Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.
It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.
So it can have the opposite effect. The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. The last voting count was 74% against the union.
We have to wait and see what the union can "win" from Amazon.
Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly.
If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.)
Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.
Alabama lost a Toyota plant to Ontario because literacy is so poor they would need to translate their documentation into Ikea-like pictograms.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-m...
The Toyota RAV-4 decision was made back in 2005. In don’t think education has improved in Alabama since. Also, IIRC, the higher Canadian wages were partially offset by not having to provide health benefits.
I cite it as I’m somewhat familiar with it as a friend and colleague worked for a supplier pricing out a in-region facility.
SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.
Just trying to provide some detail.
>SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there,
>South Carolina has anti-union laws [...] the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there,
Anti-union bias does not fully explain the South Carolina Boeing factory rejection vote because the workers did previously have a union.
Fyi... The original South Carolina aircraft factory (formerly Vought doing subcontract work on Boeing fuselages) was unionized in 2007. Then in 2009, they voted to decertify the union as they no longer wanted IAM (International Association of Machinists) to represent them for collective bargaining. (75% voted to get rid of the union.) This happened around the time Boeing acquired the Vought factory. For various reason(s) (see below), the Vought/Boeing workers didn't feel the ~$1000/year union dues were worth the benefits the IAM union negotiated for them.
Since being being voted out, IAM has repeatedly tried to re-establish union membership at SC but multiple elections have voted against it by wide margins. The last 2017 vote was 74% against. In 2018, IAM tried a new approach of establishing a "micro" union of 175 subset of employees instead of the entire ~3000 employees. The IAM won that micro vote but the Labor Board invalidated the micro union as a collective bargaining unit.
Boeing workers' (current) anti-union stance is based on their real-world experience and not ignorance. The SC workers already know what collective bargaining benefits they had with the union. They got rid of the union anyway. Maybe someday, factors will change and Boeing workers will vote for union representation again.
> Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters?
>, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina"
No, not my calculus. The SC workers reported it. One example: The workers in South Carolina didn't like the IAM directed union strike in Washington. Excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...:
>Another sore point that affected Thursday’s vote was that many in the Charleston [South Carolina] work force were laid off last fall during the two-month IAM strike in the Puget Sound region due to the lack of production in Everett.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it certainly seemed like the situation with our PNW union sites did not boost support down here.
src https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-so...
It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.
It’s currently… 47% pro-union to 53% no-union in Alabama, with over 15% (400+ ballots) challenged by both sides. It could go either way, but “more than 10%” is not backed by any metrics.
South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.
Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".
Hold it there, sparky.
Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.
Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.
That stupid system will still be there after all of those jobs are automated away.
That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers.
To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.
So there might be a lot of, or a least enough to make a difference, overlap in the hiring pool, depending how far they relocate.
One can only hope. Collective bargaining is the most powerful tool to dismantle income inequality and corporate greed.
Now worker representatives in boards, that would be very beneficial.
It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power, and union supporters will remind you of the bad times when the employers had too much power. These days we actually see a lot more of the latter. Will we swing back and forth indefinitely? Probably.
MAYBE you could in Europe, where in 1980s there was some decline in private sector investment concurrent with lower profit rates, but that never happened here.
But that's not what we're talking about here. If I am making $8 an hour at my current job and Amazon is willing to pay me $15 an hour but the union says no, first of all we insist on $20 an hour and second of all we decide who gets those jobs and your name isn't on the list, that isn't worker rights, is it?
It's not worker rights or employer rights, it's union rights. Wise up. There's a long history here - certainly on Staten Island - about how this all plays out and where the money goes.
BTW, the way you characterise unions are interesting. Very different from how they work here in Northern Europe. I wonder if American unions really are as corrupt and screwed up as the Internet makes them sound.
I didn't elect a union. If I want to work for a company and they want to hire me, how does a union have the power to tell me I can't work for them and the company can't hire me?
I understand unions have caused problems in the past. They've caused huge problems, and have had to be scaled back. But that's exactly the balance I'm talking about. We're just swinging on the pendulum towards workers rights at this time. I'm 100% sure if more unions spring up, we'll be hearing horror stories about work stoppages and companies shutting down product lines. But we hear plenty of horror stories about companies mistreating employees right now. We're just riding the free market pendulum.
It doesn't exactly get me out of my seat to think that Amazon might have to make a little less profit, or pay their executives $50 million less next year, or hell, even that prices might rise a little, if it means the free market is actually at work. In an ideal world the pendulum would stop swinging, and we would be in the middle forever. That should theoretically be the job of our government. But I don't see that happening any time soon.
I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo.
At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change the current tribal political lines. Normally this kind of movement would be a strength of the left. But lately the right has become quite populist, so maybe this plays in their direction. Whoever figures out how to capture this massive constituency is set up for a powerful future.
Most unions form at places that are genuinely terrible workspaces where workers have legitimate reasons to hate the boss. As unions become mainstream at places like Starbucks I would expect folks agitating for worker power to less radical.
It's definitely possible in 10-20 years.
I don't think most people, including those that vote Democratic, have much of an illusion of the Democratic party as a friend of labor anymore.
Sure the Republicans actively try to dismantle all worker protections, but the Democrats mostly stand by and say well what can ya do?
The role of Democrats right now is to pretend to fight for normal people just enough to get the votes, then completely fail to do anything so the rich party donors still get what they want.
The Democrats in democrat states have enacted paid parental leave, paid sick leave, higher minimum wages, banned non compete, and many other pro labor laws. At the federal level, the Dems got ACA pushed through also, even though they barely had the numbers and still had to compromise a lot due to just having 50 or 51 Senators, meaning the 1 or 2 Democrats in name only can hold legislation hostage to their will.
It just happened again last year with the Build Back Better bill.
And it's not just because they suck at winning elections, but also because they actively welcome anti-labor candidates into their ranks and crush the more progressive primary challengers even in safe blue districts.
Not to mention that the executive branch has the power to go after labor law violators and for the most part just doesn't.
The Republicans have no problem getting their moderate members to toe the line on their more extreme stuff.
"Moderate" Republican party members would make their statements about "this isn't the way things are done' every time Trump did something crazy, but every single one folded and fell in line, every single time.
If it was the priority of the Democratic national party leadership to get real, actual big legislation done that benefited workers over companies and investors, then they would. They do everything they can to block, blacklist, and crush campaigns of progressive primary challengers. They could do that to the "moderate" members who don't want to pass any legislation at all, if passing that legislation was really a priority.
It's just obviously not something they care about, and it's obvious why.
The party is run by obscenely wealthy members and donors, just like the Republicans are.
Without 51 Senate votes, how?
I would rather not have politicians that “fall in line” for the party’s sake, and rather “fall in line” for the country’s sake.
>It's just obviously not something they care about, and it's obvious why.
>The party is run by obscenely wealthy members and donors, just like the Republicans are.
I think the fact that Democrat states exclusively have better worker protections and laws says a lot more about which party is run by who. Not to mention that federal Democrats actually propose things like universal pre K, expanding access to healthcare (note Republican states exclusively opted out of Medicaid expansion), and so on and so forth.
Also, Manchin is from one of the reddest of red states, so the Democrats don't really have any leverage on him.
Because the Republican party tends to line up with rural voters, they have a statistical advantage in both the Senate and the Electoral College; because of gerrymandering, they actually have a statistical advantage in most House races, too. (That last one is more complicated, but the short version is that when Democrats are in charge of redistricting they tend to favor putting nonpartisan committees in charge of drawing district lines, while when Republicans are in charge of redistricting they tend to favor drawing the lines themselves for partisan advantage.)
The upshot of that means that Republicans can and do win elections by appealing to their most partisan voters, but Democrats literally can't do that. Republicans can get rid of moderate Republicans and still win enough elections to maintain or even gain power; Democrats cannot get rid of moderate Democrats and get the same result.
So, actually, no, the Democrats can't "block, blacklist, and crush" campaigns of moderate members. They can do that to progressives in districts that are still swing districts, whose voters seem to be largely centrist. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but statistically speaking, when centrist Democrats run in those swing districts they win more often than progressive Democrats do. Joe Manchin is not from a swing state; he's from a state that went for Trump by 35 points in 2020. He's a fluke, and if he loses his seat, he ain't gonna be replaced by someone who votes with Democrats nearly as often as he does -- which is, IIRC, about 70% of the time. This is something else that often gets lost: the truth is that the most conservative Democrat still votes with Democrats a majority of the time, just like the most liberal Republican still votes with Republicans a majority of the time.
Maybe this balance will change; maybe it'll change sooner rather than later. But there seems to be this pervasive idea on the Left that Democrats would be able to pass all the legislation they wanted if they just had enough strength or willpower or something, and that just isn't true, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. If you only have 51 people on your side, counting the VP, and a single one of them is determined to keep the filibuster, then you're going to keep the filibuster. There is no amount of pressure you can put on that person that's meaningful, because you will need them on your side for other battles, they know it, and you know it. And if you keep the filibuster and there is no way you will peel 10 people off from the other side no matter what the bill is, you're not going to pass anything that can't get around the filibuster. Period. Full stop.
Yep. And frankly it's something of a miracle that we ever have a Democrat in the White House, and a 50-50 Senate.
Many people (myself included, sometimes) complain about how Democrats seem to suck so hard at winning elections, but the system is so heavily stacked toward Republicans, it's pretty impressive that Democrats manage to hold majorities at the federal level at all.
Turnout is abysmal in these races. I have volunteered in multiple progressive races and it is such an uphill battle to increase turnout by even a few points. Many districts are won by brand loyalty(ie. a politician has been running for decades and so he is a known figure).
The obvious counter-example to this is John McCain's vote to preserve Obamacare and sink the republication attempt to end it. Since then, despite a 2-year period where Republicans controlled house, senate and presidency under Trump, they still could not get a repeal bill passed, due largely to their moderate members.
Manchin's a senator from West Virginia, a state that went for Trump by 39 points. Crushing him would just have McConnell not bringing any legislation to a vote again.
There’s been a lot of door #3 being chosen.
Support for deregulation (of workers rights), global free trade and an alignment with the financial class has been a bipartisan effort for a long time. Democratic policy hasn't been pro-labor in a long time. At best it's labor ambivalent but they support plenty of policies that hurt (American) labor as a direct and obvious byproduct.
1) Reclassify Marijuana as a non schedule 1 drug. (Finally a bill got through the house today to get the ball rolling but Biden could have done this day 1)
2) Declare COVID a national emergency and use that criteria to extend Medicare temporary to the rest of the country. Lets see the Republicans try to repeal that and not get beaten down to nothing.
There are many more things he could have done but does not want to. I have typed up this list so many times that it is tiring because it has been discussed to death at this point. Biden's upcoming historic losses are completely his and his party's fault.
The current Republican strategy is to run on nothing and they are pulling ahead.
The war in Ukraine could slow down and reverse a lot of globalization. Supply chain issues that we've seen during the pandemic have also been particularly. Maybe we'll start making more things in America again and perhaps the Democrats will do a better job supporting working class Americans.
We are living in interesting times. I'll guess we'll see what happens.
The big tent of the Democratic Party wouldn’t exist without the regimented command & control model of the Republicans.
Personally, I think that you’ll see party platforms shift as the current cohort of old people die off and their replacements are poorer and angrier. The parties of 1920, 1960, 2000 and 2040 are and will be different things.
Unfortunately the Boomers will cling on to power until their last dying breath. (ex. Nancy Pelosi running for re-election yet again).
You think politicians will be able to do such a thing? If they just decide to print an extra 100B or so every year, combined with allowing the yearly COLA to lag behind reality, maybe the trust fund won't run out after all.
It's a raw deal for everyone in any case, but it's also a third rail issue. Give people an choice between the abstract (deficit spending is bad) and actual changes to their benefits in the negative direction, most people will choose the former.
The reality is, and has always been, that this group (call it whatever you want) of incomes in the $150K to $400K range is absolutely necessary to include in increased taxation policies to pay for all the spending.
I saw an op-ed from a conservative magazine on this exact theme: [1]. The author basically says, "if we're claiming to be the party of the working class, shouldn't we be in favor of this?"
1: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/republicans...
The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality.
(perhaps, on a more speculative note, also a reflection of the seemingly general conservative pattern of wanting to see oneself as "normal", to the point of sometimes fabricating "silent majorities" and such, even when there is overwhelming counter evidence)
I tend to agree, but then again I really don't grok the Trump thing, and I can't claim that I saw it coming or sticking around as long as it has. At this point I would not be terribly shocked to see a bit of role reversal between the two major parties.
I think this is the fundamental disconnect in left-right (economic) politics. The left, as I see it, wants some guarantee of a good outcome. The right wants liberty, recognizing that comes with risk.
unless it has to do with your education, gender identity, sexual preference, religion, voting, or women's rights, I assume
We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming over the past 30 years to allow gays to have the right to marry and openly serve in the military, just like we had to drag them kicking and screaming 60 years ago to allow minorities the right to vote, or allow mixed-race couples to marry.
No conservatives lost liberty in any of those instances. They lost their "special" status, which is what they're really worried about and why the populist rhetoric resonates so strongly with them.
Obviously many people changed their minds since then. It is perhaps notable, though, to consider that most of the people who changed their minds since then identify as Democrat, while many more Republicans continue to hold such backward, discriminatory views.
What about the CA Prop 8 against gay marriage that was widely supported by minorities? Were you "dragging, kicking and screaming" those minorities as well?
Clearly you're trying to go for a "gotcha!" type comment, but... so what? People who believed same-sex marriage should be illegal are just as wrong as people who believed interracial marriage should be illegal during much of the last century. It doesn't matter if they called themselves Democrats or Republicans or whatever. It doesn't matter if they were part of some majority or minority. They were just as wrong regardless.
Some people -- Obama included -- changed their minds, for whatever reason. Many people, sadly, still have not. It might be interesting to look at what kind of person still hasn't seen the light on this, and what political party that kind of person is overwhelmingly more likely to identify with, but that still doesn't really matter much to the rightness or wrongness of a previous belief.
My comment was more about calling out a group that doesn’t actually exist or at least has no formal definition based on OPs opinion.
You didn’t answer the question. You agree Obama was a conservative. So is he still? Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t.
> Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t.
This is not true. This is both fallacy and a lie. This is also refusal to see worls as it is, insisting on comfortable dichotomy.
Then you and I agree on the exact same point. The OP was wrong to say "We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming..."
There are no "conservatives", there are "conservative views".
These people call themselves conservative. They read what other self described conservatives write or listen to their talkshows. They alter their own views to conform to what those talkshows say.
These people hated Obama. Obama did not shared all that many views with them.
It is hard to know whether you are trolling or genuinely ignored politics and culture from wherever you got born.
So again, is Obama a conservative? If you say no, then how many conservative views must one hold to belong to the group?
> If you say no, then how many conservative views must one hold to belong to the group?
When you proclaim proudly "I am conservative" and share 70% of conservative opinions or more. Or, when you talk about liberal snowflakes. Same thing, really.
So the question is, "how much risk is acceptable?" Are we okay with the idea that getting sick can ruin your entire financial future? Are we okay with child labor? Personally I lean towards providing a social safety net, and I think most people actually want _some_ version of that as well -- but perhaps have not thought deeply about where exactly the balance is for them.
The right are proponents of right-to-work legislation that force unions to represent non-dues paying members for free, and nullifies their private contracts. That's not exactly liberty, and it minimizes risk for owners.
Those union members are perfectly free to create was is called a members only union, which only represents its own members who voluntarily join the organization.
Doing that avoids any of those conditions that you are talking about.
Then you don't understand what "bargaining rights" are. It is absolutely fully legal for a members union to negotiation on behalf of its members, if those members consent to it.
In the same what that it is fully legal for me to hire a lawyer friend of mine, to bargain on my behalf.
What it can't do, is force everyone else, who is not in the members only union, to go along with that bargained contract.
So please, do not say that their bargaining rights are taken away. Instead be honest and say that their ability to force everyone else to have their bargaining rights taken away, and given to the union, against the wishes of those employees, is being removed from them.
Unless you're suggesting someone in this position should have to retrain for a different industry. Which, sure, ok, I guess, but the cost to do so might be quite high to the point of being life-ruining.
And then workers who prefer the union, can join members only unions that are not forced to represent people not in them.
Well, I am talking to you here though right? And there is context here, to this subthread that you are ignoring/missing.
If you want to say "Non union members cannot force 3rd parties to work with them, if they don't want to" Then yes I agree.
But the context of this subthread was about the idea of who is or is not forcing people to do things.
So, to get back to the point of all of this, I was initially responding to someone else who tried to claim "That's not exactly liberty".
But it is liberty. Liberty is the idea of consenting parties, not being forced to do things. So yes it is liberty to say that people can join non-members unions, but that those non-members unions cannot force other people to do certain things.
Do you understand the point and context of this all? It was about whether that is "liberty" or not, which just means who is or is not forcing others to be in the group, or forcing people to work with your group.
I think it's more that the left believes government has a responsibility to guarantee equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome in what is assumed to be a fundamentally inequitable system. The big philosophical difference to me is in what each side believes the proper role of government should be. The right (tending to be the side that supports the military, police, harsh criminal penalties, etc.) believes government's only legitimate purpose is enforcing the laws and defending the borders, in other words the exercise of violence, whereas the left also believes the government has a duty to provide for the social welfare of its citizens in exchange for the power granted to it by social contract.
And when the right says it wants liberty, what it tends to mean is that it wants liberty from the social obligations that the left tend to want government to support.
I think you're close here, but I don't think that's the root of it. That difference in position is important, but it comes from even deeper philosophical differences. I think this boils down to the argument over positive vs negative rights (freedom to vs freedom from).
A worldview built on negative rights has to have a much smaller legitimate role for the government than one built on positive rights. In the former, the government can never make anything better, only potentially rectifying wrongs (usually via punishing the offender). Within that framework, the goal of the government becomes to rectify the worst of the wrongs while disturbing things as little as possible. A worldview built on positive rights inherently leaves a bigger space for the government to behave legitimately, because this worldview sees the government as having a role in making things better.
Of course, there are very few people who adhere 100% to either of these, so reality is a bit more complicated.
People who support police when police breaks laws are not pro-enforcing laws. People who make it increasingly hard to prosecute and investigate cop when those are suspect of breaking law are not pro-enforcing laws. People who make it legal for police to use escalating aggression are not pro law enforcement either.
These people are pro state violence people. Simple as that. Whether it is happening in Russia, America or elsewhere.
There is a section of the left-right spectrum that believes in equality of opportunity, but that it’s certainly not the leftmost people in that spectrum. The left pole is not “equality of opportunity for all” and how far left you are is defined by how strongly you believe in that.
I think it’s more the middle of the spectrum who hold the view and the left extreme is much closer to equality of outcome.
But for catastrophe prevention... you don't have to think the government will care as much about your family as you do to want there to be a support system in for your family if you die, become unable to work, etc...
And "liberty" alone is so undefined as to be meaningless for these purposes. Is "paying less taxes so that the disabled don't have as much help" an example of liberty? For you? For them?
Right. It's weird to me to see so many people framing it in the ensures-good-outcome sense.
A "safety net" is literally a thing that catches you when you fall. That's it. It doesn't push you higher in general; it just helps you avoid the lowest of the low.
But, you know what really gives people freedom and liberty? The freedom to fail without worrying about how they're going to keep a roof over their head and a meal on the table. Without worrying that they're one medical emergency away from losing everything they've worked for.
You want people creating small, lifestyle businesses? Give them a safety net and let them take that step without risking everything.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...
I'm looking for a better source still, so if you find one please post it here.
EDIT: I found this. Numbers are a bit old (2007), but it shows self-employment rate per capita on page 4, which is exactly the metric we're interested in discussing.
https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2...
So, based on those two sources, your assertion seems straight up incorrect.
[0] https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/0512...
Who tend to leave for countries where it's easier to run a business and where they don't have to pay for the safety nets, but that's besides the point.
As for freedoms, I don't know. Not that much of a difference between US, UK and Germany from what I can tell.
More generally though, relying on outliers for your argument is perhaps not the best approach.
Venture capital? An awful lot of the venture capital comes from foreign investors.
Monolingual? The global business world runs on English.
Outliers? When it's all of them, the idea it is a coincidence starts getting pretty unlikely.
I'm not convinced that this is the case. Like, the US market is cheaper to operate in relative to other markets the same size (e.g. the EU) because you have an over-arching system of laws, contracts and (most importantly) language.
If your theory is correct, then one would expect the US to remain the largest source of profitable companies globally. If my theory is correct, one might expect China/India to take it's place. Come back in 20 years, I guess?
> Venture capital? An awful lot of the venture capital comes from foreign investors.
Can you point to some sources on this. A quick Google didn't reveal much information, and I really would like to know. Modulo Softbank, I suspect that it's mostly US based institutions giving VC's their money.
> Monolingual? The global business world runs on English.
All of the big companies you mentioned sell to consumers, not businesses, so the global language of business is kinda irrelevant. My point was that the US is a relatively integrated, large market with one language. Most startups begin in their home company. While a startup from Greece would likely have to hire more people to scale across the EU (20+ languages), the equivalent US based startup can scale happily without worrying about languages for a much longer period.
> Outliers? When it's all of them, the idea it is a coincidence starts getting pretty unlikely.
FAANG are 100% outliers, I don't see how you can believe otherwise.
However, Europe has produced SAP (uggghhhh), Spotify, and a bunch of second-tier fintechs (but given the regulatory advantages of the EU in this space, I suspect one of them will conquer the world).
No, but I've heard it many times. I've also seen plenty of talk about the trade deficit not being a deficit at all, as the balance is foreign investment in the US, which is not counted.
> so the global language of business is kinda irrelevant
Attend a trade show. They're in English, even in foreign countries. Every single one I've attended.
The bottom line is, which companies do you invest in?
Just guns?
This doesn’t track. No politician from either side wants to limit themselves out of a job.
It's a naieve mindset to think it's all or nothing.
It's a sliding scale between security and freedom. Every bit of security you want means giving up a corresponding freedom.
Also, most people do not include "freedom to harm others" when they're talking about freedom. I've never heard of anyone carrying a sign saying "FREEDOM" and meaning they want to be free to hurt others.
With "free" government health care, you're not only paying more for it, but you no longer get to choose what health care you get. You get what a government bureaucrat says you get.
I've never made the claim that privatized health care is more efficient. I have claimed that free market health care is more efficient. If you've got evidence that government health care is more efficient, let alone overwhelming evidence, I'd like to see it.
From what I've seen from high school economics, they can laugh at me all they want. But they don't know anything as they are taught by high school teachers who don't have any training in economics and have never held a private sector job or run a business.
Here's a reference for you with plenty of evidence that contradicts your claims. Read it and get back to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
BTW, you made one of my points for me. You just said that having the government force a plan on you is better than you picking your own plan. You gave up your freedom for security. Exactly what I was talking about.
You're making several basic mistakes thinking about freedom, because once again you're not even familiar with basic knowledge of the topic. In particular:
- Confusing the quality and quantity of choices. Free healthcare increases freedom because it increases overall quality of choices people can make - if you'd even encountered the concept of the capability approach to human welfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach) you wouldn't have made this basic mistake.
- You're conflating capitalism with freedom, when in fact capitalism is built on top of property law, a very anti-freedom system. Property is the biggest government program their is, and is enforced with violent anti-freedom, liberty-destroying government force.
In other words, you're so ideological you're not even wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).
BTW, the Soviet Union didn't allow people to own property, and had free healthcare. People were so free there they had to build a wall around it and shoot people who tried to escape. Ditto for every other communist country.
And where do those freedom-loving people want to go? The US. So many, in fact, that the US had to build a wall to keep them out.
What do all those people know that you missed?
Or, in other words, to have the freedom to self-actualize, you must have security in your basic needs.
Some safety net without the negatives would be nice. But where will the money come from?
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/04/08/us-workers-a...
In my new home. I have better access to medical care, the outdoors are better funded, voting is simple and easy.
Both parties want control over the populace. The idea one party is advocating for more “liberty” is a reductive way of viewing politics
Also, golden handcuff means enough money so that you don't want to leave. I don't think such high govermental support exists all that often.
Why did the republicans bail out the banks then?
The right wants you to think you should be responsible but the guys at the top will happily give and take govt money.
Always? No. But certainly since the 1970s.
So based on recent voting patterns, I vote Democrat.
It’s not obvious. Take a corporate tax loophole, is that spending and or a form of economic control? Foreign ownership of US companies compounds this, is it giving money to foreigners or good economic policy etc.
Tax policy you disagree with isn't a loophole.
A loophole is using a thing (a loophole) for something it is not supposed to be used for but is advantageous (entry).
In fact, you could better call this exact tax policy being discussed as a backdoor for rich people in the tax code.
This is an oxymoron.
While yes, it is true that a "loophole" is something that is unintended but allows some subset of people to benefit, when it comes to "tax loophole", that has colloquially come to mean "any means by which a special interest group gets to avoid taxes". "Tax loopholes" can be intentionally added to the tax code, even if "loophole" implies something unintentional.
Remember that English is a living language, and meanings change to suit how people use words, not how the dictionary may have once defined them.
You're wrong. You just have been using the term wrong and listening to people who do as well. Loopholes are unintentional. The things you are referring to are intentionally placed in the tax code for people to take advantage of.
Do you consider the solar credit a tax loophole for people with solar?
>Remember that English is a living language, and meanings change to suit how people use words, not how the dictionary may have once defined them.
Great but this doesn't apply to "loophole". You're just wrong and doubling down.
>tax loophole
>A provision in the laws governing taxation that allows people to reduce their taxes. The term has the connotation of an unintentional omission or obscurity in the law that allows the reduction of tax liability to a point below that intended by the framers of the law.
The classic double Irish with a Dutch sandwich was emergent behavior based on how US, EU, Irish, and Dutch tax codes all intertwined.
But nevertheless the original point stands - the state may be handing out advantages but it is not a form of spending. Not taking stuff is different to handing something out even if in some models they have equivalent effects.
Often things are written so exactly one company benefits when they agree to build something like a sports stadium in exchange for zero property taxes for N years. If that subsidy isn’t large large enough they may also hand out cash.
A subsidy is a payment to the person.
If a farmer lost money one year, the tax break does not financially benefit him.
Money I have left over from paying taxes is not a "subsidy".
“subsidy is a benefit given to an individual, business, or institution, usually by the government. It can be direct (such as cash payments) or indirect (such as tax breaks). The subsidy is typically given to remove some type of burden, and it is often considered to be in the overall interest of the public, given to promote a social good or an economic policy.” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subsidy.asp
“A subsidy is an incentive given by the government to individuals or businesses in the form of cash, grants, or tax breaks that improve the supply of certain goods and services.” https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...
That’s literally the first two definitions from searching DDG, here’s Wikipedia.
“A subsidy or government incentive is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector (business, or individual) generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy.[1] Although commonly extended from the government, the term subsidy can relate to any type of support – for example from NGOs or as implicit subsidies. Subsidies come in various forms including: direct (cash grants, interest-free loans) and indirect (tax breaks, insurance, low-interest loans, accelerated depreciation, rent rebates).[2][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
A more common example is to pay nothing and also get a rebait to avoid paying taxes in the future.
The $1400 stimulus payment was not a tax break nor was it income.
Some nonrefundable tax tax credits cap at zero or the AMT for that year.
Other nonrefundable tax tax credits can get rolled over into future years, so people with actual incomes can still pay zero in some years. Aka they go to zero and roll over savings to next year.
However refundable credits mean an actual check even in years you paid zero taxes: American opportunity tax credit, Earned income tax credit, Child tax credit, Premium tax credit. Aka they go to zero then send you a check.
It not that common for people to get a check for the full amount, but it does happen.
I find this a funny criticism considered when Trump won a big swath of non-college graduates (presumably blue collar workers) he was ridiculed for having the “dumb” vote.
He said he loves the “poorly educated”, he never said “dumb”, you did, which I think says more about you than Trump.
You introduced "dumb" as a euphemism for poorly educated. You did that in this discussion. The poster than quotes directly Trump saying he loves the poorly educated, and then you presumably feign being upset at the use of the word "dumb" that you introduced.
That speaks volumes about you.
And regardless, clearly Bilal_io was accusing Trump of something negative or why else share that clip? He literally sad "Trump was ridiculed" and shared that clip. So he agrees Trump was ridiculed for loving the "uneducated vote", which was entirely my point.
You either missed that or are intentionally trying to gaslight me.
Then please share the quote from a legit source (and not joe schmo on the internet).
And again, it's not clear if you know what you wrote. Bila_io didn't accuse Trump of something negative. You again said:
> Trump won a big swath of non-college graduates (presumably blue collar workers) he was ridiculed for having the “dumb” vote.
You specifically introduced Trump being ridiculed. Do you again not see that you introduced this concept to the discussion and yet are accusing the other person of doing it? You both wrote "dumb" and the concept of "ridicule" and are assigning responsibility to both of those to the person who responded to you. You introduced both of those in the context of Trump.
Google it, plenty of articles with headlines like this “Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication," often believe Bible is literal word of God”
https://www.salon.com/2022/03/23/new-research-on-voters-they...
Or maybe "Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally" which includes "Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces...
Happy to provide another dozen similar articles if you’d like.
I introduced nothing. I quoted articles (like the above). Sure you can be pedantic and nitpick over “cognitive sophistication” or "low-information" or "ignorant", but you know exactly what they meant - "dumb".
And what did Bila_io say? "No, he was ridiculed for [loving] the dumb vote, because he said so." I would read that as agreement that he was ridiculed for loving the "dumb" vote, the only argument being made was that Trump agreed they were "dumb" (which the clip doesn't support in the least).
And if Bila_io wasn’t accusing Trump of something negative, what was the point of the reply? Just sharing a random clip for fun?
But they don't really mean it and have never meant it. The Republican party, at least in modern history, has never been pro working class in any real sense. The opposite in fact, probably far more hostile to working class than Democrats.
Much of the "pro working class" rhetoric is largely just conservative values like abortion or region. Maybe a better way to phrase it is "pro rural white conservative working class values".
Of course, it is more likely for the Republican Party to talk like it's moving into that territory, but not actually do anything. But, for example, Trump's emphasis on "America over trade" is something that could actually help workers.
No one in this subthread is talking about the millions of Republican voters out there. The people being talked about is the much smaller group of people who set Republican policy. And we don't need to read their minds; we can look at their policy platform and directly witness what they support.
A typical conservative would say something like: what do you call the boss of a small window cleaning firm? Is he a capitalist or a member of the working class? The left generally ignore questions like this because they can't answer them. But they do spend lots of time trying to tell everyone that society is simple and "conservatives" are one big blob that all hate "workers".
Generally conservatives are anti-union, because historically unions have been very tied up with communism, very aggressive/violent and very anti-competitive, all of which are antithetical to what libertarian conservatives believe yield the most socially beneficial outcomes. That is, they're anti union because they think unions are in fact worse for the "working classes" - to the extent such a concept makes sense at all - than not having them.
Republicans hate social programs like welfare because it's so much easier to prey up on John Q Factory Worker when John is paycheck-to-paycheck and terrified of losing his job.
Ditto for universal health insurance. With medical bills are the top cause of personal bankruptcy, tying a basic human need/right to employment is just yet another way they get to hold a workforce in fear.
there will lots of change and crisis until things balance out
>Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.
Was there a large ground swell of popular conservative outlets against this?
I’ve been in a union and workers rights often aren’t the priority.
This assumption that you've smuggled in begs the entire question
There's a reason people living in small standardized modular pods in extremely dense skyscrapers is a staple of cyberpunk dystopias.
To go on a bit of a tangent, this is what bugs me so much about the housing conversation. People take fragments of thoughts and stitch them together into belief systems that are trivially incoherent. I'd be happy to live and let live if these people didn't also vote....
Most cities have a downtown core, and even some high-density housing in that downtown core, but so little of it that you can walk the whole thing in a few minutes.
Only higher wages make it possible to have taller apartments in some idealized frictionless capitalist system!
(In the real world, we can and should build taller not matter what, but certainly unionization doesn't hurt with this.)
Unionization is a mixed bag. The UAW has been in the news recently for a seemingly never ending parade of union leaders being sent to jail for corruption.
It seems like people always come out of the woodwork to explain how rising wages aren’t helpful and are solution must always seem to involve paying for more things (this cases houses).
https://econofact.org/why-and-where-are-housing-prices-risin...
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/homes-for-sale-hit-...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/may-housing-starts-51623796...
Supplies are hitting record lows.
There will always be millions of temporarily vacant homes in a country the size of the US as people move in and out of homes.
Nobody is asking developers to build only "luxury condos". Where did you get that from?
He did not say that though... He commented that many got built, but withouth any indication of why. You read it as him claiming that 'someone is asking them'. I read it as a reflection on the uneven distribution of wealth (which unions can help with).
> are solution must always seem to involve paying for more things (this cases houses)
If the towns no one wanted to live in anymore were 100% occupied, that would be very bad! It would mean more people were stuck.
If the cities people want to live in were 100% occupied, that would also be very bad! It would mean there’s no such thing as a move-in ready home to terminate your search. You’d only be able to move by swapping with someone, or else everyone in the connected component of moves would need to move on the same day (some cities actually used to do that).
In general, vacancy is good for buyers and tenants; it gives them both liquidity and leverage over sellers and landlords.
Raising wages in places where housing is in high demand, but short supply, will just serve to increase home prices further. That doesn't mean we shouldn't raise wages, it just means the real problem housing-wise is the lack of supply.
About 16M units unoccupied [1].
> How many luxury condos are being built
Quite a few! New construction is almost always targeted at the high-end, which has been true throughout history. Low-end housing, outside specific government projects, tend to be the high-end housing of the past
> and sit unoccupied?
Very, very few. The idea of luxury housing being built only to sit empty for some unspecified "investment" reason has been a persistent myth that has never been backed up by data.
Another way to look at it is that if workers have more money they might be able to better compete with the bankers that are buying houses to rent them out.
Yes, and the pandemic brought a brief moment of dignity (but not safety) to the low paid service workers who make our society operate. They went from the butt of cruel jokes to “essential workers” and “heroes” overnight. It is very, very hard to force people back into undignified circumstances once they’re had even a taste of being treated like a person.
Veering into my own pet theories, I think that the social aspect of who is and is not allowed to be treated like an actual person is a highly underrated factor of unionization pushes. It often costs companies little to nothing financially to treat their employees like actual people, but it feels good to those on top of the office hierarchy to abuse and belittle those they see as their social inferiors. They ignore the risks of this behavior at their own peril.
And is precisely why Amazon fought so fiercely (and underhandedly) to derail a similar effort in Alabama around this time last year.
The more things change…
I would like to see a wave of unionization, but I’m skeptical that unions as currently structured can actually deliver for workers. In the last few decades, as private sector union membership has declined, unions have lost influence within the larger left. They find themselves as followers rather than leaders within the Democratic Party. Even a couple of decades ago lots of workers like my father in law griped about the unions not delivering benefits that justified the dues. That’s only gotten worse as unions increasingly get enmeshed in generic progressive causes the workers themselves often don’t support.
It doesn’t appear that Amazon Labor Union affiliated with one of the big national unions, which is a positive sign. If they can deliver real benefits for workers, other locations may unionize too. But they’ll have to be laser focused on benefitting Amazon Workers and resist the urge to get over their skates.
I don't think it's any coincidence that this success at Amazon comes right now. After the GFC all regulatory efforts turned to keeping financial markets solvent. That has meant unwavering support for policies that favor those with assets over those who don't.
The pandemic happened in early 2020 just as the wheels were flying off the US economy yet again. So what would have played out got masked by many other factors, including direct government transfers.
Those stimmie checks of yore are long gone, and it will be a very steep uphill battle to bring anything remotely like that back given the rip-roaring yr/yr increase in CPI and PPI now underway. Those checks are being blamed for the ongoing inflation that more than just the lunatic fringe now thinks is the start of Weimar-style hyperinflation.
So with the 2/10 year yield curve now inverted [2], it's just a matter of time before the economic chickens come home to roost once more. Will it be different this time? Will unions step in to fill the gap that government can not?
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/do-unions-still-work/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/us-bonds-treasury-yields-inv...
Also the trend in #2 consists if 3 data points. It might be an accurate interpretation, but curves before the '73, '80, '81 recessions didn't follow this pattern. We'd need an explanation for why that's the case, and what changed in the '90s. Without that we're just drawing a bullseye around 3 dots coincidentally close together.
Was there other evidence for a recession? I know that some people were saying we were "due" for one based simply on average timing, but that's no very compelling either if GDP growth had been relatively steady.
Meanwhile, this article [0] indicates that right before the pandemic got huge we weren't checking the boxes on a variety of things that would be warning signs.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/06/her...
"Wednesday's figures, suggesting resilient consumer spending and strong-than-expected housebuilding, is likely to ease fears that the US will enter recession."
While productivity increased over the past half century, inflation-adjusted hourly wages are about what they were 50 years ago (it goes up and down - they were slightly lower in 2018 than 1972, a few cents higher in 2019). All productivity gains have been hovered up by the heirs and aristocracy.
As it was in the Silicon Valley wage cartel which collapsed in 2014. So FAANG wages have been high for 8 years, which is a historic anomaly.
"group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market"
I suppose we might argue that even the FAANGs together aren't large enough to constitute the full market. Other companies compete over the workforce of FAANG-eligible workers. The long tail of such SV employers with lower employee headcount a is still probably large in the aggregate. Though even apart from no-poaching agreements I've seen it speculated that FAANGs may employ large #s of talented people somewhat unnecessarily purely to keep them out of the hands of current competitors or potential startups that could grow into competition. That's a bit too conspiratorial for me though, at least without more evidence
My first job was earning minimum wage working full-time at Safeway. After working there for about 9 months I quit because I didn't want to pay union dues to join the union. I was already only making minimum wage, it wasn't like the union was improving my salary. The required hour long lunch breaks might have been thanks to the union, but I hated having to take hour long breaks. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
Listening to that episode didn't change my thoughts much. One of the bigger problems I have with unions is that they always want to grow to gain more power/influence. If I'm paying dues I don't want 20% or whatever of those dues to go to what is essentially advertising/marketing.
My ideal union would have low fees, not try to expand into other companies, and would be optional for employees.
What you are saying is I want the union to do all the work without me being hands on on its function. Unions are useless if the workers just sit idle and wait for the representatives to do all the work.
Participation of all workers is what make a union powerful.
A lot of people who are anti-unions appear to think the union is the cause of everything bad without noticing the same things happen everywhere else as well. Keeping shitty staff around is much more a function of employers who don't track how good their staff are than anything to do with unionization.
Also, forming an opinion about unions based on one job that lasted 3 months with 10 co-workers, the majority of who were hard-workers, is appalling. That isn't anywhere near enough information. You really need to try harder.
Buy better food? I don't understand how a person can eat their food and digest it in 30 minutes.
Back then I worked in the Safeway deli. I'd often make a sandwich for myself and set it aside, walk around the counter and buy it when lunch started, and then finish eating in 15-20 minutes. And then I'd be stuck sitting around in the break room with nothing to do waiting out the remaining 40 minutes.
Sure I usually read books or watched tv on a little Archos media player. But I would have rather finished work earlier and done that in the comfort of my home.
Unions as worker-led orgs are much better; you have faith that your reps actually know your working conditions, and you often perosnally know the rep in some capacity.
This victory is because of worker-led unions.
It's a sad state of affairs when corporations are allowed to screw citizens over.
Government regulation isn't there to stifle development, it's there to PROTECT. THE. CITIZENS.
With that said, I haven’t looked at the toll situation for either of the NJ bridges in years, so maybe tolls alone would be enough to remove any alleged savings from non-union labor.
That area also has some of the longest commutes and traffic in the country. In my mind, it doesn't make much sense for time sensitive deliveries or efficiency.
Because they already have fulfillment centers in all of those places, and during the holiday season (peak) they are maxed out.
It’s time to make a point and turn the community against the agitators. They destroyed good jobs.
Time and time again this is the proven strategy.
Go watch one of those "inside the Amazon warehouse" videos on YouTube. The box/tote sorting machines are millions of dollars each, and there are probably 3 big ones and maybe 2 or 3 more small ones. The ubiquitous conveyor belts are cheap individually, but there are miles of them. The robots moving the storage shelves are not cheap, and there are hundreds of them per floor, and typically 4 floors.
Amazon's strategy for the last decade has been to make these huge capital costs to keep variable costs low. They don't just shut an FC down.
I think you’re drastically underestimating the influence of unionization.
Amazon can choose to lose a LOT of money and bear tight margins in the retail business (as they do already). And they can just move the equipment, they don't have to lose them.
I think the reason Amazon might just not do it is there is a lot of scrutiny and discourse against Amazon is politically favorable, that they would embellish their brand as "evil" even further - whether it be real or not.
For a big, high speed 'shoe'[0] sorter, you're talking about a machine more than 100m long that is heavily, heavily bolted into the cement floor. I believe that particular building has four such sorters.
[0] Not a sorter of shoes for your feet, but a sorter that uses little boxes called 'shoes' to carefully knock packages off at the right place.
In 2022, the only time I tend to see a union do anything, it’s to disrupt and create mob like holds on things (shipping, trucking etc). There seems to be waaay more corruption in anything union related than without.
Can someone seriously explain why this is needed or a good thing? Who actually wins in Amazons case outside of corrupt, power hungry union leaders who get to create roles for themselves?
How is this to do with unions and not just lack of labor supply, i.e. lack of people with a right to work in Australia who also want to be a truck driver in the middle of nowhere.
Amazon may pay well for now, but let's be honest, Amazon is a monopolistic project. What happens when there's less competition than there is right now? Do you think wages stay where they're at without some kind of pressure?
A union is the only ways employees can have any real power in the workplace. Democratically run unions give employees real negotiating power over what it means to go to work day to day. Unions are not perfect but what group of humans ever is?
I'd take a union job over a non-union job any day of the week.
I've been part of a few and this has never been the case in my experience.
I genuinely see this as bad for online retail.
Nothing about her job changed when she left the union.
I have no issues with unions, provided the employees have the choice to belong. But there’s the rub many (most?) states require membership (and dues) if there’s a union. And that’s never sat right with me.
Did your wife also try to skip paying taxes? Do you have "no problems with taxes as long as they're not mandatory"?
Right to work states exist for this reason, and they do fine. Unions in a right to work state are not mandatory.
15$/hr ~ 30k$/year - That doesn't sound like a lot to be honest.
These aren’t highly skilled jobs. They come with healthcare and leave benefits. That’s game changing. Yet people seem enraged… I just don’t get it.
* Those workers should not earn more, a union would make them earn more, therefore they should not unionize
Or that
* The union would not make those workers earn more, therefore they should not unionize
?
$20 minimum wage would be more keeping in line with historic buying power.
This is just sad. Just a hair over 50% of the eligible voters voted; weirdly, approximately the same voter turnout for US elections historically. Does half of any given population just not care enough to vote for something?
Long answer probably involves value systems and what individuals are actually doing on that day…
I work in politics and it drives me nuts the self reinforcing idea that your vote doesn't matter.
Combined with false equivalences and inflexibility to see a larger viewpoint (that no one will get 100% 1:1 policy representation) just lets older people who consistently vote run away with it.
There is also entrenched structural problems as a result of R control, especially state & county level. That is also a part of low turnout.
Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business.
But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it means retaining worker more easily. If the company is not wise enough to do it by itself, still it doesn't means that it cannot be a net positive for the company itself.
The whole idea of treating humans as leaking, opexed, robots will need to be fixed, but it can be done and it can bring benefits.
Deeply rooted in complicated history of labor in the US from what I understand.
Here in Eastern Europe labor unions were at a certain point the source of political power, both for the establishment under socialism, and for the opposition movements before/after the iron curtain dropped. So, here banning or fighting against unions is unthinkable - they are considered a “good” thing.
It’s hard to think about this labor/business tension when you realize that all thought on this subject is constantly being monitored, lobbied and influenced.
Why would the workers insist on this? Most workers want their company to succeed, just not succeed because of exploiting people.
The empirical evidence we have shows that unions consistently make these choices. There is a huge duplication of labor and responsibilities in construction unions, the trades, etc. The workers are trying to get the company to pay more money to labor, sometimes that means more increasing the pay per hour, sometimes that means increasing the total number of hours worked. I am pretty strongly in favor of germany style labor unions, sectoral barganing and labor codetermination. The caselaw and regulations around unionization in the US are bad and often lead to poor outcomes for workers and management.
You're making it seem like companies are too dumb to know what's best for them.
I'm in favor of unions but that there's no doubt they can be detrimental to companies and to some of the workers, who maybe prefer more risk and higher rewards.
He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations.
Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all, everyone, companies included, have less reason to combat unions.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experience with both and can gauge the accuracy.
I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany.
I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension).
It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand.
The union system is the U.S. is completely broken. I think unions in the U.S. should be both more widespread but much less powerful.
Do a search on governmentjobs.com for a job title you're familiar with and decide whether the unions have been successful at bleeding the government dry via high salaries. My anecdotal experience: you need to get to one level below Chief where I work to draw a salary close to a FAANG programmer, union pay tops out at 150k.
You mean how shareholders and boardmembers are happy to completely dismantle perfectly functioning companies for a short term stock gain? I would argue workers generally have much more skin in the game than shareholders. Hardly any large shareholder is going to loose their livelihood if a company goes down, workers do.
one employee = one share = one vote.
no absentee owners.
On a micro level, traditional US unions have huge pension funds that they have won from employers and promised to existing members, and so they can be very restrictive on membership qualifications.
Typically, you don't really get unions with dues unless they've managed to get a contract with a wage increase that covers the dues.
This means the cost, to the company, of using union labor is even higher, but also that more of the union’s money and energy is spent dealing with healthcare as opposed to ensuring safe workspaces or wage sharing or PTO or other labor concessions.
Many of the union-busting activities American companies casually do would be flat out illegal in th EU.
This is interesting. I'm a government employee with a union, a pension, health insurance, the whole deal. The union does not control the pension or healthcare in any way whatsoever.
The governmental entity that I'm employed by, my employer, controls both, subject to collective bargaining to some extent. That is, my contract says I can join the pension, that I pay X% into the pension, that I can also join a 401k-style program if I wish, I'd pay Y% in that case. But it doesn't say anything about the operation of the pension or offer any real control. Same with my healthcare - it needs to meet certain criteria (e.g., premiums will be so many dollars for single coverage, employer must pay X% of actuarial value, etc.)
So, who are these unions who actually have union-run pensions and healthcare plans?
But even if your union doesn't directly control your healthcare plan, I would still assume it was part of the collective bargaining?
And yeah, pensions, healthcare are all part of collective bargaining. Do you control the healthcare plan where you work? I assume it's part of negotiating the terms of your employment, so you could always ask for a really good one.
Some other countries have nationally managed pension funds. All the U.S. has is Social Security, a minimalist safety-net pension, and it's a heavy political lift just to maintain that, so I don't see things changing here.
Also, don't unions literally sit on the board of corporations in countries like Germany? The notion that U.S. unions have too much power just seems like a typically American spin on the efficacy of unions--a bias veiled as a criticism. There's a host of reasons unions aren't more prevalent in the U.S., and they feed back onto each other, but if you had to boil them all down, IMO it's because our culture is rather hostile to unions, and it's always been that way. Even at their peak popularity in early- and mid-20th century, mainstream unions (as opposed to the infamous Wobblies, which never had significant membership) were remarkably conservative as compared to their counterparts in Europe, reflecting the general culture.
Hence, they cannot easily use management of the pension fund (they don't manage it) against the employer, as the OP claims.
European (dutch specifically) Unions have soft power. The only real control they have is declaring a strike. Everything else is bargaining for better terms of employment. The underlying trick is that entire sectors (willingly) have collective terms of employment.
So-called closed shops haven't been legal in the U.S. for 75 years, and union shops for over 35 years. What you're probably thinking of are compulsory agency fees, which admittedly have escalated to as much as 1/3 to 2/3 of full union dues. Full union dues are typically 1%-3% of wages. (According to the Teamsters website, full monthly dues are 2.5 times hourly wages, which IIUC is 1.5%, assuming 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year.)
But the Netherlands have mandatory Works Councils for any company with 50 or more employees, and the company is required to pay all the expenses, including legal and litigation expenses of the councils. So it's functionally the same thing, except the cost is hidden from the employee.
Granted, the relationship between management and workers is much less hostile in Europe, so transactional costs are presumably substantially less. I wouldn't be surprised (but can't find numbers) if Works Councils budgets or comparable budgets for equivalent union representation are much less in Europe. But I also imagine the wage premium that union power in general provides European workers, whether workers are in a union or not, is substantially greater than in the U.S., so overall "costs" (i.e. surplus value shifting) incurred by corporations would be greater.
Because management has always been so hostile to unions in the U.S., unions certainly have had to fight harder, and there's consequently more friction and acrimony. But it doesn't seem particularly fair to place that blame only on unions. IMO, management is much more culpable in that regard, but from a third-party observers' perspective one could easily simply chalk it up to American culture (and especially business and work culture) in general.
As for costs I believe works councils don't have mandated budgets just some general 'reasonable to do the job' law. I actually should find out what budget my works council has. Though I expect it would be high, both because of salary negotiations, and just because the company wants a strong works council.
But it does happen, especially with dental and similar plans.
Skilled trade unions. IBEW (electrical) has union-run pensions and healthcare, I’m not familiar enough with pipefitters or steelworkers but I’d guess their unions do too.
Pretty much all teachers unions negotiate healthcare and pensions, I think. That is, what plans you have access to, the contributions you need to make for them, and the dept. of ed.'s contribution and eligibility rules. The union and the state dept. of ed negotiate together.
"Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?".
Very counterintuitive thinking.
The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.
1. https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
Reading the article really reinforced how Denmark (most Scandinavian nations, actually) has a strong worker-first culture. I agree with you in that I don't ever see this scenario playing out in the US, for various reasons.
I strongly believe in unions, but I agree with OP that keeping them small and focused is better for both the interests of the company and the employees. Extreme power imbalances are seldom (and I'd dare say never) good. I've seen unions effectively bankrupt business during tough times. I've also seen what unchecked corporate power can do. The right mixture of regulation and collective bargaining is a good thing, but like always, too much of a good thing can quickly turn bad. As an example, you can end up overprotecting unproductive or counter productive employees, reducing bonuses and pay for the other hard working employees because of reduced profitability.
Please be specific.
That's the problem. And why you need the four pillars of human organization: Corporations, Government, Religion and Unions to be setup to be opposed to each other.
Instead in the United States Corporations own the Government, Religions are all tax sheltered Corporations and Unions are decimated.
It's misleading to consider unions in other countries like the Nordics as anything other than much stronger and more powerful. They have almost universal membership, engage in sectoral bargaining, set minimum wages, run important parts the welfare state, and sit on company boards. It's often noted that the Nordics don't have legal minimum wages - this is because industrial bargaining agreements that set minimum wages make this unnecessary because they cover ~all workers.
In countries where union membership is declining (US and other anglo countries particularly), membership rates are low and optional, there's little sectoral bargaining, most industrial action is essentially outlawed. Sympathy and wildcat strikes are entirely illegal, and in Australia you cannot strike without prior permission from a government body.
> all have well paying secure jobs
I wonder if that's linked....
And $70k a year in London is not "well paid", it's 9% of the price of an average property in London.
London transport is an interesting case. I wonder the extent to which they have well-paid secure jobs because they can and do disrupt London. Bus drivers have a much worse deal, for example, being easily replaceable.
I think from time to time about a statement made by Bob Crow, who was the former hardline chief of the RMT. He said that his members were now amongst the only working class Londoners who could afford to live decently in the city they served. Which (despite my dislike of his tactics) does seem like a reasonable point.
FWIW my union (UCU; academic) has traditionally been a lot quieter and more consensual, and we've been repeatedly shafted in recent years as a result. That kind of collaborative management/union relationship only works if both sides are committed to making a decent workplace operate, and our management no longer are.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have much say in worker pay in a great majority of sectors. Especially where it could help like warehouse work which has seen wages plummet with the advent of Amazon.
Now, compare that to two unions which are extremely powerful and not always good for the public or their members!
1) Teachers unions. Extremely powerful (at least Oregon where I know about them), but they don't necessarily help teachers! Pay is low because they haven't flexed their power and are fully at the whim of taxes. Since their funding is low the most teacher's union can guarantee their workers is that they will have a consistent job. Which sucks! Also, when COVID occurred there was little room for teachers to get a say as to how classes would be virtual, when kids would be back in schools, or when and how the mask mandate would be lifted. Supposedly a union would help!
2) Police unions: super strong, extremely political, extremely effective. Also nigh impossible to fire a cop unless they offend their union or a fellow cop. Rarely do police budgets ever get cut or does cop pay go down. Do most folks want this? Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? But hey, they're too powerful to do anything about.
Pareto distribution strikes again! Apparently new york city has a GDP that ranks 15 in the world, above mexico[1][2] and ranks 59 in the world in terms of population[3], so the fact that new york exceeds "a mid sized country" (median?) in some statistic isn't surprising. If you want to make the argument that the US is over-policed, use some statistic like officers per 100,000 people or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
It is completely bonkers to have this many uniformed officers and this much money poured into security forces, and so little positive result of any of it.
The reason that comparisons to Mexico are alarming is that it plainly does not make sense for a municipal government enclosed within a large and heavily militarized state to have an army of its own! It is strange to compare a city government to a large country! It is SUPPOSED to sound strange!
you'd think that's the case, but it seems fairly normal for countries to have more police officers than soldiers[1][2]. Just looking at g8 countries:
soldiers police officers
Canada 67,400 67,425
France 203,250 282,612
Germany 183,500 279,200
Italy 165,500 276,750
Japan 247,150 296,700
United Kingdom 148,500 148,893
United States 1,388,100 686,665
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-...
Just taking your numbers above. The NY police has 50,000 police for ~8.5 M people. Germany has ~280k police for 80 M people, and that number likely includes border police, customs police, federal police (all jobs the NY police does not do). So NY has probably around 2x as many (regular) police per citizen as Germany.
God only knows what they expect to do with them
This may have been a positive. The teachers and their unions are only motivated for them to stay home and "safe", forever. It's the customers (parents) who need the leverage to get the teachers to actually deliver the service they're getting paid for, rather than trying to hide from their job indefinitely as many would be happy to do.
Unions can be important to protect workers' rights, but it's also easy for them to go too far into not even providing the service the job is supposed to do. Particularly in an area with captive customers and government-mandated demand, like education.
There’s lots of “well then maybe that should be their mission” but no one wants to put up the capital for public daycare.
[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
[2]: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ae3016b9-en/1/3/1/index....
So, they don't get their employees good pay, they don't get a say in their working conditions. In what sense are they powerful, as you claim?
They end up being another source of control.
That’s likely why there were a slew of wildcat teacher strikes.
The short version is that there was a union that was declining to support dues paying members because they were black. It resulted in a case that went all the way to the USSC.
In contrast, European unions are allowed to be more realistic and accept that some members are knuckleheads and that it’s a positive for both the union and the employer if they are fired with minimum fuss.
In the US a union is tied to a workplace. A single company, often a single location. This is by design of the NLRA.
Corporations fight to limit the size of the bargaining unit, to make the unions less powerful. This Amazon warehouse is unionized, but the other warehouses are not unionized and warehouses over a FooBar Corp. are not unionized. Each of these unions has to work out their own contract and bargain independently even if they all work for the same company.
This gives the workers less leverage and makes it easier for US Corps to pit workers against each other.
In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, unions are also organized by sector. You could have a national Warehouse workers union, which sets working conditions for all warehouse workers. This gives them significantly more leverage and makes it difficult to do the kind of "we shut down this store and open another" tactic that you see in the US.
I'm sure there's a variety of other differences, but I don't think it's fair to characterize EU unions are weaker.
Employers already do all of this, except you have no say in it. In contrast, you're granted democratic decision making with a union, so you do get a say in those arenas.
All human endeavors are corrupt, including gov't, business, and occasionally unions. Collective bargaining is something I wish I had at my disposal. Not to mention I could use it to make life better for my colleagues overseas. No reason they should be paid any or much less than anyone else. They work hard, and we should band together.
The US is a closed shop country, which means that, once a union is in place, it has an effective monopoly for the workers that work for one of its companies.
If we switched to open shop, then unions would have to compete for membership. Of course, the existing unions are strongly against this. As an end result, everyone I know that's been a union member in the last twenty years strongly dislikes unions.
Yeah, but the article is about the US, were they invented the Pinkertons instead of addressing employee grievances :-)
These days not so much. I think part of the reason Norway works is that it has gotten past the insane hostility and there is not the all or nothing mentality. For example there is free healthcare, but there is also private insurance and hospitals if you want better care from a private provider. I think for a capitalistic society (and I don't think we have a better way yet), being able to have options is a must.
The trouble with completely optional membership is that it introduces the good ol' Free Rider Problem, bane of many an attempt to make things better without forcing anyone to do anything.
It is. Everyone wants to work for union shops like UPS or John Deere, and people feel it's a great victory to be hired. While non-union shops are always hiring, because they drive people into the ground.
It's like saying that taxes are useless because given the choice people would opt-out if they could, ignoring the consequences of if everyone did that.
[1] Some unions manage to get payroll benefits for just union workers but it's vanishingly rare because it just pushes workers to the union if they don't give it to everyone.
Union shop, if you're sure what you've been asked to do is a violation of rules, you tell your boss no, then to fuck off if they try to pressure you, and you'll be totally fine. If you're not sure if something's OK, you have the union as a resource to check with, not just other managers working for the company (whose interests may not be aligned with yours, and even asking questions might be risky).
Non-union shop... good luck with that. You can go to regulators, but it's more effort, the process for doing so is something you'll have to figure out yourself, and it's a case where even if you're right you can end up having a rough few months or even years getting it all sorted out and being fairly compensated for any e.g. retaliation that happened.
Ideally, you want reporting problems of this sort to have a low and consistent cost for the person reporting it, not a high and very uncertain cost. If you want effective enforcement, that is.
This is absolutely false. These are just a few anecdotes but there are several
"An arbitrator in 2007 found that teacher Alexis Grullon had victimized young girls with repeated hugging, "incidental though not accidental contact with one student's breast" and "sexually suggestive remarks." The teacher had denied all these charges. In the end the arbitrator found him "unrepentant," yet punished him with only a six-month suspension."
"In 2016 and 2017, Poway Unified School District officials found that Westview High School coaches Derek Peterson and Tim Medlock sent inappropriate text messages to underage students. Those officials found that they violated school policy and in response, issued each of them warnings. Both men continue to teach at Westview High."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443437504577547...
https://voiceofsandiego.org/2019/08/15/how-do-misbehaving-te...
At any rate, this, from your second link, is insightful:
> For Medlock and Peterson, it wasn’t necessarily the union that protected them. It was the district, which said they’ve been disciplined enough.
You wouldn't believe what districts cover up or ignore, even if the union's not a factor. It's routine.
The former is indeed a prisoner's dilemma. The latter is a valid complaint and an entirely valid thing to want. And the only answer I've ever seen given is "well then get involved and try to steer it in a direction you care about", with no allowance for people who don't agree with the direction it has taken and don't want to spend their whole career struggling (likely unsuccessfully) to change it.
I think collective bargaining is a powerful and useful tool, that in isolation, more people would likely support. I think it's unfortunate that that tool has lost a lot of its power, in part because it comes along with structures and assumptions that many people do not share.
As one of many examples: people often complain that a union shop values duration of tenure more than experience or skill, and devalues the latter because it's easy to objectively measure duration of tenure. I've seen people say "well, if you form a union, it doesn't have to work that way"; that's always spoken from the point of view of the people who put together or maintain the union. But that doesn't do any good if you weren't involved with the initial setup, and you're just faced with how it currently works. If you push for something else, you're tilting at a very large windmill. And it's valid for someone to say "I'd like to have collective bargaining, but if it's going to do something tenure-based then on balance I'd rather reject it".
The ability to individually choose to join or not isn't just a simple prisoner's dilemma where defecting is a loss; it's also something that gives actual teeth to a requirement to be representative of employees, if an employee believes they'd be better off with no representation other than themselves than they would with the current representation. That would have to be a pretty serious level of failure, if an employee believes that membership has negative value to them.
Conversely, it might also resolve the prisoner's dilemma problem if negotiated benefits were tied to union membership. While some negotiated benefits (e.g. working conditions) are inherently available to everyone, others (e.g. policies, vacation time, pay structure) may be such that they could be offered to those who are a member of the organization that bargained for them.
FWIW, I think you're wrong and that unions are good at improving worker conditions and pay, and that's why companies engage in aggressive union-busting and anti-union propaganda to prevent unionisation and broadly keep union membership down.
Also, with the sole exception of Japanese bus drivers, every union I know of that's ever gone on strike has, in doing so, used innocent third parties as collateral damage.
Are strikers holding people hostage? Or are they just refusing to do their jobs?
And they do. Everyone wants to work at union shops where I live (midwest). UPS, or any other Teamster shop, John Deere, you name it. It's hard to get on.
You can get a job at any old non-union warehouse though. They can't keep people. I'm shocked you even made that statement, in the everyday world everyone wants a union shop job or government job. Most everything else is exploitation in pay, benefits and protection.
Hi! Union member from ~2005-2011. Appreciated being in mine and strongly support a more unionized workforce.
This is not correct:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop
The US is not a closed shop country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Like a lot of things about employment, housing, medical insurance, etc. it varies quite a bit between states.
Also, I feel like it's safe to assume that you don't know any teachers or police officers? Both those groups seem to very much support their unions.
I know a couple teachers who tried the charter school thing and discovered non-union teaching has its own issues.
My wife is a union teacher, and makes a six figure salary. She's hardly a victim, and it's all thanks to her union, and the work of many union members for decades prior.
It doesn't happen overnight, and that may be the problem your union teacher friends are running into.
It's like hating democratic governance, not every democratic decision made is one you're going to agree with, but overall it gives you the ability to shape the future of your workplace in a way you'd never have the ability to otherwise.
Meanwhile, of the hundreds of people I know, most of them have been unhappy with their employers at one point or another...
Been in a union for 8 years. Strong like.
My wife is in a union, and is not strongly against them. In fact, they're the reason she makes a six-figure salary. She also has a robust contract to prevent abuse. I am non-union as a developer and am pretty much over a barrel. It's a no brainer to work in a licensed, union career for most people. The only losers are the owners.
I have been a manager in a union shop though. And had no issues with the union. In fact, companies get the union that they deserve.
Note for interest that this is not literally true. Some people work in jobs where unionisation is illegal, or where unionisation is legal but union action is illegal.
There is probably an abstract, theoretical future where worker freedom is significantly curtailed by union power, I guess. But being more concerned with that hypothetical than with the genuine exploitation that is the baseline for low wage labor doesn't read as caring about worker rights to me.
I share your concerns regarding the owners whose powers often go unchecked in corporate America, and I completely agree that we're reaching dangerous levels.
But I'm not speaking in hypotheticals. No, the anecdote I brought up is, in fact, the least hypothetical thing in this conversation thread. My wife examined the union pamphlet that was handed to her, decided that the union did not represent her needs adequately, but was told she'd still need to pay the union dues. This is not enabling her agency whatsoever, and actively made her conditions worse by heaping on unwanted taxes that she felt was also priced disproportionately. Yet she had no voice in this matter.
Organize a union, yes - you have my full support. Represent whichever needs your union deems to be important, yup - I'm behind it. Fight the greedy owners, great. But don't extort money from those who made the active decision to not be a part of the union. This is an active intrusion of her agency, and a real event that I brought up because I didn't think think it was fair. The fact that workers are already being exploited by greedy corporations does not excuse bad union behaviors, period.
I think it comes down to what you expect from people who are being treated poorly. Do you only accept "pure" moral acts as valid? Is small unfairness to a few justified to prevent large unfairness to many? It seems like we have different answers to these questions, but I don't think either can be dismissed as inherently against worker freedom or agency.
I care very very much about practical power for people who need it right now. I care a lot less about abstract freedoms that material conditions prevent people from being able to act on.
Thanks for engaging, and have a good one.
You can't try to misappropriate ideals meant for humanity in general, to a system that's a dictatorship. One you need to involve yourself in just to survive.
That's why there's unions, to help level the bargaining table. Otherwise there's too much power on one side, the one holding all the cards/capital. It stops the race to the bottom.
Organize a corporation, yes - you have my full support. Represent whichever needs your corporation deems to be important, yup - I'm behind it. But don't extort money from those who made the active decision to not be a part of the shareholder profit contribution scheme. This is an active intrusion of her agency, and a real event that I brought up because I didn't think think it was fair.
But you already knew these things and you also knew that the topic on hand was about unions. God forbid anyone say anything critical about THAT. If you have a point to make, get right to it instead of hiding behind snark.
Edit: nevermind guy. I can see others have already tried. Cheers.
I found your point insightful. Because you can't really have it one way, and not the other. Just cherry-picking what you find offensive in an employment agreement. If there is a union involved, you can just find another job! Same solution I'm presented if I prefer profits to go into my pocket, rather than someone else's.
Really don’t understand the reasoning to not making union membership voluntary. Completely illogical. Basically you agree it’s authoritarian but “it’s better than the alternative” which is bullshit.
However we keep going in circles and it is clear you are illogical.
Where’s the lack of logic? The real issue is you won’t even begin to engage in explaining why these two things are different. It suggests to me you haven’t arrived at this position rationally, but through ideology (“corporations good, unions bad”).
I'm not at all arguing for an "ends justify the means" position here, just pointing out that the condition we're talking about is already a morally compromised one, and so people won't always have the freedom to operate purely in line with their moral preferences. Or yours.
Because, importantly, which specific things "should be accomplished voluntarily" is an idealogical position we won't always share. There is already much coercion foundational to our society, maybe you can find another one to oppose on purely abstract moral grounds.
But if the world was 90% union, I guarantee you would NOT choose the remaining non-union jobs, because the difference in pay and treatment would be so stark (as it is today already), then you'd shed your views for your own betterment.
I just know that at work I am alone and weak. With everyone else I would be on more equal footing with my employer. Instead of quitting, why not make my workplace better?
I worked at a fast food restaurant. That sucked. But I was also a high school kid with no marketable skills. So I sort of understood I was “putting in my time” and this is the way it goes. I never thought “we should unionize and demand more money.”
If Amazon needs career people in these positions, they’ll be forced to treat the employees as career people and not like the fast food industry treats employees like myself.
Why does working in a restaurant have to suck? I've worked at plenty here in Norway during my youth, was always nice. They pay according to a collective agreement, with extra pay for evening and night work. So a pay it was possible to survive on.
Why demand that "unskilled" labor should suck? Why want to inflict that pain on others?
I wouldn’t be betting on robots just yet.
It would seem like a sensible business move, even if it involves a little bit of service disruption for users in New York.
They would? Why? How does the existence of a union prevent a company from firing everyone if it wants to? My understanding is that the only power of a union is that all of its members use collective leverage to get better deals. There is no collective leverage action if everyone is fired.
Unions have upsides, and downsides. Discussing them helps people make good decisions. Pretending it's all flowers and rainbows does not.
Please don’t ask leading questions like this, they’re not helpful to the discussion.
They cannot afford to close this shop, and it's obviously playing a big role as to why this location has successfully unionized while the location in Alabama has not.
I'm not saying that's good. But I'm saying Amazon might think it can't afford to let the employees unionise.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon announced the closure of this fulfilment centre. It would seem dramatic but if it kept other centres from unionizing I could see Amazon taking the short-term discomfort.
I don't know what Amazon's calculation will be in these circumstances. If Jeff was still in charge I reckon the fulfilment centre would be closed down.
I think you're underestimating the long term pain Amazon is opening themselves up to by closing a recently unionized site. With a labour shortage and extremely high churn Amazon is already having hiring issues - scabs aren't really on the menu if you're already scraping the barrel and a large employer in the local market.
It only seems like a sensible business move if you ignore the incredibly negative PR that'd come from it. You're laying off a lot of local workers and publicly making a target of yourself after the vote passes. Usually businesses will shut down sites before the union vote while they can still sort of BS their way into saying "Well, it looked like the vote would've failed anyways - look at this internal polling" - doing it after unionization is going to add a lot of vitriol to the situation, much more so than the underhanded techniques they use to sway the vote.
Then make all the workers redundant, but let the third party offer them employment.
Then if the union makes undue demands, the third party can go bust and Amazon buy back the centre for pennies on the dollar, but without most of the staff.
Now, McDonalds and WalMart.
Hopefully the employees of other Amazon warehouses will be inspired to do the same, after this win for workers.
You aren't negotiating against the corporation. You're negotiating against the people who determine your compensation. (This is a seemingly-minor, oft-overlooked and enormously-important distinction.)
Many on this forum have leverage over those people. (Some over the corporation.) For those people, unionization could be a net negative. Recognizing that doesn't mean the idea isn't worth pursuing.
Large corporations have been proven to fix wages for tech workers[1]. There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
Actually you do, by walking across the street and getting a big fat raise to join a different company. That is one of many reasons engineers by and large don't feel a need to have someone else bargain for them - they negotiate with their feet.
You couldn't walk across the street, because the company across the street agreed not to hire employees from the other company across the street.
The free market isn't always free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
And that’s just the ones they had enough evidence against.
1) When workers want systemic reform of an organization.
2) When workers are more-or-less interchangeable.
Software engineers aren't interchangeable at all compared to a factory worker, which is why they have such great individual bargaining power and why (historically) they don't really feel a huge need for a union to represent them. Today, software workers have a bit more interest in unionizing because they want to change their organization's high-level goals (e.g. environmental responsibility, not making tools for warfare, hiring diversity, etc).
But both scenarios apply to Amazon warehouse workers, and union representation would almost certainly be a massive benefit for them.
Deriding legitimate concerns is not how you convince people, and makes it look like you have an agenda.
Wanting better pay and benefits for workers is an agenda, and if making that clear isn't enough (even after accounting for a cons of collective bargaining, union costs, etc), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Difference between them and myself is, we work completely different jobs, in completely different markets, with completely different incentives.
Why is that an acceptable strategy for your side but not the other side? Could it be that you might both have valid viewpoints?
I don't know if the general software developer really needs a union. Some niches certainly do. Game developers are the obvious example of a group of workers who are treated worse than people with comparable skills who do comparable work in other industries. But the idea that we don't need a union because we are already paid well, we are skilled, or we can negotiate for ourselves is naive. Anytime an industry is as wildly profitable as the tech industry is, workers can benefit from a union.
Plus LeBron would be a near billionaire even without cashing a single game check. He makes way more money from being an ambassador of the game than from the game itself. Therefore he has a vested financial interest in the health of the league overall and the hundreds of other players in the NBA.
Back to software development, the question is are you the LeBron James of software development? Are you one of the handful of the best developers on the planet? If you are, I can totally understand why you might be against a union. If you aren't, you could probably benefit from a union.
Unions benefit those who play the social game more so the job requirements, as it allows for an alternative power structure to be climbed.
Those are the exact people I love being able to avoid in the software field.
I understand everyone wants to feel valued at their company, but value should be evaluated on merit and unions essentially lower the bar to keep more people paying dues and less product/service running efficiently. WE ALL HAVE THE OPTION TO FIND A BETTER JOB!
The automotive industry is a great example of how unions made factory operating conditions worse. Employees had piece rates and controlled their time and pay. I.E. get 100 parts done in 4 hours get paid the same as someone who takes 8 hours to make 100 parts. Then unions stepped in, now everyone works 8 hours, with half the work force slacking to fill the time.
For now most of us in this industry do. This is not a long term solution to anything.
> Unions promote individual rights at the expense of the customer, product, and company.
Individual rights? It's collective bargaining of workers, no?
The total salary of all of the public school teachers in the US is probably well over $150 billion. That's the market cap of many "huge" companies.
Just saying -- it's easy to criticize when you're overgeneralizing a huge dataset based on one subset of that dataset.
The teachers union is probably the only thing keeping public schools running in a country where a political party explicitly wants them to fail and will sabotage them for political gain
It feels very disingenuous to try to make an argument about teacher's unions and then use private non-union schools made up of those who can afford the tuition or qualify for a merit based scholarship and public schools made up of everyone else.
Except that states that outlaw teacher's unions have lower teacher pay and worse average scores/outcomes. They're totally comparable too, public daycare ahem school and software engineering.
Sadly due to how strange private education in the US can be I don't think any comparisons between private and public education are really fair.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp
"The average salary of public school teachers in 2019–20 for the State of California was $84,531."
That averages out to be about 58 dollars an hour if we assume the teacher works 9 months out of the year with 20 working days per month or 180 days a year. This only includes summer, not winter breaks or spring break or other observed holidays, which is quite a few. Again, not a great number but certainly better than plenty of other folks.
https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Doma...
As a parent of someone who went to an LAUSD school, my experience is completely different. Half the teachers didn't even bother to show up for parent/teacher night and were never available. The only teacher I'll give props to is the robotics club teacher, he was heavily involved, stayed late, but outside of him, that bell rang and it was a ghost town 20 minutes later.
However, "union shops" or "closed shops" don't exist, so the situation isn't directly comparable to the USA.
There is unfairness in the world. That does not mean that HN is obligated to be a soapbox for all unfairness.
Anyway, comments on HN should be intellectually substantive. That one was not.
Yes, we should discuss this on HN. No, we should not have brand new accounts posting cheap opinion comments that are devoid of intellectual content.
Instead of having new accounts post empty pro-union comments and the anti-union people having to argue against them, it's better if we just not talking about that---unless it's an intellectually substantive conversation, in which case it's fine.
That's all I'm asking---I know it's too much for you to give.
> Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
> A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Before anyone make a move for the jugular: I make a distinction between union members and union management (the entity). Union members are hard working folks, just like anyone else. They want the best for their families. That's their driving force. Nothing wrong with that at all. We all want the same things. Union management, on the other hand, well, I the tend to be between evil and criminal.
Today, US unions, in my opinion, destroy jobs. And they have done this in massive numbers. I still remember having a long conversation with a guy who retired from the printing industry. He explained, in great detail, how the union that ruled his industry absolutely decimated it. He lost his pension, benefits, etc.
The problem with US unions is that they exist to squeeze as much from companies as humanly possible. One of the most egregious examples I have seen of this is what the UAW (United Auto Workers) contracts that made US auto companies have more than 10,000 employees getting paid full wages and benefits (about $130K/year) to do nothing. Non-US car companies don't have this unbelievably destructive expense.
The effect of squeezing every possible drop out of a business is that you simply cannot be competitive over the long run. The other side effect is that economics and competitive pressures will force you to move portions of your process offshore and automate as much as you possibly can.
So, yeah, union leaders likely gave themselves a huge pat in the back for pulling that one off. And they made millions themselves (they get paid very well). And yet, a the ground level, they destroyed jobs, damaged companies, likely caused people to have serious psychological problems and damaged the long term viability of jobs.
When a company had hundreds of millions of dollars in dead-weight over head for years and years, sooner or later, there will be consequences. This is like fundamental laws of physics that cannot be violated.
In my little slice of the universe, as we are building a new manufacturing business, everything that can be automated will be so. There is no way we can pay someone $15 per hour (EDIT: to put screws into holes). If there was a way to do so and remain viable, I would have no problem with it. The truth of the matter is, this wage is a job killer. The US is already not competitive due to the huge cost of doing business here. This makes it worse.
On top of that, the combination of the $15/hr minimum wage, pandemic and other world issues has resulted in serious inflationary issues. Which means that the people who got that $15/hr wage (if they have a job at all), did not, in reality, get a raise at all. So, all we've done by pushing this nonsense is increase costs and destroy jobs.
Brilliant.
I know they look at all of this in China and cannot believe the US seems intent on destroying itself from the inside. I know because I also manufacture in China and talk to our suppliers all the time. They always tell me about how they are getting new customers because the cost of doing business in the US increases year after year.
As I said. Brilliant.
Sadly, people will not learn this lesson until things are bad enough to be obvious to nearly everyone. To be fair, what I am saying above requires having a reasonable understanding of business and skin in the game. Most people, the vast majority of people, go through life in complete ignorance of these realities. And so it is to be expected that, when the time comes to make decisions (voting) they are easily swayed into making truly dumb choices from the perspective of those who do have context.
The problem this forced wage has created is that you can't hire people without some pretty solid justification for what they will deliver in exchange. Businesses are forced to make an ROI choice on everything, including people and their wages. This is why you are seeing things like burger flipping and fries making robots. You just can't pay people that much and stay in business.
There will be plenty of high paid jobs. Just not jobs that cannot justify an artificially forced minimum wage that is not sustainable in the context of a global economy.
I'll give you a simple and real example from a recent job we sent out to bid to nearly two dozen manufacturers in the US and China. It consists of a part made by a wire forming machine and with some manual labor. The average US-cost for that part was in the order of $6.00 per unit PLUS shipping. The average cost of the same part made in China INCLUDING shipping, was $1.00. Now, somebody tell me how we can make that part in the US when minimum wage, taxes, regulatory costs, etc. make it impossible to get anywhere even close to Chinese prices. I mean, you can't make the part in the US for even TWICE the Chinese price. And, keep in mind that shipping from China costs 10x more today that it did not too long ago.
People might not like what I have to say. That does not invalidate the truth of it, you can't invalidate reality with a down-vote. Like it or not. Most people replying to my comment have never even tried to manufacture something at a non-trivial scale in the US. In other words, they don't even know what they are talking about, yet they are quick to have an opinion because words like mine hurt their feelings. Well, economics cares not one bit about feelings. Again, like it or not.
In the consumer sector things are increasingly in the picture you painted. You can do this on Amazon for just about anything. Once the Chinese figured out how to sell directly through portals such as Amazon, that gig was up.
Design, domain expertise and more in-context areas is were the west still leads on many ways. It's product dependent, of course. That's why Apple designs here and manufactures in China.
In our case, it is a combination of our embedded and workstation software that creates a reasonably solid barrier to entry. This, along with some of the protection offered by patents and trademarks (which can be near zero in some cases).
To be sure, this is a very complex and difficult landscape that has evolved over about 50 years. I you go back that far, China was mostly an agrarian economy. There's a solid argument that says that this is something that has been mismanaged for five decades. You don't get where we are now overnight.
That is not to say I hate China or the Chinese. They are doing what they have to do in order to further their economy and more. We might not agree with some of their government's darker policy positions. Not much we can do about that. On the subject of being laser-focused on economic growth through rabid entrepreneurial drive, China is probably without equal. That, as an entrepreneur, I have to admire. Most people would be floored by what they would learn from just one trip to Shenzhen.
The "I can just buy it on Aliexpress" argument is fine and very real. The problem with accepting this without looking inward at the decisions and policies that do not allow us to compete is that things will get worse here and better there. It is inevitable.
I'll give you a simple example: There's a international postal treaty dating back to the 1700's (or was it 1800's, I don't remember) that gives China the ability to ship products into the US for nothing or nearly nothing. We, the US, subsidize these shipments 100%. I cannot ship from Los Angeles to New York for free. I have to pay. A Chinese competitor can offer free shipping all the way from China. I either have to charge a significant amount for shipping or take a margin hit (which means growth, job creation and the ability to survive events such as pandemics are compromises).
We are not making intelligent decisions.
Is it not the exact analog to "I can just outsource my production to China"? What differentiates a Chinese worker from a US worker? And if they are the same in your eyes, then why shouldn't things get worse here and better there until they reach some equilibrium?
That's an interesting and very important question that is both easy and hard to answer.
My experience with China is nothing but positive along just-about any angle I can imagine. Their attitude towards doing business, their entrepreneurial drive and desire to work with you is, in my opinion, unmatched.
The best example I have is from the very first time I had a large (for me at the time) order I needed to have manufactured. It was a set of custom aluminum extrusions.
I contacted about 80 companies. 75 of them in the US and 5 in China.
Every single company in China came back with a quote the very next day. The lowest quote was $8,000. The highest $10K.
Out of the 75 US companies I contacted with full, detailed bid packages, about 50 never responded to the request for quote. No emails, calls. Nothing.
Of the remaining 25, about ten of them responded somewhere between two and four weeks after receiving the RFQ to "no bid". In other words, not interested or could not do it. In most cases they offered no explanation at all.
Of the remaining 15 companies, not one of them responded faster than one week. When they did, they engaged in an interrogation phase that is very typical of US companies: How many of these are you going to make per year? How frequently are you going to order? How many years do you think you'll need to produce these parts? Do you have other parts you will need manufactured? What are they? What's the volume? Etc. You always get combinations of these questions and more.
After that, in most cases, you end-up getting bounced around additional people. In one case the email thread reached something like eight people. For a fucking quote. By this time a couple of weeks had gone by. I had already awarded the job to a Chinese company and it was something like three weeks from shipping. Yet, I humored the process because I just wanted to compare. This was my first job going out to China many years ago.
After the interrogation about ten of those companies dropped out by either no longer responding to emails or flat-out saying they were not going to bid.
Of the remaining 5 I got two bids, one for over $30K and the other was about $25K. Getting these bids took an additional week. The other three told me they had issues with the design and only wanted to make one of the two parts. One of them told me that they could extrude the aluminum but did not want to handle the finishing and anodizing.
By the time I got all responses from US companies the extrusions were in a container and on their way to me from China.
The Chinese company I ended-up working with just blew me away. I had actually contacted them just as Chinese New Year started. Still, their sales person and one of the engineers stayed behind to make sure all my questions were answered and, if I decided to work with them, the order could get started as soon as they came back.
They personally gave me a tour of the 1.5 million square foot (~150K square meters) factory campus. It was nothing less than incredible. For those who might not have a sense of scale, that's like 15 Home Depot size buildings on a single manufacturing campus.
And yet that's not what blew me away. Once I understood this company's scale I was astounded at the level of attention I received. I was nobody. An $8000 order for this company was a rounding error. They did not have to treat me like that. They did not have to stay back and take the time to show me around and make sure I was comfortable with them. They treated me like a million dollar buyer. Nothing less. They never asked me how many I was going to make per year or when they would get the next order. They just wanted my business and treated me with the kind of respect and attention anyone would recognizes in the US as reserved for million dollar clients.
That, to me, describes the cultural business and entrepreneurship difference between the US and China. They have earned every bit of success they have realized. Nobody gave them anything. They work hard and treat everyone like a million dollar customer. Here in the US you'd be lucky to get the time of day when you send out for quotes. When you do, it takes weeks to get anything done.
I don't think we are lazy. I think we are not hungry any more. And it shows. Nobody gives a shit. What's sad is that if we keep on this path people will learn the lesson in a really ugly way.
> And if they are the same in your eyes, then why shouldn't things get worse here and better there until they reach some equilibrium?
So, they are not the same. Yes, things will get worse here. I don't see enough of cultural shift or evidence of making it happen any time soon. Things have been getting better in China and will continue to do so. China will become the dominant top economy in the world and probably hold that dominance for a century or more. What happens in the US and Europe is anyone's guess. I look at the history of Latin America, where I lived for a number of years, and see echos of their failed policies and mistakes in the US. I don't know how anyone can change that other than to push very hard for a serious change in culture, which will not be popular at all.
Given what you witnessed from the customer facing side, so you think there were no similar delays and inefficiencies in their manufacturing and acquisitions side, and no similar attempts at maximizing profits in their quote?
I'm not claiming they could have matched the Chinese price, but I am also not willing to blame either the full price nor the whole exchange on 15$/h factory floor staff.
More like the business culture is in serious need of recalibration.
At the same time, some of it is easy to understand. Manufacturing is hard, for most, unimaginably hard. The sad reality in the US is that, because of costs and the layers of bullshit you have to deal with, the easiest way to survive is to focus on high dollar/high margin markets. That means that if you can land jobs in aerospace or government contracts you can be set. You might bring in other work on a very selective basis, yet, for the most part, your "meat and potatoes" has to be --by necessity-- the low volume/high margin stuff.
Going back to the sales folks. When your job is to bring in just a few deals per year and, more importantly, keep the customers you have, you are not going to kill yourself for every opportunity put on your desk. Sales people in the US are generally compensated in a mercenary fashion (something I have never liked). You get to make some baseline and then get paid on some percentage of what you land. This does not make for a sales person who actually cares about every single potential customer. In the long run they will, very naturally, optimize for their own ROI.
So, it can't be boiled down to "bad salespeople". There's a lot more to it than that. At this point thousands of elements working together to make it almost impossible to compete. Simple example: Stupid-as-fuck oil and policy that makes it so fuel and oil derivative products (oils, lubricants, plastics, etc.) cost more. So trucking your materials to your factory to make something cost more. Now we force a doubling of the minimum wage. Innocent enough, right? Well, the guy making $10 is now making $15. The folks making $15 now demand $20 (after all, they are not minimum wage workers). And so on up the entire wage scale. Your COGS goes up and your customers are not going to spend one additional dime for your products unless there is no other option. And this is where China comes in and is able to force such low pricing that your ONLY available option is to move all of your manufacturing to China and come in with a new price model and lower margins. In a lot of cases this will eventually lead to going out of business.
> an obsession with extracting profit
The only people who use phrases like this one are those who have never started and operated a non-trivial business. I don't know any successful business who's driving force is an obsession with "extracting profit". That term in particular, "extracting profit", is linked to Marxist indoctrination --which, in the US, is being delivered constantly by our universities by professors who have also never had to survive in the real world. In short, sorry, this is complete horseshit. Entrepreneurs and the companies they build are driven by wanting to delivery great products.
Profit is a necessity for growth and survival. I thought people were also going to learn this from the pandemic. Companies need cash to survive all kinds of issues that come up on a daily basis in the course of doing business. Once again, those who have never had to face these realities simply don't understand and refuse to listen, sometimes due to being in the grips of a truly astounding level of indoctrination.
I had an incident about 15 years ago when a multi-billion dollar company we were buying key sole-source components from discontinued these components virtually overnight and without prior notice. This cost us about a million dollars in real cash as well as about a year's worth of an engineering effort to design a product line based on these components. If we had not generated enough profit from our activities to survive such a hit everyone would have lost their jobs almost instantly. Instead, because we had the cash to weather the storm, we were able to regroup, invest and take a few months to redesign every single product around new components we could actually get.
Your views of business are as wrong as thinking that gravity pulls in the opposite direction. And yet I can't blame you for it, because it is obvious to anyone with business experience that you don't have the benefit of that experience. My suggestion would be to try to make something at a reasonable scale and learn from it. I and when you do, statements like "an obsession with extracting profit" will make your blood boil.
> inefficient work practices
Not so. In the US you have to be efficient or you won't survive. What we are competing with is obsessed with being efficient. The only companies in the US who can afford serious inefficiencies are those who do government/military work. This is where we waste more money than anyone can imagine getting work done for ten times the cost.
We have problems everywhere. This is what I am talking about when I say we need a major cultural shift. We have politicians constantly talking about raising taxes, as if we work for them. No! The conversation should be about ALWAYS lowering taxes and lowering costs. This means being more efficient at everything. Our national goal should be to half our expenditures and get more for our money. Not double our taxes and costs and support ever-growing bureaucracies. This isn't a formula for long term success. This is a formula for long term disasters.
I have sold product into various government agencies, from local transportation agencies to branches of the military. I left that world because it was simply disgusting to see just how much money we are burning for nothing at all.
I remember one case where we were bidding for a contract with a local public transportation agency for custom systems that needed to go into every passenger bus. We gave them a very reasonable bid. No special pricing, just normal "this is what it costs" pricing with normal profit margins. They ended-up giving the contract to someone who bid FIVE TIMES our bid. Why? Because the layers of people working at this agency are so ignorant that everything they do is designed to cover their collective asses. It isn't their money. They can't be fired. There are no consequences for them at all other than if something serious goes wrong. Even then, they probably won't lose their jobs. So they push the easy button (easy for them) and went with a contract that had all the "I will cover your ass 100%" elements they needed. So, we raise taxes and they spend five times more money than any reasonable buyer in the private sector would pay for exactly the same thing.
> I am also not willing to blame either the full price nor the whole exchange on 15$/h factory floor staff.
You are correct in that it isn't just one thing. At this point, it is thousands. Wages are a big deal though because they setup a chain reaction that ripples through the entire ecosystem. It isn't just a few people working for you that just cost more. As I explained above, this explodes through your entire wage scale. And, of course, it does the same for every single supplier and company you work for. The net effect is that the entire commercial/industrial ecosystem in the entire nation sees a step change in the cost of doing business. When they deal with each other, when the flour making company sells flour to the bakery, the cost will be higher and the baker, in turn, will have to charge more or make less, and so on. Making less is not sustainable. It leads to the destruction of businesses and industries.
What we have is a complex multivariate problem. At the most basic level we need a serious shift in culture and policies. We need to be more pro-business, pro-oil, pro-entrepreneurship than ever. The clean future with equality and a solid social net we all want cannot happen with oil at $100+ per barrel, an anti-business ideology and our schools teaching Marxism and Socialism rather than graduating rabid entrepreneurs full of solid skills right out of high school. None of what I am saying is ideological in nature. I want 300 million electric cars in the US. I've done the math. I've taken the time to analyze this and understand what it will take. The shit people like AOC is pushing for will not get us there. That's ideological fantasy land. In the real world, we need to do almost the opposite of what we are being fed day after day.
I challenge anyone to show me that we can actually achieve a clean energy future with oil at over $100 per barrel. No hand-wavy stuff. Math and physics. Numbers. They don't lie and they don't do ideology.
For example: What does it cost to build a solar power plant that will produce output equivalent to a 1 GW nuclear power plant? How much land will it consume? How much steel, concrete and other key materials? What will it cost to transport all of the materials and elements needed? How much fuel/oil will it require to manufacture all the pieces, transport them, and do the construction? How much will it cost to maintain and service this plant over a period of fifty years? How much waste will it generate? How will it affect the environment (for example, wildlife)? Etc. Real analysis, not "solar is pink unicorns and bubble gum". Once you look at these realities with honesty and start to pull back the layers, the inevitable conclusion is that we have allowed our politicians to destroy our nation from the inside-out. And for what purpose? All I can think of is that their optimization function is only focused on keeping their jobs and retiring with a solid pension and benefits. Their equation does not include consequences for any of their actions.
This is not a simple problem.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
Sure? Yet that misses my point entirely.
We all want clean energy. We all want electric cars. Even those who say they don't eventually will.
How do we get there?
We need to double our power generation capacity and seriously upgrade the grid, our ability to deliver power, in order to support this desirable future.
Just for a sense of scale: That means building a full duplicate of our entire power generation and delivery system. It's like having to provide power for two nations, both the size of the US.
That means we need to go from 1200 GW to about 2400 GW.
To state the obvious: We cannot transition to electric transportation with the power we produce today. No way. It isn't enough. It's about half of what we need.
How do we make it happen?
Well, without getting into specific technologies we know one thing that cannot be disputed:
The solution will require massive construction projects across every state, city and town in this nation for probably somewhere in the range of 25 years. This is an endeavor of an almost unimaginable scale from our current context. We lack the leadership, regulatory freedom, culture and maybe even resources to do it.
The cost of construction at this scale is dominated by one variable: The cost of oil. Every piece of machinery used to grade, dig and reshape terrain runs on oil. Every truck, crane, hoist, van, pickup, big rig and car used in these projects runs on oil. The materials required are made with the use of oil and derivatives, from lubricants to fuels. Everything depends on oil. Even the very cables used to transport energy at scale depend on oil for their manufacture.
If oil is expensive, we will will never be able to afford the cost of transforming our infrastructure to fully embrace "clean" energy. In quotes because it isn't really as clean as people imagine it as being.
If you want solar power plants the size of states, you need cheap oil to build them or you are not going to get there.
That's why I say we need $20/barrel oil if we want to realize a clean energy future. The two are very much connected at the hip. In the long term, at scale, you cannot have one without another. No utility grade solar farm has been built without using a massive number of barrels of oils, from manufacturing every single component in China and elsewhere to moving all the materials by cargo ship, train, big rigs and local delivery trucks...and then all the construction equipment you need to run after you receive the materials.
So. Want a clean energy future? You need to lobby your representatives to push down the cost of oil as low as it will go. Or you will not get what you want. We don't have enough money to approach such a transition at a national scale.
China, on the other hand, does and likely will. What is bound to happen is that China will leapfrog everyone in transitioning to nuclear and solar --all paid by us-- and the US and Europe will simply not be able to afford transitioning at the same rate, if ever. The cost of oil will continue to increase. With every increase our ability to afford it will deteriorate more and more. We can't approach massive projects with gasoline at $7 per gallon. I don't even want to imagine what happens if it goes much higher.
I'm sure many of your arguments do apply to small-to-medium companies in manufacturing-like companies.
But if you're thinking a company like Facebook or Disney or Electronic Arts or Bank of America operates on a fear of going bankrupt, you really have a skewed perspective. These are all examples of massive and massively inefficient corporate behemoths that have so much cash that they could coast for months or years on 0 revenue if it ever came to it. They are also companies that won't leave one cent on the table if they can think about a way of getting that cent, regardless of what effects it might have on reputation, the wider economy etc. Banks and many other financial institutions will simply not be allowed by the government to fail, as has been seen in the 2008 crisis. Other huge companies are given massive amounts of free money by the government in the forms of subsidies but (often ignored) diplomatic and even military support for remote operations - infamously in the case of the banana wars. Companies like Walmart are given huge bonuses by the government in the form of financial support for most of their rank-and-file employees (food stamps, medicaid), who couldn't otherwise survive on the wages they earn through their hard work.
> Entrepreneurs and the companies they build are driven by wanting to delivery great products.
Maybe at the startup level. A lot of companies and executives are driven by pure profit, expressed in several ways (growth, shareholder value). Again, the creative industries have a very visible record of massive companies buying smaller operations who used to create products their artists and staff could be proud of and making them churn endless re-hashes with ever more aggressive monetization. Companies in the food business are infamous for putting out the worse quality food they are allowed to sell, and cutting as many corners as they can to make an extra buck (such as Olive Garden boiling pasta without salt so that they can buy cookware more rarely).
And all of this nickle-and-diming is a great source of inefficiency - "being penny wise and pound foolish". Companies are burning out their workers and the good will of their customers in a race to show growth today, tomorrow be damned. Disney is currently busy churning out superhero movie after superhero movie, even though the public and the creatives behind these movies are already showing signs of not caring any more - which will hurt Marvel massively after the craze is over.
Another huge source of inefficiency in American corporate culture is the self-importance and outright classist superiority of many American mid-to-high level execs. Execs who want to make a name of themselves and strong-arm the organization into making something they can call their own, regardless of how many people below them tell them it won't work, is quite endemic in American business culture - "I am a successful entrepreneur, of course I know better than these engineers/sales people, who have never had skin in the game / are not hungry for success".
I have seen this kind of attitude (and the failures it brings) very directly in my own work: the head of a former startup my company had acquired, convinced he knew best. Gathered most architects at a summit about the future of one of our products, and when he didn't like the direction, decided to design it himself entirely ignoring the summit's conclusions. 3 years of hard work by some of the most talented people in the company he could put together later, the product flopped tremendously, and all the work that went into this direction was thrown away. With him gone, we are now implementing more or less the direction presented in the summit, and not only building a successful product we can be proud of, but also putting together infrastructure that many of our other products can rely on, just as the architects saw a need for all those years ago.
Of course, another (more direct) form of inefficiency that is endemic in some American companies: huge amounts of managers. Layers and layers of management, teams with one manager for 3 people, a clear directive that managers ALWAYS be payed more than the employees they manage. Managers who often have so little to do that they start inventing problems to solve, coming up with cringey team building exercises, "motivational" posters that would make the soviet era ideological comissars in my ex-communist country proud, enforcing workplace rules that no one cares about, policing employee time with ever more expensive solutions and other things that (a) cost money and (b) demotivate people, reducing their productivity.
And again, if you think this only happens in government or government-leaching companies, you are, I am sorry, extremely naive. It's as true in Google as it is in IBM as it is in GE or wherever you look. It is simply a huge part of traditional US business culture, and few companies get away from it. And, of course, it is not unique to the USA.
Many decades ago I bought a surface mount assembly line (equipment) from this guy who made a living selling high quality electronics manufacturing equipment. He had just downsized from an operation with 50 employees an a huge warehouse to buying a house and smaller warehouse in the mountains (Big Bear, if you happen to know SoCal) and was very happy. His goal was to sell one or two systems per quarter and that was enough. He, at some point, decided a lifestyle business was what he needed at that stage in life. He told me that at that scale the focus on making enough profit to keep the organization going was so stressful that, after a couple of decades of that he had to simplify his life. So, yes, 50 people lost their jobs because he decided he was done focusing on profit at that scale and wanted to simplify his life.
I was a young entrepreneur and he was much older, so I guess he felt compelled to give me advice. One of the things he said that stuck in my head was "A business is like a living breathing organism with a mind of its own. You think you are in control. You are not. It tells you what you are going to do each and every day when you come to work. You can point in a general direction, but it is in control."
He went on to explain that, at nearly every scale, a focus on profit is necessary in order to achieve growth, maintain it, remain competitive and, at some point, keep everyone employed. I have personally experienced this to be true in the decades that followed that conversation.
From the outside it might seem like all someone focuses on is profits. What few people do is engage in a root cause analysis process in order to understand why --objectively-- someone might have to do this.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine who works for a manufacturing company in Arizona. In this conversation he made a comment about how annoying it was that the COO was always pounding the table to save costs on all items and designs all the time. He thought the guy was somewhere between insane and just plain greedy to make his bonus on the backs of everyone else.
I said, OK, this will be fun. It's a small company (about 20 people) in a well defined market. Let's analyze it.
We got on a zoom call, I fired-up Excel and we developed a quick financial model for this company over the next 45 minutes or so. That's when he finally realized this guy wasn't being greedy at all. He saw things like, the impact of adding dollars to the cost of goods could mean not being able to support R&D, or not being able to hire people and grow, having to lay people off, etc.
We modeled real-world events to the extent possible in such a simple analysis. For example, container shipping from China in the last couple of years, went from $2000 to $20000 or more (round numbers). The cost of fuel doubled. Many product categories went up as much as 25% due to international trade tariffs. These inputs chain-reaction through the entire supply chain and affect the costs of other products. The company that makes packaging, boxes, for you is paying more for everything, so your packaging becomes more expensive. Etc. If your profit is razor thin you cannot survive such events.
In short, while from the outside focusing on profit might look like the entire purpose of the enterprise. The reality is that, if you want to deliver good products or services, remain competitive, grow, keep people employed, etc. you are forced to maximize profit to the extent possible or none of that can happen.
From the outside it looks like the motivation is inverted: Profit as the driver. From the inside it is exactly the opposite: If I want to make great products and remain viable for a long time, I have no choice but to deliver great products but also maximize profit. If I don't the business will eventually fail.
Are there people who only care about money? Of course. Then again, you could say that about every single person with a 401K and a Roth IRA. We all maximize for profit. Not because profit is our overriding objective. Profit is necessary in order to be able to realize our actual objectives.
BTW, I have about ten years of experience in the media industry. I was CTO at a startup run by a guy who had been the president of Universal Pictures for a dozen years or so. The best way I can describe it is: A combination of YouTube and Netflix. The startup was way too early. Streaming costs were simply unreasonable. The business model simply did not work. And, yes, this guy ran the thing purely on ego...right into the ground. I did meet and work with some of the most famous stars, directors and other folks in Hollywood though. It was a ride, that's for sure.
A decade later I found myself having to face hiring sales people for my business. I had, up to that point, done that job myself but it was seriously getting in the way of my need to focus on engineering.
There is nothing that focuses your mind on the importance of profit than the agony that it can be to find and hire competent sales people. I sought advice from other business owners at the time. Took people out to lunch/dinner to have this conversation. I cannot remember a single person rolling their eyes and then telling me horror stories when I opened with: How do you hire good sales people?
I experienced months of financial and emotional pain as I hired and paid sales people seriously good salaries and they did not even deliver enough sales to cover their own salaries, much less provide for the other employees. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars --burned, really-- on them. It was brutal.
This is why one of my favorite quotes is:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" -Mark Twain
This is so true. Nothing focuses the mind better than grabbing on to that tail and not letting go. Entrepreneurship, business, is brutal in this way. It can be almost impossible to understand from the outside. It can even be impossible to understand from the inside. The engineer and warehouse worker are not generally aware of what it takes to hold on to that tail and what the business has to produce in order for them to have a job.
How much profit does a company have to make in order to be able to hire someone making x? Say x = $100K.
$100K profit? No. That formula is not sustainable.
$200K? Maybe. It depends on the nature of the business.
Restaurant, maybe. Web software engineering operation? Possibly. Hardware engineering/manufacturing operation? No way.
It is hard to nail this number down because it depends on the nature of the business, industry, etc. In a manufacturing business you need a tremendous amount of cash parked in a warehouse in the form of components, inventory, equipment, etc. If we are talking about a web SaaS, the costs structure is different and varies significantly with scale. Netflix vs. a dating app, for example. In other words, this question can only be answered with the benefit of context.
It could very well be that a company has to be able to produce a million dollars in profit in order to justify hiring someone for $150K (which, after benefits and other costs, actually means about $200K. Few people understand this reality when they get a paycheck. I can see how, without this insight, it could look like the guy focusing on making that million in profits can look like a greedy bastard to the guy who costs the company $200K. I can see how it could look almost criminal to someone looking at it without any context at all from the outside.
You have to hold the cat by the tail to understand.
Most large companies have massive amounts of dividends being siphoned off from the workers who created the wealth, to heirs who are stockholders. Talk about dead weight.
I buy food at the market price; keeping me alive doesn’t mean the supermarket deserves 100% of my pay. I sell skilled work at the market price; why would I deserve 100% of anything? I’m even leveraging the shareholders’ huge investment and earning far more than I would by myself or in a co-op.
That amount of money is about $15 most places in the country at absolute minimum and that will be a struggle.
If you can't afford to pay someone enough money at 40 hours a week that they can live with 1 other person in an apartment, eat, buy a car, maintain a car, buy gas, and have a small amount of cash left over--then your business isn't a viable business man.
It's "simple economics"
Sure. Let's pay everyone $50 an hour then?
Do you understand how ridiculous it is to base a minimum wage on what an adult needs to live with roommates?
It's a need. Of course it is a need. However, forcing a minimum wage isn't the solution at all. If it were, we could "fix it" by paying everyone $20, $30, $50, $500 per hour. Anyone but a complete moron can easily understand what happens if we set a minimum wage of $100 per hour. EVERY JOB THAT CAN BE EXPORTED WILL BE EXPORTED.
For everything else, inflation will absolutely explode. Which means that your $100 per hour won't buy you anything except for everything made in China (which will have higher prices because the Chinese are not stupid and will raise their prices to make more money). Home will cost 10x more and cars will double or triple in price. So, the $100 per hour quickly turns into a real $10 per hour. All we've done is play with numbers to create funny money. The ONLY ONES who benefit are the Chinese because they are doing everything they have to do in order to grow their economy and become the dominant economy in the world for the next 200 years.
That's the game and the stakes. People are allowing politicians to run us into the ground (or below it).
Your "simple economics" isn't real economics. It's wishful thinking. In the real world, with a globally integrated economy, a job and a standard of living can only exist in the context of where goods and services can be delivered more effectively.
This isn't even about greed. Anyone who has migrated work to China and other shores understands this very well. Only the ignorant equate this to greed. The truth of the matter is that market forces push pricing down. Since you won't pay more than $99 for a blender, everyone has to make them in China and margins are narrow. Nobody is making 300% margins because they went to China. If they do, those margins will collapse very quickly as competitors move their ops to China and push pricing down. That's economic reality. Like it or not.
Try to make something not-trivial in the US or Europe and see what happens. Most people would be horrified by the reality those of us in manufacturing understand all too well. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
I see it in what I am doing every day. I truly want to manufacture in the US. I really do. I am angry about this whole situation because of it. Stupid policies prevent me from having the option to manufacture in the US. Policies that are so destructive that you are left with no option but to send the work to China. The only other option is to go out of business.
I do not want to do this! Yet my government and the ignorant masses who vote for them and support their ignorant ways effectively forces me to take that path. It does not have to be this way at all. Yet, on the current path, things are not trending towards getting better at all.
My partners and I have already discussed moving all manufacturing to China. All of it. Just like Apple, we would design here and manufacture there. I am the only one who is stubbornly holding that decision back. And I know I am going to lose. There's nothing I can do about it. It's like fighting the laws of physics. And then I post here and people who don't have a clue refuse to even think about this and attempt to understand. How have we become so ignorant.
It isn't about a single policy. It isn't just about minimum wage. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I'll give you another example that won't be popular. What we are doing with the southern border is absolutely criminal. I haven't kept up with numbers. I think the last estimate I read was that over 1.5 million people got in...and that's the ones we know about.
BY DEFINITION: Every single one of them is unemployed. Yet, they are not counted in unemployment statistics because, well, they don't exist. Even worse, we are not creating 1.5 million NEW jobs per year for them. If we were, there could be justification for accepting people with the right skill sets. We are not. Which means we are importing unemployment. We might even be importing people who will be abused and work for menial wages in the shadows. No matter how you look at it, this isn't a plan for economic growth and stability at all. We are losing jobs and we are importing unemployment.
What's another layer of stupidity? Energy policy. It is beyond belief that we are letting people like AOC even have a word in this conversation. Solar energy is fantastic. I built a 13 kW array. As an engineer, I know everything there is to know about solar and then some. I also know that we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow. Solar is far from clean. A solar power plant equivalent to a nuclear plant consumes so much land and resources most would be horrified. Not to mention effects on wildlife, etc.
If we are going to achieve the dream of converting our ground transportation fleet to electric vehicles we are going to need to DOUBLE our power generation capacity (and power transmission infrastructure). You cannot do this with solar. Solar is unreliable and expensive. You have to do it with nuclear, at least a majority of it. That means duplicating the entire US's power generation capacity. We need twice the power. That means we need an ADDITIONAL 1200 GW. A typical nuclear power plant is rated at 1 GW. Yes, that means we need to build somewhere in the order of 1000 nuclear power plants, or maybe 500 and make-up the rest with solar, natural gas, etc.
The other one is the war against oil. This is so ridiculous it hurts to even think about it.
Simple concept: We all want clean cars and clean energy. At scale (300 million vehicles) this means undertaking the largest set of infrastructure projects in the history of this nation. Yes, heavy construction and manufacturing throughout the land.
What do we need to move materials, dirt, concrete, rebar, solar panels, grade and dig the land, etc.? OIL! With oil at $130 per barrel there is no way in hell we can afford the infrastructure development that would be required to transition a nation like the US to clean energy. We need $20 per barrel oil for 25 years. With a mission. In other words, it can't be about lower the cost of oil so we can have cheaper gasoline and diesel. It has to be: We need cheap gasoline and diesel so we can build thousands of solar, wind and nuclear power plants as well as upgrade our entire power delivery infrastructure over 25 to 50 years so we can transition to more those power sources.
Once again, politicians drive the narrative that is most convenient for them in order to secure jobs and remain in power until they retire with nice benefits and pensions. The carnage and long term destruction they create is lost on everyone living for the moment. Sadly, most people don't exercise much in the way of critical and strategic thinking when they vote for and support these charlatans.
Anyhow, yeah, I am angry and frustrated because I want to work in my country and create jobs here but my government and the people who support their dumb policies prevents me from doing this. Even trying to educate people about these realities is futile.
What happens to a lot of business owners --after getting tired of hitting their heads against the wall-- is to capitulate and take a "if you can't beat them, join them" position where they make good money for themselves and stop caring about not being able to create jobs and build full companies here (or in Europe, same problems).
Those of us, like you, who actually have or had skin in the game --real experience actually trying to make real things in the context of the real world-- know better. We know and understand exactly what's going on and where this is likely headed. Nobody here wants to hear about it. The reaction ranges from the most uninformed comments to flagging and effectively cancelling what they don't want to hear.
The worse of it is that reality doesn't care about flagging comments and down-votes, reality keeps moving forward. The path we are on is 180 degrees from what we should be doing if we actually want to have a shot a maintaining a reasonable standard of living for generations to come.
To be fair, at this point, it is almost impossible. The kind of leadership and cultural shift we need in order to do the things we have to do might be impossible to achieve given what we have done to our society. This is the most disconcerting part for me. We have devoted years destroying this nation from the inside. Europe hasn't done much better than this.
I thought that people were going to wake up to some of these realities when they finally saw reality in the form of not even being able to manufacture face masks in the US. We don't make the cloth and other materials, we don't even make the machines you need to manufacture them.
This and related realities should have been covered in great detail by our media. For people outside of manufacturing this was news. Most people go through life having no understanding whatsoever of how and where the stuff they use every day comes from, how it's made, etc.
The pandemic should have shocked everyone into pushing for massive changes that would, over time, increase self reliance. Yet, none of that happened. It was starting to, at the highest levels, but then political forces changed and now we are more concerned about giving people free money than actually securing their futures and that of the next generation. Brilliant.
I am a senior software engineer in Romania working for an American company. I am well appreciated and currently have a significant hand in designing major pieces of one of our bigger products, working with a Romanian team, a US team and a team in India. I'm explaining this just to make it clear I am not some contractor code monkey working in a sweatshop. My salary though, which is quite good for my country, is 5-10x smaller than the kinds of salaries software devs expect in California, and even Atlanta or Austin. I am higher up the corporate ladder, and better appreciated, and have brought more value to this company than many of those people - and so have many of my colleagues from Romania and India.
You can't tell me that it's OK for software devs to make 150k+/year, for sales people to make similar salaries (with bonuses), for layers and layers of middle management (who often have negative value for the company when evaluated objectively) to do the same, for executives to make tens or hundreds of millions, for shareholders to make record profits; but then if the assembly line workers get 31k/year, THAT is what's bleeding the company dry.
You're not wrong about the lack of US manufacturing, and the lack of motivation for it. But you are dead wrong about the reasons behind it.
Wage scales are what they are for a reason. Simple example, in the US an engineer might graduate with somewhere between $100K and $300K US in student loans. That, right there, starts to impose a baseline on what someone can reasonably earn in order for it to be worth it to have that job. Just like a business isn't going to exist to just break even, people tend not to work just to break even. Everyone has to make a profit.
To that you start adding professional and personal necessities and you might quickly realize that $150K a year living in Los Angeles might very well be equivalent to 1/2 or 1/5 of that salary elsewhere in the world.
I'll give you another simple example: It costs my family $1200 per month for healthcare. It used to be $600 per month. Then Obamacare was instituted --under the laughable "Affordable Care Act"-- and our healthcare tripled to $1800 US per month. We eventually moved to a $1200 per month plan where we accept greater risk and higher costs. I did the math, we have to spend somewhere in the order of $25K in a year before our health insurance really starts paying for things.
In other words, context is always important in judging how much people get paid.
An executive that is responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue should make enough money to reflect the degree of responsibility he or she has. If they don't do their job, hundreds of people lose their jobs. You simply can't compare executive pay to that of a warehouse worker who is operating at an entirely different level of responsibility and accountability.
The problem isn't pay scales. The problem is the overall cost structure, which starts at artificially forced costs --be it wages or regulatory-- imposed in complete violation of free market principles.
Here's an example of these costs, something I learned about a couple of decades ago and just astounded me. In Los Angeles County (for those outside the US, the region where the city of Los Angeles is located) we have a tax called "Los Angeles County Business Property Tax". What is this? Well, to put it in simple terms, look around your office. The County of Los Angeles makes businesses pay taxes on everything you see: Your desk, your computer, your printer, fax machine, chair, table, lights, trash can, even any improvements you may have made to your building (dividers, painting, electrical, etc). LA County makes you pay a tax on every physical product the company owns. FOR FUCKING EVER.
This is some of the context that is missed from most of these conversations and the kinds of things only people who have to deal with them would know. As is always the case, life is a complex multivariate problem that is never well represented by a single simple variable.
Unions represent their members' interests, that's the entire point of unions. It says more about the entire profession of policing (i.e. that there are so many terrible officers that the not-terrible ones can't do anything about them) than it does about unions, to be honest.
There are two unions representing metro train drivers in London, and I have little respect for RMT since they've gone on strike to defend a driver who was sacked for turning up drunk to work[1]. The other union (ASLEF) seems more reasonable.
When an issue is important to both unions (e.g. pay for nighttime services) they wield considerable power. If only RMT strike, there's significant disruption but trains still run.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2015/februa... / https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/07/london-under...
The economic argument for unions is that they provide a counterweight towards corporate monopoly powers. But in a public setting, the opposition are voters and taxpayers.
We as voters can say we want schools to re-open or police to be held accountable for their actions, and they can collectively bargain against our wishes. So, by their nature public sector unions are vaguely anti-democratic.
Consider that the public sector unions can donate to the political campaigns of the politicians they are at the bargaining table with and it becomes a little less vague.
They try to make up for the lack of responsibility of corporations towards their workers, which is important (keeps them in check), but then there is the issue of bureaucratic bloat and power concentration within unions (organizers, lawyers etc.) so they can become detached from the actual workers and their trade. At the same time there are highly skilled workers with high work ethic who benefit less from unions than their peers.
In my opinion a an ideal union is organized bottom up. Lawyers and organizers are there to support union workers and most importantly don't create a hierarchical structure where all negotiations happen at the top. Secondly a union should strive for the highest quality and work ethic among their workers. One should be proud to be part of one and have values and principles to strive for.
This causes issues in a situation like serious misconduct, where it's entirely reasonable to fire the individual. However, a union will have strong grounds to make sure those policies are enforced fairly - and they simply aren't, it'll be allowed to slide if it isn't in the headlines. The problem isn't that it happened, it's that it ended up in the news!
As for whether it's because police management is all former union, they're just collecting a paycheck, or what - I'm not sure. But where you see the power of police unions, I see the incompetence of police management. If that's intractable, I do agree that police unions are bad because there's no opposition.
In comparison, a big company typically maintains a single goal - to make money. There will be exceptions of course, but as a whole, it's a coherent goal and things will be done at all levels to support it. There are the same sorts of issues with minor misconduct, since it's irrelevant to making money, but big issues are typically bad for business and thus there is strong motivation to enforce rules like "don't choke people" or "don't steal stuff".
No, this is exactly what police unions should be doing. My problem is when elected officials and judges kiss their asses and defer to them on the subjects of public safety and civil rights.
I'm stunned by how much weight public officials and journalists give to the opinions of police about the causes of crime, the motivations of the people who commit them, and the punishments that criminals deserve. Who cares what they think about the justice system? Tell me about hitting people with sticks, directing traffic, or leaving the military with no real job prospects.
But aside from that, police are often underpaid and overworked, have to deal with workplace safety and harassment, not given anonymous channels to complain, etc. just like everybody who works. They need unions to fight for those things. Police unions are awful and racist because the police are awful and racist. The union should be working for them, not for racial justice. If you want police unions to be less racist, hire fewer racist police, and don't demand that they operate in a racist manner.
When I hear people complain about public unions, I hear people that are disapproving of unions when they're the ones in the position of employer. It's basically being pro-union except for the one at the business you own, who are clearly just outside agitators with an evil agenda making trouble and trying to destroy your family.
It's common, though. Center-left media outlets hate unions in their newsrooms as much as they love unions at e.g. Amazon.
It's hard to argue they don't serve their members' interests - admittedly to the detriment of the rest of society. Given a choice, who wouldn't like a 500lb gorilla like that in their own corner?
"No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
Original: "No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
Sentence 1: No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon.
Sentence 2: Many union leaders regard Amazon as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them.
https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/grammar/run...
To illustrate, this would be a run-on:
No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, many union leaders regard Amazon as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them.
(When instead they view Amazon as the existential threat)
Well, for one thing, the section on "which" begins: "This word, used immoderately, is possibly responsible for more bad sentences than any other in the language" :-)
Ah, it refers me to a more relevant section for this construction, "Remote Relatives". Checking that.
"Antecedent" and "relative clause" are relevant terms, meaning the word to which "which" refers, and the clause containing "which", respectively, but I can't find a name for specifying the antecedent after "which", in this text. Actually, on a skim, I didn't even see that presented as an option.
[EDIT] Incidentally, it appears the Times usage is correct, anyway, if still ill-advised—the antecedent should be the closest possible candidate before the relative clause, so "[...] Amazon, which [...]" is correct.
"No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which Amazon many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
But that's absolutely terrible, so you must be suggesting something else.
Ergo:
No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which company many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them
[EDIT] I also intentionally used the construction in my original post: "[...] which technique is usually overkill [...]". The usage there, unlike in the Times sentence, was actually necessary since the antecedent was too far removed. The original Times sentence was correct, but splitting it up or specifying the antecedent would remove the possibility of a reader being confused by thinking the Times writer wasn't, correctly, using "which" to refer to the closest antecedent ("Amazon") but instead to something earlier in the first clause ("first win").
On looking closer, I think it's the construction of that first clause that makes the "which" read like it might have been employed incorrectly, when it was (technically, kind of) not. "first win in the United States at Amazon". The "at" makes "Amazon" seem heavily dependent on "first win in the United States", so it still looks like "which" might point at "first win", not "Amazon".
Not said by the NYT: "[Amazon is] an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
The previous was actually said by Mr. Many U. Leaders who I can't locate a phone number for.
So I wonder if the recent rise in union interest is a symptom of the fact that in the U.S. a lot of industries have been monopolized or oligopolized, and the union option is starting to look increasingly more appealing every year.
There's definitely a lot of truth to this, but I think it's also important to note that switching costs for jobs can be very high for employees. People can have deep social ties with coworkers, there is no guarantee that the new job is better so the risk of ending up in a worse position (with possibly burned bridges) has to be factored in. In places where the job market is limited, it can mean moving, which can be very difficult.
Even in non-monopolistic areas, employment is very far from an efficient market.
Most workers are people without college degrees who can't even go a month without a paycheck or afford to move out of pocket.
I don't think many Americans even have any direct concept of what unionization is like, because a lot of them have barely ever been part of organized labour in their lifetime, and their only experience with it is a barrage of negative info put out by Amazon or Musk.
I'm not interested in being part of a union if the only points of negotiation are pay/hours/benefits. I want a say over profitability overall. Who we do business with and how. What products we offer, and why. And how we service and treat our customers. Google employees banding together to prevent the company from entering certain lines of businesses, for instance. That is progress.
Don't many EU countries have strong unions? Does that imply the industries in those countries are monopolized or oligoplized?
Unless the biggest players in the industry are colluding against them as was the case with Google, Apple, Adobe, and Intel: https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
Submitted title was "Amazon workers vote to unionize in stunning win for organized labor". NYT is known to change headlines so that may not have been the submitter's doing.
When will Apple (App Store) developers unionize?
Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me. I don't want to have to bring in my union rep to argue about it since going somewhere else means losing my tenure and taking a 30% pay cut.
The only time unions make sense is when you're doing labor that could be done by anyone and your bus factor is basically infinite. It doesn't make sense for skilled labor
* don’t want to have to switch jobs to address grievances
* can’t switch jobs because everywhere is shitty (eg actors guild).
* an industry has a monopoly on some local resource like forest for lumber or coal mines and so you can’t just start or join a competitor.
It’s not really about skilled labor, it’s about mobility and the market forces that prevent it.
In practice, creating unions is heavily frowned upon and discouraged through various underhanded means.
That should tell you that companies view unions as enemies, and collective bargaining in general.
And companies for sure don't have your interests in mind. Also for sure you don't have the negotiating power they have.
And, to be clear, I'm not actually saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I personally believe that social services should be at the grace of the government and not your employer - but this system relies on people on both sides of the fence (employee and employer) realizing that their employment is a contract that is to the benefit of the company and if their contract ceases to be beneficial it will be terminated. Being unaware of this fact will lead you to grief - it's on you to make sure you're getting a fair share for your value (which might, just FYI, include diverting a lot of your value creation to warehouse workers and the like who you think deserve a higher standard of living)
The Company Formerly Known As Google, that literally had to settle (i.e. paid money to not lose the trial) for collusion to depress employee wages?
That company? Yeah, employee interests at heart <3
> Meta
For employees I hear The Company Formerly Knows as Facebook is actually quite good. But they're not a charity.
> were catered to with many great benefits (including catering)
Those benefits are cheap when bought in bulk, like corporations do. They also encouraged employees to stay more at work. Yes, they're nice, but let's not pretend that those benefits were not chosen very strategically.
Both Google and Facebook are making a ton of money and still growing like gangbusters (Facebook somewhat less so). Once their growth plateaus, if they need to fire 10k employees each to increase profits and share values, they will do so without remorse. Probably on a Zoom call with all 10k employees at once.
I know what the benefits are for, and while there are some good side-effects for the company, a lot of them are genuinely good for the employees as well. I had enough massage credits, Covid cue tests, and time spent in great gyms to attest to that. If they can be bought in bulk, all the more reason I appreciate it being someone’s job at the company to manage that.
I’m not saying these companies are your best pal and will look out for you against their own interests, but I personally don’t feel like I need or want a union between me and my employer. I don’t fault anyone for wanting one, but the hyperbole and passing opinions as facts on the other side, especially without considering the downsides of unions, isn’t doing anything to convince me.
What kind of broken logic is this?
Getting caught is precisely proof that the LEGAL system works, and that companies try to and succeed in abusing it.
Those companies agreed to those illegal practices in 2006, if not earlier, and they had to pay those settlements in 2015, 9 full years later.
They probably made out like bandits during those 9 years and saved a ton more money than they had to pay.
And regarding your negotiating skills, most of us think we're better than we actually are.
Plus, this is a social thing. Let's assume you're part of the 1%. What do we do about the 99%? Do we just piss on their heads from a great height, "f** you, got mine"-style, pardon my French?
Unions should be a valid option.
Why does the former preclude the latter?
> Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me.
What if you didn't do _anything_ and your boss wants to fire you so badly? What if your boss fired you over Zoom randomly without any recourse?
> The only time unions make sense is when you're doing labor that could be done by anyone and your bus factor is basically infinite.
I disagree with this point. A union makes sense for anyone that is working for a wage. It makes sense to me to work together for all of our benefit rather than me to try to go up against those that pay my wage alone.
Put it another way, I do not think that I can argue well enough to get the actual value that I produce back in my pocket and would love if we all banded together and said "We deserve this much of the value we produce" instead.
They can do that even with a union. The difference with a union is that they can collectively stop working if the employer violated a clause like "union members must be fired with reasoning pre-approved by the union", and then the employer either needs to find new employees for every person that was in the union or needs to re-negotiate terms with the union, likely including reparations ie. re-hiring the coworker.
A union makes sense for anyone that is working for a wage but that doesn't mean people have to want to be in one. Adding a union adds a bunch of extra politics and brainpower to the advent of getting your job done, and that's not for everyone.
But that potential response by the union should be enough of an incentive that casually firing somebody over Zoom for no reason is removed from the employer's SOP.
The same as what GP said "If my company starts dicking me around I'll quit and find another job". If I'm no longer wanted at my job, I'll find another one.
Unions provide a ton of value if you're a skilled worker who does something comparable to gig work, jumping from jobsite to jobsite where the Union helps them keep their health insurance. It also helps when your job also has other political implications.
The context tech workers should unionize would be in an instance where they job hopped even more often than is currently the case, and also potentially on teams where you become just so specialized that switching companies becomes difficult.
I agree with this sentence - because of the current state of the job market, and the level of seniority I have attained. However, if you are entry or junior, or if the market changes (good times don't last forever), just working a 'skilled labor' job won't give you the job security we enjoy atm. In that case, looking for a new job would be much more daunting, and working on improving your current work conditions might be a much better option.
(edit - improve accuracy of which part of the statement I agree with)
A union does not prevent you from leaving your job for another employer. Why would you think that?
I would consider professional athletes skilled and they have powerful unions.
Hollywood writers, actors, and directors are skilled an they all have unions/guilds.
And I think it makes more sense to join a union preemptively, while things are in our favor, than to join a union in the future, possibly from a position of weakness.
The problem is, of course, every developer thinks they're a 10x rockstar who doesn't need a union.
Apple is a 10x rockstar company ...
Maybe 100x.
The days of the lone 10x programmer with a strategy that leads to guaranteed success are over.
An alliance of employers against a third party is a cartel, which is substantially different legal proposition. (Said without intending the pejorative connotations of the word 'cartel')
Do you mean developers that Apple employs full-time, or third-party developers that publish on Apple's App Store?