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It seems that union politics is swinging back. If we choose 1980 as a nominal endpoint for the union pendulum, it feels like 2020-ish may be the other one. Hon

It seems that union politics is swinging back. If we choose 1980 as a nominal endpoint for the union pendulum, it feels like 2020-ish may be the other one. Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... 40 years is a long time, considering the "pendulum" took a long time getting to 1980. I'm not sure what from past experience transposes to the present and how. The world is very different. What does an amazon union even look like? How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc. I feel like most discussions fall into generic "for" and "against" union points. Realistically, unionisations is a wide space. Sports league unions. Newspaper Guilds. Germany's DGB. America's Teamsters. Teachers unions... all very different, and different in different eras. What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?

coldpie 6y ago
Agree on the pendulum analogy. Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020. A balance is needed, so you're seeing the shift back to protecting workers. But 40 years of anti-workers-rights propaganda is a tough line to break through > What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be? Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]: """Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks.""" [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-details-plan-to-smear-fired-warehouse-organizer-hes-not-smart-or-articulate https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees-at-amazon-s-new-nyc-warehouse-launch-unionization-push https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...
- dalbasal 6y ago
  re: Amazon's union-busting efforts. This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means. The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK. I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work? Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood. Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    It'd mean that working rules are set according to what feels fair rather than the minimum standards of the law. The security line thing is I think emblematic of the problem; anyone can see you ought to be paid during the time you're stuck on company property and not allowed to leave, but Amazon contractors (with Supreme Court support: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-433 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-433) say they're not legally obligated to pay so they won't.
    - quibbler 6y ago
      There is no law that says you have to enter a contract that only gives you the minimum requirements of the law. (ianal, though). If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.
      - comex 6y ago
        That’s essentially what a union is: a mechanism for collective negotiation of employment contracts.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I agree with what you're saying, and I'm very skeptical of the argument you sometimes see that everyone ought to unionize out of solidarity. But some workers don't feel they can get a contract they're happy with on their own, and for people in that situation unionization makes sense.
      - arrosenberg 6y ago
        Law of nature says people have to eat. Amazon warehouse worker is a low-skill, low-education job - how much bargaining leverage do you think an individual has in this situation?
        quibbler 6y ago
        The proper response to helping those people is to create more jobs, so that they have alternative choices. It is not Amazon's fault that these people are low skilled and hungry. Amazon should be applauded for giving low skilled people job opportunities, not be attacked for it.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020 The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this. Here’s the most recent instance: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-williams.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Embezzlement to use union funds for personal expenses? That’s pretty low grade corruption. This sort of thing happens in private corporations and it rarely gets prosecuted unless it’s huge. We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Embezzlement by a union official does more to hurt unions than embezzlement by some random public official hurts public perception of the govt. Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you. When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      I wouldn’t call “ex-president of the union being 15th person charged in conspiracy embezzlement” a low grade corruption: if that’s low grade, what would high grade corruption look like?
      - 9387367 6y ago
        > if that’s low grade, what would high grade corruption look like? Look up and read: * Jennifer Arcuri’s funding application form. * Current Coronavirus government contracts in the UK and US * In the UK you could start with the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) * In the US look up Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force * In Israel, Netanyahu’s series of corruption cases
Kye 6y ago
The last 40 years have seen information asymmetry decline like in no other era. Until now, that mostly benefited the rich. Workers are just catching up on the same phenomenon that led to the new Gilded Age. I hope we can avoid massacres this time.
- sp332 6y ago
  Amazon has already hired the Pinkertons, so that's not a foregone conclusion. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports... Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Come on now. The Homestead strike involved a firefight between the union and strike-breakers. Do you really think that's a plausible outcome of Amazon's anti-union efforts?
    - fl0wenol 6y ago
      Asking questions like that in 2020 is cursed, why invite the devil inside?
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Look at what the cops did to protestors throughout the past year. What makes you think they wouldn’t do the same in the context of labor unrest?
- eezurr 6y ago
  It's not pure science, but Always an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...
claudeganon 6y ago
>What does an amazon union even look like? There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts. > How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread. >What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc. Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Agreed on europe. In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here. Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions. In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    > Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions. Not really. If every Amazon warehouse organized, you would still need Walmart, Target, etc warehouse workers to organize to achieve something comparable. And in the U.S., they still wouldn’t have the same bargaining power because solidarity strikes and similar tactics are illegal. But I agree that labor laws are not deterministic, as the teacher strikes in red states have recently demonstrated. We’ll also have to see what extent states will further block organizing activities if this starts gaining traction in places like Alabama. Given things like the extremely violent police response to protests, I’d wager “pretty far.”
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
Usually those who advocate unions now are the ones who would be on board with it in all its forms. So far too left to have success in today's Western politics. That's convenient for the people on the other side. But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  This is kind of what I meant by pendulum swing. In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Union politics in the west in the post WWII period started looking more like guilds and less like the pre-WWII left wing unions that dominated the 20s and 30s. Those unions were far more concerned with broader social transformation than those that came after, who were primarily interested in protecting only their workers and locking down seniority-based privileges. Corruption and conservativism ran through the labour movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and led in many cases to anti-union sentiment from the people they were supposed to be organizing. It will take significant rebuilding and rethinking of what a union is before they can have broad resurgence. Organizing in individual workplaces and industries means little when the vast majority of workers are working odd hours in multiple service industry jobs among several employers.
rayiner 6y ago
I think that’s true. But I fear the swing back is going to be cut short if unions stick to the current strategy of a unified front between public and private unions. My rough impression is that public opinion is swinging in favor of private unions and against public unions. I’m already hearing liberals get grumbly over rising taxes and declining services due to unsustainable public employee benefits, and that situation is going to get much worse before it gets better. And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-trump-policies/ http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/31/c65b110e-e7cb-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...
- tptacek 6y ago
  The evidence you're presenting that federal public sector unions writ-large joined the "resistance" is pretty thin.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Agreed99 6y ago
Unionizing is low-effort given global world order. Let Bezos sell books. The underlying logistical systems were funded by public research works and investment. The workers should demand nothing less than the use of these networks for localized normalization of real needs (driving toward biologically sustainable and socially healthy), pushing profiteering hucksters back to alleyway dice games. Nation state political games are what do not matter anymore. The rise of city-state structures has been predicted for a while now. Global corps built the bridges between the future city-state hegemony. This, like a better AI, is a long term shift, but it’s in the works. Language will continue to change such that something like sciences unification will win or we’ll blow ourselves up. I’d be hard pressed to say we’re at humanity endgame. But we’re definitely at a “hinge” moment. Once again it’s a Boolean; rational discourse or burn baby burn? Middle of the road isn’t a long term choice. The side that fires up the most nihilists wins.
nobodyandproud 6y ago
Let’s not forget: Bar associations (law). American Medical Association (MDs).
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  Bar associations are licensors that act as an ethical constraint and competence check on lawyers — and being kicked out of one (being disbarred) has direct impacts. The AMA is more of a professional organization — it publishes materials relevant to the profession (JAMA) and advocates and lobbies on behalf of medical professionals, but it doesn’t issue licenses or doctorates.
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    That used to be the role a union played as well. Before unions got all corrupt and self-serving, there used to be a better than market guarantee of quality and conduct when hiring union labor. Unions would train and discipline their members to meet the standards promised to the employer. That's why they were able to command better pay and benefits.
jedberg 6y ago
I think the biggest thing working against unionization is automation. At some point it just becomes cheaper to use software and robots. Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage. My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks. Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  So... two points. One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions. Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living. Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers. There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." They basically are. They negotiate the minimum benefits the company can offer for a particular set of workers, which includes benefits and salary, ie. total wages. > One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. True, but it is hastened by unionization. Automation always has a cost involved. Sometimes it's worth the cost, and sometimes it's not based on the cost of the human labor that is being replaced. If the cost of the human labor goes up for any reason (such as unionization) then the cost of automation looks more attractive.
lmilcin 6y ago
I think this is the right time. Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees. I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Another way of thinking of it might be "good times." Industrial unions had their success decades when the sector was growing fast. It's always easier negotiating a growing pie. Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more. That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.

coldpie 6y ago

Agree on the pendulum analogy. Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020. A balance is needed, so you're seeing the shift back to protecting workers. But 40 years of anti-workers-rights propaganda is a tough line to break through > What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be? Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]: """Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks.""" [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-details-plan-to-smear-fired-warehouse-organizer-hes-not-smart-or-articulate https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees-at-amazon-s-new-nyc-warehouse-launch-unionization-push https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...

dalbasal 6y ago
re: Amazon's union-busting efforts. This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means. The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK. I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work? Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood. Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It'd mean that working rules are set according to what feels fair rather than the minimum standards of the law. The security line thing is I think emblematic of the problem; anyone can see you ought to be paid during the time you're stuck on company property and not allowed to leave, but Amazon contractors (with Supreme Court support: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-433 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-433) say they're not legally obligated to pay so they won't.
  - quibbler 6y ago
    There is no law that says you have to enter a contract that only gives you the minimum requirements of the law. (ianal, though). If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.
    - comex 6y ago
      That’s essentially what a union is: a mechanism for collective negotiation of employment contracts.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I agree with what you're saying, and I'm very skeptical of the argument you sometimes see that everyone ought to unionize out of solidarity. But some workers don't feel they can get a contract they're happy with on their own, and for people in that situation unionization makes sense.
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      Law of nature says people have to eat. Amazon warehouse worker is a low-skill, low-education job - how much bargaining leverage do you think an individual has in this situation?
      - quibbler 6y ago
        The proper response to helping those people is to create more jobs, so that they have alternative choices. It is not Amazon's fault that these people are low skilled and hungry. Amazon should be applauded for giving low skilled people job opportunities, not be attacked for it.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020 The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this. Here’s the most recent instance: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-williams.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...
- rayiner 6y ago
  Embezzlement to use union funds for personal expenses? That’s pretty low grade corruption. This sort of thing happens in private corporations and it rarely gets prosecuted unless it’s huge. We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Embezzlement by a union official does more to hurt unions than embezzlement by some random public official hurts public perception of the govt. Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you. When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    I wouldn’t call “ex-president of the union being 15th person charged in conspiracy embezzlement” a low grade corruption: if that’s low grade, what would high grade corruption look like?
    - 9387367 6y ago
      > if that’s low grade, what would high grade corruption look like? Look up and read: * Jennifer Arcuri’s funding application form. * Current Coronavirus government contracts in the UK and US * In the UK you could start with the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) * In the US look up Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force * In Israel, Netanyahu’s series of corruption cases

Kye 6y ago

The last 40 years have seen information asymmetry decline like in no other era. Until now, that mostly benefited the rich. Workers are just catching up on the same phenomenon that led to the new Gilded Age. I hope we can avoid massacres this time.

sp332 6y ago
Amazon has already hired the Pinkertons, so that's not a foregone conclusion. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports... Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Come on now. The Homestead strike involved a firefight between the union and strike-breakers. Do you really think that's a plausible outcome of Amazon's anti-union efforts?
  - fl0wenol 6y ago
    Asking questions like that in 2020 is cursed, why invite the devil inside?
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Look at what the cops did to protestors throughout the past year. What makes you think they wouldn’t do the same in the context of labor unrest?
eezurr 6y ago
It's not pure science, but Always an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...

claudeganon 6y ago

>What does an amazon union even look like? There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts. > How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread. >What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc. Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.

dalbasal 6y ago
Agreed on europe. In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here. Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions. In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  > Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions. Not really. If every Amazon warehouse organized, you would still need Walmart, Target, etc warehouse workers to organize to achieve something comparable. And in the U.S., they still wouldn’t have the same bargaining power because solidarity strikes and similar tactics are illegal. But I agree that labor laws are not deterministic, as the teacher strikes in red states have recently demonstrated. We’ll also have to see what extent states will further block organizing activities if this starts gaining traction in places like Alabama. Given things like the extremely violent police response to protests, I’d wager “pretty far.”

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

Usually those who advocate unions now are the ones who would be on board with it in all its forms. So far too left to have success in today's Western politics. That's convenient for the people on the other side. But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.

dalbasal 6y ago
This is kind of what I meant by pendulum swing. In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Union politics in the west in the post WWII period started looking more like guilds and less like the pre-WWII left wing unions that dominated the 20s and 30s. Those unions were far more concerned with broader social transformation than those that came after, who were primarily interested in protecting only their workers and locking down seniority-based privileges. Corruption and conservativism ran through the labour movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and led in many cases to anti-union sentiment from the people they were supposed to be organizing. It will take significant rebuilding and rethinking of what a union is before they can have broad resurgence. Organizing in individual workplaces and industries means little when the vast majority of workers are working odd hours in multiple service industry jobs among several employers.

rayiner 6y ago

I think that’s true. But I fear the swing back is going to be cut short if unions stick to the current strategy of a unified front between public and private unions. My rough impression is that public opinion is swinging in favor of private unions and against public unions. I’m already hearing liberals get grumbly over rising taxes and declining services due to unsustainable public employee benefits, and that situation is going to get much worse before it gets better. And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-trump-policies/ http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/31/c65b110e-e7cb-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...

tptacek 6y ago
The evidence you're presenting that federal public sector unions writ-large joined the "resistance" is pretty thin.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Agreed99 6y ago

Unionizing is low-effort given global world order. Let Bezos sell books. The underlying logistical systems were funded by public research works and investment. The workers should demand nothing less than the use of these networks for localized normalization of real needs (driving toward biologically sustainable and socially healthy), pushing profiteering hucksters back to alleyway dice games. Nation state political games are what do not matter anymore. The rise of city-state structures has been predicted for a while now. Global corps built the bridges between the future city-state hegemony. This, like a better AI, is a long term shift, but it’s in the works. Language will continue to change such that something like sciences unification will win or we’ll blow ourselves up. I’d be hard pressed to say we’re at humanity endgame. But we’re definitely at a “hinge” moment. Once again it’s a Boolean; rational discourse or burn baby burn? Middle of the road isn’t a long term choice. The side that fires up the most nihilists wins.

nobodyandproud 6y ago

Let’s not forget: Bar associations (law). American Medical Association (MDs).

ascagnel_ 6y ago
Bar associations are licensors that act as an ethical constraint and competence check on lawyers — and being kicked out of one (being disbarred) has direct impacts. The AMA is more of a professional organization — it publishes materials relevant to the profession (JAMA) and advocates and lobbies on behalf of medical professionals, but it doesn’t issue licenses or doctorates.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  That used to be the role a union played as well. Before unions got all corrupt and self-serving, there used to be a better than market guarantee of quality and conduct when hiring union labor. Unions would train and discipline their members to meet the standards promised to the employer. That's why they were able to command better pay and benefits.

jedberg 6y ago

I think the biggest thing working against unionization is automation. At some point it just becomes cheaper to use software and robots. Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage. My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks. Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.

dalbasal 6y ago
So... two points. One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions. Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living. Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers. There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." They basically are. They negotiate the minimum benefits the company can offer for a particular set of workers, which includes benefits and salary, ie. total wages. > One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. True, but it is hastened by unionization. Automation always has a cost involved. Sometimes it's worth the cost, and sometimes it's not based on the cost of the human labor that is being replaced. If the cost of the human labor goes up for any reason (such as unionization) then the cost of automation looks more attractive.

lmilcin 6y ago

I think this is the right time. Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees. I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.

dalbasal 6y ago
Another way of thinking of it might be "good times." Industrial unions had their success decades when the sector was growing fast. It's always easier negotiating a growing pie. Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more. That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.