19 ms·

A single successful effort of unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other

• jasode 5y ago
  >unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center. So it can have the opposite effect. The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. The last voting count was 74% against the union. We have to wait and see what the union can "win" from Amazon.
  • rat87 5y ago
    I think it has more to do with politics. Conservative SC politicians have made it clear that they would rather not have good jobs if they are unionized, they don't wont workers getting ideas
  • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
    • jfjfkfmf 5y ago
      Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities?
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Why would any company actually want to do this when they could just get non union labor in any of the thousands of right-to-work cities? Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly. If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.) Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        Presumably you still need to fulfill shipping needs in New York because people still buy things there.
      • gregshap 5y ago
        It’s a last-mile facility for service to NYC.
      • Spooky23 5y ago
        It's expensive to do business in those sorts of places. Alabama lost a Toyota plant to Ontario because literacy is so poor they would need to translate their documentation into Ikea-like pictograms.
        • briandear 5y ago
          That’s false. That decision had to do with currency values not literacy. https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-moves-to-alabama-cr-v-goes-to-ontario-139505/amp/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-m...
  • smachiz 5y ago
    Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters? SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.
    • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
      I work in an office in the SC factory, that comment does indeed reflect the truth. Of course, SC unions are weak and relatively unpopular but that isn’t the whole story here. Just trying to provide some detail.
      • metalliqaz 5y ago
        but how?
    • jasode 5y ago
      [Replying to multiple commenters with the same questions] >SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, >South Carolina has anti-union laws [...] the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, Anti-union bias does not fully explain the South Carolina Boeing factory rejection vote because the workers did previously have a union. Fyi... The original South Carolina aircraft factory (formerly Vought doing subcontract work on Boeing fuselages) was unionized in 2007. Then in 2009, they voted to decertify the union as they no longer wanted IAM (International Association of Machinists) to represent them for collective bargaining. (75% voted to get rid of the union.) This happened around the time Boeing acquired the Vought factory. For various reason(s) (see below), the Vought/Boeing workers didn't feel the ~$1000/year union dues were worth the benefits the IAM union negotiated for them. Since being being voted out, IAM has repeatedly tried to re-establish union membership at SC but multiple elections have voted against it by wide margins. The last 2017 vote was 74% against. In 2018, IAM tried a new approach of establishing a "micro" union of 175 subset of employees instead of the entire ~3000 employees. The IAM won that micro vote but the Labor Board invalidated the micro union as a collective bargaining unit. Boeing workers' (current) anti-union stance is based on their real-world experience and not ignorance. The SC workers already know what collective bargaining benefits they had with the union. They got rid of the union anyway. Maybe someday, factors will change and Boeing workers will vote for union representation again. > Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters? >, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina" No, not my calculus. The SC workers reported it. One example: The workers in South Carolina didn't like the IAM directed union strike in Washington. Excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-charleston-decertifies-machinists-union/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...: >Another sore point that affected Thursday’s vote was that many in the Charleston [South Carolina] work force were laid off last fall during the two-month IAM strike in the Puget Sound region due to the lack of production in Everett.
  • e40 5y ago
    Given SC rejected the union is interesting, given the quality issues that resulted in Boeing's plant in SC. The reports of managers putting defective parts back into service was horrifying (this was reported by a whistleblower).
    • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
      As somebody that works in an office in this factory, the micro-union votes down have been very contentious. I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it certainly seemed like the situation with our PNW union sites did not boost support down here.
    • imglorp 5y ago
      The SC quality issues were so severe, some customers were rejecting product created there. src https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-south-carolina/ https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-so...
  • UncleOxidant 5y ago
    > Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center. It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.
    • Manuel_D 5y ago
      The other vote in Alabama failed, by more than 10%.
      • pyuser583 5y ago
        New York had a long history of powerful unions. Alabama had a long history of not having unions.
      • UncleOxidant 5y ago
        "facilities in that region"
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        The final decision is not here yet. Resolving the contested ballots could still swing it either way (as of this moment).
      • thebradbain 5y ago
        https://www.reuters.com/business/amazons-union-vote-counts-start-alabama-new-york-2022-03-31/ https://www.reuters.com/business/amazons-union-vote-counts-s... It’s currently… 47% pro-union to 53% no-union in Alabama, with over 15% (400+ ballots) challenged by both sides. It could go either way, but “more than 10%” is not backed by any metrics.
        • Manuel_D 5y ago
          From the article I read in the NY Times it was a gap of over 10% https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/technology/amazon-union-election-alabama.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/technology/amazon-union-e...
  • booleandilemma 5y ago
    Maybe the union can win Amazon warehouse workers more bathroom breaks.
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      You shouldn't have to wear adult diapers to work to avoid getting fired because you need to go to the bathroom twice during a shift and they're a 10 minute walk away, & good luck hitting your performance targets with that chunk of time lost.
  • VictorPath 5y ago
    > ...Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not. Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".
  • salawat 5y ago
    Woah, woah, woah. Hold it there, sparky. Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.
  • chimeracoder 5y ago
    > Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center. Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.
• clove 5y ago
  It will also encourage downsizing and expediting the shift to replacing humans with robots.
  • jethro_tell 5y ago
    They've been encouraging that forever, but it's just not there yet. They weren't going to wait until it was less convenient than people, they're going to do that the moment that it's viable, but as of yet, it still needs work.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    Great! It’s only because of our stupid system that removing the need for thousands of humans to spend their lives doing unnecessary labor is a bad thing.
    • krapp 5y ago
      >It’s only because of our stupid system that removing the need for thousands of humans to spend their lives doing unnecessary labor is a bad thing. That stupid system will still be there after all of those jobs are automated away.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    That sounds like a good thing. An Amazon warehouse job is grueling, terrible work. The more we can get machines to do the crappy jobs, the better.
  • FateOfNations 5y ago
    Relatively fewer but higher quality jobs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially in an industry where growth can absorb the efficiencies, rather than needing to resort to layoffs.
  • ATsch 5y ago
    That shift already exists plenty, as one can see from the high degree of automation of those warehouses. The only thing that Unions would change there is that they can bargain e.g. for re-training of the workers made redundant.
• tyrfing 5y ago
  I'd say this is partly demographic/generation shifts, unions have extremely strong support among younger age groups and this is just one of the first visible results. Teamsters, to name one union, just had leadership change over and will be taking a much more aggressive posture going forward, and I don't think that's a unique story.
• baccaratclub 5y ago
  I totally agree with you, Amazon is like that. https://www.google.com/ https://www.google.com/
• JustLurking2022 5y ago
  I predict the Staten Island warehouse will soon be closed due to redundancy as part of a strategic rebalancing of their logistics operations due to changing consumer demand. Someone at Amazon is probably already touring all the warehouse sites in Jersey. Doubt they accept this loss.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    I’m having a hard time seeing that work for them. Amazon’s tactics here fundamentally depend on there being an effectively inexhaustible pool of talent elsewhere that can be used to threaten any given store that considers unionizing, combined with the plausible threat of moving to get non union labor. Close up shop, hire non-union labor elsewhere, etc. That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers. To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.
    • JustLurking2022 5y ago
      There are large warehouses regularly available all along I-95 in New Jersey. They also may not need as huge of a footprint as you think - I believe they have some large warehouses just across the border in PA as well (<2 hours away), so this one may only be critical for same day delivery. Yes, it would be expensive, more expensive than closing a Wal-Mart store, but I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon finds the alternative worse.
  • CatsInSinks 5y ago
    I was thinking the exact same thing, most likely that'll be the move.
• alexk307 5y ago
  > It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization. One can only hope. Collective bargaining is the most powerful tool to dismantle income inequality and corporate greed.
  • eclat 5y ago
    This is not true at all in the case of unions. Salaries are much higher in the US than in other equivalent economies with higher levels of unionisation. Now worker representatives in boards, that would be very beneficial.
  • nxm 5y ago
    Or persistent labor strikes and disruptions. See France
    • hocuspocus 5y ago
      Unions in France are weaker and less prevalent than in many European countries. They organize strikes more often because that's often their only bargaining chip.
    • chottocharaii 5y ago
      that doesn’t sound like an employee problem
    • ohgodplsno 5y ago
      Oh no, 5 weeks of paid time off, 35 hours work week, universal retirement fund, physically hard jobs getting to retire early. And once a month some trains don't come in, and they dare warn you a week in advance. France is truly unlivable, a socialist hellscape :(
    • alexk307 5y ago
      I'd gladly give up convenience and the need to have everything available to me at all times, for more collective bargaining and better treatment of human beings. If a labor force goes on strike, you should probably ask yourself why, and if you would do the same, rather than just taking it as a disruption to your life. Would you rather get your crap from Amazon in one day, or would you rather support better treatment and benefits for 10s of thousands of human beings?
• CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
  It's interesting to see the cyclical rise and fall of workers unions in the US. I'm of the opinion that there needs to be a balance between worker and employer rights - however it seems that, at least in the US, that balance swings back and forth quite often. It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power, and union supporters will remind you of the bad times when the employers had too much power. These days we actually see a lot more of the latter. Will we swing back and forth indefinitely? Probably.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    It is really hard to make a case there ever was a "bad time workers had too much power" in the US. MAYBE you could in Europe, where in 1980s there was some decline in private sector investment concurrent with lower profit rates, but that never happened here.
  • rufus_foreman 5y ago
    >> I'm of the opinion that there needs to be a balance between worker and employer rights But that's not what we're talking about here. If I am making $8 an hour at my current job and Amazon is willing to pay me $15 an hour but the union says no, first of all we insist on $20 an hour and second of all we decide who gets those jobs and your name isn't on the list, that isn't worker rights, is it? It's not worker rights or employer rights, it's union rights. Wise up. There's a long history here - certainly on Staten Island - about how this all plays out and where the money goes.
    • Epa095 5y ago
      And you go straight to fulfill OPs prophecy: "It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power," BTW, the way you characterise unions are interesting. Very different from how they work here in Northern Europe. I wonder if American unions really are as corrupt and screwed up as the Internet makes them sound.
      • rufus_foreman 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  > It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization. I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo. At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change the current tribal political lines. Normally this kind of movement would be a strength of the left. But lately the right has become quite populist, so maybe this plays in their direction. Whoever figures out how to capture this massive constituency is set up for a powerful future.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    If the trend continues as you posit, I would expect private-sector unions to become a non-partisan alignment, similar to how social security is sacrosanct in US politics. Most unions form at places that are genuinely terrible workspaces where workers have legitimate reasons to hate the boss. As unions become mainstream at places like Starbucks I would expect folks agitating for worker power to less radical.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      It might, but they would have to be big enough to break the "conservative" alignment of resource extractors, religious fanatics and rich people. It's definitely possible in 10-20 years.
      • nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      • skrtskrt 5y ago
        Outside of Bernie and a few others, the days of Democrats having many nationally significant politicians that are truly pro-union are pretty much gone. I don't think most people, including those that vote Democratic, have much of an illusion of the Democratic party as a friend of labor anymore. Sure the Republicans actively try to dismantle all worker protections, but the Democrats mostly stand by and say well what can ya do? The role of Democrats right now is to pretend to fight for normal people just enough to get the votes, then completely fail to do anything so the rich party donors still get what they want.
• akhmatova 5y ago
  Yup, that's exactly what this potential success story means. And is precisely why Amazon fought so fiercely (and underhandedly) to derail a similar effort in Alabama around this time last year.
• la64710 5y ago
  Next is Walmart ?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ekianjo 5y ago
  you will see a wave of robotization as well because unions will take successful companies to the ground.
• tikiman163 5y ago
  I want you to be right, I really do. The problem as far as I can see it is that Amazon can simply shift the work load away from that facility and then close it, and open a new one somewhere else. Unions no longer have the protections they need. Technically, Amazon could simply shut down that facility for 1 year and 1 day, and then reopen it and the Union will no longer exist. I have serious doubts about whether Amazon cares about the negative press they would get for doing exactly that.
• poink 5y ago
  The particularly interesting thing here is that this isn’t an effort by a larger, established union. This is a self-organized Amazon employees union spearheaded by a fired Amazon worker who Amazon spent a lot of money smearing over the past couple years. Arguably, along rather racist lines. The more things change…
• rayiner 5y ago
  Depends on what the union does. My father in law worked in various unionized jobs and isn’t exactly a fan of them. I would like to see a wave of unionization, but I’m skeptical that unions as currently structured can actually deliver for workers. In the last few decades, as private sector union membership has declined, unions have lost influence within the larger left. They find themselves as followers rather than leaders within the Democratic Party. Even a couple of decades ago lots of workers like my father in law griped about the unions not delivering benefits that justified the dues. That’s only gotten worse as unions increasingly get enmeshed in generic progressive causes the workers themselves often don’t support. It doesn’t appear that Amazon Labor Union affiliated with one of the big national unions, which is a positive sign. If they can deliver real benefits for workers, other locations may unionize too. But they’ll have to be laser focused on benefitting Amazon Workers and resist the urge to get over their skates.
• kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Robert Reich has a good interview with the recent Starbucks labor organizers.