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Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

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Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#791

Post by Bluestein »

kryogen1c wrote: post #520
Diederich wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you're not kidding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer,_Alabama#Economy "Crime increased following the rise in unemployment and social disruption from the decline of manufacturing industries in the area. As of 2019 Bessemer ranks first in terms of violent crimes for US cities with 25,000 or more people." Population has fallen from its peak in 1970 of 33k to 26k today. Thanks for the reference. EDIT: Also hom…

> Also home to the world's oldest chicken, who lived 16 years frowns in Colorado https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

I hereby humbly move to make Matilda the Chicken (or Mike, the Headless) the oficial Amazon mascot. Votes welcome :)

  Funny enough, I have no heavenly idea how, I had actually run into the article on poor Mike before.-

  Further edit: Come to think, poor Mike the "headless" would be a great mascot for -at least- AWS, for obvious, ssh-related reasons :)

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#792

Post by radicalbyte »

kolinko wrote: post #628
radicalbyte wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the post above about average houses costing $90k there are true, then the Amazon workers are earning about $26k a year, that's around 3.5x salary to house cost. I live in the middle of The Netherlands; the average house price is 360k and the average wage is 36k, that's around 10x salary to house cost. One important point: in almost all cases in NL both partners work, the general rule is that women work part time a…

You need to add costs of education, which is free in Netherlands, and multiple other social services (like public transit).

Education is most certainly not free here. It would cost me 20k to do a Masters, and my wife took on debts of ~80k to pay for her education.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#793

Post by tw04 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #701
tombert wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally. I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain…

> In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver. Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use…

Spoken like someone who has never lived paycheck to paycheck and been caught in a debt spiral.

You are correct, not having access to credit is a bad thing. But having access to predatory credit is a WORSE thing. There's a reason we outlawed indentured slavery and "company scrip", and payday loans are a half a step up from that situation.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#794

Post by koshnaranek »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #287
jhbadger wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one you can vote for leadership. Unions are imperfect, but they are democracies. Corporations on the other hand are feudal. You don't get to vote Bezos into power as a worker -- he's just the lord of the manor. Some nobles are good and some nobles are bad, but the serfs have no say.

I hate how the term privilege is thrown around these days, but man, this bizarre narrative reeks of privilege and some marxist fantasy. Bezos is in his position because of his competency. He built the thing. Democracy is not a virtue in a workplace.

These laws and regulations developed not just randomly but because corporations treated workers almost like slaves.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#795

Post by gpanders »

regextegrity wrote: post #661
yibg wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a bit misleading? I don't have official bathroom breaks either, and I do just fine.

What? I don't mean scheduled bathroom breaks, I mean they aren't given enough leeway during the day to even use the bathroom. There are many reports of them peeing in bottles and shitting in plastic bags.

I certainly agree with you that those stories are shocking and horrific, those reports were about delivery drivers, not warehouse workers, so it’s not really relevant to this particular discussion.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#796

Post by tehWeeb »

prepend wrote: post #119
tehWeeb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the fundamental problem with our culture generally. The closer (figuratively speaking) to the big money and political power someone is the more comfortable they are. And we all want to believe it’s a meritocracy. We’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I think that’s a feature, not a bug. In that I don’t think it’s a problem. Labor is subject to markets like many things, and shouldn’t be exploited. But there’s some work that’s hard and doesn’t require specialized training (eg, hauling stuff around warehouses all day). Some people are willing to do this and they do, if they don’t want to they can do other things. This is an oversimplification, of course, but having…

Providing busy work for people that to prop up Amazon’s selling boat loads of knock off garbage.

Amazing. Surely because “that’s how it worked in the past” isn’t the only option for social organization?

Why not stop believing in Bezos and solve our human problems generally?

Why not a mandate to provide education and healthcare and we provide THOSE jobs?

Because Bezos and Musk are able to get real access to politicians, resulting in the rubes being fed fiscal economic policy that continues to protect them.

The circular logic is mesmerizing.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#797

Post by jyrkesh »

regextegrity wrote: post #236
JCM9 wrote: post #176

It was clear getting these workers to unionize was good for the union... it was much less clear why it would be good for the workers. People can say what they want about Amazon but the reality is they provide a far better job, wage, and benefits than most. Apart from the broad sweeping messaging around corporations = bad, unions = the answer, it wasn’t really clear at all why a union would benefit workers here. As su…

Come on.. the workers don't even get bathroom breaks.

I'm not disagreeing with your assertion (though I do expect it's not as widespread as news articles make it seem), but...why didn't they vote to unionize then? Seems like if the unions said "we'll make sure you get bathroom breaks", then that'd be enough.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#798

Post by Glawen »

2bitencryption wrote: post #280
aarongray wrote: post #127

Speaking as someone who lives adjacent to Bessemer but who does not work at Amazon, you need to understand that Bessemer is a dying city, a slum. These were the best paying jobs that many of these workers had had in their entire lives, it is no wonder that a majority of them decided not to bite the hand that was feeding them.

This may be a bit of an ignorant question, but... Are "dying cities/slums" a purely American phenomenon, in terms of rich first-world countries? Is there similarly a "rust belt" in Germany, of cities that had an economic collapse after manufacturing died out? Are there rich European countries with flailing cities that devolve into crime and poverty? Does Europe have its own Bessemers, Detroits? (though I do hear Detr…

we have dying cities and poverty in Europe, but it does not devolve into crime. Each city in Europe have at least a suburb where crime is more prevalent, poverty is a contributing factor but not the only one.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#799

Post by tombert »

Nasrudith wrote: post #745
tombert wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally. I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain…

Sounds like it hints at a nasty feedback loop. "Are they stuck in financial trouble because of poor impulse control or are they stuck with poor impulse control because of financial trouble?" Singular they that is. It is easier to think long term while feeling secure but not thinking long term can lead to becoming insecure. Not trying to make any moral or blame judgements here - just pondering origins of problems and…

I won't speak for anyone else, but I feel that I normally have reasonably good impulse control, even in 2016; I got into debt because a company I was working for ended up not paying me for multiple months and then shut down, and I didn't have much savings.

I think my lack of impulse control came as a direct cause of me being broke. I had previously never seriously considered any kind of payday loan because I knew they were multi-thousand-percent levels of interest, but that part of my brain wasn't the one thinking. When faced with a really tough situation, I think it's common for your "survivalist" side to kick in.

I never actually did get the payday loan because I was able to (begrudgingly) get a loan from my stepfather-in-law for the back rent, and I very luckily landed a decent-paying job shortly afterwards.

I was absolutely one of the lucky ones. It's not hard at all for me to envision a universe where I was stuck in an endless cycle of debt, and honestly I still have nightmares about that time occasionally. Not fun.

Re: Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

#800

Post by bsanr2 »

mjevans wrote: post #749
zwkrt wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not stupid you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life. Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you…

No way out either. In a literal sense. There's no national program for helping people relocate to areas where they can have a meaningful job, a home that's affordable to OWN, and hopefully also community as a result. I'm NOT saying it should be forced, I'm saying it should be an option.

No national program to build where people are, either. Which is a shame, because we're the country that built the Interstate Highway System, and a national rail system before it. The truth is that the hyper-local nature of our politics leads to disparity as much as it does prosperity, and the two often go hand-in-hand. There are too many rich towns filled with professionals and managers with a nearby slum that supplies all of the menial and service labor, but we're probably not ready to talk about what the remedy to that looks like, and I'm not certain we ever will be.
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