Amazon abruptly fires senior managers tied to unionized warehouse

Relative to the company, yes

It’s not a technical term, so it’s always going to be somewhat of a matter of opinion. If I had to guess, you could only really be described as a veteran at some company if you had been there longer than most other employees. It seems like at least 60 or 70% of the employees should be newer.

Amazon's done this with most of their functions. Push expectations: claim no responsibility for outcome.

Walmart laid out the playbook that profits in a thin margin market require you being an asshole to your counterparties, but blackmailing them into still working with you via scale.

> That means that they can expect the warehouse managers to get pretty desperate…

It would seem to make sense for all the warehouse managers themselves to form their own union.

Same idea seems work in public favor when firing politicians frequently: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

they end up at other companies of similar size, its part of the circuit, colloquially called FAANGs.

If one starts in Seattle, I'd expect them to end up at Microsoft, Expedia, other FANGs maybe, among other co's. Assuming they're not burned out.

The CEO of Cloudflare has said that he enjoys taking burned out SDEs from Amazon and giving them a happy life at his company. It's how, in his words, Cloudflare can compete at an engineering level with AWS.

This was also my experience at one of the “prestigious” consulting firms I endured working at for a year. It took me three months just to proceed and navigate through all of their ridiculous hurdles during recruitment.

Out of all of the positions/firms on my CV, that one seems to carry the most weight to recruiters and other companies, despite it being the time where I did the least productive work in my life (So much so that when I was asked why I was leaving during my exit interview I straight up said “I’ve gotten dumber since working here.”)

He mentioned he was a SWE though.

I see you think this is a win-lose system. Free markets, however, are a win-win system. Both parties must win for the transaction to happen.

The employer-employee relationship is just another transaction, and should be win-win. If a manager sees it as win-lose, he should be fired. The same goes for an employee.

I've been an employer and an employee, and always recognized that it should be a win-win relationship and approached it from that angle.

The problem at Amazon as I understand it is extremely darwinian stack-ranking. The leadership principles don’t address this. Even if you have a team of 10 senior high achievers by every metric, some percentage of them have to be managed out every N months. It’s absolutely insane.

If Apple did this, they’d never ship hardware or software updates.

A small part of the problem that's I observed during my interview there is the person who interviewed me mentioned that the teams largely operate independently, and sometimes have competing ideas. First across the finish line wins.

Ultimately, this, I think, sets up a lot of perverse incentives. Engineers are encouraged to burn themselves out to beat their coworkers, and there's less value in maintaining a good product. Anyone who remembers the very early days of their cloud offerings could pretty easily see the results.

Amazon is a retailer, and the mindset of a retailer is squeezing fractions of a penny out of toilet paper vendors. None of the original leadership principles says anything about human beings.

A military veteran is pretty much anyone who served, doesn’t need to be in times of active conflict.

Source: https://www.va.gov/OSDBU/docs/Determining-Veteran-Status.pdf

If you're wondering what the play from unions is after this, its "unexpected" equipment breakdowns and coordinated slowdowns because you now generally lack the leadership necessary to fire people or lead failure/productivity investigations

Most unions don’t allow managers to join, as they’re generally considered to be part of capital’s collective bargaining side, if not part of capital themselves. I think most modern labor theory includes a “professional-managerial class” to account for this.

There’s an argument to be had about where this line makes sense in modern megacorps but local managers in blue collar work tend to hold a lot of power over their employees in particular regardless of the shape of the corporation they’re under, so it would be surprising if they could.

Edit: fair points in the replies about management unions and that I was focused on a North American perspective. I was interpreting the post I replied to as saying the managers would join the union (as in the same one), but they didn't actually say that.

I can definitely believe that things would be different in a less union-adversarial environment. But it's still pretty unlikely that warehouse bosses at amazon would be welcome in the same union as the workers, or be likely to manage to unionize themselves successfully. The incentives just don't really align well in this context: corporate has too many carrots and sticks.

To be like Lukashenko and read the winds of change and to get with the winning team. They have no power otherwise, they're just cogs in the system.

Influence to avoid having the union, but if one is going to form ... then beg to join it.

Bend like a reed in the wind, it's all they can hope to do.

Senior managers (heck, even line managers) do not have the right to unionize.

In that case then the concerns of the workers could have been addressed by going over the heads of the senior managers to the higher-ups. Which provokes two questions:

- Why did it get to the point of a strike if this was just a case of bad internal communication?

- Does this theory really gel with how aggressive Amazon has been against unionization activity? Apparently they could have just met the concerns of the workers immediately.

EDIT:

> If GP is correct, then that signal would be,

On second thought: I am talking about the likely signal that they want to send to other managers, i.e. how they will interpret it. And to just spell it out: I think they will be more wary of associating with unions.

> If GP is correct

Only the Amazon higher ups will know this. Managers will see the correlation between unionizing and getting fired and connect the dots.

Management culture flows from the top. If the managers are pressured by corporate to be utter assholes, and then they get fired because that resulted in unionization, the fault's not just with them, but also further up the tree.

This seems like CYA from someone further up. Bad thing happened, someone must pay for it, we found someone, they are paying for it.

Or ... "you better join a union quick"

> Not if it was literally covered up systemically at each warehouse where the issues lie?

So, you think that they managed to systemically cover up their misdeeds from higher management before the election, but conveniently failed to continue that coverup after the union election.

I mean, sure, you concoct a strained narrative which makes this a noble move by Amazon’s higher management, but...why strain to do that?

Unlawful termination for what?

> If the government were competent at enforcing the rights of laborers, then unions would not be necessary.

I wouldn't say that, but unions should fill the same role that local government should fill. They should respond and resolve local issues specific to their area, so I wouldn't expect my union to negotiate my healthcare just like I wouldn't expect my town to negotiate trade deals with foreign countries. I do however want the unions there to deal with issues specific to my workplace, just like I do want my town to have a local government to deal with issues specific to my town.

Um, I worked on the design of that gearbox for two years. I knew it intimately. That's why I was sent to the test.

The test was to see if the box would crack, deform, or snap under the ultimate load. It didn't. But the test rig bent :-) hahahahahahahaha. Math works.

> Why is it (typically) not a problem is Europe?

Unions are bad in France. There is a strike every other day + they are far from being fair rather than being greedy. So Europe is not an exception here. Here is a recent strike in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-security-workers-go-on-strike-...

Unions can be good if you have two rational parties negotiating reasonably. A greedy employer, and an unreasonable/powerful union and you suddenly unleash hell.

> And why is a union leader who abuses the power not removed from that position? It's not benefiting the union members.

He is benefiting the members in the short-term. And many of your employees can't see past that or read an accounting statement.

> In the end, looking at this in black or white (including your statement) is part of the problem. Unions are neither universally good, nor are they universally bad.

I'm not looking at it in either color. What I am saying is that Unions do not solve the power dynamic problem; and thus can't be the answer for either employees or employers.

No, it is anti-union rhetoric. Assembling a union isn't assembling an army. We can start saying that unions are only necessary when management is bad right after we start saying that management should only have meetings when their employees are bad.

edit: They only say three things - 1) unions aren't necessary if management are good people, 2) unions are an invasion of people from the outside who either don't understand how good our management is or are fomenting discontent for their own foreign purposes, and 3) management is actually fighting against you for you, because if they gave you everything you wanted the place would close down and you would lose your job. You're saying thing number 1.

In my previous job in Germany. Sector: Tech and Research. Excellent managers, amazing WLB (worked till 8PM once and the manager apologised next day), well paid: earning the median income straight out of college.

Had an excellent union and everyone in company hierarchy worked cordially and yet deferentially with them.

Unions are not necessarily a form of attack. Unionise.

It's literally in the anti-union playbooks that union busting firms pass to their busters.

1. I seriously doubt that this is true

2. Amazon can be a customer of AWS's, even if the latter is spun out

AWS was making money well before retail moved onto it. Please show your source.

because an option on a basket is worth less that a basket of options

Investors like profit and they like growth. The moment a business unit isn’t growing or profitable, you need to start justifying why you’re keeping it around.

On the topic of write offs, losing money isn’t great unless it’s used to fuel obscene growth. You don’t spend $2 to save $1. The “we lose money on every sale, but make up for it on volume” model doesn’t work in the long run. More simply, a business is worth the value of all future cash flow, and it’s that simple.

> Why would they do that when one entity's losses can be used as a tax write-off for the other entity's profits.

Because it's better to not have losses than to use them as tax write-offs (also, because basically every use of funds other than retaining profits is already a tax write-off for business, and the ones that aren't losses contribute to future profits.)

Losing and investing money are different things. It's all fine for future to spend money on new warehouses, distribution hubs and better software. But there is expectation that this will at least increase revenue if not the profits. If it does not it is just waste that any company is better off with.

It's not about management. One business has many low paid workers as part of how things have to work; the other has fewer, high skilled workers.

Problem being that the ones interested in scrapping them aren't interested in replacing them.

The fact that a unionization vote was happening would have been more than enough to start an investigation into management and firing management before the vote due to bad practices could have prevented the unionization vote from being passed. I'm not sure it matters much how much leeway the managers actually had in preventing unionization from happening. Amazon has been extremely cold hearted and calculating with the management of their logistics infrastructure. They are managing (ruling) by fear, not love. They could easily have prevented unionization by treating their employees like human beings and not robots, but they chose to go the dystopian route of extreme monitoring and pushing their employees to work as hard as possible. It almost feels like a move that Putin and other dictators would pull. They shift blame to those that are relatively powerless in middle management and make an example of them even though the fault lies with those at the top.

> It doesn't feel like something where the local leadership was free to make their own plays.

Firing managers where unionization happens encourages managers where unionization efforts are under way to make their own plays, whether this is formally allowed or not, whether by company policy or the law.

Obviously, getting caught on independent, policy/law-forbidden, efforts would also have adverse consequences, so the incentive also is to not get caught.

My feelings are bit of a mix bag, some of the complaints I would agree, but some of them seem to be either employee or more likely media exaggeration.

I have no respect or trust of "main stream" media so the reporting on the issue has me questioning what the reality on the ground really is, and the reality from people experienced in working at other warehouses.

Guess we'd better hop in the time machine and go back to 1950 to start the American equivalent of Mondragon to preemptively destroy Amazon before Bezos is even born, then.

Well, I would presume so. May I suggest this short segment setting some groundwork for future discussion: https://youtu.be/Kiru1jZXuvA?t=1883

that's an old argument though, where does it stops?

If someone put those managers in charge of "convincing" workers to not unionize, aren't they responsible as well?

And who gave the order to put someone to "convince" them, haven't they failed too?

That's odd because Union membership has dropped off of a cliff.

Worth noting that Unions can be good and bad - and entrenched union that takes control of the workforce, the kind of place where they don't pick up a hammer unless it's in their job spec, or where hiring/layoffs are 100% controlled by Union ... that can be a problem.

But typically where Unions are formed there's probably a reason.

Walmart, AWS, and probably all of Fast Food / Service and Retail in the US need to pay more.

Sadly - it's not a ware between the 0.1% and the rest of us - though that is a war - the big war is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

At just past the median point in the US people are doing 'great' but below that it drops off a cliff. Most wages just don't enable anyone to live the American dream: own a flat/house, a car, a few appliances, healthcare, stable job, raise your kids and be happy.

America is turning itself in to a snapshot of the globe i.e. 'steep pyramid' instead of having a proper middle class.

It's obviously more complicated than that - a kind of break down in social structure esp. in the bottom layers etc..

Rule of thumb: where unions are forming there is probably a reason. Where unions are entrenched there might be a way to move past that.

How do they explain VAG being the biggest or nearly the biggest car manufacturer in the world then? Strong unions are a big feature of the German industrial landscape.

It's not unions that killed America dominance of car manufacturing it's the them versus us zero-sum attitude that pervades US life. Both the manufacturers and the unions in the US seem guilty in this respect.

“Amazon reportedly left police in Spain 'dumbfounded' by asking them to intervene in a mass warehouse strike and patrol worker productivity”[1]

I wonder what will take for anti-union companies-can-do-nothing-wrong people to consider that maybe companies can be authoritarian and bad.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-asked-police-in-spain...

A strange view. Did management have no say in this?

And yet countries the world over turfed the one protection against the race to the bottom, which are tariffs. The auto industry still exists in North America because tariffs are still in place. Any time there's a significant economic imbalance of incentives, only tariffs will 'level' out the desire to offshore.

Unions may have been presented as the scapegoat and clearly they made raw profitability worse (by what margin is certainly open for debate), the large reason that blue collar wages have been deteriorating in real dollars since the 80s can largely be attributed to globalization and the elimination of tariffs. Argue about the net benefits to the world, maybe. But your loss of dollars probably wasn't the union bugaboo but globalization.