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Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

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Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#231

Post by gruez »

kyleplum wrote: post #226
gruez wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a labor union not a cartel for labor?

No because the company has other options for labor - it can fire it's entire workforce and rehire, or relocate. The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets.

>No because the company has other options for labor [...] The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets.

that's like saying OPEC isn't a cartel because you can still get oil from russia or canada.

>it can fire it's entire workforce and rehire

isn't that union-busting and/or illegal?

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#232

Post by ETH_start »

sudosysgen wrote: post #143
ETH_start wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The propaganda the company is pushing is that the company and the workers are working together. They are not. Those workers are being exploited. Bezos considered turnover desirable. While it is propaganda to claim the interests of the workers and company are aligned, it's also propaganda to claim that they're being exploited. A voluntary market interaction, that 95% of the world population would jump at the opportu…

No, it's not. You simply use a contrived definition of exploitation that begs the question. Anyone would agree that a set lord monopolizing all the land and asking serfs to enter serfdom contracts for the right to till it is exploitative, and a similar mechanism is at work. It's all a question of degree.

My definition is the conventional one. Exploitation when used in the social context generally refers to some kind of non consensual interaction where somebody who is not capable of giving consent like a child is manipulated into accepting something that is not in their interest.

It does not refer to a job offer that is the best one on the market that is available to a person.

Your definition implies that a job offer that 95% of the world population would rush to accept, that is above market rates for that job and which is voluntary according to any court of law, is exploitation. By what standard can you describe it as such? It is a completely arbitrary definition, unless you are citing marxist theory which says that all investor profit is exploitation, in which case you should disclose your ideological suppositions from the outset so that people understand you are not referring to exploitation in the way it's conventionally understood.

As for land, that is completely incomparable to a company. Land is a public resource in a sense so if a Lord monopolizes it they're depriving others of something that they have an equal share in. And no single company or cartel of companies, has anything approaching a monopoly on the job market. So your comparison is wrong on two levels. It's telling that arguments trying to justify the socialist claims of exploitation have to make inappropriate analogies. The substance of the claim cannot be justified on its own grounds.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#233

Post by ETH_start »

andrepd wrote: post #205
ETH_start wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of the magazine defended the Berlin Wall and the killing of the surrendered Romanov children.

I for one am glad that freedom of speech exists (in practice as well as theory) and that people can express those two opinions, one of which I agree with and the other which I don't :)

Oh yes. They have a right to express themselves and I have a right to point out that they sold out their humanity.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#234

Post by ETH_start »

sophacles wrote: post #211
ETH_start wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The propaganda the company is pushing is that the company and the workers are working together. They are not. Those workers are being exploited. Bezos considered turnover desirable. While it is propaganda to claim the interests of the workers and company are aligned, it's also propaganda to claim that they're being exploited. A voluntary market interaction, that 95% of the world population would jump at the opportu…

It's a fundamentally fallacious notion to say "Other people have it worse, why would you want better for yourself?". That's part of the problem with this satement: "A voluntary market interaction, that 95% of the world population would jump at the opportunity to engage in, is by no reasonable definition, exploitive." It applies equally to a statement like this: Other companies struggle with profits when they have uni…

>>"Other people have it worse, why would you want better for yourself?"

"I want better for myself" != "if you don't offer me better, you're exploiting me". The implication of your assertion is fallacious.

>>making use of a situation or treating others unfairly in order to gain an advantage or benefit.

Nothing unfair about offering a wage for a job, and someone accepting it.

>>Punishing (the term they use is penalizing because it sounds nicer) people for being people and needing to use the restroom is unfair.

It's not a punishment. It's the terms of the deal, to ensure the employer is getting a certain unit of work for a given amount of pay.

In a free society, companies are allowed to offer such terms. What's fair/unfair is determined by the conduct of the parties to a deal, and the terms of that deal. If the conduct conforms with the terms agreed, then we in a free society should tolerate it, rather than punishing the company for it.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#235

Post by kyleplum »

gruez wrote: post #231
kyleplum wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because the company has other options for labor - it can fire it's entire workforce and rehire, or relocate. The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets.

>No because the company has other options for labor [...] The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets. that's like saying OPEC isn't a cartel because you can still get oil from russia or canada. >it can fire it's entire workforce and rehire isn't that union-busting and/or illegal?

I'm not convinced that a single labor union has the power to influence the labor market outside of the specific company the union represents. This is not the case for OPEC who has sufficient power to manipulate the market.

> isn't that union-busting and/or illegal?

It's supposed to be, but it's often the case that corporations are not penalized to a sufficient amount (or at all) to deter this. We've seen many cases where it's cheaper for the corporation to pay these fines and continue doing what they are doing - in that sense the current laws are ineffective.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#236

Post by camdat »

missedthecue wrote: post #228
adam-a wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? OPEC is not a labour union, which is clearly what’s being discussed here. You may as well say a horse is a duck because they both shit.

OPEC works the same way as a union. They are both groups of competitors that band together to form a cartel, using similar tactics to increase the price of the product the sell. In one case, oil, in the other, labor.

Unions are made up of workers and their combined labor. OPEC is not. This is definitional.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#237

Post by missedthecue »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #230
missedthecue wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricting competition to raise the cost of the product sold. That's why unions hate people who cross the picket line. If you willingly compete, you undermine the whole strategy.

That's so interesting. Most people tend to call that a monopoly and use the word union for something else. What made you choose to use union for this behavior instead?

Well unions really only work well when they have a monopoly. If a plant want's to go on strike over something, but that means only 10% of the workforce is walking off, that's not as effective as if the union was in a monopoly position.

In fact this is why the Clayton Act specifically exempts unions from anti-trust law, and it's why "Right to work" laws are so controversial - they reduce the monopoly status of the union.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#238

Post by missedthecue »

camdat wrote: post #236
missedthecue wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OPEC works the same way as a union. They are both groups of competitors that band together to form a cartel, using similar tactics to increase the price of the product the sell. In one case, oil, in the other, labor.

Unions are made up of workers and their combined labor. OPEC is not. This is definitional.

OPEC is made up of oil producing countries and their combined output. They are extremely similar except that one deals in labor, and the other in petrochemicals.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#239

Post by ETH_start »

andrepd wrote: post #161
ETH_start wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employer owes you nothing. You're citing your difficult circimstances to justify getting the government to seize control of an employer from its shareholders, in dictating its hiring decisions. But as a practical matter, opportunities expand faster when labor markets are free, and capital owners are secure in their rights. Employment growth has been widely observed to be stronger where labor laws are less restric…

>The employer owes you nothing. You're citing your difficult circimstances to justify getting the government to seize control of an employer from its shareholders, in dictating its hiring decisions. It's not about "difficult circumstances" at all. It's about the fundamental divide between those who need to sell their labour to survive, and those who can extract rent without working due only to having a monopoly on ca…

>>and those who can extract rent without working due only to having a monopoly on capital.

No capital owner has a monopoly on capital, and capital owners do not collude to act as one with respect to recruiting workers, making your claim totally specious. Also, typically businesses don't extract economic rent. Investment is a difficult and risk-filled enterprise, that adds value to the economy, making it by definition, not a form of rent extraction.

I suggest putting aside Marxist narratives and studying mainstream Economics, which would dispel you of these fallacies on which your claims of class victimhood rest.

>>This is simply not true. Notice how the best countries to live in the world are invariably those with more labour protections and a mixed economy with heavy public participation. Limiting ourselves to the US, compare the standard of living in the gilded age vs the golden age of American labour organisation.

You just criticized me for making the correlation equals causation argument with respect to Detroit and then you go on to make a far more egregious use of this argument in claiming that conditions being worse in an era 80 years prior tell us the policies in place 80 years prior were worse.

A rational analysis compares the trajectory of an economy relative to its contemporaries when trying to use comparisons between different eras to decipher what works. The fact is wages and productivity grow faster on average in countries where labor markets are more free. The Nordic countries saw far faster economic growth relative to the rest of the world when they were more free market economies and have been leapfrogged by Singapore and Hong-Kong in life expectancy since abandoning those free market policies and embracing socialism-lite.

>>Also I did not even say anything about "government seizing control"

The government mandating companies to enter into collective bargaining to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker is the government taking control of the shareholder's negotiating agency with respect to their property. Without this compulsion, the ability of unions to extract economic rent would be non-existent.

Re: Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal

#240

Post by kyleplum »

missedthecue wrote: post #238
camdat wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are made up of workers and their combined labor. OPEC is not. This is definitional.

OPEC is made up of oil producing countries and their combined output. They are extremely similar except that one deals in labor, and the other in petrochemicals.

One is big enough to influence the global market price for it's product, the other is small and localized and has effectively no influence on the going market rate for it's product.
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