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Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#211

Post by themaninthedark »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #152
beastman82 wrote: post #133

Everyone loves unions, somehow they overlook the outrageous power of police unions to keep terrible people in their ranks. Also Union actions against nonunion jobs are borderline criminal most of the time.

>Everyone loves unions, somehow they overlook the outrageous power of police unions to keep terrible people in their ranks. Unions represent their members' interests, that's the entire point of unions. It says more about the entire profession of policing (i.e. that there are so many terrible officers that the not-terrible ones can't do anything about them) than it does about unions, to be honest.

How would you purpose that the not-terrible officers do something about the terrible officers? What should the great and inspiring teachers do about the bad teachers?

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#212

Post by whimsicalism »

jfjfkfmf wrote: post #207
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.

Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities?

Presumably you still need to fulfill shipping needs in New York because people still buy things there.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#213

Post by tharne »

brimble wrote: post #121
legitster wrote: post #108

I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…

> Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all,…

> I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany.

I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension).

It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand.

The union system is the U.S. is completely broken. I think unions in the U.S. should be both more widespread but much less powerful.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#214

Post by cyberpunk »

legitster wrote: post #108

I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…

The RMT/Unite Union in the UK regularly cripples London by staging tube strikes when they all have well paying secure jobs so not entire sure I buy it.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#215

Post by Conan_Kudo »

whatever1 wrote: post #128
legitster wrote: post #108

I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…

European Govs have more regulation in place to allow for unions. That is why there are more widespread than in the US. Many of the union-busting activities American companies casually do would be flat out illegal in th EU.

They are illegal in the United States too, just culturally the laws are not enforced like they are in the European Union.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#216

Post by jfjfkfmf »

killjoywashere wrote: post #205
boplicity wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly disagree with this assessment,for a simple reason: There are many different public school organizations, not just one, with a vast array of outcomes among each organization. Sure, there certainly are some bad school systems, but it is very hard to generalize over such a massive system. The total salary of all of the public school teachers in the US is probably well over $150 billion. That's the mar…

My experience with private schools where the teachers aren't unionized suggests the non-unionized situation can be even more fraught. Chaotic, manipulative principals, skeevy board members, low pay in exchange for "prestige", etc.

My experience with public schools includes sexual abusers keeping their jobs due to union protection.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#217

Post by brimble »

josephcsible wrote: post #110
Spivak wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all the benefits of membership are excludable. Unions that hold employers accountable to following labor laws and safety regulations benefit all employees, same with annual raises, removing abusive managers, better benefits, overtime pay [1], etc. etc. Some benefits are excludable for sure, a union isn't going to fight a non-members wrongful firing case. [1] Some unions manage to get payroll benefits for…

Why is a union necessary to enforce labor laws and safety regulations? Can't individual employees report such violations to the government even in non-union shops?

It's much riskier and costlier for employees to report that kind of thing, in a non-union shop.

Union shop, if you're sure what you've been asked to do is a violation of rules, you tell your boss no, then to fuck off if they try to pressure you, and you'll be totally fine. If you're not sure if something's OK, you have the union as a resource to check with, not just other managers working for the company (whose interests may not be aligned with yours, and even asking questions might be risky).

Non-union shop... good luck with that. You can go to regulators, but it's more effort, the process for doing so is something you'll have to figure out yourself, and it's a case where even if you're right you can end up having a rough few months or even years getting it all sorted out and being fairly compensated for any e.g. retaliation that happened.

Ideally, you want reporting problems of this sort to have a low and consistent cost for the person reporting it, not a high and very uncertain cost. If you want effective enforcement, that is.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#218

Post by seibelj »

cwmma wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should also have the right to work at a company and NOT have to join the union, and negotiate your own conditions / wages independently.

This is a textbook example of loosing at the prisoner's dilemma due to selfishness. The only way you get a better contract then the union is if the company intentionally does it to spite the union.

You are authoritarian - forcing people to do something that should be accomplished voluntarily is antithetical to freedom

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#219

Post by zjaffee »

beambot wrote: post #193
zjaffee wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just blatantly false, unions absolutely make sense for skilled labor. This isn't to say tech workers should unionize, but teachers, public defenders, subway engineers, high skill building trades, skilled workers in film are all unionized. Unions provide a ton of value if you're a skilled worker who does something comparable to gig work, jumping from jobsite to jobsite where the Union helps them keep their heal…

Guild versus Union?

In the US, federated labor which used to sometimes be organized under the name guild were merged with industrial unions under the umbrella of the AFL-CIO in the US.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#220

Post by tyrfing »

cs702 wrote: post #103

A single successful effort of unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. Moreover, it will motivate employees at other large companies to try. This has been brewing for a while. It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.

I'd say this is partly demographic/generation shifts, unions have extremely strong support among younger age groups and this is just one of the first visible results. Teamsters, to name one union, just had leadership change over and will be taking a much more aggressive posture going forward, and I don't think that's a unique story.
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