Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
51–60 of 244 posts
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#52They’re reaching a market cap where it would make sense to fire everyone but AWS.
It's confusing why investors haven't pushed harder for AWS to be spun-off into its own entity.
Massive company, so an activist would need a lot of capital for any noticeable stake. Overall reasonable and relatively consistently increasing valuation, so there is little incentive. If the stock does very poorly while AWS keeps growing, so the company value diverges further from the value of individual divisions added together (sum of the parts value), you could expect pressure on this.
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It boggles the mind how many people are opposed to collective bargaining, of all things. Give the least powerful in society a fraction of an ounce of power and it makes some people completely irrational.
A lot of people blame unions for killing the American dominance of car manufacturing worldwide. And the general de-industrialization of the US. It was a big hit to peoples conceptualization of the country.
“Amazon reportedly left police in Spain 'dumbfounded' by asking them to intervene in a mass warehouse strike and patrol worker productivity”[1]
I wonder what will take for anti-union companies-can-do-nothing-wrong people to consider that maybe companies can be authoritarian and bad.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-asked-police-in-spain...
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#54As they should!
It boggles the mind how many people are opposed to collective bargaining, of all things. Give the least powerful in society a fraction of an ounce of power and it makes some people completely irrational.
More often than not, the problem is not "collective bargaining" per se. It's that unions are known to play the dumb game -- in France for example, the demands from unions are in general so far from anything reasonable that any union representative is viewed by anyone who ever so slightly understand how the economy works as a band of nonsensical fools who just need to be bypassed by whatever means.
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#55> Several were veterans of the company, with more than six years of experience I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran." But it sounds like Amazon is sending a message to managers of other warehouses, to go as low as possible, to fight unionization. Expect things to get ugly.
Well the line you quoted says company not industry. Ecommerce is a relatively young industry anyway. And Amazon has been around since what, 94? So 6 years is over 20% of the time Amazon has existed.
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Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It boggles the mind how many people are opposed to collective bargaining, of all things. Give the least powerful in society a fraction of an ounce of power and it makes some people completely irrational.
A lot of people blame unions for killing the American dominance of car manufacturing worldwide. And the general de-industrialization of the US. It was a big hit to peoples conceptualization of the country.
A strange view. Did management have no say in this?
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#57To me a more reasonable explanation than any in the article is that after losing the vote, Amazon looked into the warehouse and decided part of the problem was that the managers were making the situation worse. This could have been that the rsi injury complaints were true and unaddressed promptly. Or that the managers came off as cold in communications. Or 5 other things they could have done better.
Could be many reasons I guess. But maybe we should apply the Labor–Capital Razor: what signal does this send to the remaining managers? And what are they likely to do in response?
If GP is correct, then that signal would be, "Treat everyone who works here more-fairly and address their concerns in a timely manner. It is in everyone's best interest."
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#58The correct answer to the Amazon Problem is to create an alternate organization that starts as a unionized workplace, and goes from there. E.g. Spain's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
These problems mentioned in this thread are due to the greed of Capitalists. Period.
Once the 'age of the Capitalist' is put behind us, and we move towards post-capitalism, then bs like OP mentions will be history.
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#59> Several were veterans of the company, with more than six years of experience I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran." But it sounds like Amazon is sending a message to managers of other warehouses, to go as low as possible, to fight unionization. Expect things to get ugly.
Well the line you quoted says company not industry. Ecommerce is a relatively young industry anyway. And Amazon has been around since what, 94? So 6 years is over 20% of the time Amazon has existed.
Fair point. I just found it to be an interesting choice of words. Whenever they use the same term, in other industries, they are talking about double-digit tenures.
The main point is that this is a fairly unambiguous message to other managers, that allowing unionization to happen under their watch would be a careericidal offense.
That means that they can expect the warehouse managers to get pretty desperate, and probably break all kinds of laws and whatnot. It's just that the message is being sent in a way that allows the company to keep their hands clean, from the almost certain results.
The managers will certainly get fired, if unionization happens, and might get fired, if they get caught, spiking the trees.
Guess which path the managers are likely to take?
Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse
#60The correct answer to the Amazon Problem is to create an alternate organization that starts as a unionized workplace, and goes from there. E.g. Spain's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation These problems mentioned in this thread are due to the greed of Capitalists. Period. Once the 'age of the Capitalist' is put behind us, and we move towards post-capitalism, then bs like OP mentions will be history.
Why is “spending 70 years growing a collective workplace to huge scale” more correct than “unionizing a huge ultra-capitalist workplace that exists right now”?
Both are laudable goals IMHO.