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I’m not sure that people in other parts of the country realize how much anti union sentiment there is in the southeast. One of the biggest things that attracts

I’m not sure that people in other parts of the country realize how much anti union sentiment there is in the southeast. One of the biggest things that attracts businesses to setup shop in the south is low cost of living and lower salary requirements as a result. The same things that cause businesses to setup shop overseas. When unions get involved with promises of higher wages, it disincentivizes the business from growing in that area because it has effectively no benefit over the higher cost areas. I’ve witnessed this first hand in South Carolina ever since Boeing opened a location here. The union tactics have been crazy. Everybody down here is thrilled to have Boeing and all of the peripheral benefits to the area that come with them. Great jobs, supply chain effects, etc. Then union officials show up when it’s time for a new vote and start telling people how bad everything is. Around every vote there are always crazy news articles and sensationalized events that try to drum up union support and paint Boeing in a bad light. And then it stops until it’s time for a new vote. Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. The want corporate customers to sell services to. They want economic development and they want practices to incentivize that. What people don’t want are practices that will slow that down, especially when the non-union work pays better than most everything else in the area already. It gives the appearance to everyone, somewhat obviously, that the union is only interested is strengthening itself.

nkrisc 5y ago
It’s not surprising that those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization are not in support of it.
- seneca 5y ago
  > It’s not surprising that those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization are not in support of it. Right. But what people are missing is that "those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization" is most people who actually live in the region. The jobs are there because the unions aren't, and people want jobs.
  - iterati 5y ago
    I don't think people want jobs. I think people NEED jobs because they need to eat and a roof over their head. That's not really a good justification for fleecing your workers and paying them as little as possible - that they'd starve without you.
    - seneca 5y ago
      Paying your employees an agreed upon wage, which is higher than market rate for the region, is not really "fleecing your workers". People are glad to have these jobs.
      - some_furry 5y ago
        People are glad to have the income and extant economical benefits of these jobs*, not the jobs themselves.
        xboxnolifes 5y ago
        I'm not exactly sure what the pedant in you is getting at here. Unionizing isn't going to suddenly give the workers their "income and extant economical benefits of these jobs" without working the job. Obviously people would rather get paid and not have to work, but that's not relevant to the context.
        some_furry 5y ago
        The distinction matters. People attribute qualities to "jobs" that are actually a consequence of jobs, not a quality of the jobs themselves. Correctly identifying cause and effect is important for understanding the truth. Never conflate them.
        seneca 5y ago
        That's like arguing "people don't like breathing, they like getting oxygen into their bloodstreams so they don't die". It's a pointless distinction, and seems mostly like a rhetorical device to attack the idea of scarcity, which seems like an odd thing to rail against. I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.
wolverine876 5y ago
This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!' People want to better pay and benefits, more power over what they do with their lives 40+ hours per week. You can't be afraid to push for yourself in any negotiations, and you need leverage to get as much as you can. Without a union, you have all the leverage of a lone individual. What's crazy to me is seeing Boeing treated like a god coming down to bless the land with their beneficence, whom we must please and obey. They are a business who will use whatever leverage they have to get what they can; you need leverage too.
- dls2016 5y ago
  > This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!' Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    If it weren't Bezos I'd say it were intended as an art piece to demonstrate how bad the problem is, even between states inside a single country. That said, Virginia ended up paying about $27k per job generated while the second office in NYC was given about $75k per job generated. So a taxpayer subsidy from everyone in the region in order to produce 25,000 jobs at the above prices. Worth it? Not really sure, it seems to me like Virginia might end up fairly well off but I have a harder time imagining that creating another 25,000 jobs in NYC is worth $75k a piece to the city given that they are already out of housing. Kind of seems like it might be better put into other things on balance. Pitching it all as a public auction really accentuates the point that this is a race to the bottom with competition between people that should instead be natural allies. It would be brilliant if it were an intentional commentary on how much harm we are doing to ourselves by letting companies pit entire states against each other for profit.
- Aunche 5y ago
  The workers simply have a lot less leverage than you think. Globalization and automation has made work less scarce than labor. The pandemic reduced the supply of labor, and accordingly, wages for low-skill workers have skyrocketed, which proves that the market is working as intended. Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor. The most effective unions are those that do this to the greatest extent. For example, SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility to those that receive these speaking roles.
p0wn 5y ago
The US labor situation is changing on a cultural level big time and rapidly. The working force is taking back the control. Companies are going to have a tougher time exploiting people for cheap labor with no/shitty benefits. I love it. Unions are going to be a major driving force again and it's gonna be good for the work force. As a country we have to make it tougher for companies to exploit labor unfairly. The government has failed. The people know it and are finally taking action. A true democracy would have strict regulations on companies which guarantee good living conditions for the people that live in it. The game of capitalism must be regulated, because it's a sociopathic construct. It's only goal is to make more money... as soon as possible. Left unregulated it exploits people.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > The US labor situation is changing on a cultural level big time and rapidly. The working force is taking back the control. Companies are going to have a tougher time exploiting people for cheap labor with no/shitty benefits. > Unions are going to be a major driving force again All of those positive changes and benefits you cited are happening without an increased union presence, though. What makes you think unions are going to be a compelling option when the non-union alternatives are rapidly changing in response to market conditions without any need for union bargaining?
  - DrewRWx 5y ago
    Perfect time to double-down, go union, and strike for jugular instead of relying on a rising tide to lift all boats.
  - 8note 5y ago
    The change is only on a cultural level though. companies have a very easy time exploiting people today, ad the people are getting unhappy. No actual change has happened yet
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    This year has already seen an increased union presence and several high profile strikes. I think it is far-fetched to say that all of this has occurred without unions whatsoever. Just like Lenin's "reserve army" of the unemployed keeping workers motivated to keep working, so too does the "reserve threat" from labor organization motivate many of the 20th century improvements in labor conditions.
GoodJokes 5y ago
ah yes, the anti-union astroturfer has entered the chat. Just so you know, this was an article about Amazon, not Boeing. Is your algorithm working correctly?
xg15 5y ago
Those kinds of arguments talk a lot about "jobs" but seldomly about the quality or compensation of those jobs. A job is not a goal in itself (except in some puritan morality I guess) but a mean to several ends: Security, income, participation, etc. How much of that does a business bring to the region and what guarantees that it will do so in the future? > Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. They want corporate customers to sell services to. What kind of "people" are you talking about? This sounds as if the whole region consists exclusively of solo entrepreneurs.
avgcorrection 5y ago
Where does it end? This capital flight problem has been discussed since Smith (well, at least). The reality is that there will always be somewhere labor-cheaper for capital to move to. Meanwhile laborers (being physical beings) can’t be globetrotting wizards like digital money can be. The South-East might be cheap enough today. Until somewhere else bids lower…
- Jensson 5y ago
  The workers are still there as you say, why don't they just produce value? They could organize, create a worker led company, and just produce value without the capital class. Why don't they do that?
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    Worker co-ops are the closest thing to that. And they seem to be most successful in endeavours that don’t demand a lot of capital, for the reason that the sibling comment brought up.
  - kentrado 5y ago
    They lack access to the necessary capital.
  - salawat 5y ago
    > The workers are still there as you say, why don't they just produce value? They could organize, create a worker led company, and just produce value without the capital class. Why don't they do that? Did you seriously just invoke Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" logic as applies to capital access? I'm fairly sure you couldn't have meant it, but God bless, that rang across loud and clear on my end, as someone whose been deep in startup culture for a while, and spends many hours trying to help places pull things off workably on shoestring budgets. Workers have been resigning and making startups. They still have to raise capital to pay the overhead costs of getting stuff done. Traditional Capital tends to be more concerned with growth hacking rather than solving problems that society really needs solved, which means access to Capital is typically of the VC or philanthropic type, which both have deleterious consequences on how one has to treat the people they hire to make sure the spigots stay on. The meat grinder, in that sense, is real, and an omni-present threat threat to any workplace daring to deign to raise the bar on Quality. The central gall of the Capital class is that just because of the happy accident of being located astride yesterday's money Hoovers that that means their job is done, and they aren't responsible for keeping that wealth moving, solving problems, and making riskier investments. I'm not saying go play helicopter money, but if you aren't making money move, you're part of the issue.
ls-lah_33 5y ago
> When unions get involved with promises of higher wages, it disincentivizes the business from growing in that area because it has effectively no benefit over the higher cost areas. Say the Alabama workers decided to unionize, I don't think amazon could easily relocate warehouses to a another state/country in the same way that Boeing could do with manufacturing. There just isn't that much cheaper labor available in the country.

nkrisc 5y ago

It’s not surprising that those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization are not in support of it.

seneca 5y ago
> It’s not surprising that those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization are not in support of it. Right. But what people are missing is that "those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization" is most people who actually live in the region. The jobs are there because the unions aren't, and people want jobs.
- iterati 5y ago
  I don't think people want jobs. I think people NEED jobs because they need to eat and a roof over their head. That's not really a good justification for fleecing your workers and paying them as little as possible - that they'd starve without you.
  - seneca 5y ago
    Paying your employees an agreed upon wage, which is higher than market rate for the region, is not really "fleecing your workers". People are glad to have these jobs.
    - some_furry 5y ago
      People are glad to have the income and extant economical benefits of these jobs*, not the jobs themselves.
      - xboxnolifes 5y ago
        I'm not exactly sure what the pedant in you is getting at here. Unionizing isn't going to suddenly give the workers their "income and extant economical benefits of these jobs" without working the job. Obviously people would rather get paid and not have to work, but that's not relevant to the context.
        some_furry 5y ago
        The distinction matters. People attribute qualities to "jobs" that are actually a consequence of jobs, not a quality of the jobs themselves. Correctly identifying cause and effect is important for understanding the truth. Never conflate them.
        seneca 5y ago
        That's like arguing "people don't like breathing, they like getting oxygen into their bloodstreams so they don't die". It's a pointless distinction, and seems mostly like a rhetorical device to attack the idea of scarcity, which seems like an odd thing to rail against. I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.

wolverine876 5y ago

This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!' People want to better pay and benefits, more power over what they do with their lives 40+ hours per week. You can't be afraid to push for yourself in any negotiations, and you need leverage to get as much as you can. Without a union, you have all the leverage of a lone individual. What's crazy to me is seeing Boeing treated like a god coming down to bless the land with their beneficence, whom we must please and obey. They are a business who will use whatever leverage they have to get what they can; you need leverage too.

dls2016 5y ago
> This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!' Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?
- neltnerb 5y ago
  If it weren't Bezos I'd say it were intended as an art piece to demonstrate how bad the problem is, even between states inside a single country. That said, Virginia ended up paying about $27k per job generated while the second office in NYC was given about $75k per job generated. So a taxpayer subsidy from everyone in the region in order to produce 25,000 jobs at the above prices. Worth it? Not really sure, it seems to me like Virginia might end up fairly well off but I have a harder time imagining that creating another 25,000 jobs in NYC is worth $75k a piece to the city given that they are already out of housing. Kind of seems like it might be better put into other things on balance. Pitching it all as a public auction really accentuates the point that this is a race to the bottom with competition between people that should instead be natural allies. It would be brilliant if it were an intentional commentary on how much harm we are doing to ourselves by letting companies pit entire states against each other for profit.
Aunche 5y ago
The workers simply have a lot less leverage than you think. Globalization and automation has made work less scarce than labor. The pandemic reduced the supply of labor, and accordingly, wages for low-skill workers have skyrocketed, which proves that the market is working as intended. Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor. The most effective unions are those that do this to the greatest extent. For example, SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility to those that receive these speaking roles.

p0wn 5y ago

The US labor situation is changing on a cultural level big time and rapidly. The working force is taking back the control. Companies are going to have a tougher time exploiting people for cheap labor with no/shitty benefits. I love it. Unions are going to be a major driving force again and it's gonna be good for the work force. As a country we have to make it tougher for companies to exploit labor unfairly. The government has failed. The people know it and are finally taking action. A true democracy would have strict regulations on companies which guarantee good living conditions for the people that live in it. The game of capitalism must be regulated, because it's a sociopathic construct. It's only goal is to make more money... as soon as possible. Left unregulated it exploits people.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The US labor situation is changing on a cultural level big time and rapidly. The working force is taking back the control. Companies are going to have a tougher time exploiting people for cheap labor with no/shitty benefits. > Unions are going to be a major driving force again All of those positive changes and benefits you cited are happening without an increased union presence, though. What makes you think unions are going to be a compelling option when the non-union alternatives are rapidly changing in response to market conditions without any need for union bargaining?
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  Perfect time to double-down, go union, and strike for jugular instead of relying on a rising tide to lift all boats.
- 8note 5y ago
  The change is only on a cultural level though. companies have a very easy time exploiting people today, ad the people are getting unhappy. No actual change has happened yet
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  This year has already seen an increased union presence and several high profile strikes. I think it is far-fetched to say that all of this has occurred without unions whatsoever. Just like Lenin's "reserve army" of the unemployed keeping workers motivated to keep working, so too does the "reserve threat" from labor organization motivate many of the 20th century improvements in labor conditions.

GoodJokes 5y ago

ah yes, the anti-union astroturfer has entered the chat. Just so you know, this was an article about Amazon, not Boeing. Is your algorithm working correctly?

xg15 5y ago

Those kinds of arguments talk a lot about "jobs" but seldomly about the quality or compensation of those jobs. A job is not a goal in itself (except in some puritan morality I guess) but a mean to several ends: Security, income, participation, etc. How much of that does a business bring to the region and what guarantees that it will do so in the future? > Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. They want corporate customers to sell services to. What kind of "people" are you talking about? This sounds as if the whole region consists exclusively of solo entrepreneurs.

avgcorrection 5y ago

Where does it end? This capital flight problem has been discussed since Smith (well, at least). The reality is that there will always be somewhere labor-cheaper for capital to move to. Meanwhile laborers (being physical beings) can’t be globetrotting wizards like digital money can be. The South-East might be cheap enough today. Until somewhere else bids lower…

Jensson 5y ago
The workers are still there as you say, why don't they just produce value? They could organize, create a worker led company, and just produce value without the capital class. Why don't they do that?
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Worker co-ops are the closest thing to that. And they seem to be most successful in endeavours that don’t demand a lot of capital, for the reason that the sibling comment brought up.
- kentrado 5y ago
  They lack access to the necessary capital.
- salawat 5y ago
  > The workers are still there as you say, why don't they just produce value? They could organize, create a worker led company, and just produce value without the capital class. Why don't they do that? Did you seriously just invoke Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" logic as applies to capital access? I'm fairly sure you couldn't have meant it, but God bless, that rang across loud and clear on my end, as someone whose been deep in startup culture for a while, and spends many hours trying to help places pull things off workably on shoestring budgets. Workers have been resigning and making startups. They still have to raise capital to pay the overhead costs of getting stuff done. Traditional Capital tends to be more concerned with growth hacking rather than solving problems that society really needs solved, which means access to Capital is typically of the VC or philanthropic type, which both have deleterious consequences on how one has to treat the people they hire to make sure the spigots stay on. The meat grinder, in that sense, is real, and an omni-present threat threat to any workplace daring to deign to raise the bar on Quality. The central gall of the Capital class is that just because of the happy accident of being located astride yesterday's money Hoovers that that means their job is done, and they aren't responsible for keeping that wealth moving, solving problems, and making riskier investments. I'm not saying go play helicopter money, but if you aren't making money move, you're part of the issue.

ls-lah_33 5y ago

> When unions get involved with promises of higher wages, it disincentivizes the business from growing in that area because it has effectively no benefit over the higher cost areas. Say the Alabama workers decided to unionize, I don't think amazon could easily relocate warehouses to a another state/country in the same way that Boeing could do with manufacturing. There just isn't that much cheaper labor available in the country.