121–130 of 204 posts
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https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/26/technology/amazon-q2-earnin... I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
Context which will be blithely ignored.
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So from 1977 until 2018, you could be required to pay union dues, even if you weren't a member of the union even in "right to work" states, 22 of them. So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired. It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this. Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make t…
This is pretty much the only complaint about unions I can get behind. I think the best solution is to give the union a substantial ownership stake in the company, so that they have an incentive to operate efficiently
If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.
A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.
This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.
> Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts because you won’t have that almost $500 you paid in dues. WHY NOT save the money and get the books, gifts & things you want? DO IT without dues! Man, that is really grim. Basically admitting that $500 will be make or break for many of these employees, while the company itself is hitting record numbers.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/26/technology/amazon-q2-earnin... I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
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> Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works. No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in. Similarly, increased benefits fr…
> No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in. I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't. If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise. If you go into a busi…
No, they want their return to go up. They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
> Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
No, you want your net profit to rise. You want your margin to be low because then its harder for others to compete with you.
> If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
This is true.
> Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
> See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
> As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
> more
> opposed
I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
What would you do if you were asked to make this site?
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https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/26/technology/amazon-q2-earnin... I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
The numbers I saw were around 21 billion in profits with around 800k employees. Correct me if I’m wrong on those, but that’s more than 1000/employee.
However the profit appears substantially more than I had believed and I was mistaken so there’s that.
Thank you for the reply and the correction.
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This is pretty much the only complaint about unions I can get behind. I think the best solution is to give the union a substantial ownership stake in the company, so that they have an incentive to operate efficiently
I get what you are saying at a high level, but owning the business even in part would totally screw up the way unions work. If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers. A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract. This doesn't seem to carry th…
If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.
I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).
Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
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> Whats more relevant to our discussion is that a high performer is not as easily replaced. I agree that a high performing developer is hard to find, but so is a high performing manual worker. Conversely in my experience retaining a high performing developer at market rates is easier, because the job is more rewarding (that’s what I think makes the job easier to do). I think what you are talking about is scarcity dri…
> I agree that a high performing developer is hard to find, but so is a high performing manual worker. high performing manual workers negotiate superior wages unless they are restrained by a union > I think what you are talking about is scarcity driving the market salary rates for developers, not performance. So they are related but the key concept here is that a low performer is more easily replaced, and so does not…
It’s not easy to replace a low performing worker with scarce skills or domain specific knowledge.
It not difficult to replace a manual worker that requires limited training or domain knowledge.
Developers are paid way more than an equitable share of the salary share in organisations like Amazon because their skills are currently scarce.
This will not be the case in 20 years.
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Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Yes, it could. Unions introduce parasitic loss and collective bargaining. Collective bargaining allows a large part of the workforce to negotiate as one unit and consequently higher performing workers are unable to negotiate a salary commensurate with their performance. In order to retain higher performing workers, corporations end up paying average per…
> higher performing workers Do you mean the ones that sit at their keyboards earning a multiple of the salaries of those who do the actual physical work necessary to serve customers. I often remind my colleagues that we are very lucky to have such easy and well paid jobs by asking the simple question, “how many bags of sand did you carry yesterday?”
I for one work for 7 days a week for ~8 weeks now, and just sat and watched a wall to relax yesterday night because my brain and body refused to do absolutely anything.
Every work is exhausting when overdone or just done with sufficient care.