that were flabbergasted. Source: worked as a consultant for a union in Europe for a decade.

OP was implying what his/her interests are, or rather, would be, s/he believes, in this case. Source: I am OP and that was my intention. That's why I asked for someone with direct experience to comment. I am confused, based on my own viewpoint and experience with unions. >I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions. I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. Wha…

> I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. What is workers? Who are workers?

Workers are people who work in the rougher jobs, blue collar if that's what you prefer. White collar unions are very different in my opinion.

My experience is this: I've worked with people who were workers and then transitioned to working for the union, either because they were natural organizers, or because they had accidents that made it hard to work their job (a surprising amount of them had lost a finger or two). When they spoke about these kinds of things, like votes or organization rates, they were quick to give plenty of reasons why their colleagues would make some decision because they knew all the arguments and feelings.

The other type I met at the union was college educated, usually political science, spoke a lot of class consciousness and collective interests and had never worked the jobs the union represented. When you talked to them, they didn't understand why workers made some choice, it was always some nicely worded version of "they're not smart enough to make the right choice" or "somebody fed them lies".

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#584

Post by skynet-9000 »

krisdol wrote: post #518
saas_sam wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked in a large unionized organization? I've worked in both. Unions are worse.

My spouse (medicine) and several of my peers (journalism) have and they would disagree. Spouse has experienced both sides of the coin, and has seen better benefits and better pay in the unionized workplace than the non-unionized one. Very much the same story for my journo peers, but in their case, they unionized the workplace so the only variable that changed to improve their lifestyle was the introduction of a union…

> better benefits and better pay

You are only considering one side of the question -- and actually a limited form of that one side (namely, the material benefits/pay for the unionized employees).

What about the productivity of the firm and workers? The profits? The cohesiveness of the market strategy? The sense that the workers were participating in the success of the firm itself (and not the success of the union)? The creation of healthy relationships between management and labor?

It's probably beyond dispute that unions introduce a "middleman" between management and labor, but we are probably arguing about whether or not that middleman is (most often) a good or bad thing. (I do not dispute that sometimes unions can be healthy and might align its incentives with company success, but I tend to believe that this middleman is not usually a good thing except in extremely unhealthy companies -- perhaps like Amazon, and I must confess that in working with about 50 companies, of which less than 10 were union shops, I've never actually seen a union shop where labor didn't put union goals over company goals, to the detriment of both.)

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#585

Post by reaperducer »

tw04 wrote: post #447
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?

There are plenty of jobs in western Europe that will pay similar and won't force you to pee in a bottle or your pants. That's ignoring the whole healthcare situation... which I think you're leaving out of the equation. 30 seconds of searching indicates the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker. https://www.payscale.com/…

the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker.

Is it fair to compare the average wage of a warehouse worker across the entirety of the U.K. with the starting wage of a warehouse worker in a single deeply impoverished town?

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#586

Post by avs733 »

flavius29663 wrote: post #246
fartcannon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a tragic way to frame it. The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better so they don't have to choose indentured servitude over poverty. Edit: Added the bit about all the world governments

$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?

I love the label unskilled.

I don't think most of my colleagues in academia could physically complete a shift in an Amazon warehouse. Is that a skill?

The labels unskilled and entry level are used to depress wage expectations not accurately represent the requirements of the work performed because the work is deemed to be of low economic value.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#587

Post by temp8964 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #221
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.

One person earning $15 Amazon in Bessemer is solidly middle class for that town. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/07/22/worst-cities...

Imagining a federal $15 minimum wage will easily level up everyone in the town to middle class... (sarcasm)

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#588

Post by gtsop »

Ah, the union vs anti-union discussion again. Seriously we should TDD our way out of this discussion. There are clearly some union policies that work and some others that don't. Can't we work out just the beneficial ones and enforce them as a baseline while discarding the bad ones? Print that as a standard and boom! You've got a compliance measure to rank unions :)

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#589

Post by yourmom2 »

bhupy wrote: post #323
quijoteuniv wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that might be right,You are not taking into account that in Europe you get free healthcare & education.

The warehouse workers get the same (extremely generous) healthcare as every other Amazon employee (due to ERISA). And even if they didn't, through the Affordable Care Act, someone at that income level can buy a "Gold" plan with low deductibles for $75/month. Obviously for Amazon workers, that's irrelevant. K-12 education is free, and once you factor in-state tuition and FAFSA, university is also basically free for an…

They don’t have cash for copays and all the other american nonsense so it’s not really the same thing.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#590

Post by FearlessNebula »

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…

I'm stupid, but why does unemployment cause violent crime?
Post reply on HN