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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

#421

Post by wahern »

rocqua wrote: post #360
wahern wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unions have more hard power in the US. More control. Stuff like 'everyone who works has to be union'. Only X job can do Y. And Unions seek to increase their control as a defense against companies trying to take it back. European (dutch specifically) Unions have soft power. The only real control they have is declaring a strike. Everything else is bargaining for better terms of employment. The underlying trick is that…

> Stuff like 'everyone who works has to be union'

So-called closed shops haven't been legal in the U.S. for 75 years, and union shops for over 35 years. What you're probably thinking of are compulsory agency fees, which admittedly have escalated to as much as 1/3 to 2/3 of full union dues. Full union dues are typically 1%-3% of wages. (According to the Teamsters website, full monthly dues are 2.5 times hourly wages, which IIUC is 1.5%, assuming 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year.)

But the Netherlands have mandatory Works Councils for any company with 50 or more employees, and the company is required to pay all the expenses, including legal and litigation expenses of the councils. So it's functionally the same thing, except the cost is hidden from the employee.

Granted, the relationship between management and workers is much less hostile in Europe, so transactional costs are presumably substantially less. I wouldn't be surprised (but can't find numbers) if Works Councils budgets or comparable budgets for equivalent union representation are much less in Europe. But I also imagine the wage premium that union power in general provides European workers, whether workers are in a union or not, is substantially greater than in the U.S., so overall "costs" (i.e. surplus value shifting) incurred by corporations would be greater.

Because management has always been so hostile to unions in the U.S., unions certainly have had to fight harder, and there's consequently more friction and acrimony. But it doesn't seem particularly fair to place that blame only on unions. IMO, management is much more culpable in that regard, but from a third-party observers' perspective one could easily simply chalk it up to American culture (and especially business and work culture) in general.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#422

Post by cycomanic »

gruez wrote: post #367
hapless wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles! It is completely bonkers to have this many uniformed officers and this much money poured into security forces, and so little positive result of any of it. The reason tha…

> Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles! you'd think that's the case, but it seems fairly normal for countries to have more police officers than soldiers[1][2]. Just looking at g8 countries: soldiers police o…

But that was not what he was saying. His argument was that just because NY has such a high GDP does not mean they need to spend that much on their police force. The number of police (+soldiers) you need is more a function of the number of citizens and area.

Just taking your numbers above. The NY police has 50,000 police for ~8.5 M people. Germany has ~280k police for 80 M people, and that number likely includes border police, customs police, federal police (all jobs the NY police does not do). So NY has probably around 2x as many (regular) police per citizen as Germany.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#423

Post by ragona »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #398
rootusrootus wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality. I tend to agree, but then again I really don't grok the Trump thing, and I can't claim that I saw it coming or sticking around as long as it has. At this point I would not be terribly shocked to see a bit of role reversal between the two major parties.

I've been a conservative since I had a minimum wage job, for one reason: I want the government out of my life as much as possible. I firmly believe nobody will care about my family as much as I do and I don't want the government's golden handcuffs. Leave me alone, let me work, and I'll happily live with whatever happens. I think this is the fundamental disconnect in left-right (economic) politics. The left, as I see…

This is clearly a spectrum. On one hand we have Mad Max-style "might is right" anarchy, which is over-prioritizing freedom. On the other we remove all personal choice in order to "keep people safe."

So the question is, "how much risk is acceptable?" Are we okay with the idea that getting sick can ruin your entire financial future? Are we okay with child labor? Personally I lean towards providing a social safety net, and I think most people actually want _some_ version of that as well -- but perhaps have not thought deeply about where exactly the balance is for them.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#424

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

Taikonerd wrote: post #351
rootusrootus wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization. I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo. At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change th…

> Normally this kind of movement would be a strength of the left. But lately the right has become quite populist, so maybe this plays in their direction. I saw an op-ed from a conservative magazine on this exact theme: [1]. The author basically says, "if we're claiming to be the party of the working class, shouldn't we be in favor of this?" 1: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/republicans...

with the rise of the new generation of robber barons that's not suprising

there will lots of change and crisis until things balance out

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#425

Post by ATsch »

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.

That shift already exists plenty, as one can see from the high degree of automation of those warehouses. The only thing that Unions would change there is that they can bargain e.g. for re-training of the workers made redundant.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#426

Post by cycomanic »

tharne wrote: post #213
brimble wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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).

You mean how shareholders and boardmembers are happy to completely dismantle perfectly functioning companies for a short term stock gain? I would argue workers generally have much more skin in the game than shareholders. Hardly any large shareholder is going to loose their livelihood if a company goes down, workers do.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#427

Post by Retric »

zeruch wrote: post #414
ATsch wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that question pretty much answers itself, especially if one looks at voting demographics by income. The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality. (perhaps, on a more speculative note, also a reflection of the seemingly general conservative pattern of wanting to see oneself as "normal", to the point of sometimes fabricating "silent majoritie…

"The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality." Always? No. But certainly since the 1970s.

Parties benefit from ideological inertia. I prefer small government that minimizes spending…

So based on recent voting patterns, I vote Democrat.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#428

Post by seoaeu »

gruez wrote: post #367
hapless wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles! It is completely bonkers to have this many uniformed officers and this much money poured into security forces, and so little positive result of any of it. The reason tha…

> Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles! you'd think that's the case, but it seems fairly normal for countries to have more police officers than soldiers[1][2]. Just looking at g8 countries: soldiers police o…

That makes sense by number of personnel, but not overall budget. Your local police department doesn't need tanks and aircraft carriers...

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#429

Post by robomartin »

hotpotamus wrote: post #371
robomartin wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That sentence should have read "There is no way I am paying someone $15/hr to put screws into holes". The problem this forced wage has created is that you can't hire people without some pretty solid justification for what they will deliver in exchange. Businesses are forced to make an ROI choice on everything, including people and their wages. This is why you are seeing things like burger flipping and fries makin…

So if your product can be made entirely in China by cheap workers and shipped here, why would I order from you? What value do you add? I can already order directly on Aliexpress and even talk to Chinese customer service agents in English - and they've been delightful to work with by the way.

You can do that with some products, not all. In some cases all we have left are things like local support and software development. This is particularly true in industrial segments --which is where we are.

In the consumer sector things are increasingly in the picture you painted. You can do this on Amazon for just about anything. Once the Chinese figured out how to sell directly through portals such as Amazon, that gig was up.

Design, domain expertise and more in-context areas is were the west still leads on many ways. It's product dependent, of course. That's why Apple designs here and manufactures in China.

In our case, it is a combination of our embedded and workstation software that creates a reasonably solid barrier to entry. This, along with some of the protection offered by patents and trademarks (which can be near zero in some cases).

To be sure, this is a very complex and difficult landscape that has evolved over about 50 years. I you go back that far, China was mostly an agrarian economy. There's a solid argument that says that this is something that has been mismanaged for five decades. You don't get where we are now overnight.

That is not to say I hate China or the Chinese. They are doing what they have to do in order to further their economy and more. We might not agree with some of their government's darker policy positions. Not much we can do about that. On the subject of being laser-focused on economic growth through rabid entrepreneurial drive, China is probably without equal. That, as an entrepreneur, I have to admire. Most people would be floored by what they would learn from just one trip to Shenzhen.

The "I can just buy it on Aliexpress" argument is fine and very real. The problem with accepting this without looking inward at the decisions and policies that do not allow us to compete is that things will get worse here and better there. It is inevitable.

I'll give you a simple example: There's a international postal treaty dating back to the 1700's (or was it 1800's, I don't remember) that gives China the ability to ship products into the US for nothing or nearly nothing. We, the US, subsidize these shipments 100%. I cannot ship from Los Angeles to New York for free. I have to pay. A Chinese competitor can offer free shipping all the way from China. I either have to charge a significant amount for shipping or take a margin hit (which means growth, job creation and the ability to survive events such as pandemics are compromises).

We are not making intelligent decisions.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#430

Post by slg »

peanuty1 wrote: post #407
slg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions of professional athletes are some of the most successful unions in the US. These are people that are highly paid and have very specific skills that can't easily be replaced. These are people who already spend as much as 15% or 20% of their salary paying others to negotiate on their personal behalf. Yet these athletes still want a union to represent them as a collective class. I don't know if the general softwa…

Without the NBA union, players like Labron James would make much more than they do today.

Maybe, but there are also a few hundred non-LeBron like players in the NBA. You can argue that the union negotiates away the rights of players like LeBron to benefit those few hundred players. But you can also argue that LeBron is only in the position to make as much money because the union has been fighting for him before he was even born. Would the NBA have free agency, guaranteed contracts, and players making tens of millions of dollars a year without the union?

Plus LeBron would be a near billionaire even without cashing a single game check. He makes way more money from being an ambassador of the game than from the game itself. Therefore he has a vested financial interest in the health of the league overall and the hundreds of other players in the NBA.

Back to software development, the question is are you the LeBron James of software development? Are you one of the handful of the best developers on the planet? If you are, I can totally understand why you might be against a union. If you aren't, you could probably benefit from a union.

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