Not that Unions are simply great and effective - unions bring their own set of problems. But a company this large shouldn't have been able to fight unionization for so long.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
So with this background its not hard to see why workers don't bother to join a union or invest that much in improving working conditions in their current role. They want to be moving on to another job or better role in a year or less anyway.
Disclaimer: I am an Amazon employee, and I am speaking from my own personal viewpoint, not for Amazon.
Even with things like construction jobs, which are pretty well liked in my family, you are expected to move up to the "better" jobs like heavy machinery operator, or management, and such.
It definitely isn't in New York City, of course, which starts to get at the real problem, but this isn't really an Amazon problem. No matter how strong a union ends up being, they're not going to push wages high enough for unskilled labor to ever be able to comfortably live in a place like New York City, but New York City still needs things like Amazon fulfillment centers. This is a problem with cities in general. None of them can house the low-skill populations they nonetheless require to do most of the labor required to make a city livable for everyone else.
This explains some of the difference: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...
And from my understanding in Europe you can pick whichever Union you like (maybe you can confirm?) While in the US the employer is locked to a single Union.
That single difference explains why they are unpopular in the US.
* ACV/CSC - catholic * ABVV/FGTB - socialist * ACLVB/CGSLB - liberal.
Note how these ideologies roughly correspond to old political parties. Catholic , as an example, has lost most of its religious meaning.
The unions also tend to strike together, causing sector strikes over the whole nation.
Not everyone has the same beliefs and values as you do, so perhaps a little humility is in order.
Practice what you preach, mate. “Anti-human”? Yikes.
We all need food, healthcare, housing etc. and it's unconscionable that some jobs in the US don't provide for those basics.
If you join a union, agency is not ripped away from you, it is given to you. Alone, the fast food worker cannot demand a pay raise. Together, they all can.
Nobody is talking about "the same serving as everyone else", this is about raising the minimum serving to be reasonable so nobody has to suffer.
Agency is being taken away by capitalist exploitation, not by attempts to counteract it.
Proof of this extreme statement? How about a Jeopardy question -- "What New York City famous gangster got his start as a mafia boss with his appointment to run the New York airport union" ..
Not necessarily saying I have an issue with unions per se, but the two unions I hear people complaining about the most are the teachers and the police unions. It seems generally people don't like public sector unions from the people I've talked to.
Sounds like only one side of the story to me and highly improbable.
The mere presence of the union suddenly cuts down on the shittiness of the administration. Teachers stop getting jerked between classes and classrooms. Teachers can't get forced into doing extracurricular activities. etc.
The union also pays the legal bills when teachers get sued by idiotic parents because they had the temerity to teach evolutionary theory in a science class.
And, as I have pointed out previously, a lot of the "can't get rid of teachers" is due to the fact that the administration simply won't file the paperwork to get a teacher fired. You see, if you file the paperwork, that becomes a record and can wind up public information. That record is likely to come up when the administrator is trying to get a promotion or a new job. So, rather than creating a paper trail to fire the teacher, these administrators would rather transfer teachers to a "rubber room" and bury the problem so that it won't haunt the administrator's promotions in the future.
Unions are why when my mother got her job, she was given a paper that showed her most likely pay scale for the next 10 years. Unions are how my mother had excellent health care to take her children to the doctors, despite making just over poverty wages. Unions were there to help her when a student (a fellow student of mine, in my own class, indeed my mother taught me a few times) made baseless and false claims of sexual assault. Unions were there when nurses were being put in harms in an attempt to force nurses to bear the brunt of covid issues. Unions are there when management says "you should be expected to do X" when X is laughably beyond average expectations and also what was in your contract when you signed it.
Unions could have stopped my company from requiring unpaid overtime as "prod support" for our products. Unions could have prevented my work contract from being one sentence that's as vague as possible. Unions could have prevented my company from cutting everyone's pay by 20% during covid despite business being up 100% because we do e-commerce.
And the last person I want working as my nurse is someone who got the job because they are good at boot licking and the previous nurse who cared about patient safety was fired for "being a trouble maker" when they complained about poor quality of patient care.
Or how about a nurse who is overworked because there isn't a union around to see that they get breaks?
Or how about a nurse who is stressed because they can't pay their bills?
Without nurses unions, quality of care plummets.
Or to put it another way, people become nurses because they want to help others. People become hospital administrators to make money. Without nursing unions, the hospital administrators are the ones determining what quality of care you will get.
This is just propaganda.
The counterpoints to this would include the Geo Prizm and Pontiac Vibe, which were cheap, fantastically reliable cars built by GM union labor from Toyota designs.
"My dad beats me but at least he feeds me once a day"
More like: my dad wastes money on lottery tickets sometimes, but he always makes sure I'm cared for.
There’s a reason UAW workers are highly paid
Maybe it’s the UAW or maybe the auto manufactures that agreed to it, but in the 90s there was serious waste. Example 1 - if the Big Three laid off a worker, they were guaranteed to get paid 90% their pay. This is why there were so many rebates on American cars, because it didn’t make financial sense to cut production. Example 2 - the drafting workers that worked the CAD machines, their contract stipulated 54 hours of work per week (overtime of course for those 14 hours). There wasn’t 54 hours of work available, so these folks would come in (including Saturdays) and just sit there and read the newspaper.
Is it Jimmy Hoffa [0]?
Raab, Selwyn. The Five Families: The Rise, Decline & Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empire. New York: St. Martins Press, 2005.