Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises
bloomberg.com
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VCP is up to 4% for attendance and 4% for building productivity normally. But during Oct-Dec (peak season) these figures double to 8% each. If you average together the 4% attendance VCP (totally within our control) for 9 months and 8% for 3 months, you get a yearly average of 5% bonus, totally within our control.
I was earning $15/hr prior to this "wage boost". A 5% bonus on top of that would make my effective wage $15.75. This is without receiving any VCP bonus in regard to building productivity. This is also before you consider any "income" we were receiving through stocks. After the wage boost, my hourly wage is becoming $16hr. But I will never be able to increase that through VCP and I will never receive company stock again.
I am glad that employees across the country who were previously at $11/hr and that new starts at my warehouse are jumping from the starting $12-$13 immediately to $15, but it's hard for existing employees such as myself to see these changes as anything but a pay cut.
The median rule of hourly earnings to yearly earnings is 40 hours/week and 50 weeks/year, which results in every $1/hour == $2000/year in earnings.
For $15/hour, that's about $30,000. For a single person in California, without dependents and claiming themselves for one exemption, it would be 4,264.50 (14.22%) in Federal taxes and 579.35 (1.93%) in State taxes for a total of 4,843.85 (16.15%) in taxes.
Calculator: https://www.tax-brackets.org/californiataxtable
So after taxes around $13.40 to $13.70 per hour.
I feel like the concept of unions needs to be rejiggered for the modern era where its less (But still to some degree) about worker safety and more about control over compensation / days off / healthcare stuff.
Maybe somebody could come up with something that is like a union but meant to be more lightweight and more focused on compensation type things and has some self-imposed restrictions on things like strikes and bargaining hold-outs and things like that.
There's plenty of things wrong with US unions, but opposition of fishermen to Obamacare isn't amongst them.
So a much less radical approach of simply copying what other countries do, should work just fine much more reliably.
We can’t just adopt the laws from countries with good labor relations like Germany or Denmark and expect the culture to follow.
And yet they developed a working system involving unions out of it all. There's no reason why we can't, too.
-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Corn_Rebellion
This one on Blair mountain was big -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Veterans wanting to get paid in less than 20 years of waiting, so why not beat and shoot them? -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Just the history of union busting here -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...
Any government is going to violently suppress a revolution (or cease to exist immediately). The difference is that there wasn't even an attempt at a socialist revolution in US. The labor movement here was mostly focused on labor rights, not on the broader politics of class struggle. Radical socialists and communists within the movement were never numerous enough to organize a revolution.
This is due to a combination of lack of social safety net and lack of worker representation.
In the places where unions are noted for being "good", the government covers the social safety net and workers unions are given board seats as well as stock.
This keeps everybody's goals aligned.
For real. Unlike private sector unions, the people that the unions ares negotiating against are politicians, who have no real incentive to push back. "I'll grant your raises, you vote me back in, then I can grant more raises". The incentives are messed up.
You might want to do a bit more research into actual unions around the world rather than simply regurgitating propaganda.
Control over compensation and healthcare "stuff" (and, I'd argue, even days off) is just as important to the well-being of a workforce as worker safety, especially in a country with a relatively weak "social safety net".
How exactly does a union show that it is worth negotiating with as an equal without things that demonstrate its power, like strikes and bargaining hold-outs?
I'm not convinced. My brother's work has a warehouse. The warehouse unionized (a large push by two folks who are no longer there). Most of the warehouse workers are now making _less_ than they were before due to union dues. There are guys that my brother would love to promote and reward with better pay, but the union does not allow that. The union demands such-n-such, the business pushes back. The workers are in the middle and get shitall. This union (at least) exists to grow itself and for no other reason.
Now the "office personnel" are not allowed to talk anything union related with the "warehouse folks." It went from "us" to "us" and "them." The office people have to be careful on how they say anything or a union rep can file grievances. When you have to watch your behavior in fear of retribution, I'd say that is adversarial and I would say this happened due to the union.
Manager complains about unions. I’m absolutely stunned.
A lot of companies are not well run
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/867492/leading-swedish-n...
I worked with a software team once where the manager let the team divide up the raise pool. And they didn't divide it evenly. There was consensus about who deserved more each year. Of course that could still be a cultural value of working long hours or working when sick.
And there are many-fold more cases where managers and execs have ruthlessly driven companies into the ground for their own personal short term gain. That's unequivocally worse than workers trying to protect their livelihoods.
In general, when a company fails, the rank and file have to find new jobs. Executives, on the other hand, never have to work again. We observe this trend over and over again (unionized workforce or not).
Given this trend, which side is more likely to be the one that blows the whole thing up?
Company: that seem expensive we will shut down and move the capital to another town and try to hire people that will accept this state of affairs.
Company fails
Innocent bystander: how could the union be so evil!?
When businesses do it, we say "it's just business." Not when workers do, though.
Collective decision making and fiduciary duties are directly contrary to each other but unions are supposed to feature both. The way the circle is squared is that unions don’t in fact represent all their members’ interests, only those of 50% + 1.
If only! In reality, long-living unions create such a layered bureaucratic structure that they don't represent most workers in most matters anymore (case in point: unions in Italy, since decades ago when they were protected by law.)
Hint: it pays off both mortgages and bar tabs.
There can be multiple unions too, and inter-union conflict. Some of the unions are very right wing (hate gays and women basically) and have e.g. opposed paid maternity leave in a zero sum game approach.
...is this hard to believe? This happens all the time with unions. Professional sports unions fall for this all the time, most notably Major League Baseball and the National Football League. The former butchered their negotiations so bad in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that they screwed themselves out of hundreds of millions of dollars due to their own ineptitude and the latter settled a concussion lawsuit that didn't require ownership to admit that they negligently and criminally lied about the safety (or lack thereof) of union members at their job.
Unions regularly act against their own interests; rarely do they have legal/arbitration representation nearly as good as ownership, and this is only one factor that causes it. Oftentimes they have leadership that prioritizes the needs of the few (seniority) over the needs of the many, or are just outright corrupt.
If most of the workers are making less now, why would they vote to unionize? Before the union formed did workers get vacation and sick time, or were their unaddressed safety issues, or was management treating employees unfairly?
In the US it is a lot of work to convince people to form a union even when the benefits are clear. Companies will bring in professional union busters, force employees to watch anti union propaganda, many employers will illegally fire employees who are pro union, and they will threaten(illegally) to shut down the whole company if a union is formed.
You seem to be confusing the direction of time...
There are tons of little things like this that all add up to value that's just as good as money and that we take for granted by being in the tech world
Most companies operate on very thin margins, made up for by scale. Selling $300 hardware for $1000 is, fortunately, an exception rather than the rule. But what this means is that unions are not going to suddenly send major benefits towards employees, because the companies simply do not have the money for these benefits. Factor in the frequently unreasonably high union fees and unions are often going to be a negative overall outcome at many companies. For instance the united autoworkers union demands 30 hours of pay, or 1.44% (which is 30/2080) of your annual pay in dues per year. So in other words workers would need to see an extra 30 hours of pay or a ~1.5% raise, just to break even.
But many people don't consider economic realities when they believe they can get more stuff. If you had a national vote on enacting a $50/hour minimum wage you'd have tens of millions people vote for it even though it would lead not only to their direct unemployment, but also throwing the entire nation into complete chaos and crashing the US and world economies as well. For instance you regularly see things like employees trying to unionize at companies that are operating in the red. What exactly do they think is going to be the outcome there?
When you are minimum wage even 100 extra a year would have absolutely helped. I thinks it's fairly disengenous for any company to be raking in billions in profits while employees need public assistance to survive.
Yea, you can suddenly double your work forces wage, but you can still improve the situation.
Did they work for the union? Off to the next warehouse to liberate?
This is the case for most unions in Italy, for example, where their existence is protected by law. It's a very sad state of affairs.
Management is often guilty of this kind of thinking, too. It's not just unions.
Articles from the time paint a different picture. They claim it was mismanagement that caused the bankruptcy of the airline - not union intervention. See https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/20/us/eastern-airlines-broug..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/20713006?seq=1#metadata_info_ta... or https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&co...
Isn't this dream of every company to treat their workers as 'equal' interchangeable cogs. Union is co conspirator in this scheme, turn all workers into 'equals' of each other.
In that case, absent other constraints, one party usually has much less reason to accommodate than the other, as not hiring or continuing to employ one worker rarely would deeply impact the company, while the individual is looking at {continuing to commit, committing} a good portion of their available time, along with possibly relocating and however their income is derived, and so has much more to potentially lose by trying to receive even minor concessions.
(Footnote: Not all companies necessarily desire their employees be cogs, as some level of {competition,contention} can result in much better outcomes than any of the parties might have achieved on their own, but there is increasingly a sense that some portion of labor will be ever more readily automated with, indeed, fairly literal interchangeable parts, as well as the historical perception you describe, which can yield incredibly toxic cultures that don't care because they can, more or less, train more people whenever someone burns out or leaves because they find something better. )
You act like it can't be both.
As an organization unions have the same prime directive as every other organization, survive (and grow). One of the ways of a union to survive (and grow) is to demonstrate that it takes action and to be adversarial. So many unions tend to be adversarial. In Germany in the past especially smaller unions were highly adversarial to gain ground against larger unions in the same company ("grow").
Companies don't become more adversarial when they deal with a union - what happens is that the union shines some sunlight on any existing adversarial relationships.
When your boss asks you to work an extra hour without pay, and you tell him to pound sand, pointing at union rules, the union looks like a bad guy. Rolling over to his demands, because you lack union protection, is, for some reason, not considered 'adversarial.'
Unions level the playing field. Now, both sides have to negotiate from an even position - neither can do without the other.
Yes, they can. They can just close down the branch in question, and re-open two months later. Why do you think Wal-mart is so successful at union-busting?
Or, they could actually negotiate on an equal basis with the union.
> employees can get other employment
Collectively? For an employer that's big enough, this is not at all the case. Their industry may not be able to absorb them, individuals within the union may not be able to handle the interruption in pay, etc. This is also why striking is used as a last resort.
> The closest thing the employer has to "get other employees" is to shut down the workplace, possibly outsourcing to a different country.
Trying to find another job is very similar to what you've just described. You cut yourself off from your stream of income, and often have to relocate to a different city, or country, at great personal expense.
I forgot to mention that there is something deeply wrong with the presumption that employees (or their union) should be able to negotiate on an equal basis. They didn't risk their money to found the business. They don't own it, and shouldn't own it, because they didn't put up the funds to create it.
It doesn't belong to you. It's not yours. Do not perform a mugging.
Sure, employees want to negotiate from a position of equality or strength, but wanting something doesn't mean you deserve it or get it. To them we must say: find your own business idea and venture capital, and work hard for years with the possibility of losing everything.
Most businesses fail. Most of them fail quickly, causing painful losses. Nobody would bother if they didn't have a chance to get lots of money and power. We need people to bother, because this creates jobs.
A place like Boeing is really a government employer in disguise and has entirely different dynamics.
This is very much a cultural thing. A German union for example ensures that Workers get their fair share but understands that the company must be profitable and successful first - they know not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Whereas unions in the UK immediately try to destroy a company to prove a point about capitalism, union bosses are lavishly paid, and the Workers are mere pawns, in some cases even actively working against their members wishes. That’s why Germany has a strong auto industry and we do not.
Remember that Amazon thinks 5 years ahead, and they waited for the perfect PR and political threshold to announce these changes and capitalize on the news.
Walmart pays less because it has much lower profit margins. It serves far more customers and the average employee is a great deal less skilled. And it’s cheaper, with greater product choice. The average Walmart employee is definitely worse than the average Costco employee but Walmart is clearly the better business. It has higher gross profits, employs more people and serves more people.
So sure when it has a local monopoly it ends up with great margins, but in high competition areas the stores are far less profitable. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-people-spend-th...
>> Walmart [1]
Total Revenue (TR) = 500,343,000,000
Gross Profit (GP) = 373,396,000,000
Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~25%
>> Costco [2]
Total Revenue (TR) = 129,025,000,000
Gross Profit (GP) = 17,143,000,000
Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~13%
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/02/06/th...
> While Walmart’s gross margins are more than double those of Costco’s, an efficient model with significantly higher revenues per square foot ensure that Costco’s gross earnings for the same size of a store are higher than Walmart.
Huh? Is that a rule? So when a given corporation's GPM drops, they have to give their workers a pay cut?
In the very long run your pay will tend towards your productivity but ease of replacibility will also play a role among other things. Sculptors and aerospace engineers are both highly skilled but there are many more jobs for the second than the first so they get paid more.
In the long run it is almost a rule that if gpm drops wages will. Profits could also drop. The mix of compensation could change. They could keep wages the same but fire the least productive staff so the wage bill drops but the remaining workers do more work.
You will get to compare the UX if you walk into any Walmart store...
A checkout operator at Costco can be 2x as efficient as a checkout operator at Walmart while having a completely different customer UX (both the worker and the store itself) and being paid different wages. So what? Walmart and Costco serve different markets and sell different products so of course they will be differently run businesses.
Nothing about this is abnormal so I don't understand your comparison. They are not interchangeable other than looking at them as general retail companies.
But poor people still need food and various other necessities. I'm not convinced it's possible to pay high wages and also serve poor people.
Are we supposed to penalize Amazon for foresight?
If it benefits more people then what difference does it make as to why it was done?
This change has long-term repercussions in total current and future jobs offered, within Amazon, its competitors, and the wider labor market with govt influence. Is is not worth caring about such wide-reaching externalities of a $1 trillion company?
People always act like the sky is falling. Minimum wages were higher in terms of actual value many years ago and the world didn't end then and it won't end now.
Walmart and Amazon are prime examples of centralizing forces that slurp up wealth into urban areas and increase wealth inequality. Sure minimum wage goes up, but at the cost of more money leaving circulation in rural economies. It’s a non-trivial topic.
Why should I care about a dying small town in the rust belt?
Good. I hope they force their competitors to pay employees better wages.
Is that something you expect a 16 year old to know is going to happen?
Biomechanics is a complicated subject.
I worked on a farm throwing hay from 12-17. I ended up needing back surgery at 25.
It is hard to tell nowadays, with multiple people coming out and saying things like "millennials could afford houses if they didn't buy iPhones!"
We make rules about a lot of things to protect the collective good at the sacrifice of the individual. Workers are not free to decide that climbing a tall tower without a safety harness so as to go faster and complete more jobs for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to put their unprotected hands into fast-moving machinery so as to be more efficient and complete more piecework for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to inhale toxic gases, labor in buildings without sanitary facilities, or be worked non-stop until the worker passes out from exhaustion. (These are, of course, generalities but, again, we as a society have also decided that carve-outs can exist where required but these are the exceptions to the wide rule.)
I would also note that the person to whom you replied expressed a favorable opinion of the trade-off for health against money not being made. No rule or law was proposed. That, too, is part of what society does: we debate things in good faith, not with the assumption that an opinion is a dictate by fiat. These rules are generally considered acceptable and good. It is up to you, the person with the view opposed to the current situation, to express why you disagree instead of simply turning the question back on the person commenting.
Also the part where the cost burdens of bad health outcomes are generally socialized.
There's also the fact that if you are free to choose it, you could also be pressured to choose it. Like companies that give you the freedom to cash out your vacation instead of taking it. It'd be great because not all of us want to go on vacation every year.
But unless there's a mandatory minimum vacation, some employees will be pressured into literally never taking a vacation. Think of Japanese work culture. Top down work-life balance measures are completely ignored because they're not mandatory.
These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?
I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.
We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think this wouldn't happen to modern workers, go look at what goes on in Dubai and the UAE.
I find it very compelling to agree with you. But i also like to make my own decision, to negotiate. My ideal, at least. And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world. And I also think, its a two way street. I will not risk my life, and Amazon does not want dead people.
And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
Many confusing signals i receive.
Because people taking this up live in even worse conditions in some of the most abject poverty there is and they have no way to climb up the social ladder that doesn't involve saving some money with this kind of work even at the expense of their physical safety.
Good luck to them!
It's not about the type of labor or physical effort but the completely inhuman conditions. How the heck is that a contradiction?
My personal elders and seniors don't know the first thing about how to judge whether workplace chemicals would be harmful to me or not.
They're just other human beings, very fallible like myself.
As long at it seems decently run, I trust a government agency full of experts and reams of research over the elders and seniors I happen to know personally, who are generally totally lacking in both expertise and knowledge in most areas, any day.
What i mean is, in whatever workplace i worked so far, there were people telling me, what not to do. Surely playing around with me at first, but always keeping me away from dangers.
In the long run, well, i agree, that there are many things, that are not very obvious to me. Like office work, sitting in the chair all day, not moving, looking at screens all the time. But iam sure my boss does not mean no harm. He surely looks more at his phone than me on a screen. We get smarter over time, i hope.
The thing is, not everyone working at Amazon is a young, single person without any ties, who can afford to simply quit at a moment's notice and not worry about the risk of unemployment, or losing healthcare. So it's not a binary situation where if Amazon's employees are willing to work there, then clearly they must be willing to accept anything the company does because otherwise they would quit. For low income people, the cost of quitting can be significant, much more so if they have families to support.
Which is why regulations are necessary - because the relationship between employer and employee is not equal, as is often assumed in a perfectly ideal free market model. The ability of a company to coerce their employee due to holding arbitrary power over that employee's livelihood must be limited somehow, and there must be some means by which consequences can result for bad actors.
In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones. That's not a game most people can win alone against a billion dollar corporation.
The history of planet earth is full of bad actors in all kinds of markets, regulated or not. The animal kingdom is full of examples of deception. Seeking personal gain at the expense of others is a very deep feature of life.
Dubai is part of the UAE for what it’s worth but it would be impossible to treat workers like that in the US because (a) the US does not do slavery, or indentured servitude outside prisons (b) you can sue people in the US because you have the rule of law and a functioning legal system where everyone has equal rights. Before OSHA if a worker got injured at your place they they could sue you, so most places had insurance, which got more expensive if injuries happened. People also notice if a workplace is more dangerous. They demand higher pay to work there.
If you look at this economic history link you’ll see a reasonably consistent trend, not universal, of decreasing workplace deaths.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-workplace-safety-in-th...
Unpaid internships are a great way to gate off poor people from high-paying jobs. No matter how beneficial they are to the intern, if said intern can't afford rent and food while on your internship it's simply not an option for them. Unpaid internships have no place in a society that wants to consider itself a meritocracy because the primary qualification for an unpaid internship is not merit but a well-off family.
What you say is absolutely true but if unpaid internships are a problems journalism schools and other forms of credentialist gatekeeping are much worse.
If the choice existed would you rather go to Columbia Journalism School it spend two years working for the New York Post unpaid? Wouldn’t you get more and more valuable experience as a dogsbody for a fashion photographer than doing a degree in photography?
Credentialism is bad for the sane reason unpaid internships are bad but does vastly more damage to oppprtunity.
Given the evidence, OSHA looks dumb and useless.
If you’ve ever worked in an environment with those sorts of incentives, it’s immediately obvious that they are loosely related to productivity and turn into tools of favoritism and control.
Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They no doubt concluded that just focusing on objective, easily controlled measurements like hours ultimately made more sense. The workers themselves are disposable anyway.
Besides, the workers now have more guaranteed income that can be invested in Amazon stock! They gain the freedom of dollar cost averaging.
Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.
For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?
Most people would take the guaranteed pay raise over the non-guaranteed bonus or profit sharing/stock awards. Let people decide what to do with their money, 'benefits' largely benefit the company not always all individuals.
The problem is real pay/share of GDP to persons has gone down consistently [1] while 'real compensation' [2] has supposedly gone up and supposedly makes up over 30% of everyone's pay on average, that includes bonuses, healthcare, other benefits that most people don't see or use regularly. Even real compensation is dwindling. [3]
As an example of increasing wages over benefits, I'd rather people got paid and then purchased healthcare for instance on their own as it would be a more consumer, rather than employer, focused market.
Raises should be given on the regular and the base way to reward value creating employees, not some might be bonus or stock award tied to the company instead. A bonus oro profit sharing on top of increasing wages is still ok but not in spite of it. What if the employee wants to buy other stock, pay them so they can. Give raises, quit with the 'real compensation' gains that don't put actual money in your accounts, people would always take actual money over benefits.
The velocity of money (domestic money that changes hands) has also fallen off a cliff [4] because pay to persons/raises have been efficiently worked out of the system in favor of 'real compensation' which does not get money in accounts consumers can spend.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
I'd probably prefer something more like a logical inverse of that - baseline guaranteed coverage for everyone by a government agency, and then if necessary private providers can wrestle over offering various incentives to use them beyond the guaranteed coverage. (Not that I have an incredible amount of faith in most governments acting efficiently, but they almost always have a better record than for-profit agencies, and I'd prefer to avoid a government mandate of a non-government agency.)
(I'm not going near the convoluted structure of compensation types because I don't think I'm informed enough.)
I did read Amazon's claim in the article that the increase outweighs the decrease. But I would like to see a journalist confirm that and also report on how big the difference is and whether it affects certain types of workers differently than others.
They gained a pay rise, but lose a yearly share (£1,500 or $1,950), and another share every five years.
So Amazon did the logical thing. It increased the hourly wage, removed a highly unappreciated and misunderstood form of salary and simplified the compensation scheme so it could actually rebalance this value into a more predictable, easy to understand and liquid compensation. This should help anyone that felt exploited and of-course is going to piss off the people who actually understood the variable portion of their compensation and the ones who were already above the 15 USD mark.
I don't think what were people expecting? Hourly wage raise + stock + bonuses? I mean I don't want to sound like a capitalist pig, but that doesn't make sense, especially when we are talking about this kind of job. People deserve livable wages but also they deserve to get recognized economically when they pursue advanced studies and put the effort to get into jobs that require more specialized skills.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...
In my experience corruption sinks in on both sides when people can get away with putting in place policies to protect the status quo. When there are multiple options, and the same antitrust policies that are in place to prevent collusion between employers are also enforced to prevent “unionization of unions,” I believe that is when the individual worker actually wins.
The results differ by sector. In some cases, this plurality allowed for classic “divide & rule” strategies from management; in others, it produced chaos because each union can (and will) call for strikes at different times with little or no coordination, or refuse to agree on deals that everyone else has accepted.
The best outcomes have been consistently obtained in companies and sectors where the plurality was reduced to one or two dominant unions. Some competition is good, but it significantly increases complexity in all related processes.
You have a single employer on one side, you need a single union on the other side to make negotiations fair, otherwise they just would just low ball each other to get more jobs.
The history of labor activism shows that workers only get big gains when they work together.
Unions were largely a victim of their own success, though — once a lot of their gains were codified into laws and regulations there wasn’t as much to fight for.
Of course, if the triopoly was enforced by statute, then a corrupt member could act with impunity knowing that it cannot loose too much of its power.
> Strikes have been used to resolve labor disputes, but if your goal is long term and meanful improvement to working conditions and remuneration, then the only times unions have ever achieved that is by restricting access to the profession.
Collective bargaining is how unions achieve long term and meaningful improvement to working conditions and renumeration.
> Salaries are determined by market forces, political influence will never be able to exert much pressure on the equilibrium.
This is just demonstrably untrue -- we've been in a bull market for almost a decade. Worker pay -- in contrast to company profits -- hasn't even kept up with inflation. Something is missing.
> The only time unions have truly succeeded in this is by limiting labor supply over the long term.
Do you have any citations for this? Any data?
Agree with the idea, but in pracice every employee can just pack their baga and go to another other company. If enough employees do that, then companies sooner or later have to change, or remain with the worst of the workforce. There is monopoly on employment.
Maybe you don't live in America, or maybe you grew up with lots of privilege, but in reality, not a lot of people can do this. If you pack your bags and leave, you need to have some way to feed yourself, clothe yourself, and get health care, which is most likely provided by your employer.
The people who have the least ability to do these things without a job are also the ones who are most exploited.
Of course, universal health care and a universal income would solve these problems...
Couldn't you say the same about corporations?
I love how this argument gets applied to unions but not to companies. Many companies have killed themselves through greed and short-term thinking, yet you are not arguing that something is wrong with corporate structure.
Ultimately every human organization is prone to screwing up - unions are not at all unique here - but in the US unions often get singled out as a boogey man that hurts the economy.
Corporations can sink themselves because they are granted self-determination. That's sort of fundamental, sans bailouts.
That said, I would be happy if we could tweak incentives to shift focus away from short term returns towards long term. Companies are not perfect either, and my omission was not meant to imply they were.
It's not necessarily a big deal. The workers can just go and get another job. It's the owners who are really crying.
It's not especially perverse for unions to be indifferent to the risk of sinking the company if the people they represent hold no stake in it.
Especially since the threats that this will happen from the owners will be overblown.
I guess it's like that "fairness experiment" where monkeys would rather deprive the other side of 8 berries than take 2.
If that were true, we wouldn't need unions in the first place.
The company going out of business is a problem for the employees and is obviously a risk, it's just not a big and existential risk like it is for the owners.
"So how do you create a CEO and Board that has the right amount of power? When CEO's and Boards are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure".
I'd argue that a CEO running a company into the ground for their own selfish, short term gains is far worse than a union ruining a company, because at least when the latter occurs it's because a significant amount of the employees aren't being sufficiently paid, or are being subject to unsafe/inadequate conditions. That is far more important than a CEO getting a bonus.
How many times has this actually happened, and were they even the root cause or would the company have failed for some other reason anyway?
The TL;DR for the UK is they lose over half the pay rise from losing the bonuses.
They got one share, worth £1,500 or $1,960 after every year, and an additional share once every five years. That can be tax-free if held for 2 years.
They also lose the possibility of cash bonuses for meeting targets.
Otherwise, a separation before the first anniversary (presumably a certainty for seasonal workers) results in losing none of the raise, at just shy of the second anniversary only one quarter of the raise.
Half the raise is an upper bound, and we'd have to know at least the average tenure of a warehouse employee to guess how much an average worker loses.
You mean you can pay only cap gains if you hold it versus income tax?