Amazon Employees Don’t Need a Union | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Employees Don’t Need a Union

city-journal.org

10 pointsBostonian7 comments

"Because I don't like unions I will argue against them on the specious basis a theoretical market equality exists for all people presupposing mobility and symmetric power"

Have some empathy for people trapped by other life circumstances in specific roles and locations. "Just get educated" or "move" is like "invent time machine"

Is the author paid by Amazon or just an apologist? As other commenters have said, the asymmetry between Amazon and its employees necessitates a union to level the playing field. Not every employee can easily quit and find employment elsewhere, no matter the theoretical mobility of the job market. And Amazon, like many employers, has a million ways to squeeze their employees short of driving them to quit.

TLDR: Management has determined that current wages and working conditions are "good enough", and does not foresee that conditions might ever change to put workers in an even less favorable bargaining position. There is also the global race to the bottom to consider.

That this was written by "Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor", is worrying.

As a counterpoint, see the effect of unions in Denmark: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603398

> That this was written by "Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor", is worrying.

This isn't coincidental, FWIW. Our political and economic systems self-perpetuate by encouraging the concentration of power among individuals with views that reinforce that status-quo.

>> Tight labor markets empower workers more than any union.

Citation needed.

I suspect because of their role in process they ARE the citation because fiat: if they say it, it must be true. (Reader: it's not true. It's just an academic opinion based on one narrow view of the empowerment of labour mobility during times of full employment and it totally ignores the power balance, and life circumstances leaving many workers functionally trapped in roles. Working poor have anything BUT the freedom to move, sometimes)

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is an adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University

If I had a job writing cringe headlines like that I'd want a union.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com