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It is astonishing the continuous attempts by the highest paid workers, in one of the most well-known companies in the world, to keep trying to bring down the "s

• unionize 7y ago
  Oh, the delicious irony! Did you know that not 100 years ago, workers were murdered for going on strike for things like work weeks lower than 60-80 hours? Companies had their own police forces, and they paid you in company scrip. A lot of blood was shed so you could be tone-deaf and ignorant of the labor movement in the United States, all from a comfy office chair and with plenty of time left over to see your family at the end of the day. If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. I don’t want to argue the morality of it, but it happens over and over again. Amazon workers are having the same fights their great grandparents did (fighting for the right not to get killed at work, the right to a decent wage, the right to a goddamn bathroom break that doesn’t get you fired). Tech workers aren’t immune either. Sure, we’re more mobile than most, but that’s still not great leverage. Your employer has more power over you than you do over them. Without a union, this is always true. If you’re fine being potentially fucked that way, that’s your prerogative.
  • whb07 7y ago
    The issue is I don’t believe you’ve ever worked in such places. I also know such “evil places” aren’t good at what they do, hence the weird tactics and shitty management you’re hyperbolizing.
  • thu2111 7y ago
    Can you cite that first claim? I've frequently seen leftist labour activists claim unions are responsible for the concept of a weekend. But that's not true, and it makes me doubtful about all claims of supposed union "wins". Wikipedia talks about the history of the weekend. It starts by observing that a day of rest is a feature of society for millenia and has religious roots. Then it says: The present-day concept of the relatively longer 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century[1] and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.[7] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to the British magazine Notes and Queries in 1879. A voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers? Doesn't sound like unions. In America: In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[9] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday. Unions only appear on the scene after this point. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed. There's no mention of workers being murdered anywhere in this history, and in fact it's pretty clear that weekends were happening even without unions. If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. Google is a classic counterexample. It has been left entirely to its own devices and has spoiled its workforce rotten. Now it's in such a state it can barely fire people who aren't even working at all. This is the least exploited workforce in history. If anything from the outside, it looks like the workforce are busy exploiting the management.
    • mempko 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
      • thu2111 7y ago
        Thanks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but that sounds like the union protestors started the violence by throwing bombs (!) at the police. That'd be the other way around to workers being murdered by capitalists because they wanted a weekend.