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Amazon reaches agreement with trade unions in Italy
- ggm 5y agoIt will be fascinating to see how this plays back in the US.
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoI don’t think something similar will happen in the US. Here (I’m Italian) workers are highly protected, and this is positive in some ways but also negative because a lot of industries don’t want to invest in the country because “if someday we will be not profitable in Italy, will be very hard to close and dismiss our workers”. It’s pretty hard balancing this two point of view.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoHello fellow italian citizen :D
- pmyteh 5y agoIt's not uncommon for avowedly anti-union employers to have union contracts outside the US. When Walmart owned the British supermarket ASDA, for example, the GMB union was recognised. Companies seem quite adept at keeping their adaptations to local rules tightly firewalled.
- the-dude 5y agoExcept for the 'platforms' like Uber, JustEatTakeAway, Deliveroo et al.
- worldsayshi 5y agoOf course they make sure to get away with whatever they can get away with. "Why shouldn't they"
- lnxg33k1 5y agoBut they are also being targeted by italian authorities right now, so their ability to escape is very time constrained, they're just a new concept which wasn't legislated about so far, but regulations might be slow, but at a certain point they will get to it https://www.reuters.com/article/italy-just-eat-workers-idUSL1N2LS1TU https://www.reuters.com/article/italy-just-eat-workers-idUSL...
- pjmlp 5y agoThey think they can, until they don't. https://www.expatica.com/nl/uncategorized/uber-loses-dutch-court-fight-over-drivers-rights-152589/ https://www.expatica.com/nl/uncategorized/uber-loses-dutch-c...
- alkonaut 5y agoOf course. Take Sweden as a (admittedly extreme) example. There is very little regulation of the labor market, for example no minimum wage. All those things are agreed upon in negotiations between unions and employer organizations. But unions set the rules for the labor market as a whole, not just workplaces where the workforce had unionized. An Amazon warehouse with zero union employees would still have to have union conditions/pay for all employees. It wouldn’t be possible to not do it. And it’s not possible as an individual employee to negotiate a contract with worse terms (the equivalent of taking work under a minimum wage level). So in Sweden there is no recognizing unions. It’s like recognizing labor laws. Not optional.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 5y agoI don't expect any effects of this in the US. After all, Amazon had these agreements, treating workers as retail employees, in France for years.
- pjmlp 5y agoOne of the birth places of unions during the industrial revolution has turned into anti-union, so I don't expect much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film) I think it is still quite up to date regarding work conditions in some places.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI can only imagine it will be completely ignored by just about everyone, sadly.
- Ideabile 5y agoImagine this would lead to make working at Amazon Warehouse a better place, with more rights for the workers.
- cerved 5y agocan't read the article because of some useless Dell ad
- pjmlp 5y agoIn Germany they are in full throttle marketing campaign how cool it is to work for them. The anti-Union attemps over here made no friends. It is all over the place, TV ads, subway, bus stops...
- swarnie 5y agoWe've had a similar media blitz in the UK, luckily we dealt with most our unions in the 80s. Despite getting an email from Amazon about twice a week i could never see myself working there.
- pjmlp 5y agoNot sure if those people in Manchester felt lucky.
- zwirbl 5y agowhy luckily?
- swarnie 5y agoBecause they had an amazing crack at trashing the country and needed to be put down. 3 day work week, rolling black outs, propping up of old dead industries. Not to mention all the dead companies they striked in to the ground. Bloody criminals the lot of them.
- peoplefromibiza 5y agoItalian here. Don't get your hopes up, Italy is a very peculiar place, there are 11.5 million workers that are members of one of the tree major trade unions, not counting smaller ones, it's half of the total work force. Nothing moves in Italy without an agreement with trade unions when a company the size of Amazon starts hiring en masse. That's both good and bad, but generally more good than bad.
- qsort 5y agoItalian as well. I'm generally pro-union and I see nothing wrong with this deal. Our particular implementation of unions though is dreadful and disgusting. Full of politicians or wannabe politicians, they'll gladly defend the indefensible to raise their membership numbers. They are for all practical purposes political parties, not unions, and they regularly come out with nonsensical takes about everything. It's good most of the workforce is unionized, but I have nothing but contempt for how they're run.
- pibechorro 5y agothat is what always happens to unions and why I oppose them. They eventually corrupt because they are a political process, especially whrn in bed with regulators (look at Biden subcidies for tech only if unionized vs Tesla). The same logic applies for business lobbying regulators, they corrupt and capture. We need free markets, devoid of any political intervention. Individuals voluntarily coming to emergent consensus is the way towards fair and uncorruptable futures.
- qsort 5y agoI agree that letting the market do its job would be the optimal solution, but this is unfortunately unrealistic. In most job markets there are information asymmetries so large that the market is effectively "nonfree" to begin with (free markets don't naturally emerge, you need at least some regulation for them to flourish). In a utopian future where workers can freely reject bad working conditions, I agree, they would be unnecessary. For the time being, they are a necessary evil. I once said half-jokingly that if they ever founded a union where membership is conditional on a whiteboard interview I'd join in a heartbeat. You need to keep out the politicized idiots who join a union not because of the union itself, but because they want to LARP as communists or whatever.
- yayoplant 5y agoSurprized to see the Amazon flag fluttering beside the EU and Italy flags in the photo. Many countries require the National Flag to be given special respect, and must be flown above other flags. I'm surprised to see the Amazon flag in the first place. Gives a corporate-state vibe, rather than an "e-commerce warehouse" vibe.
- qsort 5y agoIt matches the official Italian protocol for flag display. Nothing wrong. When both the Italian and EU flags are displayed, the protocol requires them to be flown at the same height, "as equals". Many places also fly a third flag, representing city colors, regional flag, university emblem, etc. For example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Palazzo_Chigi_-_Roma_%282010%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Palazzo_... (the yellow/red flag in the corner is the flag of the city of Rome)
- teruakohatu 5y agoMany countries require other flags to be at the same height and size as the national flag, some specifying placement of the national flag in relation to others.
- thiscatis 5y agoMost people don't care
- goodpoint 5y agoVarious countries left this kind of nationalism behind after WW2.