Also reference Amazon's "Do it without dues" site:
That's almost like saying
"You're too poor to fight for your rights. Know your place."
Well, yes. The goal of an antiunion campaign is the demoralization/ disempowerment of the workforce.
Notice also the recent push for "experimental polities", AKA company towns.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/sidewalk-labs-shuts-down-t...
[2] https://theconversation.com/will-silicon-valleys-new-company...
"Explain how!"
"Money can be exchanged for goods and services"
If you believe those companies will capture so much surplus, you could also buy some of their stock and participate.
> If you are unhappy with the terms or products of a company, you are free to shop or work elsewhere.
If you don't work you starve, or at the very least lose your house, car, maybe even your kids. There is no "freedom" of choice, and this is painfully obvious to anybody who is not stuck neck-deep in dogmatic ideology.
> If you believe those companies will capture so much surplus, you could also buy some of their stock and participate.
Sure, let me just get a small loan of 300 mil a month to build my competitor to Uber.
If you're not independently wealthy you probably cannot even get 100k of credit to open a restaurant or a similar small business. Again, that access to capital (nevermind to education, connections, etc) is profoundly unequal, and thus that "just start your own business" is am absurd statement, is also obvious to anyone who isn't blinded by ideology.
> "Capture of surplus" is hate speech
Ahahahaha
This argument is made often and is patently in bad faith. You understand and I hope your readers understand there is a power disparity and a prevalent culture that has a certain effect on your ability to "be free" (of what? To go elsewhere and have the same shit done to you? To have your family go hungry because some HR shithead blackballed you?).
On a personal level I would ask you to stop actively trying to make the world worse by parroting capitalist propaganda built specifically to disempower workers.
0. https://www.epi.org/publication/why-unions-are-good-for-work...
That Amazon is fighting this so hard should signal that there is something meaningful to be gained by the workers. Hopefully they recognize this and succeed in organizing. The biggest question I would have is does Amazon pull a Walmart and just shutter the FC if they succeed?
Make your voice heard! Tell Big Brother you love him!
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.
(sic)
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Couldn't even include a stock-statement like "we got you covered" without a disclaimer.
"won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other" What the hell does that even mean? In a union you can't talk? As though you could be totally chatty before?
It isn't always about neighborly overtime.
The shoes idea works as you have to pay for them. Why pay for shoes? You know you get exactly the same benefits at Amazon while barefoot?
A classic similar example used to be the "godhatesfigs.com" parody of the Westboro Baptist church's similar slogan (sadly gone now) - with a bible passage where Jesus curses a fig tree.
Amazon would still find a way to argue. "If you're not a lowest performer, don't let a union negotiate for you and force your wages down to the lowest performing among you." or many other phrases that would appeal to those who think they're above the bottom already and plant fear that bargaining with the collective would lower their outcomes.
An ego boost? I mean this seriously -- people love being moderators of Subreddits and admins of online communities largely deep down for the ego boost.
A union really needs not much more than a Discord server and maybe a Zoom membership to organize strikes and whatever else they need to do.
No union will have much luck performing collective bargaining against Amazon without working alongside experienced lawyers.
These costs don't have to be huge, but they aren't zero.
What events? If it's to discuss a certain issue, that can be virtual and almost free. If it's a social event, meh, there are enough of those already and people can self-organize them. Hell for $500/month I could organize social events where everyone goes to Michelin 3-star restaurants every month and rants over gourmet dinners about their bosses.
> pay for mailers and other communications infrastructure
Use e-mail. I don't even check my snail mail box anyway unless someone tells me to expect something by e-mail, and even then when my snail mail box gets too full I usually just dump it all in the recycle bin, so it's not an effective way for a union to communicate with me.
> and of course pay for professionals like labor lawyers.
What if they just split the lawyer fees evenly?
Assuming an experienced lawyer charges $1000/hr and spends 100 hours on a case, and there are 1 million people in the union, that amounts to about $0.10/person/case, a far cry from the $500/month they seem to be charging. Even if my numbers are off by a factor of 100 it would be only $10/person/case, and if the union won the case Amazon would probably have to pay the legal fees anyway.
Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.
That said, it sounds like you haven't dealt with the real world logistics of large groups of people. From both a practical and legal perspective, there is a lot to cover. The finances need to be kept up to date and audited. You mention, in jest, that you could bring all these people together for a dinner at that price. Getting 15 people to agree on a time and place for dinner is close to impossible if you've ever tried it. Nevermind getting a warehouse full of people to show up.
100 hours (2.5 weeks of labor) for lawyers to come to an agreement for the 1mm workers you cited? Not possible, especially with an adversary like amazon.
Email as communication? Maybe, but does it qualify for legal matters? Voting? Have you ever tried to send a million emails? There's a reason that there is an entire industry built around bulk emails.
A union is more like an independent HR office than anything else. Think of how many resources HR uses, and that gives you an idea of what a union needs
A coworker in a non-unionized position said that the didn't like unions because of the dues. When I told them what the dues were, their opinion quickly changed. The funny part is that unionizing would only bring about small benefits in our case since the existence of unionized positions with the same employer reaped benefits for all employees.
And for what it's worth, paying $500/month in dues implies an income of about 30,000 to 50,000 per month. Not only is this outside of the target demographic of unions, but it ranks up there with taxation levels (with much richer government services). Suggesting union dues of this level is either an unintentional mistake or disingenuous anti-union propaganda.
Any reason why "show up at 8" wouldn't work? It doesn't have to work for everyone if they can be recorded, summarized, or otherwise disseminated.
A professional Union needs funds to do its work. Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues. If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.
The imaginary alternative would be to have somebody do this for free in their evenings and on their weekends. Have you ever tried to manage even a class representative and budget for your kids' school or a little league or any other kind of long-term engagement? Already at that small scale things tend to break down quote easily and few stay involved more than a few years. How can you expect volunteer union reps to work 8h+/day, spend their nights writing legal briefs, researching, organising events, managing members and expenses, etc while being up against an army of professional lawyers?
Unions brought the five day work week, end to child labour, 40/38 hour weeks, the right to breaks, vacations, medical leave, ... If you don't have those right now then that's likely because you are in a non-union workplace (and/or country).
Absolutely true.
> Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues.
That strikes me as an opinion that could use some supporting facts. It might be the case, but union fees are the same order of magnitude as many workers' savings rate. If the prospective member saved those fees over a lifetime, would they be better off?
> If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.
That means that union members are buying insurance against there being a strike declared. Would they be better off to pay smaller dues and bear the risk themselves? If all possible strikes are union-wide, it seems like this insurance can only be a losing gamble for members, all the while creating a fat piggybank for union leaders to raid/drain.
Unions have to disclose financial statements. Leaders can't just raid the strike fund. And there won't be a strike fund unless most members vote for it.
[1] https://illinoisepi.org/site/wp-content/themes/hollow/docs/w...
Virtual isn't the same as free.
>Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.
Nobody knows what the union dues will be if the union wins, but they will not be 500 per month. It might be a fair guess that they're 500 per year. About 20 per check if you get paid biweekly. The dues will be decided on by union members through some kind of democratic process.
Altruism maybe? The structure costs would probably be harder to cover than finding mad amazon workers who want to improve working standards
If you willfuly agree to unpaid work, you will be such a bad union leader, don't bother.
You missed the entire point.
Further: People do all kinds of unpaid work to make their community or shared experiences better without (most of?) us accusing them of advocating for slavery.
That's like calling volunteering slavery. Am I a slave for working at my hospital in the summer?
There could be optional dues, as well as some built in DeFi applications for investing in blockchain that could pay a dividend to the unions and their leaders.
I'm thinking of the line "the capitalists will sell you the rope you use to hang them."
I can’t help but think if this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VJqr6LBFelI
Can’t imagine this word could be used unironically