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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

I expect them to receive a lot of resistance from federal and state governments. I have a friend that works for UPS, and the union-enforced inefficiency stories he tells me would blow your mind. It's literally the gangster behavior that unions are notorious for. And those guys are no strangers to getting politicians to bend to their will.

Given a truly fair, free-market, Amazon (and the other companies the article listed) would blow traditional delivery services out of the water over the next decade, no question. Companies like UPS are just too bogged down with union bureaucracy. But that's something the delivery unions will fight tooth and nail. This war will involve just as much lobbying as innovating.

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Given a truly fair, free-market

The reason the unions exist in the first place is because a completely free and unregulated market, in the past, produced gross human rights violations. For example:

http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/23/us-workers-were-once-massac...

He said "a truly fair free market" which doesn't translate to anarchy. Some regulation may be necessary. He is just positing that the current regulations are not appropriate, not that regulations and/or law should be abolished entirely. Some regulation and law is required for a market to remain free.

Does anyone, anywhere believe a "truly fair free market" is anything but an ideal that could never exist? We'll find unicorns first.

I don't think "truly fair" necessarily implies "perfect".

"Truly fair" implies that regulation would not be needed, and that is only something that would happen in an ideal world.

Why does it imply regulation would not be needed? It's truly fair because appropriate regulations are in place and inappropriate regulations are not. There may still be minor flaws, but once a certain fidelity is reached, I think "truly fair" is an apropos descriptor of a system even if it isn't 100% perfect.

"a truly fair free market" doesn't translate to anything, because it's not attainable.

A "truly fair free market" requires perfect information on the part of all stakeholders, which is impossible to achieve.

As if events like this were happening everywhere back then. Why is this outcome attributed to an unregulated market and not a group of horrible, horrible people?

Unfortunately most people seem to think we need the government to protect us from an unregulated market of employers. But the reality is, we don't. Even during the Industrial Revolution, work-related fatalities were on the decline and the creation of OSHA had little affect on the trend [1].

It's most surprising to me that people in technology on HN make this argument. You see benefits at startups and larger companies like free meals, free transportation, remote work, free cell phones, gym memberships, on-site massages, free Kindles, health care, dental care, 401k matching, and so on.

What percentage of the potential pool of benefits are mandated by the government? I would say an extremely small percentage. So what causes all of these employers to offer such amazing benefits and salaries without anybody from the government telling them to do so? Competition for labor.

[1] http://mercatus.org/publication/evaluating-oshas-effectivene...

I don't think anyone doubts that a small slice of high-demand workers are in a favorable position to negotiate good terms. That's also why the original wave of unionization took off among occupations like coal miners and shipyard workers, not among stockbrokers or architects. Programmers don't need much government help because they, for the moment, are in high demand, so the employee has more market power than in most industries. Though even in tech, some aspects seem to still need the government to intervene: despite the shortage of programmers, employers still have enough market power to force noncompete agreements into the average worker's employment contract, unless the state bans them (as California did).

One thing I like about living in Denmark, though, is that just about all employees have reasonable working conditions and decent perks, so there's less of a social gulf between different occupations. I get 6 weeks of vacation per year, along with benefits like paternity leave, good health coverage, a safe working environment, etc.— and so does everyone else. Actually I think even in my white-collar job the benefits are a little better here, though it depends on what you care about. I don't have free lunch or a masseuse available, but the work/life balance is good: at a Valley company it would be hard to negotiate perks like 6 weeks of vacation (especially if you want a real vacation, where you disconnect for at least 2-3 weeks at a time), and people don't seem to normally take paternity leave.

I think China is the perfect example of what I believe.

Do you really believe the Clean Air Act was unnecessary? I was around in the 70's in California when the air was crap. Do you really think that cleanup would have happened without regulation? Not in a million years.

And, don't say the labor market and clean air are different. They're both driven by profits.

"Why is this outcome attributed to an unregulated market and not a group of horrible, horrible people?"

How can you separate the two things? The reason we need to regulate things in general (not just economically, but in terms of all laws, etc) is because there are a significant amount of bad apples who will act horribly (though admittedly rarely to the point of murder/massacre) for personal gain if unchecked.

If we lived in a truly utopian society where people always acted in the best interest of the entire community then unregulated capitalism would work fine, but so would pure socialism. We obviously don't live in such a utopian society so both extremes fail miserably.

>union-enforced inefficiency stories he tells me would blow your mind

Vacation, breaks and a mild improvement on minimum wage? Limits to what they're expected to lift? What are these horror stories?

UPS is an awful job with awful wages. Of course you could make them work harder for lower wages if you made sure they lacked representation, but I wouldn't refer to that as a fair, free market.

Man, the Amazon subcontracted and watched down to the second with no room for human discretion warehouse worker stories are bone chilling.

I'll have to ask him for specifics when I see him again because I wouldn't want to regurgitate inaccurate information, but it's not nearly as bad a job as you might think, and nobody's making near minimum wage. Everybody has hefty pension plans. The drivers tend to make more than the web developers working for startups in my area. Way more.

Nobody gets a promotion based on competence. It's pure seniority. The people that are there the longest get first dibs on better positions. And if somebody can't hold their own and doesn't contribute, you can forget about letting them go. It's almost impossible to fire someone who isn't worth the union wages they're making.

Now that's fine and dandy, I hope lots of folks get nice retirements after working at UPS their whole life. But Amazon is more efficient and will replace these high-wage manual laborers with robots and algorithms, and the union guys will try and use the power of government to stop them.

Dunno. My uncle has worked at UPS for decades. The job treats him well. The only bad thing that happened is once he was knocked off his feet by chemical fumes due to a mislabeled container, but he turned out alright.

I guess you have not seen or worked really awful jobs for really awful wages before?

Many UPS drivers make 6 figures (with overtime).....

UPS drivers are making six-figures with seniority, and most of them love the work -- they're outside and get to interact with people frequently. (I've yet to work at a business that isn't on a friendly, first-name basis with their UPS driver.) The preloaders who actually put the packages on the trucks don't have it so great. The shift starts at 2-3 AM, you're working on a conveyor belt in a big warehouse, and you have to load 5 trucks in 6 hours -- while the drivers get 8-10 hours to unload their one truck.

Source: Dad works for UPS, I worked as a preloader.

As far as I know, FedEx operates without unions. Not quite sure how that has effected the industry.

I'm not disagreeing, but what would UPS/USPS/unions fight them on? Is starting a delivery service regulated in some way?

The IBT is one of the last powerful private sector unions out there. It has significant lobbying power (its the 11th largest donator to political campaigns in the US), and would join with UPS/Fedex to help resist any outside company that does not acquiesce and subject itself to the IBT.

I don't know to what extent that industry is regulated, but there is a very long history of teamsters getting their way.

Not yet.

I guess we need to wait for the drones and self driving cars then.

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