Amazon Workers to Stage Coordinated Black Friday Protests in 15 Countries
vice.com
vice.com
Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... 40 years is a long time, considering the "pendulum" took a long time getting to 1980. I'm not sure what from past experience transposes to the present and how. The world is very different.
What does an amazon union even look like? How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
I feel like most discussions fall into generic "for" and "against" union points. Realistically, unionisations is a wide space. Sports league unions. Newspaper Guilds. Germany's DGB. America's Teamsters. Teachers unions... all very different, and different in different eras.
What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
> What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]:
"""Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks."""
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...
The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this.
Here’s the most recent instance:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...
San Fra public employee payroll takes the cake.
Average compensations (total headcount)
Nurse $293,000 (1471) Firefighter $192,000 (902) Police officer 3 $216,500 (821) Sergeant 3 $265,188 (500) EMT/Paramedic $194,344 (419)
"A fire prevention lieutenant made $415,111 – more than double their $184,791 base salary with a whopping $230,320 in overtime"
I'm all for competitive pay, but this is clearly out of whack.
Recall the Spanish airtraffic controller strike of 2010. On average, they were making $400k/year with some double that, yet had the balls to go on strike. Federal gov't and military stepped in and took over, ending the gravy train.
I wonder when the tipping is point is going to come for the U.S.
With that said I'm always skeptical of these numbers - you don't exactly see SFPD officers vacationing in Marakesh and flying first class, but that's typical for stripe new grads.
Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.
In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.
Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.
The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.
Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.
Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.
For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).
Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.
> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.
Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.
> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.
Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.
> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up
Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.
That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.
> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.
In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.
You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.
> That may be true for base salaries,
That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.
> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.
It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.
> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse
No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.
This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.
Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.
French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)
We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.
Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you.
When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.
One of my first jobs was working part-time in a grocery store: collecting shopping carts, "clean up in aisle 7", stocking shelves, etc. I was 16 and forced to pay dues to a union. The dues were deducted from my minimum-wage paycheck. I had NO opt-out option. I worked maybe 10 hours per week? I was a high school student. I got ZERO benefit by paying union dues. This extortion was corruption in itself, nevermind the executive-level corruption that makes headlines every few years.
The most famous example is Jimmy Hoffa, whose story has been made into films... including one in 1992 with Jack Nicholson.
“ Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials.”
One example of many.
> This sort of thing happens in private corporations
Private corporations have a mission to make money. Unions have a completely different mission.
Private corporations also have a pretty consistent thread of corruption, a similar example to the one you gave being HSBC laundering money for drug cartels. Again, pretty comparable.
This isn't to say corruption in unions hasn't been part of why they've declined, its almost definitely part of it. While a corrupt corporate leader generally creates more money for its stockholders a corrupt union rep often costs the rank-and-file members which can greatly sour their opinions of unions as a whole. But there's nothing inherent to unions with regard to corruption, people in power often take advantage of their position no matter what type of structure they have that power in, and the point that it appears, at least to some people, that unions are held to a different standard than other types of organizations is worthy of being discussed.
However, after that corruption was cleared up and the pensions moved to Goldman and Northern Trust, the funds were destroyed and benefits to retireeswere deeply cut.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-teamsters-pension-...
I had to keep pausing and checking if something was real as I couldn't believe how bad things got
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-willi...
This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.
The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.
I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?
Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.
Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?
If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.
Normally, you negotiate your contract because your company wants you, and finding someone else that would agree to the contract is a non-trivial amount of effort, so they'll hear you out. In these people's cases, all they'd hear is "lol, no" if they tried to negotiate individually, because they'd have virtually no power. As a result they're trying to find leverage in numbers: We want the freedom to negotiate all our contracts to our advantage, otherwise we're striking.
Allow me to put things differently: There is no law that says that Amazon must accept whatever terms are put forth by these unions. Amazon can, if they wish, outright refuse their terms and tell them that the contract is as-is and will not be altered.
While I'm not saying this is your case, I am puzzled at people who argue against unions with your last line, because it really does cut both ways. "If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it". Well, a union is a form of negotiating said contract, and to the companies being proposed those terms: "If you are unhappy with the terms, don't sign it". Makes sense, right?
There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts.
> How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms?
They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread.
>What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.
In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here.
Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.
In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.
Not really. If every Amazon warehouse organized, you would still need Walmart, Target, etc warehouse workers to organize to achieve something comparable. And in the U.S., they still wouldn’t have the same bargaining power because solidarity strikes and similar tactics are illegal. But I agree that labor laws are not deterministic, as the teacher strikes in red states have recently demonstrated.
We’ll also have to see what extent states will further block organizing activities if this starts gaining traction in places like Alabama. Given things like the extremely violent police response to protests, I’d wager “pretty far.”
Not gonna look up the actual figures, but safe to assume that amazon US is bigger than all retail (certainly online retail) in the netherlands, belgium or whatnot.
But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.
In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.
Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage.
My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks.
Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.
One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions.
Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living.
Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers.
There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.
They basically are. They negotiate the minimum benefits the company can offer for a particular set of workers, which includes benefits and salary, ie. total wages.
> One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization.
True, but it is hastened by unionization. Automation always has a cost involved. Sometimes it's worth the cost, and sometimes it's not based on the cost of the human labor that is being replaced. If the cost of the human labor goes up for any reason (such as unionization) then the cost of automation looks more attractive.
True in a technical sense, but misses the point. Sure, there's technically a price point at which automation is "worth it." If labour costs more, demand for labour is lower. That might be because of automation, or any of many ways that demand reacts to price: efficiency, decreased production, increased capital expenditure, outsourcing, whatever.
So really, the true generality is not that "the biggest thing working against unionization is automation." The biggest thing working against labour is wages. Higher wages, less demand for labour. This is also true about anything, not just labour and it's somewhat banal. If cornflakes or netflix cost more, people will buy less. That doesn't mean you always have to price to lose money as a business. Same for labour/unions.
In any case, the bigger point is that if some job is almost "worth automating" at minimum, market or union wage... That's not worth defending. It will probably be automated soon anyway, and there's little to gain by defending it.
>> Unions are about minimum wages.
This is very far from true. For one thing, most people don't earn minimum wage. Most union workers don't. No one wants to. In fact, neglecting the lowest rungs is a habitual mistake of unions.
Starting from the premise that unions are about minimum wages misses most of why the current amazon stuff is even interesting. Depending on what kind of union(s) they form (getting back to my original point) unionisation could mean a pretty wide range of outcomes. Amazon has a big pay scale. There's nothing to say that unionisation means nothing for those at the $200k point on that scale.
The basic premise of an amazon union is (1) amazon is very profitable (2) Negotiation power/leverage is always relative to the size of the pie. A union is what you negotiate with, profit is what you negotiate for.
Bluntly, amazon have $100bn in profits and 1 million employees = $100k per employee. Rarely has a plumper prize been seen on the horizon.
Therefore they have now negotiated the minimum wage for an actor. It's still higher than the legal minimum wage, but it's still a minimum wage. The studio would pay less if they could.
That's what unions are all about. Setting the minimum compensation for a particular worker.
Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees.
I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.
Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more.
That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.
I hope we can avoid massacres this time.
Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...
And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...
It's not like Amazon or others are forcing workers to take these jobs. This is voluntary, inevitable, equilibrium supply and demand of labor -- where willing labor is in great surplus lately compared to what was a previously stable pool of middle class jobs seeking employable bodies, leading to a very weak bargaining position. The floodgates of global labor competition were opened with a lot of underdeveloped countries' peoples willing to take up jobs at low (but high for them) pay, and that has rippled through every developed country's labor economy.
Until there is a relative shortage of willing workers, the situation will not change hugely I fear. (Aside from pockets of shortage due to education, credentials, monopolies of labor, other barriers to entry, etc)
And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself.
But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
Instead, profits take a hammering and some businesses get replaced by others with no overall reduction in employment.
If you analyze who lobbies for minimum wage hikes (labor groups) and who protests them (business) it ought to be plain as day who really gets hurt and who benefits from the narrative of "wed only hurt workers by paying them more".
The hidden assumption is that lower-paid positions are less important. They aren't. There are many minimum wage positions that are more important than higher wage positions.
They're not lower paid because they're less important, they're lower paid because they're more replaceable.
So, when you force the employer to choose between not having a janitor, or paying 3.5$ more per hour, they will certainly decide to pay 3.5$ more per hour.
Assuming that there is profit, which is a good assumption as the average surplus value rate is of around 5-7%, then what will happen is that profit will decrease, and employment will stay more or less the same.
It's very important to realize that the market values replaceability, not importance.
Maybe they end up with 60-80% of the janitorial coverage that they had before.
One way is to try to orient your economy around more high-value jobs, with a generous safety net for those who can't reach it. It's a very difficult question
But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
> Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
Labor costs in the US are higher than in China, so this should and has happened anyway. You think it would happen to a larger degree and it could be correct. But it is a restricted perspective aside from the fact that not every work can just be outsourced to low wage countries.
it's not like lowering the minimum wage would change this much - if the cost of living is an order of magnitude lower in a third-world country, the labour costs are going to be an order of magnitude lower too
A first start would be to stop subsidizing the transportation costs through the US Navy and oil subsidies/tax breaks
But maybe I'm mistaken.
Couldn't tell you. Never heard of that study. It sounds like one study among so many that all indicate the same.
Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
People DO send work offshore for that reason, and you know it. Why so childish? Why such pointless passive aggression? Why come out with that kind of nonsense bullshit? Grow up and have an adult conversation.
So the notion that raising minimum wages doesn't affect employment just doesn't hold water unless you study it in a very isolated environment, where the effects of it get washed out by the larger absorptive capacity of the broader labor market.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to prove that those two facts are related than just saying them.
Perhaps you mean that the very lowest paid jobs are those that are outsourced? Are you talking about very low-wage factory jobs, such that people in China may be paid a few dollars an hour where the same in the US would be many dollars an hour? Or are you talking about IT outsourcing, which happens at values much higher than minimum wage?
If I have to guess your arguments and make them for you, then I don't really need you in this conversation at all, I suppose.
Overall unemployment isn't worse historically. Not sure why you cherry-pick youth as if it invalidates the overall stat somehow. But even that stat isn't worse historically.
What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs?
Do we really want to race towards another Dickensian society?
Being able to eat. "Breadcrumbs" for you or me might not be worth it, but for someone else it could be the difference between buying food that the supermarket or stealing ketchup packets from a fast food store.
I recommend rereading “The Grapes of Wrath”, to get a taste of what poverty in this country had actually looked like, and what it actually was like to not be able to afford food. Then compare that with what currently passes as “poverty”: you get much more than that already on SNAP benefits.
I am very sympathetic to people in poverty, having grown up in it. However, let’s not pretend that poverty in today’s America is about “affording food”: everyone, no matter how poor, is able to afford food, and poverty today is less about the hunger, and more about the lifestyle you can or are forced to carry out.
I suspect but cannot prove; a lot of elasticity. Those graphs showing productivity and wages decoupling; all that wealth is going somewhere. It's going to rich people. As you suggest, we could "just" (ha!) change where it goes; instead of to rich people, to workers.
Imagine someone today capable of creating $1 of variable gross profit for their employer every 5 minutes before they were paid. Under a free labor market or a $10/hour minimum wage, that employee has stable and good employment prospects. Make the minimum wage $15/hour and change nothing else and that employee is on shakier ground. Either they must hope that their employer doesn’t know their individual productivity (likely somewhat true), that there is so much money being generated elsewhere that the company doesn’t care if they lose some here, that their job is practically required structurally (no one will close their shop from 10-12 and 2-4 just because the foot traffic drops off and those hours lose some money), or that their employer feels charitable but wants to dress that charity up in work clothes.
Total wages have some elasticity. I have to believe it’s not generally beyond what is advantageous to the employer and their customers (who are paying all the wages ultimately).
I’m not saying companies will invest right up to break even, but that they will attempt to avoid going beyond that point.
No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered.
There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.
If you assume that the market clearing price for non-minimum wage labor is set, as all market prices are set, by the interaction of a supply and demand curve, then it becomes clearer that there’s no mechanism by which the redistribution from one worker to another would happen.
The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this.
You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years.
> I’ve never even heard of a union closing
They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.
A tactic of union busters is to seed such strive and there are countless approaches to that. For example, if a group A forms a union against working conditions at X, X makes concessions to a subset A' of A by highlighting arbitrary differences. This can result in conflict between A and A'. If A and A' cannot reconciliate, X wins. The standard divide and conquer tactic.
You can pick your example yourself, but race, sex, age, nationality, religion are prime examples of arbitrary differences not relevant to the topic or goals that brought a group together in the first place.
We evaluate public political discourse differently and I am not saying I am correct about it, but I do think that "identity politics" has caused massive rifts between political camps formerly working together.
I don't have or want to produce formal evidence because it would just be counterproductive against my political position, but I think the picture is more clear than blurry.
I have no idea how producing formal evidence can ever be counterproductive to your political position. That statement does not make sense to me.
The rest of the group would feel put aside and would direct their anger towards the preferred group. That is a basic "flaw" in human psychology. Being called names by a friend hurts more than from a bystander and the same effect is abused here to direct anger from the former target to your own group.
> I have no idea how producing formal evidence can ever be counterproductive to your political position.
I presented it as I see it. I think unions can be very important and it is in my interest that people don't mangle themselves on superficial differences. That happens a lot lately. I am no tycoon to likes union busting.
Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
It is also essentially impossible to be paid less than ≈$22k (minimum wage of 18 473 € annually [1] at current exchange rates). Collective bargaining helps those who'd have a hard time bargaining individually, not top earners for whom frequent international travel appears perfectly affordable. (40% of Americans have never left the country, apparently. [2])
[1] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2300#t...
[2] https://yourmileagemayvary.net/2020/11/07/survey-percentage-...
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there is no universe where an American worker could do the reverse (fly to Paris for two weeks to enjoy themselves, without needing to plan it for years).
The point is, the basement standard of life in France is not close to the basement standards of the US.
These are well known features of a rigid unionized labor laws.
What is the point of having an advanced economy if you don't use it to make people's lives easier, fix poverty, and provide decent public services and pleasant public spaces?
1/3 are illegal immigrants. Those folks would be excluded from the universal healthcare system of nearly every EU country. France and Spain are the exceptions, but France is under a lot of pressure to scrap that.
1/3 are eligible for Medicaid but haven’t signed up.
1/3 can afford Obamacare premiums but choose not to buy insurance. The Obamacare premiums are capped at 9.5% of income. That’s about the same as the employee-side healthcare tax would be in France or other countries with universal healthcare.
That country is going to end up in debt.
Does that include all of the people who live in states that haven't expanded Medicare?
1. It's dependent on employment.
2. It comes with various forms of limits, out of pocket payments, and other caveats.
3. It comes with a profit motive for the insurance company to decline coverage.
etc
So fundamentally, "Am I under the threat of financial ruin if I were to get ill?" is still very much alive even with health insurance.
Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow".
As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified.
The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high.
If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity.
So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax?
I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing).
It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere.
[1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies.
[2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.
The lowering of working hours and new paid leaves in 1936 where enacted by the newly elected left-wing government. The lowering of working hours to 35h per week in France was also voted by a left-leaning government.
Healthcare systems in France and the UK were also setup by left-leaning governments.
Collective action may work within a single company but if your after general social measures then the action is to be taken at the polling station.
In France unions in private companies are very weak these days, and overall the protections and rights of employees are extensive so people no longer have strong needs for this, anyway.
The key point is that in a democratic country things happen if the majority wants it and votes accordingly.
Note that in Sweden unions aren't company specific so there is no way to prevent people from joining one.
Arguing about the legality is a harmful modern fetish that especially in contexts such as these does not help us move along.
Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
Corporations bargain collectively automatically, because they're already collectives. This is especially true in the case of enormous corporations with many thousands of employees.
When someone is getting hired by Amazon, it's literally a million versus one. That's a lot of leverage to bring to a negotiation, so it makes sense that a union would be necessary to even the odds for unskilled labor.
One of the greatest PR successes of the modern era has been the effort to convince the masses that an unacceptable relationship between labor and the owners of capital is inevitable.
It is not. As should be no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of history the inherent tension between these two groups has formed the basis for nearly all political competition.
When confronted with an example of that conflict persisting, such as today’s labor action described in the article, it’s not particularly good analysis to assume away the basic premise of what’s happening in step one.
The root cause is consumers will purchase from the sellers that offers the lowest price, and so the sellers that drives down labor costs to offer the lowest price will survive.
People will also show up and harvest your crops and sell your daughters into slavery without government intervention. The fact that a lot of people want to do something and will do so without the government stopping them doesn’t prove the inevitability of that thing happening.
This concerns me but I still haven't seen any evidence that Amazon warehouse workers are treated differently to any other unskilled manual labor. Is Amazon different because its super successful right now? Or because it uses tech to make people work harder.
I quit after 6 weeks and reported him to their HQ who did nothing at all. Eventually his pride and joy Mitsubishi Legnum was mysteriously rolled onto its roof writing it off.
For the record, and the benefit of everyone else reading this who might be too young or naive to know what to do, when your boss commits an actual felony (extortion) on you, you do not "report to their HQ". You go straight to the police.
When was "back then"? 1902? These are vaguely 'Jungle'-esque scenarios you're describing.
Another fine example was my cousin who apprehended someone stealing post from some flats. Eventually he had to let the guy go because he was too tired to maintain an advantage after the police failed to come out when a resident called them.
From what I've read negative instances are isolated to specific managers which isn't really different from any other job and doesn't make for a systematic abuse of employees.
If I was an unskilled worker Amazon seems like a pretty good bet.
That's not bias that's a somewhat informed opinion and a conscious decision. I suppose I could go talk to people as a further step, but frankly I don't care that much and that's what journalism is supposed to be for.
That's not to say I don't have bias, just that it's not some magical word you can say to make someone's statement irrelevant or that in this context you were even correct.
You picked a single piece of the narrative, the pay and its relation to the minimum wage. And pretty much ignored the rest of the narrative. This is the bias I was talking about. The information exists, but you seemed to pick the part of the information that coincide with your POV, this is called bias. Bias is normal and benign. calling out the bias is not meant to dismiss your opinion, it's meant to maybe cause you to be aware of it.
When someone shows me how I ignore facts because of my biases, I might feel uncomfortable, but I'm happy for that to happen. For me, this is the best kind of dialog.
That fact that you're trying to position this as you showing me the error of my ways when, no, in actuality I've considered the angles and still very much disagree with those positions says a lot more about you than it does me. I'm against unions, pro corporate in many cases and think Amazon goes above what they even have to.
I find this interaction pretty representative of the problems in online discourse. Namely that because I hold a widely different position to you, you assume I must not have considered multiple sources or am letting my biases talk for me. I assure you I'm pretty well considered in everything I write.
Please take your "virtue" elsewhere.
Edit: In fact thinking more about it I think your assumption even violates one of the guidelines here on HN which is to hold your opponent's thoughts in the most charitable light. That is it's on you to assume that I have put the thought in and considered multiple narratives instead of me being intellectually lazy.
I hope that I have made you happily uncomfortable.
Diamond mines in the Congo seem like a genuinely bad place to work, but that has no relevance to whether Amazon is mistreating its workers.
At most, they are singling out their Fulfillment Center to be the first trials but the automation is coming regardless of the strikes.
Imagine being able to run a warehouse in total darkness, with no heating or ventilation. The cost savings from things like having toilets and a canteen could be worth a bit too. You could also expand into the car park and use up most of that since you already own the land.
It's too good an opportunity to pass up I reckon (from an Amazon perspective anyway!)
The parking lot size is likely determined by mandatory minimums too, so there's not as much gain there either
The saying is "a rising tide lifts all boats" but at this point it seems that only a select few are granted boats.
Also, the person in charge owns equity that when multiplied by the most recent share sale price equals a valuation that might be the biggest number in the world for a publicly traded company. But that isn’t the same as money, and if it were to be liquidated, the share price would not be worth nearly as much, which it partly is because Bezos owns much of it.
And if you were to increase the supply of Bezos’ shares and sell them all in the open market, then the price would probably drop because the supply of shares for sale is greatly increasing, and because Bezos may not have the same motivations.
I don't actually care about Amazon's stock value. I care that Amazon does not pay its workers enough to have a reasonable standard of living. If it's to be a bridge job to something better, the argument usually made for why retail/fast food pays poorly, they should make enough to actually do that.
They do not.
The reason retail/fast food pay poorly is because there’s a lot of supply for people willing to do retail/fast food compared to the demand. And also because people aren’t going to pay $50 for some French fries, at that point they would start making food themselves, but that’s the same as “insufficient demand to pay someone enough that it would cause $50 French fries”.
I don’t see the purpose of a moral argument when it’s a fact retail businesses earn low single digit profit margins. Walmart can’t pay more even if it wanted to, they would have to raise their prices and then people shop at Target. It looks like it makes a lot of money, but to doesn’t split over all of its employees, and same with every other large retail operation. There’s a couple large ones serving the upper middle class market like Costco and Apple and Nordstrom and Trader Joe’s that might pay a little more, but they are unique and it wouldn’t scale for the whole population.
Here’s another example. Two people buy some land, and build two different hotels. Person A pays labor near to as low as people are willing to accept, and Person B pays more. Let’s say person A pays $15 per hour and person B pays $25 per hour. 10 years later, it’s renovation time. Person A has saved more money for renovations so they can make their hotel nicer than person B. Now, customers will prefer to pay person A more than person B, and they will be able to earn more revenue.
Now person A has more capital to purchase land. They can get bigger loans because their operating income is higher, afford to pay for more land in a more prime location, and build a new hotel. They can expand and take more market share from person B. You can see where the is is going.
Therefore, I don’t see the purpose of discussing the moral imperative for a single business to pay a material amount above market price. Consumers will, by and large, not reward the morally correct businesses. They might pay a $60 premium to Costco, but that’s about it.
So the supermarkets could easily also collaborate to maintain minimum prices on retail goods, and pay their staff more, etc. It suits them to cry "but competition!", but the competition is optional.
I don’t know the specifics of the dairy situation you are referring to, but all the information from financial reports I’ve read indicate that retail businesses don’t have much pricing power. Hence why you don’t get rich buying stock in grocery stores, but rather high margin businesses like tech companies.
In Australia, there's basically a cartel of 2 supermarket chains (Coles and Woolworths) and they control all retail pricing of groceries.
https://www.farmdrop.com/blog/how-supermarkets-ruined-dairy/
In the UK there are more players, but the game is essentially the same.
Price-fixing by colluding with the competition is illegal in both countries, but regulation is effectively powerless. The supermarkets are both politically connected, and in a position to cause voters pain.
The position might be different in the USA, I don't know. I would suspect not - this article suggests that Walmart has considerable pricing power: https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-low-price-strategy-t...
Meaning if Walmart tried to use their pricing “power” to increase prices more than a couple percent and earn more net income, shoppers would go elsewhere.
I think you're underestimating Walmart's market share.
But what you've described is that it's not a fiscal imperative. That's why it is a moral imperative - it's the right thing to do for your employees.
Mind you, the Henry Fords of the world would say your business does better when everyone pays their employees more because they can afford more hotel trips, and the results of Ford raising his wages shows a very different result from what you've described.
Henry Ford wasn’t making a commodity product at the time he offered those wages. Since then, automakers have dropped pay and payroll, see the myriad economically depressed towns where’s work moved to Mexico or southern states.
Jeff Bezos finds $1 billion every year to pour into Blue Origin. He said in an interview that he couldn't think of anything to do with his money other than rockets. I assume this is from his scheduled stock sales, but it's liquid nonetheless and Amazon's stock price survives.
1 billion a year split over his ~650k employees is about $1500 a year. This would be a life-changing amount for a lot of those employees. I made big changes on less and set the stage for even more. Amazon has so captured the market that most of it would come back to him anyway, but it ensures some of it flows through the bottom. And it would get people off his ass about it. Win-win.
The point is the solution is legislation affecting all businesses. It’s a waste of resources to focus on individual businesses.
Also, I’m not sure which market Amazon has captured. A quick search shows share of online retail revenue at 25% to 35%, and only 6% of all retail. If Amazon ceased operations today, it would be trivial to switch to Walmart/Target/Bestbuy/Costco/Alibaba/eBay/Home Depot/Lowes. Shipping times might suffer for a little bit while the logistics get reallocated, but there’s no moat around Amazon’s retail website or warehouses.
Americans have just received $1200-$2400 in coronavirus stimulus checks, and so we can look at the outcomes and see if it changed their lives. As it happened, it mostly went to reduce debt and into savings. Helpful, but not life changing.
I won't buy from Walmart.com for 5 cents cheaper.
Don't speak for me, please.
White-collars are traditionally less likely to fight only because they tend to enjoy better mobility and have better incentives to stay silent (even if they don't maximize their earning potential, their social standing typically compensates). If you mistreat them enough, they will react like anyone else.
The last time I checked, their website looked very counter intuitive and also down right ugly. Many products are seemingly garbage or counterfeit, the review system is bad and the workers and sellers are not treated well or properly respected... and I could go on.
I don't want to lecture anyone about ethics, but it's astonishing how little personal responsibility anyone takes when it comes to using services from such a company. Doing business with them is just completely off-putting to me.
Near-universal breadth of products
Typically decent prices on products
Generous return policy with free return shipping
Fast shipping (not so much anymore)
The combination of these means that buying from Amazon is largely a low-friction experience. Even though the website is horrible to navigate, you can order most of what you need on one site without searching for deals or coupons. Even though the site is filled with knock-offs and fake products, they ship quickly and are free to return, so there's little risk.
People (myself included, though I'm trying to do more of my purchasing locally or on other sites) get suckered in by the convenience and then don't have enough reason to switch to other stores, despite the overall subpar experience.
People I talk actually want to work for Amazon. The pay is great! Granted, these are software developers.
Where can I see data on the wages and perks of warehouse workers? I would like to see how they are treated by Amazon and non-Amazon.
Can someone explain how amazon did well because of state intervention in local health? I don’t see the connection.
Intervention--> more online shopping.
Is it made of and/or packaged in plastic? Each dollar you spent is a vote for more oil extraction.
Does it include paper and cardboard? You just voted for deforestation.
Are you buying non-organic food? You just submitted X votes for more pesticide use.
Are you buying mass-produced "organic" food? You just voted for more land use and "alternative" pesticides.
It's not an easy thought to face, and many turn away from it and criticize the messenger. But you must face it if you want to call yourself a conscious, aware being.
We can't stop buying things altogether in today's world, but thinking and considering each purchase is achievable.
This is pretty much false because trees for paper production are actually farmed in the developed world, and much of the deforestation is actually driven by land use conversion (eg. burning down the amazon rainforest for cattle grazing, or burning down the jungles of south east asia for palm plantations).
Are you buying organic vegetables? You just voted for 80% more land use, 50% more emissions, more water, labour etc. And endogenous pesticides in your food which can't be washed off.
Most paper and cardboard is produced from managed forests, where the harvested trees make room for more trees, the forest isn't destroyed.
Unless you buy your stuff in a specialized store e.g. a zero packaging store. Even when you buy stuff in a normal store, if it says 100% recycling paper and has a high price tag, you can assume it doesn't involve deforestation and probably not everybody in the supply chain has been screwed over.
I won't argue that everyone has to buy all things in specialized organic stores because the effort would be unreasonable. But everyone with a high salary should have a bias towards things with the higher price tags from relatable brands/producers.
This is why I think companies should completely disassociate from service providers, via gig-economy type arrangements that limit their engagement with any one employee.
As soon as they make someone an employee, there is a major risk that that person will adopt a whole bunch of baggage from a couple of centuries of labor movement lore, that convinces them that they are an integral part of that company and entitled to more than just what the mutually agreed employment contract cedes to them.