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I love how they list "living wage" as a warning word.
Absurdity of this video aside, but I just wish there was room in today's political environment to discuss pros and cons to unions and non-unions. There are some pretty good examples of unions being corrupt, there are examples where unions work. There are examples where like Amazon says, having a direct relationship with your employer is the best. Nuance is gone which is the biggest loss.
Per their own words, worker unions impede "speed, innovation, and customer obsession." Yeah, gotta feed that customer obsession at all costs.
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> democratic states are consistently better than non-democratic ones Union wages are consistently higher than non-union wages, so we have evidence that unions are an improvement compared to direct relationships with employers. Source: literally every long-term economic comparison of wages done for the last 50 years.
And not only wages, almost every single work right has been won by sweat and blood of the organized workers. 8 hours working day, 2 days off a week, vacation time, pregnancy leave, medical insurance, etc, etc. None of them was implemented as result of the benevolence of the dominant classes.
Absurdity of this video aside, but I just wish there was room in today's political environment to discuss pros and cons to unions and non-unions. There are some pretty good examples of unions being corrupt, there are examples where unions work. There are examples where like Amazon says, having a direct relationship with your employer is the best. Nuance is gone which is the biggest loss.
This is largely a legacy of the police Red squads funded by the capitalists all over the USA starting in the 1930's. To get the radicals and other effective organizers and voices of the working classes out of the unions, local politicians and the police looked the other way as organized crime gained influence over many unions, thus simultaneously corrupting local governments, law enforcement, and organized labor.
There's only one company whose recruiting emails ALWAYS get deleted sight unseen: Amazon. Who in their right mind would want to work for a company that encourages union busting?
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No, they were implemented as a result of labor-saving improvements in technology. Activists always want to take credit, but it's the engineers and scientists who actually did the thing that changed the pattern that had lasted for 10,000 years. Unions are just one particular way of structuring one side of a human conflict that is as old as civilization and as inherent as gravity.
And not locking workers inside factories? Was that implemented as a result of labor-saving improvements in technology? You should look up the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York, 1911, which it could be argued is what kicked off the modern unionization effort. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
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There are plenty of issues that should be on the table when it comes to technology workers like equity arrangements, severance at high risk companies, systems for promotions, actual vacations, open source funding, health care between employment etc. The reason it won't happen isn't because there isn't cause, or that employees would suddenly sabotage the company, but that any such organization would be a politic force…
I’m not sure I’m convinced that going into any discussion that prefaces worker organization as “impossible” is entirely in good faith. All industries view worker-related expenses as costs (they are) so I don’t see the exception in this case. What I do see is that a $350-400M settlement was seen by insiders as being short an order of magnitude, meaning that the 65,000 tech workers affected by this wage-fixing crime le…
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> But, like all big and complex organizations they become corrupted and rather than having the interest of workers and society as foremost goals, self perpetuation and preservation become the goals. The same can be said of corporations too.
The corporations produce useful stuff, though.
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Market power is irrevelant to workers being able to fetch the market rate for their labor. Corporations compete with each other for a limited pool of labor. There is no generalized class conflict between corporations and workers in a free market. Competition happens just as much within classes as between them. Ultimately that results in the wages offered being determined by the underlying market forces of supply and…
I'm certainly no expert, but it's my impression that workers for large corporations generally get screwed when unions are weak. Based on data from the past several decades.
Unions in the private sector became much weaker over the last 40 years, but that was not due to the labor laws that empower unions being eased. It was due to the type of industries that unions are prone to form in (e.g. labor-intensive, high volume manufacturing) contracting in the US.
The laws that empower unions make the US inhospitable to key industries.
What's going to happen to the US electric car manufacturing industry if Tesla's workers unionize?
What's going to happen to Amazon's business units if they see massive unionization?
The consequences for a US-based operation when their work force unionizes is a major disincentive for investing in production in the US, and a major impediment to existing US-centred companies from expanding.