US labor board official orders Amazon to redo union vote at Alabama warehouse
reuters.com
reuters.com
And those posters are just absurd. "Your dues will pay for a six figure salary for the union president" rings hollow when your labor led to Bezos' net worth.
I think it's easy to forget just how uneven things have become since the middle of the previous century: someone making more money than 95 out of every 100 Alabama residents is doing quite well compared to most of the people in the state and is still nowhere near CEO-level compensation.
No question that it's better but it's going from average to “highest income person you know who isn't your doctor” rather than executive class income.
Still a ridiculous talking point.
Median Value of owner occupied housing units:
National[0] - $217,500
Bessemer, AL[1] - $86,500
Median household income:
National - $62,843
Bessemer, AL - $32,301
[0]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
If a large minority of it is derived from capital directly or the majority of it is derived from the worker’s labor applied to their own capital.
If it is derived from wage labor and is the worker’s entire income, its just relatively high-income working class, and isn’t “close to” middle class.
I think it should be some kind of law of the internet. Any discussion of socioeconomic topics ends up reinventing the classic class system on a long enough time scale.
This illustrates an important point:
The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class.
https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
A different perspective is that two income households enabled housing costs to rise, rents to rise. And causes the cost of having a child increase due to childcare costs.
Overall maybe society is better having 1 parent (male or female) stay at home to raise the children. Or re think our North American living situation ideals of 1 family per house.
And it is indeed a positive socioeconomic shift. But it isn't the kind that the AEI means to imply: they're a neoconservative foundation that's attempting to post-hoc justify deregulation and de-clawing of federal agencies under false premises.
Hard to say that's an unalloyed positive.
And this chart is skewed by the underlying baby boomer generation which made up a bigger percent of the population (which is why you see the downward trend recently - they retired).
Interesting these charts start in 1980 as well. The average real hourly wage went down from 1972 to 1980, then began a recovery. So when you don't show things were better beforehand, it looks like a constant rise, which it was not.
And the entry of women in the workforce happened in the 1970’s. The start date of 1980 might be arbitrary, but you seem to ignore the trend being pointed out.
What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued to climb into the higher economic tiers over the last 40-50 years. In their place, hispanic households that have rapidly expanded in numbers in the US since the late 1970s are taking over an ever larger share of the middle class demographic.
When people claim the middle class has seen no economic gains in the last 40-50 years, they're either lying or painfully ignorant of what's actually occurring: a dramatic and rapid demographic shift. It takes a mere few minutes to dig up the relevant economic data and see how the middle class of ~1980 was nearly entirely white, and many of those formerly middle class whites have now shifted upward in the economic tiers (which you can spot today by looking at the median or average white household net worth vs the national median or average).
So what some of that middle class disappearing into the upper classes represents is an ongoing bifurcation by race among the classes. The US middle class will soon be overwhelmingly hispanic, in other words. That's tremendous progress in a sense, given the people it represents often came from third world countries with nothing to their names and speaking little to no English. Will they see continued progress or will their position ossify there? That's the next issue for the new, vast US hispanic middle class for the coming decades.
And what about black households over that time? They're being left behind by hispanic household net worth growth and are not seeing nearly the same progress in moving into the middle class. That is going to cause significant political ramifications as hispanic political power in the US continues to expand.
The typical drawing of the line in US discussions within the working class is; the middle class is a distinct economic class with distinct interests, but it is a much narrower and generally (though not entirely, because economic class and wealth are different though correlated things) richer group than the usual US understanding of “middle class”.
Source: lived it
The programmer has far more in common and can relate (both culturally and economically) far better to the C suite crowd than to the janitor or landscaper.
That’s a matter of perspective. Yes, both are degreed and educated.
But that’s where the sameness ends. One may think they’re like the other, but have you heard the term “coding monkey”?
Without fail and by necessity every single company has fallen victim to leadership who are less technical and more business minded.
Think of Boeing and Google as two recent examples. The better ones tend to keep a strong technical person as a sidekick, but everyone else is fighting for scraps.
The rarest and “best” individuals possess both technical savvy and ruthlessness.
Yes, and no.
Yes, in the sense that as an engineer you tend to have goals and work directed in the same overall direction as management. Optimize for max output for minimum cost. Your work product also typically is geared toward the eventual outcome of decreasing reliance on manual labor through automation.
No; in the sense that you don't get to set the incentives. You're optimizing toward what they will let you optimize toward which will often not actually be what you're told it is. The familiarity you develop as white collar can make this stand out in stark relief if you pay attention to it. Examine a call center implemented well vs. one implemented poorly. Completely different beasts. Or a warehouse. Same thing. You're a force multiplier for those there. You don't get to set the resources, you just have to do the best with what you've got.
Ultimately, it comes down, for me, what are you automating for? I wake up, and I try to deburden people first and foremost. I'm there to make sure people have the tools best fit to helping them do what they are there to do in the most ergonomic way possible.
Over time, I've skewed more blue collar in my sympathies. I don't like being perception managed, and management theory 101 is chock full of it. I work to get shit done, and help make it easier for others to do so. This creates... more quandaries than I like with traditional leadership types than I like at times, but it is what it is. I will say that if anyone has responsibility for the creation of inequity, at the end of the day, your capital allocating institutions are it.
If European companies had the same attitude towards unions as American ones, our unions would respond more aggressively too.
As someone who grew up lower-class and now makes six figures in tech, I don't think this is true.
There's a world of difference between a janitor and a white-collar programmer. A janitor worries paycheck-to-paycheck and has to consider every purchase, constantly lives in stress of a large unexpected expense, and so on, it's just vastly different.
A programmer, like a CEO, has none of those concerns. Who cares if the CEO has earned enough for a bigger mansion or a more prestigious car?
At some point (lower than most expect), money offers diminishing returns. A difference of +$100k/year will take care of most of Maslow's hierarchy and have you set for life unless you're financially irresponsible.
People in the middle-class want to believe it has more in common with the lower class.
Everyone thinks the person slightly richer then them is the one making money they don't need and lives the luxurious life, and everyone their income and lower are the ones with real struggles.
The middle-class (me included) might not like it, but they aren't the same as someone who struggles to make ends meet.
An uncomfortable truth is that many in the middle class are just a couple of shitty situations away from falling on seriously hard times, and even homelessness. Sometimes it's permanent. Illness, injury, divorce, bankruptcy or just bad luck can do it. Treatment for a heart attack can cost $800k to over $1 million, for example.
That's just not a worry or reality for the majority of the wealthy.
Lower, middle and upper middle classes are working class, as their livelihoods precariously depend on their labor and the continued whims of employers. The upper class has no need work, nor to worry about their livelihoods, as they live on appreciating assets. They can do what they want to, you have to spend your days working for them or your kids won't have health insurance.
Some of these places are doing outsourcing for US companies, where the developers do indeed get six figures, and that is why those companies are getting their contract deals.
holding this opinion means you've bought into the false narrative.
While true, that is not illustrated by the thing you are pointed to, which is the upper class using the working class against leadership within the working class.
The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is mostly not involved in this instance.
Everyone wants to believe they are marching upward, so if they or their children are trending up (no matter that they are probabilistically not likely to get near the very top), they still do not want to lower the ceiling.
I feel like this quote summarized a lot of tribal conflict, whether it be delineated along socioeconomic class or race or whatever:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
Everyone is happy when the tide is lifting all boats, but when some are rising more relative to others, implying some are moving down relative to others, there is inevitable chafing as resources are re-allocated.
The fact the most effective at doing so have a tendency to carve themselves out a niche doing so is more of an internal union matter.
Put differently, if a company loses money, is it always because the employees aren’t working hard enough?
Or a company could be ordering their employees to work in an unprofitable way, or the company could be spending the money on unnecessary non-labor expenditures...
After all, Amazon famously doesn't need the labor of their employees to sell the products and services that support their value :-)
The LTV doesn't guarantee a direct relationship between real labor and realized value (which is a combination of market and economic value): it describes a relationship between socially necessary labor and economic value.
I personally think that idea is incorrect (and labor theory of value has limited application), but I have been seeing arguments where everyone picks and chooses the idea when it is applied personally vs applied to someone else.
Yes, this is what happens when the labor is something that can effectively be independent, operate without massive capital investment, or be relocated easily. E.g. doctors, programmers, lawyers, plumbers.
But many kinds of labor are only useful in a coordinated context, requiring capital support and infrastructure, perhaps due to economies of scale, natural monopolies, regulatory restrictions, and the like. So that kind of worker must be embedded in a firm to be effective. Currently, policy is written to support corporate firms, and suppress cooperative organization and independent labor, so there's not really an option for most workers to depart. There's no such thing as an independent one-man freelance car manufacturer, for instance.
This is the distinction between the marxist concepts of petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat.
So if labor is just one of many inputs, it seems wrong to attribute all profit to labor as if it played the only part.
land itself is just about the only thing that is arguably not ultimately labor, but it seems that through the capitalist lens, land is only valuable due to location (proximity to labor?) or resources gained by application of labor to the land. you could make some arguments about conservation, but those tend to be either moral arguments about externalities which by definition are not systematically considered by capitalism, or arguments about natural environments as a resource, in which maintenance and access management become the value-creating labor.
The point is that being in a union will increase wages more than the cost of the union dues.
And yes, the union reps got the best positions, the best hours and two salaries. The next best positions and best hours went to their friends.
The unions only stepped in for the most egregious cases but not in the way you might think: When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.
Outside of federal employment and outside of hollywood, where the strongest unions are anyway, the history of union activity in the US is quite unremarkable. It is most frequently anti-consumer and often works against the long term interests of the workers that it's supposed to represent.
Literally 99% of the time I hear somebody shouting support of unions here, they've either never been in one or they've always been the reps. Voices like mine, of those who've been in unions and got the shit end of the stick, get shouted down.
I would rather die than participate in a labor union again, for as long as I live.
That's the issue though. The inability to be treated as an individual. Time is the most precious commodity in life that we have -- the only thing that we can't get back. Nobody values your time as much as you will. I don't know about you, but being able to negotiate my own exchange of time/labor allows me to conserve as much of that resource as I can. I can negotiate for myself to the fullest. I have the option to walk away and negotiate elsewhere -- in most unionized positions in the US that is simply not possible.
Nobody negotiating for you is going to put the same value on your time that you do. It's not fair-trade.
If questions and disagreement make your comment 'not welcome', you are indeed in the wrong forum, but not for the reasons you think. ;)
I've experienced that. Maybe mods could limit each user's downvotes of each other user, especially across different discussions. Some ideas:
* Amy could downvote Bob's posts in discussion D1 an unlimited number of times, but only downvote Bob's posts in other discussions N times per hour.
* In any case, Amy cannot downvote Bob more than N times per minute.
* Nobody can downvote on another user's comment page (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wolverine876 ); they must open the discussion page for each comment. Upvotes would be still possible.
Do you have a source for this? It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.
It's also the kind of thing that every party involved would try very hard to keep on the down low. I can definitely see it not making the news since there's probably only about half a dozen people party to it and nobody is a celebrity or otherwise public personality.
Without evidence, assume it's invented anti-union bullshit.
Nobody's gonna leak that to the news because "trashy line cook does something trashy" isn't really a story worth getting a new job over. You just joke about it with your coworkers friends and move on.
I was there when it happened.
Now as far as the urinating in batter? Abhorrent, and disgusting. Totally worth a firing or severance with cause. Contract's a contract though. You catch that sort of thing, when you're doing something you've promised specifically not to do, you better bloody have an alternate way of acting on it.
Also, I'd need deets. I'd actually not be convinced of a breach if the work was being done somewhere with a security camera and somebody caught him doing so on unrelated footage. There's a difference between "here's your company issued camera to surveil yourself" and "WTF the security guy was reviewing some footage for something else, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"
It's called good faith. Not everyone has it, and it leads to some shitty behavior, but it is what it is. No reason to demonize a union over.
It is pretty absurd to make the six figure claim when the boss is sitting on a 13 figure bag of money.
So the question is not “do unions help union members?” (they almost certainly do), it’s “do unions help workers like me?” - maybe the average worker is not confident that they can move to their next job if the industry is unionized?
$22/hr in 1995 was almost the median household income in the US. It's a lot of money for a fast food job.
With union meetings, both parties chose to be there. With the work meetings, one side is compelled to be there as part if their work duties.
And yes, they pay them to be there, but that also implies that if they don't listen to what is said at those meetings they'll stop paying them. As most work meetings are about things employees have to do or they'll be fired.
The company meetings are compulsory. The union meetings aren't.
> Or do you think workers can’t be trusted to decide what’s in their best interests if exposed to both sides of an issue?
We like to believe ourselves to be discerning, rational beings, unswayed by propaganda but study after study and the existence of the entire advertising industry provides strong evidence this is not the case.
Would you still object if the union could hold mandatory meetings, if they were able to pony up the cash?
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2021/11/04/jeff-bez...
To the discussion of public shares: Yes he couldn’t cash out all 177B for cash, however a significantly large portion (i.e many billions) can be over a relatively short span of time, additionally shares still possess a barter-like function.
These are not small numbers and indeed such sums could be used to resolve some pretty significant issues (see Bill Gates who is in a similar public-share-wealthy position.)
As for taking part of their pay for union fees. This is like trying to save on toothpaste: The small cost of union fees will deliver benefits for these employees that would easily outstrip contribution costs. Such an argument would only be valid for employees that already have good pay and benefits/ where a union wouldn’t be able to deliver significant change.
Bezos cries, as I wave a tenner in his face and say, mockingly: "You don't have any money, its all in stocks! You're as poor as I am!"
The labor board issue was with the voting procedure.
Makes you think.
One of the biggest things that attracts businesses to setup shop in the south is low cost of living and lower salary requirements as a result. The same things that cause businesses to setup shop overseas.
When unions get involved with promises of higher wages, it disincentivizes the business from growing in that area because it has effectively no benefit over the higher cost areas.
I’ve witnessed this first hand in South Carolina ever since Boeing opened a location here. The union tactics have been crazy. Everybody down here is thrilled to have Boeing and all of the peripheral benefits to the area that come with them. Great jobs, supply chain effects, etc. Then union officials show up when it’s time for a new vote and start telling people how bad everything is. Around every vote there are always crazy news articles and sensationalized events that try to drum up union support and paint Boeing in a bad light. And then it stops until it’s time for a new vote.
Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. The want corporate customers to sell services to. They want economic development and they want practices to incentivize that.
What people don’t want are practices that will slow that down, especially when the non-union work pays better than most everything else in the area already.
It gives the appearance to everyone, somewhat obviously, that the union is only interested is strengthening itself.
Right. But what people are missing is that "those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization" is most people who actually live in the region. The jobs are there because the unions aren't, and people want jobs.
Obviously people would rather get paid and not have to work, but that's not relevant to the context.
People attribute qualities to "jobs" that are actually a consequence of jobs, not a quality of the jobs themselves. Correctly identifying cause and effect is important for understanding the truth. Never conflate them.
I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.
The nuance is that you're presupposing a frame. There are alternative economic systems to American crony capitalism that give people the results they want without having to surrender to their corporate masters.
If you take the fact that the system we live in was invented by humans for granted, and assume it's the only way things can ever be, you can easily dupe yourself into believing that it's as natural as breathing.
However, just because something is the default choice in modern society doesn't mean it can't be different.
I care about this distinction. It might seem pedantic or stupid to some people. Even if you like capitalism, it's important to recognize it as a choice, not a consequence of natural laws.
Which is why they are anti-union. Ideology aside they lack sufficient leverage (aka they are getting a good deal sans union.)
People want to better pay and benefits, more power over what they do with their lives 40+ hours per week. You can't be afraid to push for yourself in any negotiations, and you need leverage to get as much as you can. Without a union, you have all the leverage of a lone individual.
What's crazy to me is seeing Boeing treated like a god coming down to bless the land with their beneficence, whom we must please and obey. They are a business who will use whatever leverage they have to get what they can; you need leverage too.
Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?
So a taxpayer subsidy from everyone in the region in order to produce 25,000 jobs at the above prices. Worth it? Not really sure, it seems to me like Virginia might end up fairly well off but I have a harder time imagining that creating another 25,000 jobs in NYC is worth $75k a piece to the city given that they are already out of housing. Kind of seems like it might be better put into other things on balance.
Pitching it all as a public auction really accentuates the point that this is a race to the bottom with competition between people that should instead be natural allies. It would be brilliant if it were an intentional commentary on how much harm we are doing to ourselves by letting companies pit entire states against each other for profit.
Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor. The most effective unions are those that do this to the greatest extent. For example, SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility to those that receive these speaking roles.
SAG does not force productions to do anything. The production can either use union or not use union. What they can't do is use cherry pick talent. Your best talent is going to be a SAG member. And since it's a union you either get all or none.
I'm merely applying the same language people use here to attack corporations.
>And since it's a union you either get all or none.
Everywhere else this would be a clear violation to antitrust.
What?
Sounds like a clear antitrust case to me.
That sounds like a perspective from one of Amazon's workplace signs. Union leverage is based on two things (off the top of my head, and afaik): significant control of the labor supply, and the political power of many votes and of many people to advocate for candidates. However, people can join the union; they aren't exclusive clubs.
Much of management's power comes from controlling the job supply and the political power of money, and they use that leverage to their advantage. When we live in a happy world where management stops doing that, I'll agree that unions shouldn't either.
Can you explain how this works? In Europe Unions just represent the rights of those the Employer chose to hire. The employees are not required to be members of a Union, and usually they won't join until they have already started working.
They are competing against other parts of the world in terms of labor supply. I don't know how you overcome that without either demonstrably higher productivity or protectionism.
I love it. Unions are going to be a major driving force again and it's gonna be good for the work force. As a country we have to make it tougher for companies to exploit labor unfairly. The government has failed. The people know it and are finally taking action.
A true democracy would have strict regulations on companies which guarantee good living conditions for the people that live in it. The game of capitalism must be regulated, because it's a sociopathic construct. It's only goal is to make more money... as soon as possible. Left unregulated it exploits people.
> Unions are going to be a major driving force again
All of those positive changes and benefits you cited are happening without an increased union presence, though. What makes you think unions are going to be a compelling option when the non-union alternatives are rapidly changing in response to market conditions without any need for union bargaining?
No actual change has happened yet
I think it is far-fetched to say that all of this has occurred without unions whatsoever.
Just like Lenin's "reserve army" of the unemployed keeping workers motivated to keep working, so too does the "reserve threat" from labor organization motivate many of the 20th century improvements in labor conditions.
A job is not a goal in itself (except in some puritan morality I guess) but a mean to several ends: Security, income, participation, etc.
How much of that does a business bring to the region and what guarantees that it will do so in the future?
> Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. They want corporate customers to sell services to.
What kind of "people" are you talking about? This sounds as if the whole region consists exclusively of solo entrepreneurs.
The South-East might be cheap enough today. Until somewhere else bids lower…
Did you seriously just invoke Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" logic as applies to capital access? I'm fairly sure you couldn't have meant it, but God bless, that rang across loud and clear on my end, as someone whose been deep in startup culture for a while, and spends many hours trying to help places pull things off workably on shoestring budgets.
Workers have been resigning and making startups. They still have to raise capital to pay the overhead costs of getting stuff done. Traditional Capital tends to be more concerned with growth hacking rather than solving problems that society really needs solved, which means access to Capital is typically of the VC or philanthropic type, which both have deleterious consequences on how one has to treat the people they hire to make sure the spigots stay on. The meat grinder, in that sense, is real, and an omni-present threat threat to any workplace daring to deign to raise the bar on Quality.
The central gall of the Capital class is that just because of the happy accident of being located astride yesterday's money Hoovers that that means their job is done, and they aren't responsible for keeping that wealth moving, solving problems, and making riskier investments. I'm not saying go play helicopter money, but if you aren't making money move, you're part of the issue.
Say the Alabama workers decided to unionize, I don't think amazon could easily relocate warehouses to a another state/country in the same way that Boeing could do with manufacturing. There just isn't that much cheaper labor available in the country.
I really wish more would/could be done about how Amazon mandated employees watch hours of propaganda and meeting with countless managers about how unions are bad. Almost everyone claims advertisements don't work on them and that if they were bombarded with messaging they wouldn't be affected, but hey advertisement isn't a billion dollar industry for nothing, and similarly I'm sure trillion dollar companies can pay for the best knowledge on union busting.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/17/22287191/amazon-alabama-w...
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1. Employers are prohibited from saying that they will fire people who vote for unionization but they are allowed to say that they might shut down a shop that votes for a union. Interestingly, while this is a frequent threat, the instances of an employer ever actually following through are vanishingly small.
The more common occurrence is for the employer to let the union go on strike. Then the employer keeps the shop open by hiring new workers from outside the union and lets the union stay on strike forever. Obviously the effect on the union workers is basically the same.
If you start hiring permanent replacements, you're basically killing any chance of a successful negotiation.
He goes back to the diner/bakery to demand his job back.
Also, Colt is famous for doing this and it didn't work out so great for them : https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/01/nyregion/workers-rejoice-...
They're also a defense contractor, so you're effectively talking about a public sector union and the dynamics of that are completely different.
Indeed, Amazon have used the Pinkerton detective agency [1] against their employees to root out union activity. For those unfamiliar, the Pinkertons have existed in the US since the 1850s, with a history fraught with violence and questionable ethics, famously the Homestead strike of 1892 [2].
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worke...
Amazon itself is currently being sued for failing to provide required breaks. They are infamous for making it hard to even go to the bathroom. That would never fly at my shop.
Of course, that's just one example. I also love that management can't just shift more and more responsibility onto me to save money or arbitrarily increase the complexity of my work without an increase in pay.
I don't know which state you're in, but this is absolutely not true where I grew up. A complaint to the state labor board brought the hammer down ASAP.
The people who enforce these things absolutely love to have something to track down.
Here's one example of unpaid overtime wages, nearly a million dollars worth, being stolen from workers:
> After receiving a wage complaint from a worker who failed to receive any money for his work, California Labor Commissioner Julie Su’s office began investigating contractor Tadros & Youssef Construction’s work on the Highland Oaks Elementary School construction project. Su’s office discovered that nine other employees earned below the prevailing wage and were not paid for overtime hours on this same project. The resulting settlement forced Tadros & Youssef to pay $877,876.64 restitution to the 10 workers. The contracting firm is no longer in business.
From: https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
The vote, as such, as 1798 to 738, or 29 percent pro-union.
How do you get 16 percent from that?
Especially when everyone knows Amazon can access the ballot box, so why risk it if you think it’s fixed?
Is there a public written NLRB decision? The OP didn't link to it or mention the specifics. Not a great article.
Or is there another way to see the specifics on what the NLRB considered to be the "objectionable conduct that warrants setting aside the election"?
It would be good to have the specifics of what the NLRB actually decided was this before diving into arguing about it, wouldn't it?
The specifics have been mentioned before, this article was light on them but they were already known.
From the 11/29 Supplemental Decision (which I guessed was the relevant one just cause it was 11/29), it looks like:
1. Mainly, the mailbox in the parking lot. a bunch of different issues with it's existence and treatment that violated various rules. ("OBJECTIONS 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, AND 17 – THE MAILBOX OBJECTIONS")
2. Employer "present[ing] small groups of employees with the open and observable choice to pick up or not pick up “Vote No” paraphernalia in front of Employer agents," ("OBJECTION 11 – “VOTE NO” PARAPHERNALIA POLLING").
That's it. Just these. The details are of course in the fairly readable document, including the specifics (very specifics) on why these things were problematic.
But only time will tell.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/19/amazon-prevented-free-and-fa...
EDIT: Wow: thanks a lot. Unbelievably complicated to me…
This begins to make much more sense.
In the U.S. this is an exclusive right—a "unit" of workers can only have one certified bargaining agent, and that union must represent all workers in the bargaining unit. It's also illegal for the employer to negotiate with any party other than the recognized union.
To my understanding, this is different from Europe and can seem strange to Europeans. Understanding how this framework came about historically can be useful. Before the National Labor Relations Act, workers would strike in order to gain recognition and the right for the union to negotiate on their behalf. The NLRA election framework was an attempt to bring about "labor peace" by introducing orderly elections instead.
This was generally supported by a certain segment of capital who could afford it and saw the cost-benefit as worth it, especially finance capital who were much more favorable to New Deal politics, and opposed by others. On the workers' side, this has undoubtedly made it easier to win recognition from the employer, but some see it as having sapped workers' militancy over the long run by trading away pitched battles that revealed sharp class antagonisms for a more orderly bureaucratic process.
Union votes like the one described here are about triggering protections of US law that will require Amazon to negotiate with the union.
It's illegal in the US to fire an employee chiefly for attempting to unionize their workplace. That can be difficult to prove, but it's one of the explicit protections provided by the NLRA and, when proven, is usually sufficient grounds for unconditional reinstatement[1].
So, to be clear: labor rights in the US are more than just "free association" rights. You have an exceptional right, under federal labor law, to expend time and space within your workplace with the goal of unionizing. It is illegal for your employer to retaliate against your organization under the guise of either "free association" on their behalf or at-will employment.
[1]: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/olms/regs/compliance/...
That said, this is what unions originally started out as and they were still successful. If anything, the post-legal enshrinement of unions has coincided with their weakening.
I am curious if this period of tight labor markets will bring a new chapter in union history.
The NLR{A,B} is very precise about what it considers to be a legitimate form of organized labor, the fact of which does not detract from it being illegal for an employer to fire you for attempting to organize in a form recognized under the NLRA.
It is only illegal to fire an employ for attempting to form a union of the NLRB sanctioned structure. An organization of workers that undertakes a wildcat strike can be legally fired.
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Besides the U.S. Supreme Court, other proponents of right-to-work laws also point to the Constitution and the right to freedom of association. They argue that workers should both be free to join unions or to refrain, and thus, sometimes refer to states without right-to-work laws as forced unionism states. These proponents argue that by being forced into a collective bargain, what the majoritarian unions call a fair share of collective bargaining costs, is actually financial coercion and a violation of freedom of choice. An opponent to the union bargain is forced to financially support an organization for which they did not vote in order to receive monopoly representation for which they have no choice.
>In Canadian labour law, the Rand formula (also referred to as automatic check-off and compulsory checkoff)[1] is a workplace compromise arising from jurisprudence struck between organized labour (trade unions) and employers that guarantees employers industrial stability by requiring all workers affected by a collective agreement to pay dues to the union by mandatory deduction in exchange for the union agreement to "work now, grieve later." Historically, in some workplaces, some workers refused to pay dues to the union even after benefiting from wage and benefit improvements negotiated by the union representatives, resulting in friction and violence as they were seen as 'free-loaders;' at the same time, absence of a peaceful grievance settlement mechanism created industrial instability as union members often walked off the job. The compromise was designed to ensure that no employee will opt out of the union simply to avoid dues yet reap the benefits of collective bargaining, such as higher wages or health insurance.
This appears to be completely separate logic? A balance of interests, in the Canadian case, and an inaliable right, in the U.S. one.
Regardless, "right to work" is more about banning certain union contracts than about providing some "right" to have a job or anything like that.
Edited for precision in response to whimsicalism's reply:
The extent of right to work laws is that union contracts (or I guess any contract) cannot require all employees to pay union fees as part of the union contract. That's it. There's no further restrictions on employers, only this particular restriction on employer-union contracts.
Right to work laws do not prevent union members from entering a contract with the union to pay it dues because they think it will benefit them. That's how contracts should work. I think you're just trying to play leftist word games to confuse the issue.
In my view, the word games are around the phrase "right to work." Freedom of contract and association is quite unambiguous.
No, they are not.
Employers are prohibited from altering employment contracts ex post facto. But employers are free to make offers conditional on joining a union. Given most employers have wide latitude to alter terms of employment under threat of termination, practically any employer who wants to unionize can trivially do so.
But that is a straw man. In practice, a fraction of employees want to unionize and the employer (with some employees) does not. The argument against unionization is that the first group can't force the second groups into a union contract. The argument for is that they can, provided they represent a majority of the employees.
Here's Alabama's Right to Work amendment, which is broadly representative: https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Right_to_Work,_Amendment_8_(...
Key passages are
> (c) No person shall be required by an employer to become or remain a member of any labor union or labor organization as a condition of employment or continuation of employment.
> (e) An employer may not require a person, as a condition of employment or continuation of employment, to pay dues, fees, or other charges of any kind to any labor union or labor organization.
The employer is not allowed to make union membership or dues a condition of employment, whether due to a union contract or out of their own volition.
Interestingly, if you want to look at my other post where I discuss noncompetes vs. Right to Work, you'll find that a number of states, when dealing with noncompetes, consider continued employment "sufficient consideration" for the noncompete. This means that in practice, they're allowed to change your employment contract (w.r.t. a noncompete, and presumably other things), and continuing to employ you is enough to make the contract valid, they don't need to offer you anything additional.
Georgia and Florida are two (but there are more) "right to work" states, where the employer is fully within their rights to change your employment contract ex-post-facto, except in regards to union membership.
Here's the right to work laws by state: https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/right-to-...
Here's a (pdf warning) list of noncompete laws by state: https://faircompetitionlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/No...
Note that only 3 states (California, Oklahoma, and North Dakota) ban non-competes (and I'd quibble with this, California and ND afaik ban noncompetes about poaching customers/clients, while Oklahoma allows you ban employees from poaching client, so CA and ND have the strongest noncompete protection, and one is right to work and one isn't). Of these, North and South Dakota are Right-to-Work, and California is not. It's also hard to draw particular conclusions about trends among (I think the only real one I see is that non-right to work states have salary minimums before you can be subject to a noncompete, but so much of the specifics comes down to how courts have interpreted things). What is pretty clear is that there isn't a strong correlation between right to work laws and noncompete laws.
And further, if you look at the right to work statues (for example Alabama's constitutional amendment: https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Right_to_Work,_Amendment_8_(..., or Oklahoma's : https://www.findlaw.com/state/oklahoma-law/oklahoma-right-to... as examples), you'll find that they're tailored specifically to prohibit requirements about union dues. They have nothing to do with noncompetes.
So the text of the statutes are unrelated, and its not even clear that there's a general trend of states with right to work laws having more noncompete protection.
I sort of expect you or your lawyer is extrapolating from one state (probably North Dakota, if I had to guess).
Reasonableness is key to enforcement, meaning a reasonable radius, time and field. Any agreement that prevents you from working in your field is defacto-unenforceable specifically because it’s unreasonable.
Both of these attorneys had been practicing in the state for 20 years at the time of the conversation. One graduated from Georgetown and the other from University of South Carolina’s law school.
My understanding from them was that right to work was interpreted as ensuring you actually have “the right to work” via case law with noncompete agreements.
IANAL
The situations are similar, but the logic used and conclusions reached are quite separate. Understanding the different paths taken exposes it as far from euphemism.
I'm downvoted, but that is literally what right-to-work is.
That take seems very myopic and lacks nuance. There were entire jobsites (which had multiple crews from different companies) that we couldn't work on unless we were members. That's illegal in right-to-work states. It doesn't limit the freedom of association - I suggest it prevents discrimination by association.
I am curious how this works with agency fees though - it shouldn't be legal to require union membership, but it might be legal to require agency fees paid to a union.
So it absolutely limits freedom of association by preventing organizations from choosing whom they associate with. Requiring you to employ someone can hardly be seen as a "freedom". Whether such a restriction is ethical or not, and whether such a restriction is constitutional or not are two different questions (and those two questions, and the question of whether it is a restriction on freedom of association may have different answers!).
I don't think I said they did.
> Everyone is still free to associate, or not associate, with whomever they want.
But are limited in the ways they can associate: certain contract terms are prohibited. Again, whether or not this is good is a distinct question. Minimum wage laws prohibit certain contract terms that I consider predatory (but in a sense the government is simply collectively bargaining on behalf of all workers in setting a minimum wage). Conversely, a government setting a maximum wage would probably be considered problematic. But all three, a minimum wage, a maximum wage, and "right to work" laws, limit how you can associate.
Freedom of association is the right to join or to leave groups voluntarily. You still need to respect peoples other rights, and follow other applicable laws while associated. There are some laws like child labor laws which do restrict people from being able to voluntarily join or leave a group, but right to work and minimum wage laws are not such cases.
You can sign an agreement to use only a particular supplier for a product, unless that product is labor and the supplier is a union.
I guess I'll cite Alabama's right to work amendment for the 4th time today:
> No person shall be required by an employer to become or remain a member of any labor union or labor organization as a condition of employment or continuation of employment.
The screen actor's guild often works as a labor supplier, but they cannot negotiate a contract in Alabama to be the only supplier of labor for a film. I mean I guess you can split hairs and claim that it's the combination of Taft-Hartly and right to work laws that create the situation, but since such a contract is valid in other states, it's really only the right to work law that's relevant.
> As I said previously, freedom of association means you can enter a contract with whomever you want, it does not mean you can enter a contract to do whatever you want.
I think you'll have a hard time describing how the law banning some of these would violate freedom of association, but for others it wouldn't:
- A contract that requires the employee to be black
- A contract requiring the employee to hold some certification
- A contract requiring the employee to hold membership in a professional organization
- A contract requiring the employee to hold membership in a union
- A contract requiring a salary of $2.00 an hour (minimum wage laws are also often considered a violation of freedom of association)I suspect there may be some confusion due to how we use language, but it should be noted that the freedom of association is a right that people have to join or to leave groups. Organizations, including companies, are not people and thus don't have this same right, at least not to the same extent, even though the individuals within the organization do.
> A contract that requires the employee to be black
Technically races aren't groups that can be freely associated or disassociated with, so not a freedom of association violation, but obviously still discrimination and thus an invalid contract to enter into. If you broadened it to be a contract that required employees to be members of some traditionally black group, then it would be a violation of freedom of association.
> A contract requiring the employee to hold some certification
So long as anyone is free to get the certification without being compelled to associate or disassociate with anyone, this is fine as it does not restrict who can join and leave groups. If your association is a condition of getting the certificate, it's an obvious violation.
> A contract requiring the employee to hold membership in a professional organization
Restricts a person's right to voluntarily join or to leave a group, obvious violation.
> A contract requiring the employee to hold membership in a union
The same situation as the professional group.
> A contract requiring a salary of $2.00 an hour
So long as you can't pay anyone a salary of $2.00 an hour, has no affect on who people can or can't associate with, there is obviously no violation of freedom of association, regardless of whether people falsely claim it is. If, on the other hand, people from one group can be paid $2.00 an hour but people from another group are restricted from being able to enter that same agreement, then it's an obvious violation.
Now here's an example for you:
Should an employer be permitted to require an employee to register as a member of the employer's chosen political party and contribute some financial minimum to that political party as a condition of employment? How about political group technically unaffiliated with any political party but nevertheless with a distinct ideology? How about a religious group instead of a political one? If your reaction is "employers should not be allowed to compel me to become a member of and pay money to these organizations as a condition of employment" then we're on the same page.
We can argue about morality (and whether or not I'd work for such an employer) but yes they are, afaik, all legal things for an employee to mandate.
> > A contract requiring the employee to hold membership in a union
> The same situation as the professional group [a violation]
Then you agree that right to work laws like Alabama's violate freedom of association?
Less facetiously, bank robbing is merely one extreme example of something you're not allowed to enter into an agreement to do. You also can't enter an agreement to provide sexual favors for financial compensation, or employ people full time for less than minimum wage, or require someone to donate an organ to you in exchange for financial compensation. None of these are violations of the freedom of association - there's no restriction on the groups you can freely join or leave, there are just certain things that you can't do regardless of the groups you are or aren't in. In right to work jurisdictions, requiring non-union members to pay union agency fees is just one of those things you are not permitted to do, and thus can't enter an agreement to do.
Nobody is being forced - everybody is voluntarily accepting or refusing contracts.
How do you ensure that your unionizing vote (which includes details of how the union will operate, since they each have their own charter), is fair? You have to get the parent company involved, otherwise you might be disenfranchising eligible voters/members and/or involving outside parties.
This is where it gets ugly because the company (usually) has a vested interest in observing that the vote fails.
That environment has been great for pro-business interests to push laws that weaken union power in many states.
You can bet companies (especially Amazon) are aware of this fact.
It's more palatable to back-rationalize things as being the way they are for some exceptional reason.
I find the only thing keeping groups from organizing is some schlub running an out-of-band comm network, and a fear of being heard mentioning the U-word in the workplace, and a general ignorance of just how much anti-union FUD is spread, and how amazingly cheap it is to produce balanced against how effective it is at disincenting organization.
Don't get me wrong, not everywhere needs a union. The places that do though, there really is no other option.
Source: Lived it.
What the real comment there is, is that there is a tendency for places where you have a pronounced homogenous workforce that culturally identify or share some other commonality with one another are considered unionization risks. Solidarity amongst the ranks breeds contempt of leadership, especially at a distance. It's harder to divide, and they're more likely to forge an outgroup of corporate. This is why you fill in "I'd rather not answer" on those forms, or leave it blank. There is no data point you are asked to give that some data analyst doesn't intend to mine for value in one way or another, and if you think "no one would ever do that!", I would advise you to eschew offers of bridge sales at questionable locations.
Also, it's damn easy to get even diverse groups to organize once everyone understands how the game is played. The thing is, most people don't talk about that sort of thing or haven't seen it with their own eyes/done it enough to understand just how much gets done in an "under the radar", "I never said that", fashion. If ya don't believe me, start asking for things in writing. Ask HR what they think Market Rate is. Whole different side of people comes out.
Workplaces in particular rely on the fact that workers are by and large, just out to make a living, self-interested, and conflict averse. When unions seem to be starting to form, it's easier to paint them as a threatening outgroup, threatening other worker's jobs because "paying more would impact margins/break the bank", or that the union isn't ultimately out to help anyone but the union; or is out to hold the high performers back. This predates on that self-interest motive, and tries to project an in-group association between the employer and the non-union employee. Psychology works, sadly.
Workplaces fear labor organization more than anything else. It's why the Taft-Hartley Act would never have gone anywhere without illegalizing secondary striking (whereby unions would shut down an entire industrial sector to show solidarity for one another). Capital allocators absolutely could not tolerate that kind of threat from the labor force. It's said that's balanced by illegalizing the practice of blacklisting by the Capital class; but you'll find that as capital gets more and more centralized in the hands of fewer and fewer investors, it's much easier to practice that type of collusion without paper trail, or make it so obfuscated as to not be worth looking for. See the Silicon Valley no-poaching agreement.
This is certainly terrible. Man, what a mess.
Thanks.
That is just patently wrong. It was a reaction to the previous administration's foreign policy strategy, which was to position America as less of a world leader and more of a partner.
Conservatives frequently criticized one of President Obama's early trips as an "apology tour", and were incensed when he appeared to bow to the Saudi king.
Also, they disliked the domestic policies which had a socialized feel.
It literally had nothing to do with the civil rights movement.
Happen to know of any direct discussion of this being the intent behind that slogan from the Trump administration? Especially from Trump himself?
If you don't trust me, a quick google search yields tons of results:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-cam...
Quote:
“I felt that jobs were hurting,” he said. “I looked at the many types of illness our country had, and whether it’s at the border, whether it’s security, whether it’s law and order or lack of law and order. Then, of course, you get to trade, and I said to myself, ‘What would be good?’ I was sitting at my desk, where I am right now, and I said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ ”
Security and trade would be the foreign policy bits that he felt we were far too weak on.
"Make America Great Again" doesn't reference anything in particular. It is just a catch-all phrase that captures the emotions of nostalgia, a remembrance of a better place that never was.
But - as you aptly demonstrate - it lends itself perfectly to project onto anything anyone could imagine and it is ambiguous enough to be applicable for pretty much everything.
That's why it's a actually a pretty good slogan.
So the company, being a private entity, can say that you can't talk about the union while at work. It can show you "training videos" and other anti-union materials without repercussion.
And it's mostly the union that wants it to be all or nothing, because that's the only way it really works. If 5 guys are in the union, but the other 95 are not, then the company doesn't really have to negotiate with the union.
Collective bargaining only has power when it represents the entire collective. Or at least most. But if it is in such a position that it can start negotiating, I'm sure one of the things it will negotiate is that anyone working at the company must be a union member. Which is there, yes, to protect the union, but also the workers in the union. Because if the company can hire non-union members, it can slowly replace the entire workforce with non-union labor and eventually soft-terminate the union.
The entire situation is complicated and there are lots of places where people can be taken advantage of from every angle.
As an employee, I prefer to have the right to choose whether to join a union or not, but many folks don't want me to have that choice.
As an example, if this warehouse votes to unionize, will I still be able to work there without joining the union if I don't want to? No, I will be forced to join or leave.
There are no laws forcing employees to join a union.
Some businesses might enter into contracts with their employees. Right-to-work states attempt to put restrictions on that freedom of contract by making certain contracts illegal for businesses to accept.
There is no right to employment, businesses can fire you for reason outside of any explicitly encoded wrongful termination reason.
Right-to-work proposes to ban private businesses from proposing or entering into such a contract. But there is no law requiring employees to join a union.
Having a unionized workplace is a bit like having a democratic government – in the U.S., we're born and become citizens of the U.S. government and all that comes with that. We can't "opt out" unless we move out of the country and renounce our citizenship. We still have to pay taxes and we get all the benefits of our government (safety, education, roads, etc.) even if we don't want to – you can't just not pay taxes, right?
If you don't want to join a union workplace, just find a non-union workplace. If you don't want to join a new union, vote against it and find another job if they accept the union? That's more choice than you get with being a citizen of a country where you pay taxes! (And usually, union dues are less than the negotiated benefit/wage increases anyway.)
Almost always as a rule they are. You are not going to get people to vote for a union security clause that decreases net pay.
They are saying that non-union workers are bound by the union's decision and have to pay into it.
You are saying that this is a good thing.
There are actually lots of legally binding agreements that do just this, so the fact that the law is used to enforce an agreement vs. the law directly stating it doesn't really have much material difference.
Second - employment is at-will, if you no longer agree with the contract you are free to quit at any time.
The law is not forcing employees to join a union, the private business entered into a contract with a security clause. "Right-to-work" is around banning businesses from entering into certain voluntary agreements. It has nothing to do with laws requiring employees to join a union, as no such law exists.
There absolutely are states where certain trades must be performed by union employees. My company almost got into an expensive legal battle because the locale we were working in required union contractors for electrical work. The union claimed our payroll staff (IT) violated local union laws because the union saw them running ethernet cables which constituted "low voltage" work, something the union was supposed to do. This shutdown the jobsite for our staff while the union and our company sorted things out.
> The Taft–Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947. The union shop was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States
As a supermarket cashier I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to join the union as a condition of employment. No union, no job.
This law is called basic contract law. A company can agree to only hire via a union just like a university can agree to only sell Pepsi products.
> I prefer to have the right to choose whether to join a union or not
I prefer to have the right to choose whether I am under my management structure or not. I suppose someone could say one can go somewhere else, but that would apply to a company with an exclusive union contract as well.
They are - you can already form a union whenever you want with whoever you want (some exceptions like armed forces.)
This vote is about forcing the employer to talk to your union.
In the US version there is a single union for a particular employer, and the employee is forced to join that particular one. (Barring certain laws that complicate this picture a bit.)
This is also why unions work in Europe: There is competition among them, and the employee chooses. In contrast in the US because there is a single one for an employer the unions are frequently corrupt and don't actually do anything helpful for the employee.
In my experience in the UK and Norway I was treated just the same by both my employers and the unions even though I have never been a union member.
The US history was separated and a little different. The New Deal compromise was from 1933 to the 1970s, and has been somewhat rolled back since then. The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage has fallen in the US since the early 70s, so the average US worker is worse off in that respect than they were a half century ago.
Not American but interestingly there is no freedom of association defined in the First Amendment but rather recognized by the courts as a fundamental right. Part of the challenge when it comes to unions is that it goes both ways, including the freedom to join AND the freedom to leave. This makes something like labour organization tougher to define without coming down to heavy on one side or the other. There are a bunch of aspects and this is only one; it's incredibly complex in any jurisdiction, but especially in one that prioritizes the individual.
It's an implicit right (whether fundamental or not), and the courts recognized freedom of association as being implicitly necessary to fully exercise the rights explicitly recognized in the first amendment.
It's not freedom to join vs freedom to leave, but whether a contractual agreement can limit this right; can a contractual agreement exclude a party from associating with other parties.
Exclusive labor contracts are one example (presuming the company's agreement to exclusivity was truly voluntarily, which is debatable), but what about other contracts?
Given that every purchase is a contractual agreement, could Sony put a clause in the sales agreement that says the buyer can never buy another brand of TV? What if it was only while you owned and used the Sony TV? What if your Sony TV discovers another brand TV on your home network and bricks itself until you get rid of other TV?
The right to a secret vote is equally implicit in the constitution, but we wouldn't hold a contract that forfeits that right to be valid, just as a contract requiring someone to vote a certain way would be illegal.
I do not understand this, and also don't understand why this is just glossed over in a single sentence in this article and not unpacked more.
Generic cynicism aside, since when can a private company just "have the Postal Service" install a mailbox on its property? This makes it sound like the USPS is at corporate beck and call.
This makes it sound like a company can call up the postal service, say 'setup an official mailbox on our private property', and the post office responds with 'sure, we'll be right over'.
> More Perfect Union confirmed with Jefferson County officials that last year, Amazon notified the county of traffic delays during shift changes and asked for the light to be changed.
And then the unsubstantiated speculation is that this was done as a form of union busting, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence presented (like internal meeting notes, emails, any kind of evidence, really) that this was actually the case.
Your original post was:
> They also had the red light on the public road you turn off to enter the warehouse shortened so that Union advocates would have less time to speak to workers stuck in traffic.
But the only available evidence is that the former happened, not the latter 'so that..'.
If I were someone on the fence about unionizing, and someone told me "you know Amazon changed the stoplight to prevent us from being able to talk to you", and I were to then look into it and find that while Amazon did change the stoplight speed, there's no evidence that they did it specifically to mess with organizing efforts, then I'd be pretty annoyed and write off the organizer as being full of shit. We need to stick to verifiable acts of union busting, especially because as you said, there are plenty of them to choose from, without rattling off speculation that can't be substantiated as if it were fact.
Is this drastically different from apartment buildings paying to have mailboxes installed? I bet if you called them and said you had some reason to expect a massive increase in letters sent from your front lawn they'd quote you a price to install a mailbox.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/198518/us-motor-vehicle-...
Literally only China makes more cars that the US. US beats Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Germany...
Japan, South Korea, and Germany make more per capita than both the US and China. Even Canada does.
Worth noting that (a) The USA does have an auto industry and (2) the decline of union membership correlates perfectly to the stagnation of middle-class wages and the increase of corporate revenues going to the wealthy.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262294/amazon-flex-wage-...
Obama did same thing in being explicitly pro-union.
Basically the GC's then took pretty aggressive positions
" Solomon pushed a case against Boeing in 2011 for trying to open a factory in right-to-work South Carolina. He argued this was retaliation against unionized workers in Washington state even though none had been laid off. He demanded Boeing abandon a $2 billion investment and move all production to Washington state."
Here's the letter from the Former GC - who was forcefully removed - so the agency is a bit less independent from the administration than one would think from the act itself.
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__aboutbl...
What is interesting is that even Trump allowed the (dem) GC to serve out their term, so this Biden approach is a bit new.
I mention just because a lot of posts are mention the NLRB is a "neutral" govt agency. Biden has promised that it will be the most "pro-union" ever, and has taken steps to make that happen.
How is it that HN'ers look at entities like the UAW or various state teachers' unions and think, "Yeah, let me get some of that."?
Is there an example of increased union-ization of a U.S. company leading to better outcomes for customers?
I think there's a difference between saying "Amazon is bad to intimidate its workers" and "Unions are good". It's totally fair to agree that Amazon have been acting very poorly intimidating its warehouse workers while also thinking those workers would be better off voting no to joining a union.
Ultimately the workers should have a free vote to determine what they want for themselves. You don't need to be pro- or anti-union to believe that.
Also most workers are not in a job with a candidate shortage (and candidate shortages don't last forever, better have a union while you have the power to make it happen then when you become a throwaway widget for your company)
I've also negotiated in non-standard vacation packages, like a fixed 2 months off every year.
That simply doesn't happen in collective bargaining.
I've hardly ever been a throwaway widget in any job and even when I was working shitty jobs I was the type to get promoted quickly. The only places this never happened were my 3 union jobs. And in each case I was forced to work for the union -- I wasn't seeking it.
Last week tonight on union busting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8
When a union does not work or is corrupt, we fix the union, we don't give away the collective power to the opposing side of the negotiation: oh no, my lawyer is not doing my best interest he's only trying to rake up the fees! you know what? I'll let my opponent's lawyer represent me in court instead!
Even if you are in a union, you are undoubtedly the customer of many unions or would-be unions.
edit: clarification 'a' refers to a singular union and isn't a comment on the quality/nature of said union(s).
The problem at hand is that 100 people are forced to fend for themselves against a company when they could act as a block and have leverage. One problem at a time
The lower class is not a bunch of animals to be exploited as much as possible so middle class people can have cheaper shipping
I'd say yes to that.
Here's an example of the great value they're delivering in the U.S.:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo...
Around plenty of municipalities, teachers' unions are just trying to get teachers slightly closer to living wages, and trying to best advocate for their students. That's the impression I've gotten from being vaguely around during a lot of bargaining meetings.
The poor are the most exploited people because they literally can't accept anything else for fear of death, and I want better for them. If a union can bring that, then I rejoice for their chance to try out a union and get their deserved wages.
Such things should not be allowed.
'I can still see at the top: "US labor board official orders...", with no mention of union action at all [and the omission implies there was none]. I don't think it's the union [because they are unmentioned, rather I think it is some other entity] making the bad faith argument here'