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.