The Teamsters announce coordinated nationwide project to unionize Amazon
vice.com
vice.com
> Instead the Teamsters plan to focus on a series of pressure campaigns involving work stoppages, petitions, and other collective action to push Amazon to recognize a union and bargain over working conditions.
This is good. Even in the "good old days", labor in the U.S. won a rather Pyrrhic victory in that organizing became shoehorned in a narrow legal framework with narrow goals. It makes the decline of union power same rather inevitable.
This "going back to the roots", along with the tightening of the labor market we've seen lately, has the promise to attack that problem head-on rather than wishing it away.
Even with that, teachers and police officers are terribly underpaid and also mistreated by the California government.
Unions might be the answer. However, the US has a closed shop system where a few unions have a monopoly on labor relations.
As a result, the existing national unions have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re not interested in improving working conditions for their members.
It always comes down to this. And you can argue endlessly about the various failings of modern organized labor. But ultimately it's all we've got. The capitalists have demonstrated for centuries over and over again that left unchecked they will always take capitalism to a level of borderline subsistence for the working class to maximize profits. Your boss is not looking out for you; ever.
To have an organization with funding and influence that has at least professed to defend your rights gives a more realistic chance of having your voice heard, no matter how slight.
Because that's the impression I get from the other comments that you're responding here; That they have negligible impact on member welfare, but introduce a pile of corruption and bureaucracy into the mix.
That is some -really- strong hyperbole, especially against teacher and police unions as the parent is referring to.
I would argue that the benefits teachers get and the relative job security of police offices is a good indicator of a strong labor union for both roles.
Sure, pay sucks, but teachers would probably be treated worse than amazon workers at this point if they didn't have them.
Source: worked for ed tech startup that supported teachers. Also dated a few.
That I frequently hear how public school teachers are unable to do anything about literal abuse and such does give them credence though.
You should be better off ignoring comments from people you do not know, with unknown agendas, and without sources.
Amazon is well known for astroturfing and creating "fake" profiles: https://boingboing.net/2021/03/30/twitter-bans-fake-amazon-w...
That does not mean that your fellow commenters are Amazon infiltrates or the like, but they can just be repeating misinformation from Amazon anti-union campaigns.
Any sufficiently entrenched bureaucracy is indistinguishable from corruption.
With apologies ...
Everyone rags on unions. But you know, I have great healthcare at a fair price, salary is good, protection from management fads like stack ranking, etc. The only real downside IMO is the focus on seniority.
The big argument is usually that unions breed mediocrity and incompetence. My staff and colleagues are good at what they do and deliver. I regularly work with contract and consulting companies… they don’t consistently outperform our folks.
My sister works at a big tech company. Her negative experiences with idiots, bad managers, etc are pretty similar, and consistent with my past Fortune 50 experiences. Big orgs always have that.
I think unions make sense in circumstances where a company has a monopoly granted by the government... For example Boeing. Boeing has completed a regulatory capture that makes it nearly impossible to launch competing airline building companies.
Unions do not make sense where they do not have a counterparty to negotiate against... Basically there should be no unions for government employees because politicians generally already are willing to do the will of the workers over that of the best interests of the citizens. Unions also do not make sense in highly competitive spaces where if a company underpays or mistreats its employees, those employees can just switch jobs immediately.
https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...
Going off-tangent: collective bargaining for teachers is also correlated with decreased lifetime earnings for males:
If you fire a cop for a reason that the cops don't like, their political connections will come breathing down your neck.
For some weird reason I "can't quite put my finger on", it's almost as if cop unions are uniquely different from other unions.
Perhaps reading into why Union Federations never take in cop unions will help.
If your high school has a tenure system, it's not a teacher issue, it's a systemic issues.
Cop unions are incredibly special. The thing about cop unions is that they're the same everywhere, there is no city where cops are fired adequately for cause. There are plenty of cities where teachers can get fired.
There is no profession with the same universal tolerance for abuse anywhere as cops. The reason has to do with their function as cops, not their labour union.
Cops everywhere in North America have the issue of being unfireable despite literally committing crimes.
Electricians don't have this issue.
Both of them are highly unionized.
So clearly the common denominator isn't unions. Even before their mass unionization cops were able to get away with far too much and they get away with far more than any other profession, unionized or otherwise.
When parents can take their kids out of public schools more easily, the teachers’ unions lose power.
Is union is doing wonders for the officers and teachers the actual workers ? Making sure their rights and preferences are catered to ? Then the union is doing it's bloody job.
If you are an employee at big co that is abusive or exploitative earning minimum wage then the government has already abandoned you . Should you then see the wider societal implications and scarifice your needs for greater good or actually say fuck that and unionize and try improve your quality of life and not have to pee in a bottle during work,(Amazon) or catch COVID-19 and die cause your company doesnt care (meat packing)?
Even if it is bad for the economy/society unions still have been good for the actual workers as a group. We still have lot of work related deaths, long term issues and basic hygiene requirements missing, you absolutely need unions.
The competition is not with low paying jobs in cheaper areas of US or cheaper countries like mexico or china. It is with automation and robots, you can't compete with that. Without strong worker representation employees of unskilled workforces like Amazon are going to face worsening conditions in the future as they are made to compete with automation
I have those things (well not “protection from stack ranking” but my employer doesn’t do it) without the focus on seniority. A union is not requisite nor sufficient for those things.
https://californiapolicycenter.org/evaluating-public-safety-...
The one thing I have (besides a job I absolutely enjoy doing), is job security and stability, and that is thanks to my union. It sure would be nice to have a higher salary, but someone has to be willing to pay for it, and nobody wants to do that. Instead, public employees get things that only indirectly cost money, or that don't have to be paid off until sometime in the distant future when the politicians and union bigwigs who agreed to all this stuff are no longer around.
The average police salary is $104k in California [0], 35% above the national average. In 2018 at least.
And then the pension is 50% after twenty years or service or 90% after 33 years [1], in LA at least.
This is one of the best jobs in the country, pay wise. So it’s unusual to hear someone say that police officers are underpaid.
[0] https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/police-officer/salary... [1] https://www.lafpp.com/post/tier-5-pension-plan-information
Successfully representing their members would go a long way to helping earn it back.
Generally though the Pinkerton's beating on union guys or the union guys dealing with scrabs resembles a gang war more than a "literal war"
I assume they were mentioning the regular use of the National Guard against strikers, like in the Ludlow Massacre.
That's the quaint history book narrative we like to think about in relation to the labor struggles of the 19th/20th century in the US. But the reality is that men, women and children were mowed down with machine guns and sniper fire. It was a struggle for life and death between two classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
That seems more like "literal war" than a gang turf war.
This is hardly surprising; the first priority of any institution is to perpetuate its own existence, so far from being at war with capitalism, unions are locked in a symbiotic embrace with it.
They may sing along to the Internationale but the lyrics are the Wealth of Nations.
1. That particular workforce is making above-market wages for their area. They looked at what a union might be able to deliver and decided they didn't want to rock the boat.
2. Any single location voting for union representation knows that there's a good chance management will just shutdown the whole operation. Like Wal-Mart did. Amazon could easily jettison a "troublesome" warehouse and continue doing business. Game-theoretically, it would benefit them as a message to other locations that might be flirting with organizing.
I'm not sure what coercion you're seeing in their new strategy.
I think you would have to ask employees what they want, union or not, and figure out if a union is the right way to achieve that.
A lot of the people the Union convinced ended up being swapped out with newbies who had only been exposed to anti-union propaganda and hadn't seen what the job really had to offer yet.
There's always a contingent of people who are afraid that the center will close if they vote to unionize and will lose their jobs (even though it's technically illegal).
Asking the most precarious to make the first bold move doesn't feel right.
> "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."
They will use their size and wealth to destroy competition like diapers.com and carve our a monopoly, presumably so they can sell worse quality crap at a higher price.
Why is it scandalous if Teamsters have a "dues motive" that mirrors (probably not even as strongly) Amazon's "profit motive" if this is the stream of wealth they're tapping? Are unions only moral if run by ascetic monks?
It has been quite a number of next quarters and if it is really hot garbage wouldn't people ditch Amazon? Amazon is not exactly a new entrant to the market.
> They will use their size and wealth to destroy competition like diapers.com and carve our a monopoly, presumably so they can sell worse quality crap at a higher price.
You can't have a monopoly on diapers. If diapers.com fold it would be because people don't want to know 300 websites to buy individual goods than it is Amazon. Oh, and maybe they're more expensive, not less.
One factor in the fate of on organizing is that much of the agenda was codified into law. The 40 hour week, overtime, workers comp, etc. Not that these haven't been substantially eroded...
If they pull this off it will be remarkable. The president of the Teamsters is an accomplishment free 80 year old product of institutional nepotism that's been warming the chair for almost a quarter century.
I'm not holding my breath.
> One factor in the fate of on organizing is that much of the agenda was codified into law.
Right so now that workers don't have much real power, it is nice we have the legal remnants of power in the past. But given what I am saying, this should be seen as a Faustian bargain: it's not worth sacrificing power now (via legalization-ossification), to have some remnant influence later. Moreoever, having complex erodable things enshrined in a law doesn't work well as a "rachet".
The most important thing is to sustain power and sustain politicization --- don't let the red scare take all your best organizers in the 1940s-1950s interested in the real goal of workplace democracy! And if you do go for laws, make them really simple things (40 hour workweek is better than NLRB recognition, but still too complex. Maybe UBI would be the best).
Union power is a function of the demand for labor. You can rah-rah all day long, but when the demand for labor is low unions have little influence. If you want empowered workers seek to increase demand for labor. If the policies necessary to achieve that are abhorrent to you; impeding offshoring, limiting immigration, reducing regulatory burden, etc. then understand that it is you that defangs unions.
As for the "real goal" workers seek prosperity which includes minimizing hours and maximizing income, benefits, safety and other quality of life factors. If your goal is "workplace democracy" or some other abstraction no one will listen. Perhaps you think they should, and you may be plausibly correct, but they wont.
The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The only reason private sector unions declined in membership is that the industries they exploited saw their US-based operations contract, or disappear altogether.
Meanwhile, the public sector unions have steadily grown in power, and steadily increased their control over public policy, by successfully pushing for successively more left-wing governments:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
And the result has been detrimental to the efficiency of public spending, whether you look at education:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
Or policing:
https://academic.oup.com/jleo/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jl...
Or any other public sector.
It created a bargaining entity that the owner was forced to deal with because the alternative was closure.
EDIT: Frankly, if a union is relying on its legal recognition and backing for survival, it's already a zombie, dead-man-walking structure that is just going to fall apart in the long run. Unions must maintain solidarity and collective action and a healthy internal democracy and vibrant participation, or they'll just become a bureaucratic husk. Like most of the North American labour movement.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...
(HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524637)
Instead the Teamsters plan to focus on a series of pressure campaigns involving work stoppages, petitions, and other collective action to push Amazon to recognize a union and bargain over working conditions.
Faced with workers who don't want to join a union and laws which protect them, the Teamsters plan a series of coercive measures which will force workers into a union whether they want it or not.
Personally I think that unions should be open to membership regardless of whether the company has a majority of the people there that want to be part of a union, and that companies should never be able to deny employees the right to unionize.
The only time there's a vote is when they want to force all the other workers to join the same union.
On the one hand Amazon and its bad labor relations and squeezing the last drop out of everyone and discarding ones who have no juice left. Looking the other way on fraud in their marketplace. Copycatting brands and underselling them with inferior copies (the camera bag[1] for example but many others).
On the other hand, organized labor and its infamous corruption, bullying, and drive to have everyone do as little as possible (sorry, it's 5:01 and the contract prohibits me from turning that screw, I'll be back Monday morning to do that for you) totally undermining progress, improvement and development.
It's hard to pick sides on this one. Both are quite bad and unlikable.
Over squeezing labor leads to pushback.
The Teamsters wants to force this issue in the political arena because they can't win votes.
[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/bessemer-alabama-...
I cannot possibly imagine what more organizing could have accomplished.
The Democratic party often confuses activism and media presence with organizing, and focuses on get-out-the-vote and media strategy without having done the work of organizing strongly-tied networks on the ground. The Obama campaign was the exception, because Obama had worked as an on-the-ground organizer.
Also, the RWDSU is not affiliated with the Teamsters. This is a different (and much better-resourced) union looking to step up and do the work better.
Honest question. If you're paid hourly and have job security, what's wrong with saying that? Pros don't work for free, right?
Union members get "ratted out" by others if they go "above and beyond". There is no flexibility.
That's fair. The "I only sweep floors, if you want mopping it's another department" type of union inflexibility is terrible for productivity. But I think your scenario is an example of inflexibility that's completely warranted.
The next day I was in his office when we got a nice visit from the Teamsters steward flanked literally by two huge guys glaring at us. The steward told us not to do it again. He did back off when we told him we walked the computers between the buildings - if we would have drove them between buildings he said they would have filed a union grievance.
Other comments have already explored how America has a "union monopoly" system for lack of a better term: where unions exist, the labor pool that is non-union is often extinguished.
> what's wrong with saying that?
If the alleged screw is flooding your home and you're on the phone with a contractor who says "it'll be Monday morning", it's safe to assume that the contractor feels safe because there's no competition out there that will come out to finish the job due to the union monopoly or other rules/regulations that the unions have established to make them the only turn screwers.
Unions in the United States gained a bad rap from things like this, and I think that's what the OP's intent was with their comment.
Free market would dictate you say back: "double pay" or hire another contractor.
Overtime pay is a thing everywhere including union jobs.
I'm based in Europe and i get overtime pay if I'm forced to work late/weekends. One of the nice things of unions everywhere.
If i dont want to or cant work late, there are colleagues that will jump at 150% pay rate.
Companies can hire contractors at any point but these expect much higher wages to deal with the almost no protections and doing their own taxes.
Otherwise employer could hire a second shift as they do with manufacturing and pay normal wage there.
There is no such thing as union certificate or things of the sort. Union is there just to negotiate basic contract applied company wide and make sure you are not abused.
Working in software.
And even if they did, if it only takes 30 seconds and no extra effort... why can't the person asking do it or get someone else?
Also, if you need to leave on the hour to make other commitments why should boss be able to force you to stay without compensation? (bus schedule, pick up children and spend time with them, pick up spouse, go to concerts, meet friends etc)
Taking it to the extreme is what you already see in shops and warehouses, etc, where they need to stay, unpaid, for a couple of hours to secure things and clean up...
From what I've heard of US unions (never been in one myself) they're quite strict about not allowing this kind of thing. Certain tasks can only be performed by particular union employees. I suppose they consider it a slippery slope. But again, it's also possible that in the story we're discussing the union member just didn't like this person enough to do them a favor.
An honest question - whose progress? Whose development? Do workers benefit by turning that screw at 5:01?
There are many companies where laborers do benefit by having the freedom to work outside the box to benefit their careers, learn, take pride and ownership in a long-term project, foster their own creativity, and in aggregate lift the local community. I’d fully understand your point in such circumstances, and agree that certain unions work against those less-tangible benefits for their members, at times in excess.
But Amazon specifically has designed itself to destroy alignment between warehouse workers and company goals. Promotion from the warehouse floor is actively discouraged (this is well documented), turnover is expected and encouraged well beyond industry norms, tasks are rote and automatically fed, no project is long enough to foster ownership, no operating procedure or penny of local profit not controlled by corporate from afar. Does this sound like an a situation where labor and company interests are at all aligned?
Amazon will not change this status quo at the behest of any single individual at any level; it sees no strategic value in empowering any such individual. Organizing is the natural consequence of such a situation.
Yes these sort of tropes are being brought out repeatedly, is there any evidence they actually exist? Let's talk teachers union who people like to criticise a lot. There's still plenty of excellent teachers around who go above and beyond for their students (and if you are invested in what you're doing teaching is definitely not a 9-5 job). So they are not prevented by their union from doing that?
I think this is all from the expectation of employees to go above and beyond for their employers. Just do this 10min extra unpaid work because it really needs to be done... On the other hand, no company or contractor will do that, they will charge you handsomely.
I've worked in union shops where I wasn't union, and I was warned to ensure nobody is watching when I plug in my test equipment for the embedded system I was working on. In a different location for the same company the union guys were cool and would pretend not to see me do that (same union, just different workplace culture in different cities).
Companies provide service to society. They don't exist in a vacuum. Hence it'd be good if workers are aware of the big picture and don't just stubbornly antagonize their own employers, as if they're in a battle against one another, rather than in cooperation.
In Japan when Fukushima blew out, old employees where there to contain the disaster. Do you think they did it for their personal benefit? How far would we go as a society if we're complete egoists? Not that far.
And yet publicly traded companies are legally bound to maximize the profit for the stock holders.
Do we need shoes or screwdrivers delivered next day? Doubt it. But that's only one aspect. These innovations allow for other things to be possible (grocery delivery, time sensitive deliveries, lowered costs, due to efficiencies, innovations in alternative delivery methods, etc.)
Staff up, and pay staff appropriately.
Are you under the impression that running a power plant day to day is a glamorous job? Funny.
Alternative view: "I have a life outside work, now I am free to enjoy that life as a normal human being."
It is devastating to me to see people thinking that to go home and take care of yourself and your loved ones is "undermining progress, improvement and development".
Your family and friends are important, your company is going to fire you just to make share price go up before the end of the quarter. Even if firing you is hurting "progress, improvement and development" of the company in the long term.
My hunch is that corruption, bullying, etc don't go away. Organizations don't stop doing those things unless they lose their power.
On the other hand, if a company like Amazon is treating workers poorly, then a competitive environment should fix that in the long run. E.g. if Amazon overworks its people while other companies don't, either Amazon has to pay more and more if its working conditions are worse and worse (relative to peers), or it'll have to improve working conditions to keep its workers.
That’s good to know.
There is some truth to what you're saying though: unions exist where there is a struggle between labor and private ownership. The existence of them in a "socialist" mode of production (barring some kind of syndicalist setup in which economic governance happens specifically through unions) seems superfluous and suggests that private ownership had not been abolished but was relegated to the state/bureaucracy instead of wealthy holders of capital.
IMHO you're making a judgment about what other people want, but those people's actions suggest otherwise. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on its workers, and those workers are free to work at other places: a different company's warehouse, a non-warehouse job, etc. They are choosing to stay at Amazon for some reason, so it seems like the bundle of Amazon's work intensity and its wages & benefits is worth it to a lot of people.
As an analogy, if Google hypothetically paid $200k to engineers for 40-hour weeks while Amazon paid $400k to engineers for 70-hour weeks, then there would be engineers that prefer one and engineers that prefer the other. But these engineers are not forced to work at either of those companies. In this scenario, an engineer at Amazon might complain about 70-hour weeks and poor work-life balance, but if they're working there then they find those negative conditions worth the compensation.
I grew up (middle-class) in Alabama, in a smaller town than Bessemer; I have known people in these situations. Warehouse workers there are paid $15/hr, double the minimum wage. That warehouse employs thousands of people. Folks stay in these jobs because, if they left, they would drop (far) below the Federal poverty line. There aren't enough $15/hr jobs elsewhere to go around. So, enduring the hard working conditions is a very different choice for these workers vs. someone making $400,000/year in an engineering role.
Everyone has a right to make this call for themselves, but there are limits.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that Amazon has a monopoly on online retail: If prices are low and wages are high, what is the problem?
But having those protections in place is important, because an employer may start taking advantage of it - slippery slope argument, but bear with me.
A common example - not just in the US but on my side of the pond as well - is closing time. There's a lot of people that get paid until closing time (e.g. 9PM in the DIY store I worked at as a part-time job during my college days), but, nobody goes home until the last people are out and the day's take is put in the (time locked) safe (and there'll be a security guy waiting outside to make sure it's safe, then he'll drive around back to make sure everybody's out and safe). If all goes smoothly, that's 20 minutes of unpaid overtime - but it can be more.
That's just one example, but I'm sure it's relatable to a lot of people. Think kitchen staff who work until close, but have to clean up and prepare for the next day outside of their normal working hours.
TL;DR: Don't work for free, your employer is not your friend, your time is worth more to you than his and his business is.
If you're getting paid for 9-5 with no overtime, why should you put in unpaid effort if you don't want to?, if you want to, all on you.
Rephrasing would be: what would happen if your boss asked you to work a few more hours overtime unpaid?
You are entitled to your time. If you're set to work til 5, then your employer should pay you a minute's overtime if they need you to turn that screw.
Why would you volunteer for someone else's money-making venture?
I'm not sure if it's good or not, but if the Teamsters can't do it, I don't think anyone can unionize Amazon.
If I were Amazon, I'd be shaking in my boots at the moment.
Or are you saying that the Teamsters bureaucracy in particular is bloated relative to what their organization needs? I'm not familiar with them.
I just want to clarify that we don't know if he was specifically gunned down. He was declared dead years after he went missing. The exact circumstances of his presumed death aren't known, but it's generally believed to be the mob that did it.
To be fair I want an app like that for democracy in general.
* Unions could definitely use better software, but I don't think software can replace their core functionality.
* Many companies whose main product is a seemingly simple mobile app require surprisingly large staffs.
* Are unions actually bloated? The Teamsters for example had 616 regular staff and spending of $209 million in 2019, over a membership of 1.3 million workers. That seems reasonable to me. https://www.unionfacts.com/union/Teamsters (anti-union but nonetheless useful site)
* Unions do lots of things besides electing representatives, voting on issues, and coordinating actions, all of which are big jobs in themselves. This may include contract negotiation, job training, research, organizing, and other things I can't think of right now.
* To focus specifically on organizing for a moment, a union is a coordination problem which takes a lot of work to overcome. Quoting myself from another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24079465): > The labor organizer's job is to convince the worker, who likely and often rightly fears for her job if she actively and publicly supports the union, that it's still the right thing to do. Not only convince intellectually, but psychologically prepare the worker to stick with the union effort in the face of a concerted effort from the employer to defeat it. To do that the organizer needs to ask the right questions, listen carefully, build trust, and finally push, and potentially do this repeatedly with the same person. It is psychologically demanding and not everyone can do it; I tried and I couldn't. A chatbot cannot convince a factory worker with kids to feed that he needs to stick up for his coworkers who in turn will stick up for him.
It's unlikely they would be able to due it on their own.
But still, I can see why their presence or the mere possibility of their presence is beneficial even to me. Even after Amazon employees failed to unionized their wage increased and I'm sure that management got the message.
In Québec, Canada, a journal infiltrated an Amazon warehouse by getting hired there. They run the place like that would make any Chinese sweatshop look liberating. They use AI and surveillance to systematically fire a fraction of their workforce every year and watch them constantly. They run the place the like a bad cyberpunk dystopia novel. They even go as far as to penalize employees who go to the bathroom. Work accidents are common. They make workers rights look like an afterthought.
Amazon's effect on society has become too nefarious for what it provides. I'd rather pay 5$ more per item or shipments on average knowing that the people who are responsible for delivering my goods are treated with a minimum of humanity.
They CAN pull off what they're proposing, the problem right now is that the employees are (were?) kept too afraid of losing their job, and kept too replaceable. There's no shortage of employees in the US, people willing to work for a pittance because there's nothing else for them, because they're desperate, they're one paycheck away from bankruptcy. And they're reminded constantly that there's a dozen people waiting in line to take their job if they have the audacity to try and improve their conditions.
71% for right to work laws
> Those in favor of right-to-work or open shop laws say that no American should be required to join any private organization, like a labor union, against his will. Do you agree or disagree with this?
82% agree
Gallop America poll https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
Well the unions lost in Bessemer not because they were "thwarted" but because Amazon was offering really solid employment and benefits relative to the local labor market there and unionization could have led Amazon to divest from that labor market entirely. The employees in Bessemer understood that they had a good thing going that wasn't going to be improved by unionization.
But this national thing isn't even a vote, it's just straight intimidation and extortion trying to get Amazon to "voluntarily" give in.
Yes? That's what labor organizing is supposed to be. Fighting dirty with monopsony power that should never have arisen in the first place, because that's the only option.
Without existing skin in the game at Amazon, this just seems much closer to actual extortion.
I'm sure they have some plan get enough skin in the game to actually inspire and have credibility. Maybe allow their organizers to work at amazon in "tours of duty" despite it being a non-union job.
Either way, I don't really care. p-packing implies we are measuring phenomina that is stable / replicated. But that is decidedly not the point of even local campaigns: the goal would be to convince people and change hearts and minds.
Never was the purpose to learn the true opinions of the early 20th century lower class American worker and all the learned helplessness our exploitative system has wrought.
In more mathematical terms, not only does this "measuring" change then nature of the thing being measured, but the state space / phase space is decidedly not ergodic.
Let the robots come in and do this labor, but that doesn't excuse society's responsibility to take care of its humans.
Society should take care of its humans, but this doesn't mean go into private companies and demand all the box movers get their pay tripled. It doesn't work this way.
Perfect! Isn't that the point? Automation to make our lives easier? More automation will lead to commoditization of robots, instead of the current commoditization and dehumanization of humans.
Again your mindset shows you want to use automation as a threat against humanity to keep human cattle in line, and not as a force for good.
>It doesn't work this way.
Why not? Right now society is failing to take care of a large number of humans in order to maintain status quos that greatly enrich the few.
> Again your mindset shows you want to use automation as a threat against humanity to keep human cattle in line, and not as a force for good.
Look, you're trying very hard to put me in some narrative that solely exists in your head, not mine.
Automation is not a "threat". It's happening, but it needs a push. And unions are here to provide that push. You think that millions of unemployable workers is somehow less "dehumanizing" than having a job that matches their skillset. Bizarre.
Regarding the Star Wars categories of what's a force for evil and what's a force for good, I'll stay out of that, because those are stories for children. Economics is about incentives and alignment of interests.
Again, you are positioning automation as a threat, and portraying unions as a bad thing, which will push people out of jobs, they will then become homeless, starve and die. That's the best society can offer?
>You think that millions of unemployable workers is somehow less "dehumanizing" than having a job that matches their skillset. Bizarre.
You've already dehumanized these workers and written them off as having no other skillset potential. You cannot think of an economy that could work without suppressing automation and grinding people's lives away with manual labor?
>Regarding the Star Wars categories of what's a force for evil and what's a force for good, I'll stay out of that, because those are stories for children.
No, you've made your feelings clear that "unions are a force for evil" and threats of automation are needed to nip that in the bud. We should incentivize automation, and look into ways to invest in improving the human experience, instead of writing people off as being incapable of achieving greater things.
>Economics is about incentives and alignment of interests.
This is so basic, it has practically no application in reality. You need to define what is being incentivized and who's interests are being catered to in the actual economy. Right now dehumanizing behavior and externalizing costs onto society is heavily incentivized, and I would strongly dispute there is an alignment of interests occurring.
The teamsters may seek to unionize the hourly workers and not the salaried developers. It's not unusual for very large manufacturers to have multiple unions (e.g. pipe fitters, electricians, clerical workers...). I'm sure the teamsters would Leo to be the only union for 100% of Amazon's workforce but I imagine they have tactical focus.
America has changed so much and labor is so mobile now that unionization will not make a dent.
It would make sense when you were working at the same company, in the same town for 20 years.
But all that has changed. We now change jobs every few years. Or even take time off, or work remotely. We change cities all the time. Mobility and choice is where it's at now.
Unions make sense for careers like police and old-style factories.
Besides, everyone knows that all the unions -- except the police unions no longer have any teeth.
I'm sort of tired of people living in some kind of alternate reality to think that an initiative like this could really work.
(I'm by no means anti-union. I'm just a realist.)
Old-time Charlie will be paying the same 1-1.5% that you are to the union but getting a lot more from it.
I think your anecdata around (presumably) tech labor is pretty wildly irrelevant for Amazon warehouse workers.
And why is that? I don't know but I doubt it is because they're "warehouse nomads". If Amazon warehouse offered stable jobs with good wages and benefits I doubt the turnover would look the way it does.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
500,000 new members paying $50 a month in union dues is no joke and they want a piece of that pie — or realistically the entire $100M+ pie itself.
Free market capitalism is alive and well, except in this case it will be in the form of the Teamsters vs The RWDSU on who can offer the most organized power at the best price.
Regardless of how you feel about unions or Amazon, there’s something fascinating going on here at so many levels.
Go Teamsters. Hardest punching union in the nation. I've never been in one, but I've worked with them, managed them. This country needs more unions.
The Biden administration, I understand, wishes the return of card-check.
I mean on both sides, too. The Pinkerton thugs get all the press, and are rightly condemned, but for coverage of the union men beating their non-union colleagues to death with clubs, blinding a man with thrown stones, I refer you to coverage such as McLure's Magazine article The Right To Work (1903) which gave its name to the type of law: http://moses.law.umn.edu/darrow/documents/Right%20to%20work....
I like the distinction that it draws at the beginning, too:
"PUBLIC opinion seems to be coming around to the view that the trades' union is here to stay. From many unexpected quarters we hear every now and then a more generous acknowledgment that the organization of labor is not only as inevitable as the combination of capital, but a good thing in itself. At the same time, and from the same fair minds, you hear expressions of passionate indignation at the abuse of power by unions. This means that public opinion is beginning to distinguish between unionism and the sins of unionists, as it is between organized capital and the sins of capitalists."
All we have to contend with today, here, are the vengeful downvotes.
So now it comes down to who is the doing the bigger evil: unions allegedly hampering free market capitalism, or Amazon allegedly exploiting workers.
This is not how labor market monopsony is usually defined, but I say that's simply a sign of us setting the bar too low. Fixing this would require at least one
- employers with N employees to take on employees with average N jobs
- big unions for big corps
- Everything becomes co-ops
- Full socialism
You tell me what sounds the most practical.
I can do this too: Amazon is feudalism to their employees, demanding totalitarian fealty in exchange for insulin.
They even ban membership in professional organizations by their employees in a rapt, paranoid, control fantasy.
Amazon even has cameras in some their homes, steals their wifi, and receives much their internet traffic.
Whatever bright spots appear in the economy, they are immediately targeted by rent-seeking union movements for exploitation.