These conditions aren't unique to warehouse jobs; the customer call-center industry is similar in many ways. Time is tracked down to the second, you are being recorded and/or monitored at all times, tardiness and absenteeism are ruthlessly enforced with no excuses, and there is relentless pressure to "hit your numbers", which are often nearly impossible. And of course, you're still expected to "always put the customer first" under these insane conditions.
If you don't live up in any respect, they're happy to let the next batch of trainees have your job. In fact, they prefer it; those with 5+ years of experience have the most to fear, as they acquire raises and cushier benefits over time, and so are often fired for the same infraction that gets a newbie a write-up.
I suppose that call centers are preferable to warehouses, in that there is little risk of injury, and there are more opportunities to move up or transfer careers. Still, this is one of the human costs of corporate capitalism in general: if you don't have rare or specialized skills, you have no negotiating power, and have to take whatever you can get. And don't even think about uttering the word "union".
But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not. It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service. For stores to be open at normal hours, for people to pick up the phone, for emergency rooms to be open when you need them, somebody has to care about punctuality.
Another less extreme alternative to soviet communism is a unionized workforce similar to what we had in the US 30 years ago before Democrats gave up the fight and American capitalists started shipping jobs overseas in order to break up unions.
Why is this guy being downvoted? If automation were so imminent, then why weren't the robots brought in five or ten years earlier? Why did business interests work so hard for China to get "most favored nation" trading status during the Clinton administration? Why do people go on and on about the human capital of China (iPhone factories and so forth) if not for the assembly-line grunt work?
There's a reason I used the phrase "corporate capitalism". I meant our particular flavor of government-industrial complex, not markets in general. In my opinion, either pure libertarianism or a hybrid economy of democratic socialism would both be an improvement over the "socialism for the rich" we currently live with.
but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not.
I don't think that's the issue. Whould the cost lowering productivity or making for better social conditions be so high for companies that already make so much profit? And if yes does it have to come from public pressure or enacted laws? Can't a company establish acceptable social practices by itself.
I don't care if my stuff comes in a day later if it can ease up the horror of people working there. There is something to be done in connecting people using the service with the ones making it possible and at what cost. This is just nuts
But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.
Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do with fighting the state power for more freedom.
That said, it's not either corporate capitalism (as described in the article) or USSR. There are plenty of options in between, starting with respect for workers as human beings, and regulations that ensure that treating people as mere cogs is not an option to gain a competitive advantage with. Kind of like we abolished slavery -- we can also abolish unpaid overtime and treating employees like shit. Take a look at Europe. And, no, the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not.
Having a job at those conditions or not is not the only two options --we only make them to be. It's like you're saying "it's better than 4000 slaves have an owner to feed them than not".
It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service.
Yes, people have been taught to behave like spoiled children, and expect others to work for them 24/7. To the detriment of their own working conditions, because you are a consumer for a few hours at most, but you are an employee most of your day.
> the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.
Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check. Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.
Of course those are NOT the only factors to predict how rich people are going to be. The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy. That should have been obvious by now, after we had so many great examples in the 20th century. Let's not spread the old false myths around.
> The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy
Are you kidding? Socio-cultural values, religious beliefs, natural resources, foreign policy, domestic policy, monetary systems, infrastructure, none of these things matter at all?
Your inferences from history might have value if we had a reliable World Simulator, where we could change and control variables at will and observe the results. But we don't; extrapolating any kind of simple narrative from history pretty much guarantees you're at least partially wrong. Reality is complex, and is under no obligation to work in ways that make intuitive sense to us talking monkeys.
Socio-cultural values.
Japan has totally different values from the US. China, same.Apparently that does not prevent them from all being prettu successful economically speaking.
Religious beliefs.
Huh ? Japan, China, same as previous point. Totally different from Europe or US. But otherwise pretty successful countries. Where's the correlation between economy and religion?
Natural resources.
Japan has no access to natural resources on their land. Singapore has no resources. Luxemburg has no resources. Switzerland has no resources. Holland has no resources. Funny how all those countries have rather healthy economies.
Foreign policy
Agree on that one. But policies which do not support free exchange of goods tend to do rather badly. Cuba, anyone?
Domestic policy
Domestic policy in China and in the US are totally different - you will find very few common points there. That does not seem to impact significantly their economic success, at least on the short term.
Monetary systems
You have a point there, but since all countries have abandoned the Gold standard for long, basically we are all on fiat currency currently, no matter in which part of the world you live in. Money is now paper everywhere, it's hardly a differentiator.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure usually derived from an economic system. It's when you have a growing economy and growing needs that you worry about infrastructures. Building roads and airports when people are starving is useless.
So, not many of the things you mentioned matter at all, I'm afraid. But feel free to prove me wrong.
Another key difference is that the set of thoughts whose public expression could get a person killed, and the actual danger from expressing them, has been much smaller in the US than in those two countries for the past hundred years or so.
We've had our inquisitions here, but I think people tend to recognize them and call them what they are pretty quickly. See Eleanor Roosevelt's very public comments about McCarthyism.
I think freedom of expression plays a role somewhere, but not sure how critical it is in order be successful economically. If you take a look at China, again, if you vocally oppose the government you would end up in prison pretty fast, but that does not prevent people from engaging in commerce with relative large freedom. Commerce and Freedom of expression are not necessarily tied together.
Though, on a libertarian point of view, I agree that freedom makes sense in all aspects of life, not only in economic affairs.
Good thing you're not a racist, JohnnyBrown. I take it the name "James Watson" doesn't ring any instant bells for you.
It's very easy to confuse an absence of persecution, with an absence of people who agree with you being persecuted. That just shows that you're on top and your enemies are on the bottom. Ie, all's right with the world.
Of course Eleanor Roosevelt didn't like McCarthyism - it was an attempt to persecute people like her. Eleanor Roosevelt was the alpha queen of the purge of the "isolationists." Not to mention the McCarthyites, who got purged pretty good themselves. You'll note that there's not a lot left of them. There's a lot left of Eleanor Roosevelt, however.
It's true that America doesn't generally shoot the people it purges, work them to death by forced labor, etc. We don't need to. Our methods are much more efficient than that.
Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check.
Russia is only about 100-110 million people. One third of the US. So the "large unified market" is much smaller, as is the "human capital" pool, by which I don't mean people, but scientists, inventors, etc. And the military might that Russia has and uses to gain cheap access to resources is so smaller compared to the US it's not even funny. Plus, Russia is recovering from both the USSR state bureaucrat dictatorship AND the US/IMF BS doctrines imposed on the during the Yeltsin era.
Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.
Well, unlike Russia, China DOES have all that. And China is doing rather well. It's on the up and up, and already poised to a larger economy that the US. So, if anything, this supports my argument.
Oh yeah, China is doing rather well NOW. How about China, like 20 or even 30 years ago ? It was a poor country, underdeveloped. And you know what changed ? Their economic system. Just that. It was so sudden in China you can easily trace the roots of their economic boom. It supports my argument, rather than yours.
Are you kidding? The US has had its hands on oil and other resources the world over, ensuring favorable prices, preferential treatment and US petrol companies' control over oil springs. To the point of overthrowing governments, including Iran's democratic one back in the day, when they took a oil policy they didn't like. Here's a small example:
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
The Carter administration – the most “idealist” of the post-World War II presidencies in terms of its rhetoric – openly acknowledged in National Security Directive (NSD) 63 (and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the need to ensure “the availability of oil [from the Middle East] at reasonable prices.” Carter’s administration announced that any “attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.” This policy of targeting unfriendly governments that reside in regions tangential to the Middle East was further reinforced in other official policy documents. In discussing U.S. policy, the Reagan administration explained in NSD 27 the need “to ensure the U.S. access to foreign energy and mineral forces” as a key aspect of “national security” priorities. Carter established a similar concern in NSD 63, discussing U.S. interest in dominating Middle Eastern oil as also extending to the “horn of Africa.”
(...)
Policy motivations – simply put – have long been driven by concern with dominating Middle Eastern oil supplies by force, and with support for repressive, U.S.-friendly regimes in geographic areas (such as North Africa) that are tangential to the Middle East. With regard to oil concerns, President George H. W. Bush articulated U.S. policy toward the Middle East, explaining in National Security Directive 26 that: “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to United States national security. The United States remains committed to its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate through the use of military force, against the Soviet Union or any other force with interests inimical to our own.”
With all due respect...are you trolling, or did you not read the comment you're replying to?
The original comment was, basically, an assertion that oil a globally traded commodity where prices are set for the entire market, and the price paid for any given barrel is the current market price, which will be precisely the same for all market participants (not counting the impact of taxes, subsidies, and differences in regulatory climate. (Is this true? Hint: The answer is "yes".)
Not only did your comment and links not actually disprove this assertion (not surprising, given that it's rather obviously true), but nothing you said even really disagreed with it, which leads me to believe you're not even a troll, just clueless.
Every single example you gave could well lead to lower oil prices for both American and Swedish consumers; none of them could plausibly lead to lower oil prices for American consumers but higher ones for Swedish consumers. Want to play again?
My question is whether Sweden pays a higher price for oil (ignoring taxes) than the US, not whether the US attempts to keep oil prices low.
None of your links address the question I actually asked.
If Iraqi oil is fully exploited, I agree this will result in lower oil prices. But oil prices are set by the global market - the price Sweden pays = global price + shipping cost, same as the US.
"Corporate" or "crony" capitalism is the key word. In real capitalism people would be in charge of their own production and not subject themselves to the above. Their are all sorts of laws on the books to prevent the poor from being charge of their own value (taxi laws, food licensing, planning permits etc.) as well as curbs on investment (you can't invest in the host upcoming company unless you're already a millionaire) and lending (poor people aren't eligible for loans to start busineses). Not to mention the biggest evil - public schools, where poor children are subjected to deskilling of their natural talents (schooling is important - why not give vouchers and let small businesses operate school - in third world countries this is the norm and they far outperform government schools).
I worked in a call center for two summers to pay for college. It was actually not that bad. I was certainly tracked, monitored, and given aggressive performance targets, but as an inbound CSR you don't have many calls that make you cry.
They offered us shifts in the warehouse when we didn't need 100% utilization on the phones. I never took them up on that, despite that juicy extra quarter an hour.
There's a huge degree of variability in the industry; I worked for four different call centers before I broke into web-dev, and some were much worse than others.
The absolute worst ones are the out-sourced centers that handle in-bound calls for multiple other companies. Because they have no stake in the long-term outcome and are paid solely by their numbers (cost per call), they have little incentive to train their staff well, pay well, follow through with customers, etc. Working for Comcast and AT&T directly was degrading and Dilbertesque, but they weren't as bad as the outsourced centers or the warehouse environs described in the article.
Of course, customer support is different from packing goods, which makes this flawed. I think a lot of the problems comes from companies treating customer support as a cost.
It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s)
Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a lot of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.
Maybe, except presumably a lot of the "seasonal retail" stuff would require all the "spare" warehouse-picking-capable rental-robots at the same time.
Unless you can make something generalized enough to do _other_ (profitable for the rental robot owners) tasks outside the BlackFriday/Xmas shopping season, you've still got the same problem (though more power to you if you can make that problem become the robot rental industry's problem instead of yours…)
Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers? Nobody keeps inventory around for that long. Unless you're speculating on the future supply of a product you're only keeping stuff in stock for the buffer between when a whole palette comes in and when you need another one. So you can rent "fulfillment instances" as you need to order more inventory.
> "Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals."
This would work if different businesses have significantly different seasonalities - but on the aggregate in North America this is not true. Amazon gets the same Xmas rush as Wal-Mart, along with Target, Macy's, and whatnot. The number of businesses whose rush season is out of sync with Xmas is quite low. In fact, on the whole, retail basically rises and falls all at once throughout the year.
> "Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers?"
AFAIK Amazon already does this :) Look up "Fulfillment by Amazon".
I don't think China, India, and the US have the same 'black Friday' so if you ship them at reasonable cost you can probably do some load balancing internationally.
But with robots, you can probably get them to be cheaper even when taking into account seasonality. The real problem is that lots of manufacturers/wareshouses only keep a 3 year investment horizon. If they invested with a 10 year payoff, a lot more automation is possible. (It mirrors the problem in the economy as a whole - short termism)
Only if everybody has their own warehouse. Why would you want that though? It would be better to rent WaaS (Warehousing as a Service - you heard it here first folks) so that specialized companies can have warehouses build right next to the harbor the goods came in from, and spread load across many completely automated warehouses are required. In December store Santa hats, in July swimming trunks. As a seller you don't even need to care about capacity.
The article mentions that many of these companies are effectively WaaS companies, though they're called "third-party logistics contractors, a.k.a. 3PLs".
From the article: "These companies often fulfill orders for more than one retailer out of a single warehouse. America's largest 3PL, Exel, has 86 million square feet of warehouse in North America..."
DHL and UPS, among others, offers this service.
People have been saying this for a long time. Automated picking has been around for years. When Amazon bought the large e-commerce place I worked for, the first thing they did was turn off the automated picking and replace it with people. When its cheaper and more simple to use robots, people will use robots.
Wow, that's truly incredible. I didn't realize anyone had reached this point. I'm excited to see this stuff progress, but I can't help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be created by this.
Machines have been replacing jobs for over 200 years now, but I don't think there's been a huge increase in unemployment over that period. We've always managed to invent more meaningless and repetitious tasks for ourselves to do. One might say that most office jobs nowadays are like that, too. Factories replaced farms, cubicles replaced factories. But usually this happened over generations, so people had a chance to adapt.
If, at some point in the future, so many tasks get automated so quickly that there aren't enough jobs for the majority of this planet's featherless bipeds, we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive. Work might become something that you only do because you like it, or because you want a higher income than whatever the default is. I only hope that outdated ideologies won't get in the way of such a paradigm shift.
At least on farms/agriculture, we get a chance to be outside with nature, and stay healthy/fit (even though it is much harder work). What have we got to show for modern day cubicles? :(
>At least on farms/agriculture, we get a chance to be outside with nature, and stay healthy/fit (even though it is much harder work).
At one time (just 20 years ago), your statement would have been fairly accurate. People still walked beans to get weeds, baled square bales of hay and straw (on hot summer afternoons, with indoor barn temps reaching 110+), manhandled livestock, and had to do a lot more manually with equipment.
Those days are fading, though.
The present and future of crop farming are GMO crops (with spray resistance traits, or plants producing their own pesticides/herbicides) and (near future) UAV-style robotics for tractors and combines operated from the house (or corporate HQ).
Livestock farming does remain more hands-on. However, a lot of confinement ops are automated to ensure proper and timely weight gain and less stress. And before people start complaining about confinements, many of those are popping up due to regulatory requirements based upon head count.
"we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive."
i m a stern believer that people has to produce value. And until a person can produce value merely by living, people will have to work to survive. Value right now is measured by money, and money has a limited capability in measuring things that are very subjective (how do you measure the value a nice person brings to a community?).
But i dont believe there ever will be a day when a person can live without outputting an iota of value as measured by the standards of the day. At least, not until we have a source of free, and unlimitd energy.
1) Will there ever come a day when people can produce value merely by living? That really depends on what "value" is, and as you said, the standards of the day may differ from ours. Under some circumstances, merely being a consumer might be enough to contribute to some overall good. If energy becomes cheap enough, even a tiny benefit might be enough to offset a person's energy consumption.
2) Should we let a human being's survival be taken hostage to whether or not he or she produces what other people perceive as value, provided that there is leftover capacity to give them a free ride? This is more of a moral question, and your answer may vary according to your ideological commitments.
1) I dont believe being a "consumer" can by itself have any value
2) The real question is, whether the left over capacity could be put to better use, instead of keeping alive those not pulling their weight (when they could've). Would science and tech be that much more advanced because there'd be money to put into research and development? Would infrastructure be better because money isn't "wasted" on people who otherwise make no contributions? Sure, morally, you gotta help those in need. But a line ought to be drawn - people who could otherwise have worked, shouldn't be given free handouts just because the enocomy of the country _could support them_.
Children, old people, disabled people, unemployed people, many politicians, many lawyers, criminals, spammers, many landowners, trust fundies, members of royal families, many librarians, many teachers, many policeman etc. etc. We already have people who don't actually provide value to society. In Germany, about 60 per cent of people derive most of their income from government handouts. The trend will only increase and is actually a good thing (200 years ago, almost everyone had to produce value to survive - where would most people choose, today or 200 years ago).
I think you are right. Over a certain period our society will Star Trek-like be able to provide for everyone without them doing any actual work. The biggest problem is the shifting time until then. How do you treat the 70% of people that won't find jobs because there ARE none that aren't done better by a robot or an algorithm. What is fair compared to those who are still required to work?
Should (mostly creative people i guess) they be compensated as they would today?
Is there a point where we can safely assume that everyone that has work is glad about it to a point where they won't need more than what the government provides for free?
People talk here about people pulling their weight, but from all of my customers the only people won't be so easily replaced are the creative designers, songwriters, etc.
The rest, law firms, translation specialists, server admins, myself(web developer)... are in jobs that i imagine to have atleast digital competition if not completly replaced in the next 100 years.
So what do we do when suddenly the majority is out of work? There will be a point when creating major patentlawsuits won't keep lawyers busy anymore, where feeding everyone won't keep farmers and production workers busy...
What does pulling your own weight mean, if all the necessary jobs for keeping society running are gone or done by robots? Not everyone can be a waiter for people that are into restaurants with human waiters. Not everyone can be a cutting edge scientist.
My best prediction is that we'll become a very inward faced society, taking care of each others emotional needs will be our main task in such a future. To say it simple, you'll finally visit your parents more often as you've promised.
only a small handful from the list you gave is actually none-contributing.
The 60% of the people that derive income from gov't handouts are leeching off those who do actually work - tell me how that is fair? Disabled people/old people are dependants, but they not a majority, and as for children, they _will_ create value when they grow up. I m talking about abled bodied people who choose to get a gov't handout instead of doing work to sustain their own life. The world would be better off if those people weren't given handouts.
Still, this article disturbs me and I will be making more effort to shop locally (I am lucky to live in a massive city however, where I have access to most things a short metro ride away).
Let's assume that you would need 1000 machines to have as much throughput as 4000 people.
WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k.
That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k.
Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6 and 7 years.
That, however, doesn't take into account the opportunity cost of the initial $100,000,000 outlay. That brings it up to around a decade.
Labor costs are likely double, if not more, than what i've estimated. overtime + insurance + drug testing + security + all the other crap i'm forgetting.
Well if you treat people as human machines, remove unionizing ability and what have you, then you can bring yourself to competitive levels with China, which has kinda made a very persuasive point that human robots are cheaper than mechanical ones.
The only issue with labor of course is the so called 'managing' aspect of it, which covers things like quality of life. Robots don't have and will never complain about, while being able to do tasks at a level that most humans wont ever be able to.
Re: " China, which has kinda made the point that human robots are cheaper than mechanical ones."
Not for long.
"The China Business News on Monday quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying the company planned to use 1 million robots within three years, up from about 10,000 robots in use now and an expected 300,000 next year."
Most companies don't have 4000 employees, or need 1000 robots. Like every business, you add capacity as necessary. Diapers.com started with one mom and minivan.
This article: http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/smallbusiness/kiva_robots/in... says that 1000 robots costs $15-20 million, not the $500 million that 500k a piece would run. Also what is there to indicate such a hefty need for engineering oversight? 20 engineers constantly overseeing the machines sounds like they are either constantly breaking down, or need a significant amount of custom programming per unit as upkeep, both of which just sounds like a quality control issue on Kiva's side. It makes sense that there's a lot of initial planning/programming for each installation, but I'd expect it to be mostly self-running after that. I would be curious about the energy needs per unit, though. They seem to be carrying around more weight per package shipped than with a human picker carrying just what goes in one package, but then again their use of energy might be more efficient than humans.
1000 robots needing just 30 minutes of preventative maintenance per week is 500 hours of PM a week. That sounds like about the amount of PM a staff of 20 engineers can supply, once you account for admin, PTO, training, travel between robots, and doing the actual work.
Engineer does not solely mean "one who creates software".
How much automation do you need and how "bulletproof" does it have to be? What's the up time? What sort of rates does it have to handle average and peak? How accurate does it have to be? Does your control and execution software have to be custom (since you business model and methods are oh so different than your competitors) or will the standard be good enough? Trust me automation and the software to drive it can be quite expensive.
I'm really curious about the robot costs. The automated shelving systems i've seen look, well, really simple. I'm pretty sure i could get a half assed DIY system working for a few hundred dollars. An industrial version can't be more than 100x the price can they? 50k per mover, on the outside?
> "I'm pretty sure i could get a half assed DIY system working for a few hundred dollars."
you think the same thing when you see an Oracle instance that cost tens of millions and think you could have done it with postgres. what these retailers are really paying for is reliability, redundancy and support - having a big brand co. to call when something goes wrong.
that isn't to say that there isn't a mysql/pgsql style opportunity within warehouse automation and supply chain management - it is just that it isn't likely that Wal-Mart and Amazon would be your customer. Similar development and deployment cycle as with mainframes and servers - what was once the territory of only large companies and governments is now an accessible technology and competitive advantage amongst small and medium businesses as well
The most interesting aspect of supply chain management to me is the concept of a completely outsourced warehouse - where it is cheaper to have a specialized company manage and run your inventory and supply chain as part of their larger infrastructure (and economies of scale etc.) rather than building your own warehouses and system. Amazon became very very good in this field because an outsource style solution didn't exist at the time and they had no choice other than to do it themselves, but you could imagine that an Amazon being started today would not have its own warehouses and would not be writing long letters to shareholders trying to justify hundreds of millions in capital expenses in order to automate warehouses and bring down margins.
The three examples often cited are Amazon, Wal-Mart and Diapers. Amazon implemented a lot of their own systems using partners, Wal-Mart has invested billions and Diapers.com implemented with Kiva Systems (amazon now own diapers).
Amazon and Diapers could automate end-to-end because they had fixed product sizes and packaging. A lot of other retailers like Wal-Mart are attempting to paletize their goods for this reason. It is very expensive to completely automate end-to-end with retailers who have a broad inventory (which is why the vertical online retailers such as Diapers and Zappos did so well, they could lower margins with an easier to manage supply chain).
I used to follow Amazon stock and filings. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on automation in their initial warehouses. They spent so much on the servers that run software controllers that the RedHat stock got a big bump when it was announced that they were the partner implementing it (Amazon made up a double-digit percentage of RedHat revenue).
I remember headlines of Amazon investing ~$100M into updating single warehouses. A lot of time was spent analyzing the outlay and returns - it was definitely a long-term investment rather than something you can immediately identify as being more cost-effective in the short term.
So if you have varying inventory and demand cycles it is less cost-effective to automate supply chain. There is also the part where you need to integrate with backend systems - SAP, Oracle, Sage, etc. which again involves consulting time and multi-million dollar projects.
From this story, it sounds like this warehouse as a very broad inventory. For eg. one bin contains batteries mixed with DVD's etc. which isn't suitable for robotic system since all they do is grab the basket, knowing what is inside it, and bring it to the packaging conveyor. It sounds like they already do this for the most popular products, and it is the rarer products where having a dedicated area for its stock just isn't feasible. This is also why Wal-Mart went straight into investing billions into RFID rather than the barcode scanning model used by Kiva.
IIRC, just the automation robot hardware market alone is ~$3B p.a, and online commerce with goods is ~$30B p.a, so already 10% of revenue is being invested back into hardware alone, which gives you an idea of costs and limitations. It may be a market that is ripe for disruption, since the deployment model seems to be similar to how large backend enterprise systems are implemented with Oracle, IBM etc. there doesn't seem to be any solution at the low to medium end of the market, although that is part of Kiva's pitch as well (they have standardized robot and bucket sizes).
The whole area is really interesting, I have tons of bookmarks on another laptop if you want me to send them to you. I looked into it some years ago as part of just analyzing tech companies and their margins (my main takeaway was narrower inventory, vertical market = better margins and better automation, and that it gets very expensive for broader inventories). To find more, a good starting point is the companies that sell the hardware and implement the systems such as Kiva: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems. They must have a good PR department because their customers and implementations have been written about a lot in Wired, the WSJ, NYTimes etc. as the future of warehouse automation, for eg.
Amazon probably knows their business better than you do. If they're hiring people instead of buying robots, that's probably because people get the job done cheaper - for now.
Maybe if your product is simple. However like Amazon's warehouses those where I work do not have consistent packaging or can they. Then toss in having packages which can be broken as customers do not always need complete sets; you do want your customer's happy don't you? The stock oh, nearly a hundred thousand items in each warehouse and do you see where robots don't fit in?
What you do do is arrange inventory based on sales, size, and packaging. Looking to minimize the travel of each picker and reduce the chance of injury. You also install conveyors and similar to make moving inventory around simpler.
I spent the first five years of my professional life developing software for these places. I've seen lots of warehouses and even worked in them briefly to test our software. Not the most glamorous work, but I could do fun stuff like use genetic algorithms for optimization problems or create a dynamic 3D visualization of the warehouse space.
It took me a while to realize that my work is making other people obsolete and replaceable, but I guess so does a big portion of software and technology in general. But it was surprisingly refreshing to switch off your brain for a few hours and do whatever the scanner tells you to do. Though of course I didn't have any pressure to do more than 1,000 picks a day, that is insane!
This was in Germany though, so the unions and worker's council made sure that the working conditions were more humane than described in the article.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where static electricity is a problem as in this article, find a regular wooden pencil, break it in half, sharpen both ends and then blunt them a bit so they don't poke you. As you approach the metal object, touch the end of the pencil to it first. Make sure you are in good contact with the other end. The graphite "lead" is a conductor. You won't feel the shock.
Works with any conductor like a ring or tape a paperclip to your index finger. I often touch the metallic part of my keys then use the key's to touch your door.
The pencil seems to work better, perhaps because the graphite has some resistance. I usually feel it a bit when I use a key.
In this case, the people in the warehouse were unable to carry metal in because the delay at the metal detectors would mean they got no break time. The nub of pencil would be ideal.
It doesn't stop it. Consider: the energy of the spark is flowing through your whole body, but it's only painful at the point of contact, because it's concentrated in the smallest possible cross-section. So use something else at that point of contact.
It's interesting how we put down companies for their abusive labor conditions in China but at least 50% of the population will rally behind forces that prevent any sort of government regulation or unions that help prevent this kind of abuse "in the homeland".
Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like team to respond to possible union formations.
Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.
Just because it's hard to monetize and profit from concepts like the health and well-being of employees doesn't mean that we as a society should put that value at zero.
The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers, while also requiring our own companies to do so. This would eliminate the competitive edge issue, while also allowing other countries to engage in free trade with us if they pass laws protecting their own laborers from workspace exploitation.
We simply choose not to, for certain values of we (read: members of the finance capital rentier class that dominates American political discourse).
Competitiveness is extremely important, and you highlight a way to sort of obtain that, but you can only control competitiveness in the domestic market with tariffs unless you basically oppress third worlders (how it will be viewed, anyway) by strong-arming nations to pass similar tariff laws.
The value of domestic manual labor simply isn't that high anymore except in hard-to-outsource cases, and unless we change our society to involve more wealth redistribution, those who can only perform manual labor will not enjoy a similar standard of living to those with greater leverage.
The US economy has no need to export anything into third world countries their economy's are simply to tiny accept much in the way of imports. In-fact we have long flooded most of them with cheap food which we lost money to create so balance of trade is even less valuable than you might think. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/
Ultimately, in a free society people need to be allowed the right to cooperate. And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights, and that basic human decency demands that we allow non-management employees to have similar rights.
Which is not to say that all unions are well-behaved. My time as a Teamster was both instructive and discouraging. They had secured a lot of provisions that I don't think should have been allowed to stand. For one, joining the union was a condition of employment. If that requirement didn't violate the principle of free labor markets, it at least cut close to the line. And they eradicated all traces of meritocracy; the only thing that could ever be rewarded was seniority. That was deeply discouraging for a new employee, and from the company's perspective it ensured that the highest-paid employees were also the least productive, by virtue of having spent the most time observing that hard work would never be met with any reward aside from itself.
However, we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Unions should be allowed to exist; history is rife with practical examples what happens if you don't do so.
And frankly, the potential problems posed by unions can naturally be addressed by the free market itself, if only we'd let it. If a company's compensation structure becomes unsustainable due to more efficient competition from another company, then it is absolutely OK to simply let its more efficient competitors out-compete it. That remains the case regardless of the cause of the unsustainable compensation structure.
And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights...
No, it's illegal for corporations to collectively bargain to set workers wages. On the flip side, if employees unionize, it's illegal for the employer to refuse to do business with them.
I think you may have reacted to what you thought he said here, rather than what he said.
The management within a company (considered as a class, rather than as a singular entity "the company") does indeed bargain collectively with the workers of that company. That doesn't imply they collude with the management of other companies.
I'm not sure what the consequences of that are, exactly. It does mean that it's very hard to get teams within the same company to bid on you, because they will collude to avoid that.
So I think you missed his point. I'm not sure that changes the truth of your main point, which is that the government supports employee unions and discourages corporate ones.
Though the illegality of corporations bargaining collectively doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and the illegality of suppressing unions doesn't mean that doesn't happen either. And it's pretty clear who has more leverage in the labor market: corporations. Replacing a worker is annoying but the corporation can usually afford to do without for a few months, whereas losing your job for even a short while can be devastating.
This effect leads to an effective monopsony situation for most employers.
But I've digressed from my main point, which is that while you're correct, I think what he actually said is much more interesting than the boringly wrong point you replied to. What effect DOES it have that the management of a company is united, and the workers generally divided without a union?
The management within a company (considered as a class, rather than as a singular entity "the company") does indeed bargain collectively with the workers of that company.
If that's what he meant, I have no dispute. But, like you say, I can't see how that matters.
And it's pretty clear who has more leverage in the labor market: corporations. Replacing a worker is annoying but the corporation can usually afford to do without for a few months, whereas losing your job for even a short while can be devastating.
I don't think this is clear. Losing your job for a while can be devastating if you haven't planned for it, but the same is true of an unprepared company losing a valuable employee. Some empirics are necessary.
Also, it's only an effective monopsony if workers are incapable of searching for other work while they are employed.
Re-read that article and tell me you want any human being to have to work like that for more than a week in a supposedly 1st-world country.
Those people are subsidizing your low prices by taking 800mg of advil a day to be able to get a paycheck and deferring the health disaster they will have in a few years without insurance.
If you do not have unions or government regulation, big business sets the rules and you end up with that story and in the bigger picture, the criminal health care system that plagues this nation.
I find it absurd that the answer for the USA is to pull us down to the lowest level of workforce conditions elsewhere in the world to remain "competitive". The only people who win in a race to the bottom are the ones on top enjoying their 2nd vacation home purchase while everyone else working for them rents.
Read past the first couple of words of my comment and you'll see that I agree that worker protections are important, I'm just saying that unions have historically created a whole host of hard to solve problems and are not a good way to deal with this. No job availability is still generally the worst possible outcome in a country without strong social safety nets like the US, so don't underestimate the importance of competitiveness.
There wouldn't be worker protections if unions did not exist.
They pushed for paid holidays, medical leave, safety, etc.
In the european country where I live, unions made all of this possible until the 1970s. Since then, unionization got less and less prevalent and now that the economy is gloomy at best, corporations are lobbying hard to relax worker protections. Unions are nowhere to be seen and workers are left alone to suffer.
There's unions and unions. I don't have a problem with such organizations as representatives of working people's collective interests, but the relationship between unions and business in the US can be terribly adversarial such that 'collective bargaining' often ends up looking more like mutual attrition.
It might be that historically the diversity of the US is partly responsible; where there is wide social and cultural variation among both employers and employees then the establishment of a consensus about what working conditions are fair and reasonable becomes more difficult. If you've grown up and started your career in an atmosphere of tough working conditions and demanding expectations, then as an employer you're going to have similar expectations of the people you hire. To someone who has grown up in a more collaborative or cooperative situation designed to insulate colleagues from external pressures, the demanding productivity goals of the former context may seem irrational or oppressive. Perhaps there is some correlation with the variety of household income situation experienced growing up - marginal (waged) or fixed (salaried) economic inputs are likely to influence perceptions of appropriate output.
Upvote for "There's unions and then there's unions." I live in Michigan and have known people who personally attest to all of the negative stereotypes about the Teamsters and the UAW. On the other hand, Germany manages to have a world-class economy based on manufacturing highly-sought factory-made goods, and they do it all with high-wage union labor.
I'm a red-blooded American, so I prefer as few regulations as necessary. But maybe -- just maybe -- we can copy a few of the things that those wacky krauts are doing.
I don't agree entirely with this line of thinking. The concept of protecting workers from abuses by corporations is not in and of itself undesirable. As we have seen all throughout human history those who wield power usually abuse it.
The issue with unions, as most people in America view them, is that they became to powerful themselves. This allowed them to make demands that would ultimately lead to their organizations becoming hamstrung and unable to rapidly adjust. Hence business look at them as the plague.
The issue as I see it is that business, labor, and consumers need to understand the concept of "moderation". Consumers do not need an abundance of cheap crap. Businesses shouldn't focus solely on short term profits. Unions should seek to protect their workers and not pry as much money as they possibly can out of their employer.
Unions are disastrous for many of the same reasons that much of my country's (USA) systems are failing in various ways, political corruption.
I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city.
It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or public stance will get you booted from the union. Which in some trades around here makes you unemployable unless you relocate. In other words, they use scare tactics to push their agenda.
Unions had a time and place. There were absolutely deplorable conditions of work in the US for a period of time and unions were a proper solution. Today they just lay the basis for overly cushy jobs and political corruption.
Not always the case. Many of the German and Japanese companies that have been kicking our asses on the global market have much more powerful unions than their respective US competitors.
I'm not a big fan of unions in general (especially with regards to years = seniority in pay & firing), but on ergonomics I'm with them. It doesn't cost much to implement the warehouse in an ergonomic way, but clearly this company and many like it aren't doing that at all. That has a really important effect on the difficulty of the job.
well... it costs them something more than it cost to have it the way it is now, and since they don't have to pay for the effect on the workers working in the non-ergonomic warehouse, what's the point? If they had to pay for the health/welfare of their workers directly, they'd have an incentive to ergonimicize the place.
Nonetheless, companies would do well to remember that the first unions were formed not to demand higher pay, but to protect the worker from employer caprice and tyranny, and to lobby employers to make changes to keep workers from being mangled by the machines they worked on. Paying people a pittance may make them depressed, but destroying their dignity and their health will compel them to organize - labor laws and strike breaking tactics be damned.
Yeah, generally the people are asking for 10-30% more than they're getting now (in pay, or slower pace, or better conditions), which is a whole lot less inefficiency than converting things to union rules.
The threat of unionization, combined with PR issues with customers learning about how workers are treated, will probably cause companies to fix these issues pretty soon.
Honestly, the article sounds pretty good for warehouse work.
About 12 years ago I was working in a warehouse at -25 C slogging sides of beef at 25 to 50 Kg for at least 10 hours, my record shift was 26 hours. The pay was even less, $10/hr. It had to be -25 in the freezer because there was ice cream in there too and if it didn't leave at -25 it would melt by the time it got to the destination.
The only odd thing about the job was the look I got like I was crazy when I left to work tech support in the city for a dollar an hour less.
>Temporary staffers aren't legally entitled to decent health care because they are just short-term "contractors" no matter how long they keep the same job.
This to me actually sounds illegal. I've worked in other industries where significant hoops were jumped through to make it possible to call workers contractors. If I recall one test often used is whether the worker is on a set schedule, which the situation described would utterly fail.
More than call centers, this industry reminds me of the meatpacking industry. Warehouse workers fill a crucial step in a larger fulfillment model that unnecessarily imposes harsh conditions on its workforce. The writer mentions picking 500 items during her last morning on the job, which probably represents anywhere from 200 to 300 orders (assuming the average book or dildo order is small). Over a 5 hour period, that represents 40 to 60 orders per hour, picked at real hourly cost of perhaps $14. In other words, a slower picking rate and higher wages might cost consumers several extra dimes per order. It's reasonable to say that passing this additional cost to consumers would have a trivial impact on shopper's wallets, while fueling a strong wealth creation effect in the community where the warehouse is located as its workers can actually afford to spend their way into a middle class lifestyle.
Likewise, the meatpacking industry is infamous for its brutal working conditions and low wages. It has bred many low income, working poor communities plighted by gangs, crime, and despair. The solution to righting the industry and its communities is obvious- pay employees real, middle class wages. But the industry has been fighting a race to the bottom, as the wholesalers of meat products will obviously pick the meatpacking company that can sell at the lowest cost. Because better wages would only increase the price supermarkets pay for meat by several cents per pound, one meatpacking company CEO has openly called for imposing higher wage levels across the entire industry (easier than done). The introduction of higher wages would boost local economies and in aggregate that contributes to the nation's prosperity.
The industries are examples of capitalism at its most efficient and of capitalism utterly failing society as well.
I worked at a company developing the warehouse management software. This was back in the mid '90s, but we didn't have a single customer that ran his warehouse like the one in the article. Picking is a crappy job, and everyone knows it, so pickers weren't expected to move too fast. If you showed up to work for a few weeks as a picker you'd get promoted to another position. Most of the people who got hired were ex-cons and drug addicts, so only about one in three lasted more than a day or two.
I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.
I would guess that the current economic climate provides an incentive for management to push workers harder than before, since there's a greater pool of replacements and a worse fate awaiting those who can't keep up.
The economy changed. The mid to late nineties were the years of the Clinton relative prosperity when unemployment was low jobs were not that hard to get so one could not treat people like shit, especially in low level jobs.
Mike Daisey's book, 21 Dog Years, briefly discussed conditions at Amazon's warehouses even though cube farm hell was the focus of the book. I don't have the book, anymore, but, going from memory, Daisey's account matches those of the author of the Mother Jones article.
Yes, that dystopia (at least in the beginning of the novella) is becoming reality for a lot of people. And I don't think it's getting better soon. We should consider ourselves lucky that we are the ones that program computers instead of the ones programmed by them.
It always comes down to price. The vast majority of people in the world aren't so self-righteous that they'll pay $10 more for something that was produced "the right way."
This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening
The author mentions that picking 800 items filled 52% of her daily quota. An extra 5c shipping cost per item could thus double her salary, or pay for an entire extra employee.
There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.
You're right that most consumers don't really act like it's a priority for them, even when labeling regimes exist and they have said that ethical products are important. The best you can get is a 10% premium from a segment of relatively wealthy and socially conscious people.[1]
However, for those that do, I'm not sure "self-righteous" is the right term. I think the word you were looking for was "non-hypocritical".
Anyway, I think this just shows that the checkout counter isn't the right place for us to exert our ethical standards. When no one's really watching, and the pain is significant, we're weak, atomized individuals. We even know that our individual purchasing decisions mean zero to giant economic forces. So it's rational to just go for the lower price. All progress with labor standards have come about in other ways - journalism, legislation, and unionization.
"Economists dismiss costs that aren't included in price. For them the cost that matters is the price paid by consumers."
- Paul Craig Roberts, Which Is Worse: Regulation Or De-Regulation?
Sadly, customers often act the same way as economists on this issue.
Sounds about right. Amazon is great for their investors and customers. Employees? Not so much, it seems.
In this case, it doesn't seem unreasonable. The pay rate and overtime they get means they make around $40,000 a year. In rural America with no skills other than the ability to walk and use a barcode scanner, that's not bad money. I'm all in favor of educating people so they can work 8 hour days behind a desk, but the reality is that that won't work for everyone. So having jobs available that let people good at manual labor have a decent life doesn't seem that horrible to me. I may be wrong, though.
"I probably look happier than I should because I have the extreme luxury of not giving a shit about keeping this job."
Great quote there. That's really a key to being happy in any job. Her description of this job doesn't sound all that bad you get exercise and paid above minimum wage plus overtime.
I was going to upvote you for the quote, but then I got to "her description of this job doesn't sound all that bad"... It sounds pretty bad to me, at least for a first-world country.
Well, there's your problem. First World countries now need to compete with Third World countries. Its what unregulated capitalism does.
It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!
Best bit, is we all cause this, no, we demand it when we are purchasing. Free shipping, lowest price for highest quality, etc.
Are "we" willing to pay more to get less, so that people don't get exploited? Nope...
>>It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!<<
This is preposterous. The "downward spiral" as you call it is already slowing, as can readily be seen by many US companies "reshoring" jobs now that China's labor costs have risen so dramatically.
India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc., are all following suit because as demand for labor in those places increases, so does the price of that labor. No government intervention necessary.
I'm actually surprised that the workers are getting so much over minimum wage yet are being so poorly treated. Why not just pay them closer to minimum wage since there are so many willing workers?
People are making comments here about how unions diminish competiveness. What about incompetent CEOs who make big decisions that wreck a company and still get paid millions. Why is it always the lowest paid workers who are expected to take a pay cut to make the company viable? I'm thinking of high profile CEOs who brought havoc and failure to theieto company: Stephen Elop, Leo Apotheker, Carol Bartz,Carly Fiorina...
But really, the insistence that the peons take the hits, I don't get it.
That's a meaningless blanket statement. Yes, unions have government protection. So do CEOs, since a corporate entity exists to protect CEOs and others in the company from personal liability.
Unions in the US also have government restrictions on what they can do. As one example, the Taft–Hartley Act prohibits a number of union actions, restricts First Amendment rights (eg, union offers must sign non-communist affidavits), and expressly allows a company to fire supervisors which support union rights.
The title of this essay uses "Wage Slave." The point is that "maximizing value" is not necessarily aligned with human rights. Is it your view that those two principles never be out of alignment, and if not, what happens in that case?
It isn't a meaningless statement. Unions, at least where I am from, are legally allowed to force individuals to join the union. Corporations are not legally allowed to fire everyone from the union, or demand non-unionship from their employees.
Corporations are the way that contracts can exist between parties without relying on the location or livelihood of individuals. Corporations are the reason you can sue, 40 years after the fact, the organization that polluted the river that brought about your colon cancer.
The Taft-Hartley Act was fucking retarded, but that isn't anymore reason to create further law against corporations (besides banks, since the fractional reserve system is moronic and introduces huge risks into the system.
I wasn't directing my comment at the article I was answer the person's question: Why are there negative sentiments against unions. The reason is that many of us have dealt with them at one point or another and they artificially aided by government law. All of them.
I've worked at one of the warehouses for an electronics retailer, and I rather enjoyed it.
They didn't outsource to a temp agency, instead they had their own HR department. The starting pay was far above average for similar jobs with other companies and they readjusted for cost of living increases every few years, and the employee discount was wicked.
It's interesting to read about perspectives from employees of other warehouses, it sounds like I had it good.
I've got a modest proposal. Let's bring back slavery. Then employers would worry about employee injuries, have work for them year round instead of only hiring during peak season, and in general treat their slaves with the concern that posters here seem to reserve for robots.
Amazon is the worst e-commerce company I've ever dealt with. They treat their marketplace sellers like garbage.
I have been selling for the past 5+ years. They put a review on my account and when I called them to find out some more information about it, I was met with a call center rep in India who gave me absolutely no help.
They don't actually have call support for marketplace sellers. You have to email them. When you do, you get mostly automated responses.
After this ordeal, I finally left them for good. I still can't believe people are giving Amazon this much money (most categories are between 8-16% commission) to sell their goods (plus $40/month if you have a pro-account).
It's a slap in the face when you can't even talk to someone when you have any sort of account issue. On top of this, Amazon doesn't even abide by the same harsh rules they expect all of their 3rd-party sellers to follow.
If you don't live up in any respect, they're happy to let the next batch of trainees have your job. In fact, they prefer it; those with 5+ years of experience have the most to fear, as they acquire raises and cushier benefits over time, and so are often fired for the same infraction that gets a newbie a write-up.
I suppose that call centers are preferable to warehouses, in that there is little risk of injury, and there are more opportunities to move up or transfer careers. Still, this is one of the human costs of corporate capitalism in general: if you don't have rare or specialized skills, you have no negotiating power, and have to take whatever you can get. And don't even think about uttering the word "union".