Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.
I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo.
At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change the current tribal political lines. Normally this kind of movement would be a strength of the left. But lately the right has become quite populist, so maybe this plays in their direction. Whoever figures out how to capture this massive constituency is set up for a powerful future.
I saw an op-ed from a conservative magazine on this exact theme: [1]. The author basically says, "if we're claiming to be the party of the working class, shouldn't we be in favor of this?"
1: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/republicans...
Unionization is a mixed bag. The UAW has been in the news recently for a seemingly never ending parade of union leaders being sent to jail for corruption.
Most unions form at places that are genuinely terrible workspaces where workers have legitimate reasons to hate the boss. As unions become mainstream at places like Starbucks I would expect folks agitating for worker power to less radical.
Yes, and the pandemic brought a brief moment of dignity (but not safety) to the low paid service workers who make our society operate. They went from the butt of cruel jokes to “essential workers” and “heroes” overnight. It is very, very hard to force people back into undignified circumstances once they’re had even a taste of being treated like a person.
Veering into my own pet theories, I think that the social aspect of who is and is not allowed to be treated like an actual person is a highly underrated factor of unionization pushes. It often costs companies little to nothing financially to treat their employees like actual people, but it feels good to those on top of the office hierarchy to abuse and belittle those they see as their social inferiors. They ignore the risks of this behavior at their own peril.
It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.
So it can have the opposite effect. The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. The last voting count was 74% against the union.
We have to wait and see what the union can "win" from Amazon.
Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.
South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.
Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".
Hold it there, sparky.
Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.
It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.
Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.
I would like to see a wave of unionization, but I’m skeptical that unions as currently structured can actually deliver for workers. In the last few decades, as private sector union membership has declined, unions have lost influence within the larger left. They find themselves as followers rather than leaders within the Democratic Party. Even a couple of decades ago lots of workers like my father in law griped about the unions not delivering benefits that justified the dues. That’s only gotten worse as unions increasingly get enmeshed in generic progressive causes the workers themselves often don’t support.
It doesn’t appear that Amazon Labor Union affiliated with one of the big national unions, which is a positive sign. If they can deliver real benefits for workers, other locations may unionize too. But they’ll have to be laser focused on benefitting Amazon Workers and resist the urge to get over their skates.
One can only hope. Collective bargaining is the most powerful tool to dismantle income inequality and corporate greed.
Now worker representatives in boards, that would be very beneficial.
It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power, and union supporters will remind you of the bad times when the employers had too much power. These days we actually see a lot more of the latter. Will we swing back and forth indefinitely? Probably.
MAYBE you could in Europe, where in 1980s there was some decline in private sector investment concurrent with lower profit rates, but that never happened here.
But that's not what we're talking about here. If I am making $8 an hour at my current job and Amazon is willing to pay me $15 an hour but the union says no, first of all we insist on $20 an hour and second of all we decide who gets those jobs and your name isn't on the list, that isn't worker rights, is it?
It's not worker rights or employer rights, it's union rights. Wise up. There's a long history here - certainly on Staten Island - about how this all plays out and where the money goes.
That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers.
To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.
So there might be a lot of, or a least enough to make a difference, overlap in the hiring pool, depending how far they relocate.
And is precisely why Amazon fought so fiercely (and underhandedly) to derail a similar effort in Alabama around this time last year.
The more things change…
I don't think it's any coincidence that this success at Amazon comes right now. After the GFC all regulatory efforts turned to keeping financial markets solvent. That has meant unwavering support for policies that favor those with assets over those who don't.
The pandemic happened in early 2020 just as the wheels were flying off the US economy yet again. So what would have played out got masked by many other factors, including direct government transfers.
Those stimmie checks of yore are long gone, and it will be a very steep uphill battle to bring anything remotely like that back given the rip-roaring yr/yr increase in CPI and PPI now underway. Those checks are being blamed for the ongoing inflation that more than just the lunatic fringe now thinks is the start of Weimar-style hyperinflation.
So with the 2/10 year yield curve now inverted [2], it's just a matter of time before the economic chickens come home to roost once more. Will it be different this time? Will unions step in to fill the gap that government can not?
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/do-unions-still-work/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/us-bonds-treasury-yields-inv...
My first job was earning minimum wage working full-time at Safeway. After working there for about 9 months I quit because I didn't want to pay union dues to join the union. I was already only making minimum wage, it wasn't like the union was improving my salary. The required hour long lunch breaks might have been thanks to the union, but I hated having to take hour long breaks. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
Listening to that episode didn't change my thoughts much. One of the bigger problems I have with unions is that they always want to grow to gain more power/influence. If I'm paying dues I don't want 20% or whatever of those dues to go to what is essentially advertising/marketing.
My ideal union would have low fees, not try to expand into other companies, and would be optional for employees.
What you are saying is I want the union to do all the work without me being hands on on its function. Unions are useless if the workers just sit idle and wait for the representatives to do all the work.
Participation of all workers is what make a union powerful.
Buy better food? I don't understand how a person can eat their food and digest it in 30 minutes.
Back then I worked in the Safeway deli. I'd often make a sandwich for myself and set it aside, walk around the counter and buy it when lunch started, and then finish eating in 15-20 minutes. And then I'd be stuck sitting around in the break room with nothing to do waiting out the remaining 40 minutes.
Sure I usually read books or watched tv on a little Archos media player. But I would have rather finished work earlier and done that in the comfort of my home.
Unions as worker-led orgs are much better; you have faith that your reps actually know your working conditions, and you often perosnally know the rep in some capacity.
This victory is because of worker-led unions.
Also the trend in #2 consists if 3 data points. It might be an accurate interpretation, but curves before the '73, '80, '81 recessions didn't follow this pattern. We'd need an explanation for why that's the case, and what changed in the '90s. Without that we're just drawing a bullseye around 3 dots coincidentally close together.
Was there other evidence for a recession? I know that some people were saying we were "due" for one based simply on average timing, but that's no very compelling either if GDP growth had been relatively steady.
Meanwhile, this article [0] indicates that right before the pandemic got huge we weren't checking the boxes on a variety of things that would be warning signs.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/06/her...
While productivity increased over the past half century, inflation-adjusted hourly wages are about what they were 50 years ago (it goes up and down - they were slightly lower in 2018 than 1972, a few cents higher in 2019). All productivity gains have been hovered up by the heirs and aristocracy.
As it was in the Silicon Valley wage cartel which collapsed in 2014. So FAANG wages have been high for 8 years, which is a historic anomaly.
"group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market"
I suppose we might argue that even the FAANGs together aren't large enough to constitute the full market. Other companies compete over the workforce of FAANG-eligible workers. The long tail of such SV employers with lower employee headcount a is still probably large in the aggregate. Though even apart from no-poaching agreements I've seen it speculated that FAANGs may employ large #s of talented people somewhat unnecessarily purely to keep them out of the hands of current competitors or potential startups that could grow into competition. That's a bit too conspiratorial for me though, at least without more evidence
Go watch one of those "inside the Amazon warehouse" videos on YouTube. The box/tote sorting machines are millions of dollars each, and there are probably 3 big ones and maybe 2 or 3 more small ones. The ubiquitous conveyor belts are cheap individually, but there are miles of them. The robots moving the storage shelves are not cheap, and there are hundreds of them per floor, and typically 4 floors.
Amazon's strategy for the last decade has been to make these huge capital costs to keep variable costs low. They don't just shut an FC down.
For a big, high speed 'shoe'[0] sorter, you're talking about a machine more than 100m long that is heavily, heavily bolted into the cement floor. I believe that particular building has four such sorters.
[0] Not a sorter of shoes for your feet, but a sorter that uses little boxes called 'shoes' to carefully knock packages off at the right place.
Amazon can choose to lose a LOT of money and bear tight margins in the retail business (as they do already). And they can just move the equipment, they don't have to lose them.
I think the reason Amazon might just not do it is there is a lot of scrutiny and discourse against Amazon is politically favorable, that they would embellish their brand as "evil" even further - whether it be real or not.
I think you’re drastically underestimating the influence of unionization.
It's a sad state of affairs when corporations are allowed to screw citizens over.
Because they already have fulfillment centers in all of those places, and during the holiday season (peak) they are maxed out.
It’s time to make a point and turn the community against the agitators. They destroyed good jobs.
Time and time again this is the proven strategy.
In 2022, the only time I tend to see a union do anything, it’s to disrupt and create mob like holds on things (shipping, trucking etc). There seems to be waaay more corruption in anything union related than without.
Can someone seriously explain why this is needed or a good thing? Who actually wins in Amazons case outside of corrupt, power hungry union leaders who get to create roles for themselves?
Amazon may pay well for now, but let's be honest, Amazon is a monopolistic project. What happens when there's less competition than there is right now? Do you think wages stay where they're at without some kind of pressure?
A union is the only ways employees can have any real power in the workplace. Democratically run unions give employees real negotiating power over what it means to go to work day to day. Unions are not perfect but what group of humans ever is?
I'd take a union job over a non-union job any day of the week.
I've been part of a few and this has never been the case in my experience.
Nothing about her job changed when she left the union.
I have no issues with unions, provided the employees have the choice to belong. But there’s the rub many (most?) states require membership (and dues) if there’s a union. And that’s never sat right with me.
I genuinely see this as bad for online retail.
How is this to do with unions and not just lack of labor supply, i.e. lack of people with a right to work in Australia who also want to be a truck driver in the middle of nowhere.
15$/hr ~ 30k$/year - That doesn't sound like a lot to be honest.
These aren’t highly skilled jobs. They come with healthcare and leave benefits. That’s game changing. Yet people seem enraged… I just don’t get it.
* Those workers should not earn more, a union would make them earn more, therefore they should not unionize
Or that
* The union would not make those workers earn more, therefore they should not unionize
?
$20 minimum wage would be more keeping in line with historic buying power.
This is just sad. Just a hair over 50% of the eligible voters voted; weirdly, approximately the same voter turnout for US elections historically. Does half of any given population just not care enough to vote for something?
I work in politics and it drives me nuts the self reinforcing idea that your vote doesn't matter.
Combined with false equivalences and inflexibility to see a larger viewpoint (that no one will get 100% 1:1 policy representation) just lets older people who consistently vote run away with it.
There is also entrenched structural problems as a result of R control, especially state & county level. That is also a part of low turnout.
Long answer probably involves value systems and what individuals are actually doing on that day…
Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business.
But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it means retaining worker more easily. If the company is not wise enough to do it by itself, still it doesn't means that it cannot be a net positive for the company itself.
The whole idea of treating humans as leaking, opexed, robots will need to be fixed, but it can be done and it can bring benefits.
Why would the workers insist on this? Most workers want their company to succeed, just not succeed because of exploiting people.
The empirical evidence we have shows that unions consistently make these choices. There is a huge duplication of labor and responsibilities in construction unions, the trades, etc. The workers are trying to get the company to pay more money to labor, sometimes that means more increasing the pay per hour, sometimes that means increasing the total number of hours worked. I am pretty strongly in favor of germany style labor unions, sectoral barganing and labor codetermination. The caselaw and regulations around unionization in the US are bad and often lead to poor outcomes for workers and management.
You're making it seem like companies are too dumb to know what's best for them.
I'm in favor of unions but that there's no doubt they can be detrimental to companies and to some of the workers, who maybe prefer more risk and higher rewards.
Deeply rooted in complicated history of labor in the US from what I understand.
Here in Eastern Europe labor unions were at a certain point the source of political power, both for the establishment under socialism, and for the opposition movements before/after the iron curtain dropped. So, here banning or fighting against unions is unthinkable - they are considered a “good” thing.
It’s hard to think about this labor/business tension when you realize that all thought on this subject is constantly being monitored, lobbied and influenced.
He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations.
Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all, everyone, companies included, have less reason to combat unions.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experience with both and can gauge the accuracy.
This is interesting. I'm a government employee with a union, a pension, health insurance, the whole deal. The union does not control the pension or healthcare in any way whatsoever.
The governmental entity that I'm employed by, my employer, controls both, subject to collective bargaining to some extent. That is, my contract says I can join the pension, that I pay X% into the pension, that I can also join a 401k-style program if I wish, I'd pay Y% in that case. But it doesn't say anything about the operation of the pension or offer any real control. Same with my healthcare - it needs to meet certain criteria (e.g., premiums will be so many dollars for single coverage, employer must pay X% of actuarial value, etc.)
So, who are these unions who actually have union-run pensions and healthcare plans?
Some other countries have nationally managed pension funds. All the U.S. has is Social Security, a minimalist safety-net pension, and it's a heavy political lift just to maintain that, so I don't see things changing here.
Also, don't unions literally sit on the board of corporations in countries like Germany? The notion that U.S. unions have too much power just seems like a typically American spin on the efficacy of unions--a bias veiled as a criticism. There's a host of reasons unions aren't more prevalent in the U.S., and they feed back onto each other, but if you had to boil them all down, IMO it's because our culture is rather hostile to unions, and it's always been that way. Even at their peak popularity in early- and mid-20th century, mainstream unions (as opposed to the infamous Wobblies, which never had significant membership) were remarkably conservative as compared to their counterparts in Europe, reflecting the general culture.
But even if your union doesn't directly control your healthcare plan, I would still assume it was part of the collective bargaining?
Pretty much all teachers unions negotiate healthcare and pensions, I think. That is, what plans you have access to, the contributions you need to make for them, and the dept. of ed.'s contribution and eligibility rules. The union and the state dept. of ed negotiate together.
But it does happen, especially with dental and similar plans.
Skilled trade unions. IBEW (electrical) has union-run pensions and healthcare, I’m not familiar enough with pipefitters or steelworkers but I’d guess their unions do too.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have much say in worker pay in a great majority of sectors. Especially where it could help like warehouse work which has seen wages plummet with the advent of Amazon.
Now, compare that to two unions which are extremely powerful and not always good for the public or their members!
1) Teachers unions. Extremely powerful (at least Oregon where I know about them), but they don't necessarily help teachers! Pay is low because they haven't flexed their power and are fully at the whim of taxes. Since their funding is low the most teacher's union can guarantee their workers is that they will have a consistent job. Which sucks! Also, when COVID occurred there was little room for teachers to get a say as to how classes would be virtual, when kids would be back in schools, or when and how the mask mandate would be lifted. Supposedly a union would help!
2) Police unions: super strong, extremely political, extremely effective. Also nigh impossible to fire a cop unless they offend their union or a fellow cop. Rarely do police budgets ever get cut or does cop pay go down. Do most folks want this? Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? But hey, they're too powerful to do anything about.
Pareto distribution strikes again! Apparently new york city has a GDP that ranks 15 in the world, above mexico[1][2] and ranks 59 in the world in terms of population[3], so the fact that new york exceeds "a mid sized country" (median?) in some statistic isn't surprising. If you want to make the argument that the US is over-policed, use some statistic like officers per 100,000 people or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
This may have been a positive. The teachers and their unions are only motivated for them to stay home and "safe", forever. It's the customers (parents) who need the leverage to get the teachers to actually deliver the service they're getting paid for, rather than trying to hide from their job indefinitely as many would be happy to do.
Unions can be important to protect workers' rights, but it's also easy for them to go too far into not even providing the service the job is supposed to do. Particularly in an area with captive customers and government-mandated demand, like education.
So, they don't get their employees good pay, they don't get a say in their working conditions. In what sense are they powerful, as you claim?
I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany.
I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension).
It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand.
The union system is the U.S. is completely broken. I think unions in the U.S. should be both more widespread but much less powerful.
Many of the union-busting activities American companies casually do would be flat out illegal in th EU.
"Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?".
Very counterintuitive thinking.
I strongly believe in unions, but I agree with OP that keeping them small and focused is better for both the interests of the company and the employees. Extreme power imbalances are seldom (and I'd dare say never) good. I've seen unions effectively bankrupt business during tough times. I've also seen what unchecked corporate power can do. The right mixture of regulation and collective bargaining is a good thing, but like always, too much of a good thing can quickly turn bad. As an example, you can end up overprotecting unproductive or counter productive employees, reducing bonuses and pay for the other hard working employees because of reduced profitability.
The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.
It's misleading to consider unions in other countries like the Nordics as anything other than much stronger and more powerful. They have almost universal membership, engage in sectoral bargaining, set minimum wages, run important parts the welfare state, and sit on company boards. It's often noted that the Nordics don't have legal minimum wages - this is because industrial bargaining agreements that set minimum wages make this unnecessary because they cover ~all workers.
In countries where union membership is declining (US and other anglo countries particularly), membership rates are low and optional, there's little sectoral bargaining, most industrial action is essentially outlawed. Sympathy and wildcat strikes are entirely illegal, and in Australia you cannot strike without prior permission from a government body.
The short version is that there was a union that was declining to support dues paying members because they were black. It resulted in a case that went all the way to the USSC.
In contrast, European unions are allowed to be more realistic and accept that some members are knuckleheads and that it’s a positive for both the union and the employer if they are fired with minimum fuss.
In the US a union is tied to a workplace. A single company, often a single location. This is by design of the NLRA.
Corporations fight to limit the size of the bargaining unit, to make the unions less powerful. This Amazon warehouse is unionized, but the other warehouses are not unionized and warehouses over a FooBar Corp. are not unionized. Each of these unions has to work out their own contract and bargain independently even if they all work for the same company.
This gives the workers less leverage and makes it easier for US Corps to pit workers against each other.
In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, unions are also organized by sector. You could have a national Warehouse workers union, which sets working conditions for all warehouse workers. This gives them significantly more leverage and makes it difficult to do the kind of "we shut down this store and open another" tactic that you see in the US.
I'm sure there's a variety of other differences, but I don't think it's fair to characterize EU unions are weaker.
London transport is an interesting case. I wonder the extent to which they have well-paid secure jobs because they can and do disrupt London. Bus drivers have a much worse deal, for example, being easily replaceable.
I think from time to time about a statement made by Bob Crow, who was the former hardline chief of the RMT. He said that his members were now amongst the only working class Londoners who could afford to live decently in the city they served. Which (despite my dislike of his tactics) does seem like a reasonable point.
FWIW my union (UCU; academic) has traditionally been a lot quieter and more consensual, and we've been repeatedly shafted in recent years as a result. That kind of collaborative management/union relationship only works if both sides are committed to making a decent workplace operate, and our management no longer are.
> all have well paying secure jobs
I wonder if that's linked....
And $70k a year in London is not "well paid", it's 9% of the price of an average property in London.
On a micro level, traditional US unions have huge pension funds that they have won from employers and promised to existing members, and so they can be very restrictive on membership qualifications.
Employers already do all of this, except you have no say in it. In contrast, you're granted democratic decision making with a union, so you do get a say in those arenas.
All human endeavors are corrupt, including gov't, business, and occasionally unions. Collective bargaining is something I wish I had at my disposal. Not to mention I could use it to make life better for my colleagues overseas. No reason they should be paid any or much less than anyone else. They work hard, and we should band together.
The US is a closed shop country, which means that, once a union is in place, it has an effective monopoly for the workers that work for one of its companies.
If we switched to open shop, then unions would have to compete for membership. Of course, the existing unions are strongly against this. As an end result, everyone I know that's been a union member in the last twenty years strongly dislikes unions.
Hi! Union member from ~2005-2011. Appreciated being in mine and strongly support a more unionized workforce.
It's like hating democratic governance, not every democratic decision made is one you're going to agree with, but overall it gives you the ability to shape the future of your workplace in a way you'd never have the ability to otherwise.
Also, I feel like it's safe to assume that you don't know any teachers or police officers? Both those groups seem to very much support their unions.
This is not correct:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop
The US is not a closed shop country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Like a lot of things about employment, housing, medical insurance, etc. it varies quite a bit between states.
Meanwhile, of the hundreds of people I know, most of them have been unhappy with their employers at one point or another...
Been in a union for 8 years. Strong like.
My wife is in a union, and is not strongly against them. In fact, they're the reason she makes a six-figure salary. She also has a robust contract to prevent abuse. I am non-union as a developer and am pretty much over a barrel. It's a no brainer to work in a licensed, union career for most people. The only losers are the owners.
I have been a manager in a union shop though. And had no issues with the union. In fact, companies get the union that they deserve.
Note for interest that this is not literally true. Some people work in jobs where unionisation is illegal, or where unionisation is legal but union action is illegal.
I just know that at work I am alone and weak. With everyone else I would be on more equal footing with my employer. Instead of quitting, why not make my workplace better?
I worked at a fast food restaurant. That sucked. But I was also a high school kid with no marketable skills. So I sort of understood I was “putting in my time” and this is the way it goes. I never thought “we should unionize and demand more money.”
If Amazon needs career people in these positions, they’ll be forced to treat the employees as career people and not like the fast food industry treats employees like myself.
Why does working in a restaurant have to suck? I've worked at plenty here in Norway during my youth, was always nice. They pay according to a collective agreement, with extra pay for evening and night work. So a pay it was possible to survive on.
Why demand that "unskilled" labor should suck? Why want to inflict that pain on others?
I wouldn’t be betting on robots just yet.
It would seem like a sensible business move, even if it involves a little bit of service disruption for users in New York.
It only seems like a sensible business move if you ignore the incredibly negative PR that'd come from it. You're laying off a lot of local workers and publicly making a target of yourself after the vote passes. Usually businesses will shut down sites before the union vote while they can still sort of BS their way into saying "Well, it looked like the vote would've failed anyways - look at this internal polling" - doing it after unionization is going to add a lot of vitriol to the situation, much more so than the underhanded techniques they use to sway the vote.
They cannot afford to close this shop, and it's obviously playing a big role as to why this location has successfully unionized while the location in Alabama has not.
I'm not saying that's good. But I'm saying Amazon might think it can't afford to let the employees unionise.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon announced the closure of this fulfilment centre. It would seem dramatic but if it kept other centres from unionizing I could see Amazon taking the short-term discomfort.
I don't know what Amazon's calculation will be in these circumstances. If Jeff was still in charge I reckon the fulfilment centre would be closed down.
I think you're underestimating the long term pain Amazon is opening themselves up to by closing a recently unionized site. With a labour shortage and extremely high churn Amazon is already having hiring issues - scabs aren't really on the menu if you're already scraping the barrel and a large employer in the local market.
They would? Why? How does the existence of a union prevent a company from firing everyone if it wants to? My understanding is that the only power of a union is that all of its members use collective leverage to get better deals. There is no collective leverage action if everyone is fired.
Then make all the workers redundant, but let the third party offer them employment.
Then if the union makes undue demands, the third party can go bust and Amazon buy back the centre for pennies on the dollar, but without most of the staff.
Please don’t ask leading questions like this, they’re not helpful to the discussion.
Unions have upsides, and downsides. Discussing them helps people make good decisions. Pretending it's all flowers and rainbows does not.
Now, McDonalds and WalMart.
Hopefully the employees of other Amazon warehouses will be inspired to do the same, after this win for workers.
Unions benefit those who play the social game more so the job requirements, as it allows for an alternative power structure to be climbed.
Those are the exact people I love being able to avoid in the software field.
> Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
> A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Before anyone make a move for the jugular: I make a distinction between union members and union management (the entity). Union members are hard working folks, just like anyone else. They want the best for their families. That's their driving force. Nothing wrong with that at all. We all want the same things. Union management, on the other hand, well, I the tend to be between evil and criminal.
Today, US unions, in my opinion, destroy jobs. And they have done this in massive numbers. I still remember having a long conversation with a guy who retired from the printing industry. He explained, in great detail, how the union that ruled his industry absolutely decimated it. He lost his pension, benefits, etc.
The problem with US unions is that they exist to squeeze as much from companies as humanly possible. One of the most egregious examples I have seen of this is what the UAW (United Auto Workers) contracts that made US auto companies have more than 10,000 employees getting paid full wages and benefits (about $130K/year) to do nothing. Non-US car companies don't have this unbelievably destructive expense.
The effect of squeezing every possible drop out of a business is that you simply cannot be competitive over the long run. The other side effect is that economics and competitive pressures will force you to move portions of your process offshore and automate as much as you possibly can.
So, yeah, union leaders likely gave themselves a huge pat in the back for pulling that one off. And they made millions themselves (they get paid very well). And yet, a the ground level, they destroyed jobs, damaged companies, likely caused people to have serious psychological problems and damaged the long term viability of jobs.
When a company had hundreds of millions of dollars in dead-weight over head for years and years, sooner or later, there will be consequences. This is like fundamental laws of physics that cannot be violated.
In my little slice of the universe, as we are building a new manufacturing business, everything that can be automated will be so. There is no way we can pay someone $15 per hour (EDIT: to put screws into holes). If there was a way to do so and remain viable, I would have no problem with it. The truth of the matter is, this wage is a job killer. The US is already not competitive due to the huge cost of doing business here. This makes it worse.
On top of that, the combination of the $15/hr minimum wage, pandemic and other world issues has resulted in serious inflationary issues. Which means that the people who got that $15/hr wage (if they have a job at all), did not, in reality, get a raise at all. So, all we've done by pushing this nonsense is increase costs and destroy jobs.
Brilliant.
I know they look at all of this in China and cannot believe the US seems intent on destroying itself from the inside. I know because I also manufacture in China and talk to our suppliers all the time. They always tell me about how they are getting new customers because the cost of doing business in the US increases year after year.
As I said. Brilliant.
Sadly, people will not learn this lesson until things are bad enough to be obvious to nearly everyone. To be fair, what I am saying above requires having a reasonable understanding of business and skin in the game. Most people, the vast majority of people, go through life in complete ignorance of these realities. And so it is to be expected that, when the time comes to make decisions (voting) they are easily swayed into making truly dumb choices from the perspective of those who do have context.
That amount of money is about $15 most places in the country at absolute minimum and that will be a struggle.
If you can't afford to pay someone enough money at 40 hours a week that they can live with 1 other person in an apartment, eat, buy a car, maintain a car, buy gas, and have a small amount of cash left over--then your business isn't a viable business man.
It's "simple economics"
Sure. Let's pay everyone $50 an hour then?
Do you understand how ridiculous it is to base a minimum wage on what an adult needs to live with roommates?
It's a need. Of course it is a need. However, forcing a minimum wage isn't the solution at all. If it were, we could "fix it" by paying everyone $20, $30, $50, $500 per hour. Anyone but a complete moron can easily understand what happens if we set a minimum wage of $100 per hour. EVERY JOB THAT CAN BE EXPORTED WILL BE EXPORTED.
For everything else, inflation will absolutely explode. Which means that your $100 per hour won't buy you anything except for everything made in China (which will have higher prices because the Chinese are not stupid and will raise their prices to make more money). Home will cost 10x more and cars will double or triple in price. So, the $100 per hour quickly turns into a real $10 per hour. All we've done is play with numbers to create funny money. The ONLY ONES who benefit are the Chinese because they are doing everything they have to do in order to grow their economy and become the dominant economy in the world for the next 200 years.
That's the game and the stakes. People are allowing politicians to run us into the ground (or below it).
Your "simple economics" isn't real economics. It's wishful thinking. In the real world, with a globally integrated economy, a job and a standard of living can only exist in the context of where goods and services can be delivered more effectively.
This isn't even about greed. Anyone who has migrated work to China and other shores understands this very well. Only the ignorant equate this to greed. The truth of the matter is that market forces push pricing down. Since you won't pay more than $99 for a blender, everyone has to make them in China and margins are narrow. Nobody is making 300% margins because they went to China. If they do, those margins will collapse very quickly as competitors move their ops to China and push pricing down. That's economic reality. Like it or not.
Try to make something not-trivial in the US or Europe and see what happens. Most people would be horrified by the reality those of us in manufacturing understand all too well. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
The problem this forced wage has created is that you can't hire people without some pretty solid justification for what they will deliver in exchange. Businesses are forced to make an ROI choice on everything, including people and their wages. This is why you are seeing things like burger flipping and fries making robots. You just can't pay people that much and stay in business.
There will be plenty of high paid jobs. Just not jobs that cannot justify an artificially forced minimum wage that is not sustainable in the context of a global economy.
I'll give you a simple and real example from a recent job we sent out to bid to nearly two dozen manufacturers in the US and China. It consists of a part made by a wire forming machine and with some manual labor. The average US-cost for that part was in the order of $6.00 per unit PLUS shipping. The average cost of the same part made in China INCLUDING shipping, was $1.00. Now, somebody tell me how we can make that part in the US when minimum wage, taxes, regulatory costs, etc. make it impossible to get anywhere even close to Chinese prices. I mean, you can't make the part in the US for even TWICE the Chinese price. And, keep in mind that shipping from China costs 10x more today that it did not too long ago.
People might not like what I have to say. That does not invalidate the truth of it, you can't invalidate reality with a down-vote. Like it or not. Most people replying to my comment have never even tried to manufacture something at a non-trivial scale in the US. In other words, they don't even know what they are talking about, yet they are quick to have an opinion because words like mine hurt their feelings. Well, economics cares not one bit about feelings. Again, like it or not.
Most large companies have massive amounts of dividends being siphoned off from the workers who created the wealth, to heirs who are stockholders. Talk about dead weight.
I buy food at the market price; keeping me alive doesn’t mean the supermarket deserves 100% of my pay. I sell skilled work at the market price; why would I deserve 100% of anything? I’m even leveraging the shareholders’ huge investment and earning far more than I would by myself or in a co-op.
The economic argument for unions is that they provide a counterweight towards corporate monopoly powers. But in a public setting, the opposition are voters and taxpayers.
We as voters can say we want schools to re-open or police to be held accountable for their actions, and they can collectively bargain against our wishes. So, by their nature public sector unions are vaguely anti-democratic.
Consider that the public sector unions can donate to the political campaigns of the politicians they are at the bargaining table with and it becomes a little less vague.
This causes issues in a situation like serious misconduct, where it's entirely reasonable to fire the individual. However, a union will have strong grounds to make sure those policies are enforced fairly - and they simply aren't, it'll be allowed to slide if it isn't in the headlines. The problem isn't that it happened, it's that it ended up in the news!
As for whether it's because police management is all former union, they're just collecting a paycheck, or what - I'm not sure. But where you see the power of police unions, I see the incompetence of police management. If that's intractable, I do agree that police unions are bad because there's no opposition.
In comparison, a big company typically maintains a single goal - to make money. There will be exceptions of course, but as a whole, it's a coherent goal and things will be done at all levels to support it. There are the same sorts of issues with minor misconduct, since it's irrelevant to making money, but big issues are typically bad for business and thus there is strong motivation to enforce rules like "don't choke people" or "don't steal stuff".
They try to make up for the lack of responsibility of corporations towards their workers, which is important (keeps them in check), but then there is the issue of bureaucratic bloat and power concentration within unions (organizers, lawyers etc.) so they can become detached from the actual workers and their trade. At the same time there are highly skilled workers with high work ethic who benefit less from unions than their peers.
In my opinion a an ideal union is organized bottom up. Lawyers and organizers are there to support union workers and most importantly don't create a hierarchical structure where all negotiations happen at the top. Secondly a union should strive for the highest quality and work ethic among their workers. One should be proud to be part of one and have values and principles to strive for.
No, this is exactly what police unions should be doing. My problem is when elected officials and judges kiss their asses and defer to them on the subjects of public safety and civil rights.
I'm stunned by how much weight public officials and journalists give to the opinions of police about the causes of crime, the motivations of the people who commit them, and the punishments that criminals deserve. Who cares what they think about the justice system? Tell me about hitting people with sticks, directing traffic, or leaving the military with no real job prospects.
But aside from that, police are often underpaid and overworked, have to deal with workplace safety and harassment, not given anonymous channels to complain, etc. just like everybody who works. They need unions to fight for those things. Police unions are awful and racist because the police are awful and racist. The union should be working for them, not for racial justice. If you want police unions to be less racist, hire fewer racist police, and don't demand that they operate in a racist manner.
When I hear people complain about public unions, I hear people that are disapproving of unions when they're the ones in the position of employer. It's basically being pro-union except for the one at the business you own, who are clearly just outside agitators with an evil agenda making trouble and trying to destroy your family.
It's common, though. Center-left media outlets hate unions in their newsrooms as much as they love unions at e.g. Amazon.
Unions represent their members' interests, that's the entire point of unions. It says more about the entire profession of policing (i.e. that there are so many terrible officers that the not-terrible ones can't do anything about them) than it does about unions, to be honest.
It's hard to argue they don't serve their members' interests - admittedly to the detriment of the rest of society. Given a choice, who wouldn't like a 500lb gorilla like that in their own corner?
"No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
"No union victory is bigger than the first win in the United States at Amazon, which Amazon many union leaders regard as an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
But that's absolutely terrible, so you must be suggesting something else.
(When instead they view Amazon as the existential threat)
Not said by the NYT: "[Amazon is] an existential threat to labor standards across the economy because it touches so many industries and frequently dominates them."
The previous was actually said by Mr. Many U. Leaders who I can't locate a phone number for.
So I wonder if the recent rise in union interest is a symptom of the fact that in the U.S. a lot of industries have been monopolized or oligopolized, and the union option is starting to look increasingly more appealing every year.
There's definitely a lot of truth to this, but I think it's also important to note that switching costs for jobs can be very high for employees. People can have deep social ties with coworkers, there is no guarantee that the new job is better so the risk of ending up in a worse position (with possibly burned bridges) has to be factored in. In places where the job market is limited, it can mean moving, which can be very difficult.
Even in non-monopolistic areas, employment is very far from an efficient market.
Most workers are people without college degrees who can't even go a month without a paycheck or afford to move out of pocket.
I don't think many Americans even have any direct concept of what unionization is like, because a lot of them have barely ever been part of organized labour in their lifetime, and their only experience with it is a barrage of negative info put out by Amazon or Musk.
I'm not interested in being part of a union if the only points of negotiation are pay/hours/benefits. I want a say over profitability overall. Who we do business with and how. What products we offer, and why. And how we service and treat our customers. Google employees banding together to prevent the company from entering certain lines of businesses, for instance. That is progress.
Unless the biggest players in the industry are colluding against them as was the case with Google, Apple, Adobe, and Intel: https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
Don't many EU countries have strong unions? Does that imply the industries in those countries are monopolized or oligoplized?
Submitted title was "Amazon workers vote to unionize in stunning win for organized labor". NYT is known to change headlines so that may not have been the submitter's doing.
When will Apple (App Store) developers unionize?
Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me. I don't want to have to bring in my union rep to argue about it since going somewhere else means losing my tenure and taking a 30% pay cut.
The only time unions make sense is when you're doing labor that could be done by anyone and your bus factor is basically infinite. It doesn't make sense for skilled labor
Why does the former preclude the latter?
> Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me.
What if you didn't do _anything_ and your boss wants to fire you so badly? What if your boss fired you over Zoom randomly without any recourse?
> The only time unions make sense is when you're doing labor that could be done by anyone and your bus factor is basically infinite.
I disagree with this point. A union makes sense for anyone that is working for a wage. It makes sense to me to work together for all of our benefit rather than me to try to go up against those that pay my wage alone.
Put it another way, I do not think that I can argue well enough to get the actual value that I produce back in my pocket and would love if we all banded together and said "We deserve this much of the value we produce" instead.
Unions provide a ton of value if you're a skilled worker who does something comparable to gig work, jumping from jobsite to jobsite where the Union helps them keep their health insurance. It also helps when your job also has other political implications.
The context tech workers should unionize would be in an instance where they job hopped even more often than is currently the case, and also potentially on teams where you become just so specialized that switching companies becomes difficult.
In practice, creating unions is heavily frowned upon and discouraged through various underhanded means.
That should tell you that companies view unions as enemies, and collective bargaining in general.
And companies for sure don't have your interests in mind. Also for sure you don't have the negotiating power they have.
And I think it makes more sense to join a union preemptively, while things are in our favor, than to join a union in the future, possibly from a position of weakness.
The problem is, of course, every developer thinks they're a 10x rockstar who doesn't need a union.
* don’t want to have to switch jobs to address grievances
* can’t switch jobs because everywhere is shitty (eg actors guild).
* an industry has a monopoly on some local resource like forest for lumber or coal mines and so you can’t just start or join a competitor.
It’s not really about skilled labor, it’s about mobility and the market forces that prevent it.
A union does not prevent you from leaving your job for another employer. Why would you think that?
I agree with this sentence - because of the current state of the job market, and the level of seniority I have attained. However, if you are entry or junior, or if the market changes (good times don't last forever), just working a 'skilled labor' job won't give you the job security we enjoy atm. In that case, looking for a new job would be much more daunting, and working on improving your current work conditions might be a much better option.
(edit - improve accuracy of which part of the statement I agree with)
I would consider professional athletes skilled and they have powerful unions.
Hollywood writers, actors, and directors are skilled an they all have unions/guilds.
An alliance of employers against a third party is a cartel, which is substantially different legal proposition. (Said without intending the pejorative connotations of the word 'cartel')
Do you mean developers that Apple employs full-time, or third-party developers that publish on Apple's App Store?