201–210 of 785 posts
A single successful effort of unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. Moreover, it will motivate employees at other large companies to try. This has been brewing for a while. It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.
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Everyone should have the right to collective bargaining. The US is a closed shop country, which means that, once a union is in place, it has an effective monopoly for the workers that work for one of its companies. If we switched to open shop, then unions would have to compete for membership. Of course, the existing unions are strongly against this. As an end result, everyone I know that's been a union member in the…
Isn't open-shop effectively "no union" in practice? What threat does a union have when the company can just hire non-union workers?
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i feel like I'm missing the causal link in your comment between controlling healthcare portfolios -> shrinking.
On a macro level, a US union is much more expensive per member than a EU union because members/companies have to front the cost of healthcare (as opposed to countries with universal healthcare). On a micro level, traditional US unions have huge pension funds that they have won from employers and promised to existing members, and so they can be very restrictive on membership qualifications.
I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…
It's misleading to consider unions in other countries like the Nordics as anything other than much stronger and more powerful. They have almost universal membership, engage in sectoral bargaining, set minimum wages, run important parts the welfare state, and sit on company boards. It's often noted that the Nordics don't have legal minimum wages - this is because industrial bargaining agreements that set minimum wages make this unnecessary because they cover ~all workers.
In countries where union membership is declining (US and other anglo countries particularly), membership rates are low and optional, there's little sectoral bargaining, most industrial action is essentially outlawed. Sympathy and wildcat strikes are entirely illegal, and in Australia you cannot strike without prior permission from a government body.
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I will fight tooth and nail to keep our industry from unionizing. One can simply look at the public school system and how well it performs with one of the strongest unions in the country. You don't have well paid teachers (except those who have been teaching for a long time, at the detriment to new teachers),you don't serve the children well and you now have to navigate both a career and politics of a union. Unions b…
I have to strongly disagree with this assessment,for a simple reason: There are many different public school organizations, not just one, with a vast array of outcomes among each organization. Sure, there certainly are some bad school systems, but it is very hard to generalize over such a massive system. The total salary of all of the public school teachers in the US is probably well over $150 billion. That's the mar…
I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…
Its very on brand that the first response to this on HN is more or less: "Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?". Very counterintuitive thinking.
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>unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center. So it ca…
> maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smalle…
Its very on brand that the first response to this on HN is more or less: "Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?". Very counterintuitive thinking.
The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.
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Hm, in my experience, even in a union context, healthcare was supplied by the employer, it was just negotiated in the contract. I'm not sure why that would make a US union much more expensive. Typically, you don't really get unions with dues unless they've managed to get a contract with a wage increase that covers the dues.
But if you are paying your union $25 a month to argue on your behalf, that money would go further if healthcare wasn't one of the things they had to negotiate.
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> maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities?
Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly.
If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.)
Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.