How Amazon Crushed the Union Movement (2014)
time.com
time.com
I know unions have done a lot of great in the past, but I rarely see much good coming from them anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them in my life.
> Boeing's value has reportedly fallen by about $5.3 billion since the walkout began and that strikers have lost more than $125 million in wages
Followed by this 8 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/companies/boeing_strike...
And then this 5 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/news/companies/boeing-strike...
At some point, it's getting ridiculous.
> The company had offered union members raises over the next three years totaling 11% of current pay. Boeing also offered bonuses and pension improvements it said would give the typical worker about $34,000 in additional pay and benefits during that time.
When you're given offers like that and rejecting them and it becomes a pattern that the company can expect to cost them billions of dollars every few years...what exactly do you expect company execs to do? Not have backup plans?
This is a company that's literally handing out jobs throughout a lot of the worst periods of the US economy...and it warrants constant strikes?
Look up some Airbus strikes for comparison. The articles I've seen are strikes over job cuts. There was a German strike at 4 plants that lasted...90 minutes.
At some point...yes...it is ridiculous and there are a lot of other people who would be more than happy to have the jobs you're striking over.
If unions are so great, then they can stand on their own.
If they end up sucking, then people will leave them.
I do not want the union contract, because I believe that I can get a better deal for myself. The unioners can have their contract, and I can have mine. In the same way that I negotiate for myself right now, in a fully union free industry.
IMO, both employees and employers should be free to form what groups they please and negotiate what contracts they will. This includes contracts that forbid an employer from hiring non-union workers. But there should also be no law mandating such a provision. Of course subject to government regulation that supersedes contracts (health and safety, human rights provisions, others).
You should be able to negotiate with your own group of people to get certain benefits, and I should be able to negotiate on my own. And then we could see who really gets the better deal.
Personally I am confident that my own deal would be better, but I have no problem with other people deciding for themselves that they would prefer whatever deal that a union was able to negotiate.
Also keep in mind unionization is a freedom which is currently being infringed! I firmly believe that organizations should be able to draw up agreements with another! If a union and a company mutually agree that all the company's workers must join the union, I don't see a problem with that. The fact that our lawmakers are going in and writing backdoors so that this is serious government overreach.
Or the union can force you out of your job by forcing the employer to hire unionized employees only.
Here is why this is incorrect.
It is illegal to fire someone for joining a union. This is a right that all workers have.
For the same reason that it is illegal to fire someone for joining a union, it should be illegal to fire someone for NOT joining a union.
So take you pick. If you want full freedom of association, sure, lets do that. You can make whatever contracts you want, but you can also be fired for it, (ie legalize firing people for joining a union). I think I would be happy with this outcome, to be honest.
But as long as union people are receiving this protection, NON-union people should receive the SAME protection.
But then we do that exact thing when the product is labor and not plastic. Your freedom of association is on the macro level, as in you can go from firm to firm to firm and if that firm requires you to join the union you just keep moving, same as if that firm pays a low wage or has no health insurance or anything else.
Fine, join whatever private organization that you want.
But please leave me out of it. I do not want to follow your ill thought out rules and I want to be able to negotiate myself. I can get a better deal on my own, and I do not want your collective bargaining that they try to force on everyone.
For example, a ballplayer can't waive a CBA_specified contrast constraint (e.g. many performance incentives are disallowed, can't work for less than the CBA-mandated minimum, etc.).
they can choose to not include certain things
At least people can actually measure seniority.
That's 80% because the supply/demand dynamics currently favor your profession, giving you leverage, and 20% because {markets reward value creation, you are good at bargaining}. Right now it's a harmless attitude, but when the weather turns, or for professions where it has already turned... not so much.
There is a hell lot of room for the conditions of software jobs to deteriorate before people become concerned when new grads from unknown universities can do a bit of interview prep and get $160,000 total comp working 35 hours/week with free food, massages, etc.
I'll stand up for your right to opt out and get none of these benefits.
Now 28 states (including all of the South, where wages are low) have passed laws that guarantee those who opt out of unions in unionized workplaces receive the same benefits as those who are members.
As you'd guess, that works really effectively to undercut the appeal of joining a union.
Unions exist on dues. As organizations, they were already weakening, and then if you further limit membership, you've really undermined their ability to collective bargain.
If you really think that individuals can bargain better on their own than collectively then why do companies want to get rid of collective bargaining?
As an individual you don't have power over the terms of the collective bargaining. The union can very well bargain against your interests. If you want $250,000 salary as a new grad, you might actually have a higher chance of receiving it in non-unionized world.
If you perform well and have decent bargaining power, you would not be in the majority. The people who have the most to gain from a union (people who have low individual bargaining power) would likely be the most vocal and involved in the organization.
These desires are at odds. Statistically, the majority would likely always prefer the latter, since the former assumes a poor majority and a rich minority.
There's some values that gets closer to a combination of these, such as going with the former, but banning inheritance (or indirect form of it). Effectively reseting the playing field every once in a while. Or focusing on increasing the minimum, but keeping the distribution like in the former. Like with universal minimum income for example.
Because unions mostly benefit low performers and old/senior people.
I don't want to have an organization making contracts that will hold me back just because of age. If I can demonstrate that I can perform/negotiate, then I should be able to command what benefits/salary that I am able to negotiate in the market, as opposed to be in the 1 sized fits all contract that someone else negotiated.
One possible response to that question: Why is it ethical or fair force a worker to pay union dues as part of a job?
In that case I'd argue that because the union's negotiation affects all employees (it at least sets a baseline) it is ethical and fair to ask every employee to contribute. Allowing every employee to opt out greatly reduces the amount of resources the union has available to reach its aims.
I'm assuming a few things here:
- That the negotiation performed by the union does affect all workers in the job, whether union members or not.
- That collective bargaining enabled by unions can in many cases be a positive thing for workers because it helps fix an information asymmetry that exists between employers and workers. (Such asymmetries break the assumptions of ideal free markets, which indeed are a good thing.)
- That right-to-work laws do indeed adversely affect the resources of a union. (The data shows that public sector union membership greatly dropped after Wisconsin's public sector right-to-work act passed: https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-... . As an aside: I'm not the biggest fan of public sector unions, but I think it's likely private sector right-to-work laws would have a similar effect.)
I've participated in debates like this previously on HN without a satisfying response, so I'd ask the following for a response:
Which specific parts of my response/assumptions do you disagree with, and why?
I'd really like to hear about this from people in blue-collar jobs, with small incomes, and smaller bargaining power. I am not sure if a Silicon Valley perspective about this is necessarily representative or useful.
While Silicon Valley may be unique, that just means the things workers in those jobs want to focus their collective bargaining around may be unique, too. Not working in Silicon Valley, I won't pretend to know what those things are, but I certainly know that every workplace has issues and that without unions, the power structure is completely unbalanced in favor of management.
OP mentions sexual harassment. But if the workers wanted, they could actually collectively bargain even STRONGER sexual harassment policies than management wanted!
The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological.
Unions are an organizational structure, like industry groups or lobbying groups. Just like the latter exist to represent industry interests, unions need to exist to represent workers rights and interests. Like any other organization they can do good or bad depending on their management and objectives.
Ideological? A vast multitude of people have cited ongoing examples of misbehavior and abuse that they themselves have personally witnessed, which you casually handwave away by saying it's just "ideological".
How about unions start actually cleaning up their act and making themselves respected champions of the worker again?
Unions are corporations, in every sense of the word, both legally and conceptually.
Unions are just a special type of corporation that has been granted a special right: the exclusive, irrevocable[0] right to dictate the terms of employment of its members.
In some states, the union even literally acts as the employing entity, creating a de facto subcontractor relationship.
[0] In theory, the NLRA allows for members to deunionize. In practice, this is almost impossible - once a union forms, there is almost no way it's members can feasibly remove it if they decide they don't want to be represented by it anymore.
Legally, they're in a unique class. They're 501c5s. They have their own unique set of laws that apply to them. Conceptually, they're democratic institutions and not at all like corporations.
Irrevocable? Getting rid of them is the exact same process as starting one! You have to convince your coworkers and win a vote.
What do you think a 501(c)5 corporation is?
> Getting rid of them is the exact same process as starting one! You have to convince your coworkers and win a vote.
Sort of. Companies are strictly prohibited from taking retaliatory action against employees who attempt to organize their workplace. In extreme cases, this can even result in mandatory recognition of a union without a vote.
Unions, on the other hand, have great leeway to terminate membership association with members who speak out publicly against the union, which is de facto termination. They are also legally permitted to suppress counter-organizational activities in many other ways which companies cannot do legally to prevent the formation of a union.
In practice, deunionizing a workplace is many orders of magnitude more difficult than unionizing it, because you have to obtain the written permission of 30% of the bargaining unit without attracting the attention of the union leadership.
There's a reason that only 10% of union members in the US ever had the opportunity to vote (for or against) union representation - unions are not legally required to undergo periodic re-certification votes, and they are given great latitude to prevent themselves from ever having to face a vote.
The idea that unions have greater ability to coerce workers is LAUGHABLE. First, to your point directly, the NLRB website notes that "Threats to employees that they will lose their jobs unless they support the union" are ILLEGAL, just as it is for corporations. At the same time, however, corporations are able to force employees to listen to anti-union propaganda and pressure them to vote how they want.
If you want to compromise, and say every workplace in America gets to vote every year on whether to have a union, I'd take that deal. Because yes, getting 30% signing decert cards is difficult -- as is getting the 30% of authorization cards to have a vote in favor of a union in the first place without attracting the attention of management! But no, you want elections in places WITH unions annually, but you don't want elections in places WITHOUT them. Democracy only when it suits your desired outcomes.
Which are corporations.
> But no, you want elections in places WITH unions annually, but you don't want elections in places WITHOUT them. Democracy only when it suits your desired outcomes.
Aside from having a number of basic misunderstandings about corporate and labor law, you're making enough assumptions and judgements about what I want that it's clear you're really interested in having a discussion with a straw man that doesn't actually exist, not with me. So I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere fruitful.
The only assumption I made is that you would be opposed to a union election in every workplace in America on an annual basis. If that's wrong, let me know, and I'll actually be quite thrilled.
There will be bad eggs so blame them. Using that to demonize unions as a concept is ideological and disingenuous.
Business and industries have industry groups and lobbying groups. Professionals like lawyers, doctors, architects and engineers have their own groups. Why would everyone in the system need protection and safeguarding of their rights and interests except workers?
This post includes the work NYTWA did to resist the travel ban at JFK (but is otherwise irrelevant to the current discussion, so search for the relevant parts): https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/all-worked-up-nowhere-to-go...
What did your company do to show solidarity?
Unions are made of people, like any group, there are as good or as bad as the people they are made of. Unions absolutely can make the difference for underpaid workers. Unions have lawyers workers can get advisce from and they level the playing field between the employer and the worker.
What I find odd is you pretending a lot of people think that unions are always good. In US the majority of people think unions are bad.
One is that there's a great deal at stake and most companies are going to resist unions any way that can, and we can reasonably expect that to include negative propaganda.
A second is that unions really are terrible because corporate interests have succeeded in subverting the unions they couldn't destroy and have influenced them in ways that render them dysfunctional in hopes that that will discourage employees from joining.
A third is that unions have an inherent tendency to become terrible due to internal dynamics.
I suspect all three of these are true to some degree. It seems like a good way to defend against the second and third is to have multiple competing unions and allow employees to move freely from one to the other, or start up a new union if none of the ones that exist are any good.
Like most HN readers, I don't have any experience working in a unionized industry or know much about how rules governing unions vary from state to state or which unions are better than others or what kind of checks and balances exist internally to prevent unions from become corrupt or ineffectual.
I do expect that if the tech industry were to become unionized, we would need a different kind of union. It makes sense for unions to force people to work slowly in industries where employees are at risk of ruining their joints and then being discarded by the company when they can no longer shovel their daily quota of coal. In software development, anything that slows you down is frustrating and I think most of us would rather work in an environment where under-performing employees can be fired than one where they can't. We could borrow plenty of ideas from existing successful unions, though.
So the guy should have been fired for taking a nap?
Jez man, you and I so don't see eye-to-eye on this one. If someone is tired, they are not functioning well. If a manager is tired, they are not going to be at their best for handling employees without saying something improper.
But just based on your statement, he should have been rehired.
We didn't used to have great jobs for high school-educated folks, we used to have unions. Because lots of people earning 0.05x joining together are the only way to make things fair when woking for a person earning X. Or 10x.
But that only applies to the slob packing a box to send you a fidget spinner thing. Not to you brilliant coders working in Silicon Valley, obvs. Except here's a thing: I worked for at a 8-to-5 for years before going out on my own for the last decade. And now I can't seem to go back, because all the full time gigs I find quote me $US125-150k. And I make about twice that as a contractor. Nothing fancy, I haven't found some wonderful niche, I just ask for my rate and get it and work. And even after accounting for paying both sides of Social Security taxes, I make 2x the top end of whatever StackOverflow survey you want to look at.
I'm not amazing, I'm just a guy who got a decent education that was paid for in large part by my mom's salary as a teacher. Which was a result of her efforts in a union that had to go out on strike some times. Unions aren't perfect. No organization of humans ever will be. But regurgitating "facts" about why unions failed that have been drilled into you by popular media isn't a way to overcome that. It's a way to get screwed. Good luck.
Clearly you should probably continue doing what you're doing since you make way more. But there's more benefits to a higher end job than just not paying half the social security tax, right?
Ballparking but the extra SS tax is like $8K a year or so right? If you need to provide health insurance for more than yourself and want the sort of health insurance you'd get at the top end of SO jobs, the cost should dwarf the extra SS tax you pay. If it's just for yourself then the cost would probably still equal out to about as much as the extra SS tax, no? I know you might have a spouse that gets you covered under insurance. But that isn't the case for everyone. And there's other benefits like 401k matching.
I'm not sure exactly what else there can be. I've only worked for myself too. And I risk it and just get the cheapest catastrophe health insurance since I'm still young-ish. I probably write off a lot more than someone working at a top SO job though so there is that benefit. Hm maybe my post doesn't have too much of a point then, hah.
Then you would be forced to join a union and take the same low pay as every other engineer. And your income would be based on seniority instead of skill, so there is very little chance that you would make even half of your contracting rate.
The union i belong to has features that were earned/bargained for over years.
When i worked in tech we often wished we had some if the earned "rights" i now have.
No forced Overtime; overtime after 8 hours in a day.
Guaranteed 40 hours a week.
No work before 6am or after 6am (or else premium pat)
No Sunday or holiday work
72% benefits paid by company
Part if a 2m plus benefit plan (great coverage)
Holiday and sick pay earned as we go; 15, 19 or 26 days off a year depending on length of service.
No-layoff clause after 4(or 6)years
In my union there is absolutely no advancement opportunity and we dont get rich.
In tech we looked down at bargained employees - but now i think it was jusy not understanding them
The union machinery is vastly different than the rank and file..their only goal is extracting $$$ from union members.
But now there are many poor suffering delivery people who just dont know how much power they hold collectively if they decide to disrupt the status quo.
If all uber drivers said FU and banded together - uber is NOTHING without the drivers - they would hold enormous power.
Same for Amazon workers.
It just is the existine aflcio and other unions don't represent the drivers etc. They cant because they dont fight the fight
If the honeymoon the disrupters are having now is broken it will be by organizing the downtrodden driver, part timer, giger, and servant of the rich
Here are my two pennies:
Private sector unions are great for collective bargaining, though I prefer they abstain from broad political platforms (immigration, for example), as these are so far removed the intent of the union. I tend to view these Unions as being political vehicles first, collective bargaining agents second. That isn't a compliment.
Public sector unions are awkward in that tax payer is not represented at the bargaining table. They should be restructured to make bargaining comparable to the private sector case (or reverse Aboud).
My personal experiences with Unions are very negative.
In the first experience, in SoCal in the early 90s, I saw first hand when the Teamsters moved to unionize drywall framers. My dad was a small scale developer in the San Gabriel Valley and during a protest, a Teamsters boss on a megaphone encouraged a mob of picketers to run through the project with hammers and destroy recently hung drywall. My dad also received death threats and we had a rock thrown through a window.
My second experience was doing campaign targeting for AFSCME. The people I met from that org were in the extreme far left part of the political spectrum (as in "Stalin had some good ideas"). Take from that what you will.
The feature you're describing is not an accident. Lobbying for restrictive immigration laws (not just political platforms in general, but that specific platform and issue) is the exact reason that unions like the AFL originally gained the size and political power that they have today.
Companies just move the work elsewhere. As now companies are often owned by bigger companies/have multiple operations. So it's much easier to do so.
Managers are often overworked/overpressured to perform, get by with less, competing with foreign companies with 'free' labor. And some Workers are jaded by the old Auto Factory days their parents worked. Makes for very toxic environments.
One wonders if the system is worth keeping around in its current form if so many people get screwed by it. What do we have an economic system for, anyway?
Amazon employs tens of thousands of people. These people are trying to organize 27. And failing.
It's n against y.
"It's 15 against 1"
You dont have to be in a union to be able to gather together for the common Good.
So lets say your "manager" tosses out some ridiculous rule and each person individually thinks it stinks.
With the right leader, if you simply say "its us against you." and let them know you dont have a concern about consequences, it will get you very, very far.
Be daring. Be challenging. Dont get walked on. Stand up for what is right.
Having a union frame of mind can actually help.