The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday
thenation.com
thenation.com
> But there are significant challenges to organizing the industry. “Because of the temp nature of work, it’s very easy for a worker who speaks out to be retaliated against,” says Palma. “They might not be called back to work the following day, or have their hours decreased.” That’s exactly what happened to Rodriguez, according to the WWU. After he spoke to the media and participated in strikes over unsafe workplace conditions—leading Cal/OSHA to fine the warehouse nearly $30,000—he was fired earlier this year. Federal charges have been filed against the company, alleging retaliation, and an investigation is under way.
I'm not a fan of labor unions, but I'm not sure what else can be done about this sort of thing. Litigation can only tackle small parts of the problem, and class action settlements leave the lawyers as the only winners. Fines are never high enough to disincentivize the activity. There's a high chance of not getting caught, and even when you do get caught the fine is barely higher than the cost of complying in the first place. Maybe a punishment of public floggings for executives at companies who violate labor laws?[1]
[1] There's a lot of Singapore worship among certain circles, so they shouldn't mind adopting some of their customs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore.
And after all what we see, it really is have-nots (proletariat) versus the haves(capitalists/managers).
They should get on that, and then those people won't have to be subjected to those conditions anymore.
The government can remain irrational for longer than we can remain alive.
The key thing is if the situation in the US will get worse faster or slower than the slow mentality shift that is required to considered poor people as disposable.
Something like a basic income could distribute money from all those industries at the same time to those who need it. It would solve the unemployment problem, or at least make it more bearable, and improve working conditions for these workers.
The hoe displaced farm workers. Machines replaces lots of farm workers.
Shipping containers destroyed the massive labor requirement and theft of the shipping industry. Several orders of magnitude of jobs destroyed.
People don't just wither and die; the efficiencies offered by technological change turn into new industries and higher quality of life for everyone. Would you really be better off if everyone had to farm or hunt their own food?
But hey, at least everyone would be employed.
At that level, it's not about find a job you like, it's about making enough money to survive.
Labour unions, like democracy and capitalism, are the worst things we've ever tried, except for everything else that failed. We simply don't have a better way to appoint leaders except democracy. It's obviously broken in many ways, but the alternatives are worse. Economically, capitalism is deeply broken, but everything else we've tried is worse.
And labour unions as we see them today are just plain wrong.But less wrong than unfettered capitalism. You either need labour unions or you need overregulation, with inspectors everywhere in a business.
Just My Two Cents, of course.
We already have a nearly flawless way to increase the welfare of low-paid workers, and that is to redistribute wealth to them through things like the negative income tax. Having enough money to live is the best negotiating position, union or no union. (For example, I think this is why middle-class unions have been so much more effective than lower-class ones.)
Well managed unions maintain a strike fund so that their members can survive the economic hardship of a strike.
After googling a little I think you are talking about Graduate Students United - their dues are only $5/year, which means they aren't even in the same league as the serious blue collar labor unions.
Graduate students are a whole 'nother basket of beans.
I don't think it is fair to blame the large number of unrepresented workers on the union itself. I'm sure the UFW wants to increase their membership past the paltry ~5,000 it has.
Recent grocery store workers voted to strike and the pay was going to be $100/week for picketing 15-20 hours a week. Great.
It's not ideal, and certainly no UAW, but it's much better than unchecked abuses. You can use funds to buy appropriate equipment like gloves for workers and for their replacement when they fall apart.
It's exactly as strong as I think. I just think that all the alternative ways to protect them are even weaker.
For example, if you are hired as a driver for a delivery company, you, the driver, are responsible for speeding or running stop signs and red lights, not your employer. You never here about a manager telling their employers to speed and retaliating against those that don't speed to make a delivery. On the surface, similar laws may appear to victimize the people at the bottom, but it instead does something very very important. It's places a firm barrier across which almost all workers will push back from since they are the ones that will be left holding the bag when law enforcement shows up and starts handing out fines.
So in the original article, they could create a law that fines the manager some multiple of the amount that every one of those laborers lost. Let's say it is 15 minutes work times 30 employees at $12/hour. That's $90 dollars in lost pay. Now make the fine 10x that value plus court costs and lawyer fees and now every single manager is going to think twice before willingly victimizing these temp workers, and will question their bosses when asked to do things like this.
Laws that make illegal these unethical actions with very real victims would empower workers to stand up for their rights better than anything else. No one would ever have to stick his or her neck out, they can just call the cops anonymously and tip them off to unethical business practices. The enforcement of violations would be handled right there on the spot without ever involving the legal department of the corporation responsible for the abuse.
That's the ideal. In the real world, both types of organizations will seek ways to exploit any advantage in their favor. But that's life.
If you view them purely from the point of view of market power, then yes, they are the same thing. Both create an oligopoly in the market for buying/selling labor.
But corporations also are the way that both capital and labor are organized to produce an actual product. There is no analogous role for unions, except some special unions that play a large role in management.
If you are referring to total compensation and hours, this comes under what I referred to as "oligopoly". That is, labor unions can create market power on the side of labor, in order to raise pay.
However, this doesn't benefit society as a whole, and so it is only reasonable when there is market power on the other side. In my industry, there did seem to be an attempt to form a cartel of employer, but Mark Zuckerberg seems to have broken that cartel.
If you are referring to actual working conditions, like workplace safety, I already mentioned that when I talked about special unions that are involved with management. E.g. in very dangerous professions, unions might be part of the "deal" where management and workers agree on how to, as you say, organize labor and capital.
In general, however, and especially in IT, there is no need for unions because the market for labor is competitive, and working conditions can be negotiated between the worker and the corporation.
But plenty of industries don't have that advantage. Many workers are very dependent on a single employer. This is especially the case with workers that have highly specific training and experience that doesn't translate well to other jobs. If they're exploited or otherwise unhappy, they can't simply quit and get a similar job elsewhere, whereas the employer can afford to lose a single employee and train a new one, which makes the employer-employee relationship an unequal one. There, unions can provide a lot of value to keep employers honest.
In 5(?) years these jobs will be replaced by robots. They will be safer, more efficient, and cheaper for companies. These workers will not be forced to work under these "horrible" conditions any longer. They will simply be discarded.
Question: Would you rather have this job, fully knowing its negatives, or have no job?
It's not the fault of the industry that certain kinds of labor are cheap. In fact it's nobody's fault, it's just the nature of the market.
The only kinds of response to this situation that make sense are to increase welfare (and reduce the barriers/conditions to obtaining it) and decrease taxes for people on low incomes. Anything else misses the essence of the problem, which is that a large number of people, for whatever reasons, do not produce enough value to earn a decent wage.
Enforcing various laws might help too, but given that all manual work is by nature dangerous, it's not clear that this industry is especially bad.
Yes, yes, I know, it's not that easy. But it actually is.
Hell yeah. Get off your lazy ass, and go spend tens of thousands of dollars getting an education that makes you employable (just put aside for the moment the fact that your years of compulsory education left you good for nothing better than packing boxes). It's that easy, everyone. Economy down? Well maybe you should invest massively in industry and spark a boom so there are more jobs. If you aren't doing that, you're just not trying.
Or are they not fit for tech? Is there something that sets them apart and makes them lesser than your typical dot commer?
it's not easy finding a better job, and it's also not easy hiring better people. in fact it's real hard to do either of those things.
if you have, in fact, solved this fundamental problem of labor market efficiency, please go ahead and collect your nobel prize and be sure to explain it real slow for us dumb underachieving slackers during your acceptance speech.
when the number of people far outpaces the number of jobs, "just try harder" is not a solution to this problem. i'm pretty sure, in fact, that NEITHER conservatives or liberals think this is the solution to a massive correction in the number of jobs like the one the US just went through in the past 3 years.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
"U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force"
I know that no system is perfect. And that capitalism* is better than many others which have been tried so far. But if enough people are frustrated with the given system, all it needs is a trigger to vent out that frustration.
* I guess main problem with capitalism is inheritance. When everyone is on equal footing, a "loser" may not mind the "winner" getting rich either through hard work, or even through occasional luck. But after 3-4 generations, when children of rich parents have inherent advantages (education, connections etc) which are extremely hard to overcome, this system starts becoming unstable.
The world is not perfect, there is no utopia, and whatever you might think, Capitalism is about as good of product/market fit (human-nature/society-type fit) as you can get in a world that's not based on small hunter/gatherer groups.
It's also keeps us in a state of competition, which is the driving force for innovation and progress like nothing else is.
But don't believe me, just check how all the previous Marxsist and Socialist societies in history turned out.
I wouldn't even mind a picture gallery of everybody who handled my package.
As someone else mentioned, the real solution is a Basic Income Guarantee. Otherwise, these ideas start becoming bizarro bureaucratic regulatory wasteful things, even though it sounds nice.
Here's a discussion that covered the question in the context of allowing people to tip McDonald's cashiers directly, but the same analysis applies:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/08/what_if_tipping_...
"Who benefits" is determined by the shape of the supply/demand curves, not who is being handed the dollars.
I wouldn't be interested in sitting for a professional user profile photo, or a standardized mandatory snapshot. I wouldn't smile for the photo on my ID badge. I wouldn't be interested in having candid photos of me snapped on the factory floor, while my manager, zippy the pinhead, brow-beats me, because I express obvious disinterest in a mundane, repetitive, soul crushing job.
I wouldn't put up a Facebook profile proclaiming that I work at McDonald's. Similarly, if McDonald's had it's own corporate social network at mcdonalds.com, where all the pages are themed in red and yellow, with your choice of one of three background images (french fries, a Big Mac or Ronald himself), and everyone wear's a visor or a hair net in their profile picture, it wouldn't be a social network I'd be interested in participating in. Not even for tips. It would feel a little bit like pan handling for spare change. There's a line of dignity I'm not interested in crossing, when it come to social websites.
When I drop change in the tip cup, as I pick up my morning coffee, it's a token of appreciation that goes untaxed, and unrecorded on a server. That's the way tips are supposed to work. A surreptitious reward as acknowlegement for the indignity of servitude.