Why does this surprise you? The amount of celebrations (reasons to have sales) have increased throughout the years. If you got sales regularly people will wait till stuff's on sale. Now they gotta wait less long. It might seem silly, but the whole trick is to get people to buy things they'd otherwise not buy.
Would be weird for a mostly Catholic country. In my corner of the European south we do celebrate St. Martin's Day, although with roasted chestnuts rather than turkey. And we drink piquette, which for some reason is illegal to sell in the EU nowadays.
Discounts are a thing, black friday not that much honestly.
We have other periods with discounts that are famous.
I believe black friday is only a thing in italy with regard to amazon and maybe some other online shop, and we definitely don't have people stomping on each other in front of malls at opening hours.
It's become a thing in Brazil recently. Halloween has also become unavoidable. I find this strange, because most people couldn't give you the time of day in english.
Also in Spain! But it's the businesses that are shilling both, Halloween and Black Friday, to sell you shit you don't need. But it's strange because it happened very fast overnight when suddenly everyone decided we have to celebrate it.
Many regions and countries in Europe have their own Halloween - like traditions and days that are centuries old, but American style Halloween is pushing them away.
It is in Brazil for the last ~5 years. And we don't even have Thanksgiving here. It is just one more made up date to create advertising campaigns.
Started as a shy e-commerce thing here. Then became a huge e-commerce thing. Then a huge all commerce thing. I am seeing "Black Friday" promotions everywhere, from financial services to beauty treatments.
A common joke here is that it is "Black Fraud - pay 50% of the double of the price"[0]
Because a lot of shops just smoothly increase their prices in the previous weeks, so when the date arrives, they can advertise "50% off discounts". To the point that there are websites monitoring this kind of fraud and official agencies inspecting and fining companies.
[0] The pun "Black Friday" works in Portuguese too, as shops use the original term in English and fraud is "fraude" in Portuguese.
Doesn't the same thing occur in the US? I was under the impression it's always been set up so that there isn't any actual deals, just the appearance of it.
It's also an opportunity to drop stock you don't want before the end of Q4.
My impression (about the retail version, say 15-20 years ago) was that it was companies offloading stock they wanted off their books at something of a discount ahead of the holiday season, since it let the companies close out their books for the year and customers get a little bit more for the holidays. It was a win-win in a lot of ways.
Then the disgusting marketing/accounting shenanigans took hold and made it shitty, particularly the online version. It's still possible to find genuine deals, mostly because retailers do still have stock they want to offload.
That happens to some extent but many jurisdictions have laws regulating the practice of increasing prices just to cut them as an advertised discount. For national retailers who do nationwide campaigns, the hassle of structuring deals in a way that is compliant with all state and local laws would be significant.
There are real deals too, but often with a catch "last year's flagship model for 50% off", or "buy x and get a $100 gift card to spend with us next year", etc. And for brick and mortar stores, even a decent discount may still be more than shopping online, especially considering out of state online stores don't charge sales tax.
It's spreading. Five years ago I was in Paraguay and they were having Black Friday sales. They didn't even translate the name into Spanish or Portuguese despite most of the customers being from Brazil and Argentina. Everyone just knew what those English words meant for shopping.
Black Friday is a thing even in China -- just look at major online retailers (AliExpress and similar). Though outside USA it has nothing to do with Thanksgiving day, elsewhere it's just another way to boost sales.
This year it's a thing in France too apparently, or at least some vendors are pushing it. See for instance amazon.fr's frontpage or even the local fnac.com. When I saw "black friday" on their landing page I thought I had gone on the american version by accident. It's odd because Thanksgiving is only something you see in American sitcoms over here.
American cultural imperialism is really impressive. I can understand why Halloween gets more and more popular over here since it's a fun holiday for kids but I can't figure out how black friday makes any sense when you don't celebrate Thanksgiving. I also don't understand why they hope to make "black friday" a positive brand when the only thing I associate it with is videos of Americans trampling each other to get cheap appliances.
Amazon is indeed actively pushing "Black Friday", and Fnac is playing catchup. But I don't know if anyone in France is aware that "Black Friday" means "discount"...?
Also, discount days are regulated in France (called "les soldes"); normally you can't have a discount day any time you want, you have to apply for authorization.
I sell on Amazon in Europe for the first time this year (started in January); I don't do discounts but am anxious to see if sales will rise this week-end.
It's amusing that it means that we now effectively have a "celebration" whose only purpose and justification is buying stuff. I can't think of an equivalent.
> Also, discount days are regulated in France (called "les soldes"); normally you can't have a discount day any time you want, you have to apply for authorization.
I don't have an answer for this particular thing, but will remind you that any bureaucracy tends to expand. So, what's the (state's bureaucracy) rationale to put itself at a place of control? Do they even need one?
Portugal has the same rule (and before you couldn't have them at all except in two periods in the year defined by law). The reasoning is to protect small shops from large retailers, by preventing them from forcing unplanned price wars.
Similarly, for many years the very large retailers couldn't open on Sunday afternoons, although that restriction mostly benefited the large chains of medium-sized shops, since it was based on the size of the shop rather than the company.
Because American retailers fare so much better these days and it's clearly powering the US economy[0]. Because preventing small retailer from being starved by big chains is what's sinking the french economy. Because clearly I can tell from your comment that you spent a lot of time investigating these regulations and their impact on the french economy.
Small stores and local retail are dying out due to the cheapness, convenience, and selection of online retail. As a consumer, the online stores are more convenient and save me money. If a local store can't offer anything preferable to some faceless multinational, what is it really doing other than giving some of my money to someone who doesn't add any value?
It was just my knee-jerk reaction to the insightless french-bashing comment. I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. Mall culture was never as prevalent in Europe as it is in the US so it's hard to compare directly.
It is essentially an anti predatory pricing law. You have some of these in the US too.
The general rule is that you are not allowed to sell at a loss. There are, however, exceptions, and "soldes" are one of these exceptions.
It also means that as long as they are not selling at a loss, you are free to discount as much as you want at any time you want. However, there is a second factor : false advertising. If you make discount outside the context of "soldes" you can't call them "soldes".
Just a few things I wanted to point out as a former Parisian. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. Usually, if work allows it, everyone takes the Friday off as well. The French are familiar with this, "le pont" unofficial holiday. This friday is almost exactly 1 month before Christmas. Black Friday serves as a signal that Christmas shopping begins now.
It didn't exist until a few years ago, much like Halloween. Then companies discovered that they are good ways to sell more stuff and suddenly we got Halloween first, then Black Friday. We're about to get our first Starbucks shop, in Milan (2019?).
To be fair, it's not only marketing. Ideas move by themselves.
Since Amazon & others started to advertise it heavily. But it's not like people go crazy like in the US. It's more or less yet another random excuse to sell stuff. I would say that it's still mostly an online thing.
In Sweden we have Black Friday now even though we don’t have thanksgiving.
But given that we somehow started to carve pumpkins etc in recent years, I don’t doubt that we’ll have turkey and annoying uncles at thanksgiving within just a few years.
Right now Thanksgiving is only a Black Friday sale and nothing else.
A few others from the past decade which were covered by the country's few remaining serious labor journalists. Some were also written about in books [1] or documented in film [2].
2008: Puerto Rico teachers strike.
2008: Stella D'Oro strike.
2011: Occupy Oakland and unions shut down the port following a call for a general strike.
2012: Chicago teachers strike.
2012: Republic Windows and Doors strike and occupation.
2013: Fast food workers strike in 58 U.S. cities.
There's an exciting younger generation of labor journalists, and a good way to keep tabs on what they are covering is through Dissent's podcast Belabored (feed at [3]).
And notably, scripts from that time really are problematic (somewhat crappy dialogues, weak storylines), and I think some shows even got postponed or cancelled.
Famously one of the Michel Bay transformers movies are from that time... honestly I think the strike was too short to make a systematic shift, movie revenues are as a rule highly variable from film to film but the market average I suspect moves relatively slowly.
A previous strike closer to 2000 was the birth of "reality television". The original Survivor was pitched on the basis of its immunity to a looming writers strike.
That strike led to the rise of reality TV. Which led to some people becoming reality TV celebrities. Which led to one of them running for president of the U.S.
It seems that the only unions with enough clout to strike are public workers. I've seen teachers strike or threaten to strike from to time. In the private sector, the potential win isn't worth the risk, since long term benefits are mostly off the table already.
Depends. Also workers in huge organizations like GM, Amazon etc. In the UK Amazon makes deliveries using contractors who barely have time to eat or go to the toilet. They can't go on strike since they're not employees.
The Verizon strikers would regularly blast air horns outside my home and office. Extremely annoying, and apparently legal. Made me lose my sympathy for them real quick.
> where unions realize that competitiveness trumps wages.
It seems like you’re sneaking an assertion in there. Can you clarify your point a bit? What is the relationship between competition and wages, and why is one better than the other for unions?
Well if a company cannot compete because wages are too high then the company goes under and jobs are gone.
Germany is a good example of this, they have a ton of unions and lots of production but the unions understand that competition is key to survival so there are very few strikes.
I live in Southern Europe, and our Volkswagen factory also has had much fewer strikes or other union protests, with workers voluntarily accepting temporary wage cuts and such.
I suggest you look into the differences in the management of companies of those countries rather than the unions.
Germany has a modern welfare system. When demand goes down, salaries go down. So the state welfare system makes up the difference.
German unions also have a seat at the board. Unlike most board run companies a decision isn't made without input from the union. So yes, there few strikes in Germany because labor and management actually behave like adults.
I wonder where the money for the difference comes from? Taxes. Also German economy is pretty solid since they're a net exporter at the expense of the rest of the EU. This modern welfare system wouldn't work in France, let alone Southern Europe.
Yes it comes from taxes, where else. There is no reason German union rules wouldn't work elsewhere. But I believe other companies simply do not want it. They want to delegate to the workers what they want with little feedback. German companies take worker feedback into the cost and rate of production. Therefor, no one is surprised. Workers no what they are expected to produce and management knows what to expect from labor.
This is why Walmart has utterly failed to expand into Germany. They thought they could take their abusive worker policies into Germany and when that didn't work they pulled out.
Italy has the same mechanism (it's called Cassa integrazione guadagni). It is sometimes abused for companies that ought to have gone bankrupt decades ago, but Italy has decent welfare policies and worker rights policies, especially compared to the US.
The German works-council system is exceptional, though, and it's a key part of making that work. There has to be trust in the other direction. Trust that accepting a competitive pay deal won't just immediately result in more executive pay, payouts to shareholders, or the factory being closed anyway.
It's not directly comparable, as in Germany the workers have much more power in companies to start with. You need fewer strikes if your representatives in the company board can affect the decisions before they are announced.
This needs to be backed up by data. Depends on how politics work between workers and companies. In Italy there is no system like the German Work Council inside companies, thus strikes happen more often (the negotiations are sometimes more confrontational.) But I wouldn't generalize from this.
Neoliberalism has tried to structure the economy in order to render strikes impossible by guaranteeing that they can't cause any real inconvenience.
The "sharing economy" is merely the next generation of that: there's no workplace to picket and a "flexible" supply of labour willing to cross the picket anyway.
I've heard about this too. A member of the IWW, also a Deliveroo rider, told us about how in his region fellow riders reported people for unionising. A manager fired them. After protests, Deliveroo fired the manager responsible for firing people for unionising. I still think that there is a strong anti-union undercurrent in the """sharing""" economy.
> Neoliberalism has tried to structure the economy in order to render strikes impossible by guaranteeing that they can't cause any real inconvenience.
There's also a general message carried by the medias and politicians that neoliberalism is the only possible solution. People are discouraged to go on strike (or even to vote for alternative parties) even when they see their wages and their social benefits declining. They feel that the medias may be right after all, and even if they aren't, there's not much to do anyway.
Which is why some people in the UK hate the NHS so much, purely on ideological grounds, as it is an example of a popular, avowedly socialist, organisation that does work.
Strikers in US media are often belittled. Think back to the Occupy Movement.
The banks were bailed out, none of those people who caused so much misery were ever put in jail, and the media belittled Occupy as being directionless and pointless. The protest was huge, stretching across cities and countries, but there was never any accountability for the banksters. It shows again as the Equifax execs were cleared of insider trading, when they were obviously insider trading.
When I was in London a few years ago, there was a massive tube strike. The train drivers were belittled in the media with reports claiming they made over 55k GBP a year, more than many nurses. They neglected to mention the new night train program would have meant long 7 to 14 week night shifts for every tube driver. The city was voted in on night trains, but had no money to fund them. So the blame gets passed all the way down to the tube drivers.
That's not entirely true. The strike was over the fact that if not enough drivers _volunteered_ to do the night shifts, TFL could assign non volunteers. They would still be compensated for the work hours being particularly antisocial.
It is also true that Tube drivers are well paid and yes that does impact the levels of sympathy available to them. The change was absolutely funded - just not as well as the union would like.
In essence, however, tube drivers having veto rights over being scheduled to work nights presents an opportunity to cause shortages and disruption without any ramifications or declaration of strike etc. It was a giant liability for TFL to accept.
> Tube drivers are well paid and yes that does impact the levels of sympathy available to them.
£55k isn't that well paid for people who have to live in or near London. Not if you consider it the kind of job where you should be able to afford luxuries like a family, a car, a mortgage, saving for retirement etc. It probably does sound like a lot to people who live outside London and / or aren't considering those things.
This really isn't true and I really wish this myth would stop. Sure, if you go into the financial sector or find a startup where they don't know their arse from their elbow about software workers, you can dupe them into giving you more money. But 55k in London is a good wage for a software developer and you're definitely not looking at that if you're mid-level and working for a regular company.
Source: I've lived and worked (and continue to do so) as a software developer, technical lead and CTO in London and have been in several different sectors.
Oh, 55k GBP is a nice salary by absolute standards, but not for software developers in London.
Yes, you can see people working for so little. But why leave money on the table?
> Sure, if you go into the financial sector or find a startup where they don't know their arse from their elbow about software workers, you can dupe them into giving you more money.
Yes, obviously. Why wouldn't you? If some sectors have more money than sense, that's an opportunity--not a problem.
(I can see that there are reasons to take a lower salary in return for a job you really like; but then you don't get to complain about low pay.)
Source: I've lived and worked in Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), Singapore, Sydney, London in various roles. Mostly in big tech and finance.
And, yes, if you look at Glassdoor you can find the numbers you cited. In my experience Glassdoor seems to be systematically lower than the numbers I get from my own experience and asking friends and coworkers.
(But I might just be living the charmed life that people live who have enough sense to negotiate salaries on job offers?)
Care to explain how 55k GBP (60k EUR) can be a good wage, when the average new grad software developer in Germany makes like 50k EUR? And the cost of living is what, half or less than what it is in London?
Less taxes in the UK means higher take home from the 55k than you would have in germany. And you have to factor in that the 55 figure is probably from a time where GBP to EUR was still 1.4:1. Consider that 55k GBP might have been ~4.5k EUR/mo take home not too long ago vs ~2.5k EUR/mo take home from 50k EUR in germany. Still shitty, but not as shitty as it seems now.
EDIT: Also, using current exchange rates, the cost of living in one of the larger cities (Berlin, Munich, etc) in germany isnt that much lower compared to London anymore.
OTOH, they have worse health prospects than most software engineers and they mostly have contractual requirements to live within x miles of the depot they're based out of.
The new tube stock is designed for it to be retrofitted, but replacing all of the signalling equipment is expensive (and likely to require some closures, both of segments of the line being upgraded and of the whole line).
The subsurface lines have interworking with normal mainline services, in some places sharing platforms with them, which makes fitting platform-edge doors very difficult if not impossible.
It's rolling in slowly. Many London lines are automated. Trains in Singapore are all automated and rarely ever have drivers. London will get to that point after they replace the existing train stock.
What's currently happening in London is the sub-surface lines are GoA 1 (i.e., "a train system with signals") and are moving to GoA 2 (i.e., "the train drives itself from station to station unless the driver intervenes").
The new deep-level stock (i.e., New Tube for London) is specified to be able to be retrofitted with GoA 4 equipment (i.e., "there are no staff on the train, driver, attendant, or otherwise"), but will start out as GoA 2 (Victoria, Central, Northern, and Jubilee lines are already fitted and run as such with their existing stock).
Personally I would say a tube driver is just as entitled to a decent life as an average software developer but I realize this may be the wrong audience for that argument.
In an ideal world we'd all have ponies, but in reality there's still scarcity so we have to ration resources one way or another. (And then whatever rationing system we use interacts with human incentives and lots of other systems.)
I'm not sure it does. I can't think of a reasonable definition whereby I consider an average software developer to be more entitled to a decent life than a tube driver.
And why should a software engineer in a comfy desk job be entitled to a higher wage then a tube worker?
All the software engineers in London could quit tomorrow, and life would largely go on. All the tube workers could quit tomorrow, and the city would quickly grind to a halt.
Possibly because becoming a software engineer often takes years of schooling, requires a level of aptitude that puts it out of reach for many people, and then requires continuous additional effort to keep up with the field. If this sort of thing is not compensated for more highly than low skill jobs, much fewer people would do it. Of course this argument breaks down if being a tube driver takes as much intelligence, motivation, and education as a software engineer. I don't have experience in that field. But it does seem to me that if you hired a team of software engineers for a few years you could develop a system that would not require tube drivers to exist at all. Then the city wouldn't have to worry about grinding to a halt if anyone quits.
But basically having higher wages for jobs that are harder to fill, or are more important to have highly qualified people in them, seems to be a system that works pretty well. Paying everyone the same wage seems to be a system that has largely failed anywhere it has been tried.
I think the Occupy Movement is a poor comparison because that was a protest, not a strike. And I don't recall protesters in the Occupy Movement being belittled.
I agree that labourers may often get unfairly blamed when things go wrong. Corporate overlords can be also very harsh and unfair.
But it is difficult to differentiate between unions that have valid claims and unions that are just riding the gravy train with an iron grip and not adding value. These are very muddy waters, and truth is often hard to find.
The Occupy movement was hardly universally attacked or belittled by the media. To say so is a strange interpretation of history. Maybe people are remembering the end when the movement fizzled out and critiqued for it's ultimate 'directionless' and lack of specific objectives. But Occupy was very much rah-rah'd by the press and various mainstream media venues in the early days. Or at the minimum not maligned.
The critiques that did come were almost always around the process, the act of camping out and blocking public areas, but the movement itself against Wall St was very popular during the peak of the recession.
And it was a populist movement regardless. With all the highs/lows that type of movement brings.
It's failure to bring meaningful change had little to do with the media, right-wing/tea-party, or older democrats attacking it.
The issues being protested were very complex and deeply deeply ingrained in the current US political crony economic establishment. And the democrat administration at the time did little to affect change despite this popular support, besides some token efforts. And despite the rhetoric of the democratic party being a counterbalance against the rich they largely continued (and sometimes incentivized) the status quo in the finance world. A mere temporary speed block and back to business as usual.
Which had repercussions long after including up to the latest election. It was used by the right to feed off of the mistrust people had with Hillary (and the Obama crew she inherited) with regards to their appeasement of bankers. Particularly with how the republicans hammered home her connections to Goldman Sachs (et al). Not that the right was any better in regards to cronyism, clearly, but the point is that it hit a nerve among Americans which was a legacy of cynicism and bitterness following the recession and Occupy movements.
The occupy movement - you mean the one where there were mass rapes within the encampments? Where the average protestor wouldn't know equity from stock options.
This is my recollection as well. I tried to follow it relatively closely. It was a laundry list of demands and all a bit pie in the sky. There was no specific a,b,c policy actions being requested in order to solve a single linked problem. The leaderless nature of the business made it rather toothless.
What was profoundly misunderstood by the Occupiers was that they had no leverage to negotiate with. Their sole power was being visible. That doesn't get much in the way of negotiations.
The thing that most bothered me about OWS was the disproportionate response by the police and miscellaneous conservative talking heads. Having a camp of protesters is simply something to not be bothered about except as a public health question. It's just not that big of a deal.
All that said, you can unpack the OWS complaints and produce some root causes that might be reasonably addressed. I'm given to understand that the OWS experience produced a network that in 2016 linked with Bernie Sanders' campaign, which was considerably more grounded compared to Occupy.
Occupy was the reverse of the strike -- it wasn't a bunch of workers refusing to work, it was a bunch of unemployed people protesting the unavailability of work.
Well, TBH in italy we have too much strikes. This is not the case but in public transportation is a common thing that happens recurrently only mondays or fridays. The motivitaion are pages of nonsense printed to just justify long weekends.
It's a still primarily an American thing, however a lot of (mostly) online retailers such as amazon have started to have "Black Friday Sales", "Cyber Monday Week", etc.
I'm not sure how it is in the US but at least in Germany the offers and deals are pretty bad and/or not interesting - especially on amazon.
The biggest "cultural hegemony" is basically capitalism, though.
Companies have all the interest in having such events adopted locally, since it translates in more sales for them.
But yes, Halloween and Black Friday rank among the more recent and successful American imports in EU, just a few years ago they were virtually unknown.
A bunch of companies are desperately trying to make it a thing here in Denmark, as well. By the looks of it, they jack up their prices slightly about a month in advance, and then offer crappy 20-30% "rebates" on Black Friday.
Luckily, that isn't an issue here in Denmark. Not yet, at least.
This year, I am looking to see if a very specific configuration of laptop goes on sale on a local refurb dealer, and if it's not exactly what I want at a good (ie. heavily reduced) price, it's #buynothingday for me again this year.
This is why camelcamelcamel is awesome. You can see the price graph over time for each amazon product to see if it actually a good deal. I've been using it all morning and have bought a few things already.
Happy to hear workers are standing up for themselves. The anti-union FUD campaign in the US has contributed significantly to the erosion of middle class wages over the past 50 years (check out Thomas Piketty's work if you're curious about this).
It’s not FUD when you literally have unions such as ones for police who fight tooth and nail to keep bad employees working there. Sure, that’s what a union is supposed to do, but there needs to be a line, and no one wants to define it.
It's still FUD, it just means some unions are corrupt. Or maybe more whataboutism.
Imagine if we all (and not just the left) talked about companies the same way we talk about unions, using the countless examples of managerial abuse, wage theft etc. as examples. Would you say that would be reasonable?
And preemptively, this is not a "both sides" question either. Everything is grey, but there are shades of grey. And while neither unions nor companies are perfect, both are at the same time vital to how things work right now and not above criticism. They both are definitely preferable to 1820s style enterprises for example, but worse than the Culture.
Free rider problem. Same as “well, if you want government and society, pay taxes. If not, go ahead and opt out.”
Unions are only as good as their governance and oversight. Unions can be good, and work in partnership with management, but it takes time and effort. There is no one click button or app for collective protection of worker rights.
Instead of doing that I am just going to oppose all unions everywhere and try and prevent them from getting any power at all.
Why? Because as soon as they get a foothold, it is done. Over. Can't get rid of them. There are literally rules where they can fire you for trying to end the union.
If it weren't for attitudes like yours, I wouldn't be opposing unions. But your attitude DOES exist, so my only option is all out war.
Fortunately, the rest of my industry (tech) agrees with me and does not support unions. And fortunately, union support is going down massively all across the US.
>You are protected by law in all 50 states from being fired from your job for not joining a union. You can be only liable for no more than the requirement to pay either union dues or a reduced amount to work in an agency shop. If you refuse to join the union and refuse to pay the required dues, then you can be fired.
Because it doesn't work like that, you can't deny the benefits, the way they work (in Aus, it will be similar elsewhere) is with EBA (Enterprise Bargaining Agreements). Basically, the union will go into talks with companies, agree on conditions and then they will be spread out as an effective handshake rule across the industry. The union act as mitigators between businesses and workers, which pretty much changes the entire industry. So you can't really opt out. Unless of course you go and work for companies who don't sign the EBA's, and having worked in Construction before, the majority of these companies have malicious reasons for not signing, and you wouldn't want to work for them. I've seen a handful of people try to not pay dues, and it's pretty much always because they just don't want to pay money, whilst still pulling the benefits.
> So you can't really opt out. Unless of course you go and work for companies who don't sign the EBA
Actually there is a better way. The better way is to do everything in your power as a worker and citizen to prevent the union from being formed in the first place. Either at YOUR company, or at any others, even if you don't work there. As well as by pushing for any law that reduces the power of unions.
A union can't force you to pay dues if they are crippled country wide.
And this has been what has been happening in the US for decades, as unions are less powerful than they have ever been.
Don't like that attitude? Well then the pro-union people shouldn't have pushed to require people to pay dues.
The fundamental problem is that the more power that unions get, the more likely they are to invade whatever industry I am in and destroy. I don't ever want to risk THAT.
And what incentive do collective groups have to do that? I struggle to understand why people would act against their own self-interests to undermine their own rights and pay. Did you know that global wage growth is being outstripped by inflation?
What good does crippling unions do? You think it's useful for large portions of the community to be on stifled wages and bad working conditions?
Unions are less powerful in the US because the US has a broken system where those with money have more votes than those with less? There is a financial interest in having the
"mere peons" on less cash because it results in a better balance sheet situation for executives and share holders, resulting in better EOY dividends and better bonuses.
I support Unions because of people like you, because for some fucking unknown reason, people like you believe that some are entitled to less because they are employed in xxxx profession or don't have xxxx degree.
The fundamental problem is that unions are REQUIRED, if there was a bigger sense of social responsibilty, people would get paid decent living wages and wouldn't be worked in horrendously dangerous conditions dealing with power brokers whose only interest is their own portfolio value.
Please, get away from the trickle down economics bullshit and come back to the real world. How much evidence of corporate malfeasance do you have to see on a daily basis before realising that protecting the rights of the 99% is not only a good economic decision, but also a humane one.
> And what incentive do collective groups have to do that?
Because we do not want the union "benefits" that aren't really benefits.
We do not want another group controlling our workplace or forcing us into horrible, one size fits all, collective bargaining agreements. We want to be allowed to negotiate for ourselves.
We do not want gigantic barriers to entry, meant only to discriminate against people who couldn't afford to buy a fancy 4 year piece of paper.
We do not want discrimination against young people (ie, seniority pay requirements) forced into our contracts. We want to be judged equally on our own merits.
We do not want to be stuck in an organization that we can basically never get rid of once it is established.
I believe that I am way better off without any union forcing me to join.
And apparently a whole lot of other people ALSO agree with me.
We believe that it is very much in the self interest of workers to prevent unions from destroying our industry with overbearing rules and regulations that prevent us from doing our job.
This is not some rare, weird, opinion that I hold. This is the MAJORITY opinion. Unions are less popular than ever, because we the workers don't want them.
> Because we do not want the union "benefits" that aren't really benefits.
"The union protects and improves Members' wages and conditions. Our successful bargaining campaigns continue to deliver fair wages and better conditions like superannuation, site allowances, redundancy pay and income protection. In the year 2000 this branch of the CFMEU won the 36 hour week, giving workers 26 paid days off a year."
Also get 5% YOY pay rises, which allows wages to stay in line with inflation instead of stagnating. You're being naive with your comments IMO, ignoring the reality of the matter and trying to pitch us into a "everyone's different and should be able to negotiate" which has been shown to be damaging. How much data do you need to see about stagnating wage growth and consistently growing executive wages to see that this "we don't need unions" argument is ignorant of the truth?
> We do not want another group controlling our workplace or forcing us into horrible, one size fits all, collective bargaining agreements. We want to be allowed to negotiate for ourselves.
You can believe what you want, you do realise that most of them don't FORCE you to join, but you will likely just be treated like a leech, which is appropriate.
Please provide some data for your claims because I'm straight up gonna say you're wrong on the majority of your points.
> We believe that it is very much in the self interest of workers to prevent unions from destroying our industry with overbearing rules and regulations that prevent us from doing our job.
This one (and a few of your other comments strike a nerve) because I think that you have the entire purpose of unions confused, unions are there to provide workers, me and you, your parents, normal non-1%ers, an opportunity to get a fairer distribution of the pie, not ALL of the pie, just what is fair. If you actually provided some concrete examples of industries where you don't think the unions should be, I could have easily pulled data up on their profits, compared it to their workers wages, and it would be a lot easier to make the point that most companies can afford to pay workers better wages, which is a win-win for everyone, the idea that if I work at McDonalds, and am an enterprising individual, and ask for a pay rise vs my other workers, is laughable, why would they bother? They've crushed dissenters, and now because of the shit conditions you work in, they'll just fire you and grab someone who doesn't ask for better conditions. It's an incentive disparity, companies have no interest in paying workers more.
Here's a good one, ITT they acknowledged that they understaff consistently and expect workers to be able to work their rest days so they can keep staffing requirements low. Then naturally, it's the workers fault when they actually take their rest days.
Man, the more I read this comment, the more I think you're just trolling.
I can't possibly be trolling if I am stating the majority opinion. Most people these days do not support unions.
5% YOY raises is very low and I would hate to be stuck in that kind of collective bargaing agreement that forced me to accept it. No, I'd rather negotiate on my own and get a much better one.
And yes, unions DO force you to join, because if you don't pay their fee, and accept their bargaining agreement, then you get fired.
If they don't want to force people to join, then I guess it shouldn't be a bad idea to pass right to work laws, that make it illegal to force workers to pay the fees under threat of being fired.
If you like unions, or other people do, then that would be fine if these union people didn't make these rules that cause people to be fired, because they disagree with your opinion on unions (which is a whole lot of people!)
This is not just 1 or 2 people. This is lots and lots of people who disagree with your opinion on how great unions are. And these people should be left alone.
But because they refuse to leave them alone, then there can be no compromise.
That's the biggest problem with union people. They can't possibly understand that people could disagree with them, and don't want their "help".
You are missing the point of unions. They aren't here for software engineers making couple hundred grand a year. They are here so that we don't have people losing limbs at work because the company was too cheap to do safety properly.
You aren't interested in the service, fine. But I'm not sure why you feel like you need to cry about unions when you aren't their target group anyway?
Not if unions get a foothold in my industry, then it won't be "fine". If that happens then they will be able to implement rules and regulations that force me to join them.
And yes, there ARE movements to get the tech industry unionized (they aren't very popular, Fortunately).
No thanks. I'm a not going to let my industry be ruined like that. I'd rather stop all of that in its tracks by making unions powerless nation wide.
They can't enter my industry and force me to join if they are powerless EVERYWHERE.
Also, if it is seriously "fine" for people who don't want their "services", then how about we implement right to work laws everywhere?
Shouldn't it be "fine" for everyone to not join them if they don't want to?
Fortunately for me, though, unions are continueing to become less powerful. So fortunately, less and less of them will be able to force people to join in the future.
I find it insulting that there are groups out there that demand my aligence, and assert that they are the ones fighting for my own interest.
I can fight for my self better on my own, thank you very much. I do not want an organization, forcing me to join them and forcing me to agree with their opinions "for my own good", because I don't know any better.
I will negotiate, and fight the capitalist class, using the ways that I feel are best, and not through a coercive organization that is only looking out for themselves.
If unions were so great, then they wouldn't need to make everyone join them. They would stand on their own merits. I do not want their "benefits".
And because unions refuse to be voluntary, my only option is supporting the anti-union movements that make them powerless nationwide. They can't force me to join if they are universally powerless.
Well you, and the pro union people can fight it their way, and I'll fight it mine.
Unfortunately for the pro-union crowd, though, they have forced me to be positioned against them, because they cannot give up on their dumb idea of trying to force everyone who disagrees to join them.
This strategy backfires massively, as the only option it leaves me is to try and make them as powerless as possible because if they are crippled nation wide then they can't force me to join under threat of being fired.
I'd love it if both sides could coexist. But until universal right to work laws exist, that protect workers from being require to join or pay dues, we'll there can be no compromise.
>
How about we change the laws so that people who support the union are free to join, and people who DON'T are free to leave?
>If unions are so great, then they should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to join them.
If you can convince enough people, you can? But if people organize against you, be a good loser. Nobody except the very hardcore is saying:
>If private property is so great, then everyone who wants to have it should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to accomodate them
to argue against private property or capitalism. But the same social contract that allows for private property can decide that if you want to have its benefits (e.g. the aforementioned private property) can recognize and protect the hard won rights of unions and workers. Stealing a bit of rhetoric, those who don't like it can go to some warlord ridden backwater, I hear there you are free to not follow any social contract if you are up to it
And this is why I will never ever support a union in my industry (tech) .
Fortunately, the rest of my industry agrees with me.
And ALSO, fortunately, union support is massively going down all across the US.
It looks like that social contract of yours is changing. Perhaps because of attitudes like yours.
I will not "be a good loser". I will oppose union efforts anywhere and everywhere, no matter what, because any power they get anywhere is a massive risk to me and my industry.
As soon as they get a foothold, they will implement rules that force me and others to join. It is safer to just stop them in their tracks before they can get even close to taking over.
And good on you, others will either agree or disagree with you. But I do wonder, why should you be allowed to stop union efforts if others aren't allowed to force you to join? And with whom would you...organize to stop union efforts?
The attitude of social contracts and not caring about people's free choice to not join unions. And thinking "oh, don't like unions, tough luck, go find another job or move to another country".
> But I do wonder, why should you be allowed to stop union efforts if others aren't allowed to force you to join?
But they ARE allowed to force me to join, under threat of being fired, in some states. So that's why.
If the US had universal right to work laws, where you could not be fired for refusing to join a union, then I wouldnt care and wouldn't bother organizing against unions.
The attitude of "screw you for standing up for your right to not join an organization" is very common among union supporters, which is the reason why I oppose them.
I organize against unions already, by supporting right to work laws, and supporting politicians who do as well, and donating to these efforts.
There are a ton of existing efforts to protect worker's rights of voluntary association, and their right to not join organizations that they don't support.
So you want to protect your free choice...by taking way the free choice of others to organize? For fear of something which does not happen because there is already a law against it?
>You are protected by law in all 50 states from being fired from your job for not joining a union. You can be only liable for no more than the requirement to pay either union dues or a reduced amount to work in an agency shop. If you refuse to join the union and refuse to pay the required dues, then you can be fired.
> So you want to protect your free choice...by taking way the free choice of others to organize
Yes. They want to do it to me, so why wouldn't I do it to them? That just puts me at a disadvantage for following rules that my opponents refuse to follow.
But "taking away their right to organize" is a bit of a stretch.
They should be able to "organize", in the colloquial sense of lobbying, talking to other people, expressing their opinion, and negotiating in groups, all they want in support of their cause.
Freedom of association, as defined in the first amendment of US Constitution, applies to them too.
And in turn, I will "organize" AGAINST their cause, as is also MY right.
Disagreeing with someone, and organizing against them, is not the same as taking away THEIR right to "organize".
And yes, you can be fired, if you refuse to pay the union required fee. That's the same thing as being forced to join. Go get your money from people who chose, of their own free will, to join.
How about we change the laws so that people who support the US Government are free to pay taxes, and people who DON'T are free to renounce their citizenship but keep their residency and protections?
Thanks for this. Every time unions are mentioned people want to turn it into a black/white issue and won't allow for shades of grey.
Unions can be great for workers. They can also fuck up markets and/or workers. What's wrong with taking the good and improving the bad for unions in the 21st century?
That's literally what 99% of the start-ups in Silicon Valley are doing in various verticals.
The black/white thinking when it comes to discussion of unions always feels like people have more of an agenda to push that being interested in any meaningful discussion.
Maybe 'not all unions' but several very large unions are responsible for some massive, fundamental problems we have today. E.g., cities are going bankrupt in large part tied to unions. I don't think it counts as FUD; even if 'not all unions', I think we have identified issues with the union structure that no one knows yet how to resolve, that will come back if unions come back.
It's like trying to argue 'not all cops'. Sure, but we still decided body cams were a good idea.
I believe we need to swing back towards unionizing. But I think there are real & legitimate concerns that haven't been fixed & aren't FUD.
Do we really want to talk about unions bankrupting cities without addressing the corporations? The corps who lobbied for free trade, which opened up the labor market to the world and required Americans to complete with 3rd world level wages?
Then, when Americans did not want to compete with rural Chinese farmers pay, those corporations abandoned the area? Leaving cities with huge infrastructure bills and a large population? None of these issue develop in a vacuum. They are complex.
How do you interpret cities going bankrupt due to collosal unfunded pension obligations? It takes two to tango- the city is party, but so is the union.
My favorite was when Twinkies employees went on strike for higher wages, which made the company go out of business. Turns out management wasn't lying when they said they couldn't afford higher wages. The problem with unions is that their interests don't necessarily line up with the company's or even the employees for that matter.
> The anti-union FUD campaign in the US has contributed significantly to the erosion of middle class wages
It's way more complicated than that, and it can't simply be dismissed as a "FUD campaign". Union members are actually disproportionately likely to support things like right-to-work laws, which unions dislike because it (more or less) means workers aren't obligated to be members if they choose not to.
Similarly, union membership rates have dropped even in states that have very union-friendly laws (like New York and Massachusetts), and unions are having less and less success at the polls, meaning non-unionized workers are rejecting the proposals to unionize their workforces (UAW elections in particular - AFL-CIO elections to a lesser extent).
This pattern isn't as simple to dismiss as "anti-union FUD", especially since it's seen among people who are already union members in closed shops.
The reasons for this have to do with the history of unionization of closed shops, and the regional economic pressures it creates.
> I think union membership rates have been dropping due to the fact that companies have been increasinly more anti union.
Contrary to popular belief, companies have incredibly little power in that regard, especially when you're talking about an already-unionized closed shop (as opposed to a company that wants to prevent its workers from unionizing in the first place). Legally and practically, it's incredibly difficult even for union members to decertify or deauthorize their union, and companies are basically forbidden from taking any part in that process. The NLRB is incredibly strict on this; both the NLRB and the courts bias heavily in favor of unions if there's any evidence that companies are seen to be interfering whatsoever in the process.
But beyond this, it's not as simple as "companies have been increasingly more anti-union" because this increaseingly anti-union sentiment comes from the union members. We know this from direct public polling, from their actions on the ballot at union elections, from their actions at the polling booth in government elections, and from what we can see of internal politics with union governance.
To put it another way: if it were easier for union members to decertify or deauthorize their union without getting fired[0], we'd probably see these elections happening more often (both successful and unsuccessful ones). Instead, union members support laws which allow them to bypass this process.
(Note that, after accounting for race, union members overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in the last two election cycles, despite the unions themselves endorsing union-friendly Democrats).
[0] Even if they manage not to get fired in the process - which is totally legal for a union to do, unlike a company firing an employee for supporting a union - the NLRB can overrule the results of the decertification or deauthorization election, which invalidates the whole process.
You're thinking of union shops, not closed shops. Union shops are nominally illegal, but in practice, many large unionized workplaces are effectively union shops, because the NLRB chooses to enforce a very narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court case that they lost.
> union members overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in the last two election cycles
There's a lot that's skewed in your comments, but that's just flat out wrong. Union households voted for Clinton over Trump by 8%. That's less than Democrats often get, but the idea that union members prefer Republicans is divorced from reality.
That is one race, and one that isn't particularly relevant to Union interests in contrast to local elections. What are the numbers on the other hundreds of races?
> Union members are actually disproportionately likely to support things like right-to-work laws, which unions dislike because it (more or less) means workers aren't obligated to be members if they choose not to.
Right-to-work laws are like prop 13 in California: sounds good on the surface, but hidden terrible impact.
On the surface, "I should be able to choose whether or not I join a union" makes sense, Americans love freedom and choice. But of course, in practice people who choose not to join a union get to freeload: they get most of the benefit of the union in how it informs a company's general policies and culture about workers, but don't have to pay any fees. And like most instances of the freeloader problem, the result is the responsible entity getting starved, as everyone wants the others to be the ones paying for the benefits.
> But of course, in practice people who choose not to join a union get to freeload: they get most of the benefit of the union in how it informs a company's general policies and culture about workers, but don't have to pay any fees
It doesn't sounds like they want any of those so-called benefits. As explained below, the data suggests that if members could feasibly decertify or deauthorize their unions entirely, they would.
Remember that, nationwide, only 7% of union members ever cast a vote in favor of their union. That means less than 7% voted against it, and the remainder never had an opportunity to vote at all.
It's not surprising that, in the absence of a safe way to decertify or deauthorize, some portion of the 86+% who never had the opportunity to vote supports laws that give them the next-best thing. (It's not just right-to-work laws, by the way, though that's the most frequently discussed at the national scale and therefore the most frequently polled).
> That means less than 7% voted against it, and the remainder never had an opportunity to vote at all.
I mean, most employer policies never get any kind of vote from any subset of the employees, so I'm not sure why I should be so outraged about this one in particular when it seems to be usually to workers' benefit.
They are, just not directly, because the direct process for decertification or deauthorization is both highly risky (if caught, they could lose their jobs), and also pretty ineffective (the NLRB has a habit of overturning election results, rendering the whole process moot.
So, they use other tactics - hence the increasing support from union members for anti-union lawmakers. Political pundits often write about this as a "paradox" of union members voting "against their own interests", but it's actually pretty straightforward once you remember that union members are individuals who may or may not actually support the interests of the union that they belong to.
I absolutely agree free riders are a problem with unions.
But that doesn't mean right to work laws shouldn't exist. Maybe it just means unions shouldn't exist.
I mean, if your entire business model is flawed, should the world change around your business model?
This is more of a devil's advocate position, as I'm not particularly anti-union, but I personally have zero desire to work in a union or be forced to be in one.
I refuse to say that unions have no place in the world, or have no place in certain industries, or didn't have a place in the past. I'm rather neutral on a lot of it, but the fact is the problem is inherent in the union itself.
Right to work laws are an intrusion on the free market intended to subvert unions. I'm okay with regulations on the market as long as there's a good reason, but what exactly is the compelling public interest there in blocking this one type of employment contract clause?
Like, employers can require you to do all kinds of things in a contract: wear certain types of clothes, tell you when and where to show up for work, how much you're paid, etc. We regulate some things like health and safety codes because the regulations themselves are clearly in the best interest of the workforce, but who do right-to-work laws ultimately serve?
"[..] if your entire business model is flawed [..]"
Unions go a little deep than the concept of "business model"
"[..] I personally have zero desire to work in a union or be forced to be in one."
I'm going to speculate that's only because you have good working conditions.
"unions [..] have a place in the past"
That's a common opinion. What have changed from the past?
Because the laws of capitalism tell us that if any profit or benefit goes to the worker is because there is no way around it. Sometimes is a good idea look back to history. For instance the eight hour working day:
" In 1919 in Barcelona, Catalonia, after a 44-day general strike with over 100,000 participants had effectively crippled the Catalan economy, the Government settled the strike by granting all the striking workers demands that included an eight-hour day, union recognition, and the rehiring of fired workers."
""[..] I personally have zero desire to work in a union or be forced to be in one."
I'm going to speculate that's only because you have good working conditions."
I have noticed (personal anecdote here so yeah not great) that a large majority of people that I know against unions have never worked in dangerous fields, office workers are ridiculously ignorant as to the workplace dangers of many unionised industries.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of your arguments. I have good working conditions, yes. My wife has good working conditions; she's forced to be in a union at her current job, but in previous jobs doing the same work, she was not. She doesn't like them, either, but again, we're both professionals.
However, your reply is structured around trying to convince me that I should be pro-union rather than ambivalent, and does not address the issue at hand; how to square "right to work" laws and the free rider problem with unions.
If corporations are allowed to have exclusivity contracts with other corporations, why shouldn't they also be able to have exclusivity contracts with unions?
> People who don't join a union still have to pay union fees?
Actually... yes. Maintenance-of-dues and other contract stipulations can mean that all members of a bargaining unit are required to pay dues fees, even if they aren't members of the union or covered by the union contracts. So, they're required to pay fees to the union so that the union can represent other people, not them, oftentimes against their own interests.
It's particularly common for teachers and other skilled, low-paying jobs.
>This pattern isn't as simple to dismiss as "anti-union FUD", especially since it's seen among people who are already union members in closed shops.
You act as though anti-union FUD can't affect members. That's kind of ridiculous... if it didn't affect MEMBERS as well as non-members, what would be the point?
If I'm a less-educated union member who has no concept of what life was like before unions, and constantly hear that unions just take my money while providing no benefit, I'm probably likely to be swayed. What's the union going to do? Tell me about how 50 years ago companies would literally put my life at risk because there was no downside for them. And then the people financing the anti-union movement are spewing "Well that was 50 years ago, that would NEVER happen again" - all while doing everything they can to drive up hours, drive down safety, and insulate themselves from any responsibility RE: workman's comp.
For the average joe who just wants to go to work and get a paycheck, the bigger picture is often lost.
> You act as though anti-union FUD can't affect members. That's kind of ridiculous... if it didn't affect MEMBERS as well as non-members, what would be the point? If I'm a less-educated union member who has no concept of what life was like before unions, and constantly hear that unions just take my money while providing no benefit, I'm probably likely to be swayed. What's the union going to do? Tell me about how 50 years ago companies would literally put my life at risk because there was no downside for them. And then the people financing the anti-union movement are spewing "Well that was 50 years ago, that would NEVER happen again" - all while doing everything they can to drive up hours, drive down safety, and insulate themselves from any responsibility RE: workman's comp. For the average joe who just wants to go to work and get a paycheck, the bigger picture is often lost.
Honestly, it's rather patronizing to say that union members who disapprove of their union and want to decertify or deauthorize it must either be ignorant or under the influence of external propaganda or FUD. Maybe they have access to information you don't? Or maybe they just have a different set of values from you? Maybe they hold different priorities from what you hold? Maybe they should be assumed to have their own agency?
I'm not going to say that democracy is infallible - in fact, I'm usually the first to point out the exact opposite. But "they don't know what's best for them the way I do" is a pretty dangerous line of reasoning to start heading down.
>Honestly, it's rather patronizing to say that union members who disapprove of their union and want to decertify or deauthorize it must either be ignorant or under the influence of external propaganda or FUD.
Is it patronizing to say that workers who respond to threats like this:
might not be making the best risk/reward trade off?
The employer is hardly going to tell you if they're making an empty threat and the prospect of losing your job because they pulled the nuclear option is probably quite terrifying.
Democracy is fine and well (caveats apply etc.) but the crux of the OPs comment is the "50 years of anti-union FUD". Maybe union workers indeed have a different set of values and priorities, which prefers the weakening/dismantling of unionized labor. Or maybe they were swayed by decades of a propaganda war waged by american corporations against unions, organized labor or anything that could be somehow be viewed as anti-corporatist.
I think discounting that possibility entirely is also a bit dangerous and possibly even simplistic/naive.
>I'm not going to say that democracy is infallible - in fact, I'm usually the first to point out the exact opposite. But "they don't know what's best for them the way I do" is a pretty dangerous line of reasoning to start heading down.
I guess it's a good thing I never said any of the words you both put in my mouth and "quoted". Not once did I say I know what's best for them. Not once did I say they couldn't make decisions for themselves. What I DID say is that it's ridiculous to pretend that propaganda doesn't affect people IN unions. Which is EXACTLY what you implied.
Your words were dismissive of union members whose opinions differ than your own (they're less educated and missing the bigger picture, incapable of evaluating anti-union FUD on their own).
Don't be disingenuous, "they don't know what's best for them the way I do" is a very fair representation of your words. Maybe you do? If you're going to take that position, own it.
It's easy to read tw04's original comment and focus entirely on the "less educated" part, but tw04's point still stands without that — union workers can and will be affected by opposition arguments, and therefore we can't ignore that when analyzing declines in union membership.
In my opinion what's disingenuous is to ignore the main point in favor of picking some nit.
If we're going to be so open-minded about not knowing what's best for a worker, recognizing that they have their own agency and so forth, then while we're at it, why don't we also admit that we don't know what they're thinking, or why they supported or opposed this or that? Meaning we have no idea what information they based their decision on, or whether that information included disinformation or a FUD campaign.
>For the average joe who just wants to go to work and get a paycheck, the bigger picture is often lost.
Isn't it possible the armchair talking heads like us are the ones missing the bigger picture and the actual workers are the ones who actually get it?
Let's consider the Boeing workers in South Carolina:
- 2009-09 74% of employees vote against the union and decertify it[1]
- 2009-10 Boeing breaks ground on new South Carolina plant to build 787 airplanes[2]
- 2017-02 again, 74% of employees vote against IAM union representation[3]
The "uncertainty" and "doubt" in "FUD"? The South Carolina workers are quite certain and have no doubt that in 2009, Seattle lost the extra 787 assembly work and it was given to SC workers without the union.
It's not irrational that SC workers fear the loss of jobs in Seattle could happen to them. The upcoming 797[4] model is in the works. It's not irrational for South Carolina workers to think that unionizing for better wages will move that 797 production elsewhere. (E.g. Seattle may end up losing all of the 787 production.[5])
>Well that was 50 years ago,
Well, the struggle & benefits gained 50 years ago is an abstraction. The events of 2009 are very fresh and real in the minds of workers.
Voting "YES" for a union doesn't necessarily mean you get a wage increase. It means (1) you might get a wage increase or (2) you might have no job.
How does a worker properly weigh those possible outcomes?
Yes, but nothing in this speaks to the value of unions. It speaks volumes to the US legal climate allowing massive corporations to subtly coarse employees to vote against their economic interests. Basically what you're describing is "If you'll ask for more rights or better compensation, we'll close down this factory and move it somewhere where people will just say Thank You and shut the hell up". I think that phrase is overused, but this is one of the most obvious examples of Race to the Bottom ever.
>The "uncertainty" and "doubt" in "FUD"? The South Carolina workers are quite certain and have no doubt that Seattle lost the extra 787 assembly work and it was given to SC workers without the union.
That's where a properly functioning government steps in and stops it. OF COURSE private companies are going to break a union any way possible if the government isn't there to step in. If the US military said "you close that plant, all of our contracts are going to Airbus", exactly how many seconds do you think it would take the CEO of Boeing to change his mind?
Of course, unionising doesn't necessarily mean asking for higher wages - that's one of a number of things unions traditionally do. It can also be used to bargain for increased safety, increased job security (making it harder/more expensive to fire people), better-overseen disciplinary procedures, and provides the guarantee that there'll be someone at the table with any employee when the company starts picking on them.
The idea that unions can only be used to bargain for wages is propaganda in its own right.
This happens because unions in the US are fragmented. In countries with bigger unions (e.g. France, Italy) those unions act at national level. This means that moving the assembly line from Seattle to South Carolina would simply move the strikes from one place to another.
The underlying idea is that the behavior of the S.C. is just a race to the bottom and in the same way that those jobs arrived they will be gone one day once another plant accept even worse wages.
The downside is that if the union's approach is too strict, those jobs may simply disappear because it is not feasible to pay those workers more, or it may be cheaper to move those job abroad and import the resulting products.
This also requires workers to struggle and strike not for their job, but for someone else's.
(I am not saying one approach is better than the other, in fact I am usually not too fond of unions, but I am trying to explain the union's point of view)
The union in italy have been extremely damaging to the local economy in the last 20 years. You see national union goals are too distant and misaligned from workers’
For example one of the problem is that not all professions are unionized for example, so o get more profit and power the unions need to stifle innovation and steer the government only toward heavy industry to the destriment of almost every other sector
Also being national they seldom talk directly with workers and plant owners, and prefer to play their hands at the political table, often ignoring the specificity of issues.
And since their decision have national level ramification, every singe one needs months if not years to mature, implement and execute. Like, most national contracts are expired and have wages that are ridicolous by 2017 standards and base salary need to be supplemented in various, highly taxed ways, and new form of contracts are impossible to create (IT for example is hired under industrial or commerce contract, as the gategory didn’t exist at the time and there’s no reasonable way to create it now)
What a whole bunch of inaccuracies. I have no time to waste rebutting all the multiple falsehoods in this post, but I want people living in other countries know that it is filled with inaccuracies and plain falsehoods.
No way. You can’t assert that someone is lying through their teeth and then utterly fail to provide even a single counterpoint. This is equivalent to yelling “fake news”.
The parent comment might be full of lies, but I’m actually more inclined to believe it when the best you can do is call them falsehoods with no evidence or argument.
You are FUDding.
I'm an Italian living in Italy, and I 100% agree with the parent comment.
Also, I'd add that most members of Italian national unions are retired people, so unions mostly care about pensions,ending being often in contrast with younger workers interests
(for instance, keeping retirement age low, even if it's one of the lowest in the EU).
One must also consider that there's a strong divide between unionized, older workers with "permanent job" contracts, and younger workers with precarious jobs, whose issues are completely ignored by national unions.
Italy is not a model of productivity for several reasons. Reducing this problem to the union involvement of workers looks intellectually dishonest to me.
The SC Boeing plant doesn't exactly come off looking very good in the Aljazeera documentary [1] on the 787. Just having a job shouldn't necessarily be the goal...the quality of the job and the rights of the workers to advocate for the safety of workers and the public are also things the Unions have traditionally done. I don't usually advocate for or against unions...I think they make sense in some situations and less so in others, but the Boeing case doesn't seem to be a good argument against unions. Boeing prospered tremendously when working with the unions in Washington state and it seems that a lot of their recent anti-union behavior is part of a number of decisions they've made that are quite short-sighted.
All you are showing is that management has power over labor when the labor force isn't closed-shop. Management hired scabs from SC to bust the union in WA.
I don't think so. The media (the 4th estate) is now basically a mouth piece for the corporations. Noam Chompsky has written extensively on this, and the west really does not have a diverse spectrum of opinion, information, and perspective in popular, widely distributed and readily available information sources.
Media and information sources have been consolidated into a few centralised corporate ownerships that are not interested in social justice and a fair distribution of wealth. Quite the contrary, the corporate interests are simply interested in generating shareholder profits and wealth. Indeed, the directors of media companies are duty bound to generate as much profit for their respective corporations. This naturally means that the media corporations are interested in consolidating and centralising as much wealth for themselves as possible, and will cater their information and direction of opinion to achieve that end.
There are a handful of nonprofits in the journalism business, but they are small. The Nevada Independent and the Texas Tribune.
Many nonprofits educate/persuade as part of growing their membership and fund raising. Their motives are simpler and easier to figure out bias for the purpose of triangulation. This is not the same thing as journalism.
Do multiple competing unions happen in the same workplace happen in the US ? As far as I have seen, that seems fairly common in the countries where I have lived (Europe only). And are there some cross-category unions (where workers in different areas and jobs are members of the same overarching organization, which sometimes organizes nation-wide demonstrations or even strikes)?
> Do multiple competing unions happen in the same workplace happen in the US ?
No, and that's basically by law. Unions lobbied (successfully) for laws which grant them permanent, exclusive access to the bargaining unit once 50% + 1 vote in favor of it.
Pretty much the only cases where you'd have separate unions are where they're representing different types of workers altogether (ie, nurses vs janitors) or when they're not actually employed by the same organization (ie, two different sets of subcontractors).
> And are there some cross-category unions (where workers in different areas and jobs are members of the same overarching organization
Yes, in fact almost every union is affiliated with a federation like the AFL, UAW, Teamsters, etc.
This is the main problem. Unionization is a valuable tool, but a monopoly held by one union is as bad as any other monopoly. The monopolist union is infringing on the freedoms of the members who want to choose better representation.
Erosion of Middle Class "may" have started long before, but it rapidly took off after 2008. ( There are Middle Class / Level wages, but those wages dont put them in Middle Class anymore )*
The way I see it, is either Government protect their Workers and working class with benefits and wages, Like what many parts of Europe have done or they allow Union to do it.
And i know this is considered an extremely unpopular opinion in US.
* Does any one know if this middle class problem is also a thing in Germany?
Well, companies will just use more robots, fire more workets. Robots don't get unionized, they don't need health insurance or the gov't to step and protect them.
European economy is slow compared to the US due to high taxes, too much social protection and needless state meddling in the economy. If they introduce a tax on robots it will only get worse.
(of course all of those are pretty low at the moment, which may be a more general post-2008 problem)
"Too much social protection" and "high taxes" seem to me to be memes aimed at benefiting the top 1-10%, with little grounding in truth. If you look at marginal tax rates faced by median families, and compensate for the ways in which this includes things like healthcare which aren't included in the US, it's much less of a difference.
Slow as in not robust enough. It's essentially on life support since the EU crisis of 2011. The US has pretty much recovered after 2008. Euroscepticism is just a symptom of things going south just about everywhere in Europe except maybe Germany and Switzerland. Just look at the failed ECB stimulus policy with negative interest rates.
The US is at the opposite pole, meaning too little social protection. I was thinking about some kind of middle ground, like in Canada or the UK.
> Euroscepticism is just a symptom of things going south just about everywhere in Europe except maybe Germany and Switzerland. Just look at the failed ECB stimulus policy with negative interest rates.
That sounds wrong. Example: Czech rep. had much more expansive monetary stimulus policy (we printed quite a bit of money), is booming on Germany-level and yet is super eurosceptic.
Euroscepticism is just newest brand of populism in Europe. Especially after ECB stimulus Europe is getting better, "on life support" sounds like ridiculous hyperbole.
Its because of the migrant quotas that were imposed unilaterally.
Devaluing the CZK wouldn't have been possible if your country had switched to the Euro like Slovakia did.
The problem is the ECB does not want to devalue the Euro mainly because German fears of hyperinlfation. So they're trying to stimulate sluggish growth with negative interest rates. Which doesn't work. It only destroys pensions because it's esentially a tax on money.
Which part of Waitress, Bus Drivers, Cleaners, etc get Robots took over in the past 20 years? ( Not now when AI and Robots are in use, but in the past )
Yes technology was part of it, but rampant inflation or vast increase of liquidity is also another factor, and economist are still puzzled as to why wages aren't going up.
They weren't cheap enough over the last 20 years. But they took over various manufacturing sectors, from vehicles to food.
Your obvious cleaning suspects are maybe the first ones to go. Most of the floor cleaning nowadays is done by people operating some sort of cleaning vehicle. Also, most niche cleaning jobs requiring more detail won't be replaced by robots soon. Truck and bus drivers will probably go as well, maybe in 20-30 years. Until then, this sector is just going to get more regulated with electronic log books, dynamic weight checks, satellite tracking and such. Waitresses I rather doubt will go away doring my lifetime.
In economic terms, 2008 was basically yesterday. Everything I've read points to the erosion of the middle class being related to stagnant wages in real terms going back DECADES.
Yes, or 30 years ago. The curve just got a lot steeper in 2008. That is from a Global perspective, since US just export inflation to everywhere else. Basically every asset class, mainly property market has been rising much faster then wages. Yes technology has made things much more efficient, hence the much much slower price rise in food, transport, clothes. But the majority of living cost is housing, and that is a part technology has little to no effect on.
> * Does any one know if this middle class problem is also a thing in Germany?
German here.
At this point, I think it's not yet a problem comparable to the US, but there is rising (perhaps overblown, but certainly not unfounded) fear of a social decline among the middle class.
Remember, the German employment environment (I'm struggling to find a good word) is different from the US. Trades are stronger and more respected, university education is free, social systems offer more protection (but only from outright poverty, not from social decline).
So the pressures are probably not felt a sharply. But there is growing worry.
>" The anti-union FUD campaign in the US has contributed significantly to the erosion of middle class wages over the past 50 years."
That's quite a claim, do you have any data to back that up? That just sounds like another claim intended to politicize things in some binary fashion - left vs right. Which is ironic because it is this same FUD tactic that politicians use to get people to react with their gut rather than their brain. You seem to be propagating this divisive tactic.
There are many reason for a shrinking middle class in the US - loss of the manufacturing sector, an aging population, the decline in marriage rates, a more unequal income distribution and changing demographics such as an increase in racial and ethnic diversity.[1]
Also the majority of of union members are now in public sector jobs and not private sector jobs.[2]
The past 50 years has overall seen an increase in the public sector union jobs, trending slightly downward recently.
Public-sector workers have a union membership rate (34.4 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.4 percent).[3]
Unions and expensive pensions contributed significantly to the bankruptcy of General Motors. If not for a government bail out we'd barely have an American auto industry.
As unfair & objectionable as those things might be, quite a lot of companies seem to manage to pay their execs excessive salaries, provide golden parachutes, and pay out dividends without requiring government bailout.
However this hardly makes it ok to continue this sort of behaviour, the top boys manage to wrangle huge bonuses, yet when a group of workers asks for 5% per year, they're a bunch of monsters.
All car manufacturers except Ford were bailed out, and Ford is about as unionised as anybody else.
Not to mention the bank bailouts, and I don't remember banks being known for their exceptionally strong labour organisation.
The bailouts were the reaction to an exogenous shock, the recession, and have not much to say about labour politics. In fact unions have the ability to collectively negotiate wage stalls, like in Germany in the early 2000s or Scandinavia in the 80s. Which is a positive in recessions to maintain employment and liquidity.
Really we need workers to stand up against socialists and commies trying to create an over bearing regulatory environment which will crush our economy, we must prevent the FUD from socialists, communists and other detractors of a prosperous society who claim to be 'friends of the workers'.
And that as in turn led to the current "political climate." Inconic that the union busting party now have a leader they can't control and could also lead to the party imploding.
Great way to make sure in the near future Amazon will send packages to Italy from France, Austria, Slovenia or Switzerland - the countries sharing a border with them.
(Same happened - and is happening - in Germany. Staff at logistics centers started to strike (in small numbers). Totally unrelated Amazon started shipping from Poland and Czech Republic)
And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery. Also, I don't know wether Italy has sane strike laws or not, but in Germany amazon would not be allowed to just fire the strikers, and there is and was non-negligible PR fallout from the strikes.
Just to present the full picture. In the end, either there will be a price found. But I'd say good for Italian workers for making the labour market more of a market
Just to make clear, I am not on either ones side here. Striking is a right in Italy and Germany, so the employees sure can do it. But the reality is how it is as well :/
> And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery.
Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
> Also, I don't know wether Italy has sane strike laws or not, but in Germany amazon would not be allowed to just fire the strikers, and there is and was non-negligible PR fallout from the strikes.
You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
> Just to make clear, I am not on either ones side here. Striking is a right in Italy and Germany, so the employees sure can do it. But the reality is how it is as well :/
I hope I didn't come off as aggressive. While I am very much on the sides of the workers here as a self identified socialist (since I run a company I don't really get much cred from most socialist in-groups though), I try not to be blind to market realities and alternative view points
>Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
Margins matter at that scale, otherwise amazon would have never opened warehouses in Germany (they never did in switzerland AFAIK). Same thing with the "small percentage" of prime: anecdotaly, if I can't buy it with prime, I don't bother with amazon, because then I can just support some independent store. It won't affect people too much, but it is definetely not a no brainer.
>You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
True. But then you also have politics to think about...without investing, you don't have as much indirect political clout.
If anything ,while the most likely outcome is what you describe, there will be the next time the question of an "amazon tax" comes up and without being an employer, amazon will have to invest more into lobbying, which might work but fuel resentment...nothing ever stays still, unless people just accept the status quo
> Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
Incidentally, that's not exactly true. It's about a 6-8 hour drive from Berlin to the southwest by car, that would be around 10 hours or more by track, and only if you're not stuck in traffic and the place is right on the autobahn. Distance to the polish border adds an extra hour or two. This does not include any delay for handling packages in a distribution center. Next-day delivery would be very hard to achieve consistently from any location in the border-regions of Germany. There's a reason why one of the largest of Amazons German distribution centers is located in Bad Hersfeld, right here https://www.google.de/maps/place/Amazon+Logistik+GmbH+-+FRA1...
It's very much THE central point when it comes to traffic in Germany: Intersection of the A4, A7, A5/A6 giving you excellent routes into each part of Germany and close vicinity to the population centers in the Rhine and Ruhr valley
You're constructing a straw man here or maybe you're misinformed: A strike is a structured process that requires a prior vote by the union members. And people don't get paid during strike.
The people paying them must respect labor laws, which grant workers the right to strike without getting fired in civilized countries, so that the owner of the business can't exploit them without consequences.
Put it this way then: you can’t hire someone on a contract that doesn’t include the right for them to strike without being fired. Because that would be illegal.
So what they are doing is entirely within their employment contracts.
Wait, germany forces you to pay people who refuse to work? There must be some sort of miscommunication here. Why would german workers ever do their job? What if the entire region shuts down—would they still have to pay workers?
Slovenia to Turin is a 5.5 hours drive by car, 8 by truck (550 km). The Piacenza hub is very well connected to a lot of highways and as in the middle as you can be without having mountains that get in the way.
it is pretty bad. People have to take those jobs or be unemployed and get so called sanctions (=less money) by the unemployment office.
There is no general labour shortage in germany right now. 2 million foreigners are getting unemployment payments right now, which is ~1.000 Euros per month (housing included). In addition, 7 million german people are out of work.
All in all i guess we have ~10 million people waiting in lines for more work or work at all.
Good luck to them, may they obtain whatever they ask.
It's also nice to see people doing a serious strike in Italy for once, unions have done a shitty job there in recent years, but it's important to have workers protest, to guarantee a balance of power.
The majority of countries are already enacting laws/frameworks/technology that would help eventually outlaw this sort of behaviour, perhaps not explicitly, but many times implicitly. For example in Australia the govt is looking to push facial recognition cameras into public places and "only use them for serious crimes where the sentence is 3 years or more". What they fail to tell you is that in Aus, public disturbance carries something like 5 years, so now there's the very legitimate worry that facial recognition could be used on people fighting for their rights and showing support. Used the Aus example because the two countries are fairly similar law wise, and with their surveillance stances.
At some point when the company is making tons of money but is screwing its employees, the only recourse the employees have is to do damage to the company to be heard.
Amazon is already drowning in money, Bezos is the richest man on earth, even more money is not going to convince them to treat their employees better. A bit less money is not going to sink Amazon.
> The company said salaries paid to its workers were among the highest in the logistic sector and that it also provided some benefits such as private medical insurance or money to pay for training programs.
I don't understand how you can strike if this is true.
First, "the company said" doesn't make that a fact. Maybe explicit or implicit benefits are better at other companies.
Second: Why not strike even if this is true? The workers are part of why the company earns money, why not demand their share? It's market forces, after all - workers are just using their bargaining power, just as any company does every time they negotiate a wage with an employee.
The are complaining about forced overtime, night work and working sunday, all time that is paid at minimum salary.
They say they have been contracting with the company for over a year and while they are apparently open, in practize they keep taking time and implementing no changes
I will try a summary translation for you (I can't claim to be perfect, it is more union-speak than Italian :-) ):
The issues that the unions are complaining about are:
* Need for increased wages: the current wages follow the minimum required by the CCNL (national collective contract)[], but working condition are worse than usual: pauseless working shifts, higher productivity required, night shifts spread all year long with 6 days working week in during high peak perios (e.g. Christmas).
No productivity bonuses for event such as Christmas or Black Friday.
* No ability to balance work life and personal life.
The unions say that they are going on strike since for more that one years they have tried to address those issues with Amazon but the latter always delayed any kind of action.
[*] CCNL is a contract that is agreed between unions and employers at the national level to guarantee a baseline for all employees in a given sector.
According to a link that someone else posted [1] (Sorry but it's in Italian), they get about 1200 EUR/month (this is net income after taxes, compulsory health insurance and retirement fees).
I guess that Amazon is applying the national contract for the commerce sector [2] (PDF, this too in Italian) and the amount is supposed to be about 1250 EUR (you should consider the lower amount, which is what probably applies to a regular warehouse worker with little experience and no management responsability).
So from what I understand, the union is right in stating that Amazon's pay is not above the national contract.
Keep in mind that there are a number of tricks that can be used in order not the pay the official amount. For example, if you are hired as an apprentice the pay is lower. You can not be apprentice for more than 3 years, but the system can be abused, especially if the turnover is quite high. So in a way Amazon also is right when it says that it pays above average.
But in my opinion the salary is not the main issue, if what is said about the working conditions is true (not only in Italy, but also Germany and the US), those should be fixed because I think they are not healthy.
This is what the company says, not necessarily the whole truth (how many employees got these benefits?).
Besides, things like "private medical insurance" are meaningless in Northern Italy, where the regional health service is either free or very low-cost and delivers excellent levels of care. I'm surprised they are even mentioned as important benefits; either the person speaking to reporters is not Italian, or they are trying to target the story to non-Italian audiences.
More meaningful benefits in Italy would be guaranteed bonuses ("tredicesima", "quattordicesima") or short hours.
It could be that they define logistics sector very broadly intentionally so that it includes a high number of low pay workers, such as those making minimum wage.
Or, how Amazon defines the aggregate of "salaries paid to its workers" — average, median, max, etc?
I'm generally skeptical of hand wavy claims that like this that shy far away from real numbers.
It’s simple economics. The workers believe that they have the leverage to demand more pay. Even if they are making the most of any non-skilled labor with leverage wouldn’t you try to make more?
Sorry to hear they hate their jobs so much. Luckily for them, pretty soon they’ll be replaced by robots and all be happily unemployed. And hey, the more they strike, the more incentive Amazon has to move quickly on that, so they’re definitely working towards their apparent goal.
They are basically saying that they talked with Amazon management and they were open to listen but not to act in order to raise their salaries and add bonuses. The reasons why they are asked it's because they have to work nights, Sundays and have forced overtime.
The economy in Italy is really bad, most of my friends don't have jobs and those who do usually have ones who are just average pay (18k euros/year). From what I read here (an Italian newspaper: http://www.lastampa.it/2017/03/14/edizioni/vercelli/qui-ad-a...) salaries are 1100-1200/month AFTER taxes. My dad delivers fresh fish to restaurants, he starts working at 4am every day until 1pm the next day. He works Monday through Saturday. His pay is slightly higher than that simply because he's been there for 20+ years and is now responsible for a few other things.
At least once a month there would be a strike while I was in high school, whether that was the professors, the bus drivers, the school janitors, the delivery people, etc. I don't think this is gonna be any more useful than those strikes; the difference is that Amazon can fire them, while those other strikes were "safe" because they are all state jobs which you can not be removed from. Curious to see how this plays out.
"4am every day until 1pm the next day" is 37 hours if you take it literally. Mathematically this obviously can't be true. Your interpretation of "4am until 1pm the same day" is only one of many possible ways we could "fix" the sentence to mean something sensible.
> The company said salaries paid to its workers were among the highest in the logistic sector and that it also provided some benefits such as private medical insurance or money to pay for training programs.
Not a criticism of either Amazon or the unions but I would really appreciate it if news sources would verify these claims one way or another. Obviously as a wire service, that may not be Reuters' job but whether Amazon's claim here is true or not makes a massive difference to what I glean from the article.
I talk to workers here in Canada the starting salaries and benefits are about average, definitely not 'highest in the sector' or any such nonsense though maybe in Europe they are in order to attract employees. Here they are expected to do 10-12hr overtime shifts every day, and work as hard as possible without breaks to make bonuses which are inconsistent, and because there's no union representation harassment galore goes on with managers phoning you at home all hours to answer non-critical questions that could have waited until your next shift.
Being a "wire service" doesn't remove their obligation to check claims of fact.
Otherwise, they should print my claim that Amazon has the lowest benefits of any logistics company.
Regardless, volume of work and general conditions might not align with pay. In this instance, it sounds to me that Amazon is expecting to push very high / recond volumes but not adjust compensation to align with that.
Long to short, there are reasons to strike beyond just pay.
You cannot gleam anything from this blurb. It doesn't talk about Germany's trade surplus, higher than average minimum wage, or strong unions that typically compromise with companies rather than threaten the company's long term stability. It also doesn't mention Italy's strikes being so common you check the morning news to see what won't be working that day.
The fact that the info comes from Amazon is biased at best, but without an analysis of both situations this is just a 'current events' blurb.
At least in germany the criticism is based on the fact that Amazon considers its business and workforce as part of the lower paying logistics sector, while unions expect Amazon's employess to be paid according to the retail/trade labor contract. That means mentioning the high salary level among logistic workers doesn't address the actual concern of the unions.
How do unions work in the US? From what I hear it sounds like members are "employed" by the union and the company is forced to hire workers from the union? Have I misunderstood?
In Europe workers are hired by the company and are free to enter whichever union he or she wants or not to join a union. Usually all workers at a workplace join the same union and form a local branch/club at the workplace. Unions are national and usually there's several different unions organised under one union organiser. The biggest union organiser in Norway have almost a million members (that's one fifth of the population!) across almost 30 different unions. So when push comes to shove they are able to call a general strike and basically shut down the country. That almost never happens though.
>How do unions work in the US? From what I hear it sounds like members are "employed" by the union and the company is forced to hire workers from the union? Have I misunderstood?
This is the case in the EU as well. If your company is of a certain size, you are required to pay a person that works for the union rather than for the company.
I worked as a stocker at Kroger grocery store. Made maybe $6 an hour. During interviewing, I was told that stocking at Kroger was a union position, and in order to accept the job I had to join the union. I know it somehow tied into a national union, and am sure I could google it.. but I know nothing about it.
Every week, I had an $8 deduction from my paycheck to union dues. Otherwise, it was no different from any other job. I interviewed with the store (Kroger). I got a paycheck from Kroger. I maybe had a piece of paper with a phone number of a union rep, but I never made contact with the union (for good or bad). The pay was the same as the non-union grocery store across town.
So for me personally it was nothing except $8 a week to some union bosses. But I have been AROUND many other unions, and the experiences can be far different. For example, the Chicago Public schools have a very strong union. Because of it, teachers are paid a fair bit higher than other comparable cities. In theory teachers are protected from unjust firings and harassment. As cons, the teachers get no merit award, 100% pay is based on tenure. Great for the bottom half of teachers, not so good for the top half of teachers. It also makes it basically impossible to fire a teacher if there is not a videotape of the teacher beating a kid.
> Unions said in a statement more than 500 Amazon workers at the Piacenza site in northern Italy had agreed to strike following a failure to negotiate bonuses with the company.
They could not get bonuses, so they go on strike? Jeez, Amazon really needs to work on automating its warehouses ASAP, for it seems to me workers greed is becoming a problem.
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338 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadWhy does this surprise you? The amount of celebrations (reasons to have sales) have increased throughout the years. If you got sales regularly people will wait till stuff's on sale. Now they gotta wait less long. It might seem silly, but the whole trick is to get people to buy things they'd otherwise not buy.
How so? There's nothing explicitly religious about the holiday.
Just this morning I was reading this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/opinion/thanksgiving-reli...
Few people realise it's related to American thanksgiving.
Many regions and countries in Europe have their own Halloween - like traditions and days that are centuries old, but American style Halloween is pushing them away.
Started as a shy e-commerce thing here. Then became a huge e-commerce thing. Then a huge all commerce thing. I am seeing "Black Friday" promotions everywhere, from financial services to beauty treatments.
A common joke here is that it is "Black Fraud - pay 50% of the double of the price"[0] Because a lot of shops just smoothly increase their prices in the previous weeks, so when the date arrives, they can advertise "50% off discounts". To the point that there are websites monitoring this kind of fraud and official agencies inspecting and fining companies.
[0] The pun "Black Friday" works in Portuguese too, as shops use the original term in English and fraud is "fraude" in Portuguese.
It might depend on the industry though.
My impression (about the retail version, say 15-20 years ago) was that it was companies offloading stock they wanted off their books at something of a discount ahead of the holiday season, since it let the companies close out their books for the year and customers get a little bit more for the holidays. It was a win-win in a lot of ways.
Then the disgusting marketing/accounting shenanigans took hold and made it shitty, particularly the online version. It's still possible to find genuine deals, mostly because retailers do still have stock they want to offload.
During the next few years, other sellers joined the trend pushing it even more.
This year, in order to stay competitive, Amazon Spain has been "forced" to follow the trend and have a Black Friday WEEK.
American cultural imperialism is really impressive. I can understand why Halloween gets more and more popular over here since it's a fun holiday for kids but I can't figure out how black friday makes any sense when you don't celebrate Thanksgiving. I also don't understand why they hope to make "black friday" a positive brand when the only thing I associate it with is videos of Americans trampling each other to get cheap appliances.
Also, discount days are regulated in France (called "les soldes"); normally you can't have a discount day any time you want, you have to apply for authorization.
I sell on Amazon in Europe for the first time this year (started in January); I don't do discounts but am anxious to see if sales will rise this week-end.
What is the rationale for that?
Similarly, for many years the very large retailers couldn't open on Sunday afternoons, although that restriction mostly benefited the large chains of medium-sized shops, since it was based on the size of the shop rather than the company.
I'm so thankful that you live in the US.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/business/the-economics-an...
Maybe you are stuck in the US car culture, but it is very convenient to have a store on the way home from the subway/bus stop.
The general rule is that you are not allowed to sell at a loss. There are, however, exceptions, and "soldes" are one of these exceptions.
It also means that as long as they are not selling at a loss, you are free to discount as much as you want at any time you want. However, there is a second factor : false advertising. If you make discount outside the context of "soldes" you can't call them "soldes".
To be fair, it's not only marketing. Ideas move by themselves.
But given that we somehow started to carve pumpkins etc in recent years, I don’t doubt that we’ll have turkey and annoying uncles at thanksgiving within just a few years.
Right now Thanksgiving is only a Black Friday sale and nothing else.
I'm partly kidding, but have there been any major strikes in the US lately?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–08_Writers_Guild_of_Ame...
That's almost a decade ago.
2008: Puerto Rico teachers strike.
2008: Stella D'Oro strike.
2011: Occupy Oakland and unions shut down the port following a call for a general strike.
2012: Chicago teachers strike.
2012: Republic Windows and Doors strike and occupation.
2013: Fast food workers strike in 58 U.S. cities.
There's an exciting younger generation of labor journalists, and a good way to keep tabs on what they are covering is through Dissent's podcast Belabored (feed at [3]).
[1]: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1569-strike-for-america
[2]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981035/
[3]: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/feed/belabored
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%9317_video_game_voi...
Management: We don't want high-quality work. Bye.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_strike_of_2016
It affected many of our circuit orders around that time and caused us to go with different last mile carriers.
Hell, when I was in high school even students had strikes.
It seems like you’re sneaking an assertion in there. Can you clarify your point a bit? What is the relationship between competition and wages, and why is one better than the other for unions?
Germany is a good example of this, they have a ton of unions and lots of production but the unions understand that competition is key to survival so there are very few strikes.
I suggest you look into the differences in the management of companies of those countries rather than the unions.
German unions also have a seat at the board. Unlike most board run companies a decision isn't made without input from the union. So yes, there few strikes in Germany because labor and management actually behave like adults.
This is why Walmart has utterly failed to expand into Germany. They thought they could take their abusive worker policies into Germany and when that didn't work they pulled out.
The "sharing economy" is merely the next generation of that: there's no workplace to picket and a "flexible" supply of labour willing to cross the picket anyway.
(source in german)
http://www.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2017-04/crowdworking-click...
As a human who is also an employer, I take great second hand pleasure in seeing people refuse to take that shit
There's also a general message carried by the medias and politicians that neoliberalism is the only possible solution. People are discouraged to go on strike (or even to vote for alternative parties) even when they see their wages and their social benefits declining. They feel that the medias may be right after all, and even if they aren't, there's not much to do anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
Which is why some people in the UK hate the NHS so much, purely on ideological grounds, as it is an example of a popular, avowedly socialist, organisation that does work.
The banks were bailed out, none of those people who caused so much misery were ever put in jail, and the media belittled Occupy as being directionless and pointless. The protest was huge, stretching across cities and countries, but there was never any accountability for the banksters. It shows again as the Equifax execs were cleared of insider trading, when they were obviously insider trading.
When I was in London a few years ago, there was a massive tube strike. The train drivers were belittled in the media with reports claiming they made over 55k GBP a year, more than many nurses. They neglected to mention the new night train program would have meant long 7 to 14 week night shifts for every tube driver. The city was voted in on night trains, but had no money to fund them. So the blame gets passed all the way down to the tube drivers.
It is also true that Tube drivers are well paid and yes that does impact the levels of sympathy available to them. The change was absolutely funded - just not as well as the union would like.
In essence, however, tube drivers having veto rights over being scheduled to work nights presents an opportunity to cause shortages and disruption without any ramifications or declaration of strike etc. It was a giant liability for TFL to accept.
£55k isn't that well paid for people who have to live in or near London. Not if you consider it the kind of job where you should be able to afford luxuries like a family, a car, a mortgage, saving for retirement etc. It probably does sound like a lot to people who live outside London and / or aren't considering those things.
It's more than the typical software engineer can expect to make in London.
Source: Glassdoor, Indeed, talking to colleagues who live in London, and my own memories from my last job search.
Source: I've lived and worked (and continue to do so) as a software developer, technical lead and CTO in London and have been in several different sectors.
Yes, you can see people working for so little. But why leave money on the table?
> Sure, if you go into the financial sector or find a startup where they don't know their arse from their elbow about software workers, you can dupe them into giving you more money.
Yes, obviously. Why wouldn't you? If some sectors have more money than sense, that's an opportunity--not a problem.
(I can see that there are reasons to take a lower salary in return for a job you really like; but then you don't get to complain about low pay.)
Source: I've lived and worked in Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), Singapore, Sydney, London in various roles. Mostly in big tech and finance.
And, yes, if you look at Glassdoor you can find the numbers you cited. In my experience Glassdoor seems to be systematically lower than the numbers I get from my own experience and asking friends and coworkers.
(But I might just be living the charmed life that people live who have enough sense to negotiate salaries on job offers?)
EDIT: Also, using current exchange rates, the cost of living in one of the larger cities (Berlin, Munich, etc) in germany isnt that much lower compared to London anymore.
The subsurface lines have interworking with normal mainline services, in some places sharing platforms with them, which makes fitting platform-edge doors very difficult if not impossible.
Driverless cars can't match the volume of trains:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
The new deep-level stock (i.e., New Tube for London) is specified to be able to be retrofitted with GoA 4 equipment (i.e., "there are no staff on the train, driver, attendant, or otherwise"), but will start out as GoA 2 (Victoria, Central, Northern, and Jubilee lines are already fitted and run as such with their existing stock).
In an ideal world we'd all have ponies, but in reality there's still scarcity so we have to ration resources one way or another. (And then whatever rationing system we use interacts with human incentives and lots of other systems.)
I'm not sure it does. I can't think of a reasonable definition whereby I consider an average software developer to be more entitled to a decent life than a tube driver.
All the software engineers in London could quit tomorrow, and life would largely go on. All the tube workers could quit tomorrow, and the city would quickly grind to a halt.
But basically having higher wages for jobs that are harder to fill, or are more important to have highly qualified people in them, seems to be a system that works pretty well. Paying everyone the same wage seems to be a system that has largely failed anywhere it has been tried.
- Final salary pension (5% contribution)
- Free travel on TfL network for employee and one family member (could be worth something like £130/mo x 2)
- Free parking at tube stations for 1 partner/family member (£5/day)
- 29+ days holiday + bank holidays
- Retail discounts
The person I know who works for TfL certainly doesn't complain.
I agree that labourers may often get unfairly blamed when things go wrong. Corporate overlords can be also very harsh and unfair.
But it is difficult to differentiate between unions that have valid claims and unions that are just riding the gravy train with an iron grip and not adding value. These are very muddy waters, and truth is often hard to find.
The critiques that did come were almost always around the process, the act of camping out and blocking public areas, but the movement itself against Wall St was very popular during the peak of the recession.
And it was a populist movement regardless. With all the highs/lows that type of movement brings.
It's failure to bring meaningful change had little to do with the media, right-wing/tea-party, or older democrats attacking it.
The issues being protested were very complex and deeply deeply ingrained in the current US political crony economic establishment. And the democrat administration at the time did little to affect change despite this popular support, besides some token efforts. And despite the rhetoric of the democratic party being a counterbalance against the rich they largely continued (and sometimes incentivized) the status quo in the finance world. A mere temporary speed block and back to business as usual.
Which had repercussions long after including up to the latest election. It was used by the right to feed off of the mistrust people had with Hillary (and the Obama crew she inherited) with regards to their appeasement of bankers. Particularly with how the republicans hammered home her connections to Goldman Sachs (et al). Not that the right was any better in regards to cronyism, clearly, but the point is that it hit a nerve among Americans which was a legacy of cynicism and bitterness following the recession and Occupy movements.
This was not a strike, not remotely.
Was it not? I called it so from the start; they had a list of something like 29 totally unrelated demands, and never managed to narrow it down.
An example is http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-o... . One person posted it.
What was profoundly misunderstood by the Occupiers was that they had no leverage to negotiate with. Their sole power was being visible. That doesn't get much in the way of negotiations.
The thing that most bothered me about OWS was the disproportionate response by the police and miscellaneous conservative talking heads. Having a camp of protesters is simply something to not be bothered about except as a public health question. It's just not that big of a deal.
All that said, you can unpack the OWS complaints and produce some root causes that might be reasonably addressed. I'm given to understand that the OWS experience produced a network that in 2016 linked with Bernie Sanders' campaign, which was considerably more grounded compared to Occupy.
Teacher strikes are also fairly common. Seattle in 2015, and Tacoma in 2011, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Teachers_Strike_2011
* Seattle Teachers Go on First Systemwide Strike in 30 Years After Talks Collapse - The New York Times || https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/us/seattle-teachers-go-on...
edit: at least retailers are pushing it heavily. I don't know if the general population is really into it.
I'm not sure how it is in the US but at least in Germany the offers and deals are pretty bad and/or not interesting - especially on amazon.
Companies have all the interest in having such events adopted locally, since it translates in more sales for them.
But yes, Halloween and Black Friday rank among the more recent and successful American imports in EU, just a few years ago they were virtually unknown.
It is simply not worth it.
https://www.strongtowns.org/blackfridayparking/
This year, I am looking to see if a very specific configuration of laptop goes on sale on a local refurb dealer, and if it's not exactly what I want at a good (ie. heavily reduced) price, it's #buynothingday for me again this year.
Imagine if we all (and not just the left) talked about companies the same way we talk about unions, using the countless examples of managerial abuse, wage theft etc. as examples. Would you say that would be reasonable?
And preemptively, this is not a "both sides" question either. Everything is grey, but there are shades of grey. And while neither unions nor companies are perfect, both are at the same time vital to how things work right now and not above criticism. They both are definitely preferable to 1820s style enterprises for example, but worse than the Culture.
If unions are so great, then they should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to join them.
Unions are only as good as their governance and oversight. Unions can be good, and work in partnership with management, but it takes time and effort. There is no one click button or app for collective protection of worker rights.
Why? Because as soon as they get a foothold, it is done. Over. Can't get rid of them. There are literally rules where they can fire you for trying to end the union.
If it weren't for attitudes like yours, I wouldn't be opposing unions. But your attitude DOES exist, so my only option is all out war.
Fortunately, the rest of my industry (tech) agrees with me and does not support unions. And fortunately, union support is going down massively all across the US.
http://gotfired.com/blog/2016/04/can-i-be-fired-for-not-join...
>You are protected by law in all 50 states from being fired from your job for not joining a union. You can be only liable for no more than the requirement to pay either union dues or a reduced amount to work in an agency shop. If you refuse to join the union and refuse to pay the required dues, then you can be fired.
Actually there is a better way. The better way is to do everything in your power as a worker and citizen to prevent the union from being formed in the first place. Either at YOUR company, or at any others, even if you don't work there. As well as by pushing for any law that reduces the power of unions.
A union can't force you to pay dues if they are crippled country wide.
And this has been what has been happening in the US for decades, as unions are less powerful than they have ever been.
Don't like that attitude? Well then the pro-union people shouldn't have pushed to require people to pay dues.
The fundamental problem is that the more power that unions get, the more likely they are to invade whatever industry I am in and destroy. I don't ever want to risk THAT.
What good does crippling unions do? You think it's useful for large portions of the community to be on stifled wages and bad working conditions?
Unions are less powerful in the US because the US has a broken system where those with money have more votes than those with less? There is a financial interest in having the "mere peons" on less cash because it results in a better balance sheet situation for executives and share holders, resulting in better EOY dividends and better bonuses.
I support Unions because of people like you, because for some fucking unknown reason, people like you believe that some are entitled to less because they are employed in xxxx profession or don't have xxxx degree.
The fundamental problem is that unions are REQUIRED, if there was a bigger sense of social responsibilty, people would get paid decent living wages and wouldn't be worked in horrendously dangerous conditions dealing with power brokers whose only interest is their own portfolio value.
Please, get away from the trickle down economics bullshit and come back to the real world. How much evidence of corporate malfeasance do you have to see on a daily basis before realising that protecting the rights of the 99% is not only a good economic decision, but also a humane one.
Because we do not want the union "benefits" that aren't really benefits.
We do not want another group controlling our workplace or forcing us into horrible, one size fits all, collective bargaining agreements. We want to be allowed to negotiate for ourselves.
We do not want gigantic barriers to entry, meant only to discriminate against people who couldn't afford to buy a fancy 4 year piece of paper.
We do not want discrimination against young people (ie, seniority pay requirements) forced into our contracts. We want to be judged equally on our own merits.
We do not want to be stuck in an organization that we can basically never get rid of once it is established.
I believe that I am way better off without any union forcing me to join.
And apparently a whole lot of other people ALSO agree with me.
We believe that it is very much in the self interest of workers to prevent unions from destroying our industry with overbearing rules and regulations that prevent us from doing our job.
This is not some rare, weird, opinion that I hold. This is the MAJORITY opinion. Unions are less popular than ever, because we the workers don't want them.
"The union protects and improves Members' wages and conditions. Our successful bargaining campaigns continue to deliver fair wages and better conditions like superannuation, site allowances, redundancy pay and income protection. In the year 2000 this branch of the CFMEU won the 36 hour week, giving workers 26 paid days off a year."
Also get 5% YOY pay rises, which allows wages to stay in line with inflation instead of stagnating. You're being naive with your comments IMO, ignoring the reality of the matter and trying to pitch us into a "everyone's different and should be able to negotiate" which has been shown to be damaging. How much data do you need to see about stagnating wage growth and consistently growing executive wages to see that this "we don't need unions" argument is ignorant of the truth?
> We do not want another group controlling our workplace or forcing us into horrible, one size fits all, collective bargaining agreements. We want to be allowed to negotiate for ourselves.
http://www.epi.org/blog/strengthening-collective-bargaining-...
http://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-unions-help-workin...
You can believe what you want, you do realise that most of them don't FORCE you to join, but you will likely just be treated like a leech, which is appropriate.
Please provide some data for your claims because I'm straight up gonna say you're wrong on the majority of your points.
> We believe that it is very much in the self interest of workers to prevent unions from destroying our industry with overbearing rules and regulations that prevent us from doing our job.
This one (and a few of your other comments strike a nerve) because I think that you have the entire purpose of unions confused, unions are there to provide workers, me and you, your parents, normal non-1%ers, an opportunity to get a fairer distribution of the pie, not ALL of the pie, just what is fair. If you actually provided some concrete examples of industries where you don't think the unions should be, I could have easily pulled data up on their profits, compared it to their workers wages, and it would be a lot easier to make the point that most companies can afford to pay workers better wages, which is a win-win for everyone, the idea that if I work at McDonalds, and am an enterprising individual, and ask for a pay rise vs my other workers, is laughable, why would they bother? They've crushed dissenters, and now because of the shit conditions you work in, they'll just fire you and grab someone who doesn't ask for better conditions. It's an incentive disparity, companies have no interest in paying workers more.
For example:
https://twitter.com/VirginTrains/status/881138129176014848
Here's a good one, ITT they acknowledged that they understaff consistently and expect workers to be able to work their rest days so they can keep staffing requirements low. Then naturally, it's the workers fault when they actually take their rest days.
Man, the more I read this comment, the more I think you're just trolling.
5% YOY raises is very low and I would hate to be stuck in that kind of collective bargaing agreement that forced me to accept it. No, I'd rather negotiate on my own and get a much better one.
And yes, unions DO force you to join, because if you don't pay their fee, and accept their bargaining agreement, then you get fired.
If they don't want to force people to join, then I guess it shouldn't be a bad idea to pass right to work laws, that make it illegal to force workers to pay the fees under threat of being fired.
If you like unions, or other people do, then that would be fine if these union people didn't make these rules that cause people to be fired, because they disagree with your opinion on unions (which is a whole lot of people!)
This is not just 1 or 2 people. This is lots and lots of people who disagree with your opinion on how great unions are. And these people should be left alone.
But because they refuse to leave them alone, then there can be no compromise.
That's the biggest problem with union people. They can't possibly understand that people could disagree with them, and don't want their "help".
You aren't interested in the service, fine. But I'm not sure why you feel like you need to cry about unions when you aren't their target group anyway?
Not if unions get a foothold in my industry, then it won't be "fine". If that happens then they will be able to implement rules and regulations that force me to join them.
And yes, there ARE movements to get the tech industry unionized (they aren't very popular, Fortunately).
No thanks. I'm a not going to let my industry be ruined like that. I'd rather stop all of that in its tracks by making unions powerless nation wide.
They can't enter my industry and force me to join if they are powerless EVERYWHERE.
Also, if it is seriously "fine" for people who don't want their "services", then how about we implement right to work laws everywhere?
Shouldn't it be "fine" for everyone to not join them if they don't want to?
Fortunately for me, though, unions are continueing to become less powerful. So fortunately, less and less of them will be able to force people to join in the future.
I can fight for my self better on my own, thank you very much. I do not want an organization, forcing me to join them and forcing me to agree with their opinions "for my own good", because I don't know any better.
I will negotiate, and fight the capitalist class, using the ways that I feel are best, and not through a coercive organization that is only looking out for themselves.
If unions were so great, then they wouldn't need to make everyone join them. They would stand on their own merits. I do not want their "benefits".
And because unions refuse to be voluntary, my only option is supporting the anti-union movements that make them powerless nationwide. They can't force me to join if they are universally powerless.
Bullshit you can't. You're at best a gnat against the owners of companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately for the pro-union crowd, though, they have forced me to be positioned against them, because they cannot give up on their dumb idea of trying to force everyone who disagrees to join them.
This strategy backfires massively, as the only option it leaves me is to try and make them as powerless as possible because if they are crippled nation wide then they can't force me to join under threat of being fired.
I'd love it if both sides could coexist. But until universal right to work laws exist, that protect workers from being require to join or pay dues, we'll there can be no compromise.
>If unions are so great, then they should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to join them.
If you can convince enough people, you can? But if people organize against you, be a good loser. Nobody except the very hardcore is saying:
>If private property is so great, then everyone who wants to have it should stand on their own 2 feet, instead of forcing everyone to accomodate them
to argue against private property or capitalism. But the same social contract that allows for private property can decide that if you want to have its benefits (e.g. the aforementioned private property) can recognize and protect the hard won rights of unions and workers. Stealing a bit of rhetoric, those who don't like it can go to some warlord ridden backwater, I hear there you are free to not follow any social contract if you are up to it
Fortunately, the rest of my industry agrees with me.
And ALSO, fortunately, union support is massively going down all across the US.
It looks like that social contract of yours is changing. Perhaps because of attitudes like yours.
I will not "be a good loser". I will oppose union efforts anywhere and everywhere, no matter what, because any power they get anywhere is a massive risk to me and my industry.
As soon as they get a foothold, they will implement rules that force me and others to join. It is safer to just stop them in their tracks before they can get even close to taking over.
And good on you, others will either agree or disagree with you. But I do wonder, why should you be allowed to stop union efforts if others aren't allowed to force you to join? And with whom would you...organize to stop union efforts?
> But I do wonder, why should you be allowed to stop union efforts if others aren't allowed to force you to join?
But they ARE allowed to force me to join, under threat of being fired, in some states. So that's why.
If the US had universal right to work laws, where you could not be fired for refusing to join a union, then I wouldnt care and wouldn't bother organizing against unions.
The attitude of "screw you for standing up for your right to not join an organization" is very common among union supporters, which is the reason why I oppose them.
I organize against unions already, by supporting right to work laws, and supporting politicians who do as well, and donating to these efforts.
There are a ton of existing efforts to protect worker's rights of voluntary association, and their right to not join organizations that they don't support.
http://gotfired.com/blog/2016/04/can-i-be-fired-for-not-join...
>You are protected by law in all 50 states from being fired from your job for not joining a union. You can be only liable for no more than the requirement to pay either union dues or a reduced amount to work in an agency shop. If you refuse to join the union and refuse to pay the required dues, then you can be fired.
Yes. They want to do it to me, so why wouldn't I do it to them? That just puts me at a disadvantage for following rules that my opponents refuse to follow.
But "taking away their right to organize" is a bit of a stretch.
They should be able to "organize", in the colloquial sense of lobbying, talking to other people, expressing their opinion, and negotiating in groups, all they want in support of their cause.
Freedom of association, as defined in the first amendment of US Constitution, applies to them too.
And in turn, I will "organize" AGAINST their cause, as is also MY right.
Disagreeing with someone, and organizing against them, is not the same as taking away THEIR right to "organize".
And yes, you can be fired, if you refuse to pay the union required fee. That's the same thing as being forced to join. Go get your money from people who chose, of their own free will, to join.
See the problem?
Unions can be great for workers. They can also fuck up markets and/or workers. What's wrong with taking the good and improving the bad for unions in the 21st century?
That's literally what 99% of the start-ups in Silicon Valley are doing in various verticals.
The black/white thinking when it comes to discussion of unions always feels like people have more of an agenda to push that being interested in any meaningful discussion.
It's like trying to argue 'not all cops'. Sure, but we still decided body cams were a good idea.
I believe we need to swing back towards unionizing. But I think there are real & legitimate concerns that haven't been fixed & aren't FUD.
Then, when Americans did not want to compete with rural Chinese farmers pay, those corporations abandoned the area? Leaving cities with huge infrastructure bills and a large population? None of these issue develop in a vacuum. They are complex.
That's simply a libertarian + right-wing claim.
It's way more complicated than that, and it can't simply be dismissed as a "FUD campaign". Union members are actually disproportionately likely to support things like right-to-work laws, which unions dislike because it (more or less) means workers aren't obligated to be members if they choose not to.
Similarly, union membership rates have dropped even in states that have very union-friendly laws (like New York and Massachusetts), and unions are having less and less success at the polls, meaning non-unionized workers are rejecting the proposals to unionize their workforces (UAW elections in particular - AFL-CIO elections to a lesser extent).
This pattern isn't as simple to dismiss as "anti-union FUD", especially since it's seen among people who are already union members in closed shops.
The reasons for this have to do with the history of unionization of closed shops, and the regional economic pressures it creates.
Contrary to popular belief, companies have incredibly little power in that regard, especially when you're talking about an already-unionized closed shop (as opposed to a company that wants to prevent its workers from unionizing in the first place). Legally and practically, it's incredibly difficult even for union members to decertify or deauthorize their union, and companies are basically forbidden from taking any part in that process. The NLRB is incredibly strict on this; both the NLRB and the courts bias heavily in favor of unions if there's any evidence that companies are seen to be interfering whatsoever in the process.
But beyond this, it's not as simple as "companies have been increasingly more anti-union" because this increaseingly anti-union sentiment comes from the union members. We know this from direct public polling, from their actions on the ballot at union elections, from their actions at the polling booth in government elections, and from what we can see of internal politics with union governance.
To put it another way: if it were easier for union members to decertify or deauthorize their union without getting fired[0], we'd probably see these elections happening more often (both successful and unsuccessful ones). Instead, union members support laws which allow them to bypass this process.
(Note that, after accounting for race, union members overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in the last two election cycles, despite the unions themselves endorsing union-friendly Democrats).
[0] Even if they manage not to get fired in the process - which is totally legal for a union to do, unlike a company firing an employee for supporting a union - the NLRB can overrule the results of the decertification or deauthorization election, which invalidates the whole process.
You're thinking of union shops, not closed shops. Union shops are nominally illegal, but in practice, many large unionized workplaces are effectively union shops, because the NLRB chooses to enforce a very narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court case that they lost.
There's a lot that's skewed in your comments, but that's just flat out wrong. Union households voted for Clinton over Trump by 8%. That's less than Democrats often get, but the idea that union members prefer Republicans is divorced from reality.
Do your own homework next time, instead of spreading cynical lies on the assumption that everyone else will be too lazy to check them.
Right-to-work laws are like prop 13 in California: sounds good on the surface, but hidden terrible impact.
On the surface, "I should be able to choose whether or not I join a union" makes sense, Americans love freedom and choice. But of course, in practice people who choose not to join a union get to freeload: they get most of the benefit of the union in how it informs a company's general policies and culture about workers, but don't have to pay any fees. And like most instances of the freeloader problem, the result is the responsible entity getting starved, as everyone wants the others to be the ones paying for the benefits.
It doesn't sounds like they want any of those so-called benefits. As explained below, the data suggests that if members could feasibly decertify or deauthorize their unions entirely, they would.
Remember that, nationwide, only 7% of union members ever cast a vote in favor of their union. That means less than 7% voted against it, and the remainder never had an opportunity to vote at all.
It's not surprising that, in the absence of a safe way to decertify or deauthorize, some portion of the 86+% who never had the opportunity to vote supports laws that give them the next-best thing. (It's not just right-to-work laws, by the way, though that's the most frequently discussed at the national scale and therefore the most frequently polled).
I mean, most employer policies never get any kind of vote from any subset of the employees, so I'm not sure why I should be so outraged about this one in particular when it seems to be usually to workers' benefit.
Clearly they don't think it's to their benefit, or else they wouldn't be trying to decertify or deauthorize it.
They are, just not directly, because the direct process for decertification or deauthorization is both highly risky (if caught, they could lose their jobs), and also pretty ineffective (the NLRB has a habit of overturning election results, rendering the whole process moot.
So, they use other tactics - hence the increasing support from union members for anti-union lawmakers. Political pundits often write about this as a "paradox" of union members voting "against their own interests", but it's actually pretty straightforward once you remember that union members are individuals who may or may not actually support the interests of the union that they belong to.
But that doesn't mean right to work laws shouldn't exist. Maybe it just means unions shouldn't exist.
I mean, if your entire business model is flawed, should the world change around your business model?
This is more of a devil's advocate position, as I'm not particularly anti-union, but I personally have zero desire to work in a union or be forced to be in one.
I refuse to say that unions have no place in the world, or have no place in certain industries, or didn't have a place in the past. I'm rather neutral on a lot of it, but the fact is the problem is inherent in the union itself.
Like, employers can require you to do all kinds of things in a contract: wear certain types of clothes, tell you when and where to show up for work, how much you're paid, etc. We regulate some things like health and safety codes because the regulations themselves are clearly in the best interest of the workforce, but who do right-to-work laws ultimately serve?
Unions go a little deep than the concept of "business model"
"[..] I personally have zero desire to work in a union or be forced to be in one."
I'm going to speculate that's only because you have good working conditions.
"unions [..] have a place in the past"
That's a common opinion. What have changed from the past?
Because the laws of capitalism tell us that if any profit or benefit goes to the worker is because there is no way around it. Sometimes is a good idea look back to history. For instance the eight hour working day:
" In 1919 in Barcelona, Catalonia, after a 44-day general strike with over 100,000 participants had effectively crippled the Catalan economy, the Government settled the strike by granting all the striking workers demands that included an eight-hour day, union recognition, and the rehiring of fired workers."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day)
Sometimes I think that we are all "free riders" on the fights of the past.
I'm going to speculate that's only because you have good working conditions."
I have noticed (personal anecdote here so yeah not great) that a large majority of people that I know against unions have never worked in dangerous fields, office workers are ridiculously ignorant as to the workplace dangers of many unionised industries.
> That's a common opinion. What have changed from the past?
Reminds me of a quote I recently came across by Danish communist and activist Carl Scharnberg, roughly translated as:
"The teacher told his pupils that the class struggle is over! A pupil asks: Who won?"
However, your reply is structured around trying to convince me that I should be pro-union rather than ambivalent, and does not address the issue at hand; how to square "right to work" laws and the free rider problem with unions.
That's not true.
Actually... yes. Maintenance-of-dues and other contract stipulations can mean that all members of a bargaining unit are required to pay dues fees, even if they aren't members of the union or covered by the union contracts. So, they're required to pay fees to the union so that the union can represent other people, not them, oftentimes against their own interests.
It's particularly common for teachers and other skilled, low-paying jobs.
You act as though anti-union FUD can't affect members. That's kind of ridiculous... if it didn't affect MEMBERS as well as non-members, what would be the point?
If I'm a less-educated union member who has no concept of what life was like before unions, and constantly hear that unions just take my money while providing no benefit, I'm probably likely to be swayed. What's the union going to do? Tell me about how 50 years ago companies would literally put my life at risk because there was no downside for them. And then the people financing the anti-union movement are spewing "Well that was 50 years ago, that would NEVER happen again" - all while doing everything they can to drive up hours, drive down safety, and insulate themselves from any responsibility RE: workman's comp.
For the average joe who just wants to go to work and get a paycheck, the bigger picture is often lost.
Honestly, it's rather patronizing to say that union members who disapprove of their union and want to decertify or deauthorize it must either be ignorant or under the influence of external propaganda or FUD. Maybe they have access to information you don't? Or maybe they just have a different set of values from you? Maybe they hold different priorities from what you hold? Maybe they should be assumed to have their own agency?
I'm not going to say that democracy is infallible - in fact, I'm usually the first to point out the exact opposite. But "they don't know what's best for them the way I do" is a pretty dangerous line of reasoning to start heading down.
Is it patronizing to say that workers who respond to threats like this:
http://www.nysun.com/business/wal-mart-threatens-to-close-un...
might not be making the best risk/reward trade off?
The employer is hardly going to tell you if they're making an empty threat and the prospect of losing your job because they pulled the nuclear option is probably quite terrifying.
I guess it's a good thing I never said any of the words you both put in my mouth and "quoted". Not once did I say I know what's best for them. Not once did I say they couldn't make decisions for themselves. What I DID say is that it's ridiculous to pretend that propaganda doesn't affect people IN unions. Which is EXACTLY what you implied.
Don't be disingenuous, "they don't know what's best for them the way I do" is a very fair representation of your words. Maybe you do? If you're going to take that position, own it.
In my opinion what's disingenuous is to ignore the main point in favor of picking some nit.
"My interpretation is objective reality, but your interpretation is dumb". How about don't be an asshole, man?
Isn't it possible the armchair talking heads like us are the ones missing the bigger picture and the actual workers are the ones who actually get it?
Let's consider the Boeing workers in South Carolina:
- 2009-09 74% of employees vote against the union and decertify it[1]
- 2009-10 Boeing breaks ground on new South Carolina plant to build 787 airplanes[2]
- 2017-02 again, 74% of employees vote against IAM union representation[3]
The "uncertainty" and "doubt" in "FUD"? The South Carolina workers are quite certain and have no doubt that in 2009, Seattle lost the extra 787 assembly work and it was given to SC workers without the union.
It's not irrational that SC workers fear the loss of jobs in Seattle could happen to them. The upcoming 797[4] model is in the works. It's not irrational for South Carolina workers to think that unionizing for better wages will move that 797 production elsewhere. (E.g. Seattle may end up losing all of the 787 production.[5])
>Well that was 50 years ago,
Well, the struggle & benefits gained 50 years ago is an abstraction. The events of 2009 are very fresh and real in the minds of workers.
Voting "YES" for a union doesn't necessarily mean you get a wage increase. It means (1) you might get a wage increase or (2) you might have no job.
How does a worker properly weigh those possible outcomes?
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33521235/ns/business-us_business/t...
[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/20/news/companies/boeing-797-pa...
[5] http://www.heraldnet.com/news/future-of-boeings-787-seems-se...
https://labor411.org/411-blog/1688-this-is-the-anti-union-vi...
That's where a properly functioning government steps in and stops it. OF COURSE private companies are going to break a union any way possible if the government isn't there to step in. If the US military said "you close that plant, all of our contracts are going to Airbus", exactly how many seconds do you think it would take the CEO of Boeing to change his mind?
The people of South Carolina seem to be quite happy with the current situation.
The idea that unions can only be used to bargain for wages is propaganda in its own right.
The downside is that if the union's approach is too strict, those jobs may simply disappear because it is not feasible to pay those workers more, or it may be cheaper to move those job abroad and import the resulting products.
This also requires workers to struggle and strike not for their job, but for someone else's.
(I am not saying one approach is better than the other, in fact I am usually not too fond of unions, but I am trying to explain the union's point of view)
For example one of the problem is that not all professions are unionized for example, so o get more profit and power the unions need to stifle innovation and steer the government only toward heavy industry to the destriment of almost every other sector
Also being national they seldom talk directly with workers and plant owners, and prefer to play their hands at the political table, often ignoring the specificity of issues.
And since their decision have national level ramification, every singe one needs months if not years to mature, implement and execute. Like, most national contracts are expired and have wages that are ridicolous by 2017 standards and base salary need to be supplemented in various, highly taxed ways, and new form of contracts are impossible to create (IT for example is hired under industrial or commerce contract, as the gategory didn’t exist at the time and there’s no reasonable way to create it now)
The parent comment might be full of lies, but I’m actually more inclined to believe it when the best you can do is call them falsehoods with no evidence or argument.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os
I don't think so. The media (the 4th estate) is now basically a mouth piece for the corporations. Noam Chompsky has written extensively on this, and the west really does not have a diverse spectrum of opinion, information, and perspective in popular, widely distributed and readily available information sources.
Media and information sources have been consolidated into a few centralised corporate ownerships that are not interested in social justice and a fair distribution of wealth. Quite the contrary, the corporate interests are simply interested in generating shareholder profits and wealth. Indeed, the directors of media companies are duty bound to generate as much profit for their respective corporations. This naturally means that the media corporations are interested in consolidating and centralising as much wealth for themselves as possible, and will cater their information and direction of opinion to achieve that end.
Many nonprofits educate/persuade as part of growing their membership and fund raising. Their motives are simpler and easier to figure out bias for the purpose of triangulation. This is not the same thing as journalism.
"Is that the truth or did you read it in the Herald Sun?"
Is there a source on this?
No, and that's basically by law. Unions lobbied (successfully) for laws which grant them permanent, exclusive access to the bargaining unit once 50% + 1 vote in favor of it.
Pretty much the only cases where you'd have separate unions are where they're representing different types of workers altogether (ie, nurses vs janitors) or when they're not actually employed by the same organization (ie, two different sets of subcontractors).
> And are there some cross-category unions (where workers in different areas and jobs are members of the same overarching organization
Yes, in fact almost every union is affiliated with a federation like the AFL, UAW, Teamsters, etc.
And non-union members are disproportionately likely to support things like closed-shop laws.
The way I see it, is either Government protect their Workers and working class with benefits and wages, Like what many parts of Europe have done or they allow Union to do it.
And i know this is considered an extremely unpopular opinion in US.
* Does any one know if this middle class problem is also a thing in Germany?
European economy is slow compared to the US due to high taxes, too much social protection and needless state meddling in the economy. If they introduce a tax on robots it will only get worse.
Define "slow". Growth rates are comparable everywhere with France and Germany fractionally ahead of the US:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/31/uk-comes-bo...
(of course all of those are pretty low at the moment, which may be a more general post-2008 problem)
"Too much social protection" and "high taxes" seem to me to be memes aimed at benefiting the top 1-10%, with little grounding in truth. If you look at marginal tax rates faced by median families, and compensate for the ways in which this includes things like healthcare which aren't included in the US, it's much less of a difference.
The US is at the opposite pole, meaning too little social protection. I was thinking about some kind of middle ground, like in Canada or the UK.
That sounds wrong. Example: Czech rep. had much more expansive monetary stimulus policy (we printed quite a bit of money), is booming on Germany-level and yet is super eurosceptic.
Euroscepticism is just newest brand of populism in Europe. Especially after ECB stimulus Europe is getting better, "on life support" sounds like ridiculous hyperbole.
Devaluing the CZK wouldn't have been possible if your country had switched to the Euro like Slovakia did.
The problem is the ECB does not want to devalue the Euro mainly because German fears of hyperinlfation. So they're trying to stimulate sluggish growth with negative interest rates. Which doesn't work. It only destroys pensions because it's esentially a tax on money.
Yes technology was part of it, but rampant inflation or vast increase of liquidity is also another factor, and economist are still puzzled as to why wages aren't going up.
Your obvious cleaning suspects are maybe the first ones to go. Most of the floor cleaning nowadays is done by people operating some sort of cleaning vehicle. Also, most niche cleaning jobs requiring more detail won't be replaced by robots soon. Truck and bus drivers will probably go as well, maybe in 20-30 years. Until then, this sector is just going to get more regulated with electronic log books, dynamic weight checks, satellite tracking and such. Waitresses I rather doubt will go away doring my lifetime.
In economic terms, 2008 was basically yesterday. Everything I've read points to the erosion of the middle class being related to stagnant wages in real terms going back DECADES.
German here.
At this point, I think it's not yet a problem comparable to the US, but there is rising (perhaps overblown, but certainly not unfounded) fear of a social decline among the middle class.
Remember, the German employment environment (I'm struggling to find a good word) is different from the US. Trades are stronger and more respected, university education is free, social systems offer more protection (but only from outright poverty, not from social decline).
So the pressures are probably not felt a sharply. But there is growing worry.
That's quite a claim, do you have any data to back that up? That just sounds like another claim intended to politicize things in some binary fashion - left vs right. Which is ironic because it is this same FUD tactic that politicians use to get people to react with their gut rather than their brain. You seem to be propagating this divisive tactic.
There are many reason for a shrinking middle class in the US - loss of the manufacturing sector, an aging population, the decline in marriage rates, a more unequal income distribution and changing demographics such as an increase in racial and ethnic diversity.[1]
Also the majority of of union members are now in public sector jobs and not private sector jobs.[2]
The past 50 years has overall seen an increase in the public sector union jobs, trending slightly downward recently.
Public-sector workers have a union membership rate (34.4 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.4 percent).[3]
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/business/23labor.html
[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf
Not to mention the bank bailouts, and I don't remember banks being known for their exceptionally strong labour organisation.
The bailouts were the reaction to an exogenous shock, the recession, and have not much to say about labour politics. In fact unions have the ability to collectively negotiate wage stalls, like in Germany in the early 2000s or Scandinavia in the 80s. Which is a positive in recessions to maintain employment and liquidity.
Second (and more important), taking a bailout would have meant no dividends. Many Ford family members rely on dividends as primary income.
Ford's financials were better at the time (lots of strong European subsidiaries) and they managed to tough it out.
Toyota, Honda, etc don't have the same union in their US factories.
* salary fixing * wage theft * shift of tax burden from capital to labor * raiding pensions, defunding retirement plans * denying collective bargaining * tying healthcare insurance to employment * etc, etc
A classic case of be careful what you wish for.
(Same happened - and is happening - in Germany. Staff at logistics centers started to strike (in small numbers). Totally unrelated Amazon started shipping from Poland and Czech Republic)
Just to present the full picture. In the end, either there will be a price found. But I'd say good for Italian workers for making the labour market more of a market
> And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery.
Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
> Also, I don't know wether Italy has sane strike laws or not, but in Germany amazon would not be allowed to just fire the strikers, and there is and was non-negligible PR fallout from the strikes.
You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
I hope I didn't come off as aggressive. While I am very much on the sides of the workers here as a self identified socialist (since I run a company I don't really get much cred from most socialist in-groups though), I try not to be blind to market realities and alternative view points
>Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
Margins matter at that scale, otherwise amazon would have never opened warehouses in Germany (they never did in switzerland AFAIK). Same thing with the "small percentage" of prime: anecdotaly, if I can't buy it with prime, I don't bother with amazon, because then I can just support some independent store. It won't affect people too much, but it is definetely not a no brainer.
>You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
True. But then you also have politics to think about...without investing, you don't have as much indirect political clout.
If anything ,while the most likely outcome is what you describe, there will be the next time the question of an "amazon tax" comes up and without being an employer, amazon will have to invest more into lobbying, which might work but fuel resentment...nothing ever stays still, unless people just accept the status quo
Incidentally, that's not exactly true. It's about a 6-8 hour drive from Berlin to the southwest by car, that would be around 10 hours or more by track, and only if you're not stuck in traffic and the place is right on the autobahn. Distance to the polish border adds an extra hour or two. This does not include any delay for handling packages in a distribution center. Next-day delivery would be very hard to achieve consistently from any location in the border-regions of Germany. There's a reason why one of the largest of Amazons German distribution centers is located in Bad Hersfeld, right here https://www.google.de/maps/place/Amazon+Logistik+GmbH+-+FRA1...
It's very much THE central point when it comes to traffic in Germany: Intersection of the A4, A7, A5/A6 giving you excellent routes into each part of Germany and close vicinity to the population centers in the Rhine and Ruhr valley
You're constructing a straw man here or maybe you're misinformed: A strike is a structured process that requires a prior vote by the union members. And people don't get paid during strike.
So what they are doing is entirely within their employment contracts.
I would guess Slovenia is the most probably "solution".
They even have their own website: https://www.amazon-verdi.de/
There is no general labour shortage in germany right now. 2 million foreigners are getting unemployment payments right now, which is ~1.000 Euros per month (housing included). In addition, 7 million german people are out of work.
All in all i guess we have ~10 million people waiting in lines for more work or work at all.
It's also nice to see people doing a serious strike in Italy for once, unions have done a shitty job there in recent years, but it's important to have workers protest, to guarantee a balance of power.
I dunno, maybe they think May will declare herself dictator for life and ban organised labour or something?
If you want to keep your job, your company needs money. If you want better wages/conditions, your company needs more money.
With that said, I do wish the strikers luck.
Amazon is already drowning in money, Bezos is the richest man on earth, even more money is not going to convince them to treat their employees better. A bit less money is not going to sink Amazon.
I don't understand how you can strike if this is true.
Second: Why not strike even if this is true? The workers are part of why the company earns money, why not demand their share? It's market forces, after all - workers are just using their bargaining power, just as any company does every time they negotiate a wage with an employee.
The issues that the unions are complaining about are:
* Need for increased wages: the current wages follow the minimum required by the CCNL (national collective contract)[], but working condition are worse than usual: pauseless working shifts, higher productivity required, night shifts spread all year long with 6 days working week in during high peak perios (e.g. Christmas). No productivity bonuses for event such as Christmas or Black Friday. * No ability to balance work life and personal life.
The unions say that they are going on strike since for more that one years they have tried to address those issues with Amazon but the latter always delayed any kind of action.
[*] CCNL is a contract that is agreed between unions and employers at the national level to guarantee a baseline for all employees in a given sector.
So from what I understand, the union is right in stating that Amazon's pay is not above the national contract.
Keep in mind that there are a number of tricks that can be used in order not the pay the official amount. For example, if you are hired as an apprentice the pay is lower. You can not be apprentice for more than 3 years, but the system can be abused, especially if the turnover is quite high. So in a way Amazon also is right when it says that it pays above average.
But in my opinion the salary is not the main issue, if what is said about the working conditions is true (not only in Italy, but also Germany and the US), those should be fixed because I think they are not healthy.
[1] http://www.lastampa.it/2017/03/14/edizioni/vercelli/qui-ad-a... [2] https://www.cifaitalia.it/index.php?option=com_attachments&t...
Besides, things like "private medical insurance" are meaningless in Northern Italy, where the regional health service is either free or very low-cost and delivers excellent levels of care. I'm surprised they are even mentioned as important benefits; either the person speaking to reporters is not Italian, or they are trying to target the story to non-Italian audiences.
More meaningful benefits in Italy would be guaranteed bonuses ("tredicesima", "quattordicesima") or short hours.
Or, how Amazon defines the aggregate of "salaries paid to its workers" — average, median, max, etc?
I'm generally skeptical of hand wavy claims that like this that shy far away from real numbers.
The economy in Italy is really bad, most of my friends don't have jobs and those who do usually have ones who are just average pay (18k euros/year). From what I read here (an Italian newspaper: http://www.lastampa.it/2017/03/14/edizioni/vercelli/qui-ad-a...) salaries are 1100-1200/month AFTER taxes. My dad delivers fresh fish to restaurants, he starts working at 4am every day until 1pm the next day. He works Monday through Saturday. His pay is slightly higher than that simply because he's been there for 20+ years and is now responsible for a few other things.
At least once a month there would be a strike while I was in high school, whether that was the professors, the bus drivers, the school janitors, the delivery people, etc. I don't think this is gonna be any more useful than those strikes; the difference is that Amazon can fire them, while those other strikes were "safe" because they are all state jobs which you can not be removed from. Curious to see how this plays out.
Not a criticism of either Amazon or the unions but I would really appreciate it if news sources would verify these claims one way or another. Obviously as a wire service, that may not be Reuters' job but whether Amazon's claim here is true or not makes a massive difference to what I glean from the article.
This old Gawker article accurately describes the warehouse conditions http://gawker.com/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-the-relentless-...
Long to short, there are reasons to strike beyond just pay.
The fact that the info comes from Amazon is biased at best, but without an analysis of both situations this is just a 'current events' blurb.
In Europe workers are hired by the company and are free to enter whichever union he or she wants or not to join a union. Usually all workers at a workplace join the same union and form a local branch/club at the workplace. Unions are national and usually there's several different unions organised under one union organiser. The biggest union organiser in Norway have almost a million members (that's one fifth of the population!) across almost 30 different unions. So when push comes to shove they are able to call a general strike and basically shut down the country. That almost never happens though.
This is the case in the EU as well. If your company is of a certain size, you are required to pay a person that works for the union rather than for the company.
I worked as a stocker at Kroger grocery store. Made maybe $6 an hour. During interviewing, I was told that stocking at Kroger was a union position, and in order to accept the job I had to join the union. I know it somehow tied into a national union, and am sure I could google it.. but I know nothing about it.
Every week, I had an $8 deduction from my paycheck to union dues. Otherwise, it was no different from any other job. I interviewed with the store (Kroger). I got a paycheck from Kroger. I maybe had a piece of paper with a phone number of a union rep, but I never made contact with the union (for good or bad). The pay was the same as the non-union grocery store across town.
So for me personally it was nothing except $8 a week to some union bosses. But I have been AROUND many other unions, and the experiences can be far different. For example, the Chicago Public schools have a very strong union. Because of it, teachers are paid a fair bit higher than other comparable cities. In theory teachers are protected from unjust firings and harassment. As cons, the teachers get no merit award, 100% pay is based on tenure. Great for the bottom half of teachers, not so good for the top half of teachers. It also makes it basically impossible to fire a teacher if there is not a videotape of the teacher beating a kid.
They could not get bonuses, so they go on strike? Jeez, Amazon really needs to work on automating its warehouses ASAP, for it seems to me workers greed is becoming a problem.