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.
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...
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.