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Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

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Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#241

Post by Ar-Curunir »

dnissley wrote: post #57
patwolfe wrote: post #18

Really disappointing to see the "Well, what did you expect?" comments already. Just because companies have been trying to prevent organization of their labor for over a century doesn't mean it isn't still messed up now. It's easy to say that it's just the way the world works from your desk, the people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions don't have that luxury.

Where do we draw the line? What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them? Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?

> work with any union that forms

Yes, because why the fuck would you side with the party that has power (the employer) over the side that usually doesn't (the employee)?

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#242

Post by function_seven »

clarky07 wrote: post #184
function_seven wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to spend several paragraphs designing a pair of strawmen to illustrate your point, consider widening your view on this. > That is good however to claim that he should get the same privileges and standing as his brother who spent years working hard giving back and making better long term choices is asinine. Nobody is complaining that minimum wage isn't the same as a software engineering salary. Just that t…

the counter point is that minimum wage is artificial. if you aren't actually providing that much value, businesses will just cut the job altogether. if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices. on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's ju…

> if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.

This is true, but becoming less and less true. Today there are all sorts of jobs that used to provide a living wage, that don't anymore. With no college and limited training, you could hire on at an assembly plant and make enough to support yourself. These types of jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer.

It's not always bad life choices. Sometimes it's choices life has made for you. Meaning: you were born in the wrong ZIP code, with the wrong parent(s), and sent to the wrong school. Choices other people made for you, rather than decisions you took the wrong path on.

> on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.

This is a really hard aspect to design for. I agree that we can't require that all jobs pay enough to support a single earner's ability to rent an apartment, feed themselves, pay for a car, auto insurance, healthcare, etc. If that were the case, I would never have found work in my teens and early 20s.

> if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.

I could not agree more. The labor market become so much freer when these things are taken out of the employment equation. My employer should not be anywhere near my healthcare. The way we allowed ourselves to tie those 2 things together is one of the greatest drags on our economy, and for labor mobility and opportunity.

If we had a UBI along with healthcare, I could see minimum wage being thrown out altogether. Employers would offer what the job is worth, and workers would work for what they value their own time at.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#243

Post by djsumdog »

harlanji wrote: post #127
eropple wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$16 per hour, at 2000 hours a year, is $32,000. The poverty line in the United States is around $26,000. "Slightly above poverty wages" is still pretty dang poor. (And to forestall the inevitable adjustment of one's pince-nez to well-actually: that it'd be median or even above-median wages somewhere else does not mean that it is not poor in America , nor that the two situations can be reasonably compared.)

I’ve been living in my car in SF for about 915 days, on less than $18k/yr take home. I’m so poor that I can barely get hired to a minimum wage job (“but you have a car,” “but you have an iPhone”). Everything I have is left over from a time when I made $200k/yr as a software engineer, and thankfully I’ve been given a lot of benefit of the doubt given my upstanding ways. (I was slandered, so people I meet see a good gu…

I went to your blog and listened to your post on "Interviewing Without Resources" and it feels like a non sequitur.

It felt like you see yourself as a victim. I've been out of work before, but I never saw myself as a victim or powerless. I knew what I was worth and yes, it does take a lot of work, but I found work based on my own skills and merits.

America is increasingly growing into a nation where we cloth ourselves in victimhood as virtue. We are literally in a space where no-body is in the office today. You could pick up a $130 ~ $160k job anywhere and move out to a suburb in Texas. All you need is half-decent Internet, and you'd basically be living as if you were making the $200k you had in The Valley.

Stand up for yourself. If you only see yourself as a victim, that is all you will ever be.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#244

Post by dragonwriter »

ska wrote: post #234
dragonwriter wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A "living wage" doesn't mean "middle class". A living wage means that a person is able to afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc. That's not middle class in traditional class terms ( petit bourgeois ) based on the manner of interaction with the capitalist economy, but it's pretty much requires being “middle class” by the modern American broad income categories standar…

Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves - and somehow this would work out ok for the country as a whole? That seems extreme.

> Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves

No, I'm saying that people who are below the middle income category (as that adjusts locally) often cannot reliably, securely "afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.". I'm not saying that they should accept that, just that if you are advocating for a living wage, you are, in fact, advocating to move the floor up to something that fits what is commonly styled "middle class" income currently.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#245

Post by JackFr »

dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #214
JackFr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googling. Got it. Wow, what a time saver I wish I had known about that earlier.

My point is not that googling it will reveal everything about it, but nice bad faith. My point is it has a dictionary definition and there are plenty of people who understand what it is. It is not a nebulous concept just because you aren't informed about it. If you want to get started learning about it, I recommend looking up Richard Wolff

I must not have been clear, because you seem to have missed my point.

I don't believe that capitalism is a nebulous concept because I am not informed about it. I believe it is a nebulous concept because I have actually witnessed people in arguments using it to mean different things. Some people consider capitalism as simply a rhetorical foil to Marxism. Some people consider capitalism an economy that while capital is private, the economy may be mercantilist. Others insist that free trade is part and parcel of capitalism. Etc., etc. That's all I meant.

And there's a (not small) difference between bad faith and sarcasm. And tossing around Dunning-Krueger after one extremely shallow interaction is the height of irony.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#246

Post by kwhitefoot »

JackFr wrote: post #165
neaden wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't force your workers to work in dangerous conditions with low pay and no voice in their work place, and maybe they wouldn't want to form a union.

What if I don't do any of those things? What if I run the most worker-centric paradise, with employee empowerment, great wages, benefits and conditions? And what if the national organization of an umbrella labor organization considers my non-union workforce as a threat to both their budget and their political power? And what if they provide materials and advisors promoting unionization, despite the fact that they are…

If you are such a wonderful, caring employer what difference would it make if your employees were unionised? I think that part of the problem here is that the history of unions and union busting in the US appears to be one of corruption on both sides; but this is not a necessary or inevitable feature of unionisation.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#248

Post by pyuser583 »

eropple wrote: post #79
jmnicolas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a factory building car bumpers. The work was so alienating that one day I "woke up" in the factory with literally no recollection of the last 2 hours. From all I knew I could have been taken by ETs but since my bumper quota was good I guess I just zoned out and became a bot. And I still call Amazon "horrible working conditions". The fact that it is better than being poor isn't saying much.

$16 per hour, at 2000 hours a year, is $32,000. The poverty line in the United States is around $26,000. "Slightly above poverty wages" is still pretty dang poor. (And to forestall the inevitable adjustment of one's pince-nez to well-actually: that it'd be median or even above-median wages somewhere else does not mean that it is not poor in America , nor that the two situations can be reasonably compared.)

The purpose of the poverty line isn’t to demarcate who is poor and who is not.

It’s purpose is to establish a level at which poverty is 100% ensured.

Being below the poverty line means you are certainly poor. Being slightly above the poverty line means you are very probably poor.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#249

Post by busrf »

dcgudeman wrote: post #106
CamTin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them? They don't have a right to combat them at all. Union organizing is literally a human right. Of course ownership doesn't want them -- the feelings of ownership are (supposed to be) irrelevant.

It really amazes me what some people think qualifies for a “human right”. If you are paying someone and they are doing something you told them not to do isn’t it your “human right” to stop paying them? Where do you draw the line with what a “human right” is?

You are paying someone to work 18 hours a day, every day. They would like to not work 18 hours a day anymore, and stop working at a mere 12 hours; they are even willing to accept less pay. You fire them, because you clearly told them not to do that. They organize with other workers and demand the right for a 12 hour day, with this right enshrined in law and with penalties for employers who do not comply. You say “they are free to work for someone else or quit if they don’t like it!”

Fast forward many decades later. This is a right you and I both enjoy. (This is also why we both have time to shitpost on HN.) If there was a serious proposal to take it away, you and I would probably be standing side by side on the street demanding our rights back.

It’s easy to talk a big game about human rights when your rights aren’t on the line.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#250

Post by klyrs »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #230
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are paying someone and they are doing something you told them not to do isn’t it your “human right” to stop paying them? Obviously not. Real-world cases in point: * Firing people for being queer * Firing people for objecting to sexual harassment * Firing people for going to the bathroom

Just to add, most of the bathroom related ones are other employees complaining, not management. Management has to respond to that. This is because US culture insists on separate gender bathrooms.

In the context of Amazon, though, performance quotas are inhumane, warehouses are huge, bathrooms are sparse, so employees aren't able to use the bathroom without taking performance demerits. So you get people passing out due to dehydration because they don't want to need the bathroom.
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