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The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

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Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#51

Post by SilasX »

knowitall wrote: post #21

Perhaps Amazon could add a checkbox to the shopping cart: [] pay 10% more that will go directly into the pockets of the packers. I wouldn't even mind a picture gallery of everybody who handled my package.

Unfortunately, the theory of tax/cost incidence shows what can go wrong with this: since it results in above-market effective wages, that simply intensifies the competition for those positions, probably to the point that workers will offer to do them for less than the current wage Amazon is paying, since they know they'll still make the same from such donations.

Here's a discussion that covered the question in the context of allowing people to tip McDonald's cashiers directly, but the same analysis applies:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/08/what_if_tipping_...

"Who benefits" is determined by the shape of the supply/demand curves, not who is being handed the dollars.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#52

Post by RestlessMind »

I guess this is how seeds of a revolution are sown.

I know that no system is perfect. And that capitalism* is better than many others which have been tried so far. But if enough people are frustrated with the given system, all it needs is a trigger to vent out that frustration.

* I guess main problem with capitalism is inheritance. When everyone is on equal footing, a "loser" may not mind the "winner" getting rich either through hard work, or even through occasional luck. But after 3-4 generations, when children of rich parents have inherent advantages (education, connections etc) which are extremely hard to overcome, this system starts becoming unstable.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#53

Post by vinceguidry »

cynicalkane wrote: post #19
raganwald wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labour unions are a lot like everything else that works in our society. (Hold your vituperation!) Labour unions, like democracy and capitalism, are the worst things we've ever tried, except for everything else that failed. We simply don't have a better way to appoint leaders except democracy. It's obviously broken in many ways, but the alternatives are worse. Economically, capitalism is deeply broken, but everything…

The power of labor unions for low-paid workers is not as strong as you think. Where I went to school (U Chicago), there was a very active mostly student-organized university workers' labor union, but workplace violations were still routine. The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive, and the union's legal clout was no help when the laws were hard to enforce and deep-pocketed employers…

In these situations, the main weapon is knowledge. If the law says you have to give people X number of minutes as break, a union rep's job could be to collect records of when that rule was broken. Then you can hold that knowledge over the head of the employers, who often rely on information asymmetry to get away with shit.

It's not ideal, and certainly no UAW, but it's much better than unchecked abuses. You can use funds to buy appropriate equipment like gloves for workers and for their replacement when they fall apart.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#54

Post by mcv »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #49
Amadou wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as a yin-yang situation. Corporations are a way to organize capital for the benefit of the capital owners, unions are a way to organize labor for the benefit of the labor "owners." In a healthy capitalist system, both are necessary in order to maintain balance. That's the ideal. In the real world, both types of organizations will seek ways to exploit any advantage in their favor. But that's life.

Corporations and labor unions are not really equivalent. If you view them purely from the point of view of market power, then yes, they are the same thing. Both create an oligopoly in the market for buying/selling labor. But corporations also are the way that both capital and labor are organized to produce an actual product. There is no analogous role for unions, except some special unions that play a large role in m…

What, livable working conditions don't matter compared to the prouct?

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#55

Post by mcv »

powertower wrote: post #36

If you think Capitalism is bad, just try Socialism. Instead of making X amount of people miserable, it makes almost everyone miserable. The world is not perfect, there is no utopia, and whatever you might think, Capitalism is about as good of product/market fit (human-nature/society-type fit) as you can get in a world that's not based on small hunter/gatherer groups. It's also keeps us in a state of competition, whic…

The balance is of course somewhere in the middle. The good parts of capitalism with the good parts of socialism. You get a much nicer society than with either one t the extreme.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#56

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #54
yetanotherphd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations and labor unions are not really equivalent. If you view them purely from the point of view of market power, then yes, they are the same thing. Both create an oligopoly in the market for buying/selling labor. But corporations also are the way that both capital and labor are organized to produce an actual product. There is no analogous role for unions, except some special unions that play a large role in m…

What, livable working conditions don't matter compared to the prouct?

[deleted]

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#57

Post by yetanotherphd »

mcv wrote: post #54
yetanotherphd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations and labor unions are not really equivalent. If you view them purely from the point of view of market power, then yes, they are the same thing. Both create an oligopoly in the market for buying/selling labor. But corporations also are the way that both capital and labor are organized to produce an actual product. There is no analogous role for unions, except some special unions that play a large role in m…

What, livable working conditions don't matter compared to the prouct?

I'm not sure what you mean by "livable working conditions"

If you are referring to total compensation and hours, this comes under what I referred to as "oligopoly". That is, labor unions can create market power on the side of labor, in order to raise pay.

However, this doesn't benefit society as a whole, and so it is only reasonable when there is market power on the other side. In my industry, there did seem to be an attempt to form a cartel of employer, but Mark Zuckerberg seems to have broken that cartel.

If you are referring to actual working conditions, like workplace safety, I already mentioned that when I talked about special unions that are involved with management. E.g. in very dangerous professions, unions might be part of the "deal" where management and workers agree on how to, as you say, organize labor and capital.

In general, however, and especially in IT, there is no need for unions because the market for labor is competitive, and working conditions can be negotiated between the worker and the corporation.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#58

Post by gutnor »

nsxwolf wrote: post #23
icelancer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does being unexploited pay the heating bill? That's all minimum wage workers really care about. Not some nebulous ivory tower view on economics.

No, but as soon as there's enough permanently unemployed workers, the sooner we get our precious guaranteed income, right?

Look at countries like India or even China. Countries can survive hundreds of years with high level of poverty.

The key thing is if the situation in the US will get worse faster or slower than the slow mentality shift that is required to considered poor people as disposable.

Re: The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday

#59

Post by ahomescu1 »

mcv wrote: post #55
powertower wrote: post #36

If you think Capitalism is bad, just try Socialism. Instead of making X amount of people miserable, it makes almost everyone miserable. The world is not perfect, there is no utopia, and whatever you might think, Capitalism is about as good of product/market fit (human-nature/society-type fit) as you can get in a world that's not based on small hunter/gatherer groups. It's also keeps us in a state of competition, whic…

The balance is of course somewhere in the middle. The good parts of capitalism with the good parts of socialism. You get a much nicer society than with either one t the extreme.

How do you get just the good parts of X (for any X), without the bad parts? In most cases, you just get X as a package.
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