7 ms·

What warehouse workers need is a union or some other structure that represents employees and can bargain on their behalf. Yes, there have been a lot of problems

• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975259434/house-democrats-pass-bill-that-would-protect-worker-organizing-efforts https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975259434/house-democrats-pas... (House Democrats Pass Bill That Would Protect Worker Organizing Efforts) https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842 (H.R.842 - Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021)
• lijogdfljk 5y ago
  It's funny, i find anti-union to be nearly identical to anti-government. It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I can definitely agree that it can be bad, but to me it's the only entity that should be representing me. Corporations will have no incentive aligned with myself. Unions/Governments serve as a way to organize the people at large. Which to me is a wholly good thing. This organization however does not come without risks. I think where we fail as a civilization is recognizing this power dynamic and finding ways to monitor corruption. I want to give a government power, but i also need ways to monitor them. Without know if/when an organization becomes corrupted we have no way of healing, and it will always be doomed to fail in the worst way. I'm very pro-union. However we need to figure out monitoring. In Governments, and Unions. Otherwise in my view it's just a matter of time before they fail.
  • badRNG 5y ago
    > Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I agree with your desire for oversight and accountability for either, but there is a difference of at least institutional momentum. I don't think anyone would consider institutional momentum of the US government to be aligned with the interests of workers. I think unions have an opportunity to be better and more explicitly aligned with those interests. As an employee previously part of a union, the adversarial relationship between unions and businesses seems to, at the end, strike a balance between the competing interests of the workers and the business. A business without unions can be like a courtroom without public defenders: not a great place to be the little guy.
  • tablespoon 5y ago
    > It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I don't think that's true. Those people are typically very comfortable with one "organized entity with power" that you're leaving out: private capital in its various forms. What they're doing is actually defending that against any challenges to its power. Usually those people are laborers like the rest of us, but they've been indoctrinated to identify with interests other than their own (often reinforced by having a slightly higher status than most other laborers, or by unlikely-to-be-met aspirations of hitting the jackpot and becoming a wealthy capitalist themselves).
    • adwn 5y ago
      > one "organized entity with power" that you're leaving out: private capital in its various forms Private capital is not "one organized entity", especially not in "its various forms".
      • tablespoon 5y ago
        > Private capital is not "one organized entity", especially not in "its various forms". In most cases it's at least as organized as unions. Also, a decentralized entity is still an entity. But my point stands, there are very, very few people who actually feel "any organized entity with power is bad." If it seems that way, something's being left out of the analysis.
        • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
          Can you explain how "private capital" is "at least as organized as unions"? I don't mean to be snarky, but that seems axiomatically untrue.
          • notJim 5y ago
            I'm a different person than you're replying to, but just to give some examples of how capital organizes itself, there are a ton of organizations they use to represent their interests. For example, at every level of government, there is a chamber of commerce formed by major businesses or their owners. That chamber of commerce publishes opinions, lobbies politicians, etc. There are also all kinds of think tanks funded and often founded by businesspeople to promote their interests. The Heritage Foundation is a prominent example. In the US, these groups have enormous influence at every level.
• gunshai 5y ago
  I think I'd agree with you, but the unionization vote for amazon Warehouse workers failed ... by quite a large margin already. It's not lost on me either that a vote of 3000 cast votes is not representative of every amazon warehouse, but I would think if it's really bad the vote would be much closer. https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-announces-results-in-amazon-election https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-announces...
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor... > The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon violated labor law after workers at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse tried to join a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union said Monday. > The director who presided over the NLRB hearing will recommend whether a new election is conducted, the union said in a statement, but the final decision whether workers will be allowed to cast new ballots and form a union ultimately lies with the director of the regional NLRB office based in Atlanta.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • r00fus 5y ago
    Wasn't there some rule-breaking on that vote? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053144
    • tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      Minor at best and clearly offset by the national campaign for them to vote pro union.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• tyingq 5y ago
  They tried in Alabama, but it didn't get enough votes. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/982139494/its-a-no-amazon-warehouse-workers-vote-against-unionizing-in-historic-election https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/982139494/its-a-no-amazon-war...
  • asdff 5y ago
    If I had to pick any amazon warehouse in the country with workers least likely to vote for their own self interests, it would probably be in Alabama or Texas. If this vote had happened in a state like Oregon it would have probably passed and Amazon knows it. Brilliant move by Amazon having the first union vote here since Amazon can now point to their workers "deciding against a union" whenever it comes up again in the press, and other warehouses probably lost a lot of wind in their sails for the unionization movement too after this failure.
    • rufus_foreman 5y ago
      >> Brilliant move by Amazon having the first union vote here Amazon does not choose where unions try to organize, unions do.
• AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them and unskilled workers have no power even in a union. Skilled workers are scarce, so they already have negotiating power at the individual level and collective bargaining is just overhead and another bureaucracy to take a vig that could have gone into your paycheck. Unskilled workers aren't scarce, so what happens if they unionize? The union strikes, the company hires a different set of unskilled workers and all the union workers get is laid off. This is especially true for an Amazon warehouse because there are thousands of them all over the world. If the workers at a warehouse near San Francisco strike, not only can they easily hire different workers, they can just send everybody their stuff from another warehouse in Nevada or any of a thousand other places. What unskilled workers need isn't a union, it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce, e.g. a UBI so that people aren't so desperate for a job and can hold out for better pay and working conditions.
  • fallingknife 5y ago
    > it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce Maybe don't allow employers to hire 10's of millions of illegal immigrants under the table?
    • kelnos 5y ago
      Care to back up a wild claim like that with some citations?
  • burnished 5y ago
    I generally agree with your conclusion and recognize your arguments. This might just be ignorance on my part, but don't we have a history of unions fighting for labor rights and securing real improvements for unskilled labor? My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements.
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Most of the successful 20th century unions weren't representing unskilled workers, they were representing skilled workers against employers so large that they had market power in the labor market for that type of skilled labor, like the Big 3 auto makers. The problem for those workers was that although they were skilled labor, the number of employers who needed auto workers was small enough for them to act as a cartel. The concentrated market offset the negotiating power of a skilled individual, but at the same time, a company that employed a third of the auto workers in the country couldn't just replace them all if they went on strike. But that was kind of a pathological circumstance and the better solution in that case is to do some trust busting. Or if competition increases on its own as it did from the Japanese automakers during the oil crisis. The closest thing to that in the modern economy is the relationship between app developers and platform app stores. It's the same sort of cartelized market. But some trust busting would work there too. And other markets don't look like that. If you're actually an employee of Google or Apple, they don't have anything like market power in that labor market, because it's the same skillset to go and work for Facebook or Microsoft or Netflix or a million other places including a large number of smaller companies and startups. And if you're a worker at an Amazon warehouse, it's not skilled labor. > My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements. Most of the claimed victories were symbolic, because they were things that were happening anyway and then legislators passed laws requiring them after they'd mostly already happened so they could say they were doing something. Workers expect to be paid more to work 80 hours instead of 40, so given the choice between paying one worker for 80 hours and two workers for 40 hours, employers found the second option led to higher worker productivity and reliability because the workers weren't constantly exhausted and making mistakes and didn't as often quit from burnout. Around 2% of people in the US make minimum wage. In other words, ~98% of employers pay more than that even though the law doesn't require them to, because the market does. And even without minimum wage, the other 2% would be making around the same amount of money, because the employer still has to offer enough to get the employee to accept the job. Minimum wage is even harmful to employees because it forces them into bad trade offs they otherwise wouldn't have taken. There might have been a job paying $6/hour across the street from your apartment, but it goes away if minimum wage is $7.25 and then you have to take a job at $7.25 which is an hour away and costs you more than $1.25/hour in commuting expenses, plus the lost time and significantly increased risk of a car accident. Likewise, the limit on hours or requirements to pay overtime can hurt workers, because if you need the extra hours, people end up taking a second job instead, which still doesn't pay time and a half but now you have two commutes instead of having one commute to a single job where you take two shifts. The things that help workers are the things that actually increase their negotiating power. Artificial price controls don't really do that, because when your negotiating power isn't actually any better, you just end up forced to accept worse terms on some other dimension, like the longer commute.