Ooh scary ... is the employment contract signed by Amazon's employees not legally binding? How is it Amazon's business what their grown-ass employees can or cannot sign?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are providing the ALU your personal information.
Like Amazon monitoring my spending habits?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are authorizing the ALU to speak on your behalf.
And thats terrible how?
> The ALU is not part of Amazon and does not represent Amazon
Thats the whole point.
Of course, this is Amazon we’re talking about, so they may just go for it and plan to clean up the mess later. Walmart got away with that approach for decades.
Your language, IMO, is value-laden. Card-signing is a common "tactic" for unions like the presidential election is a "tactic" for deciding the next president.
I'm not opposed to unionizing but I take issue with the idea that getting 50% support means "it is obvious that they don't need an election."
-- Bezos in helium voice
I remember quitting from Krogers bagging groceries when I was a kid. I forget why, but I did give less than 2 weeks notice. Mr. Manager gravely conveyed that if I did this, I'd be barred from working for them again forever. Pretty sure my poker face then was not what it is now, but in any case I did not find that to be anywhere nearly as distressing as he seemed to think I should.
I was raised to believe that a job is more important than just about anything, so I decided to try to go in as I was out of town. I crashed my car as I fell asleep at the wheel. It shouldn’t take that to get someone to realize the relative unimportance of a job, but the US culture (as channeled through my conservative parents, at least) doesn’t value anything higher than work and productivity in the service of capital as this deified virtue.
Despite the colloquial use of the word "contract," there is generally always going to be an employment contract (agreement) in place.
Similarly, people colloquially talk about having a "contract" for things like cellphones meaning a fixed term, but there is always an actual "contract" (agreement) with the terms of the service regardless of whether the plan has a fixed term or not and regardless of whether it's prepaid or not.
It would not guarantee a term of employment, in the standard form (but could, if it were so modified).
“But they didn't sign anything like a contract,” one might object.
They accepted an offer to do work of some specification for pay of some specification. Even if there was nothing in writing and no other explicit terms, that's sufficient to have a contract.
You really can't see the issue with authorising a group you have little to no control over, speak on your behalf ? I can totally understand that people share some views with what unions are currently defending.
But the requirement on signing a paper that says "whatever the union currently says and will say in the future 100% represents my point of view" is a fair criticism of the union model.
A union authorization card is simply a means of demonstrating the 30% employee support required for the NLRB to order an election. That’s it. Unions will generally not hold elections until 60% of employees have signed cards, because a majority vote is required.
From the anti-union National Right to Work Foundation:
“You have a legal right to revoke any union authorization card that you have signed. It is illegal for a union to restrict your right to revoke a union authorization card that you signed.”
Is that what it says? It says that you have to agree to be legally responsible for the union's opinions on netflix shows, or of your cousin's marriage?
No, it says that you're agreeing for them to represent you with the company, not some made-up all-encompassing scaremongering paraphrasing of that.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily on Amazon's side here. Their scare-mongering is pretty slimy, to say no more. But IMTDb's objection is valid, even adjusted for your criticism.
Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.
I live in very liberal SF but outside of my bubble, I hear people complain that it’s not possible to hire Nannies/housecleaners/employees anymore when Amazon and Starbucks pay $18/hr. Seems like the answer is easy: pay them more or make the job more desirable.
Amazon working conditions are challenging, and they have been super anti-union. But they’ve also done more to increase wages in the US than anyone in Washington in the past 15 years, arguably second biggest in past 40 [1].
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
I’m not here to say that Amazon is doing a great job and we should all be singing Jeff Bezos’s good graces. But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but on everyone who could want to work at Amazon but can’t because their jobs are more scarce, and by everyone who buys things from retailers (Amazon or not) in the form of higher prices.
Unionists like to talk about how the labor movement provided a lot of basic protections for workers and the 40 hour work week. What they like to talk less about is American unions’ frequent associations with organized crime, it’s history of racism and sexism, all of the environmental bills it has fought against. I could go on.
A union-free Amazon has driven up wages for workers throughout the economy. And it has helped keep prices low for everyone else so that even if you don’t earn as much as a Amazon warehouse worker nor shop at Amazon, you can still afford many basic necessities. So yes, I’m saying we should be singing the good graces of competition.
I like parts of the analysis (if a big player has to pay higher wages, this will affect many in different ways). But I think it's hard to discuss what exactly the implications would be without a deeper analysis including numbers.
Without numbers, I find that participants in a discussion are often tempted to put a high emphasis on a certain argument or on the impact of a mechanism just because they have come up with that argument or mechanism. But actual numbers might imply a different weighting.
An example would be: With longer fingernails you might be able to swim faster. But to what degree?
It doesn't matter how much you pay me if I can't see my kids and have to pee in a bottle.
Warehouse workers before Amazon were making over $20/hr. Amazon seriously depressed wages for that kind of work. How do you think they got so profitable and outcompeted everyone else in that space?
Amazon has to pay more because their jobs are shit. They aren’t doing anything to raise wages they’re just trying to get people’s asses in the door. I’m sort of shocked you linked to the department of labor’s historical page as some sort of proof of your idea.
I can guarantee that wage is the minimum they can pay to get people in the door for the level of work required by them calculated by a legion of economists.
The fact you think Amazon jobs are competing with “Nannies/house cleaners/employees” is equally strange. Like somehow these jobs are related?! Why do you only compare those jobs to Amazon factory jobs?
Their jobs also are super stressful and burn people out.
These things are not contradictory.
Anecdotally, in support of the comment you are replying to, Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here, and $100-$150 a night isn't anywhere near enough to screw with her sleep schedule. She works $18/hr morning shifts and now owns a car.
A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)
Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
What? You think overseas manufacturers are paying $30 an hour?
It wasn't high-skilled manufacturing that was outsourced. Welders and machinists still have near zero unemployment and make about as much as a software engineer. It was low skilled manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to China. Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
> Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
Auto factory jobs (which were outsourced) certainly paid that much and more in inflation adjusted dollars. From a book studying the auto industry describing average wages in Detroit,
> At $11.62 an hour in 1982 wages, Detroit's autoworkers, according to U.S. car companies, were simply too expensive, particularly with the added cost of pensions, health insurance, and union-negotiated work rules.
This is already over $30/hr in 2022 dollars.
The decline of Detroit UAW auto industry definitely weren't outsourced. It certainly wasn't GM that opened car factories in Japan and Germany. And it certainly wasn't GM shareholders or executives that benefited from the rise of Japanese and German imports.
This isn't outsourcing, this is simply a case of American carmakers being outcompeted by better products from Japanese and European competitors. (A significant fraction of which were actually assembled in US-based plants owned by those overseas competitors.)
This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)
At that point, the factory owner is going to be focused on automation and robotics, so most of the jobs they offer will be for highly skilled positions (and pay more than welders or machinists make).
Not all warehouse jobs are equally terrible, as evidenced by the people working at warehouses other than Amazon's at lower wages. Amazon pays above the going rate for warehouse workers because of its reputation w.r.t. worker conditions.
That's a big IF. Unions were invented after the onset of the industrial revolution to combat truly unsafe work conditions in industrial settings where worker's dying was common.
OSHA did away with all that.
The current generation of "bad work condition" complaints is around getting adequate bathroom breaks.
The reality is that it’s a toothless tiger by design. Many states do their own enforcement, and don’t exactly prioritize it — IIRC, North Carolina has 20% of the inspectors that it says it needs.
I’m sure your cushy IT gig requires you to stand for 6 hours without taking a piss. Try it sometime before attacking others.
Suppose you're a manager/foreman. You never outright tell your staff to ignore safety regulations; you simply give them a huge workload with a deadline and set of equipment that make it impossible to feasibly accomplish the workload within compliance. Your workers catch on that in order to get the job done, they need to ignore the safety regs. As a manager, you look the other way as they ignore the rules. If an injury happens on the job, you then blame the worker for ignoring the safety regulations, which of course you instructed them to follow. Follow up by giving them a drug test so you might even be able to get out of paying them workers comp.
This is how it works in the real world. Source: seen it, done it.
Wages are and have always been the primary driver of unionising.
The main motivation was never mustache twirling capitalist charicatures shoveling children into furnaces as fuel or some other unambiguous evil that we have since banished. Conditions have always been part of the bargain, but the goal has always been first and foremost higher wages.
Is it what usually happens when workers unionize? It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well.
Can you substantiate this claim?
With the vast majority of goods the price is set by the market, i.e. higher wages would indeed result in a smaller profit margin and not in a higher price.
The price is determined by the market. But there’s a demand curve. There are many prices that an item could sell at, with varying numbers of buyers at each price.
In a highly competitive market, the price should be driven down close to the cost of production. This allows the most people to buy at the lowest possible price, at the expense of retailer margins.
Amazon probably has the best cost structure of online retailers. Which means in many cases they are setting the floor on the price. If their labor costs go up enough to wipe out their margins, their prices must go up, or they must exit the market for highly competitive items. With less competition, other retailers have more leeway to increase prices.
As a society we may decide it is worth paying more for goods to ensure a fair living wage and safe working conditions. That doesn’t sound unreasonable. But to assume you can get that without increasing prices is naive.
Some of the grocery shops near me are known union shops. The prices are in fact higher than the non union shops.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-auto...
Sure. So the customer buys less product, the company makes less profit, and the shareholders eject the executives.
But there are huge delays in these chains of causation, which provide opportunities for arbitrage.
Based on retail business profit margins, it would mean higher prices for customers. Not that that is a bad thing, less consumption would be great.
The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes. Prices are no different than anywhere else.
...Really? That's a straight detriment in my book, as a customer.
I would generally prefer to support a union shop, but I'm extremely fond of self-checkout—and, in fact, further upstate, Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.
One of the worst things unions can do is try to "protect jobs" at the expense of technological advancement, customer service, or improved product.
They set the bottom price, and if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins, then their costs increases will have to end up in either prices increases or them no longer selling the product.
The funny thing is that it is Amazon coming along and greatly increasing demand for labor (in conjunction with reduced supply of that type of labor) that caused all the other warehouse jobs and retailers to increase pay.
And I hope the labor continues making gains in their quality of life at work and pay, but I do not see this happening without an increase in prices for products (like we have already seen).
They even know this - Amazon is running out of eligible workers to hire. But the need to hit quarterly metrics forces the line management to make strategically bad decisions.
Right now these workers work at Amazon, because that's the best paying job they can find.
If you don’t like supply chain issues and inflation right now, you won’t like the model you propose.
The simple truth is warehouse employee salaries aren’t significant because of throughput. Someone making 30$/hour vs 15$/hour sounds huge but when people are picking 300+ items an hour that’s 5 cents a pop. But, more realistic unionized job would be 17$/hour but only 250 items a sub 2 cents increase.
A lot of people, even economists, conflate the freedom of trade with the free movement of capital. They are not the same and not equivalent. I like to point people to this comic [1] that someone made when the TPP was hot news as it accurately describes this in a very accessible way.
Neoliberalism serves the interests of the capital-owning class.
Unrealistic, in neoliberalism.
They’ll eventually build higher labor costs into their financial projects and pass along some of the costs. Shareholders probably won’t care much, because Amazon is still a good investment.
If everyone gets paid tomorrow 100 USD/hour, everything around you will start costing 10x more. Look at Switzerland.
2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
What a strange comment imo. I can’t take the ‘everything will go up!’ stance seriously while higher ups are buying 10 houses and private jets. The wage gap is atrocious.
By the way, Switzerland’s GDP is 748 billion vs the United States’ 20.94 trillion. Comparing them like that is meaningless and silly.
Can you show your work here? Assume Amazon executives cut their salaries to 0, how much extra would they be able to pay workers?
Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars. And if you claim that everyone needs to make decent wages, who is to define what "decent" is supposed to be? People will always be asking for more, never less.
> 2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
Even if CEOs gave up their whole salary tomorrow, it would not change the pay of people working in very large companies with dozens of thousands or hundred of thousands of employees.
If wages at the bottom go up and that causes inflation, the overall impact of that is wage compression, or in other words, reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.
Reducing the PPP of rich people while only maintaining that of poorer people seems like a dubious policy outcome, at least in economic terms.
Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.
More subtly, in the current economy there are basically only two pots that higher real-terms wages for workers can come from: taking from other workers, and taking from the retired. That's because the whole economy has a supply-side crisis in basically everything and does not have the capacity to supply people overall with any more than they already have. All the usual scapegoats, like the super-wealthy, just don't consume enough as a proportion of the global economy that redistributing from them would have an impact on ordinary people. (Often articles attempt to confuse people about this by using definitions of wealthy that include like a third of the US population, or by comparing net worth instead and tricking people into thinking it means consumption by ordinary people could be increased by that amount if it was redistributed.)
Limiting cross-borders money flow is a very good way to keep social contract intact.
For some reason, it was the growth of global trade that coincided with the growth of global GDP & the increase of the life quality of the earth population.
My parents had good experience with their unions. Every interaction every person I know in my generation has had with them (CWA, UAW, teamsters, railway unions, etc, etc.) has been strongly negative.
The Amazon workers should form a new union if they want representation.
Cards from existing corrupt national unions are definitely a trap. Once enough people sign, they will swoop in to extract dues, bribe politicians on unrelated issues, and alternate between sabotaging Amazon's work environment and negotiating away whatever current benefits the workers get.
People that are good at negotiating union politics will somehow become unfirable, and just stop bothering to do their jobs.
If history repeats itself, the union reps will then work with Amaozn to create an underclass of ununionizable jobs and hire people at minimum wage to do the old $18/hr work, while the union cronies "supervise" for $25+/hr.
That doesn't mean unions are bad or useless. It would be like saying that since democratic governments can be corrupted, we should do without democracy.
Yeah, they were great at listening before.
Also, where are these unions where the people in it aren't the people it represents. Recently, a school board election ad, "we have to stop the teachers union and start listening to teachers." Well, who the hell is in the teachers union if not teachers?
To quote the NLRB's website directly:
> Federal law allows unions and employers to enter into "union-security" agreements which require all employees in a bargaining unit to become union members and begin paying union dues and fees within 30 days of being hired. Employees may choose not to become union members and pay dues, or opt to pay only that share of dues used directly for representation, such as collective bargaining and contract administration. Known as objectors, they are no longer union members, but are still protected by the contract. Unions are obligated to tell all covered employees about this option, which was created by a Supreme Court ruling and is known as the Beck right.
This usually works well enough, but in certain circumstances, you can have a small minority control the entire operation and the vast majority are "represented" by an institution they have no voice in. This seems to be the case in lower paid unions (e.g. grocery baggers) because the majority can't afford the extra dues.
Professional bureaucrats.
Teachers unions in public schools are the worst. They hold our childrens’ futures hostage and get paid out by politicians buying votes, who pass the bill to the next generation.
>My mom was a negotiator for the teacher's union for about a decade. She was a para-professional, working with disabled students, for about 20 years.
Nothing you said really contradicts the parent post's claim that the people working in unions are "Professional bureaucrats". If your mom was working with disabled students for 20 years, then switched to being a bureaucrat for the next 10 years, she's still arguably a "Professional bureaucrat".
Are you confusing the school board with the teachers union? One sets curriculum, class size, and budget. The later really only influences salary, benefits, and working hours.
well, union higher-ups are basically politicians, they're not usually working in the job by that point
---
[1] "The [NLRB] hearing officer also found objectionable Amazon's distribution of "vote no" pins and other anti-organizing paraphernalia to employees in the presence of managers and supervisors. ... U.S. labor law forbids companies from spying on organizing activities or leaving employees with the impression they are under surveillance. It also prohibits other actions if they are found to be coercive." https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-interfered-with-unio...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1022384731/amazon-warehouse-w...
And today's SCOTUS seems to want to defang all government agencies' ability to rule on or enforce . . . anything, really, based on their rulings on the EPA and the SEC. Well, unless it's the government trying to enforce on reservation land - that is newly allowed.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
The general idea, yeah. It proves how strong a union can be.
The implementation? No. A union for people who have monopoly on violence? No. A union that protects people who are actively hurting civilians without recourse? No.
This is exactly what happens, though. You don't stay truly rich without a decent chunk of political influence. So, yeah, police protect the private property of those who support that idea most.
Been burned big time by that.
Police are civilians too. Using "civilian" in this way is supporting the militarization of police, and is not a good thing.
I lost control of my health, my hair turned white, and during that time I lost most of my friends. It’s obviously my own fault for letting all that happen.
Of all the companies in the world, Amazon is probably one of the coldest, soulless places.
Management is riddled with politics and third rate talent who’ll often knowingly do the wrong thing, just to get promoted.
The people who actually drove the innovation, who weren’t necessary easier to work with but at least had some technical vision and production vision have all left.
A significant piece of the company is all just legacy systems and tech debt, supported by Indian H1Bs who hire more H1Bs.
If the government breaks up AWS and the rest of Amazon, most of their domains won’t make business sense anymore. There are too many middle men who are against this though - everyone from companies that help people relocate, to vendors that provide special tax services for the H1B army.
I hope Amazon fully unionizes. Even in tech, it was a grueling, toxic place to work.
Until Amazon can start treating workers well, it seems to me the best move is not to pay them to abuse people.
this should be illegal.
If you’re talking about missing the slide title, don’t be so hard on yourself, mistakes happen.
