[flyt]

Unions need more than a Discord to organize. They may need to compensate union leadership for time taken to organize away from their work duties, pay for events, pay for mailers and other communications infrastructure, and of course pay for professionals like labor lawyers.

No union will have much luck performing collective bargaining against Amazon without working alongside experienced lawyers.

These costs don't have to be huge, but they aren't zero.

[ByteJockey]

You also need a well funded strike fund so your threat of a strike looks more realistic on paper.

[dheera]

> pay for events

What events? If it's to discuss a certain issue, that can be virtual and almost free. If it's a social event, meh, there are enough of those already and people can self-organize them. Hell for $500/month I could organize social events where everyone goes to Michelin 3-star restaurants every month and rants over gourmet dinners about their bosses.

> pay for mailers and other communications infrastructure

Use e-mail. I don't even check my snail mail box anyway unless someone tells me to expect something by e-mail, and even then when my snail mail box gets too full I usually just dump it all in the recycle bin, so it's not an effective way for a union to communicate with me.

> and of course pay for professionals like labor lawyers.

What if they just split the lawyer fees evenly?

Assuming an experienced lawyer charges $1000/hr and spends 100 hours on a case, and there are 1 million people in the union, that amounts to about $0.10/person/case, a far cry from the $500/month they seem to be charging. Even if my numbers are off by a factor of 100 it would be only $10/person/case, and if the union won the case Amazon would probably have to pay the legal fees anyway.

Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.

[dghlsakjg]

I think the $500 figure is the number that AMZN pulled out of a hat, and I think it is a yearly number, not a monthly one.

That said, it sounds like you haven't dealt with the real world logistics of large groups of people. From both a practical and legal perspective, there is a lot to cover. The finances need to be kept up to date and audited. You mention, in jest, that you could bring all these people together for a dinner at that price. Getting 15 people to agree on a time and place for dinner is close to impossible if you've ever tried it. Nevermind getting a warehouse full of people to show up.

100 hours (2.5 weeks of labor) for lawyers to come to an agreement for the 1mm workers you cited? Not possible, especially with an adversary like amazon.

Email as communication? Maybe, but does it qualify for legal matters? Voting? Have you ever tried to send a million emails? There's a reason that there is an entire industry built around bulk emails.

A union is more like an independent HR office than anything else. Think of how many resources HR uses, and that gives you an idea of what a union needs

[II2II]

> I think the $500 figure is the number that AMZN pulled out of a hat, and I think it is a yearly number, not a monthly one.

A coworker in a non-unionized position said that the didn't like unions because of the dues. When I told them what the dues were, their opinion quickly changed. The funny part is that unionizing would only bring about small benefits in our case since the existence of unionized positions with the same employer reaped benefits for all employees.

And for what it's worth, paying $500/month in dues implies an income of about 30,000 to 50,000 per month. Not only is this outside of the target demographic of unions, but it ranks up there with taxation levels (with much richer government services). Suggesting union dues of this level is either an unintentional mistake or disingenuous anti-union propaganda.

[sodality2]

>Getting 15 people to agree on a time and place for dinner is close to impossible if you've ever tried it. Nevermind getting a warehouse full of people to show up.

Any reason why "show up at 8" wouldn't work? It doesn't have to work for everyone if they can be recorded, summarized, or otherwise disseminated.

[estaseuropano]

Alright, split the fees! Now you need someone to count the days paid out, calculate how much each member has to pay, send payment requests, follow up, manage the account, ...

A professional Union needs funds to do its work. Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues. If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.

The imaginary alternative would be to have somebody do this for free in their evenings and on their weekends. Have you ever tried to manage even a class representative and budget for your kids' school or a little league or any other kind of long-term engagement? Already at that small scale things tend to break down quote easily and few stay involved more than a few years. How can you expect volunteer union reps to work 8h+/day, spend their nights writing legal briefs, researching, organising events, managing members and expenses, etc while being up against an army of professional lawyers?

Unions brought the five day work week, end to child labour, 40/38 hour weeks, the right to breaks, vacations, medical leave, ... If you don't have those right now then that's likely because you are in a non-union workplace (and/or country).

[sokoloff]

> A professional Union needs funds to do its work.

Absolutely true.

> Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues.

That strikes me as an opinion that could use some supporting facts. It might be the case, but union fees are the same order of magnitude as many workers' savings rate. If the prospective member saved those fees over a lifetime, would they be better off?

> If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.

That means that union members are buying insurance against there being a strike declared. Would they be better off to pay smaller dues and bear the risk themselves? If all possible strikes are union-wide, it seems like this insurance can only be a losing gamble for members, all the while creating a fat piggybank for union leaders to raid/drain.

[pseudalopex]

Numerous studies say union workers make more on average even accounting for dues. I'll give you 1.[1]

Unions have to disclose financial statements. Leaders can't just raid the strike fund. And there won't be a strike fund unless most members vote for it.

[1] https://illinoisepi.org/site/wp-content/themes/hollow/docs/w...

[sokoloff]

If I'm reading that study correctly, those figures have an R² of around 0.23, which is quite low for explanatory power of wages as dependent on union membership (quite low as in the "none" or "very low" range)

[cool_dude85]

>If it's just a town hall to discuss a certain issue, that can be virtual.

Virtual isn't the same as free.

>Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.

Nobody knows what the union dues will be if the union wins, but they will not be 500 per month. It might be a fair guess that they're 500 per year. About 20 per check if you get paid biweekly. The dues will be decided on by union members through some kind of democratic process.

[sokoloff]

Union dues are very typically 1 to 1.5% of pay.