Well they've already solved the second problem - a certain political ideology has decided that they're fine with turning to violence and intimidation to get their way. If Amazon starts sacking workers trying to unionize they'll just burn down more buildings, cause millions more dollars in damage to major US cities, riot for a few more months, block traffic for months, fight with any law enforcement that tries to stop them, and essentially bully/coerce/intimidate the population and local governments into enacting laws and ordinances to give them what they want. (They then call themselves the good guys and use the media their political ideology has near complete control over to paint their actions in a good light).
More difficult things have been accomplished in the past. There is a strategy to a union drive, you start with little things like getting everyone to wear a red pin to work on the same day. You talk to every individual worker, one on one. It’s hard work, and management never plays fair- but it can be done. If they sack the unskilled workers the skilled ones will strike. That’s the whole idea- everyone negotiates together as a unit.
You know amazon has over a million employees. Talking to them one and a time and all wearing a red pin seems like a HUGE task.
Also, only a tiny minority of employees are skilled. They're well paid and looked after. They have large stock options (I think the only pay over 100k at amazon is given in the form of stock). I highly doubt they'll strike for the rest. They've never met them. They don't have anything in common with them. They much closer to management.
Don't get me wrong, they have every right to try. I just don't think anything even a tenth this size has been accomplished in the history of labour relations...
They're only closer to management in the sense that they make more money and have better conditions. Their livelihood is just as precarious and just as dependent on their bosses for income, and they can be fired just as easily -- and they have their own grievances about scope and purpose of work.
That's not actually true. If you're a skilled worker, you're livelihood (and security) comes from your skills. This is the core issue with unions for skilled people. If you work hard and move around, you can make great money and be secure without a union. So why unionise? That's why there is no union of doctors or investment bankers...
Imagine you're a dev at amazon, and you get 100k basic and share options worth another 100k. If you throw in with the union, you risk your job. And if you win, they get 2usd an hour more. And your 100k of share options is worthless. How does that sound like a good deal?
Professional organizations take their place for regulated professions - so the AMA for doctors and the NIBA for Investment Bankers.
But programming isn't a regulated profession. It doesn't have a professional organization. Your "cred" is reputational and based on work history, not on actual credentials or licensure. It's closer in this sense to a trade, like electrical work or plumbing, where members frequently are unionized.
Why unionize? Because your facial recognition tech is being used to round up Uigurs, or bomb Yemeni weddings, or bake cakes for gay people. To have actual say over the products you work on, and how they're used.
I don't see the relevance of some professions being regulated. A dev is skilled labour whether they're regulated or not. Being not easily replaceable puts them in the same category as the others I listed.
Your points on Why unionise? have wondered a bit if you don't mind me saying. Again, I'm all for people having a moral stance. But if you do, why did you join the Amazon Facial Recognition and Military Tech department? And why would unionising actually stop that work being done, rather than just move it to MS or Apple or Halliburton? And even if you did, why bother including the pickers? They don't care about amazon tech and you wouldn't need them to close the tech centre down...
> I don't see the relevance of some professions being regulated. A dev is skilled labour whether they're regulated or not. Being not easily replaceable puts them in the same category as the others I listed
First you say, Doctors don’t have unions.
Then you move the goalpost when it’s pointed out that many skilled professions do have something effectively similar.
I'm trying hard here to give the benefit of the doubt. Help me understand: how is the AMA a union? Especially the sort of union people are suggesting for amazon. Specifically:
* do they negotiate standard wages, hours and work conditions?
* do they organise strikes and other action when they don't get what their members want?
* do they also represent unskilled workers, say hospital cleaners (as was being suggested for the amazon Union)?
Help me out here. Am I missing something? I'm no expert so I'm happy to be corrected...
Sure: First, throw away the narrow conception of what you think a trade union is.
A trade union is simply an organization of workers to achieve a shared goal. That’s it.
For many trade associations, safety standards is a big one, and it becomes more important as the trade is more skilled.
So for instance, it’s the AMA that promoted the standards of medicine over the century and a half and lobbied to prevent quacks from practicing as “medical doctors”.
Do you believe the fragmented and haphazard standards in software today and management’s race to the bottom is beneficial to consumers or to society?
You can also unionize for better conditions and more money! NBA stars do, and rightfully so! I don't understand why many engineers feel like collective bargaining for more money is somehow dirty or an appropriation of a tool that is reserved for extremely oppressed workers. Engineers are extremely valuable to their employers, and are still probably under-compensated relative to the value they bring in.
Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down. Workers should work together, legally, to push wages up. This does not mean that compensation needs to be based on seniority or anything like that, and union contracts do not necessarily mean an end to worker flexibility. Engineers can propose whatever rules they think are fair.
However, I do agree that ethical concerns are a strong reason to organize, and a proper subject for union negotiations.
> You can also unionize for better conditions and more money! NBA stars do, and rightfully so!
No you can’t. This is a very young and naive view. The NBA is a monopoly. It will absolutely not be the same when implemented in the tech industry. Not only will you earn less, but your stock will take a huge hit.
> Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down.
This was 10 years ago and isn’t happening. The incredible salary inflation makes this pretty obvious.
1) I think the point is that all skilled jobs by definition benefit from a barrier to entry. As far as suitability to unionization, it hardly matters whether the barrier is experience, education, or taxi medallions.
2) AFAIU, for many years now the bottleneck in the United States for doctors has mostly been residency slots, which aren't controlled in any manner by the AMA, AFAIK. Skilled nurses are even more supply constrained than doctors despite having relatively lower barriers to entry. The issue there seems to simply be not enough teachers.
- Quality and security: There is no cost advantage to supporting security, unless somebody pushes to make it that way. I can’t find a large US bank that supports Yubikey.
Also think of the chaos with Experian.
- Solidarity with very important (and struggling) fields like investigative journalism. My field destroys jobs and creates others, but quality information is just too important.
It depends on whether you're coming at the question from a prescriptivist or a descriptivist viewpoint. The point about skilled workers isn't a strawman from a descriptivist viewpoint--i.e. understanding why there's less demand for unionization. Even from a prescriptivist viewpoint the point is relevant as to why alternative approaches might be better--e.g. giving consumers and users more power by rolling back limitations on class actions, and statutorily creating new rights of action designed to force companies to internalize more of their costs (e.g. regarding security). Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals?
That said, many skilled nurses are unionized. So there's definitely reason to believe that if unskilled Amazon employees become unionized, other skilled employees might follow suit, and that could be a good thing for all the reasons you described.
It’s a strawman in the sense that this entire conversation was a response to the following:
> They're only closer to management in the sense that they make more money and have better conditions. Their livelihood is just as precarious and just as dependent on their bosses for income, and they can be fired just as easily -- and they have their own grievances about scope and purpose of work
At least when I read it money and stability (or lack of) is a given, but scope and purpose of the work is really the distinguishing factor.
Though looking at it again maybe OP meant all of the above is a reason for a trade organization.
> Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals
Because it’s necessary?
Currently how can an employee blow the whistle on unethical practices, without significant repercussions?
According to his linked in (first result of googling his name), he got a job at a startup a few weeks after he finished arbitration with Google. So it worked fine for him. He didn't move city or change industry or job. Just went back to work using his skills elsewhere...
I'm an SDE II at Amazon. Posting because I hope other SDEs read this; there is strength in voices.
I absolutely will join a strike if Amazon lays off unionizing unskilled workers en masse.
The pay is good, but I think you're missing two things.
(1) A large portion of Amazon SDEs leave after a year or two anyway. (The lack of vested RSUs in the first two years is typically compensated with an equivalent sign-on bonus, which pays out with each paycheck. So the vesting schedule doesn't particularly incentivize sticking around for no other reason.)
(2) Many Amazon SDEs (like that of any FAANG) are millenials, who skew progressive: worker rights are an issue I think many feel strongly about, and many probably have friends who are part of the unskilled labor pool or gig economy. We know if it weren't for software, we'd very well be in the same boat.
Thanks, it's good to hear from someone with first hand knowledge. I wasn't aware of the vesting structure and I think you're right that a shorter term planned tenure makes people less risk averse.
Sacking workers for unionizing or engaging in concerted action to address grievances is illegal. Companies (including Amazon [1]) break this law all the time, because it reduces the union's momentum and they only have to pay back pay and rehire the person if they are found to have done so. (They usually come up with threadbare pretexts and draw things out at the NLRB.)
Still, this intimidation strategy works best when there are only a few workers involved. With critical mass, it becomes much harder. Additionally, the new administration will hopefully make this standard union-busting much more expensive by passing a bill to institute treble damages for unfair labor practice violations.
One advantage of the current fragmented bargaining landscape is that you don't need to organize the whole company at once. You can just focus on individual workplaces ("bargaining units.") The disadvantage of this is that unionization is a slog of attrition, and you're unlikely to get a result like the Flint Sitdown Strike
Amazon is the most visible example of wealth transfer during this pandemic, with online shopping and AWS, so it's an obvious target for mob energy.
But the idea of unionizing is quaint for a company that has become so many things (manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure, marketplace).
They suggest that somehow the new administration will be friendlier to unionizing, as if that was the blocker.
It doesn't take a PR genius to see what the Amazon narrative will be when people can't get their boxes of shit because of a strike. And thats just from warehouses. Extend that to AWS and Whole Foods and it'll be hard to maintain any sympathy.
Amazon was already getting their tentacles on everything before covid, and now its just amplified. I'd love to see this be the motivator that encourages people to rise up against their overlords, but it's going to end up like the people that protest by blocking freeways. It just pisses off the people trying to go about their lives, and works against the cause.
I just finished reading my six year old “horton hears a who” and I have to say, I understand the book better than I did when I was younger. Sometimes to get the big people to hear you, you all have to shout at once. Dr. Seuss was very clever in how he put messages into his books, by keeping things sort of abstract they connect even after many years. Yertle the turtle is another favorite.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.3 ms ] thread* amazon is huge, can you really mobalise 50% of the US workforce to vote for it?
* what happens when all the unskilled workers are simply sacked and replaced with non-union workers?
Also, only a tiny minority of employees are skilled. They're well paid and looked after. They have large stock options (I think the only pay over 100k at amazon is given in the form of stock). I highly doubt they'll strike for the rest. They've never met them. They don't have anything in common with them. They much closer to management.
Don't get me wrong, they have every right to try. I just don't think anything even a tenth this size has been accomplished in the history of labour relations...
Imagine you're a dev at amazon, and you get 100k basic and share options worth another 100k. If you throw in with the union, you risk your job. And if you win, they get 2usd an hour more. And your 100k of share options is worthless. How does that sound like a good deal?
But programming isn't a regulated profession. It doesn't have a professional organization. Your "cred" is reputational and based on work history, not on actual credentials or licensure. It's closer in this sense to a trade, like electrical work or plumbing, where members frequently are unionized.
Why unionize? Because your facial recognition tech is being used to round up Uigurs, or bomb Yemeni weddings, or bake cakes for gay people. To have actual say over the products you work on, and how they're used.
Your points on Why unionise? have wondered a bit if you don't mind me saying. Again, I'm all for people having a moral stance. But if you do, why did you join the Amazon Facial Recognition and Military Tech department? And why would unionising actually stop that work being done, rather than just move it to MS or Apple or Halliburton? And even if you did, why bother including the pickers? They don't care about amazon tech and you wouldn't need them to close the tech centre down...
First you say, Doctors don’t have unions.
Then you move the goalpost when it’s pointed out that many skilled professions do have something effectively similar.
The reason for having one isn’t just about pay.
* do they negotiate standard wages, hours and work conditions?
* do they organise strikes and other action when they don't get what their members want?
* do they also represent unskilled workers, say hospital cleaners (as was being suggested for the amazon Union)?
Help me out here. Am I missing something? I'm no expert so I'm happy to be corrected...
A trade union is simply an organization of workers to achieve a shared goal. That’s it.
For many trade associations, safety standards is a big one, and it becomes more important as the trade is more skilled.
So for instance, it’s the AMA that promoted the standards of medicine over the century and a half and lobbied to prevent quacks from practicing as “medical doctors”.
Do you believe the fragmented and haphazard standards in software today and management’s race to the bottom is beneficial to consumers or to society?
Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down. Workers should work together, legally, to push wages up. This does not mean that compensation needs to be based on seniority or anything like that, and union contracts do not necessarily mean an end to worker flexibility. Engineers can propose whatever rules they think are fair.
However, I do agree that ethical concerns are a strong reason to organize, and a proper subject for union negotiations.
No you can’t. This is a very young and naive view. The NBA is a monopoly. It will absolutely not be the same when implemented in the tech industry. Not only will you earn less, but your stock will take a huge hit.
> Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down.
This was 10 years ago and isn’t happening. The incredible salary inflation makes this pretty obvious.
Wrong. The AMA sets an even higher bar than any union.
2) AFAIU, for many years now the bottleneck in the United States for doctors has mostly been residency slots, which aren't controlled in any manner by the AMA, AFAIK. Skilled nurses are even more supply constrained than doctors despite having relatively lower barriers to entry. The issue there seems to simply be not enough teachers.
There’s more reasons to support an influential trade organization other than just pay and job security.
- Ethics : Litigating the worst behaviors (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.).
- Quality and security: There is no cost advantage to supporting security, unless somebody pushes to make it that way. I can’t find a large US bank that supports Yubikey.
Also think of the chaos with Experian.
- Solidarity with very important (and struggling) fields like investigative journalism. My field destroys jobs and creates others, but quality information is just too important.
I can go on.
It depends on whether you're coming at the question from a prescriptivist or a descriptivist viewpoint. The point about skilled workers isn't a strawman from a descriptivist viewpoint--i.e. understanding why there's less demand for unionization. Even from a prescriptivist viewpoint the point is relevant as to why alternative approaches might be better--e.g. giving consumers and users more power by rolling back limitations on class actions, and statutorily creating new rights of action designed to force companies to internalize more of their costs (e.g. regarding security). Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals?
That said, many skilled nurses are unionized. So there's definitely reason to believe that if unskilled Amazon employees become unionized, other skilled employees might follow suit, and that could be a good thing for all the reasons you described.
At least when I read it money and stability (or lack of) is a given, but scope and purpose of the work is really the distinguishing factor.
Though looking at it again maybe OP meant all of the above is a reason for a trade organization.
> Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals
Because it’s necessary?
Currently how can an employee blow the whistle on unethical practices, without significant repercussions?
Didn't protect James Damore.
I absolutely will join a strike if Amazon lays off unionizing unskilled workers en masse.
The pay is good, but I think you're missing two things.
(1) A large portion of Amazon SDEs leave after a year or two anyway. (The lack of vested RSUs in the first two years is typically compensated with an equivalent sign-on bonus, which pays out with each paycheck. So the vesting schedule doesn't particularly incentivize sticking around for no other reason.)
(2) Many Amazon SDEs (like that of any FAANG) are millenials, who skew progressive: worker rights are an issue I think many feel strongly about, and many probably have friends who are part of the unskilled labor pool or gig economy. We know if it weren't for software, we'd very well be in the same boat.
Still, this intimidation strategy works best when there are only a few workers involved. With critical mass, it becomes much harder. Additionally, the new administration will hopefully make this standard union-busting much more expensive by passing a bill to institute treble damages for unfair labor practice violations.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/amazon-fires-staten-island-c...
But the idea of unionizing is quaint for a company that has become so many things (manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure, marketplace).
They suggest that somehow the new administration will be friendlier to unionizing, as if that was the blocker.
It doesn't take a PR genius to see what the Amazon narrative will be when people can't get their boxes of shit because of a strike. And thats just from warehouses. Extend that to AWS and Whole Foods and it'll be hard to maintain any sympathy.
Amazon was already getting their tentacles on everything before covid, and now its just amplified. I'd love to see this be the motivator that encourages people to rise up against their overlords, but it's going to end up like the people that protest by blocking freeways. It just pisses off the people trying to go about their lives, and works against the cause.