Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

> What differentiates a Chinese worker from a US worker?

That's an interesting and very important question that is both easy and hard to answer.

My experience with China is nothing but positive along just-about any angle I can imagine. Their attitude towards doing business, their entrepreneurial drive and desire to work with you is, in my opinion, unmatched.

The best example I have is from the very first time I had a large (for me at the time) order I needed to have manufactured. It was a set of custom aluminum extrusions.

I contacted about 80 companies. 75 of them in the US and 5 in China.

Every single company in China came back with a quote the very next day. The lowest quote was $8,000. The highest $10K.

Out of the 75 US companies I contacted with full, detailed bid packages, about 50 never responded to the request for quote. No emails, calls. Nothing.

Of the remaining 25, about ten of them responded somewhere between two and four weeks after receiving the RFQ to "no bid". In other words, not interested or could not do it. In most cases they offered no explanation at all.

Of the remaining 15 companies, not one of them responded faster than one week. When they did, they engaged in an interrogation phase that is very typical of US companies: How many of these are you going to make per year? How frequently are you going to order? How many years do you think you'll need to produce these parts? Do you have other parts you will need manufactured? What are they? What's the volume? Etc. You always get combinations of these questions and more.

After that, in most cases, you end-up getting bounced around additional people. In one case the email thread reached something like eight people. For a fucking quote. By this time a couple of weeks had gone by. I had already awarded the job to a Chinese company and it was something like three weeks from shipping. Yet, I humored the process because I just wanted to compare. This was my first job going out to China many years ago.

After the interrogation about ten of those companies dropped out by either no longer responding to emails or flat-out saying they were not going to bid.

Of the remaining 5 I got two bids, one for over $30K and the other was about $25K. Getting these bids took an additional week. The other three told me they had issues with the design and only wanted to make one of the two parts. One of them told me that they could extrude the aluminum but did not want to handle the finishing and anodizing.

By the time I got all responses from US companies the extrusions were in a container and on their way to me from China.

The Chinese company I ended-up working with just blew me away. I had actually contacted them just as Chinese New Year started. Still, their sales person and one of the engineers stayed behind to make sure all my questions were answered and, if I decided to work with them, the order could get started as soon as they came back.

They personally gave me a tour of the 1.5 million square foot (~150K square meters) factory campus. It was nothing less than incredible. For those who might not have a sense of scale, that's like 15 Home Depot size buildings on a single manufacturing campus.

And yet that's not what blew me away. Once I understood this company's scale I was astounded at the level of attention I received. I was nobody. An $8000 order for this company was a rounding error. They did not have to treat me like that. They did not have to stay back and take the time to show me around and make sure I was comfortable with them. They treated me like a million dollar buyer. Nothing less. They never asked me how many I was going to make per year or when they would get the next order. They just wanted my business and treated me with the kind of respect and attention anyone would recognizes in the US as reserved for million dollar clients.

That, to me, describes the cultural business and entrepreneurship difference between the US and China. They have earned every bit of success they have realized. Nobody gave them anything. They work hard and treat everyone like a million dollar customer. Here in the US you'd be lucky to get the time of day when you send out for quotes. When you do, it takes weeks to get anything done.

I don't think we are lazy. I think we are not hungry any more. And it shows. Nobody gives a shit. What's sad is that if we keep on this path people will learn the lesson in a really ugly way.

> And if they are the same in your eyes, then why shouldn't things get worse here and better there until they reach some equilibrium?

So, they are not the same. Yes, things will get worse here. I don't see enough of cultural shift or evidence of making it happen any time soon. Things have been getting better in China and will continue to do so. China will become the dominant top economy in the world and probably hold that dominance for a century or more. What happens in the US and Europe is anyone's guess. I look at the history of Latin America, where I lived for a number of years, and see echos of their failed policies and mistakes in the US. I don't know how anyone can change that other than to push very hard for a serious change in culture, which will not be popular at all.

I don’t want to “get rid of the cops” either because I’m not a psychopath. I very much don’t want to be robbed and murdered!

The robots, yes. The sorters and conveyance, far less so. A huge portion of their cost is just the installation.

For a big, high speed 'shoe'[0] sorter, you're talking about a machine more than 100m long that is heavily, heavily bolted into the cement floor. I believe that particular building has four such sorters.

[0] Not a sorter of shoes for your feet, but a sorter that uses little boxes called 'shoes' to carefully knock packages off at the right place.

It’s genuinely terrifying. There seems to be no recognition that you cannot have labor unions and environmental protections with out tariffs to even the playing field with less scrupulous countries. We are rapidly approaching a time where only the military industrial complex retains any manufacturing expertise.

Depends on what the union does. My father in law worked in various unionized jobs and isn’t exactly a fan of them.

I would like to see a wave of unionization, but I’m skeptical that unions as currently structured can actually deliver for workers. In the last few decades, as private sector union membership has declined, unions have lost influence within the larger left. They find themselves as followers rather than leaders within the Democratic Party. Even a couple of decades ago lots of workers like my father in law griped about the unions not delivering benefits that justified the dues. That’s only gotten worse as unions increasingly get enmeshed in generic progressive causes the workers themselves often don’t support.

It doesn’t appear that Amazon Labor Union affiliated with one of the big national unions, which is a positive sign. If they can deliver real benefits for workers, other locations may unionize too. But they’ll have to be laser focused on benefitting Amazon Workers and resist the urge to get over their skates.