Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama
wsj.com
wsj.com
Edit: Added the bit about all the world governments
It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means-tested benefits for low income people, but without the poverty traps, perverse incentives and excessive bureaucracy.
Also, in this context "the top" is anything above the middle. Are lawyers and petroleum engineers going to move to a tax haven?
I think this takes more thought. I agree that we want a progressive curve, and that UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives us a progressive curve, but I don't think we've established that it gives us the curve we want. Moving from the ideal curve to the (potentially) less than ideal curve for the sake of easier enforcement may still be worth it, and may still produce a system that we'd prefer to the current one, but we have to actually establish that.
It's mostly just not that compatible with confiscatory-level taxes on very high income people, but the cause of the trouble there was never really the taxes (once they were paying the same rates as ordinary people). The problem there is regulatory capture and inadequate antitrust enforcement leading to abusive consolidated corporate empires.
It gives a family of curves, and as you say you have a knob you can turn...
I don't have a strong opinion about exactly what shape the curve should have, but I do have a strong opinion that it's probably important and I've noticed a tendency (first in myself!) for UBI proponents to be satisfied having checked the "it's a progressive curve" box without having looked carefully at whether it can produce the particular progressive curve we (more broadly) want.
Edited to add: I suppose if we do find that we need people to be taking home marginally more for the first N dollars earned, we could add a rebate based on reported income. Small fraud ("I reported a little more than I actually made") winds up pretty bounded in the amount it can walk off with; larger fraud ("I invented 500 people who are reporting income") isn't that much bigger a concern than it would already be with a UBI since the maximum rebate is probably much smaller than the stipend that would otherwise be expected. Note that I'm not calling for this, just exploring the space.
Yes? I'm not a particularly special engineer, and a significant part of my decision to leave California was the income tax. I'm certainly not alone there.
Also bear in mind that "tax haven" is a relative term. Canada can become a tax haven if their taxes are lower than ours. Europe can be a tax haven if their taxes are lower. If my net income in the US (taking into account higher salaries) comes out the same as what I would make in Europe, I'm moving to Europe. I'd much rather have the safety net than UBI.
Some remote workers who can might do that but I doubt very many.
There are almost no countries in the world that milk their citizens that way.
Two exceptions I know of:
- USistan
- Eritrea
b) Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop.
Given a country's economic output, laws, culture and a thousand other factors, there's a hidden function that determines the maximum tax rate you can employ where anything more than that is counter-productive with both short-term and long-term results, the latter often including reputational damage that can be nigh impossible to repair, soft-capping your economy far below what it could've been. See: Laffer Curve, and the shining example that is Argentina.
Mean personal income in the US is ~$54,000:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N
For a $12,000 UBI that would yield a flat tax rate of ~22%.
In real life it's more complicated than that, but not so much more complicated that the number is going to be off by an order of magnitude. It's completely viable. People are already paying nominal rates that high.
> Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop.
The primary causes of this are that higher taxes give people less money to spend which hurts the economy and that higher marginal rates deter working.
A UBI is a transfer payment, so on net nobody has any less money to spend and in practice people with less money would have slightly more and those people are more likely to spend it. So this factor goes in favor of economic growth.
Meanwhile half the point of the UBI is to get rid of the crazy marginal rate cliffs created by means-tested benefits programs. The status quo deters work more than a UBI would, e.g. you lose unemployment if you take a job. Terrible incentives that would go away.
Make the combined marginal rate 60% and now I have to go earn $375 in order to have $150 extra to pay for the labor for that repair. For the equivalent of $375 in wages for a service call, there's a lot of things I'll bother to learn how to tackle myself.
Meanwhile at the top the difference would be less than an increase from 40% to 60% because the UBI is replacing all of these other programs which would no longer have to be funded, or could be made strict alternatives to the UBI which would make the UBI less expensive.
To get the maid to show up, you have to cause their bank balance to increase by at least $10, after taxes. If the government is taking 80% of what you pay them away in food, housing and education assistance, you have to pay $50 to get them their $10. Get their real marginal rate down to 40% and you can pay $20 while they enjoy a surplus of $2.
Yes. And that is absolutely monstrously huge. You just doubled the US tax rate!
Sure, you could cut spending elsewhere, or whatever, but once you do a program that is on the scale of literally doubling the US tax rate, you are definitely at a point where the costs of the program are very high, and likely unviable.
(Half the funding for many of the existing programs don't even show up in the federal budget, even though they're federal programs, because the feds condition the program on the state government providing matching funds, but the state's taxpayers don't get any refund of their federal taxes if the state doesn't implement the program. So the states are coerced into funding inefficient programs, and those would go away.)
I think people are reasonably skeptical of this part. I've never seen someone show me the math around how all those programs would be rendered redundant by a UBI. Before getting to the political problem of dismantling benefits, some of which pay out more than $12,000 a year and have a vocal, sympathetic minority willing to fight for them.
The best way to handle this is to give people a one-time election of whether they want the UBI. If they want the UBI, they're disqualified from all of these other programs, for life.
Then nearly everyone picks the UBI. The person receiving $500 from other programs certainly does, so does the person receiving $10,000, probably even the person receiving $12,500 because they get to avoid doing the paperwork every year for all the other programs.
You're left with the negligible percentage of people who actually receive non-trivially more than $12,000 under other programs, representing a minority of the existing funding. This could also be assisted by dropping some of the less sympathetic programs immediately and further reducing the number of people on the other side of the $12,000 line. And the percentage shrinks over time, because someone picks the UBI at age 18 and then 10 years later discovers they might have received $16,000 this year from some other set of programs, but they've already made their choice. After a few years the other programs have so few people using them that there is no political will to continue them at all.
And recall that one such program is social security, which is currently funded by a 12.4% tax. That by itself is more than half the way to 22%. And all the existing retirees who choose that over the UBI would then not have to be paid the UBI.
I think that understates it: some enormous fraction (like 45%) of federal government spending is for retirees (Social Security, Medicare and government funded pension) who represent only about 15% of the population.
That's the unsquareable circle for UBI.
Social security has a dumb design if it's supposed to be a safety net. It pays out in proportion to how much money you made. That's not a safety net. If someone who made $20,000/year when they were working can survive on a given amount of money, someone who made $80,000/year when they were working can survive on the same amount. If they want more they can use the extra money they made to buy an annuity. And that's why social security costs so much -- it pays out more to people who, by and large, need it less.
Now, you're not going to pass a repeal of social security. The people currently receiving significantly more from it than they would from a UBI would revolt.
So you do this. You give people an election between a UBI for life or social security after retirement. Current 65 year olds are all going to pick social security. Current 18 year olds are going to pick the UBI, because the net present value is higher. That means social security long-term goes away.
In the short term, social security has a trust fund. It gets spent down to make up the difference between what existing retirees would get from the UBI and what they'll be getting from social security. In the long term, when all of the younger people who chose the UBI over social security reach retirement age, the high cost of social security goes away because nobody wanted it.
Well, sort of. There're two bend points where the proportions go down fairly sharply (90%-32%-15%). It's extremely progressive from that point of view: those with lower average lifetime earnings get a much higher proportion of income replaced than do those with higher lifetime earnings.
Median annual Social Security benefits for 2020 are about $15K, vs. mean of about $18K., for example.
>So you do this. You give people an election between a UBI for life or social security after retirement. Current 65 year olds are all going to pick social security. Current 18 year olds are going to pick the UBI, because the net present value is higher. That means social security long-term goes away.
It makes a big difference where you set the level for UBI, and which entitlements programs you claim it replaces. Without knowing the specifics of the proposal, you can't get good numbers.
But it sounds like you're saying UBI will replace Social Security. Let's assume UBI pays $12K per year to every adult, which is less generous than a lot of numbers I've heard. This means it would replace about two-thirds of the average Social Security benefit.
Based on U.S. life expectancies, that UBI number and average Social Security benefits, I think that puts the break-even point for lifetime UBI to equal lifetime Social Security about 56 or 57. So let's say that everyone 57 or over stays in Social Security.
>In the short term, social security has a trust fund. It gets spent down to make up the difference between what existing retirees would get from the UBI and what they'll be getting from social security.
Social Security's "trust fund" was about $2.8tn at the end of 2020. That's 2.61 years of payments. The idea that Social Security is, in some sense, pre-funded by payroll taxes is completely false. It is effectively a pay-as-you-go system with a small buffer.
Under the assumptions above, you will exhaust the trust fund in less than 8 years, which is a problem as life expectancy at 65 in the U.S. is almost 20 years. So you now either have to stop funding the gap between UBI and Social Security (politically impossible) or raise more taxes.
Over to the UBI then. Social Security brings in taxes of just over $1.06tn year year. Let's just call it $1.1tn. By the way, non-benefit costs for Social Security are only about 0.05% of the program cost, so there's very limited opportunity to make gains by streamlining administration as is often claimed for UBI.
US population is about 330m. Take out the child population (about 19%; they aren't getting UBI) and the over-65 population (about 16%; they're retired and are getting Social Security). So you now have 215m people who will receive UBI.
Your $1.1tn of payroll taxes funds only about $5,100 of the $12,000 that's supposed to be paid in UBI. Payroll taxes would have to increase by 2.35x to cover the cost of the UBI, and that's before you plug the Social Security gap.
Making UBI less generous encourages more people to stay in Social Security which means your funding gap gets wider.
Source for UBI total cost: https://freedom-dividend.com/ note: I ignored his ~$0.9 trillion in predicted savings/economic growth but that would lessen the bill even more.
500/mo or 1k/mo UBI does require raising taxes and consolidating programs (a polite way of saying cutting). At 500/mo you'd raise the total tax rate (as of GDP), but it'd not be an unreasonable raise (as compared to 2k/mo UBI for all citizens which would need taxes at 40% of US GDP).
In 2018, the household income quintiles were as follows (https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-...)
Lowest quintile mean: $13,775
Second quintile mean: $37,923
Third quintile mean: $63,572
Fourth quintile mean: $101,570
Highest quintile mean: $233,895
There were about 159M employed persons in the US in the most recent high (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons), about 50% of the US population. We want our UBI to cover everybody.
To make this simple, because quintiles comprise an equally populated group of people, let's imagine that instead of there being ~32M people per quintile, that our nation has 10 people, where 5 people don't work, and each of the remaining 5 falls into one of the quintiles.
If we wanted to define a UBI of $18,000 per person, we need to somehow come up with $18,000 * 10 == $180,000 to distribute to everyone equally.
If we fund this progressively, each individual would have to pay:
Unemployed #1: 0 (statistically, a child)
Unemployed #2: 0 (statistically, a child)
Unemployed #3: 0 (statistically, a retiree)
Unemployed #4: 0 (statistically, a retiree)
Unemployed #5: 0 (statistically, a disabled person or stay-at-home caretaker)
Lowest: $8,000
Second: $12,000
Third: $21,000
Fourth: $36,000
Highest: $103,000
Total revenue: $180,000
Then consider that everyone here is receiving back 18,000 under the UBI. The highest quintile earner’s net take-home is, thus 233,895-103,000+18,000 == $148,895, which effectively renders their effective tax rate approx 36%. If you run this breakdown across all quintiles:
Unemployed #1-5: $0 - $0 + 18,000 == $18,000
Lowest: $13,775 - $8,000 + $18,000 == $23,775 (effective tax -73%)
Second: $37,923 - $12,000 + $18,000 == $43,923 (effective tax -16%)
Third: $63,572 - $21,000 + $18,000 == $60,572 (effective tax 6%)
Fourth: $101,570 - $36,000 + $18,000 == $83,570 (effective tax 18%)
Highest: $233,895 - $103,000 + $18,000 == $148,895 (effective tax 36%)
You'll notice that the top 2 pay a tax rate that’s comparable to today’s. We wouldn't necessarily need to increase everyone's taxes by the above amount, because there's some wiggle room in the Federal budget. Examples: we can probably eliminate Social Security (which would just be replaced by the UBI), EITC/CTC (basically already a BI), and food stamps (ditto). Medicare, which is an in-kind benefit, can either be eliminated, or it can continue to exist but be paid for by the UBI. Ditto Medicaid.
Also notice that because the lowest quintile still ends up with more than the unemployed person after their taxes, there isn’t a disincentive to work.
This math also assumes that we're giving people $1,500 per month, and also assumes that children will receive the same amount as adults — a UBI may only pay $1,000 per month to adults, and $500 per month to children, in which case the effective tax rates would be lower.
This math also assumes there is 0 VAT. This math also ignores payroll taxes, which account for 35% of the current Federal revenue.
We can play with different levels of progressivity and generosity, but the idea is the same. We can scale up from single-person quintiles to million-person quintiles, but the percentages don't change.
It also removes a huge relief valve for large segments of the population to survive that can’t meet the bar demanded of the ‘normal’ workers.
Also, China has been trying to unwind their US position over time, but it is a difficult task because they have to do something with the US dollars that they get due to the trade imbalance.
The actual discussion is about the degree of which government should handle re-distributing wealth to the lower class and to what degree the middle and upper class is responsible.
The “divide” is that politicians on both sides who’s actions don’t always match their stated positions.
The lesson of the GINI coefficient and the psychology of relative wealth, is that absolute, material well being isn't the issue. The issue is whether people think the cards are so stacked against them, that they will never win.
So the answer is no. We know that condemning those at the bottom will result in civil unrest. Everyone needs to live in dignity, or there will be violence. Psychology has pretty much determined this to be a fact of human nature.
However, this doesn't mean we should have equity. People should be rewarded, and people should also have something to strive for. It's the dignity of the common person which has been eroded over time.
This is both right and wrong. Asian immigrants are notorious for arriving on foreign shores, penniless, then winding up owning businesses and sending their kids to top tier schools. The problem isn't being born into not having money and things. The problem is being born into an environment that sets children up for future failure.
The good news, is that such cultural practices aren't attached to race or ethnicity and so can be learned and adopted. There are historical precedents for this.
The bad news, is that other cultural practices can do the opposite, and insulate groups of people against things like valuing education and a work ethic.
As someone who lived in the US for a long time and now lives in Europe, I can tell you that all of the Americans I've met over here (who are not vacationing) are incredibly driven and entrepreneurial. They do not at all reflect the average American back in the US (e.g. I don't know a single Trump supporter over here; the Democrats Abroad caucus typically goes far more liberal than any state, supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 by a very wide margin).
Are refugees counted as immigrants? A lot of the refugees from Syria come through Turkey, so I'm curious if that's throwing off the numbers.
Refugees and immigrants aren't really comparable. The most stark difference is that refugees can (and likely will) be sent back when their country stabilizes enough. If you're a refugee, there's little point in building up a new life when you know it will all come to an end.
No, it's about immigrants from Turkey (who came mostly in the 60ies as regular working migrants to both feed Germany's hunger for workers and buy Turkey's entry into NATO). The Vietnamese on the other hand were often refugees, much poorer and with much less support.
There aren't any relevant numbers about the migrant crisis '15 yet, it's too recent to get meaningful statistics.
> The most stark difference is that refugees can (and likely will) be sent back when their country stabilizes enough.
True, but that very rarely happens in Germany. It's considered cruel to deport someone who has lived in Germany for a few years.
Deportations of asylum seekers usually only happen for so-called "safe countries", e.g. Balkan states, when the request for asylum is denied.
This is a strange observation to me because Trump did very well with the small business owner demographics.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/284396/small-business-owners-hi...
SMB owners who are US citizens abroad, however, are driven by primarily one thing, regardless of party affiliation: who will be most likely to support a rewrite of the punitive tax laws that the US places on its expatriate citizens (which no country other than Eritrea does).
I don't follow. What are some examples of this?
If healthcare is free, people who are healthy have to pay healthcare for those who aren't.
I'm not taking a stance one way or the other on these issues, just trying to illustrate the argument.
Food? Health care? Transportation?
has fewer people and they earn less, not fewer people who earn less.
I'll try for you: the cohesive view of cost of living would show these rubes to be peasants to the unskilled European's millionaire.
Interesting point, where's your data?
Exactly. Why would u/flavorous make a drive-by comment and not cite any data?
I expected something like this, for international comparisons:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/cost-of-liv...
That link and your refrains about data are signs of flailing due to lack of rhetorical content. Your argument is Europe good; US bad.
You're right that healthcare could be more expensive, but there is also employer-covered health insurance.
That’s 3.4% of income, lower than the typical health insurance tax in European counties.
Are they perfect? No. Pretending the systems flaws are somehow Amazon being evil vs the American medical and safety net being a morass of bureaucracy and bullshit is just wrong though.
I'm certain that a small town in Italy or Spain could come out cheaper.
Apropos of nothing: Much pedantry about wages in a blighted area. Crickets about billionaires sharing some of their cheddar with the peons.
I live in the middle of The Netherlands; the average house price is 360k and the average wage is 36k, that's around 10x salary to house cost.
One important point: in almost all cases in NL both partners work, the general rule is that women work part time and increasingly couples under 40 both work full time. That's how the insane house market is propped up.
Healthcare costs are around 200 EUR / person / month at the limit (you pay ~110 and the deductible is about 900 EUR a year).
For anyone not living in the permanently-fucked US, an explanation: your health insurance covers you for "in network" doctors at an "in network" hospital. If you go to an "in network" hospital you would assume (wrongly) that you are fully covered. But no. Some random anesthesiologist can come into your room, provide their service for 20 minutes, and stick you with a $5,000 bill because they are "out of network". And you have ERISA insurance and you are just plain fucked.
Anyone getting health services in the US must hang a sign on their door saying "In Network Only". I'm 100% serious. Every person that walks in your room must be vetted. And good luck if they can't find an "in network" surgeon for that emergency service or whatever.
Everything you're saying is partially correct, but it heavily depends on the specifics of the plan. FAANG companies, in particular, typically have extremely generous PPO plans that offer 0 co-insurance and broad networks. You're correct that, out-of-network, balance billing may occur, but Amazon's plans have networks so broad that this is unlikely to happen.
In addition, if you look at Amazon's plan documentation, they also offer a Kaiser HMO for which none of this applies.
There's a lot that can be improved around price transparency, but Amazon is one of the few companies that offers Cadillac gold-standard insurance, and because ERISA requires that all employees receive the same benefits, this extends to their full-time warehouse workers too.
> Amazon's plans have networks so broad that this is unlikely to happen
I mean, this doesn't sound reassuring you know. "unlikely" and "depends on the specifics". That's kind of the problem. No one knows what is covered and what is not. Billing in the US is this labyrinthine thing where hospitals, doctors, and insurance all seem to be making it up as they go along in conjunction with whatever they feel are the laws and whatever they feel like they can get away with. Leaving it up to the patient to appeal after appeal after appeal on a flood of bills they will receive, depending on their operation or service.
You can't even get a detailed bill out of some of these places. The doctors vanish and you're literally stuck talking to one of those robocalling bill collector agencies, which probably has a PO Box in fucking Alaska. It's shady as hell. All of it.
All that being said...
> I mean, this doesn't sound reassuring you know. "unlikely" and "depends on the specifics". That's kind of the problem. No one knows what is covered and what is not.
The "likelihood" of this happening, while probabilistic, isn't purely random. I found this tweet by a health policy expert to perfectly capture the status quo: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737
"American healthcare in short: ~60% (in good employer plans, generous state Medicaid, or M.Adv/Medigap) have the best healthcare in the world. ~30% have insurance with gaps/risk of big bills. ~10% uninsured must rely on uncompensated care, go without treatment, or risk bankruptcy
The strength of M4A proposals is that they begin with an understanding that the 40% exist and need things fixed. Their weakness is that they pretend that the 60% don't, and threaten to take away what they have."
Amazon is, pretty reliably, part of that 60%; it offers some of the best employer health coverage out there. Like, it doesn't even compare to public health plans in a lot of the world.
All of the problems you brought up (labyrinthine systems, appeal processes, bill collector agencies in Alaska) are real problems that you and I agree need to be solved, but they're also problems that don't afflict beneficiaries of generous plans paid for by rich companies, and that's what we're talking about in the context of Amazon Warehouse workers.
That said: prereq is you’re bonkers smart.
Meh. I went to an Ivy league, as did my sister. My wife was a grad student at Stanford. My classmates were clever, but they weren't that smart! The standardized test scores can be improved with work.
As for standing out with your essay and CV, I remember a talk from an admissions officer from Harvard. His take was that it's easy to stand out from 99% of students just by actually doing real, substantive work. He wasn't talking about the stuff that's designed to be a student CV stuffer to impress admissions. Do actual, substantive work.
Something like a substantive contribution to a scientific field. Amateurs can still do this. Maybe run a real business. The example this admissions officer gave was someone who dropped out of High School, got a GED, then started repairing motorcycle engines. Then, you also need to make sure your essay is well written, which is another skill which can be learned. Relate your experience back to the academic opportunity, and how this would enable you to benefit society.
There is a problem with this way of thinking of admissions: If you do pursue it in earnest, you might well decide to skip university entirely.
I went to an Ivy coming from an inner city public school and I found it a big culture shock in terms of both how well behaved people were in classrooms and also how quick/smart people were to grasp what I was saying and build on it. By the time I was a senior, I had lapsed to the "people here actually aren't that smart" line of thought - but I wonder if I just got used to being around more intelligent people.
The "not smart" people are the latter category: they can still pick things up quickly, but they viewed getting into the institution as the last hurdle they'll have to go through in order to be set for life. They just coasted and got Cs and didn't really care about learning new stuff because they knew the university's name on their degree alone would land them some cushy PM job where they wouldn't need that pesky coding ability every again).
It was actually infuriating because I really enjoy CS and getting paired up with these folks who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths but didn't care was disappointing. Most of them were uncomfortable with the mental struggle of doing difficult group projects, often just showing up for the "design session" but skipping out on most of the coding. I made a lot of enemies out of them when I told the profs to look at my (GPG-signed) git commits and consider how they want to distribute grading points.
I laughed. Did it change something in the end?
I learned most of the "defensive git" tricks during this time because I caught one of these guys trying to rewrite history to claim credit for my commit. That guy got referred to the university's "ya dun messed up bigtime" committee (I forget the actual title) and I think he was kicked out for academic dishonesty. Ever since then I gpg sign all my commits!
Great. It's one thing not to do anything (and get penalized for it accordingly) but trying to claim ownership is a whole new level.
There's an expensive way of protecting one's work: have an individual oral quiz on the code that was written.
I've met people who I would describe as "bonkers smart", as the comment I was replying to had it. That is, people who are literally 2-3 times faster at getting to the next step, and just leave the entire room behind, when the room contains a dozen graduate students. They are not that common, even in a place that's supposed to be populated by the intellectual elite.
how well behaved people were in classrooms and also how quick/smart people were to grasp what I was saying and build on it
These are just skills/habits that can be learned!
And even if they didn't, through the Affordable Care Act, someone at that income level can buy a "Gold" plan with low deductibles for $75/month. Obviously for Amazon workers, that's irrelevant.
K-12 education is free, and once you factor in-state tuition and FAFSA, university is also basically free for anyone that continues to make minimum wage throughout their career.
Amazon's plans can be found here: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us
These plans are extended to every single Amazon employee, including the warehouse workers. Most of the warehouse workers we're talking about would probably choose the Kaiser HMO that has $0 deductible and 100% coverage; all they would pay is $30 co-pay. This is more or less how the single payer healthcare works in Australia, for example.
No. We're talking about workers in Alabama, and Kaiser is listed on that very page as regional: Kaiser Permanente HMO (California, Colorado, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Washington)
I'm assuming Amazon charges employees some portion of the insurance premium, as most employers do? Also, there's this:
> Amazon’s benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment.
You're correct that there's regional variation, but that's mostly a function of the medical networks. For instance, UHC's network may have more coverage in the Northeast than Blue Cross Blue Shield (or vice versa).
Ultimately, as full-time employees, Amazon's warehouse workers are entitled to the exact same health insurance as their white collar counterparts sitting in the offices, and they offer extremely above average Cadillac health insurance.
I didn't think so. My company offers us Kaiser as an option as well, but only for folks in states where Kaiser operates (I'm in Michigan). I thought one of the distinctive features of Kaiser is that they offer insurance _and_ have their own clinics.
Regardless, the point of Amazon offering quality healthcare plans to the warehouse workers is still great to hear!
Furthermore, it is a bad historical precedent to rely on employers for healthcare. This was a poor side-effect of the wage-hike stoppages during WWII that was later tax-exempted through federal law. It was never well thought out.
Finally, how many people in this town feel they have equal opportunity for social mobility? Decades of economic stagnation and degradation have thrown any plausible arguments towards a "meritocracy/American dream/everyone has an equal chance at success" out the window.
I need more information about that health care plan. Last time I looked at the market I was looking at worse premiums, coverage, and limits and making garbage pay.
My plan is $500/mo from me and $1500 from my employer with, iirc, 8000 max oop
Edit: I reviewed the plans they offer. Mine is significantly better, excluding the max oop. Anyone know what the costs are for for the plans?
I honestly have trouble believing yours is “significantly better”. One of the Amazon plans is a $300/year deductible with $2,300/year oop, and costs $80/month, and Amazon contributes $500/year towards your HRA. Another plan has no deductible, and $1,500/year oop. Those are some of the best healthcare insurance plans I’ve ever seen in the US, period. I’d believe it if yours was about the same, but it’s pretty difficult to be “significantly better” than those.
E: I'd love to see the official coverage breakdown offers with prices if anyone has them please share, email in profile if you don't want to share publicly.
You understand that you are paying more in premiums than the premium _plus_ out-of-pocket maximums of these plans, right?
A quick Google search gives https://www.premera.com/documents/042884.pdf which indicates $31 per month (or $14.31 per biweekly pay period), which is $372 per _year_, plus Amazon refunds $500 into your HSA.
There is no way your plan could be better for you, regardless of your circumstances. You start off more than $6000 in the hole compared to the Amazon plan.
Talking about Germany here by the way.
Talking about the wealthiest country in Europe. I'm glad you are not cherry picking your data when you expose facts.
Unless you mean that the US is in fact not a wealthy country if you are looking at above facts. Then that's something that could be argued.
The US is almost exactly as diverse as the EU (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...). Alabama is more comparable to Estonia than it is to Germany.
If you want to compare apples to apples, there are States in the US where citizens pay higher taxes and get benefits like free university: https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/08/pf/college/new-york-free-tu...
The estimated cost of attendance at one of the closest public universities, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has a yearly estimated cost of attendance of $28,695 for in-state students.
University isn't 'basically free' for low income students. My parents lived below the poverty line their entire lives. I graduated with my bachelor's degree and $80k worth of loan debt.
Sure low-income students might be eligible for needs-based grants and scholarships offered at their college. But federal support for low-income students is pitiful and college for those students is a far cry from free.
You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other colleges in the area that cost fractions of Bama. And of note, Amazon actually pays for up to 95% of tuition/fees for warehouse workers who choose to pursue associates degrees.
There are certainly societal problems in the US regarding education costs and healthcare, but these are both areas where Amazon is actually providing for its workers way, way above what the federal government provides, and even way above what is normal for most Americans (the health insurance that Amazon warehouse workers get is likely better than the health insurance of most of the people posting in this thread). This is the kind of stuff that needs to be kept in mind to understand why Bessemer residents don’t all see Amazon as evil.
The University of Texas's program is: 1.) Recent 2.) Covers students enrolled at the time the program went into affect. It doesn't cover recently-graduated students. 3.) Only covers Texas residents (meaning it's irrelevant to a conversation about Amazon employees in Alabama) 4.) Only covers tuition, not cost of living. Cost of living, of course, is more than half of total cost of attendance at the University of Texas.
Go ahead. Ask me how I know what it's like to be a low-income student at the University of Texas.
> "You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state."
I scoped it to one of two public universities near Bessemer, Alabama. UAB isn't the flagship campus, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. By the way, the other public university near Bessemer is the University of Montevallo. It has a cost of attendance of 27,845 per year for in-state students.
> "And of note, Amazon actually pays for up to 95% of tuition/fees for warehouse workers who choose to pursue associates degrees."
Is that generous? Yeah. To some extent. But keep in mind the following:
1.) It only applies to associates degrees. 2.) The yearly payout is $3,000 (for full-time employees, half that for part time) 3.) You have to have worked for a year to be eligible 4.) Amazon only covers certain degrees
You also have to continue working a demanding job with irregular hours. It's not nothing, I agree. But I've worked other non-skilled jobs with much more generous tuition reimbursement packages (including, but not limited to: eligibility for dependents, unrestricted major choice, applicability to four-year degrees, and more generous yearly maximums).
> "This is the kind of stuff that needs to be kept in mind to understand why Bessemer residents don’t all see Amazon as evil."
I never said anything about Amazon being evil, or whether Bessemer residents see Amazon as evil. In fact, if you look at my posting history, I've been very upfront that I am an employee of Amazon.
Further, 'not being evil' and 'providing more then the federal (or state governments)' is a very low bar to cross. It doesn't obviate the need for a union.
Infuriatingly disingenuous argument.
Talk about an argument being disingenuous. Don’t put words in my mouth.
I am eternally grateful for the FAFSA/Pell Grant program. Without it, I wouldn't be conducting fundamental science and getting paid 6 figures.
I know this is N=1 sample size, just wanted to put it out there.
I think college should be free only for people that cannot afford it. Rich kids should pay.
Here is some more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship
In Alabama, you can actually use the net price calculator here: https://financialaid.ua.edu/net-price-calculator/
For a family of 2 that earns minimum wage tuition goes as low as $8,000/year in total, and that's excluding any Federal grants or loans.
Generally speaking, sticker price != net price for the vast majority of students: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/new-approach-curbing-col...
From the link: "The average annual net cost at a four-year public college has grown by almost 81% beyond inflation over the past decade, to $3,870."
Again, I'm sorry to hear about your personal experience; it's totally valid. It's, however, not representative of the median or the majority of the lower class.
To rephrase: "For a family of 2 that earns minimum wage, tuition remains more than 50% of your gross income."
The same source notes that the net TFRB (which I'm reading as cost of attendance, as it isn't defined anywhere) is $15,500, with $6,500 in grants. Or a CoA of ~$9,000 annually. This remains above the 50% number I mentioned.
And it's worth noting that these grants aren't solely federal grants. Universities (and states) offer all kinds of non-need-based aid. The one I'm familiar with, since I'm from Georgia, is the Hope scholarship.
This grant offers 6-10K per year, which is amazing, unless you lose it part way through your education (by failing to maintain what can be a fairly difficult GPA requirement). I nearly lost it my first year. That would have been an additional cost of ~20K over the remainder of my education. That was stressful for me, an upper middle class person with financially responsible parents who had decent savings for my education.
That kind of stress would be compounded for someone who started in more dire financial straits, and who was more heavily relying on the grant money.
[0]: And while some people can live at home, this is not available to many people, and can negatively impact your ability to network and build a social support network with peers at university, which is extremely valuable.
In addition to HOPE, you also have Zell-Miller which is even more generous (covers housing, food, and books).
The fact that Georgia's aid is tied to merit is a system that I personally agree with, but understand why someone might not. It's something that the voters of each State should litigate.
> (I went to Georgia Tech)
Then you're probably familiar with at least part of the controversy: maintaining the Zell/HOPE GPA requirement at GT is difficult. So for an above average, but not exceptional student, or a student who doesn't have a strong support network, the rational decision can be to go to a worse school because maintaining the GPA requirement will be easier.
That means UGA (or State or KSU) over Tech for many people. I think that there are a variety of reasons that's a misalignment of incentives (and thankfully there seems to be some improvements happening in this area).
Yes, and I don't see a problem with that. The best schools are for the best students. This response shouldn't surprise you, coming from an alumna of Georgia Tech, which is an extremely rigorous and prestigious school.
I understand that values differ, but at some point, personal responsibility and merit need to count for something.
If the net result of this is that an unexceptional poor student ends up going to KSU or Georgia State instead of Georgia Tech, I'm okay with that. KSU and Georgia State are perfectly fine schools, and its graduates go on to lead perfectly fine lives outside of poverty. I recommend playing with this tool which allows you to see, for every single school and major, what the earnings vs debt is: https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-college-graduates-make-th...
Not everyone is entitled to go to Georgia Tech (or MIT or Harvard) for free; and there are plenty of middle-of-the-lane universities that provide opportunities for unexceptional students, at little to no cost.
Bullshit. In Italy only the lowest income brackets get free healthcare, everyone else has various degree of copay. And even then you get terrible services, with queues several months long for exams and quality far inferior from what you get going trough the private sector.
And when I worked and lived in Dublin, same story, I had to pay 270€ for using emergency services at a public hospital and was lucky to have them covered by the private insurance my employer provided.
Proper dental procedures, substitutive hormone therapy, plenty rate stuff require specialists or medicines that mutua doesn't pass. heck if you have a condition that require a specialist during pregnancy you're going to have to pay everything out of your money to avoid the random ginecologist rotation, to the tune of 120€+/visit, and you're going to need ten or more if any complication arises.
This is the typical uninformed comment from some ableist that never actually had to suffer from the Italian healthcare beyond the most basic services.
>are unemployed
Well, yes?
Utterly false as a general rule, and free is not as glamorous as you make it sound like. Some doctors will refuse to see patients who are on the free healthcare system, too.
> if you need an expensive treatment
Yeah, if you can wait for it. Ever heard of surgery that sometimes take a year to reserve? Well that's the standard in Europe for certain conditions.
Germany and Netherlands for example the payment is in the order of 100 euros a month for health insurance.
I live in the US (originally from EU) and I don't like people arguing the EU healthcare sucks without experiencing it themselves.
No matter what your job/status is, you don't have to be scared to see any doctor - dentist, specialist, eye doctor...
Usually you know when you need a root canal. It's usually because just getting a tooth filled is more expensive than getting it pulled, and most 'decent' dentists won't do pulls, because it eventually, allegedly, leads to all of your teeth shifting and falling out.
I've had dental insurance a couple of times, and while it was $20 to get a full cleaning and xray or whatever, they wanted me to get braces for $2500 out of pocket. I've never had another dentist i was paying for myself ever mention braces or anything else. from 20-38 i went to the dentist like 5 times, 3 cleanings when i had insurance, and 2 wisdom extraction. I'm well aware i lucked out in the dentistry lottery, most people i know have way more problems with their teeth, and i am unsure why, so i never judge people on their dental accoutrements.
Single payer health care is not necessary 'free'. Here in Czechia one pays mandatory 'health tax/insurance' in addition to regular income tax. But still (IMHO) better than US system.
Not everywhere in Europe, and "free healthcare" is largely a myth. It's free until it's not. You need glasses? Out of your pocket, and it's super expensive. You need to stay in hospital? It's not going to be anywhere free. And they will kick you out as soon as they can as they are starving for beds and resources. Good luck with that.
Sure, you can always go to the emergencies to get free treatment, and wait 10 hours to see someone who is overworked to diagnose your issues.
Nobody is ever going to kick you out of hospital. It's covered and the stay is usually longer than in the US where they kick you out right after you wake up.
The wait times are not worse than in the US, never had to wait more than 2-3 hrs in the hospital.
Neither you would ever receive a surprise bill from the hospital.
Why do we keep using this term? There is no such thing as free healthcare. There is taxpayer paid healthcare. I'm not being critical of taxpayer paid healthcare. Those countries made that choice as to how they would pay for healthcare. Cool. Sounds like a good choice. But can we stop calling it "free" please.
Education is also not free... Rant off. Sorry for the interruption.
https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-cri...
That's ignoring the whole healthcare situation... which I think you're leaving out of the equation.
30 seconds of searching indicates the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker.
https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Industry=Grocery_Store_...
Of course the US healthcare system is broken so I know what you're getting at but I don't know that I want Amazon to pay their workers > $15 to subsidize a broken healthcare system for their workers I just want a functional healthcare system and for them to continue to make $15/hr.
Sorry, are you seriously trying to claim an HSA is better than universal healthcare?
>Of course the US healthcare system is broken so I know what you're getting at but I don't know that I want Amazon to pay their workers > $15 to subsidize a broken healthcare system for their workers I just want a functional healthcare system and for them to continue to make $15/hr.
I'm not even sure where you're going with this. The original claim was that $15/hr was better than you can get in Europe. I pointed out the hourly wage actually isn't much better, and oh by the way, that wage doesn't include healthcare (which it doesn't). If you want healthcare coverage you have a monthly fee, plus your co-pay and deductible. Not even REMOTELY competitive to western Europe unless you're one of the lucky few who literally never gets in an accident and never gets sick (as well as your entire family).
I was attempting to nicely dismiss your comparison.
I think it can be. Depends on the details but an HSA comes with a high-deductible plan. This is normally ideal for young people, who are generally healthy and only need insurance for rare catastrophic illness or serious accidents. Normal, routine care (checkups, immunizations, etc.) can be budgeted and paid out of the HSA tax-free. I don't see why that stuff should be "free" for most people, any more than groceries or utilities or housing should be.
Study by the NIH: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296930/
I started with a new doctor after finally getting insurance a few years back. I told them I needed to come in for my annual check-up, and came in with a list of the things that had been bothering me and that I hadn't been able to get looked at (this is common for people who have not had healthcare access). The doctor spent 15 minutes with me, doing the bare minimum of setting up outside testing/imaging - as in, basically no guidance that day - and then coded it as a 45-minute, in-depth consultation ("because of the number of issues addressed"). $250. Before any tests or treatment. For reference, that was about 1% of my annual take-home. For a lot of you, that's like paying a grand or more just for your doctor to direct you elsewhere.
So, yeah, certain things are "covered." But the structure of our healthcare system forces our clinics and hospitals to operate like many other American businesses, which is "in a predatorial manner."
If you say “my knee hurts lately”, then that’s separate as the physician will do an evaluation that is separate from a routine physical.
And it’s not just the US. I have family in Canada and they were told maximum of 2 complaints can be addressed as they can only bill for a certain amount of time. Beyond that the doctor is working for free. Another separate appointment is needed.
If you view a person and their health in a holistic manner, you can't just say, "Well, I've got you set up to check for diabetes and Crohn's, but if you want me to consider that mole then you'll have to pay me another $300 and/or wait a few weeks until I'm not so booked."
My point was that "free preventative care" is not a panacea. Any time a doctor is incentivized to turn that visit into a money-maker, they'll gladly attempt to. And that's wrong.
The difference is that I would not personally be out 1-3 weeks worth of food money for each visit, just establishing my baseline. In neither case would what happened be a "matter of billing" because I would never receive a bill.
The doctor gets paid $X for a preventive visit. If you start adding things on that will be flagged to ensure doctor get paid more, typically through additional billing codes.
The original comment was “why do I get billed more when I bring up issues during a preventative visit”?
That’s why.
You have no empathy for people who can never afford ridiculous health care systems in private systems. This optimises the failed "rugged individual" philosophy that has only lead to ruin.
I do. Having a healthy population benefits me. Having people immunised, cared for and well keeps me healthier and safer. Having people lose homes and jobs and potentially their lives because they can’t afford healthcare is not something I support.
I’m not American and have only just learned about HSAs and totally fail to understand your comment. Could you explain how they help someone poor pay for medical expenses? Doesn’t the account get low/empty and then you’re out of funds?
I'm not sure how Amazon works, but my plans works something like (I'm rounding to make it easy, the reality is slightly more complex) that I pay everything for the first $3000, then for the next $15,000 I pay 20%, and thereafter I pay nothing. My total out of pocket is $6000/year, which is also the most I can put into the HSA per year, and my employer matches some of my contributions to in reality I'm getting $7k/year while only a few rare loop holes can get me close to needing that much. It is very rare for anyone to have more than $18k in medical expense per year (I had a baby last year and still am well below that), so for most people the HSA is another retirement account.
Now the HSA does mean I'm not paying $100/month for my insurance, but instead $600/month. However most of the money is invested using the HSA as a retirement account for my medical needs. The idea of the HSA (which has not worked out in practice) is because the money is mine I'll have incentive to shop around for cheaper medical procedures to make sure there is more money for my future retirement, and this should lower costs (in practice most medical things can't be shopped around for, but a few people do look at their itemized bills and sometimes notice a billed procedure that wasn't done).
Now that $600 is $3-4/hr, which is not insignificant to someone making $15/hr. However here again things get complex. That money is pre-tax income, so your taxes are almost cut in half for the year (granted this is only $500 - and only for a single person who can't claim anything else).
It’s a phenomenal sum of money to spend, and while you have clearly considered your options, it really shows how expensive it is in the US.
That said, I was surprised to see how high it is in New Zealand where I am ($4204) and how much less you are spending than the average in the US ($10906).
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
The median person in the US doesn't spend much more on healthcare than the median European and their income is much higher. (Median income in a poor state like Alabama is higher than the UK.)
Plus we have working clothes dryers. Meanwhile in Sweden they're so poor they have to ration the tvättstuga.
That’s the same everywhere though. If you want to record the most expensive year of healthcare in someone’s lifetime, it’s a safe bet that the last year is going to be at, or near the top. Like has been compared with like.
> Plus we have working clothes dryers.
I’m missing something, and I suspect it’s obvious. What’s this about sorry?
You're right it is comparable, although it's affected by the country's demographics. I just mean if you're moving to the US as a working-age person, it is not going to represent your situation. A median or age distribution would be more informative.
> I’m missing something, and I suspect it’s obvious. What’s this about sorry?
That's just a fun quality of life fact about the US. Europe has better transit, we have better and bigger housing and our appliances work better. We're more likely to have air conditioning too.
(Clothes dryers don't work very well unless they're vented to the outside, and in older brick buildings like Europe, and for some reason also in Japan, they aren't always.)
It's not an HSA and nothing else. It looks like it's similar to my employer plan which is actually more generous than some universal systems - I/my partner use about the same services here and in Australia and I pay less here. Mainly because universal systems don't always cover dentists/specialists/mental health.
I likewise had some of the best American specialists in GI and oncology. I also ended up with six figures in medical debt despite having incredible insurance and a great job. I also experienced excruciating wait times at emergency rooms that dwarfed anything I’ve encountered at the A&E in the UK.
The NHS obviously has massive scope for improvement and isn’t even the healthcare system I have felt the most secure in (that was the Swiss) but I am confident that the NHS is almost certainly better for the average Brit than the US medical system is for the average American.
I'm glad you've had a better experience with the NHS than I have; my wife has a chronic condition and has had a pretty bad time in the NHS - she hates going to the doctors now from how many times she's been called a liar or accused of just trying to feed a painkiller addiction (despite not actually asking for painkillers). All because many doctors seemingly struggle to admit that they don't know what's wrong.
I just bring this up because I think (and I could be wrong) that some people see socialised healthcare as a panacea but my experience with it is that it's actually very inconsistent and regularly lets people down (not just my wife, a good few others that I know as well). I still wouldn't choose the US system over the NHS though, not by a long shot.
Do they? Every socialised healthcare system is crying out for money and is in need of help. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claim one is perfect.
That sounds really weird. Why would a UK doctor not fix a break?
I’m guessing there was a medical reason rather than anything to do with the NHS or quality of care?
I've had other NHS experiences that make this not particularly surprising.
Oh, and granted it was just the one experience, but the wait time seemed on par with an urgent care here in the US.
incorrect. they are OFFERED healthcare coverage. By this use of the word have, I have a private jet because I could buy one if I had the resources.
Is it fair to compare the average wage of a warehouse worker across the entirety of the U.K. with the starting wage of a warehouse worker in a single deeply impoverished town?
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/warehouse-operative
Did you know that the United States is the wealthiest country in the world?
In aggregate, sure; its somewhere between 5th-8th by per capita GDP, which is the more relevant comparison, depending on source.
But the UK isn’t even close to the US, or particularly near the top in Western Europe (which yas countries ahead of the US.)
And if it's just plane fare, there are probably a lot of places you can make it with a bus ticket that have better prospects without needing to go to Europe.
Top of mind why someone would NOT want to work in "Europe": - lower salaries - much higher tax rate - stuff in general is more expensive (higher VAT + everything that's imported)
Healthcare in the UK is not as good as you may think it is. Unless you love waiting lines for life-threatening conditions.
- Health care
- Worker protections
- Required time off
- Sick time
- Maternity leave
etc.
Here its $15. And you're on your fucking own.
If you compare it to completely underdeveloped or dictatorial economies... Sure I guess its way better. But the US shouldn't be comparing comparing itself to that. Its like saying "This engineer is horrible, but he's not as bad as this drug addict that is yelling all day outside our front door!"
The US as a whole is awful at providing healthcare, but healthcare is a particular area where Amazon actually is going way above what is normal and is provided astonishingly well for its workers.
Glad to see someone like you list the real numbers, because I keep hearing "good insurance" when it comes to Amazon warehouses, but this is the first time I saw someone actually point out the specifics. Also glad to hear that Amazon warehouse workers receive health benefits on par with full-time SWEs (not being sarcastic here, I genuinely am happy to hear this is the case).
$3k for a Microsoft SWE is a "dang, I wish I didn't have to go to the hospital" situation.
$3k for an Amazon warehouse employee earning $15/hr can often be a "there go my savings, I wonder if I got this injury due to the amount of physical activity my job requires" situation.
Currently it's something like "we charge you a lot for the first few months but also give you the money to pay it in your HSA", which makes you wonder why they give it to you in the first place. It's not like you can optimize your prescriptions out of your life, so it's not enabling choice.
Btw, once you're 65 you can withdraw money for no reason without a penalty, so it's no worse than a traditional IRA. Too bad deposits are taxed in California.
Essentially, what it means is that if an employee spends less than $1.5k/yr on medical expenses, they don't gain much benefit. If they spend over $1.5k, they essentially only spend 10% after that on all of their medical expenses. And once they hit a hard cap at $3k, they spend nothing at all. 90% off for most medical stuff is a great rate.
Not even mentioning the fact that this kind of an insurance is a godsend to people with major health problems, given that in the worst possible scenario, they would only ever spend $3k of their own money in a calendar year on medical stuff. And that's only if their actual pre-insurance-cost expenses are closer to the $16.5k, because $1.5k + $1.5k/0.1 = $16.5k.
And I am yet to see a better insurance out of any employers (not just warehouse employers). Even the "amazing" student insurance I had back in college (which I had to pay the premium for) was much worse than this.
Nitpicking here, but they probably do, because the insurance-negotiated prices for many services are much better than the prices prices you could negotiate yourself -- and that is assuming you even have the skills and energy to do any negotiating.
I have a high-deductible plan, which on paper covers literally nothing until I hit something over $7k/yr in expenses, which I thankfully never have. However, I usually pay 30-60% less than the uninsured cash price for my appointments and procedures just because I'm on the plan in the first place.
I often (not always) check this with the provider, so it's not like I'm just blindly assuming the discount claimed by the insurance company is accurate. It's usually not, but the discount still seems to be substantial.
In exactly one case I ended up saving like 50 bucks per dermatologist appointment by paying them directly.
I'm 38 and also have a $7k+ deductible (my plan is HDHP), costs me $275/mo.
That said, having to pay up to $3k a year in medical costs when you're earning a Microsoft salary is a much smaller percent of your income than having the pay the same making $15/hr at an Amazon warehouse.
And I agree with your point, that type of an insurance with a fixed cut-off is regressive in a similar way that a sales tax it. So please don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say that Amazon warehouse workers have it just as good as Microsoft SWEs in terms of benefits (or just in general).
They do, however, have the type of health benefits/insurance that is extremely difficult to beat by literally anyone except what other big tech companies provide to their SWEs. And afaik those benefits for Amazon warehouse workers kick-in on day 1, unlike what it's like at many other similar warehouse jobs.
The latter should absolutely be avoided, but an HSA is basically just another tax-advantaged retirement account along the lines of an IRA.
When I said "i don't personally touch it", I didn't mean that I avoid it. I just know that it is a part of my benefit package, i get contributions in there, but that's about it. I don't even look at it or interact with it in any way otherwise, because I am not planning to use it until much later in life.
Probably much easier than it would be for a warehouse worker. Though I have no idea how this is relevant to what was said in the message you were replying to.
Given the physical nature of the work, I'd consider them more enlightened if they provided a lower deductible at the $0 premium level for every warehouse worker across the board. I'm really getting tired of places treating the long term mental and physical health of workers as an unpriced externality that's later paid for by society.
Also, thanks to motardo for the data point. (I will assume you're an actual warehouse worker.)
> but it is the minimum $0 monthly premium plan.
The monthly premium is the cost of the insurance plan. A "$0" premium isn't actually $0, it means that Amazon is paying 100% of the monthly costs of maintaining the insurance, requiring $0 contribution from the employee. Many companies (especially warehouse type operations) are less generous, and require some monthly contribution from the employee to pay the premium. The worst health insurance I ever had required me to pay 100% of the monthly premium, with $0 committed by the company. That company lost a lot of employees.
> I pay 100% of the first $1500
This is the "deductible". The covered person is responsible for 100% of costs until the deductible is met, although there are many exceptions. For example, a routine checkup might be 100% covered ($0 cost), as well as a range of preventative care procedures described by the ACA.
> then 10% of the next $15,000
After the deductible has been met, the person is responsible for coinsurance of additional costs. An extra $5000 procedure would translate to a $500 bill for the patient.
> then 0% of anything over $16,500.
This is where the "out of pocket maximum" or OOPM is reached. In this case, the most the patient could expect to pay is $1500 (deductible) + $1500 (10% of next $15K) = $3000. After that, all excess charges are handled by the insurance company until the insurance year resets.
In short: Health care will cost between $0 and $3000 depending on how many services are used for the year (excluding fully covered benefits like annual checkup, depression screening, breast cancer screening for women, vaccinations, and other services covered for free under the ACA)
But I assume a company like Amazon is dealing with a large insurer part of nationwide networks like BCBS.
Also, insurance companies have their own doctors and pharmacists that might disagree with the patient's doctor's treatment plans, and will not cover the healthcare costs for those items without a "prior authorization" from the insurer. There's an appeal system in place for this too. Although, this type of thing exists without health insurers too, it's just employees of the government deciding what to approve and not approve.
Actually, out-of-network emergency care is an 'essential benefit' under the ACA, so most plans do cover this scenario.
I actually just screwed myself with this recently. I went to an urgent care while traveling (because that is usually cheaper when I'm at home) and it wasn't covered. An urgent care apparently doesn't count as emergency care. It turns out that I should have gone to the (typically very expensive) ER instead -- it would have been covered 100% because of the ACA!
Every time I dig into ACA, I find that it’s a pretty decent framework for a non taxpayer funded healthcare system.
This is an important point. And a related point.
- Because the OOP payments reset annually, there are perverse incentives to over consume medical care after OOP is reached within a given year. Defer preventative health care until after you have a major medical problem that runs to max OOP, then stack up on preventative care before the year ends.
- Related: Insurance is also tied to employer - if you change jobs, all those OOP values reset (to whatever policies are in place with new employer). This causes friction in the labor market - employer-provided and -subsidized health care prevents people from looking for new employment.
In general, we wouldn't even use it to access private health care, because we would then face substantial fees to use it (I don't know exactly; it varies significantly by procedure, has a $500 deductible, substantial copay, and has maximum caps), however we're taxed heavily for not having a private policy.
Our family income has recently pushed over some thresholds in the rebate system, pushing up prices even more, might have to shop around to find an even more useless but cheaper policy.
Australia's public health system is pretty decent, but the half baked private system bolted on the side is a mess. Lots of people paying thousands for unusable insurance which is just sent directly to private companies.
From what I understand, order picking there must be god awful, but being the receiving clerk might not be so bad. Being on-site IT might not be so bad. Certainly being the Director of Operations for that warehouse wouldn't be bad... at least I wouldn't think.
There is so much digging at Amazon I’d like to see the delivery and warehouse work role required performance metrics and work role benefits posted so we can look at facts.
Such a difference between talking about working at a warehouse from the outside vs being born into a life that traps you there.
I think HN struggles with topics like unionisation because most of us have just never been at the bottom of society without a way out. We’re relatively rich and so highly skilled - we lucked out to be nerds in a world of tech, perhaps due to timing or perhaps because our parents were wealthy enough to put us here.
It’s the same phenomena of loving Uber or Airbnb and not understanding the cost to others.
I don’t know how to solve this problem. I don’t personally want to go work at an Amazon warehouse so I can see how awful it is. I work damn hard but I know how lucky I must be.
How do you get the rich to realise that the poor are simply, by definition, less fortunate?
I think a significant difference is that most folks in tech do not live and work among the skilled and unskilled laborers. In the military, you know the cook, the plumber, the electrician, and the riflemen, the air traffic controller, the network technician. Personally. You've been around the world together, you may have been in firefights together.
In the military, the headquarters jobs with the bean counters are rare. Bean counting is essentially synonymous with 'fat and happy'. In tech, the equivalent of bean-counting headquarters is 90% of the organization. It's extremely advanced bean-counting, but the field units have atrophied quite a little bit.
I really like your perspective. Reminds me of the attempts in new towns in the UK to try to mix different socioeconomic classes on the same street. "Show me and I'll understand." I grew up in a deprived town (but my family was comfortable) and I've worked a lot of awful jobs, maybe that helps.
So a good first step would be to integrate within companies more? Perhaps corporates deliberately avoid that. Much easier to treat warehouse staff badly if your valuable engineers don't know them personally.
https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1103&langId=en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...
You've been mislead by propaganda. They have healthcare, protections, etc.
In Alabama you cannot qualify for medicaid unless you are a "needy child, parent, caregiver, pregnant woman, or elderly/disabled resident". Meaning you can't qualify just for being low income.
While Amazon does provide decent health insurance, most lower income jobs do not.
I make good money, and have good health insurance and it would still cost me over $1k to go to the hospital. Imagine doing that with no health insurance while making $10/hr.
EDIT: You updated your comment so I'll add on. Sure, Amazon provides health insurance, but a lot of businesses don't. In 2020, ~31 million Americans didn't have insurance. Even if you have health insurance, premiums and deductibles can be astronomical.
Europe is not one country. I hope you realize it's hard to generalize.
So while your comment is half correct, I think you should give the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt before you try and "well actually" them.
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
But yes, it comes with affordable healthcare, free education, longer vacation, and maternity leave.
I don't think most of my colleagues in academia could physically complete a shift in an Amazon warehouse. Is that a skill?
The labels unskilled and entry level are used to depress wage expectations not accurately represent the requirements of the work performed because the work is deemed to be of low economic value.
It doesn’t mean, and has never meant it was easy work or anyone could survive doing it for long - rather that the necessary skills (for the majority of the population who doesn’t already have them by dint of existing) can be taught in about 5 minutes by someone not trained in teaching it to you.
Ditch digging is ‘unskilled’ because anyone who can figure out a shovel can do it, and theoretically any random passerby could do it (for a time) to a competent degree. This is unlike a ‘skilled’ trade, or craft such as electrical work, surveying, etc.
It’s something very few people could actually sustain for very long - I spent a week ditch digging before when I was younger - but part of why the pay is terrible and the work is hard is because any rando who needs some cash this week can do it. There is a ton of competition keeping prices low and conditions hard.
Why ... what did you think that the subject was, dear ?
https://jobs.lidl.de/lidl-als-arbeitgeber/mindesteinstiegslo...
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2414-6th-Ave-N-Bessemer-A...
So yeah, you can have your own opinion. That doesn't mean that the opinion is beyond criticism, nor does it mean it's a rational thought out opinion from all points of view, considering all the facts.
Curious, what would you say is better to do? I could see either one of those choices as being equally rational and justifiable. I honestly lean a little more towards the stereo. Your answer depends on your outlook in life and your interests and wants/needs in the moment. It's not so simple as objective 'data on the situation'. Furthermore, claiming that you can deduce quickly what is rational and right for someone else is a little condescending.
Or are we talking about the hicks that vote against government healthcare and social safety nets despite the fact that they would themselves benefit?
"Voting against their interest" is just how the ivory tower crowd derides the poor for sticking to their ideological guns even when it doesn't benefit them. The poor have opinions and beliefs and making sacrifices in the name of their beliefs does not make them stupid.
In fact, the people who were the first "rednecks" would most likely reject all of the fascist bootlicking that goes on for most conservatives (not that neoliberal bootlicking is better, just less prevalent; I don't see hordes of foaming-at-the-mouth Biden supporters screaming adoration about Biden with some goofy flags and apparel on the street corners, while I still see the Trump folks doing the same cult worship of their new "god"). The original rednecks were miners who violently opposed capitalist exploitation [1]. This culminated in the battle of Blair Mountain [2], in which miners living in exploitative conditions violently rebelled against the authoritarian private police (the "Pinkertons") in their attempt to form a union. This is also the first time that aerial bombardment is used on American soil (preceding Pearl Harbor).
Needless to say, I think the original "rednecks" have nothing in common with those who pretend to espouse some sort of "rural identity"; the original rednecks would not have looked to the state to force their own restrictive ideas of living on other people.
It's fine for people to have their own opinions about these things, but when these people who stick to their ideological guns do so in the face of facts (e.g. all of the cult-of-trump people who intellectually contort themselves to see him as some skilled businessman when he has a history littered with business failures, including losing money on a casino!), it's a little difficult to respect their opinions; this is especially true when their opinions are incoherent (e.g. the GOP celebrating Goya and that my pillow guy for "getting involved in politics" when it benefits them, while deriding companies looking to boycott states that plan to impose Draconian voter suppressing laws to "stay out of politics") and involve restricting the liberties of other people to comport with their own strict world view (e.g. restricting the right of other people to get same-sex married, as though that is somehow an "attack" on hetero marriage).
Ultimately it's about being able to accept new evidence and change one's mind, which I think these people who vote against their own interest (hicks or not) are not wont to do. Just as not all people in the GOP are fascists, but all fascists vote for GOP candidates, not all people towards the liberal end of the political spectrum are open to new ideas and changing their mind, but all people who are open to learning and change are on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy [1] https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2009/08/original-redneck-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
It’s quite the opposite actually.
I mean there are plenty of people alive today that lived through a time when interracial marriage was illegal, too [0].
Even if the path they use for their goal appears to be deregulatory, they're more than happy to call in the cavalry when that same deregulation allows actors with whom they disagree to also partake in the newfound "freedom":
* Whenever some state capitol puts up the commandments in the state house because "wE'Re a ChRiSTIaN NaTiON" under the guise of freedom of religion, then gets upset when the church of satan wants to put one of their own symbols right next to it [1]
* They were more than happy to stand on the ground of "A company is a private business and should be able to operate as it pleases" when it was about a bakery and a gay wedding cake, but now that Twitter is kicking off right-wing wackos, all of a sudden they pull a complete 180. Not to mention that this was the same mindset of the Jim Crow "separate but equal" disaster in the US's history.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1%20 [1] https://www.westernjournal.com/satanic-temple-protests-10-co...
Most of them are not aware that they are making sacrifices, though. They were convinced that the only alternative is communism.
For these communities, these are well paid jobs with great benefits compared to what they would otherwise have.
At that point the question is - why should you starve so someone else can be happy about Unions?
These issues only get solved with society wide action. The poor sap casting their single vote here can’t afford to make this call on their own, and they’re just happy their particular king is generous enough to grace them and not more abusive. Because there are a LOT of more abusive ones , and they’ve probably seen that first hand unlike most of the posters here.
Conditions for a laborer in Bulgaria, Romania, and the UK are on a completely different level. This is not that dissimilar.
And while I don't know you, I'm gonna assume that you don't work for Amazon in Bessemer. Neither do I. So our responses to the situation might just be more about us and our baggage, than the actual facts on the ground in Alabama.
higher wages or better working conditions don't happen in a vacuum. Thinking it's a godsend or something is the definition of not thinking rationally.
Right, because no one has any relevant experiences which might influence their thoughts. You said anyone. You come across as incredibly condescending
People in this thread are all like, "Don't tell me giving someone food is in their self-interest! What if they want to starve?"
Interesting, so you prefer people who don't use their own brains.
Often when I hear that people need to be educated about some issue, what I understand the speaker to be implying is that the reason a person disagrees with them is due to ignorance, when that's often not the case. We may think we arrive at our opinions based on cold logic and inarguable facts, but in reality there are many more factors that influence all of us.
Contrary to what folks seem to think, unionization is not always a “no brainer”. Been through two orgs that went through the process, considered joining one because they presented a good case, rejected one because there was no value to the $50 the wanted to pull from my paycheck.
I believe The USA spends most on social welfare than any other country.
I see USA at 10 in per capita section in your wiki link.
What does that have to do with health system
The utopia would be having low income housing running on solar with affordable EV's for people under a certain income level as well. Combined with a basic income, it would certainly make a huge decrease in poverty and allow these people to bootstrap themselves into the middle class.
EDIT: for poor math skills. lol
That'd be $329 trillion[1], which is on the order of 100x what we spent.
1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+...
damn, didn't know covid killed 99% of the US population. rough.
I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago.
Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...
Fraud to get disability payments is very high. People who are unable to rejoin the job market sometimes make the difficult decision to connive with sympathetic doctors to get this. But once you do this, you can never go back to work in any official capacity. This is the one case where people who are chronically unemployed give up and become wards of the state. So the 'desperately poor' are actually taken care of in some fashion in the US.
The problem is that the people who are the 'working poor' often get shafted. These are the janitors who are working all hours of the day, the baggers at the grocery store, the short order cooks, the security people who patrol industrial and residential facilities, etc. Even though their children are eligible for all the benefits above in many cases, it's still difficult to raise a family if there is one breadwinner who makes minimum wage. These people are not eligible for many benefits programs and also do not generally get healthcare from their employers (employers deliberately keep hours/week down to avoid this expense). The problem is, 'taking care' of these people is very hard: they are the majority of the workforce, and I suspect that there is not enough money to fund programs for these people because of the sheer size of this workforce. Also remember that this group oftentimes does not have powerful unions (many subgroups do), which means politicians do not have to listen to them.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/07/22/worst-cities...
I suspect manufacturing is somewhat less casual about their employees’ health because much of it is unionized, and training is more difficult. Warehouse workers are considered disposable.
And the service industry is light years easier than warehouse work, at least based on my time in both.
People being carried out of a factory missing a limb are more noticeable than people who stop coming to work because their backs simply can’t sustain the work any longer.
But why does this work need to be for decades? Why isn't the worker in amazon also educate themselves or upskill, so that they can move to a different career with higher paying prospects?
The days of working the same job for your entire life is gone - and that it's every person's own responsibility to keep improving their own skills and career prospects, continuously throughout their life.
Secondly, are we really sure that if everyone suddenly educated themselves into a better job that there would be enough better jobs to go around? It seems unlikely. Particularly with increased automation.
My point is that the “get a better job” argument isn’t a strong solution to providing for everyone’s needs. We’re pretty clearly getting worse in this area as a society, with stagnating wages and fewer opportunities for entry-level work which can make ends meet.
At a point, if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution when people feel they don’t have another choice. We aren’t necessarily close to that, but if these trends continue, that’s more people making less money with higher prices. At some point that leads to desperation for enough people that violence happens. Just look at Russia or France in the past couple hundred years.
My meaning with that is that it’s not just someone’s own responsibility, but that there is some level of social responsibility for maintaining a baseline.
If they were valuable, they would be valuable enough to pay a high price.
And i don't believe that it is possible to run out of high skilled jobs. It may be that in the further future, these higher skilled jobs paid just as much as low-skilled jobs of today, and the lowskilled job of today disappears due to automation. But that's a good future - it means that production and output must be very high for it to occur. And who's to say there won't be even higher skilled jobs? Or brand-new job types that's not envisioned yet? After all, human have unlimited desires which is the impetus for all economic progress.
> if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution
only if society don't invest in up-skilling. I'm a big fan of society helping those of lower skill to increase their skill. Education is one of the most efficient forms of investment a gov't can undertake.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo...
America is utterly rotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer,_Alabama#Economy
"Crime increased following the rise in unemployment and social disruption from the decline of manufacturing industries in the area. As of 2019 Bessemer ranks first in terms of violent crimes for US cities with 25,000 or more people."
Population has fallen from its peak in 1970 of 33k to 26k today.
Thanks for the reference.
EDIT: Also home to the world's oldest chicken, who lived 16 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_(chicken)
Random internet serendipity, shift in topic and mood. We live in such an interesting and strange universe.
frowns in Colorado
Funny enough, I have no heavenly idea how, I had actually run into the article on poor Mike before.-
Further edit: Come to think, poor Mike the "headless" would be a great mascot for -at least- AWS, for obvious, ssh-related reasons :) VP of ... "Customer Engagement"? Prime? ...
... I got it! "Incubator"!
I'll show myself out ...Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks.
After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out.
The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.
I don't follow how you made that assumption about OP of the comment
Is having to make a decision to take your child off life support a "real actual problem in your life"? How about being told that your visa won't be renewed and you have to leave your entire life, job, friends and family behind and move somewhere else? Is that a "real actual problem in your life"? How about a cancer diagnosis? A cheating spouse?
Not all "real actual problems" in life have to be related to money - you can have plenty of it and still be in an extremely difficult and distressing situation in your life, which won't naturally lead to increase in violence(cancer diagnosis is probably one of the worst events you can have in your life and yet I cannot imagine it's corellated to increase in violence rates at all). I frankly also find the attitude of the previous poster to be condescening and jugemental.
And frankly, you don’t have to have experienced anything remotely similar to understand how economic desperation leads to crime, it just requires a capacity for, and willingness to employ empathy.
On the other hand, “Cancer patient goes on crime spree to pay for chemo” sounds like it could be a very funny film, in the hands of the right writer.
(noting there's a difference between "I'm a student living with parents, I'd like a job but can't get one so I'm unemployed" and "I have 3 kids and a sickly partner and I'm overdue on rent and I'm unemployed and I have no social/family safety net")
I wouldn't call it "not having a real actual problem" - again, it's relative and so on; but a charitable read as "never been on brink of famine/poverty" may be a good interpretation?
A good first step is a country wide housing, healthcare, food, and job guarantee. If bezos zuck musk gates etc can be billionaires we can provide a minimal standard of living for everyone. I'm open to considering any research that says doing so is impossible, but I doubt any such research exists.
One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.
The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.
It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.
Subsidize 2 luggages and a 1-way bus ticket per household member, to anyone that wants to move to a new location. No questions asked. You can do it X amount of times in your life, and anyone with income below (a multiple of poverty rate here) qualifies. That's it.
I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain was overriding my logical brain.
I can only assume I'm not unique in this fact; if it comes down to mugging someone or not eating for a week, I'm not 100% sure which option I would choose. I would like to think that I would never hurt someone, but since 2017 or so, I've had a pretty privileged life.
Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver.
Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use it to prevent disaster or rationally extend themselves, lower-income people can too. Not having access to credit isn't a _good_ thing per se.
Whenever people have actually bothered to look into the use of payday loans instead of pearl-clutching about how the poor don't know what's good for them, they've found that much of the clientele is making rational decisions. As bad as a high-interest loan sounds to privileged sensibilities, the alternative is often worse. It's just more diffuse and thus easier to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tucker_(businessman)
Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry. As a whole though, I feel the industry is quite scummy and often scammy.
I alluded to empirical evidence of their usefulness. Here's a study from the FDIC[1]. It's dated, but there are structural conclusions about the way payday loans work and why their rates are so high.
I don't see the relevance of specific payday lenders being shut down for fraud. Individual cases of fraud should be cracked down upon, and its widespread prevalence in an industry suggests that regulation is potentially a good idea. But neither of these automatically negate the usefulness of a service, just as the bad behavior of the banking industry doesn't make a bank account useless.
> Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry.
Yes, this is my point. The comment I responded to and that I quoted from said:
> I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams
The point of my comment is that they can be useful, and the GP's shame at considering an option he "knew" was a scam is unwarranted and down to midwit elites who are quick to fuck the poor over in the name of paternalistic, performative virtue, but never bother to understand them as agents making decisions that are sometimes unintuitively rational.
[1] https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/cfr/2005/wp2005/2005-09...
Not sure where you get your news/experience from ;), but I don't see how any of those arguments apply to payday loan places - in every country, city, society I've lived in, they a) were shut down for fraud and exploitation anytime anybody bothered to look & investigate b) are universally demonstrated and proven to prey upon those who can least afford it. These are not benevolent capitalists trying to help those who nobody else would help - the owners are shameless sharks exploiting and manipulating people into a vicious cycle.
(FWIW I'm not going to downvote, I actually upvoted - your perspective is interesting and must as I may disagree I'd like to hear more and maybe be educated, rather than shut the debate down; but I'd like to see some "counter-John-Oliver" studies and stats to go against the ones I think most of us have seen)
Edit: I mean heck, like with smoking, government here will try their best to talk you out of it; you can still do it, as an adult human being... but it's just a bad, bad idea
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic when I said "scam" since they usually do what they advertise. Let me rephrase: they have ridiculously high interest rates that can lead to difficult-to-escape debt, and they are predatory towards desperate people, hence why you usually see them in poorer neighborhoods.
Debt is absolutely a tool and I wasn't claiming otherwise, so when I said "scam", what I really meant was "the worst possible way to leverage debt".
From your clarifications in this comment, it doesn't sound like you're the type of person I'm talking about. I don't disagree at all that loans can take advantage of people's innumeracy and desperation-driven irrationality. And I consider this a serious concern with excessively high rates. But it needs to be balanced against the bedrock principle that taking a choice away from someone usually immiserates them further, and if you believe otherwise you need a damn high level of rigor to show it.
Tarring the payday loan industry writ large as a scam doesn't stand up to that level of rigor, and there are a thousand qualitative and quantitative pieces of evidence pointing to the fact that the industry does provide value to a portion of the underbanked population.
This doesn't preclude things like capping rates, but this is an explicit recognition that, at the given rate, the cost of the innumerate being taken advantage of is higher than the cost of cutting off an emergency lifeline for people who can use it rationally.
I don't think you and I are especially in disagreement here, given your clarification of what you meant by "scam".
That's not using debt as a 'tool', that is weaponizing it against those can't fend for themselves.
That's not a comment on the fairness of the rate charged. But if there is a sufficient amount of competition among lenders, and they were effectively regulated and monitored, we could expect their rates are enough to allow them to make a reasonable profit in spite of the risk of default.
[0] https://thehill.com/regulation/237538-borrowers-default-on-n...
European Union is not a country and every member state has their own rules regulating this, there isn't one payday lenders rulebook across the entire EU.
As for what you said - it's true, except that it boils down to a checkbox on the form "are you able to make repayments on this loan?" and that's about it, that takes care of the legal side of things.
Consider someone who got a flat tire and it needs to be replaced before the person can go to work. The cost of replacing a tire can be $100-$200. The cost of waiting could cost their job.
They could apply for a credit card with 18% interest and a bunch of fees - and the card MIGHT be delivered the next day. OR they can go to a pay day lender and borrow $100 NOW and get to their job this afternoon.
The tire replacement "should" have cost $100 - now it costs $121, and they keep their job.
You might imagine a similar situation for: your fridge broke and you NEED to keep your food fresh, your heater/AC broke, someone broke your front door trying to rob you.
Life SUCKS if you are poor.
Actual story: I met someone who was returning home on a bus, but was kicked off after having a seizure. She and her bf couldn't afford a new bus ticket to get home (to LA). They were stuck in Houston for at least a week, it is possible they missed work and were fired and missed rent and were evicted. If that was you, how much would you be willing to pay for $500 now? I didn't know them long enough to know if they were telling the truth, but I wish I had given them money.
I'm not asking why the customer doesn't just go to a bank instead.
I'm asking what's stopping you or me from opening a competing payday loan service that charges "only" $110 instead of $121.
It seems to me that this should be a highly competitive industry, the only barriers to entry being some capital, a storefront in a cheap part of town, and a little physical security? What am I missing?
Background: I work at a bank, we specialize in Credit Cards - but I'm in the car finance division. Some of what I have here is an educated guess.
Pay day lenders IS highly competitive. In certain geographies, there are LOTS of lenders. There are some very real barriers to entry:
You have to be credited with certain financial regulators (CFPB and OCC are the 2 I know of) to lend money - and these regulators come with various stipulations (e.g., keep $ in reserve, don't be racist, lend to people who can pay you back, etc)
Many "real" banks avoid this market because the regulators "punish" us - our Credit Card division would be held to a higher standard because we also had pay day loans. Fun fact: during the Obama administration, we also had Mortgages, because regulators "went easy" on the rest of the company. When Trump became president, regulators stopped caring and we sold our mortgages.
All of this being said, if you, right NOW had a lemonade stand lending money to people, you could probably get away with it.
On that note, there is a really interesting shift in the market:
Financial Services As A Service. Imagine: Bank of Small-Town-Maine is a legitimate bank. They know how to stay solvent, they are registered with the right regulators, etc. I approach them and say "let me use your Certifications, I'll use my money, my marketing, I'll buy Identification Services and Credit services - I'll lend money to people and we split the profit".
ACE Cash Express is doing something like this RIGHT NOW - and there are MANY other people doing it, too.
And on the point, financing your home appliances is a popular thing (but please, pay up front!)
> That's not using debt as a 'tool', that is weaponizing it against those can't fend for themselves.
Are you familiar with the concept of a poverty trap? We're not talking about people whose financial decisions consist of figuring out how to distribute their securities tax-efficiently across their accounts. There are lots of people for whom there are _very_ few degrees of financial freedom, where not being able to pay for car repairs can mean losing your job which can mean getting evicted, and where a precarious but livable existence can become a financial nightmare trap with a single stroke of bad luck and bad timing.
What's the discount rate on a loan for someone in that position? Why are you so confident that, a million miles away from your situation, you can make that decision better for them than they can for themselves? If someone is underbanked (like 22% of Americans), why are you so sure that a time-sensitive $300 emergency expense isn't worth $360, if they're confident they can pay it back (eg, when they get their paycheck)? If you're actually interested in the well-being of those who feel the need to avail themselves of tools like this, the New Yorker wrote an article about it half a decade ago[1]. There are a million other resources and even studies describing the demand side of the story, but it's a lot easier to just pat oneself on the back about how these poor illiterate people are being saved from themselves and then ignore the people whose weakened access to credit further immiserates them.
> I'm sorry but in Ontario, prior to January 1, 2017, the charge was $21 per $100 advanced, an effective interest rate of 14,299% (not a typo)
There are an impressive amount of things wrong with this short sentence and its implications.
1) This is the maximum allowable rate. It's completely consistent for someone to believe that the worst-possible payday lenders are on-net exploitative without claiming the entire industry is a scam.
2) The parent comment I disagreed with did not say "I was going to a pre-Jan-1-2017 Ontario payday lender, which I know is a scam". He said it of payday loans in general, a belief that's widely held in my social circles for the John-Oliver-related reasons I mentioned before.
3) Nothing in my comment said I was opposed to regulation, up to and including capping rates. Most people (poor or not) are pretty terrible at math, and desperation absolutely can push people further towards irrational decisions. Legally capping rates is a decision that, at a given rate, more people are falling prey to their innumeracy than are availing themselves of a costly but necessary emergency life-raft. There's nothing wrong with this legislative judgment call, but starting and ending your analysis at "look how high this number is!!!!" is just cosplaying compassion.
4) Again, the assumption that just waving your hands in the air and saying a number has any connection to the reality of poverty traps and the incredibly steep discount rates they impose upon people. Removing options from people isn't saving them from their misery, it's just displacing their misery into a million diffuse other problems that you don't have to think about.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-good-are-pa...
Even if we accept that payday lending has a place, I think most payday lenders benefit from this equation and certainly contribute to the poverty trap: even if most of the debtors end up getting (likely minimum wage) jobs, they now have the added burden of repaying the onerous rates that they agreed to while under extreme duress. And that duress is the thing that seems to be missing in your calculus.
The problem with payday loans is not the theoretical application of debt theory but the rational risk taking of people with no other (perceived) options: under almost all circumstances, it is better to be starving next week than it is to be starving today.
You are correct, not having access to credit is a bad thing. But having access to predatory credit is a WORSE thing. There's a reason we outlawed indentured slavery and "company scrip", and payday loans are a half a step up from that situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* well, the guidelines do also ask not to use allcaps for emphasis, but that's minor
Reminds me of an anecdote from poor African countries. Farmers would buy fertilizer months before they needed it, even though it is logically better for them to save that money and only buy the fertilizer when they needed it (assuming the price of the fertilizer was constant). But they knew if they had the money the would be tempted to spend it in the meantime, so they bought it early to avoid the temptation.
Payday loans can encourage people to take out a loan and spend money even in cases where it would be better for them to find an alternative.
Also, a lot of these payday loans are just flat-out illegal. If you look up usury laws in the US, they typically cap interest at somewhere around ~25% per year[1], and the highest I could find was on the order of 400% per year [2]. I didn't check every state so it's possible there are some that don't have any caps, but my point is that very often these payday loans are literally breaking the law by charging absurd interest rates.
[1] https://paydayloaninfo.org/state-information/40 [2] https://paydayloaninfo.org/state-information/17
You don't even have to be that smart or read high-quality sources to find this perspective! "Payday loans never provide value" is too dumb for even Vox[1]!
The reason I'm so passionate about this topic is not just garden-variety frustration at how stupid people are. "Helping" people by controlling what they can spend their food stamps on, whom they can have sex with, or how they survive and support themselves should come with a heavy, heavy burden of rigor. History is full of elites destroying the lives of others through their malicious "compassion" and refusal to actually consider that other people live different lives with different problems. The problem with things like payday loans is that the kind of IFLScience midwits that places like HN are thick with won't bother to do the most basic of research beyond clickbaity headlines, eye-popping context-free stats, amd comedy shows that pretend to be informative. It's repulsive.
[1] https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/11/5991137/john-oliver-pay...
I see the HN crowd as rather monotonic, and thanks to stories like yours, it shows me wrong, and that’s for the best.
My escape was doubling my pay, then paying off my debt, then refusing to take on any further debt, ever. Currently closing on a house, paid with cash. Never again debt.
It is easier to think long term while feeling secure but not thinking long term can lead to becoming insecure. Not trying to make any moral or blame judgements here - just pondering origins of problems and solutions.
I think my lack of impulse control came as a direct cause of me being broke. I had previously never seriously considered any kind of payday loan because I knew they were multi-thousand-percent levels of interest, but that part of my brain wasn't the one thinking. When faced with a really tough situation, I think it's common for your "survivalist" side to kick in.
I never actually did get the payday loan because I was able to (begrudgingly) get a loan from my stepfather-in-law for the back rent, and I very luckily landed a decent-paying job shortly afterwards.
I was absolutely one of the lucky ones. It's not hard at all for me to envision a universe where I was stuck in an endless cycle of debt, and honestly I still have nightmares about that time occasionally. Not fun.
For all the criticisms of UBI, I think it would be a net win simply because it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement.
I’ll support UBI when it stops being a libertarian wet dream to eliminate all other social spending and becomes a supplementary cause that lets us re-examine social spending when we can see how it shifts if everyone has “basic needs” covered.
I don't support any UBI policy that leaves anyone economically worse off compared to existing welfare. In fact I would expect people to be reliably better off after you factor in secondary benefits such as a reduced time burden upon individuals (time can be a scarce resource when you're poor) and increased ability to prioritise your own needs. The last thing poor people need is fewer resources.
I also don't support any UBI policy that attempts to supplant programs which address disability as opposed to straight poverty.
In my mind the essential benefits of UBI are:
• Less fraud. It's much harder to game a system when everyone automatically qualifies for it.
• Less stigma. It's much harder to be ashamed by reliance on a system when everyone automatically qualifies for it.
• Less disincentive to earn more. Most welfare programs cut out out after you exceed a particular income threshold, so many people have an incentive to keep their income low. (Or to lie about income.)
• Less complexity. It shifts the burden of economic rebalancing away from welfare programs (written by politicians and administered by gate-keeping bureaucrats) and towards a system that already exists: progressive income tax. While everyone qualifies for UBI, high earners are progressively, functionally disqualified by having the UBI clawed back in higher marginal income tax rates.
• Increased mobility and increased incentive to migrate to areas with lower cost of living.
I was responding to:
> For all the criticisms of UBI, I think it would be a net win simply because it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement.
The exact wording of the libertarian wet dream I was recognizing. I wasn’t labeling UBI, I was labeling an identifiable expression.
And I called out where this particular attitude would have starved me and apparently HN would prefer I starved.
If I wasn’t unclear and wasn’t misunderstood, you’ll have to explain to me how this has anything to do with libertarianism.
Is it because libertarian UBI might not be so generous? That it's motivated by saving taxpayer money rather than resolving poverty? On that I would agree. That's not the point of UBI.
Is it because libertarian UBI would be an excuse to eliminate more poverty welfare programs than liberal UBI? Because I personally see eliminating welfare programs to be a good thing so long as the UBI isn't intentionally less generous than what it replaces.
Or is it because libertarian UBI would mean Governments no longer forcing welfare dollars to be spent in a "responsible" way? Most of the criticisms I've heard seem to work on the principle that poor people don't know how to look after themselves or spend money wisely. So we need Government to force them to spend X amount on food with programs like SNAP, or spend X amount on shelter with housing subsidies. On this point I'd side VERY strongly with the libertarians. We have far too much paternalism in Government.
Close but for me it’s less about protecting similarly redistributive programs and more about protecting services best provided by government that nonetheless cost money and require the government to be empowered to administer them effectively.
No: being really broke can cause a lot of anxiety that can lead to irrational behavior.
But often a person has to choose between homelessness and crime and picks the latter as a rational choice, given the alternative.
So please don't assume poor = "crazy" = criminal, it's a bit unkind.
It's implied here:
"I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally."
...by putting that sentence out alone without clarifying the context.
> psychological pathways
> unfairly reify
Are you feeling ok?
I never said "poor = 'crazy' = criminal". I don't think poor people are inherently crazy, though I suppose that being mentally ill could conceivably hinder your ability to make a decent income, if we're being pedantic. I feel like you're assuming I said something that I didn't; I really don't think I was being "unkind". In fact, I was trying to have a pretty sympathetic perspective on this. If that was not clear then that's a failing on my end and I apologize.
Yes, you could make an argument is the "more rational" decision is to commit a crime, I read Les Miserables, but keep in mind that my comment was in direct response to someone asking why unemployment led to violent crime, and I specifically did not exclude myself from any category.
You are literally accusing the writer of implying things which rely upon a context of your own making, not theirs.
I would consider someone that has their rationality stripped (or "greatly hindered") to be irrational. I think "irrational" is a bit more passive than "crazy", but I would personally read those as mostly synonymous.
I wonder why we interpret the same sentence so differently - we may be reading between the lines in very different ways - like the "blue&black / gold&white" dress.
That's what the following paragraph is about, trying to explain that this could happen to anyone.
Are you thinking that I understood your statement to mean that being broke would permanently turn you into a loony? Maybe I generally consider "crazy" to be a temporary state or state of mind that anyone can get into or out of, and you generally consider "crazy" to be a permanent fixture of personality, dividing society into hard lines of people that are either "crazy" or "not-crazy"?
Whereas "crazy" suggests an absence of sanity.
Rational vs irrational. Sanity vs insanity. These are not interchangeable ideas.
A lot of comments here seem to think that it has something to do with morals, but from living in poor places, what I gather is that people have no other options when they’re backed into a corner.
If you’re unemployed and you need money for rent and food, what the he’ll are you going to do? Survival mode kicks in, and you’ll do anything to make the next day/week. This could include steeling (to consume or sell) and mugging people (actual money, but probably less of a problem in the near future with everyone using digital payments). Now throw into the mix drugs to numb to pain of living an abysmal life... which are astronomically expensive, so most of the time your only option is to steel and mug more.
They aren't scams, but they are only useful for a very narrow band of people in a very narrow band of circumstances. For the vast majority of people that want one of those loans, they are better off not getting it. It's entirely possible to get the loan and use it as intended, it's just the most the people that need it aren't in a position to do so, and the lenders go out of their way to make it real easy to just roll the loan over into a new ones that kicks the problem down the road to the next payday after this one.[1]
1: It's a dark pattern. "You borrowed $400 the other week and you owe use $500 today? How about we fund a new loan for $400 before your payment, roll that into your current payment, and all you have to do is pay the $100 difference this payday, and you can just pay it all next payday when it's more convenient?" Now, the lender has an installment plan for 700-1500% APR as long as they can get the client to keep doing that (but the client does have to choose to do it every time).
At least, that's how it was a decade or so ago. I think it got even more regulated since then, and they can't charge 25% interest per payday anymore (you can likely thank the NY AG if so).
If I recall, the military had a heavy hand in that. When the payday loan industry has cut into military readiness to the point the generals are talking to Congress about it, it's gone a bit too far.
edit (add ref): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109shrg50303/html/C...
You mean that it's possible for some people to use it in a personally beneficial way.
That is true without any need to get into intent. I think it's unambiguous that the predatory application is the actual intended usage-- since their business model doesn't make sense without it, they have a massive default rate that only gets paid for with the windfall customers that stay on the treadmill for a long time.
It's very rational to choose crime over starvation or exposure, especially when our legal framework (US) is morally bankrupt. Why not turn to crime when crime really isn't such a bad thing compared to the other shit going on.
Law enforcement can probably withstand some budget cuts before public safety suffers, and leaders probably cut other things first, but at some point it might have an effect.
But in the US, unemployment, desperation, and easy access to firearms can be a big problem.
BTW, I'm still shocked by the casualness of people who threaten to shoot me. Or like to show they are armed in an attempt to intimidate me.
I have a few questions, sorry if this sounds like a lot I’m just really curious.
What city are you in where this happens? What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior? Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
And also obviously it happens frequently in SF from the homeless people. That is probably more worrying as they potentially have "nothing to lose"
Once the border officer asked me (or rather - barked at me) "why are you coming to the US?", to what I said "for business".
"For how long?" - to what I answered "for 3 days"
He then asks "why so short?" to what I answered "I swear if I could squeeze it to one day I would gladly come and go not to spend money in a country that is so welcoming" (it was a very long, tiring flight and I really wanted to go to the hotel, afer having queued up for 2 hours)
He told me that I should not reply like this, to what I said that this is the truth. We had a small staring contest and he let me go.
The other similar case in Russia was when the border guard was yelling at me for not having my passport number printed on my ticket (yes, I do not know either), to which I yelled back to kick me out of their country with a "never return" stamp because I am fed up enough to have a week-end ruined with tha travel. I showed him my hands together (as in "handcuff me") and he pushed me into Russia. The stay was great, people were great.
This is what greeted my family every time we came to the US. Which fucked up ICE agent will we get this time? Most of them were pleasant but it only takes 1 asshole in the bunch to ruin a great holiday.
And no matter what they say, Canada's ICE weren't much better.
Semi-relevant anecdote: I was traveling in my car with my mom and sister to Vancouver BC from Seattle (back when I was not a US citizen yet). Canadian officer at the border was more than just inquisitive. He asked who i was, where i worked, which team i worked on, what specific product I worked on and what specifically I did (which was already making me feel uncomfortable, because the product wasn't public back then, so I wasn't really allowed to talk about it in general). The questioning itself took like 10 mins and was absolutely unnecessary. Not even mentioning how aggressive he was, I felt like I was an inch away from being escorted to their "office" for additional questioning. And I am saying that as someone who doesn't usually feel threatened much by any interactions with officers.
On the way back into the US, however, it was buttery smooth. The officer confiscated the grapes my mother tried bringing back with her (despite me urging her not to do so), and he was extremely apologetic about it. Then he said "welcome home", and that was it. Took less than a minute overall.
Not trying to generalize anything from this, as, of course, the experiences differ wildly between individual border officers and such. I just thought it was an interesting semi-relevant anecdote.
I was driving from a town in Illinois to Toronto (a very long 10 hour trip as it was). Got to the border, they said that I needed to pay several thousands dollars to import my car because according to them I was a "returning resident" even though I kept saying I work in US and was going to return to US (and had paperwork to prove it, to boot). Nope. They kept insisting I was lying about the purpose of my trip, and eventually decided that because I was "lying", they were going to seize my car (and everything in it, including laptops and cellphones).
They then proceeded to tell me I had to pay $14k to get my car back (or to find a cab willing to come to the border. Without a cell phone. At midnight on a sunday.) Did I mention I had my wife and two children in the car with me? Yeah.
So I ended up scrambling to come up with $14k by maxing out multiple credit cards, got my car and belongings back, and finally got our asses out of there at 2am (with still 3 hours of road ahead of me).
I knew the border officers were full of shit so I filed a formal appeal with the government. Six months later, what do you know, it was actually reviewed and it was determined that the border officers were in fact in the wrong and that I should get a full refund. Better late than never, but boy, that night couldn't have gone much worse.
Shouldn't be surprising that their staff follows the same principles that created the agency in the first place.
Customer service takes a nose dive once you train your staff on how to spot the next shoebomber.
Officer (in a rather rude tone): "what were you doing in Canada?"
Me (sleepy and a bit disoriented): "sorry?"
Officer (suddenly seems to realize that he has my green card in front of him): "Never mind, you're good to go"
My best guess is that he was just too conditioned to grasp at straws for reasons to give people a hard time, until realizing he couldn't deny entry to a green card holder.
> What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior?
Standing on the sidewalk, hanging out with friends.
> Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
I left when I was 18.
I'd be happy to entertain any additional questions you or others might have.
Would you happen to know why gangs would bother doing random acts of violence against teenagers standing on the sidewalk? I'd heard that the Italian mafia at least likes to keep themselves out of the public eye, interesting that other gangs don't.
They have literal games , such as "knockout". The game is literally to come from behind and hit a random passerby so hard that they fall on the ground... knocked out.
Its some real messed up stuff. I am sure you google.
Driving, riding my bike, walking. When I was a kid simply walking to school was enough. But people will threaten to shoot you for turning, not driving fast enough, merging, stopping, not stopping. Riding a bike in the right lane.
Growing up down here you get used to it. Far too many Americans have access to guns. Hopefully, they only use it on themselves. But even if only 1% of gun owners were certifiable crazy, that's still over a 1 million unhinged individuals.
I moved to Europe for a time. But career and family brought me back here. And I like money :-)
Guns are illegal.
Still, plenty of shootings and killings from random roadrage incidents.
What? Where in the US do you live? I've lived in the US my entire life and never, not once has anyone ever threatened to shoot me. Thats a felony in itself and I am really surprised by that.
The US is a big, diverse place with a lot of history.
Two is that America’s high crime rates well preceded the advent of the modern welfare state. New York had much higher crime than London even in the 19th century at the height of Victorian social Darwinism and Dickensian work houses. If anything the disparity has actually decreased in the post war period.
The short answer is America, and in fact the Western Hemisphere in general, is just a much more violent society at its roots than the Old World.
I am originally from Russia, but live in US. I actually feel safer in US than in Russia.
It is far easier to get assaulted as result of road rage or because somebody don't like how you dress in Russia. Hopefully Russia have stricter gun laws, so it's less lethal.
I think there is a clear reason: nihilism and depression. If you have resigned yourself to being unemployed and impoverished forever, what difference does it make whether you're in jail or not? It's the same reason we argue that jailing the homeless is pointless. They don't care; life in prison might even be better in terms of quality of life. Sure, there's less freedom, but the poorer you are, the less the delta in freedom is. You don't have access to a lot of the freedom that financially healthy people have to begin with. Jailing them is like trying to drown a fish. We don't have any functional punishments for people who don't care about their life (I'm not advocating that we try to invent some).
You mentioned rape specifically. The prevailing theory afaik is that rape is about control over someone else rather than sexual gratification. There are plenty of ways to have sex; the floor on sex worker prices is shockingly low. Doubly so in extremely poor areas. It's not shocking to me that people with almost no control over their lives would lash out in ways that grant them control, or at least a feeling of control. If you're poor and have no safety net, you have little control over your housing (can't afford to move), your job (don't have a rainy day fund to tell your boss to fuck off), your food (you eat what's cheap, or what the food bank will give you), your money (you're lucky if you even have enough to pay bills, much less have money left over that you can pick what to do with), etc. Your life becomes a constant chain of being shunted around and manipulated by people who do have money.
Crimes of opportunity are an attempt to lift yourself out of poverty. Crimes of passion are an attempt to cope with the struggles of living a life that you have almost no control over.
I'm not attempting to absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions, but I can see how someone would make that choice.
Also, suicide is an act of passion, and it's highly correlated with unemployment.
No, that's not quite right. Someone who is depressed is not homicidal and highly unlikely to be violent to anyone but themselves. A nihilist is consumed in the thought that life is meaningless so they would not go around randomly hurting people by definition. A sociopath might but that's different.
Also when people believe that they can't, by legal and socially acceptable means, thrive, their belief in the current social order is undermined. A lot of society operates on trust in fundamental fairness; for people who find that life is fundamentally unfair, that trust is eroded, sometimes permanently.
But in countries going through late stage capitalism, if you don't have a job, you have to rob your neighbour to eat.
Any country with a strong social safety net will be far better off when unemployment spikes than one without such a net.
When humans care about their fellow man, society flourishes. When it's every man for himself, spiralling unemployment means crime, anarchy, and chaos.
Perhaps you need me to be more clear. When there is unemployment, crime goes up. This happens no matter where in the world you are. I didn't think I needed to spell that out.
Countries with a strong social safety net will be far safer when unemployment rises out of control. That's just common sense.
It's why Sweden is multiple times safe than the US, regardless of the unemployment rate. They have a social safety net.
Yes, 10,000 years ago our monkey brains were just fine at navigating the world as it existed. They're not just fine at it today. Today, even some of the simplest jobs require advanced skills in disparate areas, and frankly about 16% of the entire world population is not up to the task. Sixteen percent is the amount of the world population with an IQ at or under 85. These are people who struggle with tasks as simple as folding a sheet of paper into thirds, more or less perfectly, and then placing it into an envelope.
The world we live in, and almost certainly the world we're creating, has no place for these people. Even something as simple as receiving merchandise on a dock in a warehouse requires some basic computer skills, from either operating a Windows or Linux machine and interfacing with SAP, Oracle's JD Edwards, or IBM's AS/400, to figuring out the proper layout of boxes on a wooden pallet to maximize storage space of the warehouse. Something your grandfather or great grandfather did with a 6th grade education, now requires a minimum of a high school education by necessity, if not by design.
That brings me to actual answer to your question... because they don't have the decency to lay down and die. Because inside every human is an irrational desire to live, even when you're no longer useful. I know, know... a long argument can, and likely will, be made that "every life is valuable", etc., so forth. I understand and even accept those arguments on an emotional level, because I am not a machine - I am a man, and because I find it morally repugnant to allow people to die because they have no economic value.
That said... clearly there are plenty of others who do not feel the same way. If you work on AI to streamline a process or aid in manufacturing, you feel this way. The people who employ you, feel this way. You cannot design an algorithm that replaces 7,800 jobs and then throw your hands up and say, "I'm just doing my job." We either have to decide that everyone is worthy of life, regardless of their intellectual abilities and their economic contribution, or we have to decide that's not the case. Right now, because no one is taking Universal Basic Income seriously, we're clearly deciding that your value is mostly - one could argue almost entirely - economically based. We have a few exceptions to this that I can think of off the top of my head - the clergy seem to provide some kind of non-productive "good" that enough people, in America at least, feel is worth the cost of supporting them. But the factory worker who makes widgets for your ConsumerGoodX that you bought, she apparently does not.
I would like to be wrong about this, but our actions as a society say otherwise. We reward companies that reduce their "human capital" and return the money that would be spent on those salaries to either expanding their operations or in dividends to their shareholders. We reward them with higher stock prices and increased demand to purchase those stocks. We reward them by purchasing their goods. We tell ourselves another story, because if you really thought long and hard enough about it, you'd likely have to do some serious soul searching. Most of us don't want to do that.
Crime often puts people in stressful situations.
People in stressful situations sometimes act violently, even if that's not their default mode of conduct.
As a simple example, imagine someone shoplifting some food from a market, where an employee confronts them and bars their way, saying they are calling the police. The shoplifter tries to leave, and a scuffles ensues while the employee tries to restrain the accused. It's very easy for the crime to become assault while someone is fleeing, and nobody needed to intend for any violence at any point.
I think a retail/warehouse workers' union only really works if it's a national sort with local chapters so that a company can't hire except through a union.
I'm not saying such a situation isn't rife with its own problems, but as long as these unions are essentially on a per-location basis, a company with the resources can always close one location and open up down the street to avoid the union.
If you don't have the first it is easy to replace anyone striking, and the union doesn't have power. If you don't have the second the better employees will want more money and so they won't work with the lesser ones
In retail it is generally easy to replace people. It only takes a few minutes of training and the new person will figure it out.
In retail there are a lot of different jobs. People who can do more (and have been around longer) are worth more. Many of the jobs do have metrics that can be measured to say who is better. While the pay this results in isn't much more, it is enough.
That isn't to say you need the above to have a union. There are counter examples that work, but they are less powerful than unions that have those factors because they find it harder to get everyone to stand together.
As such retail unions have trouble working. It is too easy to hire someone else if they go on strike.
This is also why the UAW started dying once containerized shipping made it practical to move factories overseas.
Are "dying cities/slums" a purely American phenomenon, in terms of rich first-world countries?
Is there similarly a "rust belt" in Germany, of cities that had an economic collapse after manufacturing died out? Are there rich European countries with flailing cities that devolve into crime and poverty? Does Europe have its own Bessemers, Detroits? (though I do hear Detroit isn't as bad as it's made out to be)
The UK definitely has declining factory towns (often called mill towns there) similar to the US. Northern England is like that for the most part. Less of a rust belt and more of a rust hat.
(Also German carmakers have - at least until now - done much better than Detroit for a variety of reasons).
Inside immigration is also big. Small towns/cities are losing population while big cities/capitals are rapidly growing. We have hundreds of towns that once had thousands inhabitants and now they barely have a couple hundred and haven't seen a kid in more than a decade.
But as far as I know, there's no Detroits in Europe. The cities with most crimes are also the ones that are attracting more people and immigrants. The abandoned places are quiet and peaceful.
There's also growing trend of trying to revive those places by people that just can't take big cities anymore or people who work for home, etc. Why would they pay a huge chunk of their salary for a crappy shared flat on the city when they can live on a nice house with garden only 5 hours away?
As for crime, it's some economic and some that Detroit was the center of the car industry which means everyone was huffing leaded gasoline fumes for decades. In Europe everyone is still breathing in diesel, which just kills you rather than makes you a rage monster.
Charleroi Belgium comes to mind. Once a prosperous industrious town, now the glory is gone. Recently read somewhere there is a bit of revival, culturally at least. Economically I’m not sure. A bit like Detroit maybe.
Not yet, but we are doing out best to deliver that in the near future \s
What we do have is sort of a coal belt. The Ruhr Area, where coal mining used to be big but has died out. Some regions did not recover from the closing of mines, Gelsenkirchen for example.
Most of Japan is dying as nearly its entire population moves to Tokyo.
And that's only a slight sprinkle of hyperbole. Other regions are sustained only by tourism or by other industries where the average worker age is past 60.
I don't know more details, I am only speaking observationally. Someone else might tell you why this happened.
I would assume it has to do with globalization and other nations being more competitive than local business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
Not anti union, but these also had high union activity, which some explain as a cause of their 'rustification' as companies moved production elsewhere (like Alabama) to avoid.
One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it. Otherwise it is just a race to the bottom.
Well, that guy would do a really bad job, especially after he dies. You can compete with him by staying healthy and being much more productive.
That's not an accurate description of overseas labor though, those people are skilled at what they do and their PPP-adjusted pay is better than that. (Sometimes overseas developers aren't skilled at enterprise development, in that case their skill is scamming the outsourcing manager.)
> One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it.
That's not what a tariff does, a tariff makes foreign companies' products more expensive for domestic customers. It's just a pointless tax increase. And when the other country fights back it makes your products more expensive for foreign customers, hurting you.
Keeping jobs domestically means doing the opposite, increasing foreign customers for your stuff. This falls under industrial policy and it's what the overseas countries taking your jobs did better than us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Labor_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Negro_Labor_Congress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Revolutionary_Black_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Revolutionary_Union_Move...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Black_Trade_Union...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Brotherhood_of_Worker...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Po... (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_v._Pullman.... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_R...
It's not that any city is altogether full of crime and poverty, personally I'd say they're just less desirable with full-on "crime and poverty" being noticeable only in some hotspots (but then again, I don't live there and only ever visit for short periods of time, so really all I can say is "it doesn't seem that bad").
Observe for yourself the recordings by CharlieBo313
Until they get hurt on the job and Amazon fires them for failure to show up to work:
https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-cri...
No, they should do so, just not be so exploitative about it (e.g. deliberately going into areas full of desperate people, for the reason of using that desperation to exert maximum control with minimum accountability).
The society should act accordingly.
I am trying to say there is a contradiction in what you are saying. You claim to want companies to move into impoverished areas, but also say doing that is evil. No company has ever moved into an impoverished area to help people, they have always done so out of self interest.
So which do you want, companies to move into impoverished areas (acting evil), or not (acting good, according to you).
Luckily, this isn't true. There are absolutely areas where companies can do good and profit. Moving good jobs into a blighted area is a classic example of a win-win. The company gets low wages, and residents get some of the best jobs they have access to.
> Why would a company ever do anything out of the goodness of their hearts?
Because a company is made of people. I won't fault a company for following market incentives, but questions like yours sometimes imply that a company shouldn't do anything out of the goodness of their heart. Then you get people saying stuff like the company's goal must be to maximize shareholder value and stuff, and getting angry when a company does something out of the goodness of their hearts, which I take issue with. <end rant>
It's one thing to shop for a lower price, it's quite another to notice someone's desperate and take advantage.
> The collective population of the world does this when we chose to purchase things for cheaper prices made in countries with more lax environmental and labor laws.
An a lot of people object to that, too, and they often lack the power to make any other decision.
Amazon could probably have no problem staffing the center at $11/hr there, but they're paying $18-$22 instead. How on earth can you define that as 'exploitation'? It's borderline charity, given the observable labor market equilibrium there.
Speedwalking an Amazon warehouse carrying objects, run by hyper-optimizing automation that times tasks to the second, is different from leaning on idle cash register at McDonalds, or slowly pushing a vacuum cleaner.
It's not company town level of influence, though. A defining feature of which IIRC is that the company owned most or all other businesses in the town and often extracted most of the workers wage through extortionate pricing of basic goods and services.
Nevermind the fact that from my eyes looking at America from overseas, it seems like companies are the only institutions/organisations that are functioning even remotely in a socially optimal way.
Your government is a disaster and couldn't meaningfully manage the pandemic at all, academia is a disaster and is bankrupting your future, military is a disaster and has heavily underinvested in next generation weapons programs so they could spend more time bombing the middle East, your unions are self-serving enterprises (aren't schools in your most populous state STILL closed due to teacher's unions?), your newspaper are incredibly corrupt across the spectrum.
The only things that seem to work correctly are your companies which are still world-leading and world class. Amazon is a gem in your society, but demonised as if it is the source of all problems.
Isn't that what taxes are for?
I think a good question to ask before is what happens if they dont come in the first place? If I were a resident in a town wanting jobs, i'd probably be more excited about jobs arriving than the possibility they might eventually disappear.
I wouldn't search for evil intent in those moves.
And if it was such a hell hole, why did Amazon choose to open a warehouse there? Out of the goodness of their hearts? We need to ask questions as to why Amazon had to become a "savior" for the City of Bessemer. Not just focusing on effects but looking into causes too!
My comment isn't about Amazon specifically as much as the fact that there are so many cities all over this country (supposedly the wealthiest in human history) that have fallen into so much disrepair and so much distress that they need companies like Amazon to come "save" them.
We need to ask why is all I'm saying.
[1] https://ugapress.org/book/9780820356273/americas-johannesbur...
They voted to allow the “hand” to maximize exploitation without restraint.
How did we as a nation go from the land of the free, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, to "beg for scraps or you will starve."
All of this has always been propaganda, nothing more. The average unskilled worker has never had a good life in America.
They'll be able to put a roof over their head, and not worry about their kids' next meal or maybe even their kid breaking their arm. But they're not going to advance to the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
You’re painting way too bleak of a picture based on zero data.
This was basically the norm from 40s to late 80s after reganomics started widdling away workers' rights.
This is the way it should be - 1 parent at home, 1 bringing home $$.
Else, the government should cover child care, or pay stay-at-home parents a salary for providing their own child care.
If a company can sell its products two towns over for 2x the price Bessemer can afford, it's not going to slash prices in Bessemer just because everyone there is poor.
I was a union member back in the last 1980s through 1990s early. I was in a low skilled job where we paid our dues and got exactly nothing for it. Oh we had a wonderful contract that specified it all. It was great for basically keeping anyone new boxed in. Each quarter if we were lucky we got a visit by our local union rep in her Mercedes which cost more than many of us made a year. So I am so not a big union supporter and lean against them.
On another personal note, they spent decades harassing my uncles, now cousins industrial roofing business calling OSHA and other inspectors out to where even the OSHA representatives joked about it. It became a coffee break for them. All this over a company with less than thirty people at max.
So while they may have some application on higher paid jobs when you are low wage there isn't much they do for you other than suck two hours of wages or more from you each month.
People here glorify unions have no experience with them at the level that would have been seen in Amazon. They have these grandiose ideas how everyone benefits. Oh don't get me wrong, you are likely to get some changes that are beneficial, but in the end you are still exactly where you are before but now its all in nice pretty print writing which spells out exactly how you aren't going anywhere fast. Oh, don't forget the monthly payout (could be weekly in some places) and don't expect much if you ever actually reach strike stage.
I might recommend to watch Waiting For Lefty to understand the distinction.
Had a friend who was a pilot. Personal situation - moved, wanted to live in base rather than deadhead yadda yadda - you start off at ground zero at the new airline - literally next to guys with no time on type (and you could have thousands of hours on type - which is years of work).
As I've grown older I've tried to resist the urge to marry myself to these stark beliefs. Following this thread there's a lot of good information on what those competing perspectives actually entail. In my current area, which is mostly liberals of varying degrees, unions are almost universally championed. If you ask about the downsides or present an example of how they can be bad you can face people who think you're some kind of oppressor, or that you must be conservative. Where I'm from, which is mostly various flavors of conservativism the mention of unions causes similar outrage but in the other direction. If you mention how a union could be useful or various implementations that are non-stock (such as unions that don't try to practice authoritarian control over pay and just maintain representation for working conditions) then you'll be demonized for being a socialist. I used to think, "these are bad people of varying variety" but I've come to understand they're just people without experience in each other's geography and problem set, so it becomes easier to speak dogmatically.
Sometimes a union can be good, sometimes it can be bad, sometimes it's a bit of both pending nuance and implementation details, but at the end of the day this is a truth: the only people whose opinion matters is the people whose lives it will directly affect.
Find a dying city with huge unemployment. No problem finding workers for a factory where most employees don't require anything more than ability to walk and read.
This why we need national and international coordination on minimum wage and minimum work environment laws.
Normally having a huge employer would be a boon to the city, but most of these people are going to be working for close to minimum wage and Amazon most likely negotiated with the city so they don't have to pay a dime.
"I know better than those people", posted a thousand miles away via the latest iPhone, while binging Netflix and waiting for their 2nd Amazon delivery of the day.
HN in a nutshell.
And please don't yell about Amazon misrepresenting things. I suspect these people are quite capable of detecting company BS. Give them some credit. Just because you don't agree with their choice doesn't mean their choice is wrong.
“The retail workers union said Amazon was trying to surveil employees in Bessemer and even changed a traffic signal to prevent organizers from approaching warehouse workers as they left the site. Last month, the New York attorney general said in a lawsuit that Amazon had retaliated against employees who tried to protest its pandemic safety measures as inadequate.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-...
Are they? Not saying that this is the case here but recent elections (Trump) and referendums (Brexit) have shown that you can absolutely manipulate and mislead the masses. Again, not taking any sides here, but assuming that those decisions are well informed or won't be taken against their own interest seems naive to me.
People can say what they want about Amazon but the reality is they provide a far better job, wage, and benefits than most. Apart from the broad sweeping messaging around corporations = bad, unions = the answer, it wasn’t really clear at all why a union would benefit workers here. As such the result isn’t terribly surprising. The result isn’t even close.
While there are some stories lately about how much tax Amazon pays, the government is very much in the business of keeping Amazon (and all major US-based corporations and firms) happy... by contrast, the US government almost certainly cares very little for a warehouse worker in Alabama.
Unions are in the business of recurring subscriptions, and the pitch had to reflect that. Sounds like in case of this specific workplace, the cost-benefit analysis was either high on costs or low on benefits.
Boeing came in and brought great jobs with them. Then the union reps came in and started acting like everybody was being wronged somehow.
It CAN be both... but generally it isn't.
Every company big enough will have its share of shitty issues, but even taking it with a grain of salt it doesn't look to me like a company that needs no employee representation to counter-balance the management.
[0] https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=b...
When you see headlines about unions negotiating certain benefits or raises from employers, it's often framed as a victory that wouldn't have happened without the union. The reality is more nuanced, as the union's existence forces the company to play hardball during negotiations so they have something to negotiate when it comes time to do the negotiations.
The employer is incentivized to hold these back in any case, absent some countervailing pressure (e.g. retention against competing offers, if they exist, etc.). This is why the largest raises (in tech, at least) typically come when jumping companies.
The countervailing pressure is that non-unionized employees are more likely to leave.
Most unions in the US place a high value on seniority. The more seniority you have, the more benefits you get from a union. Good for people who have been there for 10 years, bad for new employees looking to get jobs. This makes unionized employees less incentivized to leave and more incentivized to stay and strike. Leaving (even if for higher pay) would sacrifice that union seniority that many members value.
It's a very different negotiating dynamic.
SpaceX Blue Origin Space Systems Loral JPL Boeing Embraer Airbus Cessna Northrup Grumman Lockheed Martin General Electric Raytheon Boom Rolls Royce, Honeywell Eurocopter Bombardier
not to mention the adjacent fields of Green tech (wind turbines) Drones/UAVs
There are a lot of options out there
That’s literally the point of unions. To turn the employees into a monolithic block for the purposes of negotiation.
https://leehamnews.com/2020/09/14/pontifications-boeing-sc-m...
On that same trip, I was staying at a hotel with a view of city hall from my window (The Artic Club). I heard a bunch of horns blowing and looked out the window to see a line of cabs parked out front honking for about 1 minute before they drove off. News crews were there so I watched the local news that night.
That clip was there but the news made it sound like the drivers had been there all day blockading and honking. It was nothing more than enough time for a news clip (protesting Uber).
At that point, it became very clear to me how unions operate.
And now we're seeing the results of the race to the bottom play out.
https://twitter.com/yeselson/status/1380363511709196288
The short version is: while the Bessemer campaign was a good thing, the vote (according to this person --- everything I'm writing here is according to Yeselson and subject to errors in my understanding) was not. To wit: if a skilled organizer effort isn't sure it's going to win, they pull the vote, reorganize, and try again when they're sure they will.
There's further evidence in the threads that nuts-and-bolts organizing, "101 stuff" to use the term I got from labor organizing blogs following up on this, wasn't done; that in fact the worker opponents to unionization were only weakly opposed, and under-educated.
Another fun Google search that I found from this thread: [union "hot shop"].
You can say this about anything.
Getting a job doesn't always contribute to a better outcome for the unemployed.
Getting healthcare doesn't always contribute to better health outcomes.
Getting housing after being homeless doesn't always lead to a better life.
> It’s hard to motivate a vote for unions when Amazon pays double the federal minimum wage.
So many people repeating the same things over and over.
Instead, both sides (rightfully) call each other out on their biases and no voter feels able to trust either side.
You're right. It's ideological. And you're on the wrong side of it.
This is extreme wishful thinking. The very nature of corporations like Amazon is in conflict with giving workers a "fair deal". Thus, exploitative labor practices exist.
But anyway yes in my case it is idealogical and I won't dispute that at all. Anything that reduces the power of companies or increases the power of works is something I favor regardless of political practicality.
You state it as if it is somehow obvious, but really need to show your work here.
If it is just some reductionist claim about not having a third party consuming resources, that's almost too silly to respond to. But if you also want to forbid employers from hiring lawyers, at least you'd then be consistent.
I think it’s pretty silly to quibble over whether someone will answer gotcha questions like “can you name one good/bad thing that has ever happened in a unionized/non-unionized workplace.” That’s just not relevant.
Consider Obamacare. Objectively, it was an awesome law that covered millions of previously uninsured Americans. However, it was a PR disaster because people were told they could keep their plans and their premiums wouldn’t increase. Because of how impossible it was to lie about those two things and because the Obama administration lied about them anyway, people greatly distrusted Obamacare, even though most of them actually liked the law and its outcomes.
Similarly, if a worker is told by a pro-union advocate that no one will lose their job with a union but that worker also readily sees that many workers lose their jobs when unions cause companies to collapse, that worker is going to feel lied to despite knowing that union membership is probably in their best interests.
So you can tell something new. I am not sure if blue collar workers are looking for total revolution to overthrow this capitalistic system.
OK, so if it's inevitably why hasn't this happened to the creative unions in Hollywood like SAG, WGA, the DGA, and the PGA?
You can form a union whenever you want, like you can form any other group of people a club. You just can't unilaterally force an employer to deal with you.
If a company has 100 employees and only you, Pat, and 3 others form a union, the company will (rightly) likely entirely ignore the union.
Fewer than 50% of employees voted to form a union, so the result isn't really any different.
Why it came to be that? I speculate that both existing unions and non-unionized businesses preferred the election accompanying single representative system, since it entrenches both. It preserves the status quo mostly, and gives power to existing unions that can run expensive election campaigns over a simple group of workers bargaining.
It seems to be a result of multiple factors:
1. "Mitbestimmung" or co-determination. German workers elect the board of directors.
2. Labor reps vote alongside shareholders
3. Laborers in the same strata form "work councils" and choose reps to bring issues to managers or higher up the chain
4. "Betriebsverfassungsgesetz" federal laws giving workers the rights to form these work councils
The people i've spoken too (anecdotal, I know) don't seem to have the same hostility to the unions. It is just kinda accepted and "normal" that the union is going to be there so they seem to work with them instead of fighting them at every step.
Exactly what I've observed throughout my career, thank you for putting it so succinctly.
You're also missing those for whom the union is a pure political, power-grabbing device.
"BREAKING: @RWDSU says that Amazon illegally interfered in the #BAmazonUnion vote in Bessemer, and the union will be filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB."
The only question now is how Amazon punishes the organizers and reward the dissenters.
https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1380245193924878337
This was plainly illegal and tainted the vote.
It would be interesting to hear from them why. I think we all have opinions (I certainly do). But I've never worked at amazon so my opinion is low value...
You tell me there's a better world on the other side of the hill, but I'm just trying to keep my children from starving this month. I can't even begin to think about the uncertainty and risk of trying to get there.
Some commentary: I think this is one reason why social safety nets are tremendously valuable. The reason I eventually took the risk was because being without a job was not a potential death sentence. I would have unemployment insurance for a while and universal healthcare would take care of my kids if they had sudden needs.
I understand others would say that the employer is more powerful to begin with and thus it's just a way to balance things. And without that, workers would be exploited and society would be worse off.
The reason I'm writing this is that there are two sides of this discussion with pretty good arguments. So just because other countries think differently, it doesn't mean that they are doing the right thing.
Majority is more important than the minority.
Poor is better than rich.
Dumb is better than smart.
This is the purpose of a union! Because you band together, the employer can't punish you individually. Sure they might be able to fire/replace everyone, but without a union they could target you specifically and there would be no leverage or help.
Data I can find for other unions shows somewhere between 1 to 4 percent of gross pay as typical for union dues. Assuming $15/hour, 4 percent of gross pay would be $144/month. But, if $500/month is accurate, it's 13.8% of gross pay for $15/hour workers, and 10.4% of gross for $20/hour workers. That's very high.
Edit: $500/year. There were many news stories with the inaccurate $500/month quote.
If I'm scraping by already, I'm not looking forward to taking another hit to an already stretched paycheck.
If that's indeed accurate, it's 13.8% of gross pay for $15/hour workers, and 10.4% of gross for $20/hour workers. That seems really high.
Edit: It's apparently $500/year, see other posts though, many news stories did post $500/month.
The union should wave union dues until wages rise
and ???
This seems not unlike Walmart informing employees that it is paying them so little that they qualify for Food Stamps.
Looking forward to the Amazon paper, "Pareto Optimal Employee Compensation for Maintaining Fluid Labor Markets"
https://www.justia.com/employment/unions/right-to-work-and-u...
> A union is an exclusive collective bargaining agent, which means that it must fairly represent all of the workers in the bargaining unit, including those who have decided not to be members or pay dues.
I can't trust the Union to waive dues. Especially if they haven't said they would. Even if this would benefit me in the long run, I kind of need a place to stay, food to eat, and transportation to work in the interim and if I'm already one bad day away from being destitute, It seems like throwing that extra $5 - $10 a check is only going to exacerbate that issue.
I've been in tight situations. Where I've had to juggle 0% financing and dick around with minimum payments just to keep myself at level. Charges I had to incur due to various emergencies at the time. I wouldn't have been able to afford to unionize in those days.
Now I have a much better job. I just moved into a pretty nice house and my biggest concerns are whether my curtain rods are going to arrive before my curtains and if a larger TV wouldn't be more optimal for the living room. So I try and be cautious about not going too "Lucille Bluth" when I hear that what I would now consider a small expense be a major factor in someone's decision. I realize my situation has changed a lot compared to where I started.
The $500 figure seems to have come from the now defunct "doitwithoutdues.com" website that Amazon made. Strangely, it just says $500[1], and not "$500/month". But, "$500/month" is indeed in a lot of news stories[2].
Pretty sad for the union if the true figure is lower, and they failed to get that message out.
Edit: Apparently it is $500/year, though many news stories are saying $500/month.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210223103728/https://www.doitw...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+union+vote+%22%24500%...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/early-vote-counts-sho...
https://apnews.com/article/what-to-know-amazon-union-vote-ex...
https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2021/03/30/lighting-fuse-amaz...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-labor-union-push-alabama...
Though Amazon did seem to be saying $500/year in most of their messaging: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/a3uk0eKNWqaQAaE6u9Y8qjPmCJk=...
The "doitwithoutdues.com" site just said $500, without saying "month" or "year".
For reference, I searched UPS union dues and it comes up right at the top - 2.5x base salary.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/early-vote-counts-sho...
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+union+vote+%22%24500%...
https://apnews.com/article/what-to-know-amazon-union-vote-ex...
https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2021/03/30/lighting-fuse-amaz...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-labor-union-push-alabama...
1. It's always harder to get people to vote to change the status quo. Even if people think the change is going to be good, people are usually risk averse so you need to work harder to change things vs stay the same.
2. Their general opinion about unions is poor.
3. Their specific opinion about this union and the unionization effort is poor.
4. Dues were too high vs benefits.
5. Worry about retaliation from Amazon.
6. I imagine a lot of people don't really think of their Amazon warehouse job as a career. Most people working there probably only plan to do it for a few years, in which case the value of union membership falls dramatically.
Just some ideas.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-announces...
Can someone who works/worked one of these jobs please explain it to me? I am so confused by how lopsided this was.
ZipRecruiter shows the average in all states as under $15 [0] so an Amazon worker will likely make more than a worker in other warehouses.
Doesn’t mean that they are rolling in the money, but makes me think higher wages is probably not a motivating factor for unionization.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Wa...
Warehouses are frequently in rural settings and $15 isn’t so bad. I have friends who are doing ok on $12/hour but they only have $300 rent and really low expenses. Rural America doesn’t have many upsides, but being cheap is one.
And my point wasn’t that Amazon was wonderful, just that it pays more than the alternative since the average pay is much lower ($11 vs $15 I think) at other companies.
So then what's worse: $11 an hour at a job you can work indefinitely, or $15 an hour at a job where your body will eventually fail and you may be left with a permanent injury which Amazon will not help you with?
https://coloradosun.com/2020/09/29/amazon-safety-crisis-thor...
I think people can make that decision when they choose to work for orgs.
I’d like to see info on how long warehouse workers last in the job.
But Amazon does provide disability insurance [0] beyond social security, so they do help with permanent injury for all their workers. If it’s on the job there’s also worker’s comp.
[0] https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us
Not a lot of money, but what else to expect from the job that requires minimum skills and no education?
Amazon workers make more than other non-unionized warehouses in the area, but they still make less than unionized warehouses. For example Piggly Wiggly warehouses make $20/hr on top of having vacation days and medical benefits.
Plus, if unionization makes its way to every Amazon warehouse, then everyone will compete on equal footing vis-a-vis wages.
The whole "voting against your own interest" is hugely paternalistic and anti-democratic. People have their own set of values and interests. As an outsider without knowledge of the people to accuse them of voting against their own interest because they did not vote the way you wanted them to is the height of arrogance.
Personally, I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions. It was always the people who only talked, read and wrote about workers that were flabbergasted. Source: worked as a consultant for a union in Europe for a decade.
That's why I asked for someone with direct experience to comment. I am confused, based on my own viewpoint and experience with unions.
>I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions.
I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. What is workers? Who are workers? What group of people would you consider workers? I've been part of two unions, both of which benefited me, personally, immensely. These were knowledge jobs and not hands-on jobs. Am I a worker? My father is very blue-collar manufacturing and he has been both anti- and pro-union, depending on which shop he worked for. Is he a worker?
I don't understand what you're saying. Honestly. It sounds like you're the font of some mystical knowledge about a mythical group of people. What do you mean by your statement? I don't get it.
Workers are people who work in the rougher jobs, blue collar if that's what you prefer. White collar unions are very different in my opinion.
My experience is this: I've worked with people who were workers and then transitioned to working for the union, either because they were natural organizers, or because they had accidents that made it hard to work their job (a surprising amount of them had lost a finger or two). When they spoke about these kinds of things, like votes or organization rates, they were quick to give plenty of reasons why their colleagues would make some decision because they knew all the arguments and feelings.
The other type I met at the union was college educated, usually political science, spoke a lot of class consciousness and collective interests and had never worked the jobs the union represented. When you talked to them, they didn't understand why workers made some choice, it was always some nicely worded version of "they're not smart enough to make the right choice" or "somebody fed them lies".
I didn't intend to be arrogant at all, I am legitimately confused. The two jobs that I was in a union, the union was massively beneficial to my life. That is where my perspective came from.
Just because the union was beneficial does not mean it was better to have it around than not to. You only experienced one side of the coin in those situations.
I know it is just my experience, so it's very anecdotal evidence at best. And that was my point - that is my experience, which is why I'm confused by the massive vote against unionization. I, personally, do not understand it and would like to.
It also established more rigid pay levels that were better on average but not as good for high performers, and I always got much higher than average raises and bonuses.
To a lesser extent, I didn’t like the idea of union leadership who were paid for things I didn’t think added value.
So my overall take was that it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
This is my fundamental problem with unions—it helps the insiders and hurts everyone else.
Amazon’s working condition are rough (and I really hope that changes), but there are plenty of jobs out there that are much worse and don’t pay nearly as well. They just get all the attention because of their size and impact.
The closer (figuratively speaking) to the big money and political power someone is the more comfortable they are.
And we all want to believe it’s a meritocracy. We’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Labor is subject to markets like many things, and shouldn’t be exploited. But there’s some work that’s hard and doesn’t require specialized training (eg, hauling stuff around warehouses all day). Some people are willing to do this and they do, if they don’t want to they can do other things.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but having the ability to provide more jobs with more options is the solution I think.
I grew up in a small town and it sucks for work. If you think working for Amazon sucks, you should try working in the warehouse of the only grocery store in town. The one run by a racist jerk who knows you have no options.
The current state is optimal for Amazon only. It's far from optimal for society.
It’s easy for you to theorize what Amazon can do and what they can’t. Amazon has competitors with warehouses. People can work there.
As consumers we can also demand more. But Amazon is probably the best for workers when compared to their competitors.
Secondly, what is low skill exactly? Can these people not read, write, use Excel and email, could they not do secretarial and other jobs? I bet quite a few of them have degrees. Some countries have free education / upskilling specifically to avoid people getting trapped in this situation, and to improve overall productivity of the economy.
By unskilled I mean that you can be trained on the job in less than a day. It doesn’t mean that the workers don’t have degrees and skills, it just means the job doesn’t require anything. By all means, they can certainly take other jobs but good luck finding a secretarial job for $15/hour.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has a lot of info on how they classify “low skill” jobs [0] and even tracks overqualified workers who have more skills but work in jobs that require fewer skills.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/wage-and-job-skill...
Amazing. Surely because “that’s how it worked in the past” isn’t the only option for social organization?
Why not stop believing in Bezos and solve our human problems generally?
Why not a mandate to provide education and healthcare and we provide THOSE jobs?
Because Bezos and Musk are able to get real access to politicians, resulting in the rubes being fed fiscal economic policy that continues to protect them.
The circular logic is mesmerizing.
"helps insiders and hurts everyone else" sounds bad, but if the insiders are being exploited by everyone else, it could be a good thing.
In general I'm sympathetic to your point. However I think Amazon is perhaps a special case, or at least occupies a different point on the than most companies.
Amazon is an Aggregator[1], which spins up its flywheel by providing a great experience for consumers, and commoditizing its suppliers. This naturally drives towards a monopoly.
Aggregator monopolies have an interesting property in that unlike historical non-Aggregator monopolies, they are great for consumers, rather than resulting in consumer harm through higher prices (like Comcast, say). US antitrust law is focused on preventing consumer harm, not just preserving competition for its own sake (as the EU laws are). So US antitrust is somewhat less well-equipped to deal with Aggregator monopolies.
If the corporation, consumers, and legal system are all pointing towards exploiting a group of workers, it's hard to see how anyone is going to vote to make things better. So unions could be more appropriate specifically in the case of Aggregators.
(Worth mentioning that you could perhaps just mandate higher minimum wages, and avoid the need for unions; I'd prefer to make the minimum viable change that prevents exploitation, and leave the market free to optimize everything else. But if not unions, who drives the political fight for minimum wages?)
All this mess devalues the manufacturers willing to produce quality items, they are lost in the noise and never make money.
The meme "Amazon is a dumpster fire of counterfeit goods and fake reviews" is popular around here, but I don't think it has much impact/traction with John/Jane MainStreet.
Maybe it would if it was better-known? But I think if folks found counterfeit goods or fake reviews to be a huge problem they would go back to Debenhams/Walmart. But by revealed preferences, we can tell they prefer the value prop of Amazon.
Misesean analysis showed that unions cannot benefit everyone, they always benefit the sr workers at the expense of the jr workers.
I wouldn’t say it was a good job and I certainly don’t do it any more. But I just tried to explain my thinking.
I was one of the few High School employees they had that was reliable and always did what I was asked, this enabled me to get not only higher wages but ever increasing job titles
A good one seems to be that they are afraid unionizing will push Amazon to close the delivery center. This has happened before when other companies (see Walmart [0]) just closed the location once the workers voted to unionize. And unfortunately it's less likely US law will protect the workers to the same degree as Canadian law [1].
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wal-mart-to-close-unionized...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-unionized-wal...
>To a lesser extent, I didn’t like the idea of union leadership who were paid for things I didn’t think added value.
Can you expand on this point, please?
>So my overall take was that it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
That makes a ton of sense.
It may not be rational as maybe they did great stuff and I couldn’t see their value, but I would see them get high salaries compared to workers and serve in positions for very long terms.
There was some great video floating around recently of a forklift operator or something who explained what his union dues got him and he was so informed and unphased by the dues he was paying.
But if the Amazon workers are in that situation then we would need to expand this conversation anyway.
The point remains: under normal income circumstances (i.e. not related to welfare or equity), there is no way for you to get a raise in your real income and have your take home income decrease due to your federal income tax bracket.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071114/can-moving-h...
That said, you are unlikely to be eligible for these benefits at all if you are a full-time warehouse employee. They are aimed mostly at those in genuine poverty.
> "...Most of the folks who vote aren't really the type to sit down and think long-term..."
Why do people call others dumb (and let's not kid ourselves, that's just what these phrases are a cultured, genteel way of saying) and then are surprised when said others don't vote for the causes they believe in?
Don't they realize that casting aspersions on the intelligence of others to their faces is "against their own collective interest"? If you want people to vote for your causes, work harder to prove that it benefits them instead of denigrating them.
Most of these workers slave for long hours. And then they work another job on top of it. And then they wonder why they STILL aren't making enough to pay TODAY's bills. Their mindset is myopic because they live paycheck to paycheck. You tell them they're losing MORE money out of each paycheck, that suddenly makes them worry exponentially more.
I'm friends with people living this dilemma monthly. They don't have the luxury to think what the long-term return on investment is.
And to say they're under-educated isn't calling them dumb. The ones I know are high school dropouts/graduates only. High school doesn't teach you personal finance the way a finance course at a college might introduce you to it. It's just statistical correlation.
How does calling people dumb affect the way they vote? In fact, if me and others calling people who vote against unionization dumb makes them more likely to vote against unionization, it clearly means that they are not primarily considering their self-interest, since whatever I and other leftists say or think is completely irrelevant.
If I say "you're an idiot for voting for Trump" and that makes you more likely to vote for Trump, then, I'm sorry to say, you proved my point.
However, I absolutely understand the need, and feel sorry for those stuck in a sitation where union type help is needed. If there was a way to wipe out existing unions and start fresh where nobody from leadership of exisiting unions were allowed to have influence, then maybe just maybe I would start leaning towards unions. But at the current implementation, it's a nope from me.
If you do have elections, then your comment is akin to a republican proclaiming that democracy doesn’t work, but would work in principle but only of the current leadership was replace with Donal Trump.
So does Iran, Russia, etc. Do you feel like those elections are free and fair? I don't feel like union leadership votes are. Again, there's a lot of baggage associated with current unions. New unions are needed, not new leadership of existing unions.
And at the end of the day, the workers just weren't particularly unhappy, and those weren't palatable risks.
Advantage: Amazon
Maybe they are not sufficiently confident that the union will act in their interest?
Is that so crazy an idea?
If you're in favour of unions then I guess you're in favour of workers being able to have a say in how they work. And if they don't want to work with a union then I can't understand how you can rationally do anything but say 'ok thank you for saying, if that's what you want no problem we'll do it that way'.
It's a pretty simple calculus. When the company spends twice the yearly payroll of the entire place on preventing the lowest of low workers on the totem pole from forming a union, maybe the company isn't acting in their best interests.
But if that's what they say when asked what else should we do except honour that?
If you think it's absolutely inconceivable they could legitimately vote against it at all... I mean then why have a vote at all? Might as well unionise them by force against their will and impose the union leaders as unelected and unwelcome representatives? That'll empower 'em, right?
I don't think its as clear cut as "in your interest". I certainly wouldn't vote to unionize my profession and I would even go as far as avoiding unionized fields. I prefer to have a direct relationship with my employer. I stay away from organizations that have a table that will tell you how much you'll make after N years. It's just not a dynamic place to work. Or at least that's my impression when dealing with unionized groups in large banks.
I don't think that's necessarily a characteristic of a union shop and if it is, those are probably minimums.
For example, professional baseball players and are unionized yet individuals can still negotiate salary.
It would more likely be something akin to a teacher union, with teaching being in between performance athletes and uniform workers. And even there I don't think individual teachers have much power to negotiate salary, but I could be wrong.
Unionizing can make sense for other types of jobs as well. The person I responded to mentioned their preference for having a direct relationship with an employer. To me, that means other types of places than warehouses because I doubt very much that many warehouse workers have a relationship with anybody above their direct supervisor.
A warehouse employee is not likely to have any kind of relationship with anybody above their supervisor. They can only bargain collectively.
McDonald's Mr. Floersch the managerial turnover was at 20% globally while that of the crew members averaged between 80 percent and 90 percent. [0]
That high turnover means that low paid employees are much faster to leave. Some don't even show up to their first day of work. It's also selection bias sure. But if you talk to anyone who manages low paid employees, the primary skill set they have is interpersonal relationships with their staff, or at least the good ones. The fixed costs are very high to hire someone, regardless of salary. You have to pay a recruiter or even spend time looking through resumes, running expensive background checks, interviewing etc.
Now consider the Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst. They get paid extremely well and get treated like crap. Do they have a "direct relationship with their employer"? Hardly.
If you're making $10 an hour its a lot easier to find another employer paying you a similar amount than it is if you're making $200k a year.
[0] https://ukdiss.com/examples/high-employee-turnover-at-mcdona...
Hell, I used to be a dishwasher then line cook at a Friendly's (east coast family restaurant, primary PA/NJ/NY/CT/MA) for two years and by the time I left for college I was the most senior person there who didn't have a key to open the building. And two of the three cooks who had keys were still in school, one HS and one college.
Managing a restaurant is super demanding work but it's not that far off from median salary. It's not as much of a dead end as people think it is, especially if you start at the bottom and work up.
Union execs become a bunch of corrupt fat cats. They are terrible [1][2][3]. The union execs will go on fancy dinners with amazon execs and decide how to "make a deal". You pay dues to a bunch of fat cats (out of your horrible salary), THEN, good luck getting any kind of promotion without fat cat approval. Promotions will quickly be based on seniority. Production will soon slow then the company will decide to shut down these unproductive plants. Read about "flint michigan" to learn how awesome unions are in the US.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/promi...
https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/
https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio...
Digging a two mile tunnel eats half of the state budget? Police refuses to wear body cams? Schools are slow to reopen after covid? Rightly or not, in many people's minds unions are to blame.
Are you talking hypotheticals? Because that hasn't happened, and couldn't have happened since COVID isn't "over" anywhere in the US.
If you were a contractor to a state and you scored a contract worth half the state's budget, would you consider that a success or a failure?
You would consider it a success! The examples you give show exactly how unions work in the self-interest of their members. If the tunnel costs half the state's budget, the tunnel workers are surely well-paid, police officers rather not wear body cams so that they can whack people with their batons without being prosecuted, and teachers rather not return to schools as long as the epidemic is ongoing.
(Throwaway because being anti-union is unfortunately taboo)
Maybe work-life at Amazon low end is not as bad as the media sensationlizes. Why should it be your default to consider this as paradoxical rather than evidence?
The answer is in the article
> Some workers who voted not to unionize said they ultimately didn’t see how a union would improve their pay or working conditions.
They looked at the issue and felt it would not be better. We don't know what the union was promising them, and what they had seen through the process.
I came here to find this comment because the "vote against their interest" argument is very predictable. It assumes that people should have no agency. That they're supposed to be robots that only vote one way on issues because of their demographic, and if they don't, then they must have been hoodwinked. It's condescending.
Look, I get the good intentions on all the discourse about not judging what's in another person's interests because you can't possibly know what they value, but it sure seems indisputable to me that a union would've delivered better pay and working conditions. I'm not sure in what warped universe voting against that isn't a vote against your interests and I don't think it's at all disrespectful to say they were victims of propaganda to get them to vote against their interests because when I look at the facts, that's what I see.
Regardless, it's a decent argument for a nationwide union to avoid race to the bottom effects.
Not if Amazon thought swift action would act as a deterrent in other locations. This specific thing has happened with other companies, so I don't think it's unlikely at all.
> Regardless, it's a decent argument for a nationwide union to avoid race to the bottom effects.
OK, but the question is whether these specific workers could possibly have any reason to vote against unionization. Maybe they don't find it plausible that a nationwide union will form, or maybe they don't want to deal with the interim turmoil that will befall them personally, even if they would support a nationwide effort. All seem like perfectly fine reasons to me.
It's not a 'logical fallacy' to not want to risk disruption of your livelihood, and that's the only relevant question to this thread: is there any set of facts that would reasonably lead the workers to vote against unionization? I think clearly there is, and there's no point arguing over subjective prioritizations. The workers are not 'irrational' for prioritizing their own jobs over the 'national action' that you seem to want. They may even consider that harmful. Not all workers have the same political opinions.
I don’t see how a propaganda campaign can push the vote to 70%, this is not Soviet Russia. Money does help but not on this order of magnitude (see Mike Bloomberg or many failed ballot propositions with tons of money behind them).
Pro-union people have a lot of work to do to restore the reputation of unions more generally. We need to up our propaganda game a lot because we got crushed in the Reagan era and never recovered.
Why can't you just leave them alone?
The unions asked them if they wanted to unionise. They said 'no thanks'. Why isn't that enough for you? If you support workers' right to have a voice then listen to them when they use it. Some individuals are even quoted in the article - they want the unions to leave them in peace!
I don't know your life experiences but I think you've got a funny idea that unions are some kind of perfect good descended from heaven? In reality in most cases unions come with a lot of unpleasant people and politics and aggravation. The workers are already seeing that aggravation with all this unwanted attention. That's one extra problem than they had before, and they don't have any confidence the union will reduce any problems they already had. And the union wants to be paid hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege! What a joke and no wonder people are hostile. I bet people are going to be even more hostile at the next factory these unions turn up at.
From the workers' perspective, there is an endless supply of people who will offer to take their money or the little power they have in return for supposedly 'fighting to improve their lives'.
Most of them do not really share your interests, and many are actively trying to trick you to use your money and power for themselves.
See for example the majority of politicians.
So far this union has uninvitedly hassled these workers for months, and then reacted angrily when they said 'no thanks' in a vote, so I can understand the workers are not buying now even if they were considering it before!
Not all of them will be able to deliver.
Not all of them were genuinely interested in you or your problems in the first place.
But, collective bargaining is only a single aspect of unions. They're not voting against it because they dislike collective bargaining, but because of other reasons. Collective bargaining is likely not a significant motivator for them because their salaries really are fairly high for the area.
I think in many cases unions are good, and in many others they are bad. I disagree that you can point at overall data and use that decide a specific case. Union data likely has severe survivorship bias, since unions likely tend to exist where they are more helpful.
It's because unions in America cannot guarantee the existence of the job. Yes, unions can force negotiations but they have no power to force the corporation to keep the factory open. (E.g. workers of Bakers union go on strike and in response, Hostess closes the factory.)
That's the tradeoff of possible negative consequences that many armchair observers totally leave out when they only emphasize benefits of unions such as "higher pay, better work conditions, etc".
I'd contend that observers who are confused why workers would "vote against their self-interest" and being "illogical" -- do not truly empathize with the poor workers' plight. (Or the observers are from Europe where unions work differently than America.)
So the workers (Volkswagen workers in TN, Nissan in TN, Boeing in SC) that voted to reject union representation weighed the game theory tradeoffs of:
(a) jobs continue to exist with better pay and conditions
... or ...
(b) jobs are eliminated leading to layoffs and pay of $0
The possible outcome of (b) becomes even more perverse in that the workers pay dues to have their jobs eliminated!
Yes, but if workers don't form a union -- "it's a race to the bottom!". Well, repeating memes is the currency of pundits rather than real cash that puts food on the table. Workers, understandably, make local decisions because they want a paycheck rather than worry about some global abstraction of "race to the bottom".
Other fields such as NFL, NBA, superstars have leverage in union negotiations. Faceless workers have much less leverage. E.g. baseball umpires (faceless and less leverage) strike but the MLB just accepts their resignations and hires replacements. The unskilled line workers in factories have even less leverage.
Isn't that a problem?
Should Amazon be prevented from closing the factory? For how long? Do they have to send as much product there as they did before? Can they open a non-union warehouse in Columbus, MS less than two hours away? Any temporary/sunsetting requirements just get factored in to the new math of how much a union would cost them. So maybe you buy the workers six months but the same thing happens. So if you actually want to "fix" things (again, from the assumed standpoint that shutting down the factory is a Bad Thing) the requirement has to be permanent. So is the requirement then that Amazon has to keep this one warehouse open in perpetuity just because its unionized? What if Amazon goes bankrupt? What if Amazon sells its fulfillment and shipping components to another company? What if that company buys everything except this one warehouse?
The argument of "they shouldn't be able to close the factory" falls apart pretty quickly when you think of how you would have to enforce it.
The arguments in favor are certain. There's is no mention of downsides; the only talk is of more money and more security with at most a mention that some dues will need to be paid (though on balance the worker will come out ahead).
Microeconomics argument: The only meaningful way unions increase employees wages is by artificially restricting supply. They can only move the point of equilibrium of demand and supply in their favor by restricting supply, thus unions always have in their interests on: increase minimum wages, licensing, closed shops, etc.
Political Economy argument: What is most interesting for unions is to survive as unions, which means that even if sometimes they are adversarial with employers, they are often allies to the structure. This is because at the negotiation table between unions and employers there are some actors missing, namely, the consumer.
Political argument: Unions exhert force only by destruction: by refusing to work, by boycotting, by collecting administration fees to maintain its structure. The proliferation of unions is the proliferation of destruction. Giving special legal status, protections, considerations, rewards to unions, you are proliferating unions and proliferating destruction.
The good economists also sees what is unseen.
I'm positive that education was strongly correlated with voting in favor of unionization. This is something the left everywhere struggles with enormously. When poor people are too dumb to vote according to their own self-interest, the left's worldview falls down. The left then claims that poor people are brainwashed by capitalist propaganda. Yeah, maybe, but it can't explain completely disastrous results like this unionization vote.
Misguided people will claim that unionization is not in the self-interest of most workers. Those people are wrong as there are about a billion studies showing that unionization improves both salaries and working conditions. For example: https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/ The science is incredibly clear-cut and these workers who voted against unionization voted against their own self-interest.
You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest, this is simply false
The union has supplanted individual choice for collective voting, and if your interests align with 50.1% of your fellow co workers than great but if your needs to not align with the majority of your co-workers then the union will screw you to serve the collective, and that is the best case.
No, and that is a pretty far stretch from what I said. Please re-read "your own collective interest". It's easy to win an argument when you misrepresent what is said. Collective interest implies that it is the greatest good for the majority of people. Not the most good for you every time.
Question for you:
>I absolutely do not understand why someone would vote to be collectively represented instead of being able to act as as individual in your own best interest
Do you really not see how it may be easier to negotiate as a group, rather than as an individual? In high-skill, high-demand jobs, yes, it is probably much easier to negotiate for individual benefits, because you have the power as the worker. But in low-skill, or high-supply jobs, the employers have all the power. I don't understand what you're saying.
Further good employees, even in low skill jobs, are very hard to find and even harder to retain. employers want to keep them, unionization often limits their ability to retain these high performing employees because they are not allowed to give bonus, raise or any other incentive beyond what is laid out by collective bargaining.
So I really do not see how it is easier to negotiate as a group. my personal experiences matches what have have observed in employment rations through out my career from when I was in a entry level position to now where I am in a higher skilled position
As to right-to-work itself, yes it does sound very odd on the face of it, and that's because the way unions have been institutionalized is quite odd. It's a very peculiar legal framework, divorced from the "situation on the ground". I recommend https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/uaw-academic-workers-coll... https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/eidlin-united-states-cana... for some background.
Now, one school of thought is "these are the tools we have, use them" another school of thought is "this is self-defeating weirdness", I am not sure. But it certainly isn't so clear cut that "of course right-to-work" is bad. Regardless of everything else, it was an anti-labor cudgel created in bad faith. Any solution that finds union compulsion icky but doesn't do something about the monopsony power of employers is not to be taken seriously.
Ignorance of their own reasoning is rooted in the presupposition that the union was in their best interest and the dues were worth it. Obviously, the employees in this case did not agree it was in their interest. People think differently than others and that is OK.
I grabbed a position at a Minnesota warehouse as a post-college graduate with no fulltime job. Kinda just wandered in off some job posting online and they just brought me on.
Feels like people just don't want to mess with a good thing tho? A lot of my friends came from super different walks of life, but almost all unanimously enjoyed coming in for shifts and shooting the shit with their friends. Might just be a perception that change means that things will get worse and no one wants that.
The union takes money out of your pocket, reduces your ability to get paid for performance, and slows the firm's ability to innovate.
If the firm mistreats you, you can leave.
It's a result of how unions are structured in the US. (It's different in Europe from what I understand, and they're more popular there as a result.) In the US unions are structured as a monopoly on labor which then nominally has more negotiating power with the employer.
The problem is that monopolies are inherently an industrial scale fail factory and everything about them makes everything worse.
You then have effectively two possibilities.
The first is that the employer is competing with a hundred other local employers for labor. In this case there isn't really anything for the union to do, because the employer will already have to offer competitive working conditions or employees will go work for somebody else. And the employer in a competitive market won't have thick margins for the union to extract from, implying that the union's overhead will be larger than what they can extract from the employer.
The second is that the employer is, itself, a monopoly. In theory it now has thick margins that the union can extract concessions out of. But then you have two monopolies negotiating with each other. It's a battle of attrition. Can the employer afford to have their facility closed for longer than you can afford to be on strike? You know the answer to this is for large multinational corporations. The corporation will barely even notice the complete shuttering of that facility because they have a thousand more to pick up the slack.
A monopsony employer is still a big problem, of course, it's just not a problem that unions are a solution to. Try antitrust, or lower regulatory barriers to small businesses so that there are more competing local employers etc.
I like your comment, but unions aren't necessarily meant to solve this problem. Amazon imposes terrible working conditions on its warehouse workers, which a union absolutely could address.
How? The union's negotiating power comes from the ability to go on strike. They make a demand, Amazon says no, they go on strike, Amazon closes that warehouse and sends people their cheap junk from a different one.
All the union can get you is the unemployment line, unless you do something to increase local competition for labor. In which case you don't need the union because employers have to compete through better working conditions.
I repeatedly voted against unionization in previous lives of blue collar jobs: bus building, commercial roofing, and sheet metal workers.
First, Union leadership is bought out and pursuing their own interests. They're not "for the people" as repeatedly braindeadly repeated in the comments section ad infinitum. Union leadership is out to benefit themselves first and foremost, and workers might benefit if you contribute to their cause, but it's a fantasy to pretend union leadership has everyone's best intentions in mind.
Inevitably, this leads to the second, which is escalation of costs at the company. This is only partially wages; business decisions get delayed at committee, competitive advantage on market timing goes away, old-timey boomers get mad when something changes, and your company's innovation becomes stagnate. Your company falls behind and wages stagnate, and union leadership blames literally everyone except for themselves.
Finally, the benefits are stupid for the price you pay. If they were measured on charity navigator, they would be listed as some of the worst run. The money gets funneled into union leadership pockets and their golf buddies. Nepotism runs wild; promotions got to whomever is slapping whom's ass or giving it out to their kid. It's a "tax" you can't vote yourself out of except to quit your job.
Edit: I would be very enthusiastic about a union that stuck to just labor issues, no unrelated issues.
Notoriously easy industries for the working class poor to get into.
They either think it was rigged somehow--some vast compspiracy regarding mailboxes(!)--or that workers are too naïve to know what's right for them.
(For example: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/4/9/2025040/-Amazon-re... )
This reaction seems familiar, doesn't it?
It seems the average is about $500/year which is (IMHO) insane unless it's your only paid news source.
Edit: Question: Can this vote also be taken as a proxy indicator of the working conditions not being anywhere close to what the sensational and click-bait media pieces point out to be?
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...
A lot of people working in the transportation industry do this and it is not very hard to imagine why they would do this.
Just one example: https://www.quora.com/Do-truck-drivers-ever-actually-use-pis... You can find several other articles, and also speak to actual drivers and they will also explain why do they do this.
Basically, there were a number of really bad tactical errors made by organizers throughout the process.
On one hand I can see why it was attractive for unions to push for it, given how brutal anti-union efforts were in the US, but it seems to over time have had the effect of making unions focus on drives to win workplace by workplace and ignoring places they don't see a chance of winning a full-on unionisation vote.
Because I'd expect support to rise next time something Amazon does annoys its employees.
if the balance of power was more evenly divided maybe, but unions are almost non-existent and government regulations don't favor labor - that making such arguments feels naive to the reality of the situation
Up until they make a decision that's not in accordance with what i, the great armchair warrior, decide is good for them. Rejecting my unsolicited advice, means they are ungrateful fools unworthy of my elevated consideration.
All of that went through my head the moment i read the headline. I'm surprised at how intolerant i really am. But with second thoughts, these workers had a choice, they made it. Who am i to say that they are wrong.
My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc).
So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? If it is grapevine, what was the original source?
Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures.
I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.
I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics.
My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.
It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?
You will have to pay it just to do a short television appearance. It is certainly not worth that to everybody.
Then there are annual dues, whether or not you actually earned any money.
Then there's recent discussions of them kicking out long-standing members over their political views.
If there's a downside, it's that they used to act as a bit of a moat for the incumbent studios. Studios have entire departments devoted to processing issues raised by union members, which is of course expensive to do. And union members can only work on union productions, which meant tiny indie films could have problems getting talented people budget-wise. It's not just pay, it's meeting the requirements of the dictionary-sized "Basic Agreement" in terms of other aspects of production. That said, SAG has led the way to finding ways to accommodate smaller budgets and it's not as difficult as it once was.
https://files.epi.org/charts/img/172988-21725.png
https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
I'm sure those aren't valid examples anyway, as the only unions that matter in discussions on this hellsite are the ones that also exist in Randian works of fiction.
You are only considering one side of the question -- and actually a limited form of that one side (namely, the material benefits/pay for the unionized employees).
What about the productivity of the firm and workers? The profits? The cohesiveness of the market strategy? The sense that the workers were participating in the success of the firm itself (and not the success of the union)? The creation of healthy relationships between management and labor?
It's probably beyond dispute that unions introduce a "middleman" between management and labor, but we are probably arguing about whether or not that middleman is (most often) a good or bad thing. (I do not dispute that sometimes unions can be healthy and might align its incentives with company success, but I tend to believe that this middleman is not usually a good thing except in extremely unhealthy companies -- perhaps like Amazon, and I must confess that in working with about 50 companies, of which less than 10 were union shops, I've never actually seen a union shop where labor didn't put union goals over company goals, to the detriment of both.)
That whole thing about requiring union workers to do tasks is stupid. One year I was attending a fan convention and decided to check out the rules for vendors. The convention center used unionized labor so one of the rules was that the vendors were limited to carrying like one case of stuff over to their spot. All other moving and setting up had to be done by the union workers. I get what the protection here is, it prevents loopholes for getting around using union workers at all (which, if it was possible to do, would make a union ineffective). But hell, why can't they pay the union workers as if they would have to do all the work but then let people decide if they want the union workers to actually do something or not?
If I, as a vendor, could have my people do the work of moving and set up and elect not to use the convention center staff, then there's a way to circumvent the convention center staff and fire them all.
You just hire a "vendor" with their own crew to do all the stuff. With no actual work to do, it's justifiable to fire the convention center staff.
If people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need such weird rules. But then again, if people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need unions either.
If a union can only operate by forming a workforce monopoly - something is wrong with the model itself.
It is only natural to put up a collective against that monopoly.
GM, Ford, and Chrysler on the other hand can do practically nothing to prevent a machinist or welder from leaving to work at literally thousands of other companies in dozens of industries across the country that require those skills.
Imagine if most employees bring a contract of their choosing from one employer to the rest, and employers are the ones maybe hagling over specific provisions. Really imagine that. Totally different world right?
That's what it would be like if employees had more market power.
> I believe what GP was alluding to is that if a workplace is unionized, the worker does not have a choice of wanting to be a part of the union or not(in a non right to work state), and so essentially a monopoly.
That's a distinction without a difference. If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace. It's just another condition of employment, just like all the other conditions of employment you'd have to abide by without a union.
> If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace.
Or, if unions weren't forced down onto the workers, they might choose to work with the same employer and not deal with the union.
Why can't workers have a choice - whoever sees the union's being a better fit can join the n number of unions operating at a single employer. Whoever wants to remain free from the union can choose not to join, and negotiate with the employer directly.
Let me put it this way: if managers weren't forced down onto workers, maybe I'd work with a different manager or no manager at all. The employer used its "monopoly" over its workplace to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
Most employers will allow changing teams/managers internally. Also, you can discuss it with your employer and if you can convince them that you will be able to be productive and relevant without the need for a manager, some employers will actually entertain this request. Several startups actually have a very flattish structure and very loosely defined hierarchy.
> The employer used its "monopoly" to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
So? It's totally at the employer's discretion, and there are a million other things that are non-negotiable.
> It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
> In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union. However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job. It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
Sure. But it is between you and your employer, and it is not unilaterally dictated by you or by your employer. Also, an unrelated third party doesn't have a say in the agreement you have between you and your employer. If there are some things that are unacceptable to you(for eg, having a manager to report to), you and the potential employer can shake hands and go away from each other.
> Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
From discussing a legal binding around closed union shops to opposing "all labor laws" is quite a leap and also a strawman. But to answer your question, no I don't oppose such a law that says children cannot be employed in dangerous conditions like mines etc.
> That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union.
Yeah so clearly something that can and should be between you and your employer has to now involve other colleagues and you end up with varying degrees of coercion basically.
> However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job.
Or, the easier and simpler route is to leave the union and possibly join another union operating at the same place(if such a thing were to be allowed), or not join any union at all and still work for the employer. More freedom/choice for every worker, lesser or possibly no coercion and less disruptive for the employer, and more importantly, less disruptive for the worker.
It is absolutely absurd that just because set of workers are happy with their working arrangements, a different set of workers cannot get their working arrangements that are more suited to them. Or, in other words, two functioning adult parties are ready to come to a potential agreement that concerns just them, with both of them getting what they want, but some third party who is not and should not be privy to this agreement will not get what they want, and so the actual participants in the agreement cannot make the deal they want, and instead their options are to be coerced into a deal that they wouldn't want, or drop the deal altogether.
> It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
Certainly unavoidable if its a closed union shop no? Which is the very thing that we are discussing. And I am glad that they are rare.
Once an employer can no longer hire non-unionized employees, it has to either surrender to the union requirements or close altogether. This is a monopoly in its best.
On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings.
There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.
In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
> your merits don't matter at all
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
> wayyy too much focus on seniority
At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line.
> overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO)
Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO.
I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
>In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally.
>And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop.
Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
>unlimited PTO
This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine.
Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited".
But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)?
The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO"
is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO.
But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*
> In a survey we conducted just before we hit the one-year mark, our employees ranked unlimited vacation third-highest among the benefits we offer, just behind health insurance and a 401(k). It beat out vision insurance, dental insurance, and even professional development, all of which ranked highly in their own rights.
Their Unlimited PTO policy didn't move the needle at all on how much vacation people took, but it had a huge impact on how people felt about it. In short, they appreciated being treated like adults.
How the author of that Workforce article got from the two sources they cite to the extremely negative article they wrote is beyond me.
Then work for a company with fixed PTO. There are plenty of these; the vast majority, actually. Why are you so hell-bent on denying that choice to people who wish otherwise? Even worse, you're telling these people that they are wrong and that unlimited PTO cannot possibly be a good fit for them. How can you expect people not to disagree when they have first-hand experience of the contrary?
Are you a poet?
In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".
And research in logs and events can either be quick or very slow, depending on what you're looking for.
And it's also easy to slop out slow bad code, and make it someone else's problem (dev side of things).
I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.
The situation you're describing is going to be far more about the specific personalities and power dynamics than anything related to accurate performance estimation.
In the most absurd case, the best developer got a contract offer from another company with deadline to sign at the end of November. He wanted to stay at the current company, and the managers were telling him they wanted him... but he was unable to get the contract extension on paper. So at the end of November, he was like "okay, screw it, I wanted to stay here, but I am taking the other contract, to avoid the possibility that I would miss that other offer and this company would not extend my current contract here". So he signed that other contract (starting from January), and when towards the end of December this company finally offered him a contract extension, he was like "sorry guys, but I already signed a contract with someone else". He left, and the managers were all surprised "but we told him we wanted him, why couldn't he wait?" During the following year, a chain reaction started, when his closest coworkers left too, then more people left, most of them reasoning like "I was already considering a change of job, but I stayed here mostly because of good friends at workplace, now that the friends are no longer here, I might leave too". The company lost most of their developers... because there were not willing/able to extend their best developer's contract two months before expiration instead of the usual one month.
Another example, this was an internal employee, there was a super talented guy, freshly out of university, but incredibly experienced in some technologies. Also super helpful, whenever someone in the company had a technical problem, they usually asked him for help, and he always helped. The whole company changed their technological stack based on his recommendations. Then, one day, another company approached him and offered double of his current salary. He wanted to stay, so he went to management, described the situation, and asked them for 50% increase (which would still be only 3/4 of what the other company offered him). The managers refused; as I later learned, their conclusion was that "a person this young does not deserve such high salary". So the guy left.
Maybe this is "specific personalities", but those personalities seem quite frequent.
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination.
I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that.
You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.
Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.
What do you base this on?
My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity.
I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is:
a. incompetent administration
b. failure to desegregate our schools.
Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds.
2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs.
3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor.
It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students.
I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district.
If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids.
We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood?
I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all.
Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.
Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback? If you look at recordings from Boston parents during the busing protests, they're quite clear about what their issue is ("n*****s").
> If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school
This sounds intuitive when you hear it for the first time. And I did alude to it in my previous comment. But I don't think we should overstate the effect. From 21st century data, at a macroscale, enrollment does not really drop when you integrate, even when that integration involves sending kids to schools that are not the closest neighborhood one.
Cambridge, MA has implemented a '21st-century busing' controlled choice approach and saw no decline in enrollment. [0] Parts of Brooklyn recently did the same and saw no change in the enrollment of white students. [1]
It's hard to say exactly why this is the case - perhaps racial animus has declined, perhaps there is a growing awareness that attending a racially diverse school is not actually harmful for educational outcomes, perhaps white flight in the 80s and 90s wasn't caused by busing in the first place, perhaps the benefits to remaining in cities are increasing, etc.
Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
I don't buy that de facto segregation is an inevitable result of freedom of mobility. The evidence strongly suggests that it is related to policy choices and that it can be changed. Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
[0]: tcf.org/content/report/cambridge-public-schools/ [1]: https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/11/14/21121770/a-push-to-integ...
>Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback?
Not wanting to send your kid to a bad school in a bad neighborhood? Let's be specific here - these were parents in South Boston worried about sending their kids to Roxbury. (Yes, ironic given Southie was also a bad neighborhood.) Sure, plenty of them were racist as hell on top of that.
To the larger point - were these privileged kids living in Southie? No - they were also poor and working class, just like the kids in Roxbury. So where are these privileged kids living? In the suburbs. Which didn't have busing into inner city schools. And where affordable housing means paying half a million dollars for a condo instead of a million dollars. And there's very few POC who can afford living there. Are these families racist? Maybe not overtly, but they certainly aren't challenged to living along side POCs.
> Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
So it failed in the 90s instead of the 80's. Roxbury and South Boston still have bad schools (although both are less crime-ridden than the 70's)
Interesting enough, Cambridge and Brooklyn have grown in affluence starting in the 90s, which more affluent families moving in. Lo and behold, the schools improve across the board as the city can bus kids and resources around to poorer preforming schools.
> "It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students."
I could not disagree more, not with our current approach to inner city schools. Desegregation through busing among bad neighborhoods didn't improve bad schools. Affluent families moving into those neighborhoods did.
> Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
Given the current trends, I'm not seeing the interest in making these poorer communities less poor. It would be bold to see an attempt to bus kids from affluent communities into the city, but that is very unlikely to happen.
Where as much of the rest of the country has had children in schools just fine for months.
You can damn well place a lot of blame on the unions because they are not there for the welfare of students and no action they have taken shows otherwise. If anything they guarantee the least needed teachers will ever end up in schools desperate to have them. They will go after any alternative means of education which includes home teaching, something they have effectively now forced on many minority families in our largest cities.
I think it is funny that outsiders on an anti-union crusade will continue dismiss what students & parents who actually go to schools like these say many of the problems are.
e: And I'm not saying unions are entirely unproblematic. I had a few (2 or so) teachers who were protected. But they are so far from the root cause of the dysfunction in our urban schools. Informal segregation is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
If all media could list facts and stats, and lay out all kinds of reasons and assumptions. Unfortunately, both left and right media are doing the opposite. For instance, some right labels NYC teacher's union as a woke entity. The teacher union said that reopening school was racist. And Twitter, oh, the almighty righteous Twitter, simply bans the accounts who are opposing CDC's guidelines. It's just so hard to see influential medias and platforms to engage nuanced discussion.
* Randomly assigned poor & black students to socioeconomically diverse and non-diverse schools, found rich-poor achievement gap was halved in math (https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2010/10/1600543...)
* Systemic benefits in national tests for students in socioeconomically diverse schools, regardless of family background (https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica... along with a whole laundry list of other evidence).
* Evidence that minority parents in my school district favor distance learning while the pandemic continues. I couldn't find the original stat because the thread was deleted, but here is a similar poll showing the same thing (https://www.the74million.org/article/as-more-dcps-schools-op...)
Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.
Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.
People have had bad experiences with unions protecting shitty employees far beyond what companies usually do, and the response amounts to, "NUH UHHH".
If that's what people have actually experienced, telling them "actually what you saw with your eyes isn't reality" is not effective messaging.
> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either.
Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed.
"No, you didn't actually see that."
You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment?
Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.
We can use seniority, but why not get creative and rank employees by height, moustache density, or digits of pi memorized?
This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.
Then either you and all your coworkers so far have been amazing, or you're the bad one. Either way consider yourself lucky!
Which work environments are merit based?
Which employers fire bad performers?
Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer.
And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.
Trading/finance, because it's either outsmart the rival trading firms, or lose your entire stack in 1 day.
The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.
I’ve worked for orgs where this wasn’t true and I avoid those orgs and prefer environments that are merit based.
I feel bad if people really have never experienced this as it’s really disheartening to work in an org where performance doesn’t matter. That must really suck.
What type of data? Nothing but qualitative analysis of devs work gives any hint on performance IMHO.
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo...
There's plenty of other variables to consider here and he just graphed two of them. Corporate taxes were much higher. Also it looks like share of income going to the top 10% hasn't really changed much at all in the last 100 years. 40% +/- 10%. That needle hasn't moved very far.
https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
Correlation != Causation.
This is data cherry-picked to support a conclusion and published by a lobby group (a pro-union one and publihed on labor day, no less. It's flashy!). You may agree with said conclusion, but this is research presenting a theory not a proof.
There is no causation being shown here. It's a possible theory, but that is all that it is.
I’m not qualified to say if they have a place still, but I know anyone pretending it’s all rainbows hasn’t actually suffered like I have.
To take government work as an example: you mentioned some minuses that are very obvious. But you didn't mention what I consider one of the biggest pluses: not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties. That still happens in leadership positions, but it used to happen to rank-and-file workers as well; I believe it's the public employee unions that stopped that.
I don't work for Amazon and I don't have a dog in this fight, but it would've been very interesting to see what happened if this site had unionized. It's not really clear to me whether/how much Amazon is jerking its workers around; are there plants really unsafe, are people really miserable, should they be paid more? Having one site unionize for a couple of years would probably answer those questions better than a million forum posts.
Rewarding supporters with cushy jobs (and firing the old workers) en mass is known as patronage and is a minor abuse of power, akin to corruption. Well-developed democracies take steps to prevent it, not because it's bad for the workers, but because it is bad for the fabric of government. The US enacted these reforms more than 100 years ago, starting with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act. Public sector unions had very little to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
Granted, I have seen the other side of things, and free riders are a problem. It sucks when you care about doing things right and don't get anything better than the people who just dial it in. But there are always going to be free riders: either people who figure out how to game the system because they're just there for a paycheck, or people who run the system and soak up all the value while delivering little, because their family knows the right people at the country club.
Now, when a company is new, small, and nimble like a startup, you can control the nepotism and free riding somewhat, but any bigger shop it's just going to get baked into the system either way. Try to really solve this problem, and you'll threaten those with real power and get shut down.
Sometimes you get leapfrog moments from companies like SpaceX that demonstrate just how much drag the corruption has caused on progress, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. And, any comments about Elon as an individual aside, the powers that be have not been shy about using a bunch of media mouthpieces to spread FUD about disruptors like SpaceX and Tesla. (Again, not going to even touch on whether those are good or bad companies, or whether Elon is a good or bad person. But they are causing a ruckus in their respective industries.)
So again, you may be doing a lot better than some people at your job, and that's commendable. But it will be used to manipulate you more often than not, because you care.
Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money.
Thankfully my workplace is not unionized and I have great team members. Whether union or non-union workplaces can encourage that, I don't know, but that is an example of why an employee would care.
More practically, if I'm working at a place where my team has fixed head count I'd rather us have the ability to replace someone who's not contributing to the success of the team.
Compensation often includes stock; so you do get something when somebody else makes the company money. And if nothing else, the company doing well may help you feel job security and be better able to make plans for your future.
You also may enjoy making the best product you can. When another employee gets in the way of that, it can make it harder to enjoy your work.
By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members. The question should be, how can we retain or enhance those benefits while also minimizing the well-known downsides?
Mind citing your source or perhaps one example of a good union? I'm genuinely curious
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
This report from. US House committee has a bunch of links too... https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%2...
When that sort of thing happens it makes me wish that there was a clear agreement between management and employees that codified when/how/why promotions happen so that people who have worked hard and performed well would be favored. It’s really awful that that union precluded that from happening.
Is it? It just seems to vary per thread.
I don't know where you lived, but this is the opposite of the situation in most places. Private schools attract people who will pay private school tuition because they offer higher standards.
In my limited experience with private schools, it was relatively easy to poach good teachers away from unionized jobs precisely because the school had freedom to offer them higher wages and better benefits. Many of them were also sick of dealing with the issues that come with unionized labor and union membership.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.10.a...
Sometimes I've seen them push back against bad management, but it is frightfully rare. Bullying, discrimination, favouritism, giving young/non-clique staff the worst jobs: all good.
I don't think public sector unions are very good stewards, partly because everyone is in the union. They push against govt objectives (control wages) and politics (push whatever rhetoric of the day is) and seek to gain public support (teaching/learning is essential for society etc). Unless you're a cog in the union machine, they won't be present except to prevent you being fired or make you work extra hours.
This became very evident during the pandemic: unions stuck with (1) better pay, (2) keep leave. While (1) is essential, the real problem was (3) death. But adjusting the school year, virtual teaching, classroom ventilation, support for students: nothing, except opposition. They wanted nothing to change. It was bonkers.
Writers Guild of America East (for journalism), or the Authors Guild (novelists). You can become a journalist or a novelist without being a member. But both guilds have collective bargaining agreements with publishers.
This is the direct purpose of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Unions are required to represent employees regardless of whether or not they pay dues, meaning other members shoulder the costs of collective bargaining. This is called the "free rider" problem and is one of the biggest ones facing unions today. It's also one of the main targets of the PRO Act.
I was reprimanded by another worker because according to whatever union full-time employee had, cleaning a canoe was a union job and by bringing my own rag and cleaner I was violating the union's chart of some shit.
So merely by nature of the type of individual you'll encounter on HN, you'll get a strong bias towards the anti-union.
Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the warts. That’s a kind of nuance I’m not seeing from the “eat the rich” crowd which makes me think they don’t have direct experience.
This essentially means that there needs to be a process to fire you. You need to supply at least one verbal warning on stated grounds (backed up as a written), then another one and then you can fire someone.
It works reasonably well (not always, obviously) and it's super bizarre to me that you don't have that in the US. To be honest, when my previous employer wanted to move me to the US, this was one of my concerns, especially when you're dependent on the job for a visa.
It just seems that its a bad trade-off for US people in general, and it's odd to me that it appears to be mostly unquestioned.
Sounds like it might be a good idea.
So partly whether or not it would be a good idea would depend on the details of the proposed law, and how they would end up being interpreted by judges.
My position is that given all this HR dance to prevent lawsuits, at-will doesn't really exist in professional jobs, so it might be worth ensuring that this is standard across all roles rather than just those where the fired employee might sue.
- Do something egregious like steal or curse out a customer and you’ll be escorted off the premises
- For poor performance you can get a write up and a meaningful chance to improve before being fired
- You can be laid off just because your department / function / office isn’t needed anymore but they do something for you severance-wise
I’d support a legal change.
And it's worth noting that the EU is very, very different from country to country, so it's a bad idea to generalise.
None of them have at-will employment though, so it's an appropriate comparison to make.
I think the real difference here is what people value. Personally, I value having some advance notice that the boss hates me and wants me gone. This reduces my stress, and allows me to find another job before I stop earning money.
Perhaps other people value the efficiency that comes from being able to change staffing on a whim. I don't think either of these is wrong, they're just different statements of values.
And note that if we're talking about tech people founding US companies, it's driven predominantly by access to capital rather than anything else.
> Like your smartest citizens leaving to start companies in the US?
Do you have any examples of this?
That's probably the most absurd thing I've read in these comments.
(Maybe look at my reply which gives more details).
For example, just in the replies to your comment people are saying they dislike unions because they protect the incompetent, stifle progression, give preferential treatment purely on seniority, etc.
But then go look at Hollywood, with the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the PGA, etc. These are unions that have some of the most highly paid and richest people in the world as members. The same is true in the sports world.
And sure, these unions are not perfect by a long shot, but they are doing a huge amount to hold what is ultimately a very exploitative industry to account.
Of course, companies like Google, Amazon, and the like would much prefer software engineers continued to think that all unions were like the Teamsters. They don't want you to know that there's a whole class of professional unions serving some of the most highly paid people and engaging in collective bargaining.
Your point is a good one when we see the backlash against unions in software engineering and related fields. I just wanted to bring it back around to why anti-union comments on this story specifically would be right to cite their problems you listed in the 2nd sentence.
The point is that these situations are often framed as the angelic unions vs the evil capitalist employer. In reality, there are plenty of bad unions just as there are plenty of bad employers.
Work the union job for $10 an hour, earn credit towards joining the SAG. In 10 years I can actually join the SAG and make actual decent paying jobs, and actually get health insurance.
vs
Work a non-union job for $20.
It feels very much like a way to exploit people to let them someday get the magic card. The numbers are very approximate, but the sentiment I have gotten from people actually with boots on the ground. Do I want this as a developer? No way!
It's also a challenge to get into a guild, SAG has minimum requirements for having already performed. A union is generally just something you have to join when you take a job at a unionized company.
This is not a value judgment, just wanted to point out the differences.
He pointed out that not all unions are the doom and gloom version where you can't carry lightbulbs (seriously people, don't ever use that example, it's right out of the anti-union video, obvious tell) and good people can't get promotions because of blah blah blah.
You then responded by saying it doesn't count because it's different.
Yeah, that's the point. A "union" isn't a thing like gravity. It doesn't only work one way. It a collection of workers who want to collectively bargain with an employer to bring some balance to the power dynamic between huge companies and individual workers. Whatever rules the union wants to set out are up to them.
Contract provisions that screw over newcomers, and set up additional barriers to entry are not good.
I do not want the tech industry to discriminate against new comers, or developers who don't have a CS degree, or H1Bs more than it is already doing so.
And that is what those kinds of unions do to the industry. They setup barriers to entry to target these groups.
Other unions do the same, such as longshoremen. You can work next to unionized longshoremen, doing the same type of job, yet not be part of the union because it strictly controls who can be a member in order to keep membership low and compensation high.
Things like the actors guild are simple rent seeking at the expense of newcomings. They are setup in a way where only insiders are allowed to get jobs at certain places, and there are large barriers to entry to becoming an insider.
If we were to apply this to tech, it would be contract provisions that keep out engineers that dont have degree, or discrimination against H1B immigrants.
And I don't want the tech industry to have contractual provisions that discriminate against these groups, and would be willing to spend a huge amount of effort fighting people who want to do that. (And based on comments that I have read on hacker news, there really are a lot of people who want to screw over self-taught developers, or immigrants)
I understand that you want to retaliate against immigrants and people from other countries.
But if that is your opinion then don't expect anyone who has an H1B visa to ever agree with you.
You should probably expect people who don't hate immigrants to fight against your efforts though, and to take actions to sabotage the union.
Don't expect to ever get those other people on your side, if your argument is that you just don't want foreign workers to be able to get jobs here.
History and reality. Look at union run cities like Chicago and union run industries like the auto-industry that got demolished by foreign companies.
Personally, I think unions have their places... but in 99% of cases these days? The bureaucracy, red tape, added expenses and other assorted BS are more net negative than the few positives that unions offer.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" trope gets repeated often online, but it's largely unfounded cynicism. It's true that we need to fix our health care system and bolster our safety nets, but the reality is that average Americans are relatively wealthy and even the median worker has significant career opportunities that are harder to come by in some other countries.
Look toward the professional trades like software engineering and the differences are even more pronounced. I worked at a company with US and European offices for a while, and the European employees were routinely stunned to learn that the US office had to pay employees so much more for the same work.
> They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them,
The situation is more nuanced than what you read online. The reality is that these moves aren't as unilaterally good as presented. It's more honest to approach them as tradeoffs.
In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the workers casting these votes did more research and have a better understanding of the situation than the internet gives them credit for. The idea that they're all voting against their self interest because they're dumb, or that we know what's better for them than they do, is very presumptuous.
Why can't we accept that these people are really voting for what they believe is in their best interests? Why do we have to conclude that they're not smart or that they're voting against helping themselves? The reality isn't so simple, and we're not in a position to judge after reading a few paragraphs on the internet.
The one point I would have to disagree with the the reasons for voting against their interests. And the only reason for this is seeing the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. What happened there is people who set themselves up as figures of authority and told the people Brexit was in their interest. They made the fishing industry into the poster child of their campaigns and convinced them they would benefit. The fishing communities in particular where overwhelmingly in support. Perhaps some did try do their own research, but a large part of social media and the mass-media where all pushing the agenda and using scare tactics and any concerns were batted away as "project fear". When you have figures of authority pushing an agenda it's understandable that people will believe them - Why would they lie? But as Jan 2021 rolled around, the fishing industry in the UK is all but decimated (YoY Salmon exports were down 98% in January). So from that perspective, I wouldn't call the voters dumb because it's easy to get caught out by the disinformation that's out there, but for the most part I would say many were naively trusting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The industry in the non-unionized county was literally some of the best in the world in what it does. The plants were clean and well run. Early on in the management-part of his career, my dad hired some formerly unionized workers who had moved up from the unionized county in order to find work (jobs were disappearing in that county due to the bankruptcies). They were fired in a few months because they wouldn't show up on time, were constantly dropping the ball, etc. In his opinion, their work ethic had been ruined.
I'm actually not anti-union, but I'm mostly anti US union. I think if we adopted a non-antagonistic model similar to Germany, it'd be alright.
People disagree over whether Amazon is a situation where unions would be a benefit or a detriment. Make an argument instead of diminishing people who disagree with as you misinformed.
"Next, the union dues. I know this isn't a problem at every location but mine is part of the local teamsters union, and having to pay $450 in initiation fees and $40 on the regular adds up, especially for someone who is in real need of the income. I wouldn't be complaining if I saw the tangible benefits the union provides, but after speaking to several coworkers, many of whom have worked at my location for 20+ years, I am of the impression that the union does not actually do anything to improve working conditions at Costco. If anything, it seems to me that the union locations simply serve to protect the wages of those who are not unionized by playing into Costco's desire to prevent the unionization of said locations. Yes, the union makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people, "guarantees" you won't get scheduled for 7 days straight (have seen otherwise at my location), etc. In my view, this only contributes to my previously mentioned point that many long-time employees feel protected from termination regardless of how they perform or act, and as such they bring subpar attitudes, service, and effort into their work."
And in the end, all the bargaining didn't really get us any better than what we would have gotten without a union. So now I got a little raise and I hate my company and I'm telling everyone else how shitty the company is.
Realistically? Probably libertarian advocacy literature coupled with a few confirmatory anecdotes that may or may not be from first hand experience. When I was anti-union, that's where it came from.
You also have to keep in mind the HN is run by a VC firm, and a lot of its culture was set by aspiring capitalists hoping to win the startup lottery. That's going to lead to certain predicable biases (e.g. taking the perspective of a business owner even if you're unlikely to ever successfully be one).
Is that a good enough source for you, or does that not count?
I'll never understand the people who think "You have a differing opinion. It must be because you don't know what you're talking about and have just consumed a bunch of propaganda".
If you are questioning the source of a specific piece of data than be clear about what that data is.
If you are asking people to cite a source for a general opinion they personally hold, they don't owe you that.
we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there.
like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.
From speaking with family members who work or worked for Unions.
From a management perspective it is untenable to not be able to hire who you want (because you must offer the job to any "qualified" union employee before you can hire externally), not be able to fire who you want (because you must meet arbitrary requirements set by the union).
From an employee perspective I've seen situations where they want specific or custom arrangements with their boss and their boss would like to give them but they violate union rules so they are either forced to work around it (and face repercussions if they are found out) or refuse to accommodate situations that both the manager and the employee agree upon.
I will also say that I find the anti-anti-union rhetoric very distasteful. I fundamentally agree that employees have the right to discuss their desire to join or form a union but I think that companies have the fundamental right to advocate their position as well. Virtually all of this get's called out as "anti-union" propaganda and I find that very distasteful and disingenuous. Most of the "propaganda" videos I've seen I found to be actually quite reasonable arguments, while most of the anti-anti commentary I find to be disingenuous appeals to emotion.
There are also many industries where unions are massively corrupt. I know nothing about the union here so I won't speak about it, but I do have personal experience with this.
Finally, I will also say that my opinion of unions skews heavily against larger and more diverse ones. Had this been Amazon Warehouse workers choosing to form their own union vs join an existing union, I feel that would have been more successful by virtue of being smaller in scope and more targeted.
I'm not saying all unions are bad. I think many industries might benefit from well run, transparent, regulated unions. But I have seen many examples where they are bad.
I think it's an unfair argument to say that unions need further regulation. Regulating them is how we've lost millions of union jobs to contractors, and where we keep seeing large strikes broken up by governments. Regulations often benefit large players over small ones. We'd rather see a plethora of smaller, niche unions, than just one massive union. Competition breeds capability.
Well first off, especially in low wage jobs, there is little they do for you and it can cost nearly two hours of your pay per month for the benefit. You get this wonderful set of rules which spells out what your employer can and cannot do but it also limits you as well. I got first hand experience in a union shop from late 1980s to early 1990s. My reward was seeing our rep once a quarter if we were lucky in her Mercedes which cost more than we made.
However for every complaint about people being anti union and listing off "Bunch of facts" you never see those same people list their facts that support a pro union stance. Most of the time its little more than what people already have with some variation of something they won't even get when unionized.
The simple fact is, in the US they are more political than worker oriented. They feed a ridiculous amount of dues and even state funds into political coffer so they come replete with lots of wonderful political supporters and press who love to lay the claim that workers will be better for representation. The benefactors are political appointees, elected officials, and union leadership. The workers are mostly pawns.
What I read about European unions would be very nice to see in the states but what I experienced, family members have experienced, is not this fantasy that some people have of what its like here.
I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG.
The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions.
Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run.
However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real.
Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off.
It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers.
The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be?
Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal.
SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies.
Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial.
Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.
As for Amazon workers, since there was so much resistance coming from Amazon on this case, the workers probably feared that Amazon would have closed shop if they chose to unionize.
I worked about a decade in industry and never felt like management was the enemy. We didn't expect management to coddle us, though. We knew we were there to do a job and if being there wasn't worth the benefit, we'd leave. Being in union, it feels like an artificial wall between management and union has been erected; that it's us versus them. Like the vice presidents are fat cats smoking cigars in their high rise offices while we, the proletariat, fight to get what's fair. Its as if union members think there's some reservoir of money we could get in salary if only we could break down the dam that management is using to hoard all the money.
I'm in a right to work state and technically don't have to pay union dues. But, I pay my dues because if you don't, your name gets published publicly and there is a lot union members can legally do to make life difficult for you if you don't want to join the club.
> HN is very consistently anti-union.
I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.
It is absolutely a cancer of the place. Granted, I think that probably in a lot of places that have unions they can easily become a scapegoat to all of the organization's problems, but some of the ones that I deal with on a daily basis are really hard to pin on anything else.
In an idealized world, there would be infinite competition both on the demand and supply side of labor. The argument for unions, at least, is that in the real world the balance tips in favor of the demand side, and I'm sure in many organizations this makes a ton of sense. But at a place like a small learning organization where I work at, it just ensures that nothing ever happens. You have a fantastic faculty member that you want to compensate above and beyond market rate because they deserve it? Union will make that an issue. You want to fire a severe under-performer? Union will make that an issue. You are a non-union manager who has energy and wants to improve things? This sort of stuff will destroy your morale. Over time, the really good people who want to be recognized for their work individually leave, the people who care and want to actively promote change ALSO leave, and what you are left with is an assorted collection of folks going through the motions and heavily invested in not rocking the boat out in any direction. It sucks.
One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation.
Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin.
Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.
You are a member of HN. Please just elide such generalizations.
The value compromising was great for short term growth but here's where we are now.
I've long thought the Samuel Gompers strategy was the right approach to coalition building. I've really started to question it probably just this week.
The short term gains are substantial but it bites back hard
I mean look at all these comments. Most people want the political power dynamics of syndicalism. But our compromised manifestations soured their dreams
Yes, there are people here that have had bad experiences with American unions, many of which do suck for a variety of reasons, but their stories confirm a prevailing narrative not create it.
People like to shit all over Margaret Thatcher and her policies but they forget that it was the actions of the unions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) under a Labour government that got her elected in the first place.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
EDIT: $500/year, apparently
Edit to add source https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/early-vote-counts-sho...
Is that actually accurate? Last I read, that number came from an Amazon propaganda website created to persuade voters away from unionizing.
> Amazon... created a website for employees that tells them they’ll have to pay $500 in union dues a month, taking away money that could go to dinners and school supplies. https://apnews.com/article/what-to-know-amazon-union-vote-ex...
> She said she felt insulted by some of Amazon’s anti-union efforts, particularly the company’s statements to the staff that they would be required to pay nearly $500 in union dues every year. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/business/amazon-union-bes...
Actual site just says $500, leaving the interval up to interpretation https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jMRHfH...
In all serious, the political theater espoused on these people has eroded their critical thinking, and this will come back to haunt us when there comes a time for serious leadership in the face of a changing climate, and all we have at the helm are grifters protected by their blind sheep majorities.
People aren't dumb. Assuming you know better for people is.
Maybe your critical thinking is eroded if you refuse to try to understand why people would vote against a union. I'm not saying you have to agree with their decision, but it's ridiculous to assume everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
Are you an Amazon employee at Bessemer? I'm pretty sure any employee there is more qualified to make a decision about their own lives than you.
Bessemer voted about 5:1 in favor of Biden in the 2020 election.
https://www.sos.alabama.gov/sites/default/files/election-dat...
* https://www.unionfacts.com/union/Retail,_Wholesale,_and_Depa...
There's a separate point about 'unionfacts.com' with a bunch of anti-union stories on their website clearly being a propaganda op.
1. Basic info (including membership, which has significantly fallen in recent years) -- https://www.unionfacts.com/union/Retail,_Wholesale,_and_Depa... 2. Leaders and salaries (they seem to be well-paid) -- https://www.unionfacts.com/union/Retail,_Wholesale,_and_Depa... 3. Crime and corruption (are they more/less corrupt than an average union?) -- https://www.unionfacts.com/union/Retail,_Wholesale,_and_Depa...
... And so on.
If the data is incorrect, then there's reason to object to linking to the website. Is the data incorrect?
Is there a "pro-union" website that provides/aggregates the same data?
I'm not an expert on this matter, but if a website smells like a propaganda op, I start wondering about data selection, spin and other forms of bias.
So you found some stats... great! (I can't see them, tabs don't load, I think you had a particular union in context somehow) How would I put that in context, is it possible that they're highlighting the worst things they can find, and spinning them as hard as they can, in the service of 'union facts'? Why do they have a 'crime & corruption' tab for every single union, is there a dollar figure? What went into that aggregate dollar fiture?
Where's the positive side, like 'new union contract increases pay' or whatever? It sounds like the only stats provided have a negative spin based on title alone.
I did notice that they helpfully linked to this website as well: http://aftfacts.com/ -- check out that homepage while you're at it :)