Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#801

Post by GhostVII » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #701

tombert wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally. I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain…

> In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver. Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use…

I agree that there are cases where a payday loan is a good option, and that if people behaved rationally it would be objectively better to have that option than to not have it. The problem is that people don't behave rationally. And behaving irrationally isn't isolated to poor people (lots of people get 96 month loans on expensive cars they can't afford), but it hurts them the most.

Reminds me of an anecdote from poor African countries. Farmers would buy fertilizer months before they needed it, even though it is logically better for them to save that money and only buy the fertilizer when they needed it (assuming the price of the fertilizer was constant). But they knew if they had the money the would be tempted to spend it in the meantime, so they bought it early to avoid the temptation.

Payday loans can encourage people to take out a loan and spend money even in cases where it would be better for them to find an alternative.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#802

Post by xwolfi » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #210

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 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

Well reality so far is that things will stay unbalanced for a while.

I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago.

Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#803

Post by 8bitsrule » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #486

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?

In Europe there are a lot of social benefits that mitigate this. - Health care - Worker protections - Required time off - Sick time - Maternity leave etc. Here its $15. And you're on your fucking own. If you compare it to completely underdeveloped or dictatorial economies... Sure I guess its way better. But the US shouldn't be comparing comparing itself to that. Its like saying "This engineer is horrible, but he's no…

"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store"

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#804

Post by dvdkon » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #714

Justsignedup wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe there are a lot of social benefits that mitigate this. - Health care - Worker protections - Required time off - Sick time - Maternity leave etc. Here its $15. And you're on your fucking own. If you compare it to completely underdeveloped or dictatorial economies... Sure I guess its way better. But the US shouldn't be comparing comparing itself to that. Its like saying "This engineer is horrible, but he's no…

So work hard and get a better job. The fact is that you will not if you have a safety net under you. I lived on welfare and refused to make more money until it was a LOT more money. I finally got off the safety net only when my income increased five fold. Even that was a little begrudging because I had $800 a month in food stamps and free medical care and so all those costs got flipped onto me--not to mention the $60…

The worse job you'd leave still need to exist, it's just going to be someone else toiling in unreasonable conditions. Sure, "get a better job" is something people in low-paying jobs should strive for, but it's selfish only to care about one's own situation and ignore the people you're leaving behind.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#805

Post by LeifCarrotson » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #749

zwkrt wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not stupid you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life. Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you…

No way out either. In a literal sense. There's no national program for helping people relocate to areas where they can have a meaningful job, a home that's affordable to OWN, and hopefully also community as a result. I'm NOT saying it should be forced, I'm saying it should be an option.

There have been plenty of attempts to do so...but if you thought cache invalidation was a hard problem, welcome to sociology.

One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.

The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.

It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.

1: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/sota.page

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#806

Post by mynameisvlad » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:44 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #531

bradleyjg wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side I wonder how many of the pro union voices I see on Facebook or elsewhere, especially millennials & gen z, have ever worked a union job and seen what a seniority system or non-at-will employment actually looks like in practice. Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the wart…

I've seen what non at-will employment leads to in Europe, and it's pretty good.

Yeah honestly I'm pretty shocked at the number of people that think being able to be fired on the spot anytime for practically any reason is a good thing.

That's probably the most absurd thing I've read in these comments.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#807

Post by annoyingnoob » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

FearlessNebula wrote: post #590

Diederich wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Starve your self for a week. Hunger will make you do things you never thought you would/could do.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#808

Post by duckfang » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #333

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…

And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad n…

> This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.

Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine.

Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited".

But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)?

The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO"

is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO.

But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#809

Post by tombert » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #801

wutbrodo wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver. Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use…

I agree that there are cases where a payday loan is a good option, and that if people behaved rationally it would be objectively better to have that option than to not have it. The problem is that people don't behave rationally. And behaving irrationally isn't isolated to poor people (lots of people get 96 month loans on expensive cars they can't afford), but it hurts them the most. Reminds me of an anecdote from poo…

Sure, but it almost seems like you are justifying predatory behavior. When people are really desperate they'll do anything to survive, and providing a 14000% loan to people feels like you're just exploiting people's survivalist instincts.

Also, a lot of these payday loans are just flat-out illegal. If you look up usury laws in the US, they typically cap interest at somewhere around ~25% per year[1], and the highest I could find was on the order of 400% per year [2]. I didn't check every state so it's possible there are some that don't have any caps, but my point is that very often these payday loans are literally breaking the law by charging absurd interest rates.

[1] https://paydayloaninfo.org/state-information/40 [2] https://paydayloaninfo.org/state-information/17

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#810

Post by mekoka » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #132

HN is very consistently anti-union. My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc). So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from?…

Your comment (like a few others) reads as though you've discarded the possibility of some in the HN crowd having first-hand experience with unions.

> HN is very consistently anti-union.

I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.