Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It's clear in situations like this to see that the only reason Amazon is doing this is for power and money, and probably just money.
If we want to survive another 100 years, corporations have be brought to heel somehow, and if that means legislation to curtail stock buy backs instead of re-investment, or altering what fiduciary responsibility means to include the wellbeing of employees, not just shareholders, I'm fine with that.
But this current system is taking us nowhere good.
If we want work places to care for employees, care for the environement, care for the neighborhood, then corporations are just not the correct tool so we have to use another one. Workers-owned coops are good, voluntary associations are another one.
> But this current system is taking us nowhere good.
Indeed, but it's specifically by knowing what the "system" is, what are its tools, its methods, its proponents, and what to do instead that we can go forward.
Even if Amazon was fully worker owned right now I suspect most employees would want a raise eventually, meaning either profits must grow or other employees must leave. So you're back at the "maximise growth all else be damned", just now with the incentive spread across all workers instead of just the investors.
Salary is not everything. Amazon is known for its crude exploitation if its workers to the point they don't have time to go to the toilet and must bring a piss bottle with them everywhere; a worker-owned company can't have the same policy because people won't exploit themselves. Workers are fully aware of the ecological impact of industries, so they can take meaningful actions to live a bit more harmoniously with their environment. They can care more easily about the discriminations, about their place in the city and in society because they are directly part of it and are the first concerned.
If you can't maximize benefits without hurting yourself and the environment you live in, there's a food chance you will actually not maximize it and care about the rest
Middle class people want to project misery and suffering that don't exist, on unwilling "workers", just to validate their own silly middle class job.
If you really believe in unions, then fight for a union in your own workplace.
> If you really believe in unions, then fight for a union in your own workplace.
I believe work is the creator of riches, and such riches are to be redistributed by those who made it, by remembering that we all depend on each other so there can't be personal property if it harms someone else or the environment. Unions are a step in this direction and I do fight for them but it's only the first step.
I don't know how you can be so condescending as to say you know everything there is to know about workers and I don't. Workers want to have an easier life than what they have right now, and capitalism will not help them
Because I am working class.
Workers are way too close to reality to ever get seduced by such ideas, they create things with their own hands, so they understand perfectly well that this needs to be done, to create any value for anyone.
It's only sheltered middle class people with bullshit jobs who come up with the idea that we could somehow just get rid of this annoying work.
> Workers are way too close to reality to ever get seduced by such ideas, they create things with their own hands, so they understand perfectly well that this needs to be done, to create any value for anyone.
You're perfectly describing why workers are interested in overthrowing capitalism, because workers produce the riches, create the value and know what it's worth. Why should the value be given to said bullshit jobs so they can do whatever they want with it including not giving workers their fair share ?
Workers only play one part in this, not the whole. The factory was built by someone who had a design for it, and you need investments, with returns for that to ever happen.
The "workers" never build any factories, it's impossible to get a large amount of people to pull in the same direction and realise such an idea, without having a central single point of leadership.
And for anyone to take on that leadership and take that risk, there needs to be a reward.
You need to think about the future, not only today. If you share everything with the workers you will just exhaust that resource, and then get outcompeted by others who allow more innovation.
As we have already seen in history for example with the car industry in detroit, or England in the late 1970s. So what is your argument for why it should work this time, and why we should apply the politics of the 1970s? No argument whatsoever other than "trust me, I know a better alternative to capitalism". Sorry but that's just nonsense.
The most important thing for everyone is to be as close as possible to the next jeff bezos. The only way you can have a good job is to be close to
1. innovation or 2. extraction of natural resources.
Because that's how value is created, and how opportunity arise. There is no pie being delivered by "someone else" for ever and ever, that you just have to divide.
Leftist always assume that these opportunities come out of nowhere, and will also last forever.
It leads to stagnation.
Sooner or later you run out of other people's money.
An "Owner" ironically lacks real skin in the game that workers have.
The difference of incentives would probably be mainly internal to the organization, but the effects of that would not be insignificant. By far, most people are workers not capitalist owners after all [1].
[1] Having a 401k does not make you a capitalist owner, it's just a clever trick to get to you make some decisions like one.
Amazon has shown us once again that despite best intentions, given a chance, employers will squeeze employees for all they can and that employees need protection. Otherwise, to a corporation a worker is just a part, a cog in the machine, as replaceable as a beam of wood or a piece of pipe or an item in a spreadsheet, to be used up and discarded once worn out.
Amazon might as well be one of the coal-mining companies from the union-busting era (like the movie "Fire In the Hole"). The only part missing from the original story are the gun thugs, and even here Amazon is trying (as was done before) to use police and political influence to coerce workers.
Much of the social change we've seen, happened despite enormous pushback from the status quo, and was in no way 'time-tested'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post
I wouldn't be surprised if it's an attempt to muddy the waters, misleading actual investigators.
Seattle has had a really strong progressive slant for a long time, this isn't at all surprising.
What are they supposed to do then?
(I get what you mean, but IMO reducing Bismarcks policy too introducing pensions seems way to simplistic. Especially how that worked out a few decades later...)
Sure, sure, Amazon has increased the base rate for their warehouse workers, but it’s clearly not enough.
Promoting postwar politics in 2022 is not progressive, it's regressive.
If you mean they are equal-opportunity exploiters, then ok I guess. But Amazon is not progressive at all, they are driven only by calculations of profit and power. It is no different to pseudo-progressive politicians like Obama, Hillary Clinton, etc. who for example had their public relations teams flip a switch on the messaging around gay marriage the moment that the demographic data showed that it was acceptably palatable to the general public.
In practice, they're the same axis. There is no society without economy, and there is no economy without society. Plenty of people try to pretend otherwise, but the result is oodles of cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics.
Paying lip service to diversity doesn't change the fact that they want 99% of the exact same things as the authoritarian capitalists that hold up guns and yell yeehaw.
Hugely popular measures that actually help the people rather than the rich are rejected bipartisanly at every single level of government in every country where murdoch reigns using the same garbage propaganda whilst privacy is removed, police powers are increased, and trillions of taxpayer dollars are sent to coal and oil barons or arms dealers based on votes taken in the middle of the night.
At a local level the 1% of NIMBYs are listened to over the 70% of people that actually want low carbon, more convenient transport or money to be spent on local parks and activities or increased housing density whilst budgets for the local PD to LARP as a special forces team are doubled without consultation and yet another poor neighborhood is demolished for highways. This happens no matter whether the local pro-facist or shit-light party is in power.
Painting a rainbow or the local indigenous flag on an intersection is completely meaningless when both parties agree to defund and privatise social services (or at the very best one party defunds and sells these things to their buddies for a song while the other party undoes 10% of the damage and pats themselves on the back).
How does “gerrymandering” lead to under 30% of Hispanics approving of Biden?
> The very fact that you're attempting to lay the blame on swing voters and aspirational immigrants is proof that the system is fundamentally broken and completely uncoupled from the wants or needs of the majority.
I’m not “blaming” anyone. I’m asking you to think honestly about what these folks really want, instead of what you wish they want.
> Hugely popular measures that actually help the people rather than the rich are rejected bipartisanly at every single level of government in every country where murdoch reigns using the same garbage propaganda whilst privacy is removed, police powers are increased, and trillions of taxpayer dollars are sent to coal and oil barons or arms dealers based on votes taken in the middle of the night.
The typical aspirational immigrant doesn’t care about any of these things. The top issue among Hispanics right now is inflation: https://www.newsweek.com/ominous-sign-democrats-poll-says-in.... The plurality want police funding increased: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...
Asians, the fastest growing minority group, were instrumental in recalling Chesa Boudin in SF, supporting it by larger margins than anybody else.
> At a local level the 1% of NIMBYs are listened to over the 70% of people that actually want low carbon, more convenient transport
This is urbanist fantasy. Most people, especially aspirational immigrants, don’t meaningfully care about “low carbon.” Most want a suburban house with a pool. As incomes among Hispanics improves, for example, pickup truck sales are skyrocketing in that demographic.
I'm probably in the "far left communist" camp in a lot of folks mind but it's important to be clear that this type of thing (when talking about the politics of a City, Region, or State) are extremely extremely relative.
Edit: I don't think we're disagreeing to be clear, I'm just tired of this whole "SEATTLE ISN'T PROGRESSIVE ANYMORE" rhetoric. Far right media groups use it as a rallying cry for their movements and I think it's important to recognize that despite things being slightly less progressive than they could be, doesn't mean the city as a whole is suddenly embracing nazi-ism or outright authoritarianism. We've got our issues but becoming a welcoming bastion of hate is not one of them.
Edit 2: Fuck Howard Schultz. His fragile ego and god complex are why we don't have an NBA team too. I view all of this union busting the same way I viewed him after that whole debacle, a megalomaniac who wants people to "believe" he's a savior when in reality he's just another rich dude who wants regular folk to worship him and throws a tantrum if he doesn't get what he wants.
Like of course he's going to do this, it's the libertarian "I got mine but I'm pulling the ladder up" way.
Unions are basically the embodiment of misaligned incentives - combining the worst of medieval guilds' exclusion (e.g. unions were openly exclusionary against Blacks during Great Migration), ineptitude of a government bureaucracies (too many examples to recount), monopolistic power (e.g. healthcare supply restrictions by AMA) kleptocratic "nepotism" (whatever is the equivalent of nepotism for an old boys club - that's where criminal connection come in), and actual incentive to be inefficient that probably has no parallel in history (see e.g. construction staffing in NYC vs. almost anywhere else, and many more examples including from some union members I know where necessary work is postponed forever so the union could benefit, in the safety of knowing it is illegal for non union workers to do it).
They are literally the most harmful organizations invented by man outside of those dedicated to violence explicitly.
Yes, they were a major factor in achieving something good, once, in very specific historical circumstances. So were nuclear strikes on cities...
I really hope you're not going to claim because they put in responses from an Amazon spokesperson that makes the whole article pro-Amazon.
Being able to choose your bad press is just about as good as preventing all of it, and if your goal is trick people into thinking you aren't manipulating what gets published, it's even better than censoring every negative article.
The most common example of this would be to poison-the-well. Make the opposition to something to something look crazy, and it can help to make it look like that something is only opposed by people who are a few screws short. I'll conclude with the final paragraphs of this article:
"The road to holding a union election in Campbellsville could be a long one. Already, [union organizer who had the cops called on him] Litrell said, members of his organizing committee have quit out of concern that Amazon will learn of their involvement and fire them. Workers in Campbellsville can’t afford to lose their Amazon jobs, Litrell said.
“There’s other factories and such, but you’d have to go outside of Campbellsville to find a decent-paying job. Campbellsville is dependent on Amazon — it’s like a company town,” he said. “The other jobs are fast food or a telemarketing company and some small factories that don’t pay worth a damn.”
“Amazon is the best employer in Campbellsville,” he said."
That's dire indeed. :(
I can’t imagine bezos being able to exert much direct control over the WaPo, however; too many people would know and talk about it. Instead, his influence would be a more long term thing (eg hiring Amazon sympathetic reporters and editors over a decade).
They do this in scmp for international readers. Of course for internal news that's not allowed
This influence is used less obviously, when it matters, at elections!
What is that based on?
Sounds like someone's getting the cops called on them/fired.
1. Amazon makes a big show about fighting unionization. Police, media, all the rest.
2. While doing (1), they quietly install leaders in the union movement that will do what they are told. The easiest way is to buy off whatever organic leadership emerges, but anybody can't be bought outright can be... persuaded.
3. Once (2) is complete, the proverbial dam breaks, and management is "forced" to accept unionization. There might be a few token concessions to show the masses that they have won a victory.
4. Now that there's a union, they act as legally independent enforcers for whatever the owners want, backed by the social force of the worker mob.
This is how unions worked in the Soviet Union and its various client states. I've found Soviet organizational patterns be the most predictive model for understanding the current state of things.
Workers absolutely had union representation to collectively bargain against "management" (the State).
Your union just happened to bargain its way to whatever the State wanted them to do. Union bosses lived very comfortable lives.
If you complained to the union, they'd hold one of the rigged votes that socialists are so famous for, and in the end, you'd likely be branded a "counter-revolutionary" and a "spreader of misinformation", and face consequences.
My doubt is largely because they can just stop them existing and face little to no consequences. Why bother being cute?
If Amazon's workforce manages to organize outside of the penumbra of the company boot, then there absolutely will be negative consequences for Amazon. Why not just get ahead of that using a cheap, time-tested, and well-proven strategy that makes your position even stronger?
You're thinking like a commoner. Which I get, I'm a commoner, too. I certainly wouldn't try that kind of "persuasion". That'd land me in jail for a million years.
But the the rules are different when you're a member of the ruling class or serving their interests.
It's unfortunate. It really is. But that's how things are.
The cheap, time-tested way is just busting the union. I've yet to hear any examples of unions working like you propose in the US, but there's as many examples as you could want for companies preventing unions from existing.
Bolsheviks were "socialist" because at the time socialism and communism were largely interchangeable terms; you might be thinking of the various factions with "social" in their names that vied with Bolsheviks around the revolution (Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries). Socialism certainly didn't have the "softer" connotation it has now.
> one of the rigged votes that socialists are so famous for
What socialists are famous for rigged votes? The Soviet Union was famous, but they weren't socialist. Is Sweden famous for rigged votes?
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn't socialist? Just famous? What?
A Socialist society is one in which True Equity has been achieved. The State sort of just fades out of existence, as it is no longer needed to ensure cooperation.
This has never happened, because it will never happen, ergo cue the cries of "True Communism has never been tried!"
The fact that every attempt has made the Nazis look like a troop of Jainist Girl Scouts is immaterial. Slaughtering a hundred million people while redefining the depths of human misery is fine and dandy, as long the goals are noble. Can't make that omelette without breaking a few eggs.
Authoritarians — regardless of their purported economic philosophy — always leave the streets red.
This is just Nazi revisionism. The Soviets were horrible, so were the Nazis.
> Slaughtering a hundred million people while redefining the depths of human misery is fine and dandy, as long the goals are noble. Can't make that omelette without breaking a few eggs.
Same goes for the fascists, all over the world. The problem is extremists (and their great empowerers, Western apologists).
The Soviet union was quasi-socialist. It had elements of social ownership of means of production, but wasn't democratic, so means of production weren't actually in the hands of workers.
Sweden was social democratic. This is not socialism, although it's sort of supposed to be: However, Sweden's social democracy failed to achieve any kind of true worker influence, in fact, it created the illusion of social equality when in fact Sweden has extreme capital concentration (Sweden is one among four countries with wealth GINI above 85-- the club is Russia, the US, Sweden and the Netherlands). Essentially the Swedish economy is controlled by a very small number of multi-billionaires.
What you see in Sweden is instead redistribution from ordinary workers to slightly poorer ordinary workers and to the unemployed, so the high taxes are not actually a progressive or pro-worker policy, but a regressive policy where resources taken from successful workers are used to reduce the dissatisfaction of the poorest with the economic system.
This could perhaps be acceptable if it led to high wages but this has not been the result-- with economic power comes political power, and in my assessment the the desire by the capital-owning class to keep Swedish exports competitive have led to use of low central bank interests rates, intended to reduce the value of wages, as well as a surprising political support for immigration which has existed in the political parties which has no mirror in the views of ordinary people. It has been so successful that it's not unusual to see programmers working on quite hard stuff get paid 45 000-50 000 USD per annum before taxes. At present the wage share of GDP in Sweden extraordinary low, 55%, to be compared to 59% in the US-- so Swedish workers are actually more exploited than US workers.
And it leads to a more classist society with even higher wealth concentration, and real struggles with motivating people to actually perform, because of the lack of opportunity and glass ceiling.
Sweden probably has the poorest middle class of all of the western nations, and way poorer even than many asian and south american countries.
I really can't see how sweden could stay competitive, I think there will be some significant brain drain with the younger generations that can speak fluent english.
I recall chatting with some highly-placed dude in Deutsche Post a few years back. He had come in from the tech industry to unfuck their... well, tech, and was amazed at the level of opulence available to him as a highly-placed public servant.
A full-spec Mercedes S-class limousine with a chauffeur for his exclusive use was just the start. It was nuts.
The marketing is fantastic. Let's all chip in to help each other out, take care of the poor, all that jazz. But sweet baby Jesus doesn't that machine just grease the hell out of its own wheels.
What they were saying is that the Swedish system is very friendly to wealthy individuals operating in the private sector, while letting the middle class bear the brunt of subsidizing costs for those with lower income, which is true.
Sweden achieves great outcomes for its population, and the people there seem happy with it. They are all deceived and you know their business better than they do?
The wealth GINI data can be found here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...). What the page is based on is an excellent analysis by Credit Suisse which takes care to estimate also the largest fortunes, which in these countries are of course particularly important. As you see the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden and the US are on top.
With regard to what I've said about wages, there's a Swedish labour union (in Sweden basically who doesn't run their own company is part of a union, even managers), Unionen, which has made a list of typical wage intervals for the wages of 'systemutvecklare', a term that essentially refers to programmers. It can be found here (https://www.unionen.se/rad-och-stod/om-lon/marknadsloner/sys...).
They divide programmers into three difficulty levels, the lowest for which they suggest the wage interval 41231-54190 USD, the middle 47122-61204 USD and the highest 55319-72974 USD. This doesn't count a payroll tax called arbetsgivaravgift, which is 31.42%, so we have to multiply all these numbers by 1.3142 to get the actual pre-tax compensation:
Thus we obtain 54185-71216 USD for the lowest level, 61927-80434 USD for the middle level and 72700-95902 USD for the highest level.
They characterize levels as follows: for level 1 they write 'Analyserar och bedömer programförutsättningar, specificerar program samt programmerar. Testar och dokumenterar program' 'analyses and judges what is required for a program, specifies programs and programs. Tests and documents programs', level 2 'Medverkar i utveckling av IT-projekt eller förvaltar existerande IT-system och svarar för utveckling och förvaltning av delsystem. Leder delprojekt eller mindre projekt. 'participates in development of IT projects or maintenance of IT systems, being responsible for development and maintenance of subsystems. Leads subprojects or smaller projects' with level being ' Leder utveckling av nya eller förvaltning av existerande system ifråga om omfattande och komplicerade system, från framtagning av förstudie och kravspecifikation till att systemets tagits i drift hos användare.' 'Leads development of new or the maintainance of existing systems involving large and complex systems, from pre-studies and requirements specifications to when the system is made available to the user', so level 2 and 3 are for engineering managers, and even the top level has its top below 100 000 USD p.a.
With regard to outcomes, in my assessment we have very severe problems of several kinds, and simultaneously; and I find the view that we have great outcomes as quite strange, although some severe outcomes for individuals are avoided. A critical aspect of our current state of society is that schools are very ill-functioning. That alone is cause for great fear.
More and more laws feel like a smokescreen to stop us from doing what they can.
ie- laws for thee, but not for me.
“Amazon is the best employer in Campbellsville,” he said.
Bill Gates did a good job of reputation laundering through his foundation trying to reinvent himself as a “friendly elder statesmen”; then the whole Epstein shit came to light, his wife divorced him etc.
Ever billionaire that has taken Buffet’s so-called philanthropy pledge, will always be a billionaire.
Now Mackenzie Scott on the other hand, has been giving money away faster than anyone, and an order of magnitude more than Jeff “I can’t think of any other way to spend my money except on an interplanetary escape pod for myself” Bezos.
And frankly the reason I'm not a Gates Foundation fan is exactly that it funds all sorts of low quality nonsense research, and has distorted the disease fighting community in all kinds of ways. Not saying I'd be able to do it better mind you. Just that any time you have vast sums of money and give it away you always end up distorting things and maybe creating new problems via broken incentives.
Seriously. The problems you describe come from trying to pick winners. You cant. Just rent helicopter, and let the market decide.
Think also a bit about who is benefitting and making money from instigating this type of jealousy, being exploited as an unpaid click puppet is even worse than being a warehouse worker.
I'll bite. Who? Who has the money, power, and motivation to secretly manipulate the pliable masses to turn against the billionaires, for their own nefarious ends?
Everyone who is not a billionaire, but still currently holds a privileged position compared to the pliable masses, will benefit from such propaganda of over simplified "injustice", because if will deflect attention away from their own privilege and keep them safe.
You will see this most clearly if you look at ivory tower academics or cultural elite, who love to hate rich capitalists for being greedy, to get the "people" on their side to avoid having their own privilege under scrutiny, which in reality is often just as greedy and selfish.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
You say that "it was usually said that billionaires owning mass media is used by them to push their free market agenda," which seems like a convenient way to make a statement without attributing it to a source or taking ownership of it yourself.
https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1533622885306503168
I've never seen them as a highly trusthworthy and informative source.
It's only unexpected if you're an adherent of one very pat, messageboard-y Theory of Journalism. But it's really just run-of-the-mill evidence that particular theory is not very good.
Go figure.
Unions and corruption/illegal conduct, after all, go hand-in-hand. Consider the fact the RWDSU was caught illegally intimidating workers into signing up to them in order to extract fees, earning them a rebuke from the NLRB. [1]
So, if the retail unions targeting Amazon have such a history of illegal intimidation, and Amazon is alleging it's happening yet again, why shouldn't they be believed?
These unions have shown they'll intimidate and operate illegally to achieve their goals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail,_Wholesale_and_Departme...
The previous behavior of the company is all the reason one should need to scrutinize anything they say/do with a magnifying glass and to never give Amazon the benefit of the doubt. That was forfeited by them long ago.
Unions that are outright threatening or bribing people to break a vote, though. That's an unambiguous use of the word corruption.
It is in my opinion totally a legit view to first believe the workers. History has shown that corruption and lawbreaking are many magnitudes more prevalent in corporations than unions.
He's living his best life with his new girlfriend and fancy boat, he's absolutely not going to go slumming at the WaPo headquarters to beat down a couple annoying reporters.
Also interesting how they disclose the history (founder) but not the current (executive chairman).
Unless they are all lying and some of the best journalists (who tend to be maybe too ethical e.g. 'equal coverage') are complicit.
I could see an argument about access to the opinion section but he doesn't need to own a paper for that.
Whataboutism is the dumbest way to make a point.
In what ways? Were they growing/developing themselves? I found working at a Union job everyone was just yelling at each-other all the time. It was horrible.
From what I gather from your comments, yours must have been a horrible experience (why?). It doesn't cancel the fact that these Amazon workers are being squeezed for a competitive edge in a company that's already a monopoly - in several sectors. They need to battle for fair working conditions which is exactly what a union will provide.
In the Navy, we called a public sector union a 'mutiny'.
You'll be hard pressed to find a large police union that isn't Democratic, much like most unions.
At least on campaigns I've worked on they tend to endorse what comes out as the more 'conservative' candidate because it's all realpolitik: the candidate which promises the most police friendly policies and who has the best relation (and thus would be friendliest in office to) police, fire, ems, whatever group leaders.
Which are usually considered the more 'conservative' or policy friendly.
"fires" refers to termination of employment, not firemen.
When workers have had to literally, physically fight and sometimes die for what we now consider to be workers rights, who were they fighting? who killed them? Often it was the police.
My grandfather was child laborer in the coal mines in Illinois and saw scabs get killed when he was barely a teenager.
I've been the guy in uniform who turned up to negotiate a peaceful settlement to a transport dispute. I'm not sure why the inspector picked me to go inside the picket with him, but once there we both ended up dealing with the union. My starting points were "you want an outcome, some of this is private property, some is a road under the traffic act, but irrespective, nobody wants an injury" (trucks driving over people in the picket seemed distinctly possible) and "I'm a union guy"- which an inspector is not really (they have a separate commissioned officer union which .. is. .not like a union )
We didn't move anybody in the picket. Management acknowledged the petition. Business resumed later that day and no-one got runover. Over the next 18 months there were investigations, in various states including ours, that identified breaches of transport acts, OHS etc, by some of the contracting companies- and a couple of directors got fined. And going on, general issues with trucking law enforcement , fatigue management etc had an impact on normalising the laws across the states. (ie the transport unions had a valid point about problems in the industry)
So I'd say, don't expect police to go heavy against unions, you may be disappointed. 15 years exp.
YMMD outside Australia
- Amazon has better wages and conditions than the industry average. Warehouse work is tough in general, Amazon isn't making it particularly hard and pays relatively well.
- Unions aren't universally good. The reason we got to "defund police" is because cops are practically unfireable due to a strong union; and unions were at least part of the reason why GM lost so hard in front of Toyota and other competition.
In general, societies create wealth through freer markets, then vote to spend that wealth on social policies and income redistribution. Which is perfectly fine, btw. However, this gives a framework for answering the question of timing: do you want more social policies now? If you think it's a good time, then yes, unions are one way forward. If you think the economic/geopolitic situation is still fragile, you may want to vote for more slack in the system.
Absolutely! Let's give it a few more hundred years of the Bezoses of the US getting richer off the work of everyone else, and only then ask for some rights in return - wouldn't want to do it too soon!
Besides, peeing in a bottle to make your delivery times is actually fun once you get used to it!
> - Amazon has better wages and conditions than the industry average. Warehouse work is tough in general, Amazon isn't making it particularly hard and pays relatively well.
People working in Amazon warehouses often feel exploited for other reasons - such as the absurdly strict time keeping that doesn't often doesn't allow them enough time to get to a toilet, use it, and get back to work in the alloted time for a toilet break. This not how the industry universally works.
Further, Amazon has a monopoly on employment in this industry in many areas, so workers are not free to choose who to work for - they take the Amazon terms or starve.
Finally, even if Amazon is above the industry average, that doesn't mean that the industry average is all workers can hope for. They are well within their rights to demand much better, give how crucial they are to our way of life.
> - Unions aren't universally good. The reason we got to "defund police" is because cops are practically unfireable due to a strong union; and unions were at least part of the reason why GM lost so hard in front of Toyota and other competition.
Police unions are fundamentally different from worker's unions in some ways (because of police's virtual monoploy on the use of force). Also, even in common practice, police unions are highly aligned with their employer (the city/state authorities) on most items of interest to the general public, so they are part of the problem for those issues.
Even so, police unions are extremely beneficial to their members - probably much more so than an Amazon union could hope to be in the coming years.
Finally, if GM lost to Toyota because Toyota was willing and able to exploit their workers, then it is a failure of the US government to have protected GM than a failure of the unions. If the unions were simply sabotaging GM, then yes - they were short sighted and did more harm; future unions should learn from their mistakes, just as business owners learn from the mistakes of people who bankrupt their own companies. It doesn't mean the concept of unions is bad, just like Yahoo being run into the ground by an incompetent CEO doesn't mean we should get rid of CEOs.
> In general, societies create wealth through freer markets, then vote to spend that wealth on social policies and income redistribution. Which is perfectly fine, btw.
This only works if all people have an actual ability to control policy. In all studies done on this for the last 30-50 years in the USA it has been found that the lower ~50% of the population by income has essentially no say in government, at least on economic policies at the federal level. They put in the work, but have no ability to control how the wealth is allocated.
As such, even if society overall is prospering, it is often doing so at the expense of the well being of its poorer working class, which understandably is not ok with that. Unions are one of the more benign and constructive ways this can be changed. Historically, societies on this path have ended in bloody revolutions or fascist autocracy, both of which hopefully can be avoided.
I ridiculed your original post because of the implication I felt that it's somehow too soon for these changes. The lack of unions and the erosion of worker rights, and extreme inequality of the use of wealth are problems that have been around for 40 to 50 years. It is in fact very late for some efforts to improve things for the lower class. Perhaps some of the current crises could in fact have been avoided or softened if this had happened earlier.
You don't become a billionaire without providing value to millions of people and improving their lives. I admire Bezos and his achievements, candor, leadership, and judgement. His yearly memos are profoundly thoughtful and he has changed the world forever, for the better. Obviously he is not perfect. Amazon employees have become millionaires and they are paid fair wages.
I really don't understand billionaire hate.
You can understand the hate, it’s your choice not to because the outcome is a net positive to you.
If you ask a Bay Area software engineer, they'd give some feel good answer about how they love overpriced mom & pop shops and Amazon is to blame for their demise.
But, to overwhelmingly large portion of customers of Amazon, the middle class, it has provided an unthinkable amount of value. If it didn't, they'd stop using it. It is doing even more in developing countries.
And we're just talking about Amazon store.
You consistently want to look at the impact Amazon had on consumers, which may well be positive, while ignoring that they can only achieve this by exploiting their workers.
So I think it's pretty fair to say that the burden of proof is on you that Amazon is worse than industry average, since people are voting with their feet to work for them.
I will tell you one thing in advance: if you touch systemic issues (such as unemployment in general), then you're advocating for a freer market with less unions, because that's how you create jobs.
We should pass laws that provide safe working conditions. OHSA is the body that governs that.
I would be very very surprised if there is a majority of the people working for amazon that wants to form unions, I'm sure it's just a small minority.
The actual working class people probably really don't want middle class people to "fight" for them in this way, and be used as puppets in their virtue signalling competition.
> Can you please tell me who is suffering from Amazon existing? Who has a net negative outcome from that?
What have you done to find out how Amazon affects different groups?
Of course, just like Bezos, it wasn't the plantation owners providing the cheap cotton, it was the work of their slaves doing so - they only provided some direction and made some managerial decisions.
Of course, Bezos doesn't treat his workers as badly as the plantation owners treated their slaves - I'm not trying to say that Amazon workers are treated as badly as the disgusting inhumanity of the slave trade.
The general idea is that the entirety of Amazon's success is to be attributed to its workers, not to its owners. Bezos of course has an important contribution, probably higher than any other individual worker - but in his capacity as worker, not owner. As he is no longer a CEO, his contribution to Amazon's new successes is 0 or close to it, even if he remains a major shareholder.
Of Amazon's millions of employees though, only a small handful became rich, and only one became a billionaire. This is the issue here: Bezos is an important part of Amazon, but his profits from its growth are completely, mind-boggling disproportionate compared to all other workers for Amazon. The designers of AWS, the people who negotiated the network of distribution contracts, the marketing and sales people etc - all of them are only getting scraps of the value they have created. The warehouse workers of course are not even getting scraps.
And the comparison with plantation slaves is hilarious. There are even now jobs and activities that are literally harsher than slave work. People do a lot of them for fun and hobby. The difference is choice.
And a small thing, which is just a bit grating to me: plantations weren't that efficient, actually. It was a social self-perpetuating system that kept them going. Using employees and later machines was more effective for pretty much the whole human history.
That's not only his merit, it is the merit of all of the workers of Amazon (plus a massive dose of luck).
> That's his contribution as an owner, as opposed to a worker.
No, it's not. His only contribution as an owner is putting down the original capital to buy the PCs and offices and books. All his other contributions in leading the company and deciding what paths it takes are as the CEO, a worker.
> The difference is choice.
Yes, and people often don't have a real choice: in certain areas, they either work for Amazon or go without food while trying to learn a new skill/move to a new city.
> plantations weren't that efficient, actually. It was a social self-perpetuating system that kept them going. Using employees and later machines was more effective for pretty much the whole human history.
They weren't efficient in terms of cotton yields, but they were efficient in terms of return on investment (until machines became widely available) - it's cheaper to buy slaves and have them work the land for some food and some shelter than it is to hire a worker a living wage for the same job, even if the worker has better productivity.
All companies have employees, and the law of large numbers tells us that it's unlikely they're a whole lot better at Amazon (at least not by chance). Larger the samples, large the similarity between samples.
Investors literally make a job from finding the best companies and giving them money, so they're not exactly a cause. They're hound dogs, looking for the best bet.
What's left? 1-2 early CEOs that set the course? Well, that was Bezos as well. And the owner is the one picking the CEO and approving what he does. An anyways, in large corporations the leadership is a bit more complex, with various mixtures of shareholders, board, chairman, CEO and so on. It's enough to say Bezos was "it".
Also, the law of large numbers definitely doesn't say that. It only says that the average over the value of a large number of samples from a random variable will grow closer to the expected value of the random variable as the number of samples grows to infinity.
This tells you that, over time, it's unlikely that Amazon will have only good employees (if the random variable is "employee quality", and the samples are employees that Amazon hires). However, employee impact is not uniformly distributed - having an amazing CEO, or amazing software architect, or amazing head of sales will have a bigger impact on the value of the company than a warehouse worker or a junior sofware engineer - especially early on. And there are nowhere near enough people in high-impact roles to warrant talking about the law of large numbers - we are maybe at best talking about a few hundred people.
I could go into how hiring is not at all like sampling from a random variable, as a good senior engineer or manager will likely be able to hire better-than-average subordinates, and this effect again snow-balls, so you only need to get lucky once to guarantee you get lucky more times afterwards.
Overall, my take is that Amazon was lucky early on to have a combination of high-performing individuals in many high-impact roles, who set the company up for success. Jeff Bezos is definitely one of these individuals, but nowhere close to the only one. However, he has made much more of the money from Amazon's success than all the other high-impact contributors combined.
Finally, even if your work is easily exchangeable with someone else's (i.e. even if you are an average worker) you still deserve your share of the value you produce for the company - not the minimum share that anyone else would agree to work for, as wages are usually done.
That's not a valid argument, and you are smart enough to know that. Something of the size of Amazon, with almost monopoly in many areas, won't suddenly fail tomorrow just because it was lucky to get where it is today.
No? Then why is he the one getting all the benefits of "creating value"? Why shouldn't the people doing those jobs get a fair share?
That's why the "billionaire hate", and support for the unionization efforts.
Amazon is putting food on the table and enabling a million employees to raise families. Pay rents. Pay bills.
The entire equation whether you look from the employee side or customer side, has made the world better, the scale of which is difficult to imagine.
Bezos's wealth was not stolen from anyone or sitting in cash in his house. The entire pie got larger. His wealth is in the company that provided value to millions and they paid for the service voluntarily. It is important to note that there was no coercion involved.
Companies like Amazon make the world a better place. Otherwise we'd still be living in 1/1000th of the GDP of pre-industrial era with 90% people living in poverty. Every person that works, whether owns or a business or has a job, creates value, thereby increasing the size of the pie and lifting people out of poverty.
If I bring you the ingredients for a pie (say, worth 10 dollars), then pay you 10 dollars to bake it, then turn around and sell that pie for $1000, would you be happy with this arrangement? Would you say that you got a fair deal? After all, the pie is now larger, and I put food on the table for you, and I contributed to the $1000 directly, as you wouldn't have had the connections necessary to sell it for that amount yourself.
If the employee had anything to do with sales and marketing a $1000 thing, they should deserve a proportional cut. If they were simply emptying garbage cans in your office, then they should too get a fair and just wage that is proportional to the value they provide.
You could counter with unfair trade and I'd agree with you. Crony capitalism is not what I am referring to. Nor am I referring to anywhere coercion or force is used.
Why are you viewing it like that, and not "if you can make a $1000 pie for $20 worth of materials, you deserve the profit"? What if the worker could have sold the pie directly for $900, but wasn't given the opportunity because they couldn't access the $10 of materials for whatever reason?
By what possible reason are you putting the entire profit on the person contracting the work?
I'd be the first one to suppor that! Absolutely. Go for it. Workers should bypass middlemen if they don't add any value. They have the moral right to act in their self interest. Not only is this important, but it is necessary. Tesla going direct sales by bypassing Dealerships? Best thing ever. Everyone benefits. We see that all the time and it is a feature of a healthy capitalist society.
However, if the middlemen actually add value and there is a moat through IP, capital, assets or salesmanship, etc; they absolutely deserve the wealth they generate. Interfering in anyway here is asking for a bleak society where productivity plummets, enterprise is lost and there is no innovation. We're seeing this in certain industries with heavy regulation.
Undeserved middlemen that clog up the economy should be overthrown and eliminated through means of enterprise. Not through regulation.
Sometimes I wonder if we're on a startup forum. I hope we have some overlap in agreement. I would encourage you to study examples of how economic freedom benefits all and how it has led to unparalleled progress and lifting people out of poverty. And also how collectivist, use of force and coercion, regulations, marxist ideas, lead to increase in poverty. (Cambodia, NK vs. SK, Hong Kong and Taiwan, 19th century and mid 20th century USA, West vs East Germany, the fall of USSR, stagnancy of Cuban economy, etc).
This is where you're wrong. Most people accept these jobs out of need, and possibly desperation. They don't have much say in the matter. If it weren't for some unions and laws, they would probably exploit the employees even more if they could.
You are taking a huge problem with how society currently works, and reducing it down to individual responsibility. That's not a very nice way to look at your peers.
It's also weird to be so pro-free-market, but than balk at the thought of employees using their choice to then create unions.
Same here, I really could not care less if some guy has 10 sports cars in a basement somewhere, so what? It seems so incredibly childish and petty to walk around and be angry about that.
And when having a few billionaires comes with the benefit of more jobs, higher salaries and better economy for me and everyone else, then it seems great to me.
How can people prefer an equal society where everyone's poor just to be relieved from their childish jealousy? It's not going ever be fixed anyway, because nature and life is always unfair.
Please explain how having a few billionaires "comes with the benefit of more jobs" and stuff for everyone else. How is it better to share the crumbles, instead of the whole bread? Perplexing.
There is no such thing as fair, it's impossible to even define what that would be, and that's the whole point of the free market, that it solves this problem. The more you use these outdated political catch phrases, the more impractical and meaningless things become. Life is unfair, nature is unfair.
> No one "prefers a society where everyone's poor", that's just childish and off-putting straw men by you.
This is demonstrably what happens as we have seen during 100 years of large scale experiments involving millions of people. If you keep pushing socialist politics from the 1970s I'm just going to suspect that the same bad things will happen, as happened then. When there is such a massive body of evidence, why should anyone suddenly start thinking "oh yeah, I bet it works this time, let's try that again"?
> Please explain how having a few billionaires "comes with the benefit of more jobs" and stuff for everyone else.
Because it's the only way to make people pull in the same direction, to create value in a positive bottom line.
> How is it better to share the crumbles, instead of the whole bread? Perplexing.
Because there will be no bread to begin with, if you share the whole bread, because nobody wants to bake a bread when they are forced to give away the whole thing.
Countries with fewer billionaires and more socialistic policies are much, much better to live in today I'd say. Just compare US with EU for instance. So not sure how you can assert that the opposite "demonstrately happens".
Don't you think people would "pull harder" if they themselves actually saw the fruit of their labor? We're talking about people's livelihoods here, and you still talk about "bottom lines".. I'm not sure if you're trolling or actually hold these views?
You can think that's "chill" but sooner or later the outside world will run away from you and you will be outcompeted.
Just look at what happened now to the german car industry, they are so proud of their strong unions, but they get outcompeted by tesla instead who is now building car factories in germany. It almost got killed by the unions in the same way detroit was in the US when the japanese caught up.
Nice sweet union deals with lifetime guarantees of great benefits, mean nothing when the whole company disappears, and the country goes into a recession. It's just putting your head in the sand for a while and pretending that you have found the perfect position where opportunity will last forever.
Would they have done the same thing if animal rights protesters, or the Proud Boys, or whoever came and someone thought they were on Amazon property illegally? I think so.
In any case, Amazon may also make mistakes that help the protesters, but that would never be reported on(e.g protesters illegally trespassing, but no one at Amazon realizes it and calls the police)
And I have no idea where you're getting your information about Proud Boys "often" being authorized employees. Mind to share any kind of source?
It was almost certainly meant to be IN CONTRAST to Proud Boys. Edit: apparently not, see below!
I was in fact saying that a lot of Proud Boys are employed by Amazon, and that I doubt Amazon would particularly care about PB demonstrations. And of course I can’t answer GP with proof of that, quite a lot of the group operates with aliases. But I live in the company town and people get to know each other.
That said, again your point is much more salient.
What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. This is like saying that Taco Bell employs racists. Yes, undoubtedly it does, because 200,000 people work for taco bell and at least some of them are bound to be racist. But how exactly are you going from that fact, to the idea that Taco Bell condones racists?
Yes.
> Why are these groups operating in secret if they're supported by Amazon?
I’m not saying they’re supported, to be clear.
As to why they operate in secret, to the extent they do: they’re fascists. That’s somewhat more socially acceptable today than it was 20 years ago, but still generally frowned upon to admit outright.
> What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say.
Come stand out on the streets in company town and get to know some of the locals, I guess?
> This is like saying that Taco Bell employs racists. Yes, undoubtedly it does, because 200,000 people work for taco bell and at least some of them are bound to be racist. But how exactly are you going from that fact, to the idea that Taco Bell condones racists?
A fair point. I can’t tell you how many Taco Bell employees are also fascists, it’s bound to be greater than zero. I can say that the proportion of highly organized fascists are generally not slinging fast food.
Go ahead and share your reasons then please.
> I can say that the proportion of highly organized fascists are generally not slinging fast food.
Instead, they're slinging boxes in fulfillment centers?
I'm sorry, I just don't believe you. There are clearly racists and fascists working for Amazon, due to the sheer size of it, but to suggest that Amazon would protect them is ridiculous.
If you call the police on your neighbors for spurious reasons, and the cops come and discover it was a spurious complaint, your neighbors are going to think you are targeting them and trying to get them in trouble, even if in the end "everything is okay". Especially if you have a cosy relationship with the cops, and you actually own the home your neighbors are renting, for example.
If you think this was some kind of corporate intimidation, how many people would you guess were involved with the decision?
Why isn't Amazon hiring scary bike gangs with plausible deniability to come harass the organizers instead of cops who generally enforce the law?
Sorry. But I just can't see it. "We're a trillion dollar organization with hundreds of thousands of employees with global reach. Our preferred intimidation methods involve a bumpkin county sheriff who knows how to enforce the law"
What's likely to have happened is that a person in local management wanted to stop union solicitation, so they called the cops with little regard for whether it was actually legitimate or not, in the hope that the cops might at least recommend the organizer move their activity to a less "aggravating" (i.e., less effective) location.
Are you arguing that Amazon doesn't know where their property line is? (Also, comparing classic union organizing to white supremacists who are charged with "seditious conspiracy" in the violent attack on the nation's capital in an attempt to overthrow an election is wild.)
You might have got that from the wide political difference between the two examples.
Bringing up a violent group like this makes no sense at all. And yes, examples are given specifically as points of comparison.
>> Would they have done the same thing if animal rights protesters, or the Proud Boys, or whoever came and someone thought they were on Amazon property illegally? I think so.
I read it as: take any arbitrary group of people who might organise a protest from any arbitrary political or social position "or whoever". Regardless, Amazon would have reacted the same. There is no implicit comparison to insurrectionists in such a reading.
Using the Proud Boys as an example during a discussion about lawful, non-violent efforts makes no sense at all; this group isn't merely a group with a different political or social position than the union organizers.
Amazon knows where their property line is, in the sense that the organization could locate it eventually given the need. However, just one person called the sheriff. Maybe they thought their property extended to the roadway, instead of only to the fence line?
In either case, it is basically a nothing-burger because the Sheriffs showed up and recognized their right to be where they were, and went on with their day. It seems like the system worked?
Feel free to attribute organizational motive to it through your own heuristics, but I expected a little bit better from a globally read newspaper.