Amazon's anti-union site for its Alabama warehouse
doitwithoutdues.com
doitwithoutdues.com
Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I don’t believe unions are universally perfect. When they’re well run and union members participate and have a voice, they can be quite amazing. My partner’s union makes my cosy software job seem like it’s missing something. Sure she pays huge dues, but she’s also given protections and benefits I couldn’t even dream of.
I net about 4x as much as her on paper, but if you figured in the cumulative value of her union agreement, it would be much more than her dues. Collective bargaining is no joke. She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
You say you don't get paid leave as a software developer, are you a contractor?
Are you employed by this company as a full time employee, or are you a contractor?
In the U.S. at least, this is a night and day difference so I guess that is why I am trying to get clarification on that.
I just meant that the initial statement about your current benifits compared to someone in the union wasn't fair.
Sorry if I made it seem your opinion wasn't welcome, that wasnt my intent.
I can understand why this would be highly preferable for part time workers. Can you understand how a company might be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 40 hours a week, but not be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 20 hours a week? Can you see how increasing the cost of part time employment might make a lot of those part time jobs go away?
> The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I understand that it seems unfair for a company to replace one 40 hour worker with two 20 hour workers. Especially when the 40 hour worker has benefits and the 20 hour workers do not. The issue here is that requiring an employer to provide benefits for full time employees creates the situation where an employer may not be able to afford benefits for their full time employees. So in order to keep the business going, they do what they can. Making it more expensive for them to do this is just going to result in fewer businesses anyway.
> Collective bargaining is no joke.
Collective bargaining flattens worker salaries, the lower performing workers make more than they should and the higher performing workers make less. Its not a given that everyone wants this, or should want it. People should be able to negotiate as individuals.
> She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
Not everyone wants all these things. More importantly, not everyone wants to pay for all of them. Some people could use the money elsewhere (perhaps they are covered under a spouse).
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I like a world where both of these things are available for people who choose them.
> I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I personally would prefer to get paid more and manage my own finances and vacations. You don’t get interest on vacation days (although they do include health insurance).
As far as negotiating as an individual goes, you’re right - a union removes that option. It does however empower those who can’t or won’t or otherwise struggle to negotiate for themselves, for a multitude of valid reasons. To me that’s worth something. I’ve been fortunate enough to more or less glide through my career and rarely need to negotiate anything in order to live comfortably. This is exceedingly rare though. I wouldn’t want to say no to a union because I’ve never needed or wanted one for myself. If people collectively desire it, I think it’s a net positive.
As far as getting paid more and managing your own benefits and vacation, I hear that. I’ve felt the same as times. However, the older I get the more I think things like a pension and extended health sound pretty nice. It’s like having an easy-bake oven that pumps out legitimate desserts. We’re not all endowed with the chops to make that happen, so having this stuff on autopilot is a significant windfall eventually.
As far as flattening wages goes, I’m not so sure. Everywhere my partner has worked with a union, her wages have steadily increased due to the union bargaining for her. Sometimes the increases are substantial. The wages across the current organization certainly aren’t flat either.
You’re right that not everyone wants these things, too. I’m not sure you can get around that particular problem.
Ultimately I’d just say unions aren’t inherently bad and if you don’t like them, work somewhere that doesn’t have one. Most places don’t, so it’s not a limiting factor that should impose personal risk.
I'm of an age and socioeconomic stratum where union membership is not only not really done - people don't even really know what unions do or how they work, and I was essentially just as ignorant.
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
The real epiphany moment for me came when I understood that my lifelong fixation on salary, into which I, as an upper-middle-class person, was socialized from a young age (along with everyone else I know), is a form of sleight of hand: in a society like ours, with a gutted social safety net and enormous inequality, no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country. And this effect gets worse as you age and have kids, of course.
So these days, after getting a tiny whiff of these dynamics in my somewhat modest (meaning not high-status) but fairly-compensated union gig, I find myself wondering, if given the choice between a $200k salary in Idaho or a $100k salary in, say, Sweden, which would I choose? And a second doesn't pass before I smell pickled herring and lingonberries.
> I don’t believe unions are universally perfect.
I don't either. I'm not blindly ideological about this, and like any human system, human beings can fuck up unions to the detriment of everyone else, too. But man, as someone low on the totem pole in my organization, it's nice to know that a group of competent people with (some) real power actually have my back.
I disagree with the factual assertion and the framing here. The money that you make is not “intended to ma[ke] up for” benefits and services that could be provided in some hypothetical. The money that you’re saving is to provide for yourself in retirement because you’re the one who doesn’t want to die of exposure or become a burden on someone else when you stop working.
I guess when you can't make a proper case, just use 50pt fonts and stock-art-esque images of people giving thumbs up. That'll convince 'em!
Man, that is really grim. Basically admitting that $500 will be make or break for many of these employees, while the company itself is hitting record numbers.
I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
However the profit appears substantially more than I had believed and I was mistaken so there’s that.
Thank you for the reply and the correction.
It's almost like a parody of itself
It's so blatant & over the top that I'd almost believe the union organizers set it up to make Amazon look bad.
And it's telling that they focus pretty exclusively on the $500 in dues: They pay their employees little enough that they know ~$10/week might be a significant decision making factor here.
Pleade strike the first sentence of this comment, thanks.
That they provide excellent value to consumers. Indeed the recent pandemic would have been much worse without them.
> What a ridiculous narrative you're trying to push.
Maybe try understanding others’ perspectives instead of ridiculing them.
Amazon undercuts competitors and plays hard ball with suppliers literally every day. That's business, that's life. I don't see why workers shouldn't take their opportunity to engage in tough negotiations with Amazon themselves.
Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value because of moral hazards, perverse incentives, and agent-principal problems.
Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency. If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
Nonsense, people insisted that it was foolish to require bundling of routine insurance with catastrophic insurance, people advocate for the severability of hardward and operating systems, people oppose forced bundling of insurance and all kinds of other goods.
> Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency.
They would however observe that that single legal team only protects the company, and that each employee should have their own, individual legal representation for their own personal liability.
> If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
> Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
I think the comparison here has been twisted so far beyond the breaking point that there is no need of a rebuttal.
None of that is collective bargaining.
> This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
One comment earlier: "Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value"
Neither were your examples.
> One comment earlier: "Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value"
That point still stands.
What's more, all of those buzzwords can apply to the relationship between any other supplier as well. In addition, corporations are themselves a highly collected bargaining unit. They may nominally be a single entity, but they represent the financial interests of many people.
Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.
So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired.
It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this.
Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make things difficult, and costly for non-union employees. My personal experience was that I removed from a wall mount a wi-fi router, rebooted it, and placed it back on the wall.
This resulted in me reprimanded, my department having to pay a 4 hour call out fee, to the union electrician.
So, my choices are to call out a union electrician to service the mounted piece of equipment. Or "accidentally" bump the IO switch on the surge protector.
It was this, and countless other stupid shit, that made me really dislike working in a place with a union.
If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.
A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.
This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.
If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.
I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).
Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
And ownership can easily present a conflict of interest even when spread out.
So now 25% compensation is based on this buy in, if a business unit is doing poorly and has brought down that compensation, the company wants to shit can the business unit and its employees, the members of the union would not be directly working against their own interest fight to keep them. (this is always the case really, but now it is directly felt by the members)
Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding you, what you're calling a "conflict of interest" is literally my entire point.
It is a good thing that the union has an incentive to balance the interests of workers with the interests of the overall company.
If the company needs to cut jobs to be competitive, it is a good thing that the union has a stake in both sides of the issue. That way they will be incentivized to work towards a solution that is fair to the workers, and profitable for investors.
It's the exact situation we all face every day. I like the taste of donuts. I know that if I eat them all the time, I'll get fat. Because my stomach and brain have a "conflict of interest", I make choices that balance short term and long term pleasure. If every donut I made got somebody else fat, then they would be in trouble, because I might like the taste of donuts more than I care about their health.
Unions typically already have a seniority over competency problems, this seems like something that would only really exacerbate the issue.
You also have to consider these are warehouse workers not software developers, there is a very high turn over rate, I don't think many of the warehouse workers would be interested in a vesting period before they saw anything from their RSU.
I also and not sure how this would work in a PLA multi-union site, lets not forget that the truck drivers, electricians, and many others already have their unions, and in my experience once a place has a labor union onsite, they want supporting employees to be union also.
And I think we will have to agree to disagree on conflict of interest.
Maybe the line with the worst rhetorical trick is this bullshit in the "joining a union" FAQ: "Q: Will a union provide better wages and benefits? A: A union cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. With union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
I love that because it works exactly as well when you just negate the question:
"Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Without a union, Amazon cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. Without union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
'Can a union guarantee [...] better wages?' 'No [...] only Amazon can make commitments about [...] your wages.'
And then a paragraph later
'You may end up with more, the same, or less'.
So, if Amazon are the only people who can make commitments, why would you negotiate for me to earn less... unless it's not really my interests you have at heart in the first place.
Unionization efforts also always take place against the backdrop of former employers simply shutting down the business location and moving elsewhere to avoid unions: Subtle and not so subtle threats of that are always in play during unionization efforts.
Realistically, how much would it hurt to move amazon warehouses near the border of any neighboring state?
The days of the factories, and none movable infrastructure a long gone, so it is a strong factor to consider.
I literally witnessed this threat first hand growing up when my mom was involved in union efforts.
Alabama is a right-to-work state. My understanding is that it would be completely legal for Amazon to hire new employees the second someone doesn't show up because of a strike, so I'm not sure their leverage.
These workers are probably making between 30k and 50k a year so $500 isn't nothing.
B) Not every state is a right-to-work state. So, from a 'worker's of the world unite' perspective then obviously making a union in Alabama will help other places form unions.
I could be very wrong and perhaps the union could get 1 or 2k more per year - but I am skeptical.
In the example of something like missing a day of work, the contract will spell out the specifics of advance notice for days off/sick days. If it's completely unannounced, the contract will spell out the steps of a disciplinary process.
Source: I work in a right to work state, used to be a union member, asked this very same question at the time.
From Amazon's perspective unions are strictly a net-loss. Even if the unions offered the employees zero advantages, the same paychecks from Amazon would have less impact on workers because of dues/meetings, so you'd expect moderately higher attrition and other negative effects.
On the flip side though, is it actually clear that an Amazon union _would_ benefit workers once accounting for the overhead? Is that even the goal, or are prospective Amazon unions just trying to improve safety levels to something on par with other warehouses? Are there other factors?
Quick Google search turned this up, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole but this line seems relevant:
> Factors like race, gender, and educational attainment have an undeniable effect on people’s economic outcomes over time that unions do not necessarily flatten, but certainly helped to mitigate. For instance, macro-level data show that unionized workers, in general, see a wage boost of around 20%. When VanHeuvelen controlled for various demographic factors like race and geographic location, he tracked wage increases between 3% and 12.5% for union members.
I'd like my chances that will add up to more than $500 over the year if I were a union worker, and this does not take into account the other potential upsides.
What is this line even supposed to mean? Probably the most incomprehensible union busting talking point I've ever heard.
https://www3.swipeclock.com/blog/union-employers-what-you-ne...
I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
Though I disagree with Amazon's official arguments, I'm even more opposed to the notion that anyone who agrees with them is dead inside.
I suggest you hang around Blind for a bit and you'll realize that some of our techie colleagues hold some.. interesting opinions about labor or about how much to pay workers we now consider 'essential'
Many of us don’t like unions. We consider them to be parasitic organizations that pervert the employer-employee-customer relationship without adding value. In fact, by twisting a business so that it is run for the benefit of the employees instead of for the mutual benefit of employees, employer, and customers, they destroy value. What is worse, unions have a nasty habit of convincing the government to make laws that effectively give the union a monopoly on certain kinds of tasks, preventing other workers from competing.
Now you may not agree with this perspective and its certainly something that people should discuss rather than accept uncritically. But have you considered that you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions that you have trouble imagining how someone could make a website opposing them without being dead inside because you’ve only been exposed to pro-union arguments?
How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth. Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
I disagree on the pervasiveness of anti-union propaganda. Perhaps this is your experience, it has not been mine.
> Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
Barely any of us are amateur radio operators and you never hear about amateur radio from anyone except preppers and geeks, but it isn’t because of inundation of anti-ham-radio propaganda from birth, merely that most people aren’t aware that ham radio could fulfill any of their needs.
> I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
Thats your experience. But I bet you didn’t wonder that each and every person who propagandized you were dead inside. Rather you eventually became aware that some of them had their own beliefs based on their own perspectives that led them to their anti-union work.
> The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
As does the idea that someone could only make anti-union website if they were dead inside, but we like to assume good faith when people make statements and keep our cynicism to ourselves when possible.
I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
> Thats your experience
Yes, that's my experience. My experience is extremely common.
Have you not worked any blue collar or service jobs?
> I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
This whole ting started because they said that how could someone do that unless they were dead inside which I inferred to mean they hadn’t been exposed to any reasons why someone would do that, and you couldn’t believe that anyone would be unaware as to the legitimate rational case against unions based on workers’ interests. So I observed that you didn’t share the same reaction as the original commenter when you were exposed to the propaganda.
You yourself haven't even had the experience of going through life without seeing a significant amount of anti-union propaganda. Yet you believe there are people who miraculously have.
> IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.
It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
> It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
You’re probably being hyperbolic but this lack of charity is one reason why we can’t have nice things.
An union negotiates/help negotiate, an employer would never run it's business if there was no benefit for them. Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
If the employer doesn’t accrue some marginal benefit, he’ll liquidate his investment if he is able. So he has to get something, and a good parasite will make sure not to kill the host.
It's the sheer cynicism, condescension, accidental self-parody, and other design choices of that website that make me wonder about the people behind it. It's a postmodern cocktail of horror. Nowhere do they make a good faith attempt to lay out solid anti-union arguments.
You say that now, but what about when Amazon starts encouraging employees to replace their arms with pneumatic forklift tines?
If you make it illegal to provide bad jobs, those jobs will not be substituted one-for-one for good jobs. That's not how an economy works. You're only hurting low-skilled workers by mandating higher minimum work standards.
Responding to below:
Yes, every so-called labor protection for adults, except protection against contract fraud, should be abolished, for exactly that reason.
Even child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/10/business/worldbusiness/wa...
Union participation is very tricky. It's supposed to be voluntary, but there is evidence that those who don't join the union are denied employment, and advancement. The problem with unions is that they're never really voluntary. I would hate to see the unions of old that used violence to force people to join; or for a more recent example, card check initiatives to make the vote be non confidential.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. If you are a smart business, you don't charge what's "fair", you don't start by saying "I'm going to pay $X to my workers, so let's see how many I can hire with that money." Those are bad ways to run a business. You hire the number of workers you need to run your business at the price the market will bear.
This is something that gets drilled into you if you take any entrepreneurship classes: things cost what the market will bear, there is no concept of "fairness" that entrepreneurs should be thinking about. You pay as little as you can to make something, and you charge as much as you can for it, and those are largely independent variables from each other.
The idea that Amazon is going to stop hiring workers if they get more pee breaks... that's just not how markets work. If Amazon could afford to let those workers go, it would have done it already. If it doesn't need those workers and it's hiring them anyway, then it's just a badly managed company.
Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works. You're talking about the market like supply and demand form a constant ratio with each other. They don't.
It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out (although reality is more complicated and these simplistic models rarely capture how everything will work out), it's also wrong because it's fundamentally bad market theory on a simple level. Nobody starts a business deciding that they're going to pay a constant amount of money that gets divided equally among all of their workers. At least, they don't think that way if they want to stay in business for very long.
No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services, and more automation.
I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't.
If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material/labor, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
In both cases, no competent business owner is thinking "I only want to hit $X profits this year, and anything over that is going to the consumers as a gift so that they'll like me."
> Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services
See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is (arguably) the entire cornerstone of free market Capitalism -- the idea that the value of a set of inputs into a business is not necessarily the same as the value of its outputs. One of the big points of Capitalism is that products get priced based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what they cost to produce or based on some kind of predetermined formula. If you have to pay your workers more, tough luck. Under Capitalism, your products are still only worth what the market is offering.
> and more automation
As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
And in any case, automation is good. We want to eliminate bad jobs. And even among automation-critics who worry about lost jobs and the cost of retraining, their goal in opposing automation is not to make those jobs periodically worse and worse to try and keep pace with the price of machines.
No, they want their return to go up. They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
> Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
No, you want your net profit to rise. You want your margin to be low because then its harder for others to compete with you.
> If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
This is true.
> Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
> See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
> As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
> more
> opposed
I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Which is determined by a combination of, among other things, your profit margin and your volume.
> They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin and net profit often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
> Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
Do you think that Amazon right now is purposefully pushing it's profit margins to the bare minimum that is possible for them to stay alive because they're so devoted to growth? Do you think there's some kind of fundamental rule that means if they had more profit they would be forced to invest it into growth or change their position in the market -- that profit can only ever be reinvested? Are you aware that Apple exists?
I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
No, it doesn't miss the point, the point you're making is wrong. The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
> I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
Yes, and a lower margin keeps the volume high by making it more difficult for people to compete.
> And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
Yeah the amount of profit impacts the decision to issue a dividend.
> Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
No, and no.
> I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
Look, its clear that you have a perspective and you’re not interested in other perspectives. Good, do you.
> The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
I’m not talking about what its worth, but what it sells for. My point has as much to do with accounting as it does economics.
> And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
And so it is disingenuous to push unions as though they will help workers out when you know you’re actually helping convince amazon to replace them.
I'm not going to force anyone to debate with me, but if your economic theory says that Amazon's prices should have dropped this year, and they didn't, then your economic theory is wrong and/or incomplete. That seems like a pretty straightforward test.
Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
Right, except that’s not what I said. So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory, that happens to also not coincide with some fact you refer to, I question your sincerity in discourse.
> Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
It is for this reason that theoretical predictions in economics are considered ceteris paribus
> We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
Yeah we do.
> Yeah we do. [...] So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory
Literally two comments earlier:
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
I'm not the person here arguing that changes in input costs and prices are universally linearly coupled to each other.
> universally linearly coupled to each other.
Yeah, neither am I.
>>I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Increased labor costs slow the rate at which the economy automates.
The rate of automation is almost indistinguishable from the rate of economic growth. Almost all economic growth comes from the labor-cost savings, and those in turn come from automation and trade-derived specialization.
When one of the major inputs to production, like labor, is subject to arbitrary government imposed price floors, it leads to economic deadweight losses that reduce economic output, and in turn reduce the volume of economic resources available to invest in new capital that automates production.
Automation increases per capita production, and with it, wages.
They will hire fewer workers.. there will be fewer profitable business ventures when the cost of one of the inputs to production increases.
In some case, it's true that higher wages will reduce profits, instead of reducing the number of jobs available, but that is not a good thing.
High profit margins encourage greater investment.
Take N95 masks for instance. If there is a shortage, any one producing them will raise prices and earn a huge profit.
Now let's say a progressive politician is elected and decides that those profits should be reallocated to the workers producing the N95 masks, so imposes an industry-specific minimum wage for N95 mask creators. Now profit margins decline for producing N95 mask makers, and N95 mask maker employees earn more.
What's lost is the massive influx of investment capital that high profit margins would otherwise have elicited, that would have raised N95 mask supply, which would have made the masks more affordable and plentiful.
Price controls don't work to increase net welfare. They reduce social welfare for reasons Economics explains in depth. Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations. They are the product of a super collective intelligence that tells us where economic resources should be allocated.
>>It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the minimum wage, to the extent that it has an effect, harms wage growth. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
There are a bunch of outlier situations in which artificial price bounds might theoretically not create economic deadweight losses, but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need? If Amazon could hit the shipping volumes it needs to hit with 50% of the current workforce, then it would be hiring ~50% of the current workforce -- if that's not the case, then somebody in the company that's making hiring decisions needs to be fired.
> Price controls don't work to increase net welfare.
A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare. We can debate the theory, but we can also just look at reality and say, "we've tried this before, and when handled correctly, it works."
> Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations.
I would be on board with your argument if the original comment starting this thread didn't boil down to "costs go up, prices go up". You're not talking about a complex signal at that point, you're talking about basic economic principles, and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Even your N95 example shows this point. Why did prices go up for N95 masks? Not primarily because of costs of production, primarily because demand changed. The basic principle economic principle is demand, not costs of production.
If you want to step away from those basic principles and talk about the complicated realities of what people will invest, and how safe they feel, and the size of the payout influencing investment enthusiasm, and so on -- then fine, that's reasonable, but the complicated reality is also that economic experts have looked at minimum wage increases, weighed up all of the complicated inputs that go into final product prices, and regularly concluded in multiple studies that minimum wages don't consistently increase prices or decrease market investment.
> It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
> but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
Agreed, but "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good" is much closer to reality than saying "the economy does conform to simplistic models, therefore a price floor is always bad." You're arguing that the simplistic model isn't applicable, in a thread that was started with you arguing that the simple model was that price and material/wage costs would always move in the same direction. That's just not true, it's both an oversimplification and just bad economic theory.
We can't prove that it's not hiring fewer workers than it otherwise would have. In the absence of the ability to run a controlled experiment on how a minimum wage affects Amazon behavior, we can only trust in Economics, the same way we trust in what epidemiology tells us about the efficacy of vaccines, and assume that a larger volume of people would be hired without an artificial floor on the price of labor.
>>A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
You're talking about a price control on manual services in general, i.e. labor.
>>B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare.
No they haven't. Studies on minimum wage cannot conclusively show anything, because they are not controlled, and minimum wages are too low to affect a significant number of jobs.
Meta-studies suggest that minimum wage tends to be harmful, just as you'd expect, though these are not definitive for the reasons mentioned.
>>and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Yes I agree with that, but I didn't make the counter-argument, another commenter did.
>>Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
Nothing is guaranteed in economics, but we should err on the side of basic economics in the absence of certainty and proof.
that’s insulting, why CAPITALIZE words in such SHORT sentences? Do they really THINK their employees are SO dumb that they can’t even read a FULL sentence?
I noticed on other Squarespace sites that second comment is usually just the domain minus the TLD. I wonder if "cranberry groundhog" means anything in particular.
Edit: Guess it's autogenerated? https://cranberry-groundhog-8agy.squarespace.com/
Probably something to use before your IT team sets up the CNAME record.
According to this (Danish)
https://fagbladet3f.dk/artikel/svenske-amazon-arbejdere-faar...
the workers are in an union.
Amazon: "Don't pay $500 in dues"
Their main argument is that it is not worth the money.
The most basic of caste systems.
First Amendment.
(To be clear, this is a terrible site. But as long as it isn’t threatening or lying, I don’t see why the government should be able to suppress it.)
If you do not like it you may criticize them publicly, boycott their business, or start your own competing employer with the policies you prefer.
The National Labor Relations Act allows employers to argue against the employees voting for union formation.
What would you do if you were asked to make this site?