Amazon instructs New York workers “don't sign” union cards
engadget.com
engadget.com
Ooh scary ... is the employment contract signed by Amazon's employees not legally binding? How is it Amazon's business what their grown-ass employees can or cannot sign?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are providing the ALU your personal information.
Like Amazon monitoring my spending habits?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are authorizing the ALU to speak on your behalf.
And thats terrible how?
> The ALU is not part of Amazon and does not represent Amazon
Thats the whole point.
-- Bezos in helium voice
I remember quitting from Krogers bagging groceries when I was a kid. I forget why, but I did give less than 2 weeks notice. Mr. Manager gravely conveyed that if I did this, I'd be barred from working for them again forever. Pretty sure my poker face then was not what it is now, but in any case I did not find that to be anywhere nearly as distressing as he seemed to think I should.
r/Kroger and r/Walmart are real people just trying to deal with life as best they can.
The point here is that getting blacklisted is probably a much scarier prospect for the manager. PMC jobs typically have more stringent reference checks and employment history requirements. Meanwhile a low-wage grocery store clerk is going to have no trouble finding another shitty job. Typical minimum wage jobs just want someone who will show up and doesn't have a criminal record.
The so-called “professional managerial class” is (1) not a class, and (2) a grouping that cuts across the proletariat and petit bourgeiosie (and is largely contained within the intelligentsia component of those classes.)
(Its basically an American-Left resurrection of the Leninist critique of the behavior of the intelligentsia, divorced from the theory in which that critique was grounded which recognized that the intelligentsia were not a genuine classes because their relation to the economy was predominantly as wage labor hired by capital–and thus proletarian–but occasionally petit bourgeois; its kind of weird that its invocation seemed to fade after the 1970s but has become popular again in the last few years.)
The exercise of control over capital/means of production (what defines PMC) isnt exactly the same thing as ownership but it's closer to that than only being able to offer labor.
It's not uncommon for it to be better. PMCs (e.g. C level execs) of major corporations a often make out better than shareholders.
As usually defined (where by the 2010s it accounted for more than a third of American jobs), it's not. It's mostly proletarians, a bit of it is in the petit bourgeois, and a numerically irrelevant or even smaller numerically irrelevant slice is in the haut bourgeoisie (it's not clear to me if the upper end of the usual understanding includes the haut bourgeois who incidentally have the kind of job usually ascribed to the “class” but for whom it is not particular job reflects rather than is in any way necessary to the power they exercise over capital, but it makes little difference either way.)
The whole purpose of the designation, within Leftist discourse, is to identify and growing (even at the time first identified) segment of the wage-labor force as class enemies of the proletariat by inventing a new class label to apply to them, so as to justify why they aren't targets for solidarity efforts.
> PMCs (e.g. C level execs) of major corporations a often make out better than shareholders.
C-level execs of major corps aren't typical members of the PMC “class” by a long shot.
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class - University of Minnesota Press
I was raised to believe that a job is more important than just about anything, so I decided to try to go in as I was out of town. I crashed my car as I fell asleep at the wheel. It shouldn’t take that to get someone to realize the relative unimportance of a job, but the US culture (as channeled through my conservative parents, at least) doesn’t value anything higher than work and productivity in the service of capital as this deified virtue.
I nailed everything from context except the particular crime being alluded to.
It would not guarantee a term of employment, in the standard form (but could, if it were so modified).
Despite the colloquial use of the word "contract," there is generally always going to be an employment contract (agreement) in place.
Similarly, people colloquially talk about having a "contract" for things like cellphones meaning a fixed term, but there is always an actual "contract" (agreement) with the terms of the service regardless of whether the plan has a fixed term or not and regardless of whether it's prepaid or not.
I don't think this is a controversial definition of the word contract (for example Wikipedia's entry for "contract" states, "A contract is a legally enforceable agreement...").
I did not say that contract and agreement are synonyms that can be replaced with each other in all circumstances, so I'm not really sure that your comment is relevant to what I wrote.
I was also trying to clarify that the employment contract might be titled "Employment Agreement" or something like that but is still a "contract."
My workplace doesn't have them except for employees that are part of bargaining units (ie, the ones represented by unions). Sadly, I am not one of these; my employment is contract-free.
If the worker isn't receiving consideration: Slavery, which is illegal in the civilised world (Americans still enslave convicted criminals...)
If the employer isn't receiving consideration: Some sort of payroll error? Are you mistakenly still paying people you fired? Call HR now.
“But they didn't sign anything like a contract,” one might object.
They accepted an offer to do work of some specification for pay of some specification. Even if there was nothing in writing and no other explicit terms, that's sufficient to have a contract.
Of course, this is Amazon we’re talking about, so they may just go for it and plan to clean up the mess later. Walmart got away with that approach for decades.
Your language, IMO, is value-laden. Card-signing is a common "tactic" for unions like the presidential election is a "tactic" for deciding the next president.
I'm not opposed to unionizing but I take issue with the idea that getting 50% support means "it is obvious that they don't need an election."
Maybe that’s not always the case, but that’s what I’d guess is happening in this case.
(via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check)
Without reforming the secret ballot process, you’re just handing power to the companies by advocating against card-checks
However, a huge percentage of companies today are actively doing these things to their workers, and if you selected 10 companies at random where there were unionization efforts, I'd bet you money that in at least 9 of them, management was doing everything they could legally, and probably some things that are questionable or outright illegal, to try to prevent unionization.
Stop the "both sides"-ism. It's disingenuous and detrimental to genuine understanding of the situation.
You really can't see the issue with authorising a group you have little to no control over, speak on your behalf ? I can totally understand that people share some views with what unions are currently defending.
But the requirement on signing a paper that says "whatever the union currently says and will say in the future 100% represents my point of view" is a fair criticism of the union model.
Is that what it says? It says that you have to agree to be legally responsible for the union's opinions on netflix shows, or of your cousin's marriage?
No, it says that you're agreeing for them to represent you with the company, not some made-up all-encompassing scaremongering paraphrasing of that.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily on Amazon's side here. Their scare-mongering is pretty slimy, to say no more. But IMTDb's objection is valid, even adjusted for your criticism.
A union authorization card is simply a means of demonstrating the 30% employee support required for the NLRB to order an election. That’s it. Unions will generally not hold elections until 60% of employees have signed cards, because a majority vote is required.
From the anti-union National Right to Work Foundation:
“You have a legal right to revoke any union authorization card that you have signed. It is illegal for a union to restrict your right to revoke a union authorization card that you signed.”
Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.
Unrealistic, in neoliberalism.
They’ll eventually build higher labor costs into their financial projects and pass along some of the costs. Shareholders probably won’t care much, because Amazon is still a good investment.
Based on retail business profit margins, it would mean higher prices for customers. Not that that is a bad thing, less consumption would be great.
They set the bottom price, and if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins, then their costs increases will have to end up in either prices increases or them no longer selling the product.
The funny thing is that it is Amazon coming along and greatly increasing demand for labor (in conjunction with reduced supply of that type of labor) that caused all the other warehouse jobs and retailers to increase pay.
And I hope the labor continues making gains in their quality of life at work and pay, but I do not see this happening without an increase in prices for products (like we have already seen).
Paying 18$ for something your selling for 20$ is a 10% margin, taxes and CC processing fees are similarly inflexible. So if 2-4% of the final price is profit then they could raise their internal costs by 10% and still be profitable.
They're not (depending on the product).
My wife used to work in Halloween costume design for a wholesaler (and some of her costumes did end up in Target and Walmart, which was cool to see), and the retailers' margins on those were at least 50%.
As I said, the margin does depend heavily on the product, but do not assume that across-the-board average margins are anywhere near that razor-thin.
I would need a good reason to believe the executives and owners of retail businesses do not want to report higher profit margins.
To simplify, if you want to say develop new software you can call it a capital investment and pay for it with after tax money or call it operating expense and pay for it in pretax money. Guess which one is a better deal.
It’s like the old trick of paying an offshore subsidiary in a tax heaven licensing fees to use your own IP with the added advantage of being able to directly profit from the use of these investments. Nobody looking at the books would think such things are actual expenses, but companies must pretend they are.
They even know this - Amazon is running out of eligible workers to hire. But the need to hit quarterly metrics forces the line management to make strategically bad decisions.
The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes. Prices are no different than anywhere else.
...Really? That's a straight detriment in my book, as a customer.
I would generally prefer to support a union shop, but I'm extremely fond of self-checkout—and, in fact, further upstate, Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.
One of the worst things unions can do is try to "protect jobs" at the expense of technological advancement, customer service, or improved product.
You're subsidizing them at your own cost with self-checkout. After all, you are:
-Updating their inventory tracking system -engaging with the regulatory framework of purchasing on their behalf -being subject to their annoying "loss prevention hot days" where they turn the merchandise scales on.
I've started to take a different view toward these jobs over time. Being an employer is a high bar in the U.S., and if we (the taxpayers proxied through the markets/Federal Reserve) have an objective to have people participating in the workforce, then these "automated" checkouts cost workforce participation.
Which also means fewer training opportunities for low skill workers, fewer jobs of last resort, etc. Not everything is necessarily $$$.
Be a hell of an economics project to really suss out the difference in flow of money in grocers who took different approaches.
Kroger did that here a few years ago. They pushed it hard. Got very little uptake. It's still an option, but they aren't shoving it in your face when you walk in. There are just a handful of scanners on a rack by the entrance, and I've never seen anyone using them.
Works great.
The point is, retail and warehouse unions don’t translate into retail apocalypse.
Walmart tries to do everything but they suck imo. The produce is garbage, but the dry goods are cheap due to their economy of scale.
Limiting cross-borders money flow is a very good way to keep social contract intact.
For some reason, it was the growth of global trade that coincided with the growth of global GDP & the increase of the life quality of the earth population.
It's funny how people cry about CO2 and whatnot. But when it's about trade, suddenly transporting stuff thousands of kilometers is fiiiine.
More subtly, in the current economy there are basically only two pots that higher real-terms wages for workers can come from: taking from other workers, and taking from the retired. That's because the whole economy has a supply-side crisis in basically everything and does not have the capacity to supply people overall with any more than they already have. All the usual scapegoats, like the super-wealthy, just don't consume enough as a proportion of the global economy that redistributing from them would have an impact on ordinary people. (Often articles attempt to confuse people about this by using definitions of wealthy that include like a third of the US population, or by comparing net worth instead and tricking people into thinking it means consumption by ordinary people could be increased by that amount if it was redistributed.)
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...
That's a big IF. Unions were invented after the onset of the industrial revolution to combat truly unsafe work conditions in industrial settings where worker's dying was common.
OSHA did away with all that.
The current generation of "bad work condition" complaints is around getting adequate bathroom breaks.
The reality is that it’s a toothless tiger by design. Many states do their own enforcement, and don’t exactly prioritize it — IIRC, North Carolina has 20% of the inspectors that it says it needs.
I’m sure your cushy IT gig requires you to stand for 6 hours without taking a piss. Try it sometime before attacking others.
Wages are and have always been the primary driver of unionising.
The main motivation was never mustache twirling capitalist charicatures shoveling children into furnaces as fuel or some other unambiguous evil that we have since banished. Conditions have always been part of the bargain, but the goal has always been first and foremost higher wages.
https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/factory-fire-reveals-banglad...
Suppose you're a manager/foreman. You never outright tell your staff to ignore safety regulations; you simply give them a huge workload with a deadline and set of equipment that make it impossible to feasibly accomplish the workload within compliance. Your workers catch on that in order to get the job done, they need to ignore the safety regs. As a manager, you look the other way as they ignore the rules. If an injury happens on the job, you then blame the worker for ignoring the safety regulations, which of course you instructed them to follow. Follow up by giving them a drug test so you might even be able to get out of paying them workers comp.
This is how it works in the real world. Source: seen it, done it.
If you do not push back against management, nothing changes, and unfortunately, to get anything provable in a court of law beyond he said she said... It has to be on paper/in an email.
Go on. Text your boss you can't get the job done on his schedule without violating OSHA standards. Then come back tomorrow and finish it. If they decide to fire you, sue. All the evidence you need will be discoverable.
Don't absorb risk for people not putting their neck on the line.
Here's the secret though: It's their ass on the line if it doesn't get done. If they're a middle manager, they now have to go back with hat in hand and tell their higher up they made a mistake. That repeats for however many layers of middle management exist until resources get properly allocated. It's their business that takes the hit if it gets out to client's that project their having built is meat grinding their laborers.
You the end laborer, hold the power in this case. A manager cannot knowingly force you to conduct your work in such a way as your rights to a safe workplace are jeopardized. You have the power to expose it, and make it unequivocably known to your higher ups that these violations are happening. You can report your employer to your local OSHA enforcement arm.
A law on paper but never enforced is no law at all, and a workplace where everyone lets the boss abuse one another is the only outcome if you won't stand up for you, and sometimes, encourage someone else to stand up for themselves. I did it for my people damn it. You need to do it for yourselves and your peers. This is why labor organization is important. Businesses can abuse you because people don't act in concert to the degree the business does.
No work is so important it cannot be done as safely as possible. No one has the right to conspire to put you in harms way. An employer who provably does is not entitled to be an employer in the United States. That is a privilege, not a right.
Fight, damnit! Fight! Or vote with your feet by finding something else to do! If you don't set the bar for people to not work for, and refuse to make their life more difficult by making them accountable for their own malfeasance, you're passing the buck to the next crazy motherf'er who will, and we are in short supply.
Those things are currently damn tough for most people, and that's where
FIGHT DAMMIT!!
...breaks down.
You aren't wrong. Having been in those scenarios, when it was my turn to make the calls, the stuff got done safely, work / life balance is appropriate, and so forth.
It's expensive too! Tons of economic pressure on not doing the right things for and with people.
The farther away from the edge people are, the more they are able to do those things you say. The more robust their support network is, the more able they are.
If everyone gets paid tomorrow 100 USD/hour, everything around you will start costing 10x more. Look at Switzerland.
2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
What a strange comment imo. I can’t take the ‘everything will go up!’ stance seriously while higher ups are buying 10 houses and private jets. The wage gap is atrocious.
By the way, Switzerland’s GDP is 748 billion vs the United States’ 20.94 trillion. Comparing them like that is meaningless and silly.
Can you show your work here? Assume Amazon executives cut their salaries to 0, how much extra would they be able to pay workers?
If the high pay is truly attracting better performers (which I admit is unlikely) they could easily be benefiting the company’s workers a larger amount by increasing demand. Or maybe not and they are kinda useless , but in any case the total cost isn’t that high.
Amazon allegedly has about 1.6 million employees. Assuming that the "executive" class is a trivially small number of them, and that the average employee works say 2,000 hours per year, you're suggesting that the cost to Amazon of paying those executives is somewhere between $960B and $3.2T per year.
The high end of that estimate is about one fifth of the total earned income for the entire U.S. economy.
Wow, then they can buy an extra starbucks coffee now and then. That would surely change their life.
Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars. And if you claim that everyone needs to make decent wages, who is to define what "decent" is supposed to be? People will always be asking for more, never less.
> 2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
Even if CEOs gave up their whole salary tomorrow, it would not change the pay of people working in very large companies with dozens of thousands or hundred of thousands of employees.
Huh? That isn’t reasonable at all and I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith because of it.
Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.
If wages at the bottom go up and that causes inflation, the overall impact of that is wage compression, or in other words, reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.
Reducing the PPP of rich people while only maintaining that of poorer people seems like a dubious policy outcome, at least in economic terms.
Well, it wouldn't outpace inflation right now, shit is crazy. But usually, yes.
If you don’t like supply chain issues and inflation right now, you won’t like the model you propose.
The simple truth is warehouse employee salaries aren’t significant because of throughput. Someone making 30$/hour vs 15$/hour sounds huge but when people are picking 300+ items an hour that’s 5 cents a pop. But, more realistic unionized job would be 17$/hour but only 250 items a sub 2 cents increase.
Is it what usually happens when workers unionize? It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well.
Sure. So the customer buys less product, the company makes less profit, and the shareholders eject the executives.
But there are huge delays in these chains of causation, which provide opportunities for arbitrage.
Obviously, if workers can negotiate more effectively by being unionised, that exerts upward pressure on costs. Those additional costs can be met out of profits (i.e. shareholders pay, and execs get sacked) or "efficiencies" (e.g. automation, reducing headcount).
If you can figure out how to make a better product that you can charge more for, then everyone's happy. If you can't, then perhaps your competitor can, even if he's unionised too. Unions can contribute at least as much to product and process improvement as management can. In fact unions can be seen as an adjunct to management.
> In fact unions can be seen as an adjunct to management.
That's arse-over-tit. My view has long been that management's purpose, in a company that makes stuff, is to remove obstacles from production staff. In that respect, they are servants: rather like clerks, or office managers. Managers are an adjunct to production workers, not the other way round.
I don't mean to disparage either clerks or office managers; most of the ones I've worked with were pure gold. But I've never met a useful project manager; and as you get higher in the monkey tree, you meet people who are more difficult/dangerous, and less helpful.
/me retired, had time to reflect on my career. A bit.
I always liked computers as a teen.
I started work in a Big-5 computer company, and gradually moved to smaller companies. Me and big companies wasn't a good match, on reflection. But I can't see what I could have done differently, at the time. Even in the light of what I've learned since.
Can you substantiate this claim?
With the vast majority of goods the price is set by the market, i.e. higher wages would indeed result in a smaller profit margin and not in a higher price.
Some of the grocery shops near me are known union shops. The prices are in fact higher than the non union shops.
The price is determined by the market. But there’s a demand curve. There are many prices that an item could sell at, with varying numbers of buyers at each price.
In a highly competitive market, the price should be driven down close to the cost of production. This allows the most people to buy at the lowest possible price, at the expense of retailer margins.
Amazon probably has the best cost structure of online retailers. Which means in many cases they are setting the floor on the price. If their labor costs go up enough to wipe out their margins, their prices must go up, or they must exit the market for highly competitive items. With less competition, other retailers have more leeway to increase prices.
As a society we may decide it is worth paying more for goods to ensure a fair living wage and safe working conditions. That doesn’t sound unreasonable. But to assume you can get that without increasing prices is naive.
[0]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2022/q1/...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-auto...
I wrote this comment earlier today, but didn't post it. Now I do, and added some stuff at the end to hint the answer to your question:
I worked for amazon logistics some time ago and the lack of future vision and aim for automating everything™ was the biggest reason for why I quit.
I wish amazon would invest more into automation, but at the moment humans are just so much cheaper that you’d rather hire 500-2000 people for a few months peak (prime day and holiday season), than invest in automation.
Actually, amazon itself does zero to none research and engineering in logistics by themselves. Instead, they only buy third party solutions (Opex) or the whole company (Kiva - now amazon robotics). And Kiva is only working on the six wheeler, Robin (arm) and Pegasus. What does this mean? Well, amazon has more than one warehouse type: they have the fullfillment centers, where the six wheelers are used, but they also have IXDs (inbound cross dock), where EVERY product, which comes from the vendor and will be sold via fullfillment centers will go through. These IXD facilities have almost no automation, at least the ones which I visited (UK, DE, ES).
People are counting hundreds of shirt buttons by hand.
People are bubble wrapping hoes for gardening by hand.
People are bagging clothes by hand.
People are repackaging STANDARD SIZE cans (food and drinks) into boxes by hand.
People are palletizing STANDARDIZED CONTAINERS BY HAND(!)
People are putting a single scissor into a tote, because the computer told them so. Why? Because someone entered wrong dimensions BY HAND. (You could easily get the dimensions by scanning. Even taking a picture would be sufficient to get the correct dimensions into the system). [1]
Kiva's projects don't solve a single problem regarding: Palletizing, receiving items, sorting items in the RECEIVING part of IXD, labelling items, bubble wrapping items, bagging items, repackaging items into new boxes (literally putting item from container A into container B). What made me sad is that amazon didn't even try to solve these issues. They just act like these problems don't exist and always show the nice fullfillment centers where you pick and stove.
To end my rant: Amazon was the worst company I ever worked for. Insanely slow, very inefficient and way too much nepotism. They lack the actual will and hunger for improvement. My main goal when I applied to amazon was to make an "all lights out warehouse". What I got instead was an enterprise which is rotten on the inside.
But hey, there were still a lot of brillant people, especially my manager (kudos to him!). Also, the engineers who worked for AWS were always very friendly and problem oriented (only had very little contact during outages though).
[1] A tote is one of those yellow boxes: https://media.wired.com/photos/593256d2edfced5820d0fb9d/mast...
What? You think overseas manufacturers are paying $30 an hour?
It wasn't high-skilled manufacturing that was outsourced. Welders and machinists still have near zero unemployment and make about as much as a software engineer. It was low skilled manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to China. Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
At that point, the factory owner is going to be focused on automation and robotics, so most of the jobs they offer will be for highly skilled positions (and pay more than welders or machinists make).
Not all warehouse jobs are equally terrible, as evidenced by the people working at warehouses other than Amazon's at lower wages. Amazon pays above the going rate for warehouse workers because of its reputation w.r.t. worker conditions.
I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse. It's easy for someone working as a developer to maintain that warehouse jobs aren't all "equally terrible." They mostly are terrible. The majority of warehouse workers would rather be working another job, especially Amazon workers. In many of their labor markets, Amazon is chewing through the available labor supply faster than it can be replenished. By the end of this year and especially by the end of 2024 in many markets Amazon will no longer have fresh workers. I wonder where you prime delivery will be then.
Further, Amazon might pay higher than average wages for the industry, but the high turnover creates an oversupply of warehouse skilled labor and actually depresses wages. They offer slight incentives for staying but then overwork their employees to encourage their resignations to hire newer, minimum starting pay employees.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-am...
I have, on multiple warehouse floors, for around 3 years cumulatively.
Meanwhile, it's obvious you're projecting your own inexperience. Maybe you're the one who should actually set foot in a warehouse before commenting.
> They mostly are terrible.
Then I'm sure you'd consider any job away from an air-conditioned office to be terrible.
Warehouse work is certainly hard work; picking and packing certainly entail being physically active. I won't pretend it's immune to asshole bosses or that injuries never happen; that's the nature of manual labor under capitalism. It's still vastly preferable to outright abusive job sectors like retail or restaurant work or customer service; I'll take walking 5+ miles through a pick path or packing 50+ boxes all day (even with leads and sups breathing down my neck over my numbers) long before I'd consider subjecting myself to snotty asshole customers berating me over their own ineptitude.
Amazon is the exception, not the rule. Warehouse workers outside of Amazon could certainly be paid better - all workers could and should, in many many sectors - but this assertion that a megacorporation with a specific reputation for abuse is somehow representative of an entire job sector is one of those baseless assertions that demonstrates considerable ignorance and inexperience.
> I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse.
I don't think that I should have said this, and my combative tone wasn't constructive to the discussion. It is my normal, sometimes incorrect operating assumption on this site that while the general user knows about tech that they know jack-all about working in retail etc.
> Then I'm sure you'd consider any job away from an air-conditioned office to be terrible.
Generally speaking, I do consider this to be true, especially in triple digit weather with high humidity which seems to be the norm moving forward. We are all less human and more prone to aggression in this heat. I am grateful that I have the privilege of working in an air conditioned office now.
> Warehouse work is certainly hard work; picking and packing certainly entail being physically active. I won't pretend it's immune to asshole bosses or that injuries never happen; that's the nature of manual labor under capitalism. > I'll take walking 5+ miles through a pick path or packing 50+ boxes all day (even with leads and sups breathing down my neck over my numbers).
Neither of these descriptions provide a positive assertion of warehouse work being not terrible. Warehouse work often takes a physical and mental toll that makes pursuing opportunities to leave it absurdly difficult without social support. I think that your descriptions only further lend credence to my claim that working in a warehouse is generally terrible or at the very least not pleasant.
> It's still vastly preferable to outright abusive job sectors like retail or restaurant work or customer service > long before I'd consider subjecting myself to snotty asshole customers berating me over their own ineptitude.
I recognize this misanthropy. I still have it from my time working in retail and elsewhere. It'll be a cold day in July when I go back of my own volition. I get it. I really do. I'm not going to rehash my experiences here, but it sounds like you've had similar moments, hours, shifts, years.
I see that you've also fallen for that trap of hating one type of low income work more than another. They all have their shitty sides. I think all of our lives would be improved if the general public learned a shred of empathy and respect. I won't hold my breath, but sometimes I have hope.
> this assertion that a megacorporation with a specific reputation for abuse is somehow representative of an entire job sector is one of those baseless assertions that demonstrates considerable ignorance and inexperience.
Amazon typifies and exemplifies this trend of declining working conditions, respect, and exacting work. Also, maybe you should calm down and take a few deep breaths. Try getting more sleep, eating healthy, going for walks where possible, and limiting caffeine intake.
> workers outside of Amazon could certainly be paid better - all workers could and should, in many many sectors
I think we'll both find common ground here. I've often had enough of people expressing disdain for 'undifferentiated' or 'low-skilled' labor' being undeserving of income necessary to afford living. I think we could both find common sense and common views, but we have different outlooks on society. Given the quality of our discussion here I sincerely hope we don't have the displeasure of meeting. Vaya con dios.
And you have every right to that opinion, but that wasn't quite the topic of the discussion; rather, the topic was whether all warehouse working conditions are equally terrible, and my experience (as well as the experiences of my coworkers during that time, some of whom came from Amazon) strongly suggests otherwise.
> I see that you've also fallen for that trap of hating one type of low income work more than another.
That's hardly a "trap"; that's a basic preference for doing hard work v. doing hard work while also being endlessly emotionally abused as part of the job description - and even ignoring Amazon, the former tends to pay at least marginally better.
> Also, maybe you should calm down and take a few deep breaths. Try getting more sleep, eating healthy, going for walks where possible, and limiting caffeine intake.
Maybe you should follow your own advice instead of yet again projecting onto me.
> I've often had enough of people expressing disdain for 'undifferentiated' or 'low-skilled' labor' being undeserving of income necessary to afford living.
And hopefully you realize that I already do agree with that disdain (as is obvious from the other comments of mine on this site over the last 10 years).
> Given the quality of our discussion here I sincerely hope we don't have the displeasure of meeting. Vaya con dios.
If we do, then hopefully it'll be under better circumstances, without the initial hostility.
> Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
Auto factory jobs (which were outsourced) certainly paid that much and more in inflation adjusted dollars. From a book studying the auto industry describing average wages in Detroit,
> At $11.62 an hour in 1982 wages, Detroit's autoworkers, according to U.S. car companies, were simply too expensive, particularly with the added cost of pensions, health insurance, and union-negotiated work rules.
This is already over $30/hr in 2022 dollars.
1. only low skilled jobs were outsourced
2. low skilled jobs by definition do not pay more than $30/hr.
i am saying at least one of these is wrong, but it really is a question of semantics which one it is.
The decline of Detroit UAW auto industry definitely weren't outsourced. It certainly wasn't GM that opened car factories in Japan and Germany. And it certainly wasn't GM shareholders or executives that benefited from the rise of Japanese and German imports.
This isn't outsourcing, this is simply a case of American carmakers being outcompeted by better products from Japanese and European competitors. (A significant fraction of which were actually assembled in US-based plants owned by those overseas competitors.)
This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)
2. It does have to do with mobility of capital in that many of these "international" competitors are still reliant on American capital and are owned in no small part by American institutional investors.
> This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)
You are mixing in a moral argument about which is better but it is sort of irrelevant to the veracity of claims like "manufacturing jobs never paid close to $30/hr" and "high-skilled manufacturing was never outsourced."
The Japanese auto industry, like virtually all of postwar Japan, was almost entirely financed by Japan's persistently high domestic savings rate. You don't have to take my word for it, just look at the long and persistently high current account deficit Japan has with the US. Japan is a huge net exporter of capital, not importer, and it has been for 50 years.
Right now these workers work at Amazon, because that's the best paying job they can find.
For jobs that Amazon hires people there isn’t a technology to automate right now.
Such technology is being developed (better AI and better robotics), but increasing the budget wouldn’t necessarily speed things up.
Did you ever work on AI or robotics?
They are not willing to pay to upgrade all the old FCs, new international FCs, etc. i.e. “it’s too expensive”.
This is also clear in how Amazon waited till the pandemic to add self checkout counters to many Whole Foods. They spent “$4 BB on safety measures for employees” and called self checkout a safety measure to reduce employee to employee density and employee to customer contact. Again it was previously “too expensive to do in mass” even if only for the terrible press it would have brought out side the pandemic.
Not saying “they will never get to it.” They will. Or that it’s not worth it. But the other commenter is also right that unions and hire wages could drive a larger investment in automation earlier than it would have otherwise.
I live in very liberal SF but outside of my bubble, I hear people complain that it’s not possible to hire Nannies/housecleaners/employees anymore when Amazon and Starbucks pay $18/hr. Seems like the answer is easy: pay them more or make the job more desirable.
Amazon working conditions are challenging, and they have been super anti-union. But they’ve also done more to increase wages in the US than anyone in Washington in the past 15 years, arguably second biggest in past 40 [1].
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
Amazon has to pay more because their jobs are shit. They aren’t doing anything to raise wages they’re just trying to get people’s asses in the door. I’m sort of shocked you linked to the department of labor’s historical page as some sort of proof of your idea.
I can guarantee that wage is the minimum they can pay to get people in the door for the level of work required by them calculated by a legion of economists.
The fact you think Amazon jobs are competing with “Nannies/house cleaners/employees” is equally strange. Like somehow these jobs are related?! Why do you only compare those jobs to Amazon factory jobs?
Their jobs also are super stressful and burn people out.
These things are not contradictory.
Anecdotally, in support of the comment you are replying to, Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here, and $100-$150 a night isn't anywhere near enough to screw with her sleep schedule. She works $18/hr morning shifts and now owns a car.
They're low-skill/training jobs, so no skilled job is able to pay less than that. (Also, the Starbucks thing is part time, and she had babysat for other people too -- babysitting probably made sense at 2x the hourly rate of a part time job, but $25 isn't 2x anymore.)
Seems like $25/hour was the market rate.
Presumably, it'll even out after the labor shortages subside.
What does not exist is an intersection of the supply and demand curves of people willing and able to pay what people capable of babysitting want to get paid for babysitting.
I’m not here to say that Amazon is doing a great job and we should all be singing Jeff Bezos’s good graces. But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but on everyone who could want to work at Amazon but can’t because their jobs are more scarce, and by everyone who buys things from retailers (Amazon or not) in the form of higher prices.
Unionists like to talk about how the labor movement provided a lot of basic protections for workers and the 40 hour work week. What they like to talk less about is American unions’ frequent associations with organized crime, it’s history of racism and sexism, all of the environmental bills it has fought against. I could go on.
A union-free Amazon has driven up wages for workers throughout the economy. And it has helped keep prices low for everyone else so that even if you don’t earn as much as a Amazon warehouse worker nor shop at Amazon, you can still afford many basic necessities. So yes, I’m saying we should be singing the good graces of competition.
But HR departments are not usually doing that as a first step. They talk to the employee and try to get an apology if needed. The stories in the news are always egregious examples or people with a long history and it was the last straw
Even if someone does something truly horrific, unions still need to protect their rights to a proper hearing, evidence, etc.
A while ago a reporter was fired from the NYTimes for repeating racist language used by a third party.
The reporter had works at the NYTimes for decades with a clear record. A few years before the incident, they became part of unions negotiating team.
Once they joined the negotiating team, the paper suddenly began disciplining then for minor infractions.
Once the allegations about racist language came about, they had a dirty record.
Per the union agreement, had a right to see the evidence against them. The paper refused to do that.
If this person hadn’t been part of union negotiating team, they would have had a clean record, and likely would have survived.
They are now working as a reporter at the Economist.
How does that translate into making racist or hateful statements?
A better translation is they were in a forum where racist or hateful statements were made, but did it participate in making them.
I like parts of the analysis (if a big player has to pay higher wages, this will affect many in different ways). But I think it's hard to discuss what exactly the implications would be without a deeper analysis including numbers.
Without numbers, I find that participants in a discussion are often tempted to put a high emphasis on a certain argument or on the impact of a mechanism just because they have come up with that argument or mechanism. But actual numbers might imply a different weighting.
An example would be: With longer fingernails you might be able to swim faster. But to what degree?
It doesn't matter how much you pay me if I can't see my kids and have to pee in a bottle.
Obviously Amazon is giving good enough wages for their working condition as evidenced by people choosing to work there rather than leaving.
A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)
Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.
If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.
I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.
This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.
With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.
I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.
Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.
> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.
Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.
We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.
Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?
If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans
Business cannot exist without two parties transacting. Businesses can exist without ownership. That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them. There does not even have to be capital exchanged. Bartering for labor can and does happen.
That would be an insane stance to take. That is essentially arguing in favor of slavery, the idea that someone other than me owns my labour.
You can own the output of my labour if you have an employment contract with me where I trade you that in exchange for something from you, but you can't ever own my labour itself. That would be nuts.
And such quibbling over definitions is irrelevant when people can't even afford the more affordable of the two.
Warehouse workers before Amazon were making over $20/hr. Amazon seriously depressed wages for that kind of work. How do you think they got so profitable and outcompeted everyone else in that space?
A lot of people, even economists, conflate the freedom of trade with the free movement of capital. They are not the same and not equivalent. I like to point people to this comic [1] that someone made when the TPP was hot news as it accurately describes this in a very accessible way.
Neoliberalism serves the interests of the capital-owning class.
That doesn't mean unions are bad or useless. It would be like saying that since democratic governments can be corrupted, we should do without democracy.
Better job opportunities for a part of the population means that all employers need to improve conditions to compete for employees.
> Unions can be corrupted or do mistakes
Industry in Detroit is a perfect example of what can happen when unions have way too much power. The current conversation really downplays how ridiculously powerful unions like the UAW were. It was effectively impossible to lose your job -- you would have line workers that would bring a portable TV to work and watch their work roll past them all day, and they were able to do that until the plants closed down because of the terms the union had in place. I have multiple drawers of tools from vendors that only ever sold B2B; in my father's time, you would buy them off UAW members that stole them from auto manufacturers in decently large quantities, because you wouldn't get fired for it. The only way to reliably lose your job was to cross the union itself. Even people who were part of a union at that time will pretty readily admit that they were unsustainably powerful. We're not even started on the organized crime that came out of unions in Detroit at that time.
The point isn't that unions shouldn't exist at all. The point is that you need to be really careful with comments like the root comment, which describe unions as the common man engaging in a heroic struggle against the forces of capitalist evil, while completely glossing over what they have become in multiple places at multiple points in history.
My parents had good experience with their unions. Every interaction every person I know in my generation has had with them (CWA, UAW, teamsters, railway unions, etc, etc.) has been strongly negative.
The Amazon workers should form a new union if they want representation.
Cards from existing corrupt national unions are definitely a trap. Once enough people sign, they will swoop in to extract dues, bribe politicians on unrelated issues, and alternate between sabotaging Amazon's work environment and negotiating away whatever current benefits the workers get.
People that are good at negotiating union politics will somehow become unfirable, and just stop bothering to do their jobs.
If history repeats itself, the union reps will then work with Amaozn to create an underclass of ununionizable jobs and hire people at minimum wage to do the old $18/hr work, while the union cronies "supervise" for $25+/hr.
Yeah, they were great at listening before.
Also, where are these unions where the people in it aren't the people it represents. Recently, a school board election ad, "we have to stop the teachers union and start listening to teachers." Well, who the hell is in the teachers union if not teachers?
well, union higher-ups are basically politicians, they're not usually working in the job by that point
To quote the NLRB's website directly:
> Federal law allows unions and employers to enter into "union-security" agreements which require all employees in a bargaining unit to become union members and begin paying union dues and fees within 30 days of being hired. Employees may choose not to become union members and pay dues, or opt to pay only that share of dues used directly for representation, such as collective bargaining and contract administration. Known as objectors, they are no longer union members, but are still protected by the contract. Unions are obligated to tell all covered employees about this option, which was created by a Supreme Court ruling and is known as the Beck right.
This usually works well enough, but in certain circumstances, you can have a small minority control the entire operation and the vast majority are "represented" by an institution they have no voice in. This seems to be the case in lower paid unions (e.g. grocery baggers) because the majority can't afford the extra dues.
Professional bureaucrats.
Teachers unions in public schools are the worst. They hold our childrens’ futures hostage and get paid out by politicians buying votes, who pass the bill to the next generation.
>My mom was a negotiator for the teacher's union for about a decade. She was a para-professional, working with disabled students, for about 20 years.
Nothing you said really contradicts the parent post's claim that the people working in unions are "Professional bureaucrats". If your mom was working with disabled students for 20 years, then switched to being a bureaucrat for the next 10 years, she's still arguably a "Professional bureaucrat".
Are you confusing the school board with the teachers union? One sets curriculum, class size, and budget. The later really only influences salary, benefits, and working hours.
---
[1] "The [NLRB] hearing officer also found objectionable Amazon's distribution of "vote no" pins and other anti-organizing paraphernalia to employees in the presence of managers and supervisors. ... U.S. labor law forbids companies from spying on organizing activities or leaving employees with the impression they are under surveillance. It also prohibits other actions if they are found to be coercive." https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-interfered-with-unio...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1022384731/amazon-warehouse-w...
And today's SCOTUS seems to want to defang all government agencies' ability to rule on or enforce . . . anything, really, based on their rulings on the EPA and the SEC. Well, unless it's the government trying to enforce on reservation land - that is newly allowed.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
The general idea, yeah. It proves how strong a union can be.
The implementation? No. A union for people who have monopoly on violence? No. A union that protects people who are actively hurting civilians without recourse? No.
Been burned big time by that.
This is exactly what happens, though. You don't stay truly rich without a decent chunk of political influence. So, yeah, police protect the private property of those who support that idea most.
Police are civilians too. Using "civilian" in this way is supporting the militarization of police, and is not a good thing.
I lost control of my health, my hair turned white, and during that time I lost most of my friends. It’s obviously my own fault for letting all that happen.
Of all the companies in the world, Amazon is probably one of the coldest, soulless places.
Management is riddled with politics and third rate talent who’ll often knowingly do the wrong thing, just to get promoted.
The people who actually drove the innovation, who weren’t necessary easier to work with but at least had some technical vision and production vision have all left.
A significant piece of the company is all just legacy systems and tech debt, supported by Indian H1Bs who hire more H1Bs.
If the government breaks up AWS and the rest of Amazon, most of their domains won’t make business sense anymore. There are too many middle men who are against this though - everyone from companies that help people relocate, to vendors that provide special tax services for the H1B army.
I hope Amazon fully unionizes. Even in tech, it was a grueling, toxic place to work.
Until Amazon can start treating workers well, it seems to me the best move is not to pay them to abuse people.
this should be illegal.
If you’re talking about missing the slide title, don’t be so hard on yourself, mistakes happen.