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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

#251

Post by vikingerik »

marricks wrote: post #231
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…

Cases like this you really need to be extremely specific about what powerful means. I think a lot of left leaning folks could agree with such statements but made too broadly it can be taken a number of different ways. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have mu…

> Also, when COVID occurred there was little room for teachers to get a say

This may have been a positive. The teachers and their unions are only motivated for them to stay home and "safe", forever. It's the customers (parents) who need the leverage to get the teachers to actually deliver the service they're getting paid for, rather than trying to hide from their job indefinitely as many would be happy to do.

Unions can be important to protect workers' rights, but it's also easy for them to go too far into not even providing the service the job is supposed to do. Particularly in an area with captive customers and government-mandated demand, like education.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#252

Post by djrobstep »

josephcsible wrote: post #47
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.

Indeed. And remember that any union that's actually good for workers would have no reason to oppose such a right.

Should you also have the right to work at the company and not be forced to contribute to shareholder profits? Surely any management that was actually good for workers would have no reason to oppose such a measure.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#253

Post by themaninthedark »

simulate-me wrote: post #240
themaninthedark wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Marginalize them? Give them the unimportant tasks and classes. Put them in positions that limit harm.

Assigning tasks and classes is the job of management, not the fellow union workers. Often, management is not allowed to be in the union as that would be a conflict of interest.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#254

Post by cool_dude85 »

wahern wrote: post #228
cool_dude85 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is interesting. I'm a government employee with a union, a pension, health insurance, the whole deal. The union does not control the pension or healthcare in any way whatsoever.…

Private corporations no longer offer pension (i.e. defined benefit) plans, so if employees want a pension it's going to be managed by a union, assuming they even have a union. That's probably for the better because these days (as opposed to 70 years ago), unions will be far more responsible managers of a pension fund than corporations, partly because of stricter government oversight. Some other countries have nationa…

This is the exact distinction I'd like to make, in fact. The pension probably isn't managed by a union, it's managed by a board and management structure that will usually include both employees (who might be former employees, or members of one union, or a different union, or management) and representatives of the employer. The union most likely negotiates certain details of the pension in their contract, but actual management is not typically done by a union.

Hence, they cannot easily use management of the pension fund (they don't manage it) against the employer, as the OP claims.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#255

Post by munk-a »

londons_explore wrote: post #34

Can Amazon now just shut down that warehouse and fire all the workers? It would seem like a sensible business move, even if it involves a little bit of service disruption for users in New York.

> It would seem like a sensible business move, even if it involves a little bit of service disruption for users in New York.

It only seems like a sensible business move if you ignore the incredibly negative PR that'd come from it. You're laying off a lot of local workers and publicly making a target of yourself after the vote passes. Usually businesses will shut down sites before the union vote while they can still sort of BS their way into saying "Well, it looked like the vote would've failed anyways - look at this internal polling" - doing it after unionization is going to add a lot of vitriol to the situation, much more so than the underhanded techniques they use to sway the vote.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#256

Post by gregshap »

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?

It’s a last-mile facility for service to NYC.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#257

Post by pmyteh »

cyberpunk wrote: post #214
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.

RMT and ASLEF; Unite don't tend to organise train crew.

London transport is an interesting case. I wonder the extent to which they have well-paid secure jobs because they can and do disrupt London. Bus drivers have a much worse deal, for example, being easily replaceable.

I think from time to time about a statement made by Bob Crow, who was the former hardline chief of the RMT. He said that his members were now amongst the only working class Londoners who could afford to live decently in the city they served. Which (despite my dislike of his tactics) does seem like a reasonable point.

FWIW my union (UCU; academic) has traditionally been a lot quieter and more consensual, and we've been repeatedly shafted in recent years as a result. That kind of collaborative management/union relationship only works if both sides are committed to making a decent workplace operate, and our management no longer are.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#258

Post by dionidium »

brimble wrote: post #249
dionidium wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. You seem to be suggesting: "No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which Amazon many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them." But that's absolutely terrible, so you must be suggesting something else.

> "[...] which company many union leaders regard [...]" Ergo: No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which company many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them [EDIT] I also intentionally used the construction in my original post: "[...] which technique is usually over…

That's obviously what you wrote, so I don't know why I replaced "company" with "Amazon" in my head. That's definitely better. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for not biting my head off where I deserved it.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#259

Post by jethro_tell »

clove wrote: post #201
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.

It will also encourage downsizing and expediting the shift to replacing humans with robots.

They've been encouraging that forever, but it's just not there yet. They weren't going to wait until it was less convenient than people, they're going to do that the moment that it's viable, but as of yet, it still needs work.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#260

Post by tyrfing »

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.

In my opinion, the big problem is that police unions have a clear goal: protect their members and advocate for their interests, like most unions. The people on the other side are much more ambivalent and don't really care what happens; it's the faceless appointed bureaucracy spending taxpayer money, insulated from accountability.

This causes issues in a situation like serious misconduct, where it's entirely reasonable to fire the individual. However, a union will have strong grounds to make sure those policies are enforced fairly - and they simply aren't, it'll be allowed to slide if it isn't in the headlines. The problem isn't that it happened, it's that it ended up in the news!

As for whether it's because police management is all former union, they're just collecting a paycheck, or what - I'm not sure. But where you see the power of police unions, I see the incompetence of police management. If that's intractable, I do agree that police unions are bad because there's no opposition.

In comparison, a big company typically maintains a single goal - to make money. There will be exceptions of course, but as a whole, it's a coherent goal and things will be done at all levels to support it. There are the same sorts of issues with minor misconduct, since it's irrelevant to making money, but big issues are typically bad for business and thus there is strong motivation to enforce rules like "don't choke people" or "don't steal stuff".

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