10 ms·

As great as seeing workers get better wages and working conditions would be, I observe that Amazon and other companies (let's just call them "employers") simply

As great as seeing workers get better wages and working conditions would be, I observe that Amazon and other companies (let's just call them "employers") simply have the upper hand in having a surplus of global labor wanting to work for the wages and conditions offered. (see the other story about "what happened in 1971" and the general stagnation of wages for the last few decades) It's not like Amazon or others are forcing workers to take these jobs. This is voluntary, inevitable, equilibrium supply and demand of labor -- where willing labor is in great surplus lately compared to what was a previously stable pool of middle class jobs seeking employable bodies, leading to a very weak bargaining position. The floodgates of global labor competition were opened with a lot of underdeveloped countries' peoples willing to take up jobs at low (but high for them) pay, and that has rippled through every developed country's labor economy. Until there is a relative shortage of willing workers, the situation will not change hugely I fear. (Aside from pockets of shortage due to education, credentials, monopolies of labor, other barriers to entry, etc)

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago
It's a shame these large companies are are driven to extract as much value from their workers as possible.
- EliRivers 6y ago
  Ah, the curse of the Shareholder Value obsession. A doctrine from the previous century that's so pernicious people assume it's law.
room271 6y ago
Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? They don't solve the underlying problem. And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
  - namdnay 6y ago
    > Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      > In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - EliRivers 6y ago
        That's certainly not considered absolute fact. There is a lot of data showing increases in minimum wage without associated increase in unemployment.
        supernova87a 6y ago
        You mean those studies about Seattle airport employment zone and such small scale examples of raising the minimum wage? I don't think it applies in general, or it would be a big mistake to think that you could replicate that widely. But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
- laurent92 6y ago
  History disagrees. If you look at the paid leave in France in 1936, and look at the various direct and indirect advantages (salaries + paid leave +...) obtained between 1920 and 1940, you’ll notice that the huge strikes of 1936 to obtain paid leave played almost no role in obtaining this perk. And a lot of companies had started doing so 1 to 5 years earlier, and it was developing at the same time in other countries which didn’t have strikes. Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
  - djrobstep 6y ago
    Puzzled by this. France is exactly the country most people would think of an an example of the effectiveness of collective bargaining and unionisation for shorter working hours and better working conditions (and maybe the Nordics too). Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
    - laurent92 6y ago
      And are « poorer » than in US. It’s only recently that French people started enjoying frequent worldwide travels, whereas it has been affordable for Americans for several decades. We also have smaller houses (90sqm in average vs 140sqm in USA, but also our interiors are generally less renovated, and anyone with a kitchen that would be average in USA, looks like an aristocrat here). It is quasi-impossible to be paid 140k$ in France. We get less money for less work, it is entirely proportional, the difference is, it was collectively bargained. But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        What about health care?
        vladvasiliu 6y ago
        I wonder if this isn't a question of who bears the responsibility. For example, in the US you make more money but are expected to save, and make sure you have something to fall on in case of difficult times. In France, you expect the state to take care of you in such a situation. Spoiler alert: depending on the state is not a good situation. Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow". As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified. The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high. If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity. So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax? I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing). It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere. [1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies. [2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  With enough free trade agreements without statues for worker protections, you can forget unionization to a large degree. And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this. You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
  - eigenket 6y ago
    This seems like baseless conjecture, unless you have an example of a union (literally any union in history) being busted by "identity politics". Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Surely the unions for all the industries that were outsourced from the UK to cheaper countries have closed.
      - eigenket 6y ago
        What happens as industries reduce is that multiple unions which are becoming smaller merge together. This is very different to what the guy was writing above about unions fragmenting due to political differences.
    - toyg 6y ago
      > (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years. > I’ve never even heard of a union closing They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here. The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
  - croissants 6y ago
    That's a pretty malicious motivation to attribute to OP without (as far as I can tell) evidence.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.
  - wesammikhail 6y ago
    This argument only makes sense if you are not ideological about minimum wage laws. Which most people are. This whole thing does not stem from the desire to help others but from the strict ideological position that any regulation that _seems_ to favor the worker must indeed favor the worker. There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
  - pydry 6y ago
    They have strong labor unions who set effective minimum wages in collective wage agreements. Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
  - bondant 6y ago
    Germany does have minimum wage since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany
  - ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
    Norway effectively does as union collective agreements apply to everyone, Sweden again uses collective bargaining, Finland again covers effectively every employee with collective bargaining. Germany does have a minimum wage as of 2015 so that’s just wrong. I’m not going to fact check the others but I imagine it’s a similar situation. It’s not like these countries are lawless and allow rampant employee exploitation.
    - Leherenn 6y ago
      Several Swiss cantons have minimum wage (Geneva starting from this month for instance). Also collective bargaining is pretty common as well (e,g, in the watch industry).
CPLX 6y ago
> inevitable One of the greatest PR successes of the modern era has been the effort to convince the masses that an unacceptable relationship between labor and the owners of capital is inevitable. It is not. As should be no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of history the inherent tension between these two groups has formed the basis for nearly all political competition. When confronted with an example of that conflict persisting, such as today’s labor action described in the article, it’s not particularly good analysis to assume away the basic premise of what’s happening in step one.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  What happens when an owner of capital manufacturers a product in a country where people are willing to earn 5% of an American salary, and then sells it in America for 50% of the cost that an owner of capital who chose to manufacture in America? The root cause is consumers will purchase from the sellers that offers the lowest price, and so the sellers that drives down labor costs to offer the lowest price will survive.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    America says, among other things, "you may not import products form countries without suitable labour standards" and works to solve that problem.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      That isn’t part of the relationship between an owner of capital and labor. And good luck getting votes by pushing a policy that will cause prices to rise causing people to be able to purchase less (even if it is in most voters’ long term interests). Voters will focus on the fact that they need to reduce consumption in the immediate future.
  - CPLX 6y ago
    The same thing that happens with any action that people take in their own narrow self interest that society deems detrimental. The society, in the form of its government, regulates it. People will also show up and harvest your crops and sell your daughters into slavery without government intervention. The fact that a lot of people want to do something and will do so without the government stopping them doesn’t prove the inevitability of that thing happening.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
It's voluntary on some level sure, but it's also true that in any single 'negotiation', Amazon has an enormous advantage by virtue of size. Corporations bargain collectively automatically, because they're already collectives. This is especially true in the case of enormous corporations with many thousands of employees. When someone is getting hired by Amazon, it's literally a million versus one. That's a lot of leverage to bring to a negotiation, so it makes sense that a union would be necessary to even the odds for unskilled labor.
sp332 6y ago
"Employers" as a group have the upper hand currently, but only because they were willing to kill to get it. Union busting up to and including a bunch of murders got us where we are now. In a democratic system with one vote per person, workers would have much more power than employers.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago

It's a shame these large companies are are driven to extract as much value from their workers as possible.

EliRivers 6y ago
Ah, the curse of the Shareholder Value obsession. A doctrine from the previous century that's so pernicious people assume it's law.

room271 6y ago

Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.

supernova87a 6y ago
Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? They don't solve the underlying problem. And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
- namdnay 6y ago
  > Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    > In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - EliRivers 6y ago
      That's certainly not considered absolute fact. There is a lot of data showing increases in minimum wage without associated increase in unemployment.
      - supernova87a 6y ago
        You mean those studies about Seattle airport employment zone and such small scale examples of raising the minimum wage? I don't think it applies in general, or it would be a big mistake to think that you could replicate that widely. But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
laurent92 6y ago
History disagrees. If you look at the paid leave in France in 1936, and look at the various direct and indirect advantages (salaries + paid leave +...) obtained between 1920 and 1940, you’ll notice that the huge strikes of 1936 to obtain paid leave played almost no role in obtaining this perk. And a lot of companies had started doing so 1 to 5 years earlier, and it was developing at the same time in other countries which didn’t have strikes. Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  Puzzled by this. France is exactly the country most people would think of an an example of the effectiveness of collective bargaining and unionisation for shorter working hours and better working conditions (and maybe the Nordics too). Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    And are « poorer » than in US. It’s only recently that French people started enjoying frequent worldwide travels, whereas it has been affordable for Americans for several decades. We also have smaller houses (90sqm in average vs 140sqm in USA, but also our interiors are generally less renovated, and anyone with a kitchen that would be average in USA, looks like an aristocrat here). It is quasi-impossible to be paid 140k$ in France. We get less money for less work, it is entirely proportional, the difference is, it was collectively bargained. But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      What about health care?
      - vladvasiliu 6y ago
        I wonder if this isn't a question of who bears the responsibility. For example, in the US you make more money but are expected to save, and make sure you have something to fall on in case of difficult times. In France, you expect the state to take care of you in such a situation. Spoiler alert: depending on the state is not a good situation. Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow". As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified. The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high. If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity. So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax? I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing). It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere. [1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies. [2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.
raxxorrax 6y ago
With enough free trade agreements without statues for worker protections, you can forget unionization to a large degree. And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this. You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
- eigenket 6y ago
  This seems like baseless conjecture, unless you have an example of a union (literally any union in history) being busted by "identity politics". Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Surely the unions for all the industries that were outsourced from the UK to cheaper countries have closed.
    - eigenket 6y ago
      What happens as industries reduce is that multiple unions which are becoming smaller merge together. This is very different to what the guy was writing above about unions fragmenting due to political differences.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years. > I’ve never even heard of a union closing They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here. The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
- croissants 6y ago
  That's a pretty malicious motivation to attribute to OP without (as far as I can tell) evidence.
bufferoverflow 6y ago
Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.
- wesammikhail 6y ago
  This argument only makes sense if you are not ideological about minimum wage laws. Which most people are. This whole thing does not stem from the desire to help others but from the strict ideological position that any regulation that _seems_ to favor the worker must indeed favor the worker. There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
- pydry 6y ago
  They have strong labor unions who set effective minimum wages in collective wage agreements. Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
- bondant 6y ago
  Germany does have minimum wage since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany
- ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
  Norway effectively does as union collective agreements apply to everyone, Sweden again uses collective bargaining, Finland again covers effectively every employee with collective bargaining. Germany does have a minimum wage as of 2015 so that’s just wrong. I’m not going to fact check the others but I imagine it’s a similar situation. It’s not like these countries are lawless and allow rampant employee exploitation.
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    Several Swiss cantons have minimum wage (Geneva starting from this month for instance). Also collective bargaining is pretty common as well (e,g, in the watch industry).

CPLX 6y ago

> inevitable One of the greatest PR successes of the modern era has been the effort to convince the masses that an unacceptable relationship between labor and the owners of capital is inevitable. It is not. As should be no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of history the inherent tension between these two groups has formed the basis for nearly all political competition. When confronted with an example of that conflict persisting, such as today’s labor action described in the article, it’s not particularly good analysis to assume away the basic premise of what’s happening in step one.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
What happens when an owner of capital manufacturers a product in a country where people are willing to earn 5% of an American salary, and then sells it in America for 50% of the cost that an owner of capital who chose to manufacture in America? The root cause is consumers will purchase from the sellers that offers the lowest price, and so the sellers that drives down labor costs to offer the lowest price will survive.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  America says, among other things, "you may not import products form countries without suitable labour standards" and works to solve that problem.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That isn’t part of the relationship between an owner of capital and labor. And good luck getting votes by pushing a policy that will cause prices to rise causing people to be able to purchase less (even if it is in most voters’ long term interests). Voters will focus on the fact that they need to reduce consumption in the immediate future.
- CPLX 6y ago
  The same thing that happens with any action that people take in their own narrow self interest that society deems detrimental. The society, in the form of its government, regulates it. People will also show up and harvest your crops and sell your daughters into slavery without government intervention. The fact that a lot of people want to do something and will do so without the government stopping them doesn’t prove the inevitability of that thing happening.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

It's voluntary on some level sure, but it's also true that in any single 'negotiation', Amazon has an enormous advantage by virtue of size. Corporations bargain collectively automatically, because they're already collectives. This is especially true in the case of enormous corporations with many thousands of employees. When someone is getting hired by Amazon, it's literally a million versus one. That's a lot of leverage to bring to a negotiation, so it makes sense that a union would be necessary to even the odds for unskilled labor.

sp332 6y ago

"Employers" as a group have the upper hand currently, but only because they were willing to kill to get it. Union busting up to and including a bunch of murders got us where we are now. In a democratic system with one vote per person, workers would have much more power than employers.