Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I don’t believe unions are universally perfect. When they’re well run and union members participate and have a voice, they can be quite amazing. My partner’s union makes my cosy software job seem like it’s missing something. Sure she pays huge dues, but she’s also given protections and benefits I couldn’t even dream of.
I net about 4x as much as her on paper, but if you figured in the cumulative value of her union agreement, it would be much more than her dues. Collective bargaining is no joke. She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I'm of an age and socioeconomic stratum where union membership is not only not really done - people don't even really know what unions do or how they work, and I was essentially just as ignorant.
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
The real epiphany moment for me came when I understood that my lifelong fixation on salary, into which I, as an upper-middle-class person, was socialized from a young age (along with everyone else I know), is a form of sleight of hand: in a society like ours, with a gutted social safety net and enormous inequality, no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country. And this effect gets worse as you age and have kids, of course.
So these days, after getting a tiny whiff of these dynamics in my somewhat modest (meaning not high-status) but fairly-compensated union gig, I find myself wondering, if given the choice between a $200k salary in Idaho or a $100k salary in, say, Sweden, which would I choose? And a second doesn't pass before I smell pickled herring and lingonberries.
> I don’t believe unions are universally perfect.
I don't either. I'm not blindly ideological about this, and like any human system, human beings can fuck up unions to the detriment of everyone else, too. But man, as someone low on the totem pole in my organization, it's nice to know that a group of competent people with (some) real power actually have my back.
I disagree with the factual assertion and the framing here. The money that you make is not “intended to ma[ke] up for” benefits and services that could be provided in some hypothetical. The money that you’re saving is to provide for yourself in retirement because you’re the one who doesn’t want to die of exposure or become a burden on someone else when you stop working.
You say you don't get paid leave as a software developer, are you a contractor?
I can understand why this would be highly preferable for part time workers. Can you understand how a company might be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 40 hours a week, but not be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 20 hours a week? Can you see how increasing the cost of part time employment might make a lot of those part time jobs go away?
> The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I understand that it seems unfair for a company to replace one 40 hour worker with two 20 hour workers. Especially when the 40 hour worker has benefits and the 20 hour workers do not. The issue here is that requiring an employer to provide benefits for full time employees creates the situation where an employer may not be able to afford benefits for their full time employees. So in order to keep the business going, they do what they can. Making it more expensive for them to do this is just going to result in fewer businesses anyway.
> Collective bargaining is no joke.
Collective bargaining flattens worker salaries, the lower performing workers make more than they should and the higher performing workers make less. Its not a given that everyone wants this, or should want it. People should be able to negotiate as individuals.
> She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
Not everyone wants all these things. More importantly, not everyone wants to pay for all of them. Some people could use the money elsewhere (perhaps they are covered under a spouse).
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I like a world where both of these things are available for people who choose them.
> I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I personally would prefer to get paid more and manage my own finances and vacations. You don’t get interest on vacation days (although they do include health insurance).
As far as negotiating as an individual goes, you’re right - a union removes that option. It does however empower those who can’t or won’t or otherwise struggle to negotiate for themselves, for a multitude of valid reasons. To me that’s worth something. I’ve been fortunate enough to more or less glide through my career and rarely need to negotiate anything in order to live comfortably. This is exceedingly rare though. I wouldn’t want to say no to a union because I’ve never needed or wanted one for myself. If people collectively desire it, I think it’s a net positive.
As far as getting paid more and managing your own benefits and vacation, I hear that. I’ve felt the same as times. However, the older I get the more I think things like a pension and extended health sound pretty nice. It’s like having an easy-bake oven that pumps out legitimate desserts. We’re not all endowed with the chops to make that happen, so having this stuff on autopilot is a significant windfall eventually.
As far as flattening wages goes, I’m not so sure. Everywhere my partner has worked with a union, her wages have steadily increased due to the union bargaining for her. Sometimes the increases are substantial. The wages across the current organization certainly aren’t flat either.
You’re right that not everyone wants these things, too. I’m not sure you can get around that particular problem.
Ultimately I’d just say unions aren’t inherently bad and if you don’t like them, work somewhere that doesn’t have one. Most places don’t, so it’s not a limiting factor that should impose personal risk.
I guess when you can't make a proper case, just use 50pt fonts and stock-art-esque images of people giving thumbs up. That'll convince 'em!
Man, that is really grim. Basically admitting that $500 will be make or break for many of these employees, while the company itself is hitting record numbers.
I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
It's almost like a parody of itself
It's so blatant & over the top that I'd almost believe the union organizers set it up to make Amazon look bad.
And it's telling that they focus pretty exclusively on the $500 in dues: They pay their employees little enough that they know ~$10/week might be a significant decision making factor here.
Pleade strike the first sentence of this comment, thanks.
Amazon undercuts competitors and plays hard ball with suppliers literally every day. That's business, that's life. I don't see why workers shouldn't take their opportunity to engage in tough negotiations with Amazon themselves.
Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.
So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired.
It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this.
Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make things difficult, and costly for non-union employees. My personal experience was that I removed from a wall mount a wi-fi router, rebooted it, and placed it back on the wall.
This resulted in me reprimanded, my department having to pay a 4 hour call out fee, to the union electrician.
So, my choices are to call out a union electrician to service the mounted piece of equipment. Or "accidentally" bump the IO switch on the surge protector.
It was this, and countless other stupid shit, that made me really dislike working in a place with a union.
Maybe the line with the worst rhetorical trick is this bullshit in the "joining a union" FAQ: "Q: Will a union provide better wages and benefits? A: A union cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. With union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
I love that because it works exactly as well when you just negate the question:
"Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Without a union, Amazon cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. Without union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
'Can a union guarantee [...] better wages?' 'No [...] only Amazon can make commitments about [...] your wages.'
And then a paragraph later
'You may end up with more, the same, or less'.
So, if Amazon are the only people who can make commitments, why would you negotiate for me to earn less... unless it's not really my interests you have at heart in the first place.
Unionization efforts also always take place against the backdrop of former employers simply shutting down the business location and moving elsewhere to avoid unions: Subtle and not so subtle threats of that are always in play during unionization efforts.
Realistically, how much would it hurt to move amazon warehouses near the border of any neighboring state?
The days of the factories, and none movable infrastructure a long gone, so it is a strong factor to consider.
Alabama is a right-to-work state. My understanding is that it would be completely legal for Amazon to hire new employees the second someone doesn't show up because of a strike, so I'm not sure their leverage.
These workers are probably making between 30k and 50k a year so $500 isn't nothing.
In the example of something like missing a day of work, the contract will spell out the specifics of advance notice for days off/sick days. If it's completely unannounced, the contract will spell out the steps of a disciplinary process.
Source: I work in a right to work state, used to be a union member, asked this very same question at the time.
From Amazon's perspective unions are strictly a net-loss. Even if the unions offered the employees zero advantages, the same paychecks from Amazon would have less impact on workers because of dues/meetings, so you'd expect moderately higher attrition and other negative effects.
On the flip side though, is it actually clear that an Amazon union _would_ benefit workers once accounting for the overhead? Is that even the goal, or are prospective Amazon unions just trying to improve safety levels to something on par with other warehouses? Are there other factors?
Quick Google search turned this up, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole but this line seems relevant:
> Factors like race, gender, and educational attainment have an undeniable effect on people’s economic outcomes over time that unions do not necessarily flatten, but certainly helped to mitigate. For instance, macro-level data show that unionized workers, in general, see a wage boost of around 20%. When VanHeuvelen controlled for various demographic factors like race and geographic location, he tracked wage increases between 3% and 12.5% for union members.
I'd like my chances that will add up to more than $500 over the year if I were a union worker, and this does not take into account the other potential upsides.
What is this line even supposed to mean? Probably the most incomprehensible union busting talking point I've ever heard.
I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
Many of us don’t like unions. We consider them to be parasitic organizations that pervert the employer-employee-customer relationship without adding value. In fact, by twisting a business so that it is run for the benefit of the employees instead of for the mutual benefit of employees, employer, and customers, they destroy value. What is worse, unions have a nasty habit of convincing the government to make laws that effectively give the union a monopoly on certain kinds of tasks, preventing other workers from competing.
Now you may not agree with this perspective and its certainly something that people should discuss rather than accept uncritically. But have you considered that you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions that you have trouble imagining how someone could make a website opposing them without being dead inside because you’ve only been exposed to pro-union arguments?
How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth. Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
> IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.
It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
It's the sheer cynicism, condescension, accidental self-parody, and other design choices of that website that make me wonder about the people behind it. It's a postmodern cocktail of horror. Nowhere do they make a good faith attempt to lay out solid anti-union arguments.
An union negotiates/help negotiate, an employer would never run it's business if there was no benefit for them. Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
You say that now, but what about when Amazon starts encouraging employees to replace their arms with pneumatic forklift tines?
I suggest you hang around Blind for a bit and you'll realize that some of our techie colleagues hold some.. interesting opinions about labor or about how much to pay workers we now consider 'essential'
Though I disagree with Amazon's official arguments, I'm even more opposed to the notion that anyone who agrees with them is dead inside.
If you make it illegal to provide bad jobs, those jobs will not be substituted one-for-one for good jobs. That's not how an economy works. You're only hurting low-skilled workers by mandating higher minimum work standards.
Responding to below:
Yes, every so-called labor protection for adults, except protection against contract fraud, should be abolished, for exactly that reason.
Even child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. If you are a smart business, you don't charge what's "fair", you don't start by saying "I'm going to pay $X to my workers, so let's see how many I can hire with that money." Those are bad ways to run a business. You hire the number of workers you need to run your business at the price the market will bear.
This is something that gets drilled into you if you take any entrepreneurship classes: things cost what the market will bear, there is no concept of "fairness" that entrepreneurs should be thinking about. You pay as little as you can to make something, and you charge as much as you can for it, and those are largely independent variables from each other.
The idea that Amazon is going to stop hiring workers if they get more pee breaks... that's just not how markets work. If Amazon could afford to let those workers go, it would have done it already. If it doesn't need those workers and it's hiring them anyway, then it's just a badly managed company.
Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works. You're talking about the market like supply and demand form a constant ratio with each other. They don't.
It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out (although reality is more complicated and these simplistic models rarely capture how everything will work out), it's also wrong because it's fundamentally bad market theory on a simple level. Nobody starts a business deciding that they're going to pay a constant amount of money that gets divided equally among all of their workers. At least, they don't think that way if they want to stay in business for very long.
that’s insulting, why CAPITALIZE words in such SHORT sentences? Do they really THINK their employees are SO dumb that they can’t even read a FULL sentence?
I noticed on other Squarespace sites that second comment is usually just the domain minus the TLD. I wonder if "cranberry groundhog" means anything in particular.
Edit: Guess it's autogenerated? https://cranberry-groundhog-8agy.squarespace.com/
Probably something to use before your IT team sets up the CNAME record.
According to this (Danish)
https://fagbladet3f.dk/artikel/svenske-amazon-arbejdere-faar...
the workers are in an union.
Amazon: "Don't pay $500 in dues"
Their main argument is that it is not worth the money.
The most basic of caste systems.
First Amendment.
(To be clear, this is a terrible site. But as long as it isn’t threatening or lying, I don’t see why the government should be able to suppress it.)
If you do not like it you may criticize them publicly, boycott their business, or start your own competing employer with the policies you prefer.
The National Labor Relations Act allows employers to argue against the employees voting for union formation.
What would you do if you were asked to make this site?
