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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird, of the ~15 people I know who have been in unions, exactly two of them have been unhappy with them. Meanwhile, of the hundreds of people I know, most of them have been unhappy with their employers at one point or another...
Of the thousands of public school students I know, all know at least one unqualified teacher.
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.
I predict the Staten Island warehouse will soon be closed due to redundancy as part of a strategic rebalancing of their logistics operations due to changing consumer demand. Someone at Amazon is probably already touring all the warehouse sites in Jersey. Doubt they accept this loss.
That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers.
To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.
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.
It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power, and union supporters will remind you of the bad times when the employers had too much power. These days we actually see a lot more of the latter. Will we swing back and forth indefinitely? Probably.
This is just sad. Just a hair over 50% of the eligible voters voted; weirdly, approximately the same voter turnout for US elections historically. Does half of any given population just not care enough to vote for something?
It's great that people are standing up against the abusive power of big companies. When will Apple (App Store) developers unionize?
Why should developers unionize? I love not being in a union. If my company starts dicking me around I'll quit and find another job. Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me. I don't want to have to bring in my union rep to argue about it since going somewhere else means losing my tenure and taking a 30% pay cut. The only time unions make sense i…
And I think it makes more sense to join a union preemptively, while things are in our favor, than to join a union in the future, possibly from a position of weakness.
The problem is, of course, every developer thinks they're a 10x rockstar who doesn't need a union.
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…
Cases like this you really need to be extremely specific about what powerful means. I think a lot of left leaning folks could agree with such statements but made too broadly it can be taken a number of different ways. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have mu…
So, they don't get their employees good pay, they don't get a say in their working conditions. In what sense are they powerful, as you claim?
I have some family members that work at Amazon, my understanding is that the conditions at Amazon are hard to pin down because some warehouses are run just fine and others are abusive. That said, everyone working a job has a right to a union. Whether there's workplace abuse going on or not. All human endeavors are corrupt, including gov't, business, and occasionally unions. Collective bargaining is something I wish I…
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…
When this has happened at individual Walmart stores in the past, the company would immediately shut down the store and everyone would lose their jobs. A couple years later they would build a new store within 20 or so miles of the old store, free of the union. This was obviously financially painful for Walmart, but it served as such a strong signal to employees to not even try to unionize that it must have paid for it…
I don't think Amazon wants to shut this warehouse down, my rough understanding is that it's a hugely important warehouse, serving NYC's millions of customers.
It's a sad state of affairs when corporations are allowed to screw citizens over.
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.