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Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#721

Post by watwut »

refurb wrote: post #705
watwut wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who identify themselves as conservatives. They are subculture that very much exists. It is not true that there is no such thing as conservative. These people call themselves conservative. They read what other self described conservatives write or listen to their talkshows. They alter their own views to conform to what those talkshows say. These people hated Obama. Obama did not shared all that many v…

You’re putting people in buckets again.

So? Yes there is such a thing as a conservative or liberal oe whatever. And then there are people who are not conservatives and still hold some socially or economically conservative view.

It is hard to know whether you are trolling or genuinely ignored politics and culture from wherever you got born.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#722

Post by lamontcg »

fgonzag wrote: post #239
lamontcg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very on brand that the first response to this on HN is more or less: "Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?". Very counterintuitive thinking.

I've seen what large unions can do (just search for some of the largest Mexican unions, like the PEMEX one). Any organization of a certain scale and power gets corrupt, including private companies and unions. I strongly believe in unions, but I agree with OP that keeping them small and focused is better for both the interests of the company and the employees. Extreme power imbalances are seldom (and I'd dare say neve…

> Any organization of a certain scale and power gets corrupt

That's the problem. And why you need the four pillars of human organization: Corporations, Government, Religion and Unions to be setup to be opposed to each other.

Instead in the United States Corporations own the Government, Religions are all tax sheltered Corporations and Unions are decimated.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#723

Post by WalterBright »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #677
WalterBright wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the FAANG companies all based in the US?

Large amounts of venture capital from US investors, a really large monolingual market and path dependence. More generally though, relying on outliers for your argument is perhaps not the best approach.

Outlier? FAANG is just the top of the market. Companies are started in the US and grown because the opportunity to make money is much greater.

Venture capital? An awful lot of the venture capital comes from foreign investors.

Monolingual? The global business world runs on English.

Outliers? When it's all of them, the idea it is a coincidence starts getting pretty unlikely.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#724

Post by WalterBright »

Retric wrote: post #689
WalterBright wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying less taxes is not government "spending". A person's income is not government property that the government generously allows the person to keep some of it.

That’s at best a semantic argument as refundable tax breaks can result in a net payment by the government. As in you can revive 1,400$ having never paid any money to the government. A more common example is to pay nothing and also get a rebait to avoid paying taxes in the future.

I see. You think that the money you make belongs to the government, and they just allow you to keep a bit of it.

The $1400 stimulus payment was not a tax break nor was it income.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#725

Post by WalterBright »

roenxi wrote: post #675
mantas wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing taxes, especially in a selective way, is essentially state spending money on subsidies.

Although you are correct, the point goes further than that because any system of taxation is effectively a subsidy to whatever doesn't get taxed. Income taxes cause over-allocation to assets, wealth taxes cause over-allocation to short term spending, taxing left handed people causes allocation to right handed people, etc. I like the idea of a land value tax/Georgism, from a philosophical belief that we should under-a…

That's abusing the word "subsidy".

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#726

Post by bastardoperator »

matt_wilson_206 wrote: post #327
bastardoperator wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at CA, teachers aren't getting rich, but they're making decent wages at 9 months a year, with some fairly nice benefits depending on the size of the district and level they teach. We need to raise some of these numbers, but I suspect smaller schools are in more remote areas of California where it is certainly cheaper to live than say SF, or LA. https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp "The avera…

It looks like you used 8 hours per working day in your calculations? Anecdotally, I haven't encountered a teacher who does a flat 40hrs a week. Also, summer break is only 2 months in LAUSD, not sure of the smaller districts.

You can see here on the LAUSD calendar the schedule is for 180 days:

https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Doma...

As a parent of someone who went to an LAUSD school, my experience is completely different. Half the teachers didn't even bother to show up for parent/teacher night and were never available. The only teacher I'll give props to is the robotics club teacher, he was heavily involved, stayed late, but outside of him, that bell rang and it was a ghost town 20 minutes later.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#727

Post by 0xB31B1B »

onion2k wrote: post #692
0xB31B1B wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a union is not an unalloyed good for the employees. I also worked at a unionized grocery for about 3 months. At our shop, it was clear that the union was set up to protect the senior employees at the expense of the junior employees. There were about 10-ish people on the checkout stands during my shifts, 4 of them were employees who had been working there for 10+ years, and 6 of them were people who had been working t…

That has nothing to do with unions though, obviously. If you look at any organisation you tend to see people who have been there a long time without moving upwards or onwards are pretty lazy people who know how to play the system. They don't need a union for that. A lot of people who are anti-unions appear to think the union is the cause of everything bad without noticing the same things happen everywhere else as wel…

I'm sorry I didn't cover the industrial and labor relations courses I took in college in my 5 sentence long comment on an online posting board

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#728

Post by 0xB31B1B »

matsemann wrote: post #697
0xB31B1B wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue employers have with unions is much less about wage bargaining an almost entirely about the duplicative work/labor unions tend to lead to. As a hypothetical, lets say you run a widget factory. Line workers at your widget factory spend 6 hour of their shift making widgets, and 2 hours of their shift packing widgets up after they have completed making their widgets. A union comes in and will say "we can have e…

Lol, what a load of bs that comment is. Straight anti-union propaganda. Why would the workers insist on this? Most workers want their company to succeed, just not succeed because of exploiting people.

"Why would the workers insist on this?"

The empirical evidence we have shows that unions consistently make these choices. There is a huge duplication of labor and responsibilities in construction unions, the trades, etc. The workers are trying to get the company to pay more money to labor, sometimes that means more increasing the pay per hour, sometimes that means increasing the total number of hours worked. I am pretty strongly in favor of germany style labor unions, sectoral barganing and labor codetermination. The caselaw and regulations around unionization in the US are bad and often lead to poor outcomes for workers and management.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#729

Post by Retric »

WalterBright wrote: post #724
Retric wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s at best a semantic argument as refundable tax breaks can result in a net payment by the government. As in you can revive 1,400$ having never paid any money to the government. A more common example is to pay nothing and also get a rebait to avoid paying taxes in the future.

I see. You think that the money you make belongs to the government, and they just allow you to keep a bit of it. The $1400 stimulus payment was not a tax break nor was it income.

Not that 1,400$. 1,400$ of the 2,000$ child tax credit is refundable and that’s not a stimulus the GOP made part of the child tax credit refundable back in 2018.

Some nonrefundable tax tax credits cap at zero or the AMT for that year.

Other nonrefundable tax tax credits can get rolled over into future years, so people with actual incomes can still pay zero in some years. Aka they go to zero and roll over savings to next year.

However refundable credits mean an actual check even in years you paid zero taxes: American opportunity tax credit, Earned income tax credit, Child tax credit, Premium tax credit. Aka they go to zero then send you a check.

It not that common for people to get a check for the full amount, but it does happen.

Re: Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

#730

Post by Retric »

WalterBright wrote: post #725
roenxi wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although you are correct, the point goes further than that because any system of taxation is effectively a subsidy to whatever doesn't get taxed. Income taxes cause over-allocation to assets, wealth taxes cause over-allocation to short term spending, taxing left handed people causes allocation to right handed people, etc. I like the idea of a land value tax/Georgism, from a philosophical belief that we should under-a…

That's abusing the word "subsidy".

A tax break on any farmer that grows corn is a corn subsidy. It’s the classic definition of a subsidy in that it reduces costs to create something.

Often things are written so exactly one company benefits when they agree to build something like a sports stadium in exchange for zero property taxes for N years. If that subsidy isn’t large large enough they may also hand out cash.

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