Amazon instructs New York workers “don't sign” union cards

2. It does have to do with mobility of capital in that many of these "international" competitors are still reliant on American capital and are owned in no small part by American institutional investors.

> This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)

You are mixing in a moral argument about which is better but it is sort of irrelevant to the veracity of claims like "manufacturing jobs never paid close to $30/hr" and "high-skilled manufacturing was never outsourced."

I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.

Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.

> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.

I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.

I lost control of my health, my hair turned white, and during that time I lost most of my friends. It’s obviously my own fault for letting all that happen.

Of all the companies in the world, Amazon is probably one of the coldest, soulless places.

Management is riddled with politics and third rate talent who’ll often knowingly do the wrong thing, just to get promoted.

The people who actually drove the innovation, who weren’t necessary easier to work with but at least had some technical vision and production vision have all left.

A significant piece of the company is all just legacy systems and tech debt, supported by Indian H1Bs who hire more H1Bs.

If the government breaks up AWS and the rest of Amazon, most of their domains won’t make business sense anymore. There are too many middle men who are against this though - everyone from companies that help people relocate, to vendors that provide special tax services for the H1B army.

I hope Amazon fully unionizes. Even in tech, it was a grueling, toxic place to work.