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Comment by sergefaguet | Hacker News Reader

An extremely efficient and competent corporation doing everything it can to deliver goods cheaper and faster to hundreds of millions of people while creating value for tens of millions of shareholders? And now it has more and more impact running social services too?

How dare they do this travesty without democratic oversight. Clearly the best way forward is to regulate them so that they are on a level playing field with other democratically overseen government services.

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How dare workers ask to not be treated like shit! /s

You do know Amazon has been caught union busting right? I'm not so sure what your definition of democracy is when workers can't voice their concerns.

Interesting. I must have missed the point when unions became about voicing concerns. Last I recall, creating unions is an attempt at monopolizing labor to extort the employer. When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”

How surprising that employers who pay above-market wages do not wish to be extorted further. All the modern propaganda says they have to welcome this benevolent expression of democratic freedoms!

> creating unions is an attempt at monopolizing labor to extort the employer. When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”

Wow, I’m not even gonna comment on this first paragraph. I only have one question: do you live in the US?

> How surprising that employers who pay above-market wages do not wish to be extorted further.

Employers in our current system always pay their employees less than what they produce for them, it’s called profit.

Are you really claiming that tech workers extort Silicon Valley companies because they get paid a lot of money? Wow I didn’t expect that argument.

> Last I recall, creating unions is an attempt at monopolizing labor to extort the employer. When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”

This seems like an argument in bad faith but I'll bite.

You are ignoring the pre-existing power imbalance between employer and employee, where the employer holds authoritarian control of production and the lives of employees. Cartels and market manipulation are mechanisms used by those with existing autocratic power to grow and strengthen their control over production and people, while unions try to balance this power by giving workers a seat at the table. I think it's pretty obvious that they are not the same thing

I’m not ignoring this.

You are making the moral assumption that just because someone has a better negotiating position in a situation there is a moral obligation to intervene in some centralized way to “correct the imbalance.”

I am denying your assumption and presenting a different point of view which has no less of a claim to morality or truth than yours.

I never made a moral assumption in my response. I was just stating that the unions and cartels are not very similar for a reason that you admitted exisists in you response

in your original comment you said:

> When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”

My comment was simply explaining the reason why this is the case

Sounds just like the East India Company.

What happens when the largest employer in the company town shuts the warehouse or whatever town?

I guess the town shuts down, right?

No, it goes back to square one. Amazon is not literally building these towns. These towns have been there before. Then Amazon came, and made job market better. If it leaves, it won’t be worse off than it was on the first place.

Why is that a bad thing? People are smart. They’ll figure something out just like humans have done for centuries.

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