I don't know about Amazon, but many employers don't let most employees work full time. If that's the case these workers sort of are born into part-time employment since the socioeconomic class you grow up in is the biggest factor of success.
The best argument against unions is thay they violate contract liberty, and thereby inhibit market freedom and increase economic rent seeking.
With a couple notable exceptions, like Hollywood, any industry in the US that came to be dominated by unions became uncompetitive: the auto industry, US Steel, and the passenger rail service, which went bankrupt as a result of the demands of the "Brotherhoods".
Numerous states have been straddled with trillions in pension obligations and increasingly inefficient public sectors, due to unions.
Unfortunately, those working for the media are all unionized now so even the prism through which we interpret the world is now propagandized by the left.
I cannot prove causality, but I think common sense dictates here. Everything we know about economics tells us that inhibiting contract liberty in the way that labor laws do in order to give unions monopolistic control over the negotiating power of a company's work force will be economically harmful and an objective review of US economic history validates that.
>>The US auto industry is still very union-based, and beyond the occasional bailout, seems to be doing well.
The US auto industry is now protected by trade barriers so the bleed has stopped, but it saw a massive drop in market share since the early 1960s:
>Unionization does not cure bad management, it merely makes sure that the employees are treated fairly, regardless of the quality of management.
It reduces managerial discretion. It makes it so that the labor market is not free. It makes unionized workers into a privileged set of insiders who do not compete on an level playing field with other workers. It also reduces the range of options available to investors/entrepreneurs, in inhibiting their contract liberty. Reducing optionality in voluntary interaction is going to be an economic net negative.
>>Remember: the reason people have jobs is to feed their families, not to support the company.
The reason people invest in companies, or buy from a company, is to personally profit, not to provide people with jobs. Once you force the private sector to act like a charity, you are introducing top-down control and limiting the free market that is so effective at coordinating large numbers of people to better meet their collective needs.
responding to below:
chmod775:
>>Worker's unions are compatible with free markets as much as corporate groups or large companies are.
Yes, that is true. I meant under the current laws, where a union can force their employer to negotiate exclusively with them. This is mandated collective bargaining, as opposed to mutually voluntary collective bargaining.
>>Except that a most of the competition that leapfrogged them has famously strong unions.
Besides the unionized German auto sector, I don't know what you're referring to. Some of my examples, like the US passenger rail service which went bankrupt soon after the unions took over, or the public sector, had/have no foreign competition.
With respect to Germany, it should be noted that Germany's wage/GDP growth has been quite stagnant since the 1970s as well. Its auto industry has been successful, but that can be attributed to numerous other factors, like its effective education system, its engineering culture, and government policy focused on promoting auto manufacturing, all of which can counter-act the negative effects of its unions.
Also it should be noted that the relationship between unions and employers in Germany is more cooperative that in the US.
jakelazaroff:
>>Unions increase the negotiating power of those selling their labor. That’s not forcing the private sector to act like a charity, it’s just giving workers more leverage.
They increase that negotiating power by preventing the employer from negotiating with the larger labor pool. It is a zero sum gain t...
Unions increase the negotiating power of those selling their labor. That’s not forcing the private sector to act like a charity, it’s just giving workers more leverage.
The thing I don’t understand about your argument is that you say that giving “monopolistic control over the negotiating power of a company's work force will be economically harmful”. But companies already have monopolistic (well, monopsonistic) control over their workforce. So why is this an acceptable status quo?
I can't respond to your original post anymore, because it's already downvoted into oblivion, so I'm going to post my reply here:
> The best argument against unions is thay they violate contract liberty, and thereby inhibit market freedom and increase economic rent seeking.
Freedom of contract is about state interference. Worker's unions are compatible with free markets as much as corporate groups or large companies are. You can't make a logical argument rejecting only one of them.
> any industry in the US that came to be dominated by unions became uncompetitive: the auto industry, US Steel, and the passenger rail service
Except that a lot of the competition from other countries that supposedly leapfrogged them has famously strong unions. So much in fact they're usually used as examples for them. How do you reconcile that?
Also the US car industry isn't even that bad off and neither is steel.
Saying that your argument is limping would be sugar-coating it. If that was truly - as you say - the "best" argument against unions, then... oh well.
> you are introducing top-down control and limiting the free market that is so effective at coordinating large numbers of people to better meet their collective needs
I can't believe you're saying that with a straight face, talking about Jeff Bezzos' company, after covid and 2020.
Alabama is a right-to-work state, so how is a union inhibiting contract liberty? You legally cannot be forced in Alabama to pay union dues if you don't want to be part of a union.
Of course, an industry might decide not to work with people who are outside of the union, but an industry might also choose not to hire anyone who refuses to sign arbitration and/or anticompete agreements, and I'd wager you probably think those contracts are the results of free choices from all players.
So by the same logic, a voluntary union in a right-to-work state is the result of voluntary contracts and decisions made by people who vote to join the union and by businesses that freely decide to work with that union in order to access that workforce. You might not like the outcome of those negotiations, but a group of people deciding to collectively accept or reject a contract is contract liberty. Of course they should have the freedom to make that decision.
I understand some of the union objections in states where employees can be forced to join and/or pay dues against their will, but people act like collective bargaining is fundamentally anti-freedom, and I just don't understand that point of view at all. What is a collective bargaining agreement other than another contract that people have the freedom to sign?
> Tesla is doing great, and its workforce is not unionized.
By what definition? There have been multiple articles and accounts describing Tesla's factories as awful places to work, and its management tried to pressure its workers to ignore COVID restrictions.
Sure, if the only thing you're optimizing for is profit, then any attempt to increase employee bargaining power is going to be a problem, because all of them will reduce profit. But Tesla seems to be largely failing the "is this what we want a modern factory/workplace to look like" test.
----
Edit, addressing your points:
> We're talking about the strength of industry here. By that standard, Tesla is doing great.
That's a very vague definition -- I wouldn't say that Tesla is producing wildly better cars than everyone else on the market. They're certainly very profitable, but if you're only thinking about profit marging and stock price, then you're going to end up opposing literally anything that improves worker conditions in any way.
> The Biden administration is planning to get rid of right to work:
And your solution to that is to oppose people's rights to collectively bargain? Again, I understand some of the objections you might have around union regulations, but you're still not arguing for free contracts if you're throwing the concept out entirely. I mean, arguably even right-to-work laws themselves are anti-free-contract, I know Libertarians who hold that view because those contracts bar what contracts an employer can sign with a union.
If you have objections about federal laws, fine, but that's not the problem of the current workers who want to collectively bargain with Amazon. They shouldn't have to give up their collective bargaining rights just because you have an issue with the federal regulations, they still at a fundamental level have the right to unionize.
Take it up with Biden, don't complain about the workers.
>>That's a very vague definition -- I wouldn't say that Tesla is producing wildly better cars than everyone else on the market. They're certainly very profitable, but if you're only thinking about profit marging and stock price, then you're going to end up opposing literally anything that improves worker conditions in any way.
1. Strength of industry is pretty commonly understood by its profitability. And profitability and worker conditions are positively correlated, so they are in no way opposing each other. The profitability of Tesla and the export revenue being brought into the US by Tesla's market success means more spending by Tesla on US-based operations which applies upward pressure on US wages. This is Economics 101.
2. If people are choosing their cars over other cars, that means they are producing better cars. Consumer choice is the only objective measure of quality we have.
3. Tesla is driving the entire car industry forward, by encouraging other auto makers to embrace electric cars, and also self-driving features, while expanding the recharging infrastructure needed for widespread use of electric vehicles.
>>And your solution to that is to oppose people's rights to collectively bargain?
If by "right to collectively bargain", you mean having laws that force companies to collectively bargain with unions, yes. Companies should be free to decide who to negotiate with, and free to reject requests to collectively bargain. The laws, as they are, are problematic.
> They increase that negotiating power by preventing the employer from negotiating with the larger labor pool. It is a zero sum gain that enables unionized workers to extract economic rent.
Such rent as sick leave, holidays, weekends, basic health insurance (US), ...? That rent?
I like how the main objection would be instantly nullified if Amazon paid their workers more. Do you think a union would be able to negotiate for more than $500 of extra compensation?
I honestly am skeptical. AMZN already pays more than other small businesses and even medium/large businesses. It doesn't make money by paying its workers less - it makes money with efficiency and volume.
Alabama is a right-to-work state. My understanding is that it would be completely legal for Amazon to hire new employees the second someone doesn't show up because of a strike, so I'm not sure their leverage.
These workers are probably making between 30k and 50k a year so $500 isn't nothing.
A) If the union has a good chance of increasing wages 400 to 600 per year locally, then that is a great deal for the union organizers, a passable deal for the workers, and a bad deal for Amazon. I didn't say they won't be able to raise wages at all - just maybe not enough to justify the $500 union fees.
B) Not every state is a right-to-work state. So, from a 'worker's of the world unite' perspective then obviously making a union in Alabama will help other places form unions.
I could be very wrong and perhaps the union could get 1 or 2k more per year - but I am skeptical.
No, a union contract supersedes a "right to work", because it's a contract. Yes, an employer can fire you for little/no reason (if it's not discriminatory) but if they sign a contract saying they won't fire you, then their hands are tied.
In the example of something like missing a day of work, the contract will spell out the specifics of advance notice for days off/sick days. If it's completely unannounced, the contract will spell out the steps of a disciplinary process.
Source: I work in a right to work state, used to be a union member, asked this very same question at the time.
Unions don’t increase wages by negotiating, they do it by excluding non-union members from employment. It is literally the only mechanism by which unions can increase remuneration.
This is another reminder that we have some of the negative aspects of a cyberpunk future without the cool empowering hacking parts.
I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
>I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
Though I disagree with Amazon's official arguments, I'm even more opposed to the notion that anyone who agrees with them is dead inside.
> I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job?
I suggest you hang around Blind for a bit and you'll realize that some of our techie colleagues hold some.. interesting opinions about labor or about how much to pay workers we now consider 'essential'
Blind is very toxic. It's one of apps I install rarely, only when needed (something is happening at work or to gauge offers) just for mental health reasons. It's unbelievable what people are comfortable sharing under anonymity. HOWEVER, it's one of the only places in tech where the koolaid is called out for what it is and nobody pretends to be happy. It's an island of sincerity.
I am not in the tech world, but reading through HN has been more than enough to understand exactly what you mean. Ultimately, people's opinions will change depending on what increases their material conditions at the expense of other groups, and I am no different in that regard.
> Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
Many of us don’t like unions. We consider them to be parasitic organizations that pervert the employer-employee-customer relationship without adding value. In fact, by twisting a business so that it is run for the benefit of the employees instead of for the mutual benefit of employees, employer, and customers, they destroy value. What is worse, unions have a nasty habit of convincing the government to make laws that effectively give the union a monopoly on certain kinds of tasks, preventing other workers from competing.
Now you may not agree with this perspective and its certainly something that people should discuss rather than accept uncritically. But have you considered that you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions that you have trouble imagining how someone could make a website opposing them without being dead inside because you’ve only been exposed to pro-union arguments?
> you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions
How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth. Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
> How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth.
I disagree on the pervasiveness of anti-union propaganda. Perhaps this is your experience, it has not been mine.
> Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
Barely any of us are amateur radio operators and you never hear about amateur radio from anyone except preppers and geeks, but it isn’t because of inundation of anti-ham-radio propaganda from birth, merely that most people aren’t aware that ham radio could fulfill any of their needs.
> I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
Thats your experience. But I bet you didn’t wonder that each and every person who propagandized you were dead inside. Rather you eventually became aware that some of them had their own beliefs based on their own perspectives that led them to their anti-union work.
> The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
As does the idea that someone could only make anti-union website if they were dead inside, but we like to assume good faith when people make statements and keep our cynicism to ourselves when possible.
I have, I’ve been a welder/fabricator, a machine operator, a forklift driver, and a temp. I’ve seen anti-union propaganda. I’ve seen pro-union propaganda. And I’m familiar enough with the discourse that I don’t wonder why anyone chooses what they choose. And there are evil parasites on both sides. But rarely do I see people acknowledge the arguments of the other side, usually just calling them parasites.
> I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
This whole ting started because they said that how could someone do that unless they were dead inside which I inferred to mean they hadn’t been exposed to any reasons why someone would do that, and you couldn’t believe that anyone would be unaware as to the legitimate rational case against unions based on workers’ interests. So I observed that you didn’t share the same reaction as the original commenter when you were exposed to the propaganda.
You yourself haven't even had the experience of going through life without seeing a significant amount of anti-union propaganda. Yet you believe there are people who miraculously have.
Perhaps there are plausible anti-union arguments out there, but this Amazon website isn't making them. Instead we get text like this:
> IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.
It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
Yeah that jumped out at me but it was probably a poorly phrased attempt at referring to the changes inherent in a unionized workplace. Like restrictions on how much work a person is allowed to do and conflict between employees who pay dues and employees who do not pay dues.
> It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
You’re probably being hyperbolic but this lack of charity is one reason why we can’t have nice things.
>In fact, by twisting a business so that it is run for the benefit of the employees instead of for the mutual benefit of employees, employer, and customers, they destroy value.
An union negotiates/help negotiate, an employer would never run it's business if there was no benefit for them. Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
> Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
If the employer doesn’t accrue some marginal benefit, he’ll liquidate his investment if he is able. So he has to get something, and a good parasite will make sure not to kill the host.
You could say the exact same from the employers side. They would love to pay people nothing if they could, but they need to make sure the employee gains the minimum benefit to keep them working.
Exactly. So the employee negotiates the highest wage that he can, and the employer negotiates the lowest wage that he can, and they arrive at an acceptable wage.
If you look at the website, it's not the mere fact that it's against unions that is disturbing. That's an ideological point of view that doesn't strike me as unusual. In fact, it's pretty rational to be anti-union if you are among those who stand to profit from that, just like people who can profit from unions will naturally be interested in one and will align most of their ideology with that.
It's the sheer cynicism, condescension, accidental self-parody, and other design choices of that website that make me wonder about the people behind it. It's a postmodern cocktail of horror. Nowhere do they make a good faith attempt to lay out solid anti-union arguments.
Maybe the line with the worst rhetorical trick is this bullshit in the "joining a union" FAQ: "Q: Will a union provide better wages and benefits? A: A union cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. With union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
I love that because it works exactly as well when you just negate the question:
"Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Without a union, Amazon cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. Without union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Yes, it could. Unions introduce parasitic loss and collective bargaining. Collective bargaining allows a large part of the workforce to negotiate as one unit and consequently higher performing workers are unable to negotiate a salary commensurate with their performance. In order to retain higher performing workers, corporations end up paying average performing workers more and high performers less under union conditions. The amount of benefit you receive from collective bargaining, and if you receive a benefit at all, are directly related to your productivity relative to the median worker.
Do you mean the ones that sit at their keyboards earning a multiple of the salaries of those who do the actual physical work necessary to serve customers.
I often remind my colleagues that we are very lucky to have such easy and well paid jobs by asking the simple question, “how many bags of sand did you carry yesterday?”
> Do you mean the ones that sit at their keyboards earning a multiple of the salaries of those who do the actual physical work necessary to serve customers.
I mean “higher performing” according to the people who pay them.
> I often remind my colleagues that we are very lucky to have such easy and well paid jobs by asking the simple question, “how many bags of sand did you carry yesterday?”
I’ve been a welder/fabricator, machine operator, and forklift driver. Programming and web development isn’t easy although it isn’t physically arduous. Whats more relevant to our discussion is that a high performer is not as easily replaced. Physical work is honorable and demanding. Its also something a lot of people can do.
> Whats more relevant to our discussion is that a high performer is not as easily replaced.
I agree that a high performing developer is hard to find, but so is a high performing manual worker.
Conversely in my experience retaining a high performing developer at market rates is easier, because the job is more rewarding (that’s what I think makes the job easier to do).
I think what you are talking about is scarcity driving the market salary rates for developers, not performance.
Personally I think a union with members including the scarce developers and the abundant manual workers would be a good thing for all the employees.
I expect 20 years from now there will be no scarcity of developers, and the vast majority of them will not be paid nearly as much as US manual workers - primarily because they will be working in poorer countries with labour laws that favour the employer.
> I agree that a high performing developer is hard to find, but so is a high performing manual worker.
high performing manual workers negotiate superior wages unless they are restrained by a union
> I think what you are talking about is scarcity driving the market salary rates for developers, not performance.
So they are related but the key concept here is that a low performer is more easily replaced, and so does not have the negotiation power to negotiate a higher wage. So these workers benefit from a union.
> Personally I think a union with members including the scarce developers and the abundant manual workers would be a good thing for all the employees.
It would be a good thing for the replaceable workers and a bad thing for the less replaceable workers.
>I’m defining “high performance” to include those sorts of persons.
My point is that you may be confusing the ability to perform a function efficiently with the ability to perform a function that less people can do.
I don’t think many here would define a VBA/Excel analyst that knows the data model and how to access a bunch of legacy platforms to produce a criterial report each month as high performing - but they’re scarce and difficult to replace.
>It is equitable precisely because those skills are scarce.
My use of the use of equitable was as a synonym for fair.
I don’t think it’s fair that those who work in higher risk or less fulfilling jobs should be paid half as much. There are credible arguments about why it’s justified , but I don’t think there are any tenable arguments that it is fair.
> I don’t think many here would define a VBA/Excel analyst that knows the data model and how to access a bunch of legacy platforms to produce a criterial report each month as high performing - but they’re scarce and difficult to replace.
I didn’t mean to debate semantics with you and I can see how my language provoked that. My claim is that a scarce, difficult to replace employee deserves more money because of their scarcity and difficulty in being replaced.
> I don’t think it’s fair that those who work in higher risk or less fulfilling jobs should be paid half as much. There are credible arguments about why it’s justified , but I don’t think there are any tenable arguments that it is fair.
I believe its fair. In fact I believe its unfair not to do so. Rather than debate the fairness, I’m more interested in if you think fairness is objective or intersubjective?
I respect your attempt to disengage from the discussion. Can I respectfully ask you to consider how your notions of fairness impact on the ethics of forcing one person’s notion of fairness on another? Thank you.
While I agree that workers who do physical work do not earn enough, it's not OK to simplify the work that sysadmins, developers and other people do.
I for one work for 7 days a week for ~8 weeks now, and just sat and watched a wall to relax yesterday night because my brain and body refused to do absolutely anything.
Every work is exhausting when overdone or just done with sufficient care.
It can be. Some offices are hazardous (sick building syndrome, mold) on top of the problems associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Whereas some physical jobs are amazing (work outside, lots of breaks, stay in good shape because you’re moving a lot). It really depends on the specifics of the job.
> Great, now do the same thing but you have to lift boxes.
We install our own datacenter hardware. Hundreds of servers. Carrying. Mounting. Cabling. I'm no stranger to hard, manual work.
I feel tired, but I feel no pain. That's a different kind of being exhausted. Mental exhaustion cannot be compared with physical exhaustion. Both are hard, both are crippling, however one is not better than the other.
It's also very satisfying to install a new fleet and bring it up while drinking tea with muscle tingling all over your body.
The issue was comparing suffering. If one makes 7 times more than another, they only have to put up with it 1/7th the amount of time before earning enough to tell their employer to screw off. Hard to feel as sorry for the person making much more money.
That resentment is harmful. It's built on prejudice that the one earning more money is looking down to person with lower income, and it's not always true.
Also, I still do not agree on earning sevenfold with 1/7 amount of effort (a 49 fold difference). Neither being a sysadmin or a developer is that easy when a single click of your mouse can affect research of 500 people who have deadlines.
It's not "just a walk in the park" when you're working with a lot of projects with deadlines, entering meetings and try to finish everything on time and not being able to see straight due headaches induced by overloading yourself and sleeping 3-4 hours continuously.
No job is easy, they're different. All of them worthy of respect. Also it's always greener on the other side.
To be brutally honest, I have great respect who work at manual jobs, work at shifts, work at weekends. In general who work hard, a lot and in unconventional hours.
I try to be extra nice to these people, try to release the burden on them, when I can. When chatting with my SO, we sometimes talk about these people and how bad I feel about their circumstances.
I want to reiterate that I think that they need to earn more and live better.
I haven't worked in full time labor job, however I helped or worked with laborers on volunteering basis. OTOH, just because I worked as a volunteer, I didn't work less when compared to them.
Similarly, on my current job, I have worked off-site, in hazardous sites, in off-hours (including all-nighters), in movement restricted conditions (think as soft imprisonment inside a building) or extremely stressful circumstances. These weren't "Oh, there's a deadline, so let's crunch!" stuff. It was against all odds, against the clock rescue jobs where nobody including your teammates were believing that it's possible, but we (me and a friend) have prevailed.
On the hardware mounting stuff, it was not again "let's playfully install" this stuff too. 100+ servers, left in boxes in front of the building. Carry, unbox, install rails, mount, make all the cabling (incl. electricity, from distribution boxes if req'd) and make them work, in 2 days most.
Yesterday, I was carrying servers to make some part replacements on them.
I never expect not to become one of these laborers. I never think of them as servants or invisible people. On the contrary, they are forming the backbone of some of the stuff that we never see consciously. These systems become invisible because of their hard work. They deserve a lot of respect.
Trash is picked up 1am in my street. I always think of the man, their families and circumstances.
Similarly, when I go to a carrier's office, I try to prepare all my answers and papers before to take their time less (they're literally drowning in packages to ship, so if I'm faster, they can finish their other work faster). I actively try not to reflect myself onto them since they see hundreds of people every day. I try not to be one of the people which makes them feel like a useless/replaceable cogs.
Just because I can play with a lot of cutting edge servers, not sweat everyday and wear my body down to earn a bit of money, it doesn't mean that I can not or don't want to understand and romanticize the burden they're going through.
Similarly just because I have a nicer job, it doesn't mean that all my friends or people I know and care are in the same circle or in higher places.
Just because I know how to manage an OS and write high performance code, it doesn't mean I live isolated in my high castle.
Sounds like you definitely appreciate the efforts of manual labor and even have some manual labor as part of your job.
I agree that there are other factors (far more important ones) than just job/earnings. For example, a star developer making millions with a terminally ill spouse or child would easily trade places with manual laborer if doing that made a difference in their outcome. Silly example but it does illustrate how money is really not at the top of everyone’s list.
> Sounds like you definitely appreciate the efforts of manual labor and even have some manual labor as part of your job.
Thank you. I really appreciate them. Yes, manual labor is a part of our job and we (as the group) do not whine about that. On the contrary, we like the thing TBH.
> For example, a star developer making millions with a terminally ill spouse or child would easily trade places with manual laborer if doing that made a difference in their outcome.
That's not a silly example. It's spot on. I did similar choices (not drastic as the example, and luckily not based on health issues). Rejected higher pay or prestigious titles or shiny companies to be able to stay closer to my family and people I love, to be able to live a simpler and more free life.
I'm not a money oriented person. I do this job because I like computers, I worked a lot and I was definitely lucky up to a certain extent.
However as I said, I don't keep my job as a crown or title about myself to pretend to be more precious and important than other people. We're equal on this little blue dot and everyone and everything deserve respect IMHO.
...except for Amazon warehouses where to my knowledge almost everyone with the same role gets basically the same pay (without any unions). Minimum wage (or even amazons $15 minimum wage) jobs are very difficult to negotiate from a performance perspective given the nature of the job.
> almost everyone with the same role gets basically the same pay
> without any unions
Good, they don’t need one then? They do the same job at the same performance but they somehow want more money. Good, so does everyone else.
> Minimum wage (or even amazons $15 minimum wage) jobs are very difficult to negotiate from a performance perspective given the nature of the job.
Yeah, it sounds like the government already mandated that they get paid more than their labor is worth so I’m sure a union would just introduce more parasitic loss without adding anything.
Different country and different rules but when I was an employee I always earned much more than the basic salary for the industry I was working in. And I always got salary increases, either because I performed well or because the company knew they had to keep up with the competition.
A union in Germany negotiates income in multiple income brackets. People on the same bracket get the same income. As an employee you just negotiate which bracket you are on. You can still get more income from better performance.
What is even wrong with the world you are describing? I would much rather live in a world of more flat compensation, where I don’t have to worry about negotiating a salary, where there are more rigid worker protections, etc. I don’t see myself as better or more deserving than my coworkers, I see us all as on the same team, with the same basic interests.
> I would much rather live in a world of more flat compensation, where I don’t have to worry about negotiating a salary, where there are more rigid worker protections, etc.
Thats fine and all but I don’t share your preference and so I’d appreciate it if you’d understand that I’m free to negotiate and don’t attempt to take that from me.
> I don’t see myself as better or more deserving than my coworkers,
I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.
> I see us all as on the same team, with the same basic interests.
> I’d appreciate it if you’d understand that I’m free to negotiate and don’t attempt to take that from me
No-one is trying to do that (at least, not at this stage, and any attempt to do so would be subject to at least a second vote). You are welcome to simply not join the union if you feel it doesn't represent your interests.
> I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.
Leaving aside the fact that is perfectly possible for a union to negotiate performance-based pay and/or bonuses, I would be interested to think what you think a fair productivity:pay ratio would be for a worker in an Amazon fulfillment centre. Currently, I understand employees are held to such high productivity targets as a matter of course that many of them are afraid to take bathroom breaks in case their productivity dips and they end up getting fired.
This seems to be a valid fear - I couldn't find anything for Alabama, but in Baltimore, Amazon fire around 10% of their workforce annually for failing to meet performance targets. I wasn't able to find any documentation of bonuses or higher pay for higher performance, only the 15.30 USD starting wage, but if anyone has evidence that compensation is higher for high performers, I'd be happy to see that.
> Do you share a bank account with them? Why not?
This question doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why are you asking this?
> Leaving aside the fact that is perfectly possible for a union to negotiate performance-based pay and/or bonuses, I would be interested to think what you think a fair productivity:pay ratio would be for a worker in an Amazon fulfillment centre. Currently, I understand employees are held to such high productivity targets as a matter of course that many of them are afraid to take bathroom breaks in case their productivity dips and they end up getting fired.
You know I heard those stories before I went to amazon, and while I wasn’t happy with the work conditions, it certainly wasn’t like that. So I’m not saying the stories are false. But I’m not convinced they are representative either, they certainly weren’t representative of my experience.
I’ll answer your question with a question, how do you measure productivity? What percentage of productivity is contributed by labor, and what percentage by capital? We’re going to need this number if we are to answer your question anyway.
> This seems to be a valid fear - I couldn't find anything for Alabama, but in Baltimore, Amazon fire around 10% of their workforce annually for failing to meet performance targets.
That seems reasonable. I think Jack Welch had a similar policy.
> This question doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why are you asking this?
Gp said he/she were on the same team and have the same interests. If one has the same interests why does one have separate bank accounts?
> I’ll answer your question with a question, how do you measure productivity? What percentage of productivity is contributed by labor, and what percentage by capital? We’re going to need this number if we are to answer your question anyway.
I personally don't really object to being paid the same as everyone who shares my job title and does substantially the same job as me, provided we're all making the same (and proportionate to hours worked). This was based on your statement that 'I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.'
> That seems reasonable. I think Jack Welch had a similar policy.
For a lot of people, that doesn't seem reasonable at all, but ultimately, you are entitled to your opinion. If you have first-hand experience working in a fulfillment centre and your opinion is that these stories aren't representative, then I will bow to your experience.
> You said you’re on the same team and have the same interests. If you have the same interests why do you have separate bank accounts?
Can we skip past the point where you try to get me to say something and move to the counterpoint you're trying to set up? The original statement was not me, actually, but in case it's one of the below, then I'm not arguing, but feel free to add what you need to make your point:
- if one person 'earns more' then they should have the right to 'spend more'
- if you want to spend your money differently to someone else then you don't have the same interests
- how I spend my money shouldn't be dictated by other people (with provisos around tax, etc.)
From my perspective though, the main point that I wanted to raise with you was the first one, that no-one is being forced to join, and no-one is losing any right to negotiate individually, so why shouldn't the people who want to unionise be allowed to do so?
> From my perspective though, the main point that I wanted to raise with you was the first one, that no-one is being forced to join, and no-one is losing any right to negotiate individually, so why shouldn't the people who want to unionise be allowed to do so?
Well I’m arguing that its not in some employees interest to unionize. I’m fine with people voluntarily agreeing to whatever, freedom of association and all. I just don’t like unions when they require people to join or hold a monopoly on labor.
You and your work are not an island. My productivity is not just my own, I am aided by mentors, supported by smart teammates, etc. I find your hyper individualist mindset very depressing and isolating. I think it would be foolish to claim that any success or talent of mine or my team is solely my own. I believe in social obligations, not just in the context of work, but in general. My goal is not to maximize my personal salary, but to live in a world that is more humane and more just and treats everyone, including myself, with dignity and respect.
> Do you share a bank account with them? Why not?
No, because I don’t have a pension, but many people do and I am fully in support of the concept.
> I find your hyper individualist mindset very depressing and isolating.
I’m not a hyper individualist, a lot of this seems to be interpretation you’re bringing.
> I think it would be foolish to claim that any success or talent of mine or my team is solely my own.
There’s definitely a way to consider a person’s individual productivity in the context of a team of people they work with. Its not easy to measure or quantify and its definitely got subjective elements but some people are more productive than others and in a team that shares work, someone has to do the work that other people don’t do or it doesn’t get done.
> I believe in social obligations, not just in the context of work, but in general.
I believe in the power of incentives to shape behavior and I think there is a soft social obligation to align incentives so that they encourage desired behavior.
'Can a union guarantee [...] better wages?'
'No [...] only Amazon can make commitments about [...] your wages.'
And then a paragraph later
'You may end up with more, the same, or less'.
So, if Amazon are the only people who can make commitments, why would you negotiate for me to earn less... unless it's not really my interests you have at heart in the first place.
I think we should keep asking that question about everything spoken or printed that someone, somewhere might potentially disagree with or find objectionable. Free speech means freedom from disagreement and objection. So all speech should be approved ("allowed") by the proper authorities before being able to be communicated. Free speech is restricted speech.
Same reason why Amazon can cut service to Parler. The First Amendment guarantees the right for private companies to govern their own properties, literature, and procedures.
If you do not like it you may criticize them publicly, boycott their business, or start your own competing employer with the policies you prefer.
I'm personally glad that Amazon are able to express this sentiment for all to see. That the only time they've ever supposedly cared about the spending power of the workers they employ concerns union membership dues should be quite telling. They're betting that unions are going to cost them money because they believe that high union membership will lead to better wages, costly improvements to working conditions or other costly responsibilities. There's no other conceivable reason for them to publish this trite because it is in their interest to pay as little as possible for as much productive power as possible. It's not at all in their interest that you could buy a fancy dinner for the money you'd spend on membership dues.
Amazon warehouses are one of the few reasons, I think we can all agree, that a union has a place. There is the argument to be made that if someone doesn't like the job, go elsewhere, it's the free market. True, but I see a lot of these fulfillment centers in small towns. They become a major employer, sometimes eclipsing even the local Walmart. It's a place where jobs are hard to come by, so maybe Amazon offers something the desperate, the poor, and the struggling something they can't get elsewhere. I don't have an answer for it, but shifting a little power away from the corporate monolith and to the citizens of the community it inhabits, sounds like a good idea.
>>. It's a place where jobs are hard to come by, so maybe Amazon offers something the desperate, the poor, and the struggling something they can't get elsewhere.
If you make it illegal to provide bad jobs, those jobs will not be substituted one-for-one for good jobs. That's not how an economy works. You're only hurting low-skilled workers by mandating higher minimum work standards.
Responding to below:
Yes, every so-called labor protection for adults, except protection against contract fraud, should be abolished, for exactly that reason.
Even child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
You can make this argument about literally any labor protection. “You’re only hurting people desperate for work by mandating safety requirements.” “You’re only hurting poor families by banning child labor.”
This is a very tidy theoretical argument, but in practice you don't build a warehouse in a rural area along a shipping route then just abandon it when the community unionizes. Companies stick around for as long as they can possibly make a return on that investment, even if it means paying the people at the top less or decreasing margin to comply with union demands. And yeah, unions can go too far, but Amazon warehouses seem like a great place for them. Also, as long as the state is right to work so union participation is voluntary, what's the problem with it?
Walmart closed stores in Canada that unionized. Why wouldn't Amazon close a warehouse? Seems easier to close a warehouse than an entire brick and mortar store.
Union participation is very tricky. It's supposed to be voluntary, but there is evidence that those who don't join the union are denied employment, and advancement. The problem with unions is that they're never really voluntary. I would hate to see the unions of old that used violence to force people to join; or for a more recent example, card check initiatives to make the vote be non confidential.
> If you make it illegal to provide bad jobs, those jobs will not be substituted one-for-one for good jobs. That's not how an economy works.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. If you are a smart business, you don't charge what's "fair", you don't start by saying "I'm going to pay $X to my workers, so let's see how many I can hire with that money." Those are bad ways to run a business. You hire the number of workers you need to run your business at the price the market will bear.
This is something that gets drilled into you if you take any entrepreneurship classes: things cost what the market will bear, there is no concept of "fairness" that entrepreneurs should be thinking about. You pay as little as you can to make something, and you charge as much as you can for it, and those are largely independent variables from each other.
The idea that Amazon is going to stop hiring workers if they get more pee breaks... that's just not how markets work. If Amazon could afford to let those workers go, it would have done it already. If it doesn't need those workers and it's hiring them anyway, then it's just a badly managed company.
Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works. You're talking about the market like supply and demand form a constant ratio with each other. They don't.
It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out (although reality is more complicated and these simplistic models rarely capture how everything will work out), it's also wrong because it's fundamentally bad market theory on a simple level. Nobody starts a business deciding that they're going to pay a constant amount of money that gets divided equally among all of their workers. At least, they don't think that way if they want to stay in business for very long.
> Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works.
No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services, and more automation.
> No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't.
If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material/labor, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
In both cases, no competent business owner is thinking "I only want to hit $X profits this year, and anything over that is going to the consumers as a gift so that they'll like me."
> Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services
See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is (arguably) the entire cornerstone of free market Capitalism -- the idea that the value of a set of inputs into a business is not necessarily the same as the value of its outputs. One of the big points of Capitalism is that products get priced based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what they cost to produce or based on some kind of predetermined formula. If you have to pay your workers more, tough luck. Under Capitalism, your products are still only worth what the market is offering.
> and more automation
As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
And in any case, automation is good. We want to eliminate bad jobs. And even among automation-critics who worry about lost jobs and the cost of retraining, their goal in opposing automation is not to make those jobs periodically worse and worse to try and keep pace with the price of machines.
> If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same.
No, they want their return to go up. They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
> Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
No, you want your net profit to rise. You want your margin to be low because then its harder for others to compete with you.
> If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
This is true.
> Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
> See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
> As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
> more
> opposed
I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Which is determined by a combination of, among other things, your profit margin and your volume.
> They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin and net profit often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
> Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
Do you think that Amazon right now is purposefully pushing it's profit margins to the bare minimum that is possible for them to stay alive because they're so devoted to growth? Do you think there's some kind of fundamental rule that means if they had more profit they would be forced to invest it into growth or change their position in the market -- that profit can only ever be reinvested? Are you aware that Apple exists?
I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
No, it doesn't miss the point, the point you're making is wrong. The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
> I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
> Which is determined by a combination of your profit margin and your volume.
Yes, and a lower margin keeps the volume high by making it more difficult for people to compete.
> And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
Yeah the amount of profit impacts the decision to issue a dividend.
> Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
No, and no.
> I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
Look, its clear that you have a perspective and you’re not interested in other perspectives. Good, do you.
> The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
I’m not talking about what its worth, but what it sells for. My point has as much to do with accounting as it does economics.
> And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
And so it is disingenuous to push unions as though they will help workers out when you know you’re actually helping convince amazon to replace them.
> Look, its clear that you have a perspective and you’re not interested in other perspectives.
I'm not going to force anyone to debate with me, but if your economic theory says that Amazon's prices should have dropped this year, and they didn't, then your economic theory is wrong and/or incomplete. That seems like a pretty straightforward test.
Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
> I'm not going to force anyone to debate with me, but if your economic theory says that Amazon's prices should have dropped this year, and they didn't, then your economic theory is wrong and/or incomplete. That seems like a pretty straightforward test.
Right, except that’s not what I said. So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory, that happens to also not coincide with some fact you refer to, I question your sincerity in discourse.
> Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
It is for this reason that theoretical predictions in economics are considered ceteris paribus
> We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
> > We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
> Yeah we do. [...] So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory
Literally two comments earlier:
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
I'm not the person here arguing that changes in input costs and prices are universally linearly coupled to each other.
>>I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Increased labor costs slow the rate at which the economy automates.
The rate of automation is almost indistinguishable from the rate of economic growth. Almost all economic growth comes from the labor-cost savings, and those in turn come from automation and trade-derived specialization.
When one of the major inputs to production, like labor, is subject to arbitrary government imposed price floors, it leads to economic deadweight losses that reduce economic output, and in turn reduce the volume of economic resources available to invest in new capital that automates production.
Automation increases per capita production, and with it, wages.
>>The idea that Amazon is going to stop hiring workers if they get more pee breaks... that's just not how markets work. If Amazon could afford to let those workers go, it would have done it already.
They will hire fewer workers.. there will be fewer profitable business ventures when the cost of one of the inputs to production increases.
In some case, it's true that higher wages will reduce profits, instead of reducing the number of jobs available, but that is not a good thing.
High profit margins encourage greater investment.
Take N95 masks for instance. If there is a shortage, any one producing them will raise prices and earn a huge profit.
Now let's say a progressive politician is elected and decides that those profits should be reallocated to the workers producing the N95 masks, so imposes an industry-specific minimum wage for N95 mask creators. Now profit margins decline for producing N95 mask makers, and N95 mask maker employees earn more.
What's lost is the massive influx of investment capital that high profit margins would otherwise have elicited, that would have raised N95 mask supply, which would have made the masks more affordable and plentiful.
Price controls don't work to increase net welfare. They reduce social welfare for reasons Economics explains in depth. Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations. They are the product of a super collective intelligence that tells us where economic resources should be allocated.
>>It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the minimum wage, to the extent that it has an effect, harms wage growth. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
There are a bunch of outlier situations in which artificial price bounds might theoretically not create economic deadweight losses, but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need? If Amazon could hit the shipping volumes it needs to hit with 50% of the current workforce, then it would be hiring ~50% of the current workforce -- if that's not the case, then somebody in the company that's making hiring decisions needs to be fired.
> Price controls don't work to increase net welfare.
A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare. We can debate the theory, but we can also just look at reality and say, "we've tried this before, and when handled correctly, it works."
> Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations.
I would be on board with your argument if the original comment starting this thread didn't boil down to "costs go up, prices go up". You're not talking about a complex signal at that point, you're talking about basic economic principles, and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Even your N95 example shows this point. Why did prices go up for N95 masks? Not primarily because of costs of production, primarily because demand changed. The basic principle economic principle is demand, not costs of production.
If you want to step away from those basic principles and talk about the complicated realities of what people will invest, and how safe they feel, and the size of the payout influencing investment enthusiasm, and so on -- then fine, that's reasonable, but the complicated reality is also that economic experts have looked at minimum wage increases, weighed up all of the complicated inputs that go into final product prices, and regularly concluded in multiple studies that minimum wages don't consistently increase prices or decrease market investment.
> It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
> but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
Agreed, but "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good" is much closer to reality than saying "the economy does conform to simplistic models, therefore a price floor is always bad." You're arguing that the simplistic model isn't applicable, in a thread that was started with you arguing that the simple model was that price and material/wage costs would always move in the same direction. That's just not true, it's both an oversimplification and just bad economic theory.
>>Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need?
We can't prove that it's not hiring fewer workers than it otherwise would have. In the absence of the ability to run a controlled experiment on how a minimum wage affects Amazon behavior, we can only trust in Economics, the same way we trust in what epidemiology tells us about the efficacy of vaccines, and assume that a larger volume of people would be hired without an artificial floor on the price of labor.
>>A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
You're talking about a price control on manual services in general, i.e. labor.
>>B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare.
No they haven't. Studies on minimum wage cannot conclusively show anything, because they are not controlled, and minimum wages are too low to affect a significant number of jobs.
Meta-studies suggest that minimum wage tends to be harmful, just as you'd expect, though these are not definitive for the reasons mentioned.
>>and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Yes I agree with that, but I didn't make the counter-argument, another commenter did.
>>Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
Nothing is guaranteed in economics, but we should err on the side of basic economics in the absence of certainty and proof.
"<!-- This is Squarespace. --><!-- cranberry-groundhog-8agy -->"
I noticed on other Squarespace sites that second comment is usually just the domain minus the TLD. I wonder if "cranberry groundhog" means anything in particular.
I tried it in curl before your edit and yeah, "curl https://ext-sq.squarespace.com -H 'Host: cranberry-groundhog-8agy.squarespace.com'" just returns this site.
Probably something to use before your IT team sets up the CNAME record.
What I don't understand is why anybody would believe opinion pieces put out by their employer regarding if a union is right for you or not. Your interests are clearly not aligned. Is there some segment of workers who can't appreciate that fact? Whenever anybody gives you an opinion on anything, it will be tainted with their interests. Is pondering a topic from another party's perspective an exceptional critical thinking skill of sorts? I ask because it seems this sort of advertising is often effective.
Don't take it completely at face value. This wasn't just to to try to convince people that a union was a bad choice, this was a scare tactic to indicate how angry Amazon will be if they go ahead & unionize, and the consequences of that anger. See the part about not being so "helpful".
Unionization efforts also always take place against the backdrop of former employers simply shutting down the business location and moving elsewhere to avoid unions: Subtle and not so subtle threats of that are always in play during unionization efforts.
Well businesses closing and moving, has happened a considerable amount, and often to devastating effects to a community, so it seems like something that would be of real concern.
Realistically, how much would it hurt to move amazon warehouses near the border of any neighboring state?
The days of the factories, and none movable infrastructure a long gone, so it is a strong factor to consider.
It doesn't even have to be another state. It can be a few miles away: Fire all current employees because you're shutting down. Open the new place, hire new people.
I literally witnessed this threat first hand growing up when my mom was involved in union efforts.
From Amazon's perspective unions are strictly a net-loss. Even if the unions offered the employees zero advantages, the same paychecks from Amazon would have less impact on workers because of dues/meetings, so you'd expect moderately higher attrition and other negative effects.
On the flip side though, is it actually clear that an Amazon union _would_ benefit workers once accounting for the overhead? Is that even the goal, or are prospective Amazon unions just trying to improve safety levels to something on par with other warehouses? Are there other factors?
Quick Google search turned this up, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole but this line seems relevant:
> Factors like race, gender, and educational attainment have an undeniable effect on people’s economic outcomes over time that unions do not necessarily flatten, but certainly helped to mitigate. For instance, macro-level data show that unionized workers, in general, see a wage boost of around 20%. When VanHeuvelen controlled for various demographic factors like race and geographic location, he tracked wage increases between 3% and 12.5% for union members.
I'd like my chances that will add up to more than $500 over the year if I were a union worker, and this does not take into account the other potential upsides.
> IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues
What is this line even supposed to mean? Probably the most incomprehensible union busting talking point I've ever heard.
Usually it's all or nothing: a place unionizes, everyone is a member of the union. Technically, you could say "no I'm not going to be a member". But you're still part of what is called the bargaining unit. In some cases it is even possible to opt out of the union dues... there was a Supreme Court case about it recently that came down on the side of allowing opt-out, but I don't know the full extent/ramifications of that ruling.
My wife worked in the event planning industry - the few unionized venues she had to deal with were a huge pain loaded with restrictions. As a client you couldn't even move a table by yourself on the spot - a union employee had to do it as part of an assigned task. Perhaps it's warning of similar red tape that gets in the way of doing work directly.
"Doer" sounds like they're trying to bring in the "maker" moniker into jobs where you don't really make anything. "Maker" sounds fun and positive - you're someone who creates something! Not really it has the same kind of effect when you're not making anything and you're just doing what you were ordered to do.
I got a weird vibe of WW II-era propaganda from it, the cute music bopping dog... like a modern version of something out of a newsreel piece, or a parody of it from a Fallout videogame.
It's so blatant & over the top that I'd almost believe the union organizers set it up to make Amazon look bad.
And it's telling that they focus pretty exclusively on the $500 in dues: They pay their employees little enough that they know ~$10/week might be a significant decision making factor here.
<strike>They pay their employees so much that they only make $1k/employee in profit.</strike> The dues on top of whatever useless shit the union negotiates for could put amazon back into the read without any benefit for anyone except union officials.
Pleade strike the first sentence of this comment, thanks.
No, they agressively undercut competitors (to attempt to force them out of the market) so much that they only make $1k/employee profit. What a ridiculous narrative you're trying to push.
Amazon is free to refuse to sign any contract with the union that doesn't leave them with their desired level of profitability. Forming a union doesn't change that.
Amazon undercuts competitors and plays hard ball with suppliers literally every day. That's business, that's life. I don't see why workers shouldn't take their opportunity to engage in tough negotiations with Amazon themselves.
These kinds of arguments are only ever applied to workers.
Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency. If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
> These kinds of arguments are only ever applied to workers.
Nonsense, people insisted that it was foolish to require bundling of routine insurance with catastrophic insurance, people advocate for the severability of hardward and operating systems, people oppose forced bundling of insurance and all kinds of other goods.
> Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency.
They would however observe that that single legal team only protects the company, and that each employee should have their own, individual legal representation for their own personal liability.
> If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
> Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
I think the comparison here has been twisted so far beyond the breaking point that there is no need of a rebuttal.
> people insisted that it was foolish to require bundling of routine insurance with catastrophic insurance, people advocate for the severability of hardware and operating systems, people oppose forced bundling of insurance and all kinds of other goods.
None of that is collective bargaining.
> This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
One comment earlier: "Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value"
That's a lot of those buzzwords that do not address the question of why negotiating for labor resources should be any different than some other resources the company needs.
What's more, all of those buzzwords can apply to the relationship between any other supplier as well. In addition, corporations are themselves a highly collected bargaining unit. They may nominally be a single entity, but they represent the financial interests of many people.
I wonder how many people commenting have actually been part of a union. I have. My take is that if it's voluntary: great. If the union has negotiated that a company cannot hire you without being a part of the union: not great. Perhaps that should even be illegal. Forcing people making minimum wage to pay union dues is as far from helping people at the bottom as you can get. Unions are typically about benefitting people with TENURE. It's one of the reasons you end up with lots of tenured teachers with great pay who are impossible to fire, while the best young teachers with relatively terrible terms defect to private or charter schools, burn out, or become cynics and wait their turn to do nothing once they have tenure.
What you're talking about making illegal, requiring all employees to join the union or pay dues, that's already illegal in much of the country: that's what "right-to-work" laws do.
Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.
So from 1977 until 2018, you could be required to pay union dues, even if you weren't a member of the union even in "right to work" states, 22 of them.
So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired.
It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this.
Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make things difficult, and costly for non-union employees. My personal experience was that I removed from a wall mount a wi-fi router, rebooted it, and placed it back on the wall.
This resulted in me reprimanded, my department having to pay a 4 hour call out fee, to the union electrician.
So, my choices are to call out a union electrician to service the mounted piece of equipment. Or "accidentally" bump the IO switch on the surge protector.
It was this, and countless other stupid shit, that made me really dislike working in a place with a union.
This is pretty much the only complaint about unions I can get behind. I think the best solution is to give the union a substantial ownership stake in the company, so that they have an incentive to operate efficiently
I get what you are saying at a high level, but owning the business even in part would totally screw up the way unions work.
If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.
A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.
This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.
How can unions lose their incentive to serve workers? It's a collective body of the workers. When workers are owners, incentives are aligned.
If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.
I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).
Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
Do you suppose that the union will raise the funds to aquire 25% or that the workers would take a pay cut to offset this? Or should a business owner give up a quarter of their company just so that the employees do the jobs they are compensated for?
And ownership can easily present a conflict of interest even when spread out.
So now 25% compensation is based on this buy in, if a business unit is doing poorly and has brought down that compensation, the company wants to shit can the business unit and its employees, the members of the union would not be directly working against their own interest fight to keep them. (this is always the case really, but now it is directly felt by the members)
How the union acquires their stake is a fair question which could be answered a lot of different ways. It can simply be considered a part of employee compensation. This is normal for software engineers (RSUs). The union might get a loan to purchase a stake. I worked for a company that transitioned from private to employee owned, it's not an insurmountable problem by any means.
Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding you, what you're calling a "conflict of interest" is literally my entire point.
It is a good thing that the union has an incentive to balance the interests of workers with the interests of the overall company.
If the company needs to cut jobs to be competitive, it is a good thing that the union has a stake in both sides of the issue. That way they will be incentivized to work towards a solution that is fair to the workers, and profitable for investors.
It's the exact situation we all face every day. I like the taste of donuts. I know that if I eat them all the time, I'll get fat. Because my stomach and brain have a "conflict of interest", I make choices that balance short term and long term pleasure. If every donut I made got somebody else fat, then they would be in trouble, because I might like the taste of donuts more than I care about their health.
This is still compensation, if they are being paid by the company for what the company is willing to offer, it would need to be paired with a cash reduction, or amount to a raise paid for by the company.
Unions typically already have a seniority over competency problems, this seems like something that would only really exacerbate the issue.
You also have to consider these are warehouse workers not software developers, there is a very high turn over rate, I don't think many of the warehouse workers would be interested in a vesting period before they saw anything from their RSU.
I also and not sure how this would work in a PLA multi-union site, lets not forget that the truck drivers, electricians, and many others already have their unions, and in my experience once a place has a labor union onsite, they want supporting employees to be union also.
And I think we will have to agree to disagree on conflict of interest.
That very first * is the first major point for unions.
Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I don’t believe unions are universally perfect. When they’re well run and union members participate and have a voice, they can be quite amazing. My partner’s union makes my cosy software job seem like it’s missing something. Sure she pays huge dues, but she’s also given protections and benefits I couldn’t even dream of.
I net about 4x as much as her on paper, but if you figured in the cumulative value of her union agreement, it would be much more than her dues. Collective bargaining is no joke. She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I’m in Canada, but I work an hourly contract with no explicit vacation time. By law I need to be paid some minimum amount to cover the bare minimum of vacation time (4% of my wage, I think) but ultimately if I’m on vacation, I’m not going to get a pay cheque.
I’m an employee, but my hours aren’t set. I can work no hours or forty in a week. I was a contractor before, but this arrangement made it easier to add other forms of compensation besides wages to our agreement. It’s an atypical arrangement.
Given my current position, I suppose not - but I’ve been in a union and my partner has never not been in a union. I have other family members in unions. It’s a topic I’m close to and very interested in. I see no reason I can’t weigh in on it.
> Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
I can understand why this would be highly preferable for part time workers. Can you understand how a company might be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 40 hours a week, but not be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 20 hours a week? Can you see how increasing the cost of part time employment might make a lot of those part time jobs go away?
> The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I understand that it seems unfair for a company to replace one 40 hour worker with two 20 hour workers. Especially when the 40 hour worker has benefits and the 20 hour workers do not. The issue here is that requiring an employer to provide benefits for full time employees creates the situation where an employer may not be able to afford benefits for their full time employees. So in order to keep the business going, they do what they can. Making it more expensive for them to do this is just going to result in fewer businesses anyway.
> Collective bargaining is no joke.
Collective bargaining flattens worker salaries, the lower performing workers make more than they should and the higher performing workers make less. Its not a given that everyone wants this, or should want it. People should be able to negotiate as individuals.
> She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
Not everyone wants all these things. More importantly, not everyone wants to pay for all of them. Some people could use the money elsewhere (perhaps they are covered under a spouse).
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I like a world where both of these things are available for people who choose them.
> I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I personally would prefer to get paid more and manage my own finances and vacations. You don’t get interest on vacation days (although they do include health insurance).
These are all valid points that are worth investigating.
As far as negotiating as an individual goes, you’re right - a union removes that option. It does however empower those who can’t or won’t or otherwise struggle to negotiate for themselves, for a multitude of valid reasons. To me that’s worth something. I’ve been fortunate enough to more or less glide through my career and rarely need to negotiate anything in order to live comfortably. This is exceedingly rare though. I wouldn’t want to say no to a union because I’ve never needed or wanted one for myself. If people collectively desire it, I think it’s a net positive.
As far as getting paid more and managing your own benefits and vacation, I hear that. I’ve felt the same as times. However, the older I get the more I think things like a pension and extended health sound pretty nice. It’s like having an easy-bake oven that pumps out legitimate desserts. We’re not all endowed with the chops to make that happen, so having this stuff on autopilot is a significant windfall eventually.
As far as flattening wages goes, I’m not so sure. Everywhere my partner has worked with a union, her wages have steadily increased due to the union bargaining for her. Sometimes the increases are substantial. The wages across the current organization certainly aren’t flat either.
You’re right that not everyone wants these things, too. I’m not sure you can get around that particular problem.
Ultimately I’d just say unions aren’t inherently bad and if you don’t like them, work somewhere that doesn’t have one. Most places don’t, so it’s not a limiting factor that should impose personal risk.
The part-time/full-time issue is very union dependent. I was a member of the Teamster's union many moons ago and got zero benefits as a part-time worker.
I joined my union somewhat by accident, and it's opened my eyes to a lot of what you're talking about. (My workplace is not usually the kind of place that's known to be unionized in the US, so when I showed up I was surprised to hear it was a thing. I did my due diligence and decided to join.)
I'm of an age and socioeconomic stratum where union membership is not only not really done - people don't even really know what unions do or how they work, and I was essentially just as ignorant.
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
The real epiphany moment for me came when I understood that my lifelong fixation on salary, into which I, as an upper-middle-class person, was socialized from a young age (along with everyone else I know), is a form of sleight of hand: in a society like ours, with a gutted social safety net and enormous inequality, no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country. And this effect gets worse as you age and have kids, of course.
So these days, after getting a tiny whiff of these dynamics in my somewhat modest (meaning not high-status) but fairly-compensated union gig, I find myself wondering, if given the choice between a $200k salary in Idaho or a $100k salary in, say, Sweden, which would I choose? And a second doesn't pass before I smell pickled herring and lingonberries.
> I don’t believe unions are universally perfect.
I don't either. I'm not blindly ideological about this, and like any human system, human beings can fuck up unions to the detriment of everyone else, too. But man, as someone low on the totem pole in my organization, it's nice to know that a group of competent people with (some) real power actually have my back.
> no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country.
I disagree with the factual assertion and the framing here. The money that you make is not “intended to ma[ke] up for” benefits and services that could be provided in some hypothetical. The money that you’re saving is to provide for yourself in retirement because you’re the one who doesn’t want to die of exposure or become a burden on someone else when you stop working.
> Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts because you won’t have that almost $500 you paid in dues. WHY NOT save the money and get the books, gifts & things you want? DO IT without dues!
Man, that is really grim. Basically admitting that $500 will be make or break for many of these employees, while the company itself is hitting record numbers.
If being one of the most successful businesses in the world means you can’t pay your employees a living wage, then I think there’s a fundamental problem. That’s also context.
> If being one of the most successful businesses in the world means you can’t pay your employees a living wage, then I think there’s a fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem is that the government keeps mandating policies that drive up the cost of living so that low-skilled and unskilled workers are constantly struggling to keep their head above water, then tries to solve the problem by doubling down on the same failed policies that make it harder for poor and working class people to survive.
Some people don’t make very much when they negotiate because their labor actually isn’t worth very much on the market. Its not worth very much when translated into goods and services. So they work a lot and they don’t have very much and its sad. So people feel bad for them and change the law so they have to get paid more money for the same work. But they aren’t any more productive so there isn’t any more stuff to go around, so when they take their more money to the market, they bid up the prices of goods and end up where they started, sometimes even a bit further behind. But they spent the money at a business that makes a profit. And that profit eventually ends up in the pocket of someone who owns that business. But the working class person is still dependent on that artificially high wage, and the cycle repeats itself.
>so when they take their more money to the market, they bid up the prices of goods and end up where they started, sometimes even a bit further behind.
I haven't seen any evidence that this actually happens to a significant degree, could you link a study on it? Cause as far as I have read the inflation cause by minimum wage increases is relatively minimal, especially compared the the increase in income.
> I haven't seen any evidence that this actually happens to a significant degree, could you link a study on it?
No and I’m not aware of a study that shows this, and although there may be one out there arguing one way or the other I’d be inclined to disregard it because a claim like “ceteris paribus bids on scarce resources drive up the price” isn’t empirically testable because ceteris is never paribus. Whatever study that argues anything of this nature is required to use a theory to interpret data and the theory that “prices are the emergent result of repeated bid-ask transactions between interested parties” is more basic than whatever theory they are going to use in those (hypothetical) studies. I’d be happy to entertain objections to my statement.
> Cause as far as I have read the inflation cause by minimum wage increases is relatively minimal, especially compared the the increase in income.
I’m not arguing that they will always end up with less money. I’m asserting that the increase in wage will all go to consumption goods/services that are provided by profitable businesses owned by “the rich and/or wealthy” and so the minimum wage earners will stay at subsistence level but the people who already own assets will profit.
The relative motion of various prices is the result of many complicated factors and its likely that increased profits for the providers of these goods/services would cause more firms to enter the market and there would be more of these consumption items than before. But the people who own businesses would keep accumulating profit and the people at minimum wage would keep spending their entire paychecks on consumption items.
Apparently we are both mistaken. I am using 1.2 million employees from wikipedia, [0] has 2 billion usd in one quarter. So thats an upper bound of just under $8k per employee although thats guaranteed to be high as the 2 billion is a record.
However the profit appears substantially more than I had believed and I was mistaken so there’s that.
Side stepping all the union talk, this site is ugly and inaccessible. The contrast ratios are awful; white text sitting on top of full screen, lightly colored videos? This was made in haste by some amateurs. Or maybe it's trying to be trendy? It's tragic either way. Doubly so if you actually read the content.
I imagine they allocated like an hour to make the site. The FAQ are just a bunch of poor-quality JPEG images. Guessing that properly layouting that FAQ would've taken too much time.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadThe most basic of caste systems.
I guess when you can't make a proper case, just use 50pt fonts and stock-art-esque images of people giving thumbs up. That'll convince 'em!
With a couple notable exceptions, like Hollywood, any industry in the US that came to be dominated by unions became uncompetitive: the auto industry, US Steel, and the passenger rail service, which went bankrupt as a result of the demands of the "Brotherhoods".
Numerous states have been straddled with trillions in pension obligations and increasingly inefficient public sectors, due to unions.
Unfortunately, those working for the media are all unionized now so even the prism through which we interpret the world is now propagandized by the left.
Yeah, like the police unions... we should get rid of those first.
The US auto industry is still very union-based, and beyond the occasional bailout, seems to be doing well.
Moreover, plenty of industries that didn't become dominated by unions also became uncompetitive.
You say that "those working for the media are all unionized" but I have no idea what you're talking about. Citation?
Unionization does not cure bad management, it merely makes sure that the employees are treated fairly, regardless of the quality of management.
Remember: the reason people have jobs is to feed their families, not to support the company.
>>The US auto industry is still very union-based, and beyond the occasional bailout, seems to be doing well.
The US auto industry is now protected by trade barriers so the bleed has stopped, but it saw a massive drop in market share since the early 1960s:
https://detroitwillrise.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/2/1/18213209/...
Tesla is doing great, and its workforce is not unionized.
>>You say that "those working for the media are all unionized" but I have no idea what you're talking about. Citation?
Look at the New York Times:
https://www.nyguild.org/about-the-new-york-times
Or the Washington Post:
https://postguild.org/
Or any other major news organization.
>Unionization does not cure bad management, it merely makes sure that the employees are treated fairly, regardless of the quality of management.
It reduces managerial discretion. It makes it so that the labor market is not free. It makes unionized workers into a privileged set of insiders who do not compete on an level playing field with other workers. It also reduces the range of options available to investors/entrepreneurs, in inhibiting their contract liberty. Reducing optionality in voluntary interaction is going to be an economic net negative.
>>Remember: the reason people have jobs is to feed their families, not to support the company.
The reason people invest in companies, or buy from a company, is to personally profit, not to provide people with jobs. Once you force the private sector to act like a charity, you are introducing top-down control and limiting the free market that is so effective at coordinating large numbers of people to better meet their collective needs.
responding to below:
chmod775:
>>Worker's unions are compatible with free markets as much as corporate groups or large companies are.
Yes, that is true. I meant under the current laws, where a union can force their employer to negotiate exclusively with them. This is mandated collective bargaining, as opposed to mutually voluntary collective bargaining.
>>Except that a most of the competition that leapfrogged them has famously strong unions.
Besides the unionized German auto sector, I don't know what you're referring to. Some of my examples, like the US passenger rail service which went bankrupt soon after the unions took over, or the public sector, had/have no foreign competition.
With respect to Germany, it should be noted that Germany's wage/GDP growth has been quite stagnant since the 1970s as well. Its auto industry has been successful, but that can be attributed to numerous other factors, like its effective education system, its engineering culture, and government policy focused on promoting auto manufacturing, all of which can counter-act the negative effects of its unions.
Also it should be noted that the relationship between unions and employers in Germany is more cooperative that in the US.
jakelazaroff:
>>Unions increase the negotiating power of those selling their labor. That’s not forcing the private sector to act like a charity, it’s just giving workers more leverage.
They increase that negotiating power by preventing the employer from negotiating with the larger labor pool. It is a zero sum gain t...
The thing I don’t understand about your argument is that you say that giving “monopolistic control over the negotiating power of a company's work force will be economically harmful”. But companies already have monopolistic (well, monopsonistic) control over their workforce. So why is this an acceptable status quo?
I think do unions in right to work states are excellent, though.
> The best argument against unions is thay they violate contract liberty, and thereby inhibit market freedom and increase economic rent seeking.
Freedom of contract is about state interference. Worker's unions are compatible with free markets as much as corporate groups or large companies are. You can't make a logical argument rejecting only one of them.
> any industry in the US that came to be dominated by unions became uncompetitive: the auto industry, US Steel, and the passenger rail service
Except that a lot of the competition from other countries that supposedly leapfrogged them has famously strong unions. So much in fact they're usually used as examples for them. How do you reconcile that?
Also the US car industry isn't even that bad off and neither is steel.
Saying that your argument is limping would be sugar-coating it. If that was truly - as you say - the "best" argument against unions, then... oh well.
I can't believe you're saying that with a straight face, talking about Jeff Bezzos' company, after covid and 2020.
Alabama is a right-to-work state, so how is a union inhibiting contract liberty? You legally cannot be forced in Alabama to pay union dues if you don't want to be part of a union.
Of course, an industry might decide not to work with people who are outside of the union, but an industry might also choose not to hire anyone who refuses to sign arbitration and/or anticompete agreements, and I'd wager you probably think those contracts are the results of free choices from all players.
So by the same logic, a voluntary union in a right-to-work state is the result of voluntary contracts and decisions made by people who vote to join the union and by businesses that freely decide to work with that union in order to access that workforce. You might not like the outcome of those negotiations, but a group of people deciding to collectively accept or reject a contract is contract liberty. Of course they should have the freedom to make that decision.
I understand some of the union objections in states where employees can be forced to join and/or pay dues against their will, but people act like collective bargaining is fundamentally anti-freedom, and I just don't understand that point of view at all. What is a collective bargaining agreement other than another contract that people have the freedom to sign?
> Tesla is doing great, and its workforce is not unionized.
By what definition? There have been multiple articles and accounts describing Tesla's factories as awful places to work, and its management tried to pressure its workers to ignore COVID restrictions.
Sure, if the only thing you're optimizing for is profit, then any attempt to increase employee bargaining power is going to be a problem, because all of them will reduce profit. But Tesla seems to be largely failing the "is this what we want a modern factory/workplace to look like" test.
----
Edit, addressing your points:
> We're talking about the strength of industry here. By that standard, Tesla is doing great.
That's a very vague definition -- I wouldn't say that Tesla is producing wildly better cars than everyone else on the market. They're certainly very profitable, but if you're only thinking about profit marging and stock price, then you're going to end up opposing literally anything that improves worker conditions in any way.
> The Biden administration is planning to get rid of right to work:
And your solution to that is to oppose people's rights to collectively bargain? Again, I understand some of the objections you might have around union regulations, but you're still not arguing for free contracts if you're throwing the concept out entirely. I mean, arguably even right-to-work laws themselves are anti-free-contract, I know Libertarians who hold that view because those contracts bar what contracts an employer can sign with a union.
If you have objections about federal laws, fine, but that's not the problem of the current workers who want to collectively bargain with Amazon. They shouldn't have to give up their collective bargaining rights just because you have an issue with the federal regulations, they still at a fundamental level have the right to unionize.
Take it up with Biden, don't complain about the workers.
1. Strength of industry is pretty commonly understood by its profitability. And profitability and worker conditions are positively correlated, so they are in no way opposing each other. The profitability of Tesla and the export revenue being brought into the US by Tesla's market success means more spending by Tesla on US-based operations which applies upward pressure on US wages. This is Economics 101.
2. If people are choosing their cars over other cars, that means they are producing better cars. Consumer choice is the only objective measure of quality we have.
3. Tesla is driving the entire car industry forward, by encouraging other auto makers to embrace electric cars, and also self-driving features, while expanding the recharging infrastructure needed for widespread use of electric vehicles.
>>And your solution to that is to oppose people's rights to collectively bargain?
If by "right to collectively bargain", you mean having laws that force companies to collectively bargain with unions, yes. Companies should be free to decide who to negotiate with, and free to reject requests to collectively bargain. The laws, as they are, are problematic.
Such rent as sick leave, holidays, weekends, basic health insurance (US), ...? That rent?
It's almost like a parody of itself
Alabama is a right-to-work state. My understanding is that it would be completely legal for Amazon to hire new employees the second someone doesn't show up because of a strike, so I'm not sure their leverage.
These workers are probably making between 30k and 50k a year so $500 isn't nothing.
B) Not every state is a right-to-work state. So, from a 'worker's of the world unite' perspective then obviously making a union in Alabama will help other places form unions.
I could be very wrong and perhaps the union could get 1 or 2k more per year - but I am skeptical.
In the example of something like missing a day of work, the contract will spell out the specifics of advance notice for days off/sick days. If it's completely unannounced, the contract will spell out the steps of a disciplinary process.
Source: I work in a right to work state, used to be a union member, asked this very same question at the time.
I wonder about the sort of person who would design such a website. Surely you'd have to be dead inside to create such an abomination, even if it's just a job? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here.
Though I disagree with Amazon's official arguments, I'm even more opposed to the notion that anyone who agrees with them is dead inside.
I suggest you hang around Blind for a bit and you'll realize that some of our techie colleagues hold some.. interesting opinions about labor or about how much to pay workers we now consider 'essential'
Many of us don’t like unions. We consider them to be parasitic organizations that pervert the employer-employee-customer relationship without adding value. In fact, by twisting a business so that it is run for the benefit of the employees instead of for the mutual benefit of employees, employer, and customers, they destroy value. What is worse, unions have a nasty habit of convincing the government to make laws that effectively give the union a monopoly on certain kinds of tasks, preventing other workers from competing.
Now you may not agree with this perspective and its certainly something that people should discuss rather than accept uncritically. But have you considered that you’re so unfamiliar with the actual case against unions that you have trouble imagining how someone could make a website opposing them without being dead inside because you’ve only been exposed to pro-union arguments?
How can the average American worker be so unfamiliar with the case against unions? We are inundated with anti-union propaganda practically from birth. Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
I disagree on the pervasiveness of anti-union propaganda. Perhaps this is your experience, it has not been mine.
> Barely any of us are unionized, corporations have gone to the ends of the earth to disempower or dismantle unions for the past 40-50 years, and you hardly ever hear any pro-union narrative outside of union organizers and the left.
Barely any of us are amateur radio operators and you never hear about amateur radio from anyone except preppers and geeks, but it isn’t because of inundation of anti-ham-radio propaganda from birth, merely that most people aren’t aware that ham radio could fulfill any of their needs.
> I have heard the arguments against unions so many times I can recite them by heart. I've had posters up in my workplace, I've had to watch anti-union videos before even applying for jobs and I've had comments like yours pushed all over anything that even mentions unions.
Thats your experience. But I bet you didn’t wonder that each and every person who propagandized you were dead inside. Rather you eventually became aware that some of them had their own beliefs based on their own perspectives that led them to their anti-union work.
> The idea that someone is pro-union because they've never heard the arguments against unions beggars belief.
As does the idea that someone could only make anti-union website if they were dead inside, but we like to assume good faith when people make statements and keep our cynicism to ourselves when possible.
I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
> Thats your experience
Yes, that's my experience. My experience is extremely common.
Have you not worked any blue collar or service jobs?
> I'm not the original poster, so I'm not sure why you're responding to me as if I were.
This whole ting started because they said that how could someone do that unless they were dead inside which I inferred to mean they hadn’t been exposed to any reasons why someone would do that, and you couldn’t believe that anyone would be unaware as to the legitimate rational case against unions based on workers’ interests. So I observed that you didn’t share the same reaction as the original commenter when you were exposed to the propaganda.
You yourself haven't even had the experience of going through life without seeing a significant amount of anti-union propaganda. Yet you believe there are people who miraculously have.
> IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.
It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
> It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone involved in drafting that text actually believed it was a meaningful argument.
You’re probably being hyperbolic but this lack of charity is one reason why we can’t have nice things.
An union negotiates/help negotiate, an employer would never run it's business if there was no benefit for them. Do you really believe that unions make it so only employees and not the employer benefit?
If the employer doesn’t accrue some marginal benefit, he’ll liquidate his investment if he is able. So he has to get something, and a good parasite will make sure not to kill the host.
It's the sheer cynicism, condescension, accidental self-parody, and other design choices of that website that make me wonder about the people behind it. It's a postmodern cocktail of horror. Nowhere do they make a good faith attempt to lay out solid anti-union arguments.
You say that now, but what about when Amazon starts encouraging employees to replace their arms with pneumatic forklift tines?
Maybe the line with the worst rhetorical trick is this bullshit in the "joining a union" FAQ: "Q: Will a union provide better wages and benefits? A: A union cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. With union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
I love that because it works exactly as well when you just negate the question:
"Q: Will NOT having a union provide better wages and benefits? A: Without a union, Amazon cannot guarantee better wages and benefits. Without union negotiations, you could end up with more, the same.... or less than what you make today."
Do you mean the ones that sit at their keyboards earning a multiple of the salaries of those who do the actual physical work necessary to serve customers.
I often remind my colleagues that we are very lucky to have such easy and well paid jobs by asking the simple question, “how many bags of sand did you carry yesterday?”
I mean “higher performing” according to the people who pay them.
> I often remind my colleagues that we are very lucky to have such easy and well paid jobs by asking the simple question, “how many bags of sand did you carry yesterday?”
I’ve been a welder/fabricator, machine operator, and forklift driver. Programming and web development isn’t easy although it isn’t physically arduous. Whats more relevant to our discussion is that a high performer is not as easily replaced. Physical work is honorable and demanding. Its also something a lot of people can do.
I agree that a high performing developer is hard to find, but so is a high performing manual worker.
Conversely in my experience retaining a high performing developer at market rates is easier, because the job is more rewarding (that’s what I think makes the job easier to do).
I think what you are talking about is scarcity driving the market salary rates for developers, not performance.
Personally I think a union with members including the scarce developers and the abundant manual workers would be a good thing for all the employees.
I expect 20 years from now there will be no scarcity of developers, and the vast majority of them will not be paid nearly as much as US manual workers - primarily because they will be working in poorer countries with labour laws that favour the employer.
high performing manual workers negotiate superior wages unless they are restrained by a union
> I think what you are talking about is scarcity driving the market salary rates for developers, not performance.
So they are related but the key concept here is that a low performer is more easily replaced, and so does not have the negotiation power to negotiate a higher wage. So these workers benefit from a union.
> Personally I think a union with members including the scarce developers and the abundant manual workers would be a good thing for all the employees.
It would be a good thing for the replaceable workers and a bad thing for the less replaceable workers.
It’s not easy to replace a low performing worker with scarce skills or domain specific knowledge.
It not difficult to replace a manual worker that requires limited training or domain knowledge.
Developers are paid way more than an equitable share of the salary share in organisations like Amazon because their skills are currently scarce.
This will not be the case in 20 years.
I’m defining “high performance” to include those sorts of persons.
> Developers are paid way more than an equitable share of the salary share in organisations like Amazon because their skills are currently scarce.
It is equitable precisely because those skills are scarce.
My point is that you may be confusing the ability to perform a function efficiently with the ability to perform a function that less people can do.
I don’t think many here would define a VBA/Excel analyst that knows the data model and how to access a bunch of legacy platforms to produce a criterial report each month as high performing - but they’re scarce and difficult to replace.
>It is equitable precisely because those skills are scarce.
My use of the use of equitable was as a synonym for fair.
I don’t think it’s fair that those who work in higher risk or less fulfilling jobs should be paid half as much. There are credible arguments about why it’s justified , but I don’t think there are any tenable arguments that it is fair.
I didn’t mean to debate semantics with you and I can see how my language provoked that. My claim is that a scarce, difficult to replace employee deserves more money because of their scarcity and difficulty in being replaced.
> I don’t think it’s fair that those who work in higher risk or less fulfilling jobs should be paid half as much. There are credible arguments about why it’s justified , but I don’t think there are any tenable arguments that it is fair.
I believe its fair. In fact I believe its unfair not to do so. Rather than debate the fairness, I’m more interested in if you think fairness is objective or intersubjective?
It’s unlikely either of us will change the others view, and HN is not the forum to attempt to do so.
I for one work for 7 days a week for ~8 weeks now, and just sat and watched a wall to relax yesterday night because my brain and body refused to do absolutely anything.
Every work is exhausting when overdone or just done with sufficient care.
Office work is not comparable at all.
We install our own datacenter hardware. Hundreds of servers. Carrying. Mounting. Cabling. I'm no stranger to hard, manual work.
I feel tired, but I feel no pain. That's a different kind of being exhausted. Mental exhaustion cannot be compared with physical exhaustion. Both are hard, both are crippling, however one is not better than the other.
It's also very satisfying to install a new fleet and bring it up while drinking tea with muscle tingling all over your body.
Thank you.
Also, I still do not agree on earning sevenfold with 1/7 amount of effort (a 49 fold difference). Neither being a sysadmin or a developer is that easy when a single click of your mouse can affect research of 500 people who have deadlines.
It's not "just a walk in the park" when you're working with a lot of projects with deadlines, entering meetings and try to finish everything on time and not being able to see straight due headaches induced by overloading yourself and sleeping 3-4 hours continuously.
No job is easy, they're different. All of them worthy of respect. Also it's always greener on the other side.
I try to be extra nice to these people, try to release the burden on them, when I can. When chatting with my SO, we sometimes talk about these people and how bad I feel about their circumstances.
I want to reiterate that I think that they need to earn more and live better.
Similarly, on my current job, I have worked off-site, in hazardous sites, in off-hours (including all-nighters), in movement restricted conditions (think as soft imprisonment inside a building) or extremely stressful circumstances. These weren't "Oh, there's a deadline, so let's crunch!" stuff. It was against all odds, against the clock rescue jobs where nobody including your teammates were believing that it's possible, but we (me and a friend) have prevailed.
On the hardware mounting stuff, it was not again "let's playfully install" this stuff too. 100+ servers, left in boxes in front of the building. Carry, unbox, install rails, mount, make all the cabling (incl. electricity, from distribution boxes if req'd) and make them work, in 2 days most.
Yesterday, I was carrying servers to make some part replacements on them.
I never expect not to become one of these laborers. I never think of them as servants or invisible people. On the contrary, they are forming the backbone of some of the stuff that we never see consciously. These systems become invisible because of their hard work. They deserve a lot of respect.
Trash is picked up 1am in my street. I always think of the man, their families and circumstances.
Similarly, when I go to a carrier's office, I try to prepare all my answers and papers before to take their time less (they're literally drowning in packages to ship, so if I'm faster, they can finish their other work faster). I actively try not to reflect myself onto them since they see hundreds of people every day. I try not to be one of the people which makes them feel like a useless/replaceable cogs.
Just because I can play with a lot of cutting edge servers, not sweat everyday and wear my body down to earn a bit of money, it doesn't mean that I can not or don't want to understand and romanticize the burden they're going through.
Similarly just because I have a nicer job, it doesn't mean that all my friends or people I know and care are in the same circle or in higher places.
Just because I know how to manage an OS and write high performance code, it doesn't mean I live isolated in my high castle.
I agree that there are other factors (far more important ones) than just job/earnings. For example, a star developer making millions with a terminally ill spouse or child would easily trade places with manual laborer if doing that made a difference in their outcome. Silly example but it does illustrate how money is really not at the top of everyone’s list.
Thank you. I really appreciate them. Yes, manual labor is a part of our job and we (as the group) do not whine about that. On the contrary, we like the thing TBH.
> For example, a star developer making millions with a terminally ill spouse or child would easily trade places with manual laborer if doing that made a difference in their outcome.
That's not a silly example. It's spot on. I did similar choices (not drastic as the example, and luckily not based on health issues). Rejected higher pay or prestigious titles or shiny companies to be able to stay closer to my family and people I love, to be able to live a simpler and more free life.
I'm not a money oriented person. I do this job because I like computers, I worked a lot and I was definitely lucky up to a certain extent.
However as I said, I don't keep my job as a crown or title about myself to pretend to be more precious and important than other people. We're equal on this little blue dot and everyone and everything deserve respect IMHO.
> without any unions
Good, they don’t need one then? They do the same job at the same performance but they somehow want more money. Good, so does everyone else.
> Minimum wage (or even amazons $15 minimum wage) jobs are very difficult to negotiate from a performance perspective given the nature of the job.
Yeah, it sounds like the government already mandated that they get paid more than their labor is worth so I’m sure a union would just introduce more parasitic loss without adding anything.
I didn’t assume anything of the sort. Consider bargaining skills to be normally distributed in society.
Thats fine and all but I don’t share your preference and so I’d appreciate it if you’d understand that I’m free to negotiate and don’t attempt to take that from me.
> I don’t see myself as better or more deserving than my coworkers,
I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.
> I see us all as on the same team, with the same basic interests.
Do you share a bank account with them? Why not?
No-one is trying to do that (at least, not at this stage, and any attempt to do so would be subject to at least a second vote). You are welcome to simply not join the union if you feel it doesn't represent your interests.
> I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.
Leaving aside the fact that is perfectly possible for a union to negotiate performance-based pay and/or bonuses, I would be interested to think what you think a fair productivity:pay ratio would be for a worker in an Amazon fulfillment centre. Currently, I understand employees are held to such high productivity targets as a matter of course that many of them are afraid to take bathroom breaks in case their productivity dips and they end up getting fired.
This seems to be a valid fear - I couldn't find anything for Alabama, but in Baltimore, Amazon fire around 10% of their workforce annually for failing to meet performance targets. I wasn't able to find any documentation of bonuses or higher pay for higher performance, only the 15.30 USD starting wage, but if anyone has evidence that compensation is higher for high performers, I'd be happy to see that.
> Do you share a bank account with them? Why not?
This question doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why are you asking this?
You know I heard those stories before I went to amazon, and while I wasn’t happy with the work conditions, it certainly wasn’t like that. So I’m not saying the stories are false. But I’m not convinced they are representative either, they certainly weren’t representative of my experience.
I’ll answer your question with a question, how do you measure productivity? What percentage of productivity is contributed by labor, and what percentage by capital? We’re going to need this number if we are to answer your question anyway.
> This seems to be a valid fear - I couldn't find anything for Alabama, but in Baltimore, Amazon fire around 10% of their workforce annually for failing to meet performance targets.
That seems reasonable. I think Jack Welch had a similar policy.
> This question doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why are you asking this?
Gp said he/she were on the same team and have the same interests. If one has the same interests why does one have separate bank accounts?
I personally don't really object to being paid the same as everyone who shares my job title and does substantially the same job as me, provided we're all making the same (and proportionate to hours worked). This was based on your statement that 'I do think its better to earn your own wage rather than an average of all wages. After all I contribute my own productivity, I don’t contribute some average negotiated productivity.'
> That seems reasonable. I think Jack Welch had a similar policy.
For a lot of people, that doesn't seem reasonable at all, but ultimately, you are entitled to your opinion. If you have first-hand experience working in a fulfillment centre and your opinion is that these stories aren't representative, then I will bow to your experience.
> You said you’re on the same team and have the same interests. If you have the same interests why do you have separate bank accounts?
Can we skip past the point where you try to get me to say something and move to the counterpoint you're trying to set up? The original statement was not me, actually, but in case it's one of the below, then I'm not arguing, but feel free to add what you need to make your point:
- if one person 'earns more' then they should have the right to 'spend more'
- if you want to spend your money differently to someone else then you don't have the same interests
- how I spend my money shouldn't be dictated by other people (with provisos around tax, etc.)
From my perspective though, the main point that I wanted to raise with you was the first one, that no-one is being forced to join, and no-one is losing any right to negotiate individually, so why shouldn't the people who want to unionise be allowed to do so?
Well I’m arguing that its not in some employees interest to unionize. I’m fine with people voluntarily agreeing to whatever, freedom of association and all. I just don’t like unions when they require people to join or hold a monopoly on labor.
> Do you share a bank account with them? Why not?
No, because I don’t have a pension, but many people do and I am fully in support of the concept.
I’m not a hyper individualist, a lot of this seems to be interpretation you’re bringing.
> I think it would be foolish to claim that any success or talent of mine or my team is solely my own.
There’s definitely a way to consider a person’s individual productivity in the context of a team of people they work with. Its not easy to measure or quantify and its definitely got subjective elements but some people are more productive than others and in a team that shares work, someone has to do the work that other people don’t do or it doesn’t get done.
> I believe in social obligations, not just in the context of work, but in general.
I believe in the power of incentives to shape behavior and I think there is a soft social obligation to align incentives so that they encourage desired behavior.
'Can a union guarantee [...] better wages?' 'No [...] only Amazon can make commitments about [...] your wages.'
And then a paragraph later
'You may end up with more, the same, or less'.
So, if Amazon are the only people who can make commitments, why would you negotiate for me to earn less... unless it's not really my interests you have at heart in the first place.
First Amendment.
(To be clear, this is a terrible site. But as long as it isn’t threatening or lying, I don’t see why the government should be able to suppress it.)
If you do not like it you may criticize them publicly, boycott their business, or start your own competing employer with the policies you prefer.
The National Labor Relations Act allows employers to argue against the employees voting for union formation.
If you make it illegal to provide bad jobs, those jobs will not be substituted one-for-one for good jobs. That's not how an economy works. You're only hurting low-skilled workers by mandating higher minimum work standards.
Responding to below:
Yes, every so-called labor protection for adults, except protection against contract fraud, should be abolished, for exactly that reason.
Even child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/10/business/worldbusiness/wa...
Union participation is very tricky. It's supposed to be voluntary, but there is evidence that those who don't join the union are denied employment, and advancement. The problem with unions is that they're never really voluntary. I would hate to see the unions of old that used violence to force people to join; or for a more recent example, card check initiatives to make the vote be non confidential.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. If you are a smart business, you don't charge what's "fair", you don't start by saying "I'm going to pay $X to my workers, so let's see how many I can hire with that money." Those are bad ways to run a business. You hire the number of workers you need to run your business at the price the market will bear.
This is something that gets drilled into you if you take any entrepreneurship classes: things cost what the market will bear, there is no concept of "fairness" that entrepreneurs should be thinking about. You pay as little as you can to make something, and you charge as much as you can for it, and those are largely independent variables from each other.
The idea that Amazon is going to stop hiring workers if they get more pee breaks... that's just not how markets work. If Amazon could afford to let those workers go, it would have done it already. If it doesn't need those workers and it's hiring them anyway, then it's just a badly managed company.
Similarly, if you get rid of labor laws and reduce the minimum wage for Amazon's workers, it's not going to hire twice as many people just because it has the money. It'll increase its profit margins, because it's a business being run by smart people who understand how supply/demand works. You're talking about the market like supply and demand form a constant ratio with each other. They don't.
It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out (although reality is more complicated and these simplistic models rarely capture how everything will work out), it's also wrong because it's fundamentally bad market theory on a simple level. Nobody starts a business deciding that they're going to pay a constant amount of money that gets divided equally among all of their workers. At least, they don't think that way if they want to stay in business for very long.
No, they will lower prices and keep margins constant. This prevents competitors from moving in.
Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services, and more automation.
I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't.
If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material/labor, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
In both cases, no competent business owner is thinking "I only want to hit $X profits this year, and anything over that is going to the consumers as a gift so that they'll like me."
> Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services
See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is (arguably) the entire cornerstone of free market Capitalism -- the idea that the value of a set of inputs into a business is not necessarily the same as the value of its outputs. One of the big points of Capitalism is that products get priced based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what they cost to produce or based on some kind of predetermined formula. If you have to pay your workers more, tough luck. Under Capitalism, your products are still only worth what the market is offering.
> and more automation
As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
And in any case, automation is good. We want to eliminate bad jobs. And even among automation-critics who worry about lost jobs and the cost of retraining, their goal in opposing automation is not to make those jobs periodically worse and worse to try and keep pace with the price of machines.
No, they want their return to go up. They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
> Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.
No, you want your net profit to rise. You want your margin to be low because then its harder for others to compete with you.
> If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.
This is true.
> Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.
Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
> See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.
This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
> As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?
> more
> opposed
I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Which is determined by a combination of, among other things, your profit margin and your volume.
> They don’t care about the margin, they care about the total yield (growth + dividend).
And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin and net profit often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
> Glad you agree that companies are optimizing for their place in the market and not naively optimizing for a large profit margin.
Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
Do you think that Amazon right now is purposefully pushing it's profit margins to the bare minimum that is possible for them to stay alive because they're so devoted to growth? Do you think there's some kind of fundamental rule that means if they had more profit they would be forced to invest it into growth or change their position in the market -- that profit can only ever be reinvested? Are you aware that Apple exists?
I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
No, it doesn't miss the point, the point you're making is wrong. The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
> I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
Yes, and a lower margin keeps the volume high by making it more difficult for people to compete.
> And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin often play a role in dividend policies by any chance?
Yeah the amount of profit impacts the decision to issue a dividend.
> Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead?
No, and no.
> I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more.
Look, its clear that you have a perspective and you’re not interested in other perspectives. Good, do you.
> The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism.
I’m not talking about what its worth, but what it sells for. My point has as much to do with accounting as it does economics.
> And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful.
And so it is disingenuous to push unions as though they will help workers out when you know you’re actually helping convince amazon to replace them.
I'm not going to force anyone to debate with me, but if your economic theory says that Amazon's prices should have dropped this year, and they didn't, then your economic theory is wrong and/or incomplete. That seems like a pretty straightforward test.
Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
Right, except that’s not what I said. So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory, that happens to also not coincide with some fact you refer to, I question your sincerity in discourse.
> Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
It is for this reason that theoretical predictions in economics are considered ceteris paribus
> We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.
Yeah we do.
> Yeah we do. [...] So when you insist on a gross misreading of my theory
Literally two comments earlier:
> This is true and still misses the point that an increase in the cost of inputs results in an increase in costs, resulting in an increase in price.
I'm not the person here arguing that changes in input costs and prices are universally linearly coupled to each other.
> universally linearly coupled to each other.
Yeah, neither am I.
>>I think its well understood among people who are familiar with unions that increasing labor costs results in acceleration of an automation process that is already in progress.
Increased labor costs slow the rate at which the economy automates.
The rate of automation is almost indistinguishable from the rate of economic growth. Almost all economic growth comes from the labor-cost savings, and those in turn come from automation and trade-derived specialization.
When one of the major inputs to production, like labor, is subject to arbitrary government imposed price floors, it leads to economic deadweight losses that reduce economic output, and in turn reduce the volume of economic resources available to invest in new capital that automates production.
Automation increases per capita production, and with it, wages.
They will hire fewer workers.. there will be fewer profitable business ventures when the cost of one of the inputs to production increases.
In some case, it's true that higher wages will reduce profits, instead of reducing the number of jobs available, but that is not a good thing.
High profit margins encourage greater investment.
Take N95 masks for instance. If there is a shortage, any one producing them will raise prices and earn a huge profit.
Now let's say a progressive politician is elected and decides that those profits should be reallocated to the workers producing the N95 masks, so imposes an industry-specific minimum wage for N95 mask creators. Now profit margins decline for producing N95 mask makers, and N95 mask maker employees earn more.
What's lost is the massive influx of investment capital that high profit margins would otherwise have elicited, that would have raised N95 mask supply, which would have made the masks more affordable and plentiful.
Price controls don't work to increase net welfare. They reduce social welfare for reasons Economics explains in depth. Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations. They are the product of a super collective intelligence that tells us where economic resources should be allocated.
>>It's not just wrong because reality is more complicated and in practice the simplistic models don't always bare out
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the minimum wage, to the extent that it has an effect, harms wage growth. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
There are a bunch of outlier situations in which artificial price bounds might theoretically not create economic deadweight losses, but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need? If Amazon could hit the shipping volumes it needs to hit with 50% of the current workforce, then it would be hiring ~50% of the current workforce -- if that's not the case, then somebody in the company that's making hiring decisions needs to be fired.
> Price controls don't work to increase net welfare.
A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare. We can debate the theory, but we can also just look at reality and say, "we've tried this before, and when handled correctly, it works."
> Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations.
I would be on board with your argument if the original comment starting this thread didn't boil down to "costs go up, prices go up". You're not talking about a complex signal at that point, you're talking about basic economic principles, and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Even your N95 example shows this point. Why did prices go up for N95 masks? Not primarily because of costs of production, primarily because demand changed. The basic principle economic principle is demand, not costs of production.
If you want to step away from those basic principles and talk about the complicated realities of what people will invest, and how safe they feel, and the size of the payout influencing investment enthusiasm, and so on -- then fine, that's reasonable, but the complicated reality is also that economic experts have looked at minimum wage increases, weighed up all of the complicated inputs that go into final product prices, and regularly concluded in multiple studies that minimum wages don't consistently increase prices or decrease market investment.
> It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.
Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
> but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".
Agreed, but "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good" is much closer to reality than saying "the economy does conform to simplistic models, therefore a price floor is always bad." You're arguing that the simplistic model isn't applicable, in a thread that was started with you arguing that the simple model was that price and material/wage costs would always move in the same direction. That's just not true, it's both an oversimplification and just bad economic theory.
We can't prove that it's not hiring fewer workers than it otherwise would have. In the absence of the ability to run a controlled experiment on how a minimum wage affects Amazon behavior, we can only trust in Economics, the same way we trust in what epidemiology tells us about the efficacy of vaccines, and assume that a larger volume of people would be hired without an artificial floor on the price of labor.
>>A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
You're talking about a price control on manual services in general, i.e. labor.
>>B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare.
No they haven't. Studies on minimum wage cannot conclusively show anything, because they are not controlled, and minimum wages are too low to affect a significant number of jobs.
Meta-studies suggest that minimum wage tends to be harmful, just as you'd expect, though these are not definitive for the reasons mentioned.
>>and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Yes I agree with that, but I didn't make the counter-argument, another commenter did.
>>Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
Nothing is guaranteed in economics, but we should err on the side of basic economics in the absence of certainty and proof.
I noticed on other Squarespace sites that second comment is usually just the domain minus the TLD. I wonder if "cranberry groundhog" means anything in particular.
Edit: Guess it's autogenerated? https://cranberry-groundhog-8agy.squarespace.com/
Probably something to use before your IT team sets up the CNAME record.
Unionization efforts also always take place against the backdrop of former employers simply shutting down the business location and moving elsewhere to avoid unions: Subtle and not so subtle threats of that are always in play during unionization efforts.
Realistically, how much would it hurt to move amazon warehouses near the border of any neighboring state?
The days of the factories, and none movable infrastructure a long gone, so it is a strong factor to consider.
I literally witnessed this threat first hand growing up when my mom was involved in union efforts.
According to this (Danish)
https://fagbladet3f.dk/artikel/svenske-amazon-arbejdere-faar...
the workers are in an union.
Amazon: "Don't pay $500 in dues"
Their main argument is that it is not worth the money.
From Amazon's perspective unions are strictly a net-loss. Even if the unions offered the employees zero advantages, the same paychecks from Amazon would have less impact on workers because of dues/meetings, so you'd expect moderately higher attrition and other negative effects.
On the flip side though, is it actually clear that an Amazon union _would_ benefit workers once accounting for the overhead? Is that even the goal, or are prospective Amazon unions just trying to improve safety levels to something on par with other warehouses? Are there other factors?
Quick Google search turned this up, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole but this line seems relevant:
> Factors like race, gender, and educational attainment have an undeniable effect on people’s economic outcomes over time that unions do not necessarily flatten, but certainly helped to mitigate. For instance, macro-level data show that unionized workers, in general, see a wage boost of around 20%. When VanHeuvelen controlled for various demographic factors like race and geographic location, he tracked wage increases between 3% and 12.5% for union members.
I'd like my chances that will add up to more than $500 over the year if I were a union worker, and this does not take into account the other potential upsides.
What is this line even supposed to mean? Probably the most incomprehensible union busting talking point I've ever heard.
https://www3.swipeclock.com/blog/union-employers-what-you-ne...
It's so blatant & over the top that I'd almost believe the union organizers set it up to make Amazon look bad.
And it's telling that they focus pretty exclusively on the $500 in dues: They pay their employees little enough that they know ~$10/week might be a significant decision making factor here.
Pleade strike the first sentence of this comment, thanks.
That they provide excellent value to consumers. Indeed the recent pandemic would have been much worse without them.
> What a ridiculous narrative you're trying to push.
Maybe try understanding others’ perspectives instead of ridiculing them.
Amazon undercuts competitors and plays hard ball with suppliers literally every day. That's business, that's life. I don't see why workers shouldn't take their opportunity to engage in tough negotiations with Amazon themselves.
Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value because of moral hazards, perverse incentives, and agent-principal problems.
Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency. If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
Nonsense, people insisted that it was foolish to require bundling of routine insurance with catastrophic insurance, people advocate for the severability of hardward and operating systems, people oppose forced bundling of insurance and all kinds of other goods.
> Nobody argues that a company having a single legal team that represents all of its managers and sets org-wide hiring policies is anti-efficiency.
They would however observe that that single legal team only protects the company, and that each employee should have their own, individual legal representation for their own personal liability.
> If you negotiate with a publicly traded company, you are engaging in collective bargaining, because public companies are collectives that represent the multiple interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations.
This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
> Nobody argues that companies are anti-value because they restrict my freedom to negotiate a separate contract with every single member of the company's board. But suddenly it's different if the workers do the same thing.
I think the comparison here has been twisted so far beyond the breaking point that there is no need of a rebuttal.
None of that is collective bargaining.
> This doesn’t offer a counterpoint to my point.
One comment earlier: "Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value"
Neither were your examples.
> One comment earlier: "Because collective bargaining results in a net decrease in value"
That point still stands.
What's more, all of those buzzwords can apply to the relationship between any other supplier as well. In addition, corporations are themselves a highly collected bargaining unit. They may nominally be a single entity, but they represent the financial interests of many people.
Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.
So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired.
It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this.
Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make things difficult, and costly for non-union employees. My personal experience was that I removed from a wall mount a wi-fi router, rebooted it, and placed it back on the wall.
This resulted in me reprimanded, my department having to pay a 4 hour call out fee, to the union electrician.
So, my choices are to call out a union electrician to service the mounted piece of equipment. Or "accidentally" bump the IO switch on the surge protector.
It was this, and countless other stupid shit, that made me really dislike working in a place with a union.
If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.
A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.
This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.
If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.
I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).
Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
And ownership can easily present a conflict of interest even when spread out.
So now 25% compensation is based on this buy in, if a business unit is doing poorly and has brought down that compensation, the company wants to shit can the business unit and its employees, the members of the union would not be directly working against their own interest fight to keep them. (this is always the case really, but now it is directly felt by the members)
Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding you, what you're calling a "conflict of interest" is literally my entire point.
It is a good thing that the union has an incentive to balance the interests of workers with the interests of the overall company.
If the company needs to cut jobs to be competitive, it is a good thing that the union has a stake in both sides of the issue. That way they will be incentivized to work towards a solution that is fair to the workers, and profitable for investors.
It's the exact situation we all face every day. I like the taste of donuts. I know that if I eat them all the time, I'll get fat. Because my stomach and brain have a "conflict of interest", I make choices that balance short term and long term pleasure. If every donut I made got somebody else fat, then they would be in trouble, because I might like the taste of donuts more than I care about their health.
Unions typically already have a seniority over competency problems, this seems like something that would only really exacerbate the issue.
You also have to consider these are warehouse workers not software developers, there is a very high turn over rate, I don't think many of the warehouse workers would be interested in a vesting period before they saw anything from their RSU.
I also and not sure how this would work in a PLA multi-union site, lets not forget that the truck drivers, electricians, and many others already have their unions, and in my experience once a place has a labor union onsite, they want supporting employees to be union also.
And I think we will have to agree to disagree on conflict of interest.
Many unions protect part time workers, or protect workers from being excluded from a fair share of benefits based on their inputs.
The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I don’t believe unions are universally perfect. When they’re well run and union members participate and have a voice, they can be quite amazing. My partner’s union makes my cosy software job seem like it’s missing something. Sure she pays huge dues, but she’s also given protections and benefits I couldn’t even dream of.
I net about 4x as much as her on paper, but if you figured in the cumulative value of her union agreement, it would be much more than her dues. Collective bargaining is no joke. She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
You say you don't get paid leave as a software developer, are you a contractor?
Are you employed by this company as a full time employee, or are you a contractor?
In the U.S. at least, this is a night and day difference so I guess that is why I am trying to get clarification on that.
I just meant that the initial statement about your current benifits compared to someone in the union wasn't fair.
Sorry if I made it seem your opinion wasn't welcome, that wasnt my intent.
I can understand why this would be highly preferable for part time workers. Can you understand how a company might be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 40 hours a week, but not be able to afford to provide a $30,000/yr benefits package to workers who work 20 hours a week? Can you see how increasing the cost of part time employment might make a lot of those part time jobs go away?
> The reason for this is that there’s no incentive to push hours down until no one gets benefits. Which is not uncommon, unfortunately. Many companies tout incredible benefits with a significant portion of their workforce having no entitlement to it because of arbitrary suppression of their shifts.
I understand that it seems unfair for a company to replace one 40 hour worker with two 20 hour workers. Especially when the 40 hour worker has benefits and the 20 hour workers do not. The issue here is that requiring an employer to provide benefits for full time employees creates the situation where an employer may not be able to afford benefits for their full time employees. So in order to keep the business going, they do what they can. Making it more expensive for them to do this is just going to result in fewer businesses anyway.
> Collective bargaining is no joke.
Collective bargaining flattens worker salaries, the lower performing workers make more than they should and the higher performing workers make less. Its not a given that everyone wants this, or should want it. People should be able to negotiate as individuals.
> She has life insurance that would cost me an arm and a leg, a great pension plan, incredible leave options, very generous extended health/vision/dental benefits... It’s a long list.
Not everyone wants all these things. More importantly, not everyone wants to pay for all of them. Some people could use the money elsewhere (perhaps they are covered under a spouse).
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
I like a world where both of these things are available for people who choose them.
> I think she gets something like 6 weeks of leave per year, too. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid, period.
I personally would prefer to get paid more and manage my own finances and vacations. You don’t get interest on vacation days (although they do include health insurance).
As far as negotiating as an individual goes, you’re right - a union removes that option. It does however empower those who can’t or won’t or otherwise struggle to negotiate for themselves, for a multitude of valid reasons. To me that’s worth something. I’ve been fortunate enough to more or less glide through my career and rarely need to negotiate anything in order to live comfortably. This is exceedingly rare though. I wouldn’t want to say no to a union because I’ve never needed or wanted one for myself. If people collectively desire it, I think it’s a net positive.
As far as getting paid more and managing your own benefits and vacation, I hear that. I’ve felt the same as times. However, the older I get the more I think things like a pension and extended health sound pretty nice. It’s like having an easy-bake oven that pumps out legitimate desserts. We’re not all endowed with the chops to make that happen, so having this stuff on autopilot is a significant windfall eventually.
As far as flattening wages goes, I’m not so sure. Everywhere my partner has worked with a union, her wages have steadily increased due to the union bargaining for her. Sometimes the increases are substantial. The wages across the current organization certainly aren’t flat either.
You’re right that not everyone wants these things, too. I’m not sure you can get around that particular problem.
Ultimately I’d just say unions aren’t inherently bad and if you don’t like them, work somewhere that doesn’t have one. Most places don’t, so it’s not a limiting factor that should impose personal risk.
I'm of an age and socioeconomic stratum where union membership is not only not really done - people don't even really know what unions do or how they work, and I was essentially just as ignorant.
> I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately.
The real epiphany moment for me came when I understood that my lifelong fixation on salary, into which I, as an upper-middle-class person, was socialized from a young age (along with everyone else I know), is a form of sleight of hand: in a society like ours, with a gutted social safety net and enormous inequality, no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country. And this effect gets worse as you age and have kids, of course.
So these days, after getting a tiny whiff of these dynamics in my somewhat modest (meaning not high-status) but fairly-compensated union gig, I find myself wondering, if given the choice between a $200k salary in Idaho or a $100k salary in, say, Sweden, which would I choose? And a second doesn't pass before I smell pickled herring and lingonberries.
> I don’t believe unions are universally perfect.
I don't either. I'm not blindly ideological about this, and like any human system, human beings can fuck up unions to the detriment of everyone else, too. But man, as someone low on the totem pole in my organization, it's nice to know that a group of competent people with (some) real power actually have my back.
I disagree with the factual assertion and the framing here. The money that you make is not “intended to ma[ke] up for” benefits and services that could be provided in some hypothetical. The money that you’re saving is to provide for yourself in retirement because you’re the one who doesn’t want to die of exposure or become a burden on someone else when you stop working.
Man, that is really grim. Basically admitting that $500 will be make or break for many of these employees, while the company itself is hitting record numbers.
I edited to remove my mistake, the downstream convo is gonna be wacky
The fundamental problem is that the government keeps mandating policies that drive up the cost of living so that low-skilled and unskilled workers are constantly struggling to keep their head above water, then tries to solve the problem by doubling down on the same failed policies that make it harder for poor and working class people to survive.
Some people don’t make very much when they negotiate because their labor actually isn’t worth very much on the market. Its not worth very much when translated into goods and services. So they work a lot and they don’t have very much and its sad. So people feel bad for them and change the law so they have to get paid more money for the same work. But they aren’t any more productive so there isn’t any more stuff to go around, so when they take their more money to the market, they bid up the prices of goods and end up where they started, sometimes even a bit further behind. But they spent the money at a business that makes a profit. And that profit eventually ends up in the pocket of someone who owns that business. But the working class person is still dependent on that artificially high wage, and the cycle repeats itself.
I haven't seen any evidence that this actually happens to a significant degree, could you link a study on it? Cause as far as I have read the inflation cause by minimum wage increases is relatively minimal, especially compared the the increase in income.
No and I’m not aware of a study that shows this, and although there may be one out there arguing one way or the other I’d be inclined to disregard it because a claim like “ceteris paribus bids on scarce resources drive up the price” isn’t empirically testable because ceteris is never paribus. Whatever study that argues anything of this nature is required to use a theory to interpret data and the theory that “prices are the emergent result of repeated bid-ask transactions between interested parties” is more basic than whatever theory they are going to use in those (hypothetical) studies. I’d be happy to entertain objections to my statement.
> Cause as far as I have read the inflation cause by minimum wage increases is relatively minimal, especially compared the the increase in income.
I’m not arguing that they will always end up with less money. I’m asserting that the increase in wage will all go to consumption goods/services that are provided by profitable businesses owned by “the rich and/or wealthy” and so the minimum wage earners will stay at subsistence level but the people who already own assets will profit.
The relative motion of various prices is the result of many complicated factors and its likely that increased profits for the providers of these goods/services would cause more firms to enter the market and there would be more of these consumption items than before. But the people who own businesses would keep accumulating profit and the people at minimum wage would keep spending their entire paychecks on consumption items.
However the profit appears substantially more than I had believed and I was mistaken so there’s that.
Thank you for the reply and the correction.