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> Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers? A friend of mine had to move to a new city on short notice when his wife got a new job. He

> Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers? A friend of mine had to move to a new city on short notice when his wife got a new job. He applied at an Amazon warehouse while he applied to longer term jobs. He expected the worse given all of the news stories, but then he started working there and it was fine. He said it was the most well-run warehouse job he’d had. Still a warehouse job, but nothing like the horror stories in the news. Obviously only an n=1 anecdote and it’s entirely possible that other locations are worse, but it wasn’t the dystopian job that we’ve all read about in every news article about Amazon lately.

LanceH 5y ago
There are explanations for why these stories come out about Amazon needing to be unionized that which can put bad actors on either side of those stories. I'm not anti-union, but I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases.
- burkaman 5y ago
  > I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases. I genuinely don't think there's a single person on the planet who believes this.
- mountainb 5y ago
  People also conflate historic unions with the current post-New Deal legal framework around unions, which is a framework that only really benefits labor lawyers without really benefitting other people. Just because they're called "unions" does not mean that they are the same thing as the historic "unions." They're a completely different thing governed by a highly complex body of law which is utterly different from the previous framework, operating under totally transformed social and economic conditions. Current day unions are fee bonanzas for lawyers paid for by the workers, the corporation, and the shareholders. The New Deal is often misinterpreted by current day leftists who incorrectly conflate their own views with FDR-era progressivism and the legal reality that it created. They like the fantasy idea of unions in the same way that we can admire the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, and do a lot to avoid perceiving the bureaucratized reality of contemporary unions in favor of nostalgia LARPing.
mountainb 5y ago
What bourgeois newspaper readers tend to get twisted is that they try to compare an FBA warehouse job to something like being a hospital administrator, and find that it sounds like a bad job. But the comparison is really between an FBA warehouse job and another warehouse job. The FBA warehouse job tends to pay more and have better working conditions than the non-FBA warehouse job.

LanceH 5y ago

There are explanations for why these stories come out about Amazon needing to be unionized that which can put bad actors on either side of those stories. I'm not anti-union, but I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases.

burkaman 5y ago
> I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases. I genuinely don't think there's a single person on the planet who believes this.
mountainb 5y ago
People also conflate historic unions with the current post-New Deal legal framework around unions, which is a framework that only really benefits labor lawyers without really benefitting other people. Just because they're called "unions" does not mean that they are the same thing as the historic "unions." They're a completely different thing governed by a highly complex body of law which is utterly different from the previous framework, operating under totally transformed social and economic conditions. Current day unions are fee bonanzas for lawyers paid for by the workers, the corporation, and the shareholders. The New Deal is often misinterpreted by current day leftists who incorrectly conflate their own views with FDR-era progressivism and the legal reality that it created. They like the fantasy idea of unions in the same way that we can admire the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, and do a lot to avoid perceiving the bureaucratized reality of contemporary unions in favor of nostalgia LARPing.

mountainb 5y ago

What bourgeois newspaper readers tend to get twisted is that they try to compare an FBA warehouse job to something like being a hospital administrator, and find that it sounds like a bad job. But the comparison is really between an FBA warehouse job and another warehouse job. The FBA warehouse job tends to pay more and have better working conditions than the non-FBA warehouse job.