Amazon reaches agreement with trade unions in Italy | Hacker News Reader

Amazon reaches agreement with trade unions in Italy

reuters.com

39 pointsriffraff52 comments

Italian here.

Don't get your hopes up, Italy is a very peculiar place, there are 11.5 million workers that are members of one of the tree major trade unions, not counting smaller ones, it's half of the total work force.

Nothing moves in Italy without an agreement with trade unions when a company the size of Amazon starts hiring en masse.

That's both good and bad, but generally more good than bad.

Italian as well.

I'm generally pro-union and I see nothing wrong with this deal. Our particular implementation of unions though is dreadful and disgusting. Full of politicians or wannabe politicians, they'll gladly defend the indefensible to raise their membership numbers. They are for all practical purposes political parties, not unions, and they regularly come out with nonsensical takes about everything.

It's good most of the workforce is unionized, but I have nothing but contempt for how they're run.

that is what always happens to unions and why I oppose them. They eventually corrupt because they are a political process, especially whrn in bed with regulators (look at Biden subcidies for tech only if unionized vs Tesla).

The same logic applies for business lobbying regulators, they corrupt and capture.

We need free markets, devoid of any political intervention. Individuals voluntarily coming to emergent consensus is the way towards fair and uncorruptable futures.

I agree that letting the market do its job would be the optimal solution, but this is unfortunately unrealistic. In most job markets there are information asymmetries so large that the market is effectively "nonfree" to begin with (free markets don't naturally emerge, you need at least some regulation for them to flourish).

In a utopian future where workers can freely reject bad working conditions, I agree, they would be unnecessary. For the time being, they are a necessary evil.

I once said half-jokingly that if they ever founded a union where membership is conditional on a whiteboard interview I'd join in a heartbeat. You need to keep out the politicized idiots who join a union not because of the union itself, but because they want to LARP as communists or whatever.

I have seen what free markets do to weekends, vacations, employee illness, and barging power, no thanks.

Want to see free markets in action?

Talk to the Asian or South American folks at the end of an offshoring sweet shop.

I bet plenty can jump in here, with their "barging power".

11,5 million people are members of the major trade unions, but roughly half of them are not workers anymore, they are retired

That's what the right wants people to believe.

The far right has been very active to support this claim, web sites like primatonazionale keep pushing false information about it, in reality age wise only 46% of the members are 50 or older, age of retirement is at least 62 years in Italy, so statistically a vast majority of the members is still working.

It is true that many retired people keep supporting the trade unions, but trade unions work for retired people too and their rights as former workers. My mom, for example, had free legal assistance by the unions to obtain a compensation for an occupational disease that made her partially disabled. If she had to fight alone she wouldn't have obtained it and it would have costed us a fortune.

Please stop spreading disinformation.

There is also another problem with Italian trade unions. The workers who are unionised are generally privileged compared to the general population. Meanwhile many disadvantaged workers - who are employed with short-term contracts[1] or very often without contract[2], (which is wide spread even though that is technically illegal) are not unionised.

At the same time you will see categories of privileged workers such as Alitalia pilots or hospital doctors where the vast majority of workers are unionised.

So Italian unions are halfway between what unions are really supposed to be, and a nation-wide country club.

At least, this was the situation 10 years ago when I left the country. From what I hear, it doesn't seem this has changed.

[1] these are known in Italy as "precari" i.e. people who are in a precarious position.

[2] illegal labour is very common especially in central and southern regions, it is known in Italy as "lavoro nero" - nero is the colour black in Italian but in this case it actually means "submerged".

> Meanwhile many disadvantaged workers - who are employed with short-term contracts[1] (or very often without contract[2], which is wide spread even though that is technically illegal) are not unionised.

Not to defend Italian unions, that have their fault, but:

Of course workers working illegally are not unionized, that doesn't mean they have no protection at all.

Italy is well known for having a subsidy for everything, including unoccupied people, who earn money from the State and from their illegal job.

Anyway, short-term workers are protected by unions, I know for sure at least CGIL has a department devolved to temporary workers or people working part time or on a short-term contract.

In Italy even cab drivers have their own unions! (plural!)

> Anyway, short-term workers are protected by unions, I know for sure at least CGIL has a department devolved to temporary workers

But they are generally less likely to unionise i.e. the percentage of temporary workers who are union members is lower compared to long term contract workers.

I’m not saying this is necessarily the union’s fault, and of course I agree with you that it would be nearly impossible for illegal workers to unionise, however the fact remains that unions don’t generally represent the most disadvantaged groups.

I have to say though that the Amazon deal is a sign that things are changing. The unions that I remember would have strongly opposed the possibility of Amazon entering the Italian market, let alone making a deal with them.

Many peoplet that are unlikely to unionized aren't even aware of their work rights per law, the basic stuff they aren't actually obliged to do, but they do it anyway thanks to their lack of knowledge, and fear to lose their job.

Surprized to see the Amazon flag fluttering beside the EU and Italy flags in the photo. Many countries require the National Flag to be given special respect, and must be flown above other flags.

I'm surprised to see the Amazon flag in the first place. Gives a corporate-state vibe, rather than an "e-commerce warehouse" vibe.

It matches the official Italian protocol for flag display. Nothing wrong.

When both the Italian and EU flags are displayed, the protocol requires them to be flown at the same height, "as equals". Many places also fly a third flag, representing city colors, regional flag, university emblem, etc.

For example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Palazzo_...

(the yellow/red flag in the corner is the flag of the city of Rome)

Many countries require other flags to be at the same height and size as the national flag, some specifying placement of the national flag in relation to others.

Most people don't care

Various countries left this kind of nationalism behind after WW2.

In Germany they are in full throttle marketing campaign how cool it is to work for them.

The anti-Union attemps over here made no friends.

It is all over the place, TV ads, subway, bus stops...

We've had a similar media blitz in the UK, luckily we dealt with most our unions in the 80s.

Despite getting an email from Amazon about twice a week i could never see myself working there.

Not sure if those people in Manchester felt lucky.

why luckily?

Because they had an amazing crack at trashing the country and needed to be put down.

3 day work week, rolling black outs, propping up of old dead industries.

Not to mention all the dead companies they striked in to the ground. Bloody criminals the lot of them.

Put down. Interesting choice of phrase.

Interesting that my phrasing is the only thing you seem to have issue with.

I assume you agree with my general analysis of the unions effect on Britain?

Why interesting? I simply decided to call you out for calling for the murder of union members.

It was before I was born and I don’t have much of an opinion. I do have a very strong opinion that nobody should advocate the murdering of union members, though.

None of the 11 definitions offered by google mention the murder of people, maybe your confused?

The closest answer is the 3rd:

put down

phrasal verb of put

3) suppress a rebellion, coup, or riot by force. "the security forces put down a coup attempt in the capital"

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=put_down&oldid=6...

4th definition: (euphemistic) To euthanize (an animal).

I'd say it's not out of question that this could be applied to people as well.

Yes, what people need to understand about the history of British unions is that they effectively shut down the entire country repeatedly to try and force the Government to keep coal mining which wasn't viable anymore going. That's basically intolerable in a democracy. Thatcher's breaking of the unions only happened after previous governments who thought the unions could be negotiated with were brought down by their inability to deal with the damage being done. (There's also some impressive double-think on the British left around this and global warming, since of course dealing with that means that coal mining and use has to go away.)

Unfortunately even left wing folks in the UK remember that the coal unions shut down the country regularly in the 70s. I’m not from here, but I know a very left wing crowd and the older ones remember how they would dine in candlelight during the big coal strikes. Tatcher was a reaction to this.

I'll be honest i didn't expect this forum of all places to be so pro-union.

I understand why some people need collective bargaining to raise their position in the workplace but i thought this forum was full of talented professionals.

There are plenty of talented professionals over 40 who wish they had union protections.

Not in civilised countries.

What!

Being a talented professional and being pro-union is not mutually exclusive. Unions can (and oftentimes do) serve as a counter to employers leverage, while admittedly reducing workplace flexibility. Unions have achieved worker-rights that are now taken for granted, keeping these will need entities working towards that

The right wing have been sending troops and tanks and other kinds of hired thugs out to keep miners in their place and force them to accept pay and work conditions that were often illegal for a long time. Generally with the benefit of hindsight, the miners were in the right.

So its probably ahistorical to suggest that Margaret Thatcher, only attacked the unions because they went too far. Maybe she just wanted to keep the money for herself and her political connections rather than pay the people risking their lives to mine it a fair wage.

Imagine this would lead to make working at Amazon Warehouse a better place, with more rights for the workers.

It will be fascinating to see how this plays back in the US.

I don’t think something similar will happen in the US. Here (I’m Italian) workers are highly protected, and this is positive in some ways but also negative because a lot of industries don’t want to invest in the country because “if someday we will be not profitable in Italy, will be very hard to close and dismiss our workers”.

It’s pretty hard balancing this two point of view.

Hello fellow italian citizen :D

It's not uncommon for avowedly anti-union employers to have union contracts outside the US. When Walmart owned the British supermarket ASDA, for example, the GMB union was recognised. Companies seem quite adept at keeping their adaptations to local rules tightly firewalled.

Except for the 'platforms' like Uber, JustEatTakeAway, Deliveroo et al.

Of course they make sure to get away with whatever they can get away with. "Why shouldn't they"

But they are also being targeted by italian authorities right now, so their ability to escape is very time constrained, they're just a new concept which wasn't legislated about so far, but regulations might be slow, but at a certain point they will get to it

https://www.reuters.com/article/italy-just-eat-workers-idUSL...

They think they can, until they don't.

https://www.expatica.com/nl/uncategorized/uber-loses-dutch-c...

If I am not mistaken, this is still open to appeal.

It might be, that doesn't change the fact that they can't just ignore local laws.

Of course. Take Sweden as a (admittedly extreme) example. There is very little regulation of the labor market, for example no minimum wage. All those things are agreed upon in negotiations between unions and employer organizations.

But unions set the rules for the labor market as a whole, not just workplaces where the workforce had unionized.

An Amazon warehouse with zero union employees would still have to have union conditions/pay for all employees. It wouldn’t be possible to not do it. And it’s not possible as an individual employee to negotiate a contract with worse terms (the equivalent of taking work under a minimum wage level).

So in Sweden there is no recognizing unions. It’s like recognizing labor laws. Not optional.

I don't expect any effects of this in the US. After all, Amazon had these agreements, treating workers as retail employees, in France for years.

One of the birth places of unions during the industrial revolution has turned into anti-union, so I don't expect much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

I think it is still quite up to date regarding work conditions in some places.

I can only imagine it will be completely ignored by just about everyone, sadly.

can't read the article because of some useless Dell ad

It must be real challenging to browse the web without an adblocker.

Exhibit A : https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1435827240286109702?s=21

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