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Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

nytimes.com

101–110 of 244 posts

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#101

The 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.

That corporation doesn't seem particularly effective at capturing marketshare (a proxy for the combination of price and quality). Total revenue of $16B across 4 major industries makes it a tiny player. Goldman Sachs had $59B in 2021 revenues alone, nevermind all the other big banks. The Wikipedia article further says "comparatively low wages [for managers] can make it very difficult to recruit managers from investor-owned firms". Given the impact that skilled managers have historically had on companies (ex: Steve Jobs @ Apple, Lisa Su @ AMD, Howard Schultz @ Starbucks, etc), it seems unlikely that such an organization could effectively compete against normal corporations led by skilled CEOs.

And before you say that competition is not supposed to be the point of production, your geopolitical enemies aren't going to care about your nice ideals. If they can outcompete your inefficient economy and economically dominate you they will. You can't beat the market, even under socialism/communism.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#102
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

> If GP is correct

Only the Amazon higher ups will know this. Managers will see the correlation between unionizing and getting fired and connect the dots.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#103

The 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.

That corporation doesn't seem particularly effective at capturing marketshare (a proxy for the combination of price and quality). Total revenue of $16B across 4 major industries makes it a tiny player. Goldman Sachs had $59B in 2021 revenues alone, nevermind all the other big banks. The Wikipedia article further says "comparatively low wages [for managers] can make it very difficult to recruit managers from investor-…

Are you a Capitalist? I need to know the answer to that question before I can produce a good answer. Thank you.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#104

> 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.

When I left Amazon (as an SWE), with about 11mo of tenure, I was apparently at about median longevity. Yes, some of it is their growth, but a significant reason is also that they churn through people unnecessary. It's ridiculous to me that a big tech company treats people so terribly and continues to get away with it.

Curious: Where do you feel the SWE people they churn through generally end up?

I'm a bit concerned about this one guy on one of my previous teams who moved from Europe to US to work on AWS. I don't think he was aware of the company culture.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#105
post #82
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every group can organize. There's no magical barrier. Dunno about the US but unions for management does exist in other countries.

This is one of the ongoing problems with discussion about "unions" "Unions" in the US are very very very very very different legally than "unions" in EU and other nations, personally i think they are so different we need a different term for them... The closest we have to a EU style union would be something like SAG, or the other entertainment unions, which often referr to themselves as Guilds. The employment unions…

> which have ALOT of downside for even the workers in them.

Do you have examples?

As someone in the UK I don't see anything different between the Amazon workers Union and the unions here except for age and experience. They all just want to not be treated like dirt.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#106
post #39

To 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.

Seems weird to just fire a bunch of managers instead of working on fixing the problem with them.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#107

> 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.

By industry consideration, you mean the new york times? Seems they just reviewed a few linkedin profiles and chose that word.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are, except one is actively being viciously suppressed, and the other already exists and is working great.

Guess we'd better hop in the time machine and go back to 1950 to start the American equivalent of Mondragon to preemptively destroy Amazon before Bezos is even born, then.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#109
post #98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"letting it happen" could be many contexts as well, letting is happen could mean that the managers were soo terrible at their jobs that they allowed issues to fester to the point where the employees were disgruntles enough to vote in a union. Happy employees do not vote to unionize. The "hot take" here is that Amazon management wanted to the managers to some how play hardball with the union, in my experience with iss…

That would make sense to me if this particular warehouse/region/whatever was characterized as having notably worse conditions than others. Reading about Amazon warehouses, it seems like a pretty universally bad working environment, regardless of which one.

My feelings are bit of a mix bag, some of the complaints I would agree, but some of them seem to be either employee or more likely media exaggeration.

I have no respect or trust of "main stream" media so the reporting on the issue has me questioning what the reality on the ground really is, and the reality from people experienced in working at other warehouses.

Re: Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

#110
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Management culture flows from the top. If the managers are pressured by corporate to be utter assholes, and then they get fired because that resulted in unionization, the fault's not just with them, but also further up the tree.

This seems like CYA from someone further up. Bad thing happened, someone must pay for it, we found someone, they are paying for it.

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