That very first * is the first major point for unions.
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 joined my union somewhat by accident, and it's opened my eyes to a lot of what you're talking about. (My workplace is not usually the kind of place that's known to be unionized in the US, so when I showed up I was surprised to hear it was a thing. I did my due diligence and decided to join.)
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.
> 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.
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.
I’m in Canada, but I work an hourly contract with no explicit vacation time. By law I need to be paid some minimum amount to cover the bare minimum of vacation time (4% of my wage, I think) but ultimately if I’m on vacation, I’m not going to get a pay cheque.
I’m an employee, but my hours aren’t set. I can work no hours or forty in a week. I was a contractor before, but this arrangement made it easier to add other forms of compensation besides wages to our agreement. It’s an atypical arrangement.
The part-time/full-time issue is very union dependent. I was a member of the Teamster's union many moons ago and got zero benefits as a part-time worker.
> Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
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).
These are all valid points that are worth investigating.
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.
> Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts because you won’t have that almost $500 you paid in dues. WHY NOT save the money and get the books, gifts & things you want? DO IT without dues!
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.
Apparently we are both mistaken. I am using 1.2 million employees from wikipedia, [0] has 2 billion usd in one quarter. So thats an upper bound of just under $8k per employee although thats guaranteed to be high as the 2 billion is a record.
However the profit appears substantially more than I had believed and I was mistaken so there’s that.
I got a weird vibe of WW II-era propaganda from it, the cute music bopping dog... like a modern version of something out of a newsreel piece, or a parody of it from a Fallout videogame.
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.
<strike>They pay their employees so much that they only make $1k/employee in profit.</strike> The dues on top of whatever useless shit the union negotiates for could put amazon back into the read without any benefit for anyone except union officials.
Pleade strike the first sentence of this comment, thanks.
Amazon is free to refuse to sign any contract with the union that doesn't leave them with their desired level of profitability. Forming a union doesn't change that.
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.
These kinds of arguments are only ever applied to workers.
Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency. If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
> These kinds of arguments are only ever applied to workers.
Nonsense, people insisted that it was foolish to require bundling of routine insurance with catastrophic insurance, people advocate for the severability of hardward and operating systems, people oppose forced bundling of insurance and all kinds of other goods.
> Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency.
They would however observe that that single legal team only protects the company, and that each employee should have their own, individual legal representation for their own personal liability.
> If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
> Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
I think the comparison here has been twisted so far beyond the breaking point that there is no need of a rebuttal.
That's a lot of those buzzwords that do not address the question of why negotiating for labor resources should be any different than some other resources the company needs.
What's more, all of those buzzwords can apply to the relationship between any other supplier as well. In addition, corporations are themselves a highly collected bargaining unit. They may nominally be a single entity, but they represent the financial interests of many people.
No, they agressively undercut competitors (to attempt to force them out of the market) so much that they only make $1k/employee profit. What a ridiculous narrative you're trying to push.
I wonder how many people commenting have actually been part of a union. I have. My take is that if it's voluntary: great. If the union has negotiated that a company cannot hire you without being a part of the union: not great. Perhaps that should even be illegal. Forcing people making minimum wage to pay union dues is as far from helping people at the bottom as you can get. Unions are typically about benefitting people with TENURE. It's one of the reasons you end up with lots of tenured teachers with great pay who are impossible to fire, while the best young teachers with relatively terrible terms defect to private or charter schools, burn out, or become cynics and wait their turn to do nothing once they have tenure.
What you're talking about making illegal, requiring all employees to join the union or pay dues, that's already illegal in much of the country: that's what "right-to-work" laws do.
Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.
So from 1977 until 2018, you could be required to pay union dues, even if you weren't a member of the union even in "right to work" states, 22 of them.
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.
This is pretty much the only complaint about unions I can get behind. I think the best solution is to give the union a substantial ownership stake in the company, so that they have an incentive to operate efficiently
I get what you are saying at a high level, but owning the business even in part would totally screw up the way unions work.
If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.
A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.
This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.
How can unions lose their incentive to serve workers? It's a collective body of the workers. When workers are owners, incentives are aligned.
If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.
I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).
Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
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.
What I don't understand is why anybody would believe opinion pieces put out by their employer regarding if a union is right for you or not. Your interests are clearly not aligned. Is there some segment of workers who can't appreciate that fact? Whenever anybody gives you an opinion on anything, it will be tainted with their interests. Is pondering a topic from another party's perspective an exceptional critical thinking skill of sorts? I ask because it seems this sort of advertising is often effective.
Don't take it completely at face value. This wasn't just to to try to convince people that a union was a bad choice, this was a scare tactic to indicate how angry Amazon will be if they go ahead & unionize, and the consequences of that anger. See the part about not being so "helpful".
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.
Well businesses closing and moving, has happened a considerable amount, and often to devastating effects to a community, so it seems like something that would be of real concern.
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.
It doesn't even have to be another state. It can be a few miles away: Fire all current employees because you're shutting down. Open the new place, hire new people.
I literally witnessed this threat first hand growing up when my mom was involved in union efforts.
I like how the main objection would be instantly nullified if Amazon paid their workers more. Do you think a union would be able to negotiate for more than $500 of extra compensation?
I honestly am skeptical. AMZN already pays more than other small businesses and even medium/large businesses. It doesn't make money by paying its workers less - it makes money with efficiency and volume.
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.
No, a union contract supersedes a "right to work", because it's a contract. Yes, an employer can fire you for little/no reason (if it's not discriminatory) but if they sign a contract saying they won't fire you, then their hands are tied.
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.
A) If the union has a good chance of increasing wages 400 to 600 per year locally, then that is a great deal for the union organizers, a passable deal for the workers, and a bad deal for Amazon. I didn't say they won't be able to raise wages at all - just maybe not enough to justify the $500 union fees.
B) Not every state is a right-to-work state. So, from a 'worker's of the world unite' perspective then obviously making a union in Alabama will help other places form unions.
I could be very wrong and perhaps the union could get 1 or 2k more per year - but I am skeptical.
Unions don’t increase wages by negotiating, they do it by excluding non-union members from employment. It is literally the only mechanism by which unions can increase remuneration.
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.
> 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
What is this line even supposed to mean? Probably the most incomprehensible union busting talking point I've ever heard.
My wife worked in the event planning industry - the few unionized venues she had to deal with were a huge pain loaded with restrictions. As a client you couldn't even move a table by yourself on the spot - a union employee had to do it as part of an assigned task. Perhaps it's warning of similar red tape that gets in the way of doing work directly.
Usually it's all or nothing: a place unionizes, everyone is a member of the union. Technically, you could say "no I'm not going to be a member". But you're still part of what is called the bargaining unit. In some cases it is even possible to opt out of the union dues... there was a Supreme Court case about it recently that came down on the side of allowing opt-out, but I don't know the full extent/ramifications of that ruling.
"Doer" sounds like they're trying to bring in the "maker" moniker into jobs where you don't really make anything. "Maker" sounds fun and positive - you're someone who creates something! Not really it has the same kind of effect when you're not making anything and you're just doing what you were ordered to do.
This is another reminder that we have some of the negative aspects of a cyberpunk future without the cool empowering hacking parts.
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.
> 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?
> you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions
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.
> How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth.
I disagree on the pervasiveness of anti-union propaganda. Perhaps this is your experience, it has not been mine.
> 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.
Barely any of us are amateur radio operators and you never hear about amateur radio from anyone except preppers and geeks, but it isn’t because of inundation of anti-ham-radio propaganda from birth, merely that most people aren’t aware that ham radio could fulfill any of their needs.
> 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.
Thats your experience. But I bet you didn’t wonder that each and every person who propagandized you were dead inside. Rather you eventually became aware that some of them had their own beliefs based on their own perspectives that led them to their anti-union work.
> The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
As does the idea that someone could only make anti-union website if they were dead inside, but we like to assume good faith when people make statements and keep our cynicism to ourselves when possible.
I have, I’ve been a welder/fabricator, a machine operator, a forklift driver, and a temp. I’ve seen anti-union propaganda. I’ve seen pro-union propaganda. And I’m familiar enough with the discourse that I don’t wonder why anyone chooses what they choose. And there are evil parasites on both sides. But rarely do I see people acknowledge the arguments of the other side, usually just calling them parasites.
> I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
This whole ting started because they said that how could someone do that unless they were dead inside which I inferred to mean they hadn’t been exposed to any reasons why someone would do that, and you couldn’t believe that anyone would be unaware as to the legitimate rational case against unions based on workers’ interests. So I observed that you didn’t share the same reaction as the original commenter when you were exposed to the propaganda.
Perhaps there are plausible anti-union arguments out there, but this Amazon website isn't making them. Instead we get text like this:
> 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.
Yeah that jumped out at me but it was probably a poorly phrased attempt at referring to the changes inherent in a unionized workplace. Like restrictions on how much work a person is allowed to do and conflict between employees who pay dues and employees who do not pay dues.
> It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
You’re probably being hyperbolic but this lack of charity is one reason why we can’t have nice things.
If you look at the website, it's not the mere fact that it's against unions that is disturbing. That's an ideological point of view that doesn't strike me as unusual. In fact, it's pretty rational to be anti-union if you are among those who stand to profit from that, just like people who can profit from unions will naturally be interested in one and will align most of their ideology with that.
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.
>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.
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?
> Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
If the employer doesn’t accrue some marginal benefit, he’ll liquidate his investment if he is able. So he has to get something, and a good parasite will make sure not to kill the host.
You could say the exact same from the employers side. They would love to pay people nothing if they could, but they need to make sure the employee gains the minimum benefit to keep them working.
Exactly. So the employee negotiates the highest wage that he can, and the employer negotiates the lowest wage that he can, and they arrive at an acceptable wage.
> 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 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'
Blind is very toxic. It's one of apps I install rarely, only when needed (something is happening at work or to gauge offers) just for mental health reasons. It's unbelievable what people are comfortable sharing under anonymity. HOWEVER, it's one of the only places in tech where the koolaid is called out for what it is and nobody pretends to be happy. It's an island of sincerity.
I am not in the tech world, but reading through HN has been more than enough to understand exactly what you mean. Ultimately, people's opinions will change depending on what increases their material conditions at the expense of other groups, and I am no different in that regard.
>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.
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.
Amazon warehouses are one of the few reasons, I think we can all agree, that a union has a place. There is the argument to be made that if someone doesn't like the job, go elsewhere, it's the free market. True, but I see a lot of these fulfillment centers in small towns. They become a major employer, sometimes eclipsing even the local Walmart. It's a place where jobs are hard to come by, so maybe Amazon offers something the desperate, the poor, and the struggling something they can't get elsewhere. I don't have an answer for it, but shifting a little power away from the corporate monolith and to the citizens of the community it inhabits, sounds like a good idea.
>>. It's a place where jobs are hard to come by, so maybe Amazon offers something the desperate, the poor, and the struggling something they can't get elsewhere.
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.
You can make this argument about literally any labor protection. “You’re only hurting people desperate for work by mandating safety requirements.” “You’re only hurting poor families by banning child labor.”
> 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.
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.
> 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.
No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services, and more automation.
> No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't.
If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material/labor, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
In both cases, no competent business owner is thinking "I only want to hit $X profits this year, and anything over that is going to the consumers as a gift so that they'll like me."
> Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services
See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is (arguably) the entire cornerstone of free market Capitalism -- the idea that the value of a set of inputs into a business is not necessarily the same as the value of its outputs. One of the big points of Capitalism is that products get priced based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what they cost to produce or based on some kind of predetermined formula. If you have to pay your workers more, tough luck. Under Capitalism, your products are still only worth what the market is offering.
> and more automation
As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
And in any case, automation is good. We want to eliminate bad jobs. And even among automation-critics who worry about lost jobs and the cost of retraining, their goal in opposing automation is not to make those jobs periodically worse and worse to try and keep pace with the price of machines.
> If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same.
No, they want their return to go up. They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
> Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
No, you want your net profit to rise. You want your margin to be low because then its harder for others to compete with you.
> If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
This is true.
> Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
> See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
> As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
> more
> opposed
I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
>>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.
They will hire fewer workers.. there will be fewer profitable business ventures when the cost of one of the inputs to production increases.
In some case, it's true that higher wages will reduce profits, instead of reducing the number of jobs available, but that is not a good thing.
High profit margins encourage greater investment.
Take N95 masks for instance. If there is a shortage, any one producing them will raise prices and earn a huge profit.
Now let's say a progressive politician is elected and decides that those profits should be reallocated to the workers producing the N95 masks, so imposes an industry-specific minimum wage for N95 mask creators. Now profit margins decline for producing N95 mask makers, and N95 mask maker employees earn more.
What's lost is the massive influx of investment capital that high profit margins would otherwise have elicited, that would have raised N95 mask supply, which would have made the masks more affordable and plentiful.
Price controls don't work to increase net welfare. They reduce social welfare for reasons Economics explains in depth. Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations. They are the product of a super collective intelligence that tells us where economic resources should be allocated.
>>It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the minimum wage, to the extent that it has an effect, harms wage growth. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
There are a bunch of outlier situations in which artificial price bounds might theoretically not create economic deadweight losses, but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need? If Amazon could hit the shipping volumes it needs to hit with 50% of the current workforce, then it would be hiring ~50% of the current workforce -- if that's not the case, then somebody in the company that's making hiring decisions needs to be fired.
> Price controls don't work to increase net welfare.
A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare. We can debate the theory, but we can also just look at reality and say, "we've tried this before, and when handled correctly, it works."
> Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations.
I would be on board with your argument if the original comment starting this thread didn't boil down to "costs go up, prices go up". You're not talking about a complex signal at that point, you're talking about basic economic principles, and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Even your N95 example shows this point. Why did prices go up for N95 masks? Not primarily because of costs of production, primarily because demand changed. The basic principle economic principle is demand, not costs of production.
If you want to step away from those basic principles and talk about the complicated realities of what people will invest, and how safe they feel, and the size of the payout influencing investment enthusiasm, and so on -- then fine, that's reasonable, but the complicated reality is also that economic experts have looked at minimum wage increases, weighed up all of the complicated inputs that go into final product prices, and regularly concluded in multiple studies that minimum wages don't consistently increase prices or decrease market investment.
> It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
> but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
Agreed, but "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good" is much closer to reality than saying "the economy does conform to simplistic models, therefore a price floor is always bad." You're arguing that the simplistic model isn't applicable, in a thread that was started with you arguing that the simple model was that price and material/wage costs would always move in the same direction. That's just not true, it's both an oversimplification and just bad economic theory.
>>Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need?
We can't prove that it's not hiring fewer workers than it otherwise would have. In the absence of the ability to run a controlled experiment on how a minimum wage affects Amazon behavior, we can only trust in Economics, the same way we trust in what epidemiology tells us about the efficacy of vaccines, and assume that a larger volume of people would be hired without an artificial floor on the price of labor.
>>A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
You're talking about a price control on manual services in general, i.e. labor.
>>B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare.
No they haven't. Studies on minimum wage cannot conclusively show anything, because they are not controlled, and minimum wages are too low to affect a significant number of jobs.
Meta-studies suggest that minimum wage tends to be harmful, just as you'd expect, though these are not definitive for the reasons mentioned.
>>and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Yes I agree with that, but I didn't make the counter-argument, another commenter did.
>>Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
Nothing is guaranteed in economics, but we should err on the side of basic economics in the absence of certainty and proof.
This is a very tidy theoretical argument, but in practice you don't build a warehouse in a rural area along a shipping route then just abandon it when the community unionizes. Companies stick around for as long as they can possibly make a return on that investment, even if it means paying the people at the top less or decreasing margin to comply with union demands. And yeah, unions can go too far, but Amazon warehouses seem like a great place for them. Also, as long as the state is right to work so union participation is voluntary, what's the problem with it?
Walmart closed stores in Canada that unionized. Why wouldn't Amazon close a warehouse? Seems easier to close a warehouse than an entire brick and mortar store.
Union participation is very tricky. It's supposed to be voluntary, but there is evidence that those who don't join the union are denied employment, and advancement. The problem with unions is that they're never really voluntary. I would hate to see the unions of old that used violence to force people to join; or for a more recent example, card check initiatives to make the vote be non confidential.
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?
"<!-- This is Squarespace. --><!-- cranberry-groundhog-8agy -->"
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.
I tried it in curl before your edit and yeah, "curl https://ext-sq.squarespace.com -H 'Host: cranberry-groundhog-8agy.squarespace.com'" just returns this site.
Probably something to use before your IT team sets up the CNAME record.
Side stepping all the union talk, this site is ugly and inaccessible. The contrast ratios are awful; white text sitting on top of full screen, lightly colored videos? This was made in haste by some amateurs. Or maybe it's trying to be trendy? It's tragic either way. Doubly so if you actually read the content.
I imagine they allocated like an hour to make the site. The FAQ are just a bunch of poor-quality JPEG images. Guessing that properly layouting that FAQ would've taken too much time.
I don't know about Amazon, but many employers don't let most employees work full time. If that's the case these workers sort of are born into part-time employment since the socioeconomic class you grow up in is the biggest factor of success.
Doesn’t the existence of the website validate that Amazon considers the union to be favorable for workers and, therefore, unfavorable to them? Otherwise, why would Amazon care enough to create it? I doubt it was truly due to Amazon’s concern for the workers alone.
everybody seems to be talking about wages negotiation but let's remember that some Amazon employees had to pee in bottles. It's easier to collectively bargain for toilets to be better located (though it's sad that you have to)
I think we should keep asking that question about everything spoken or printed that someone, somewhere might potentially disagree with or find objectionable. Free speech means freedom from disagreement and objection. So all speech should be approved ("allowed") by the proper authorities before being able to be communicated. Free speech is restricted speech.
Same reason why Amazon can cut service to Parler. The First Amendment guarantees the right for private companies to govern their own properties, literature, and procedures.
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.
I'm personally glad that Amazon are able to express this sentiment for all to see. That the only time they've ever supposedly cared about the spending power of the workers they employ concerns union membership dues should be quite telling. They're betting that unions are going to cost them money because they believe that high union membership will lead to better wages, costly improvements to working conditions or other costly responsibilities. There's no other conceivable reason for them to publish this trite because it is in their interest to pay as little as possible for as much productive power as possible. It's not at all in their interest that you could buy a fancy dinner for the money you'd spend on membership dues.
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.