It would sure be something if Amazon went from one of the worst places to work, to one of the best through the creation of unions. If they can do this, then I think it will be held up as an example for other people to unionize. I'm rooting for them
The notion that a corporation's employees should have the same 'stakeholder' role as a corporation's shareholders might seem to be a radical notion. It would require re-imagining the corporate board's role: worker value and shareholder value would have to be balanced. This seems like a much fairer system of governance, and also has the benefit of partially democratizing corporations.
The Amazon warehouse business and Amazon Web Services having the same union is … odd.
My prediction - warehouses that unionize will get split off into separate companies and be contracted out to by Amazon.com, the store. But they rely on Amazon.com for so much of their tech that they'll be beholden to them and have no leverage in negotiations. Warehouse workers will be even worse off than they are today.
Unions do seem to be making a big comeback
Amazon can give more shifts to non striking workers, train new employees in a matter of hours, leverage labour hire companies, bus in workers from other facilities, lean on FBM and other 3PL providers, increase automation. They also have a massive network of fulfilment centers and can easily just ship in fulfilled orders from elsewhere using non union trucking and last mile.
Amazon also has deep pockets and a long time horizon, so worst case they'll just allow the facility to be shut down by strikes and let their customers know it'll take another day to deliver their order from elsewhere.
Like, just the game-theoretic analysis here suggests municipalities will want nothing to do with this.
Warehousing is massive industry and even at their size Amazon is less than 10% of it.
The most realistic solution is for workers to spend any spare time they have learning new skills to move into better industries. Trying to make pick pack roles not suck is not realistic.
On a general note ... life in general seems cyclical.
https://hbr.org/2017/08/research-shows-unionized-workers-are...
It paid well, and allowed me to go to college with no debt.
But it absolutely drained her. It was terrible toward the end.
She was a nurse. Nursing is a profession that can be greatly improved, but the unions don’t seem too interest in that.
They are much better at getting better pay and benefits.
Better pay? Yes. Better benefits? Yea. Less chaos? Yes.
Less toxicity? Unions give the workers a bigger say. That’s it.
How toxic are your coworkers? If they’re toxic … unionizing won’t help. If they’re not toxic … unionizing still probably won’t help.
Unions are about pooling together for a better negotiating position.
That doesn’t make anything less toxic.
For example, will the union support using H1B visa workers? Amazon had a lot of H1B tech workers. That could get very toxic very fast.
This isn't really true. Unions typically negotiate for baseline working conditions, which can include protection from abuse and such things. "Toxicity" could easily fall under that and does in many (if not most?) workplaces in Sweden.
In practice, the union can negotiate disciplinary rules. However they tend to focus on protecting workers from discipline.
There are some practices they can’t/won’t give much protection to, like misusing company funds.
Some unions have offered less protection when accusations of racism and sexism are involved, but employers have learned to abuse that.
Read about the firing of Donald McNeil by the New York Times to get an idea of how cowardly, social-justice focused unions can majorly screw up by not defending their members.
So if the person making your life miserable is a coworker who constantly denigrates you, unions might be more focused on helping them than you.
No, it doesn't because the rules are agreed to before the events, just like the rule of law in society in general. They don't negotiate rules during a conflict...
In Sweden, everything you're saying is irrelevant because it's neither the company nor the union which evaluates the contract and the specific case in question. There are special courts and authorities to handle this which are independent of both parties. The only way that unions and companies are involved are negotiating the contracts that are evaluated.
Even if what you said applied, which it doesn't, my response would be "perfect is the enemy of good." That system would be better for most people than one of total subjugation.