It's so weird that this is even needed. I mean didn't they already have laws that requires breaks, etc... Leave it to Amazon to come up with a legal or computational strategy to work around the existing laws.
The US is not alone in that. Laws should always include a cost benefit analysis and a declaration saying how they will be enforced and how they will be financed.
Reminds me of when people were claiming ADA exemptions for masks, as a "loophole". Then folks involved in the ADA point out it wasn't a loophole, because it was illegal to claim an exemption if you have a real condition.
Except the way laws like the ADA and HIPAA are written, it's literally impossible in most cases to check if someone is lying or not. So unless you're ready to literally gamble on your guts feeling (they can't sue you for discrimination if it was indeed false, but you have no way to check!), you couldn't do anything.
But hey, it's against the law, so I'm sure people won't lie.
Scroll down to "The system also tracks an associates time off task" It basically admits that "time off task" doesn't automatically account for bathroom breaks. You have to ask a manager to include each one, during the conversation where you're being scolded for high "time off task"! The wording in this section is Amazon's wording, too. Oof.
Edit: After a bit of searching, there don't appear to be any federal laws requiring breaks in the US, and there are many states that don't have any either.
Well, and local laws. Making sure people get their breaks has been part of the supervisor/manager role for every food service job I've had, but I'm in California where breaks are mandated by the government.
California is kind of a different planet than the rest of the country for restaurant work. A good example is that tipped workers still get paid well in California where in Boston they still get paid $5.55/hr, if anything because many places do under-the-table tips-only work. That was $2.63/hr less than 5 years ago... and it's why folks from California have a 'slight' reputation for occasionally being worse tippers than others.
Breaks are legally mandated a lot of places where people don't get them. I've known many hundreds of people that have worked in many thousands of restaurants in all positions in the northeast cities— NY, Boston, etc. Breaks for restaurant workers— aside from 5ish minute cigarette breaks— though legally mandated, are nearly unheard of. More often than not, the much exalted 'family meal' is cheap leftovers eaten while standing up in a back hallway or while doing other work.
It's also very common for cooks to be given rules like "don't punch in more than 30 minutes before service, or punch out more than 30 minutes after service" even though you've got 2+ hours of setup and cleanup which you'll get fired for not completing. It's obviously not legal, but restaurant back of the house workers are so disempowered on a whole, that it really doesn't matter.
If you're interested in seeing more about the local restaurant work culture, check out the saga of a Boston-based pizza chain "The Upper Crust." Their brazenness was based in experience for how these things were generally handled. The fact that they were punished for their behavior is the exception rather than the rule. Almost all restaurant work complaints that get sent to the AG are ignore. I know because I've sent 4, personally, for outright wage theft and know many others that sent complaints in for similar problems.
This is obviously not true in corporate environments with more uniform employment policies.
At least in the urban northeast, the number of non-corporate restaurants that allow their employees anything more than a couple <5 minute smoke breaks is vanishingly small. I've worked in about 20 restaurants, clubs and bars and restaurants in several cities in this general area over 25 years, and had thousands of coworkers with the same experience. It's a very common griping topic.
Americans may think they are the kings of capitalism but I have seen things...
I saw a Polish kapo beat someone who said he was too sick to work. It's almost a concentration camp out there but most of the public will never know. One day we will run out of folks to exploit but until then full steam ahead I suppose.
I was friends/coworkers with a 19 year old Mexican American mom who had just extricated herself from a small, c-grade traveling circus in Texas. A few months after joining them, the ringmaster woke her up every morning demanding she start training on the trapeze immediately, and would punch her in the stomach every day she refused. She was 16 years old and pregnant.
Check out this Frontline documentary on labor trafficking in the us:
It feels like most problems like this end up being defection scenarios in the prisoner's dilemma.
If every worker would just take their breaks, and allow their quotas to slip, what is Amazon going to do? Fire everyone? But instead, individuals decide to look out for themselves first, and defect, which causes everyone to be miserable, including themselves.
I don't blame them in the slightest for this, but it still makes me sad. I guess this is what unions are for. Oh wait, Amazon engages in union-busting, never mind.
Yup. These type of quotas are often used for promotion opportunities, too, so the carrot on the stick is very tempting. If they can just push themselves a little harder, they could make more money. If you push that to its extreme, you end up with people harming themselves quite a bit. Like you said, prisoner's dilemma.
Regulations about breaks don't really cover this situation. The gist, as I understand, is that Amazon requires workers to meet very specific productivity metrics such that the employment becomes a trade-off between efficiency and employee well-being. My understanding is that there isn't anything in the books that quantify exactly what's the minimum acceptable amount of "slacking off" an employee is allowed to engage in (I'm using the term "slacking off" loosely here to mean anything that isn't strictly actively engaging 100% in whatever is considered "productive"). In other words, there's nothing that specifically says "employers can't get you into hot water because you walked too slow from this shelf to that shelf"
The thing I constantly find weird about California regulation these days is how short sighted and micro-managey it all is. This one clearly is explicitly targeted at Amazon, the AB5/Prop 22 pair is specifically targeted at Uber/Lyft, etc.
It strikes me as a deep lack of understanding about how policy making is supposed to work. Ideally, policy is supposed to be something you get experts to research holistically, present data on and implement based on certain expectations of how pros and cons are supposed to play out. California policy making looks to me more like a reactive game of whack-a-mole, trying to put out whatever is the fire du jour with hacks and bandaids and hoping the new rules don't cause any collateral damage.
Well, in terms of AB5 the federal government tried to head this one off with broad legislation 83 years ago. The Fair Labor Standards Act defines an "employ" as "to suffer or permit to work" specifically because they understood that employers would try to classify workers as anything other than an employee in order to get around the law. It doesn't seem to have worked out that way, so there's an argument for being a bit more specific. (I learned about this from this excellent podcast: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/to-suff...)
I think the underlying problem is that these employers have disproportionate power, influence, and resources, along with endless creativity. If they can't get the government fully on their side every time, they'd rather it be dysfunctional.
> California policy making looks to me more like a reactive game of whack-a-mole, trying to put out whatever is the fire du jour with hacks and bandaids and hoping the new rules don't cause any collateral damage.
I was thinking exactly this while reading this article. I was really hoping to read that this was a much more generic law that strengthens worker protections, that also just happens to help with the problems in Amazon warehouses. But, nope, just feels like "injustice whack-a-mole". That's not a good way to develop policy at all.
There are too many laws. The other effect it has is that it cements Amazon. Any other startup that tries to compete, even in a small way, Amazon now has a new legal tactic to shut-down competitors by making sure they get drowned in all the legal mumbo jumbo.
Considering that more and more power is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer mega-companies, it is natural that laws should target these specific companies.
These are corporations with more power than nation states with CEO's having more personal power than many dictators.
If you want generic laws, then break up these companies into smaller ones.
I've worked in logistics and supply chain for a while, and that type of quota is pretty much the norm (honestly, it kind of is in any job that is easy to quantify, like call centers, sales, and some segments of retail).
The way the quotas get set is kind of as a bell curve. You set quotas, including threshold for promotions, as some where you'll get let go. They hire people, and those folks thrive to meet the quota/make more money. If everyone is doing so well that the tip of the bell curve is too much to the right, they increase the quota. If they have trouble hiring and everyone's leaving, or if they end up needing to let go too many people, they lower it.
Of course, a company could push it way too far if they have enough power and a big enough employee pool. They can then put super high quotas and only keep people who can push it that far (probably where the whole "peeing in bottles" come from).
The concept itself isn't that weird. Maybe weird to people who mostly worked in salaried jobs that are hard to quantify.
Where it becomes a problem is when too many people are desperate enough for money that they're willing to literally harm themselves to meet their quotas or get promoted. That's probably where regulators came from with this type of law. I didn't read it, but that sounds really tough to implement.
Living has always required energy, effort, and skill. How can we get around this without some sort of parasitic relationship? Do you have any recommendation for some reading for a sustainable model? From my understanding, UBI is largely unproven.
Most people will want more than just the basics. Most people won't be satisfied with UBI. They want to earn something on top.
So people will still want to work. But they no longer are forced to take any job just to survive.
I'm sorry I don't have reading recommendations. This doesn't mean they don't exist, I am just not deep enough into this topic to ever have looked for them.
I'm a big UBI advocate, but even if we went that route, it will require a certain maturity on both the government and the citizens. It won't be long before people are in the street saying UBI isn't enough as you can't buy a house in a big city while feeding a family of 4 with it.
We'd need to, as a society, draw a line in the sand as to what "the basics" are (it's extremely subjective. I think MIT or Harvard has a site with threshold they consider the minimum, but it uses arbitrary metric like expected amount of kids, and it's by city).
Once we pick, while we should always be ready to revisit, it can't be a constant thing. If folks are robbing CVS saying they wouldn't if UBI was higher (assuming it was set to a reasonable amount to begin with. A big if), we're not much better off than where we are now.
I'd like to see the quotas like Amazon has for the warehouse workers be set by having the management team, C-level, Board of Directors, etc work the roles for a week doing those jobs. Then average their productivity rates and that becomes the maximum that could possibly be set as a quota.
It seem that far to often management just keep increasing the productivity requirements, squeezing more and more blood from the stones of the workforce with zero regard for the health and wellbeing of the regular employees.
Pretty rich when Jeff Bezos is attacking SpaceX on the grounds that Musk doesn't respect the law. Like, he's not wrong, but that's solid "takes one to know one" territory right there.
How does flagging or making a comment dead work in hn? I thought it occurred after many downvotes but I managed to check this thread <60 seconds after ‘Nikki nana posted
>Now unionize!
And the comment is already [dead]. That feels like it could only happen if there were bots downvoting instantly
I think it's an automatic thing if the user is banned or suspended; like a shadow ban. So, there may very well not have been a number of down-voters and was simply dead from the start.
There’s a “comments” link in the header that shows the newest comments across all stories. People could be refreshing that and acting on comments without checking every individual story. This could be a good way to help moderate a lot of low quality comments, but the people doing it might not have all the context.
That probably means that they have been banned which starts their post at -4 karma and requires vouching in order to list publicly. This only happens for repeated bad behavior.
They'll just do away with hard quotas and tell them they are "slow" or "could be doing more". This is what happens at my company since they aren't allowed to count story points, but they just do it behind the scenes anyways.
In higher level tech jobs, we struggle to find good metrics to measure performance, and then in jobs where it's easy to measure performance with a clear metric - using it is controversial.
Maybe the lesson is that when a metric becomes tangible, expectations to meet/exceed those metrics becomes an all-encompassing aspect of the job.
The public would vote for indentured servitude if it kept their Amazon retail and Uber services cheap (and in California, they did, with Prop 22 [1]). That’s why it’s important to have checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of the majority [2]. The public voting themselves overly generous government benefits is no different than the public voting themselves consumer excess on the backs of gig workers.
Sure, unions have problems and labor rights are inconvenient for businesses. At the end of the day, people deserve dignity and a less miserable work experience than they getting today.
I've lived long enough to quickly suss out humans with a lack of empathy and life experience. The life experience I can forgive, the lack of empathy I cannot. I hope you embrace the opportunity to grow as a human.
I get a sense you haven't experienced enough suffering for the conclusion you're arriving at. It is easy to project onto others that "they should be able to choose to work for a pittance if they want", when they don't want but have no other options. I'd argue, in a developed country with aspirations of being a civil society, you set a solid floor for those with the least power instead of making excuses that "this is their choice." But, as you mention, we all vote and see how it goes.
Which is why there aren't many large-scale pure direct democracies out there. Most governments are set up to have at least some checks and balances to protect minority components from majority rule.
That's a bit of a malicious characterization. Prop 22 was about trade-offs: more drivers each taking a smaller piece of the pie vs less drivers each taking more. The caveat is that this trade-off has different levels of impact on consumers (less drivers means less availability, slower pick up times and higher prices).
A bunch of Uber drivers I've spoken to do it as a side thing, to supplement income from other sources. The conundrum is that there are a lot of casual drivers and fewer full time ones, and those two groups generally sit on opposite ends of the debate (casuals don't want to be forced to choose between driving and their other income sources, and full time ones want employee benefits)
Ultimately, it doesn't boil down to something as sinister as a secret desire for indentured servitude, it's simply a matter of everyone being selfish. Unions are also a form of people being selfish (though collectively). IMHO, the answer isn't in bickering on whose selfishness is more warranted, it'd be more apt to question why isn't a social net provided by the government itself in the first place (in the form of public healthcare, unemployment insurance, etc) if they deem it important enough to legislate?
If it makes you feel any better about the public, according to a poll shortly after[1] ~40% of people voting Yes on Prop 22 self-reported that they thought they were voting for the option that would classify drivers with more benefits. This means a majority of people voting intended to give or maintain more regulations and benefits. However, Uber/Lyft ran the most expensive campaign in California history, burning through 200+ million dollars to confuse the issue, and causing many voters (23%) to vote Yes instead of No.
This is a clear corporate-money-dictating-politics thing. I used to joke that if the self-driving car thing doesn't pan out, there's a always a consultancy pivot ready for Uber. "Don't like a law? Have some taxes due? No sweat, for $20/vote we can make those pesky taxes disappear!"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly... - Anecdotally confirmed to me with some canvassing last year as well, many (easily more than 23%) were going to vote "Yes" since they misinterpreted the question to be the exact opposite
I’m not sure voters quite understood what Prop 19 did. It was a first of it’s kind law for the US and the bulk of the TV ad spending was misleading (for example app-based taxis have significantly increased in price since the law was passed.)
What warehouse workers need is a union or some other structure that represents employees and can bargain on their behalf. Yes, there have been a lot of problems with unions, in the US, in the past, but that doesn't mean the need for worker representation has gone away.
It's funny, i find anti-union to be nearly identical to anti-government.
It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I can definitely agree that it can be bad, but to me it's the only entity that should be representing me. Corporations will have no incentive aligned with myself. Unions/Governments serve as a way to organize the people at large. Which to me is a wholly good thing.
This organization however does not come without risks. I think where we fail as a civilization is recognizing this power dynamic and finding ways to monitor corruption. I want to give a government power, but i also need ways to monitor them. Without know if/when an organization becomes corrupted we have no way of healing, and it will always be doomed to fail in the worst way.
I'm very pro-union. However we need to figure out monitoring. In Governments, and Unions. Otherwise in my view it's just a matter of time before they fail.
> Be it government, or union - the effect is the same.
I agree with your desire for oversight and accountability for either, but there is a difference of at least institutional momentum. I don't think anyone would consider institutional momentum of the US government to be aligned with the interests of workers. I think unions have an opportunity to be better and more explicitly aligned with those interests. As an employee previously part of a union, the adversarial relationship between unions and businesses seems to, at the end, strike a balance between the competing interests of the workers and the business. A business without unions can be like a courtroom without public defenders: not a great place to be the little guy.
> It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same.
I don't think that's true. Those people are typically very comfortable with one "organized entity with power" that you're leaving out: private capital in its various forms. What they're doing is actually defending that against any challenges to its power.
Usually those people are laborers like the rest of us, but they've been indoctrinated to identify with interests other than their own (often reinforced by having a slightly higher status than most other laborers, or by unlikely-to-be-met aspirations of hitting the jackpot and becoming a wealthy capitalist themselves).
> Private capital is not "one organized entity", especially not in "its various forms".
In most cases it's at least as organized as unions. Also, a decentralized entity is still an entity.
But my point stands, there are very, very few people who actually feel "any organized entity with power is bad." If it seems that way, something's being left out of the analysis.
I'm a different person than you're replying to, but just to give some examples of how capital organizes itself, there are a ton of organizations they use to represent their interests. For example, at every level of government, there is a chamber of commerce formed by major businesses or their owners. That chamber of commerce publishes opinions, lobbies politicians, etc. There are also all kinds of think tanks funded and often founded by businesspeople to promote their interests. The Heritage Foundation is a prominent example. In the US, these groups have enormous influence at every level.
I think I'd agree with you, but the unionization vote for amazon Warehouse workers failed ... by quite a large margin already.
It's not lost on me either that a vote of 3000 cast votes is not representative of every amazon warehouse, but I would think if it's really bad the vote would be much closer.
> The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon violated labor law after workers at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse tried to join a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union said Monday.
> The director who presided over the NLRB hearing will recommend whether a new election is conducted, the union said in a statement, but the final decision whether workers will be allowed to cast new ballots and form a union ultimately lies with the director of the regional NLRB office based in Atlanta.
The biggest issue with this vote is that it happened in Alabama, a state where the republican majority has spent six decades villifying labor movements in the eyes of the people who would benefit the most for them; Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation. Now look at how good this turned out for Amazon. There are now people like you who cite this vote and its margin alone, without understanding the political context, and use it to suggest that Amazon workers would not collectively benefit from unionization. These PR people in these large corporations are absolutely brilliant at their propaganda. You've been made into an unintentional parrot, not your fault considering how hard it is to find signal with all the corporate noise that is dumped out there in the press these days.
If I had to pick any amazon warehouse in the country with workers least likely to vote for their own self interests, it would probably be in Alabama or Texas. If this vote had happened in a state like Oregon it would have probably passed and Amazon knows it. Brilliant move by Amazon having the first union vote here since Amazon can now point to their workers "deciding against a union" whenever it comes up again in the press, and other warehouses probably lost a lot of wind in their sails for the unionization movement too after this failure.
The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them and unskilled workers have no power even in a union.
Skilled workers are scarce, so they already have negotiating power at the individual level and collective bargaining is just overhead and another bureaucracy to take a vig that could have gone into your paycheck.
Unskilled workers aren't scarce, so what happens if they unionize? The union strikes, the company hires a different set of unskilled workers and all the union workers get is laid off.
This is especially true for an Amazon warehouse because there are thousands of them all over the world. If the workers at a warehouse near San Francisco strike, not only can they easily hire different workers, they can just send everybody their stuff from another warehouse in Nevada or any of a thousand other places.
What unskilled workers need isn't a union, it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce, e.g. a UBI so that people aren't so desperate for a job and can hold out for better pay and working conditions.
I generally agree with your conclusion and recognize your arguments. This might just be ignorance on my part, but don't we have a history of unions fighting for labor rights and securing real improvements for unskilled labor? My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements.
Most of the successful 20th century unions weren't representing unskilled workers, they were representing skilled workers against employers so large that they had market power in the labor market for that type of skilled labor, like the Big 3 auto makers.
The problem for those workers was that although they were skilled labor, the number of employers who needed auto workers was small enough for them to act as a cartel. The concentrated market offset the negotiating power of a skilled individual, but at the same time, a company that employed a third of the auto workers in the country couldn't just replace them all if they went on strike.
But that was kind of a pathological circumstance and the better solution in that case is to do some trust busting. Or if competition increases on its own as it did from the Japanese automakers during the oil crisis.
The closest thing to that in the modern economy is the relationship between app developers and platform app stores. It's the same sort of cartelized market. But some trust busting would work there too.
And other markets don't look like that. If you're actually an employee of Google or Apple, they don't have anything like market power in that labor market, because it's the same skillset to go and work for Facebook or Microsoft or Netflix or a million other places including a large number of smaller companies and startups. And if you're a worker at an Amazon warehouse, it's not skilled labor.
> My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements.
Most of the claimed victories were symbolic, because they were things that were happening anyway and then legislators passed laws requiring them after they'd mostly already happened so they could say they were doing something.
Workers expect to be paid more to work 80 hours instead of 40, so given the choice between paying one worker for 80 hours and two workers for 40 hours, employers found the second option led to higher worker productivity and reliability because the workers weren't constantly exhausted and making mistakes and didn't as often quit from burnout.
Around 2% of people in the US make minimum wage. In other words, ~98% of employers pay more than that even though the law doesn't require them to, because the market does. And even without minimum wage, the other 2% would be making around the same amount of money, because the employer still has to offer enough to get the employee to accept the job.
Minimum wage is even harmful to employees because it forces them into bad trade offs they otherwise wouldn't have taken. There might have been a job paying $6/hour across the street from your apartment, but it goes away if minimum wage is $7.25 and then you have to take a job at $7.25 which is an hour away and costs you more than $1.25/hour in commuting expenses, plus the lost time and significantly increased risk of a car accident.
Likewise, the limit on hours or requirements to pay overtime can hurt workers, because if you need the extra hours, people end up taking a second job instead, which still doesn't pay time and a half but now you have two commutes instead of having one commute to a single job where you take two shifts.
The things that help workers are the things that actually increase their negotiating power. Artificial price controls don't really do that, because when your negotiating power isn't actually any better, you just end up forced to accept worse terms on some other dimension, like the longer commute.
> If you're actually an employee of Google or Apple, they don't have anything like market power in that labor market, because it's the same skillset to go and work for Facebook or Microsoft or Netflix or a million other places including a large number of smaller companies and startups.
Skilled workers have unions. For example, airline pilots have some pretty strong unions. The jobs that don't work as unions are where workers are not interchangeable because of large differences in talent. This makes it a bad deal for highly talented members of that professions to be in the union, as they can get paid a lot more than the average because of their exceptional talent. If they were in a union, they would be more likely to get paid the same as other members of the union. For example, software developers have wide differences in talent and ability, and thus pay, and that's why they don't unionize. An airplane pilot can only be so good at their job though, even though it takes years of training, so they benefit from a union.
I generally agree with your take, although professional sports players have unions that seem to work well for them despite being skilled workers with large differences in talent.
I guess there's no hard requirement that unions get involved in pay negotiations, and that's the only one I know of that seems to have workers' pay in-line with actual market factors. It's not like Tom Brady has to get paid the same amount as a lesser-performing quarterback just because they've been doing it the same amount of years.
> What unskilled workers need isn't a union, it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce, e.g. a UBI [...]
Here in Germany, unions work as intended. The solution is simple: you can't be fired for participating in a strike. There, problem solved, no UBI necessary.
> The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them
Also wrong. There a many unions for skilled workers in Germany.
> The solution is simple: you can't be fired for participating in a strike.
If you're on strike you're not showing up so you're not getting paid. They just let you stay on strike forever and in the meantime hire somebody else.
Assuming they don't just close the warehouse, so that you're not getting fired for going on strike, you're getting laid off because the job no longer exists.
That doesn't always work, especially when all the workers available for those positions are members of a union. And closing a warehouse is a drastic measure that will undoubtedly cause harm to the company's finances. That's not a decision they'd make lightly. Striking actually can work, and I find it strange that you seem to believe that unions aren't effective. Despite their problems, unions tend to work ok in the US, and even better in other places where they have healthier attitudes toward employment.
> That doesn't always work, especially when all the workers available for those positions are members of a union.
But they're not, because it's unskilled labor. They can just hire anyone off the street.
> And closing a warehouse is a drastic measure that will undoubtedly cause harm to the company's finances.
If you close a warehouse, it's still a warehouse. You sell it to Walmart or Target and pretty much get all of your money back.
That's the problem with the whole thing. A strike is brinkmanship. It hurts the workers and the company both. The idea is that if you're willing to hold out longer than they are, you can get what you want. Which you might be able to do if going on strike shuts down their whole business.
But going on strike only causes the 10112 mile journey the goods take from source to destination to become a 10188 mile journey. They just route it through some other path. From the company's perspective it's a mild inconvenience that they could suffer indefinitely without ever feeling the need to concede anything over it.
Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid. So they blink first, and the company knows they will, so the union can't gain anything from striking and is consequently useless.
No, they can't, not quickly. First they have to find a large number of new hires (which takes time), then those new hires have to be taught how to use the equipment and do the job in general (which takes time), then it takes even more time until they're fully productive.
> They just route it through some other path.
You have this weird idea that only a single warehouse would be put on strike. Why? Do you think there would be one union per warehouse?
> Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid.
The way this typically works is that workers pay union dues, some of which is used to replace their pay during a strike. Those funds aren't endless, but usually sufficient to force the company to make concessions.
Again, unions actually work outside the US. Why are you ignoring the evidence that they do?
> Skilled workers are scarce, so they already have negotiating power at the individual level and collective bargaining is just overhead and another bureaucracy to take a vig that could have gone into your paycheck.
Totally disagree with this. Being skilled at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are skilled at negotiating your pay or working conditions. These are entirely different skills. We all know people who are not as good at their jobs, but are smooth talkers and good negotiators, and vice versa is true, too. I know for sure that I could be making a lot more if I had a professional negotiator, whose job and dedicated skill it was to negotiate, either collectively bargaining or bargaining on my behalf.
On your list are one group of government employees, three licensed industries and one of the last industries to still be dominated by a tightly knit cartel (the big Hollywood movie studios).
Public sector unions are negotiating with a monopoly. In that sense they actually do something. The problem is that the monopoly is the government and then the union is a labor monopoly acting in opposition to the public rather than a capitalist private business. This is great for teachers but terrible for students and parents and taxpayers.
The unions in licensed industries are unions because the law privileges unions, but in practice they're lobbying organizations. Your local electrician doesn't need a union to negotiate with you when you want a generator panel installed in your house. Their actual purpose is regulatory capture, and then you have the same problem as the teachers unions, e.g. the union lobbies to make it harder for people to become electricians to reduce competition to the detriment of prospective electricians and the general public who then has to pay more for the services of the people already in the club.
And then Hollywood is a cartel in need of some antitrust enforcement, which is the one place where unions actually do something useful (but the better solution is still busting the trust).
The average public school teacher salary in the US is $63,645. The US median personal income is $35,977. On top of that, public school teachers get pensions and other benefits not given to the median US worker. The idea that they're poorly compensated is a myth. They make more money than most of the people funding their salaries.
On top of that, teachers unions cause all the usual non-monetary harms, like preventing teachers who deserve to be fired from being fired, or driving off eager young teachers with stale seniority rules.
Are we talking about medians or averages? People with or without bachelor's degrees and the accompanying debt?Comparing the median teacher salary to the average general wage doesn't really say much even if you had provided sources for your claim.
The median teacher salary is $62,870, if you prefer that to the average, but they're both nearly double the median personal income before pension and benefits.
Asking for sources is pedantic when anybody can type "US median teacher salary" into google themselves, but here it is on the BLS website:
But your numbers were wrong according to that same source.
Median average pay for all workers is $42k compared to $61k for teachers. Saying that they make twice as much money is either a significant mathematical error or intentionally disingenuous.
Moreover, you still didn't address the fact that teachers have a significant debt load
>Overall, educators borrowed an average of $55,800—and still owe an average $58,700 because of low salaries and hefty interest rates—but those amounts vary a lot, depending on age and race.
>It’s worse for young educators. Because of rising tuition costs, two of out three educators under the age of 35 borrowed for college, compared to 27 percent of those 61 and up. Additionally, nearly half of young educators borrowed more than $65,000, compared to 13 percent of educators 61 and over. Nonetheless, many older educators are still struggling. In fact, more than a quarter of educators over the age of 61 still haven’t paid off their student debt. Of those, more than a third still owe at least $45,000.
Are you arguing that all of these unions don't help their members or that they have other negatives you don't like? Because that's kind of a different discussion imo
>The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them
Entirely disagree. Unions for skilled workers would mean that when you go into surgery for a car accident the doctor who is putting you back together actually had a full night of sleep that day.
On the front of this, it seems odd for legislation to target a specific company or a few companies. But as power concentrates in the hands of a few conglomerates, policy will need to be tailored to addressing those conglomerates head on. While universal policy would be nice, it is both impractical to write and easy to avoid.
> "While universal policy would be nice, it is both impractical to write and easy to avoid."
rather, every law should scale with (economic and political) power, to create fairer markets, better representation, and more equitability, as conglomerates of any sort should be designed to benefit the public at large, not the principals only. for instance, fines for corporate malfeasance should be much higher proportionally than for small businesses (who have little/no market power). some laws try to approximate this with step functions, often a single cutoff (like "greater than 50 employees"), but those practically invite evasion (e.g., by creating 50-employee subsidiaries).
I wish our policy was so advanced. But we are policymaking at a lower level right now. Some people still think rent control is a good way to control shelter costs!
in theory we shouldn't need rent control at all, but our housing markets are so distorted that i wouldn't support abolishing it until the even more distortive policies (like prop 13 in CA) are repealed first.
If shuffling boxes around gets them the highest pay they can get on the market it just may be the most productive thing they can do! That means being a useful cog in a very effective machine.
My point is that being a cog in the larger machine may be the most productive thing for a person. Even if it means doing a boring, repetitive job. For example someone shuffling boxes in Amazon may be way more productive than an office worker in some small company.
I think it's important to highlight the difference between productive and profitable here. There's likely many things someone could do that's more productive, as in creates a benefit for those around them, but those productive things aren't always paid. What these workers are doing is getting the highest wage they can by engaging in work owners of capital believe will lead to profits from the market
The terms productive and profitable are tightly related to each other. Of course you can argue about definitions, but I think I understand what you mean anyway. Yes, some things are hard or impossible to price (measure). But nonetheless pricing is the best tool in this complex world that we have for deciding what is most productive. We get monetary compensation for our work that we can exchange for the work of others. The more we earn the more we can do. We can help others with our earnings, maybe more this way than by direct contribution. It is a matter of specialization and division of labor that helps everyone be more productive.
I think the OP just means productiveness in time, ie. spending 8-10 hours a day moving product while being paid 2x but working 3x as hard isn't as 'productive' as if you were doing something you loved for those 8-10 working hours, even if you were being paid a median $7.50/hr wage (not that most would achieve this by working the gas station register). If everyone could get a free education in what they want to do for a living, people wouldn't choose to work at Amazon and waste a third of their daily life moving boxes.
The root of the problem is that Amazon's $15/hr minimum attracts talent as a result of the price of things, including rent, continuing to rise, sometimes up to 15% YOY - people are often required to either work 16 hours a day at 2 jobs or work 8-10 hours at Amazon to reach the minimum income needed to have nice-enough living conditions.
I do not perceive productive as equal to fulfilling. But I understand you mean that for some people the sacrifice would not be worth the extra pay. It is another issue. Being a cog in a machine for x hours a day is a sacrifice. One voluntarily becomes a slave but in return can enjoy the fruits of the labour in the leisure time.
Regarding the matter of education, it is not always an option to do what ones enjoy for a living no matter the acquired knowledge and the degree that confirms that. Some work is more valued than other. The market, we, decide that by our selective spending. One can become expert in the ancient history and end up working at Starbucks just because there is no need for their knowledge.
Or mid term. I wonder if there is a study that looks into this problem. I suppose it backfires similarly to minimum wage. The legislation while helping some workers will hurt others. I doubt it will be net positive.
I would be surprised if Amazon wasn't investing everything they could into automated fulfillment centers. The factor for switching over is the viability of the technology, not the cost of labor.
I'm not super thrilled, given our current supply chains, about making another important sector (distributing basic goods like food) of the US economy 100% dependent on semiconductors from the pacific rim.
Don't quotas already exist in other forms of unionized work; like I recall hearing electrical unions have designated time quotas for completing certain jobs? Maybe that memory is off though or inaccurate.
At least in those instances, the union can negotiate for better (longer) quotas. In Amazon’s case, there’s no union to represent them. There’s the companies (that contract with Amazon) that the drivers work for, but they’re less powerful because there’s another company right next to you.
Amazon shareholders get stringent minority shareholder protection and legally protected collective voting schemes and can openly collude together against workers. A union gives somewhat similar rights to a similar stakeholder.
How can I, and Amazon shareholder, go collude with other Amazon shareholders? Tell me how this is possible. I've never heard of it.
You can only collude with someone you were in competition with. Shareholders of the same company by definition cannot collude with each other because they are not competing. Collusion would be Walmart and Target and Costco and Amazon unionizing together to negotiate wages.
"collude: cooperate in a secret or unlawful way in order to deceive or gain an advantage over others"
Shareholder votes are public, but anonymous. The more typical scenario is that you hold on to the shares and create demand for the stock as a sign of your approval. Unless you own tens of thousands or more shares, you were probably not invited to the perfectly legal but private discussions about the proposals.
Shareholders recently voted against every single proposal that was also opposed by Amazon.[1]
I said "can openly" collude, not plain unadorned collude.
Amazon buys a competitor and suddenly what would be considered collusion prior is washed clean, because someone else could bid too? My whole point is how silly this transformation from illegal to legal is, if at the same time you want to prevent unions.
Unions BTW have similar restrictions to your second half of your comment (secondary strikes are illegal).
Amazon workers have the right to unionize if they want to. If state politicians can't convince them to unionize and instead have to pass laws targeting just that company because they didn't unionize then maybe there is a problem with the politicians instead.
That's because repairing an electrical outage is unpredictable. There are a lot of uncontrollable variables. However, jobs like manufacturing definitely have quotas. I know for a fact that they exist at the heavily unionized auto-manufacturing facilities in the US.
If they do, I'm sure they're not so tight that the electrician won't be able to stop and go to the bathroom, or facilitate soft bans on potentially mandatory break times.
How often have you seen linepersons diligently working after a heavy storm while doing the pee-pee dance?
While the PR campaign is pretty strongly against quotas, the underlying law doesn't attempt to prohibit quotas, only provide a straightforward avenue for employees to challenge quotas which are too strict to let them take breaks and such.
I think quotas are fine, as long as they aren't unreasonable to the point that workers need to forego bathroom breaks in order to meet them.
I think the problem is that Amazon probably does this completely backwards. Quotas should be based on tracking the output of all your workers and deciding on some percentile to use as a baseline. And this output needs to be tracked when no quotas are in place, so you get an idea of what "normal" work looks like.
Instead, I expect that Amazon essentially says "we want at least X packages to move through here every Y hours, and we want to spend no more than $A on warehouse workers, so that means we'll hire no more than B workers, so they'll just have to work as hard as it takes". That's obviously a recipe for unrealistic expectations and a lot of overwork.
Since you bring up unions, the quotas are almost certainly negotiated by the union, so (hopefully) what's negotiated will be much fairer to the workers. But of course Amazon fights against their warehouse workers unionizing, in no small part due to this.
Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers? How do you judge manager performance, solely by morale?
> if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers?
You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.
This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.
> instead of the workers knowing the metric out in the open, you hide it from them and secretly judge them on it?
I'm not advocating this. But it's how most management is done. Pushing back only on quotas, without otherwise empowering the labor force, will almost certainly lead to such a regression.
> Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers?
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.
And so defining the level of work required in law is usually not going to help anyone. This is why unions exist - so the people that know the workplace and subject matter best can negotiate to make the job fair.
... which is the ridiculous thing. As much as unions do have problems, I think a better fix to all of this would be a law that just said "all warehouse employees must be a member of an independent labor union". Amazon has fought tooth and nail to keep their warehouse workers out of unions.
(I don't love this sort of law, but it'll probably give these workers a better outcome than they have now, and likely a better outcome than the law that we're talking about here.)
Is having quotas itself a problem, or is it that the quotas are too demanding and rigid? From what I've read, it's very hard for most people to meet them, and injuries are common. Turnover is also very high. Quotas do have the benefit of being objective, which is good for workers too. It's harder for a manager to fire someone for discriminatory reasons if they're meeting an objective criteria, for example.
It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.
Quotas are fine, as long as they are reasonable, and workers don't need to skip food and bathroom breaks in order to make them.
The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.
There's an obvious way that Amazon would workaround this law. They can drop their base wage for all employees to the minimum wage. And offer performance-based bonuses that bring the average wage back to what it is today. I don't see how the law would handle this. I can't think of any reasonable way to outlaw "we'll pay you more for doing more work" policies. Even if it leads to the exact same outcome - most workers will do exactly what they are doing now, because everyone wants to get paid more.
There is another obvious solution here. Increase budgets for Earned-Income-Tax-Credits or initiate a Universal Basic Income. This would increase the baseline standard-of-living for all workers, so that they would have better alternatives to what Amazon is offering. Of course, this would also mean that the average taxpayer would need to accept his obligations to his fellow citizen, and shoulder the cost of doing so. Not nearly as popular as outsourcing this responsibility to private companies.
> They can drop their base wage for all employees to the minimum wage.
1: set of people willing to take a job with decent pay/benefits and then find out over the course of probably months that they are in a current day episode of Black Mirror where the job has been scientifically designed to burn them out.
2: set of people willing to take a job for minimum wage with the "freedom" to hit stretch goals and make their wildest dreams come true!
I claim that set 1 has more people in it.
I offer into evidence the fact that Amazon already chose #1 when choosing #2 would have been vastly more cost effective for them if the sets contained the same number of people.
True, but consider the following. Every single restaurant waiter and uber driver is already a member of set 2. In fact, even more so - they are taking jobs with zero or below-minimum-wage, with the expectation that they will earn more from variable income. Uber, lyft, and the dining industry hasn't had too much trouble hiring people from set 2.
I agree that set 1 is larger and preferable to Amazon. But if set 1 is outlawed, they will simply transition to set 2 instead. Or give everyone a pay cut and hire more people. Not pay their employees the same wage for lower output.
Without greater taxes on the beneficiaries of Amazon's profits (shareholders and people whose salaries are dependent on company performance like the CEO), UBI is itself a subsidy to those beneficiaries.
Entrepreneur A creates a company with a very labor-intensive business plan. He eventually hires 1 million low-wage blue collar workers, all of whom preferred working for him over their next best alternative. His company earns $1 billion in annual profits.
Entrepreneur B creates a company specifically designed to require minimal labor. He hires only a small number of workers, mostly high-earning and white collar professionals. His company earns $1 billion in annual profits.
I would argue that both entrepreneurs should be equally obligated to support the social safety net. And both companies should be taxed equally to fund the social safety net. Imposing higher taxes and obligations onto entrepreneur A and his company, is a perverse way of punishing entrepreneurs for pursuing labor-intensive business models which create more job opportunities for low-wage workers. If anything, we should be doing the opposite.
171 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadLets give them a quota in attention points to point out - or be fired.
Reminds me of when people were claiming ADA exemptions for masks, as a "loophole". Then folks involved in the ADA point out it wasn't a loophole, because it was illegal to claim an exemption if you have a real condition.
Except the way laws like the ADA and HIPAA are written, it's literally impossible in most cases to check if someone is lying or not. So unless you're ready to literally gamble on your guts feeling (they can't sue you for discrimination if it was indeed false, but you have no way to check!), you couldn't do anything.
But hey, it's against the law, so I'm sure people won't lie.
See https://www.scribd.com/document/407590982/Amazon-Termination...
Scroll down to "The system also tracks an associates time off task" It basically admits that "time off task" doesn't automatically account for bathroom breaks. You have to ask a manager to include each one, during the conversation where you're being scolded for high "time off task"! The wording in this section is Amazon's wording, too. Oof.
Edit: After a bit of searching, there don't appear to be any federal laws requiring breaks in the US, and there are many states that don't have any either.
Breaks: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/rest-periods
Meals: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/meal-breaks
Breaks are legally mandated a lot of places where people don't get them. I've known many hundreds of people that have worked in many thousands of restaurants in all positions in the northeast cities— NY, Boston, etc. Breaks for restaurant workers— aside from 5ish minute cigarette breaks— though legally mandated, are nearly unheard of. More often than not, the much exalted 'family meal' is cheap leftovers eaten while standing up in a back hallway or while doing other work.
It's also very common for cooks to be given rules like "don't punch in more than 30 minutes before service, or punch out more than 30 minutes after service" even though you've got 2+ hours of setup and cleanup which you'll get fired for not completing. It's obviously not legal, but restaurant back of the house workers are so disempowered on a whole, that it really doesn't matter.
If you're interested in seeing more about the local restaurant work culture, check out the saga of a Boston-based pizza chain "The Upper Crust." Their brazenness was based in experience for how these things were generally handled. The fact that they were punished for their behavior is the exception rather than the rule. Almost all restaurant work complaints that get sent to the AG are ignore. I know because I've sent 4, personally, for outright wage theft and know many others that sent complaints in for similar problems.
This is obviously not true in corporate environments with more uniform employment policies.
I saw a Polish kapo beat someone who said he was too sick to work. It's almost a concentration camp out there but most of the public will never know. One day we will run out of folks to exploit but until then full steam ahead I suppose.
I was friends/coworkers with a 19 year old Mexican American mom who had just extricated herself from a small, c-grade traveling circus in Texas. A few months after joining them, the ringmaster woke her up every morning demanding she start training on the trapeze immediately, and would punch her in the stomach every day she refused. She was 16 years old and pregnant.
Check out this Frontline documentary on labor trafficking in the us:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-hidden...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trafficked-in-americ...
If every worker would just take their breaks, and allow their quotas to slip, what is Amazon going to do? Fire everyone? But instead, individuals decide to look out for themselves first, and defect, which causes everyone to be miserable, including themselves.
I don't blame them in the slightest for this, but it still makes me sad. I guess this is what unions are for. Oh wait, Amazon engages in union-busting, never mind.
The thing I constantly find weird about California regulation these days is how short sighted and micro-managey it all is. This one clearly is explicitly targeted at Amazon, the AB5/Prop 22 pair is specifically targeted at Uber/Lyft, etc.
It strikes me as a deep lack of understanding about how policy making is supposed to work. Ideally, policy is supposed to be something you get experts to research holistically, present data on and implement based on certain expectations of how pros and cons are supposed to play out. California policy making looks to me more like a reactive game of whack-a-mole, trying to put out whatever is the fire du jour with hacks and bandaids and hoping the new rules don't cause any collateral damage.
And if you look at Universities, well good luck. They have a known ideological bent that would cause recommendations that are skewed the other way.
I think the underlying problem is that these employers have disproportionate power, influence, and resources, along with endless creativity. If they can't get the government fully on their side every time, they'd rather it be dysfunctional.
I was thinking exactly this while reading this article. I was really hoping to read that this was a much more generic law that strengthens worker protections, that also just happens to help with the problems in Amazon warehouses. But, nope, just feels like "injustice whack-a-mole". That's not a good way to develop policy at all.
These are corporations with more power than nation states with CEO's having more personal power than many dictators.
If you want generic laws, then break up these companies into smaller ones.
The way the quotas get set is kind of as a bell curve. You set quotas, including threshold for promotions, as some where you'll get let go. They hire people, and those folks thrive to meet the quota/make more money. If everyone is doing so well that the tip of the bell curve is too much to the right, they increase the quota. If they have trouble hiring and everyone's leaving, or if they end up needing to let go too many people, they lower it.
Of course, a company could push it way too far if they have enough power and a big enough employee pool. They can then put super high quotas and only keep people who can push it that far (probably where the whole "peeing in bottles" come from).
The concept itself isn't that weird. Maybe weird to people who mostly worked in salaried jobs that are hard to quantify.
Where it becomes a problem is when too many people are desperate enough for money that they're willing to literally harm themselves to meet their quotas or get promoted. That's probably where regulators came from with this type of law. I didn't read it, but that sounds really tough to implement.
Universal healthcare and UBI are would enable much more employer freedom in defining working conditions.
Living has always required energy, effort, and skill. How can we get around this without some sort of parasitic relationship? Do you have any recommendation for some reading for a sustainable model? From my understanding, UBI is largely unproven.
So people will still want to work. But they no longer are forced to take any job just to survive.
I'm sorry I don't have reading recommendations. This doesn't mean they don't exist, I am just not deep enough into this topic to ever have looked for them.
We'd need to, as a society, draw a line in the sand as to what "the basics" are (it's extremely subjective. I think MIT or Harvard has a site with threshold they consider the minimum, but it uses arbitrary metric like expected amount of kids, and it's by city).
Once we pick, while we should always be ready to revisit, it can't be a constant thing. If folks are robbing CVS saying they wouldn't if UBI was higher (assuming it was set to a reasonable amount to begin with. A big if), we're not much better off than where we are now.
It seem that far to often management just keep increasing the productivity requirements, squeezing more and more blood from the stones of the workforce with zero regard for the health and wellbeing of the regular employees.
>Now unionize!
And the comment is already [dead]. That feels like it could only happen if there were bots downvoting instantly
Flagged to death will say both flagged and dead.
And for good reason, judging by their other comments.
... no matter how much time you spend in meetings.
Maybe the lesson is that when a metric becomes tangible, expectations to meet/exceed those metrics becomes an all-encompassing aspect of the job.
Sure, unions have problems and labor rights are inconvenient for businesses. At the end of the day, people deserve dignity and a less miserable work experience than they getting today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
You know drivers can just stop working if they don't like the wage right?
Which is why there aren't many large-scale pure direct democracies out there. Most governments are set up to have at least some checks and balances to protect minority components from majority rule.
A bunch of Uber drivers I've spoken to do it as a side thing, to supplement income from other sources. The conundrum is that there are a lot of casual drivers and fewer full time ones, and those two groups generally sit on opposite ends of the debate (casuals don't want to be forced to choose between driving and their other income sources, and full time ones want employee benefits)
Ultimately, it doesn't boil down to something as sinister as a secret desire for indentured servitude, it's simply a matter of everyone being selfish. Unions are also a form of people being selfish (though collectively). IMHO, the answer isn't in bickering on whose selfishness is more warranted, it'd be more apt to question why isn't a social net provided by the government itself in the first place (in the form of public healthcare, unemployment insurance, etc) if they deem it important enough to legislate?
This is a clear corporate-money-dictating-politics thing. I used to joke that if the self-driving car thing doesn't pan out, there's a always a consultancy pivot ready for Uber. "Don't like a law? Have some taxes due? No sweat, for $20/vote we can make those pesky taxes disappear!"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly... - Anecdotally confirmed to me with some canvassing last year as well, many (easily more than 23%) were going to vote "Yes" since they misinterpreted the question to be the exact opposite
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842 (H.R.842 - Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021)
It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I can definitely agree that it can be bad, but to me it's the only entity that should be representing me. Corporations will have no incentive aligned with myself. Unions/Governments serve as a way to organize the people at large. Which to me is a wholly good thing.
This organization however does not come without risks. I think where we fail as a civilization is recognizing this power dynamic and finding ways to monitor corruption. I want to give a government power, but i also need ways to monitor them. Without know if/when an organization becomes corrupted we have no way of healing, and it will always be doomed to fail in the worst way.
I'm very pro-union. However we need to figure out monitoring. In Governments, and Unions. Otherwise in my view it's just a matter of time before they fail.
I agree with your desire for oversight and accountability for either, but there is a difference of at least institutional momentum. I don't think anyone would consider institutional momentum of the US government to be aligned with the interests of workers. I think unions have an opportunity to be better and more explicitly aligned with those interests. As an employee previously part of a union, the adversarial relationship between unions and businesses seems to, at the end, strike a balance between the competing interests of the workers and the business. A business without unions can be like a courtroom without public defenders: not a great place to be the little guy.
I don't think that's true. Those people are typically very comfortable with one "organized entity with power" that you're leaving out: private capital in its various forms. What they're doing is actually defending that against any challenges to its power.
Usually those people are laborers like the rest of us, but they've been indoctrinated to identify with interests other than their own (often reinforced by having a slightly higher status than most other laborers, or by unlikely-to-be-met aspirations of hitting the jackpot and becoming a wealthy capitalist themselves).
Private capital is not "one organized entity", especially not in "its various forms".
In most cases it's at least as organized as unions. Also, a decentralized entity is still an entity.
But my point stands, there are very, very few people who actually feel "any organized entity with power is bad." If it seems that way, something's being left out of the analysis.
It's not lost on me either that a vote of 3000 cast votes is not representative of every amazon warehouse, but I would think if it's really bad the vote would be much closer.
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-announces...
> The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon violated labor law after workers at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse tried to join a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union said Monday.
> The director who presided over the NLRB hearing will recommend whether a new election is conducted, the union said in a statement, but the final decision whether workers will be allowed to cast new ballots and form a union ultimately lies with the director of the regional NLRB office based in Atlanta.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053144
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/982139494/its-a-no-amazon-war...
Amazon does not choose where unions try to organize, unions do.
Skilled workers are scarce, so they already have negotiating power at the individual level and collective bargaining is just overhead and another bureaucracy to take a vig that could have gone into your paycheck.
Unskilled workers aren't scarce, so what happens if they unionize? The union strikes, the company hires a different set of unskilled workers and all the union workers get is laid off.
This is especially true for an Amazon warehouse because there are thousands of them all over the world. If the workers at a warehouse near San Francisco strike, not only can they easily hire different workers, they can just send everybody their stuff from another warehouse in Nevada or any of a thousand other places.
What unskilled workers need isn't a union, it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce, e.g. a UBI so that people aren't so desperate for a job and can hold out for better pay and working conditions.
Maybe don't allow employers to hire 10's of millions of illegal immigrants under the table?
The problem for those workers was that although they were skilled labor, the number of employers who needed auto workers was small enough for them to act as a cartel. The concentrated market offset the negotiating power of a skilled individual, but at the same time, a company that employed a third of the auto workers in the country couldn't just replace them all if they went on strike.
But that was kind of a pathological circumstance and the better solution in that case is to do some trust busting. Or if competition increases on its own as it did from the Japanese automakers during the oil crisis.
The closest thing to that in the modern economy is the relationship between app developers and platform app stores. It's the same sort of cartelized market. But some trust busting would work there too.
And other markets don't look like that. If you're actually an employee of Google or Apple, they don't have anything like market power in that labor market, because it's the same skillset to go and work for Facebook or Microsoft or Netflix or a million other places including a large number of smaller companies and startups. And if you're a worker at an Amazon warehouse, it's not skilled labor.
> My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements.
Most of the claimed victories were symbolic, because they were things that were happening anyway and then legislators passed laws requiring them after they'd mostly already happened so they could say they were doing something.
Workers expect to be paid more to work 80 hours instead of 40, so given the choice between paying one worker for 80 hours and two workers for 40 hours, employers found the second option led to higher worker productivity and reliability because the workers weren't constantly exhausted and making mistakes and didn't as often quit from burnout.
Around 2% of people in the US make minimum wage. In other words, ~98% of employers pay more than that even though the law doesn't require them to, because the market does. And even without minimum wage, the other 2% would be making around the same amount of money, because the employer still has to offer enough to get the employee to accept the job.
Minimum wage is even harmful to employees because it forces them into bad trade offs they otherwise wouldn't have taken. There might have been a job paying $6/hour across the street from your apartment, but it goes away if minimum wage is $7.25 and then you have to take a job at $7.25 which is an hour away and costs you more than $1.25/hour in commuting expenses, plus the lost time and significantly increased risk of a car accident.
Likewise, the limit on hours or requirements to pay overtime can hurt workers, because if you need the extra hours, people end up taking a second job instead, which still doesn't pay time and a half but now you have two commutes instead of having one commute to a single job where you take two shifts.
The things that help workers are the things that actually increase their negotiating power. Artificial price controls don't really do that, because when your negotiating power isn't actually any better, you just end up forced to accept worse terms on some other dimension, like the longer commute.
I don't know that I'd be so sure about that: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-offer-415-million-to-...
I agree that the market is larger, but that doesn't keep some of the big players from banding together against employee interests.
I guess there's no hard requirement that unions get involved in pay negotiations, and that's the only one I know of that seems to have workers' pay in-line with actual market factors. It's not like Tom Brady has to get paid the same amount as a lesser-performing quarterback just because they've been doing it the same amount of years.
Here in Germany, unions work as intended. The solution is simple: you can't be fired for participating in a strike. There, problem solved, no UBI necessary.
> The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them
Also wrong. There a many unions for skilled workers in Germany.
If you're on strike you're not showing up so you're not getting paid. They just let you stay on strike forever and in the meantime hire somebody else.
Assuming they don't just close the warehouse, so that you're not getting fired for going on strike, you're getting laid off because the job no longer exists.
But they're not, because it's unskilled labor. They can just hire anyone off the street.
> And closing a warehouse is a drastic measure that will undoubtedly cause harm to the company's finances.
If you close a warehouse, it's still a warehouse. You sell it to Walmart or Target and pretty much get all of your money back.
That's the problem with the whole thing. A strike is brinkmanship. It hurts the workers and the company both. The idea is that if you're willing to hold out longer than they are, you can get what you want. Which you might be able to do if going on strike shuts down their whole business.
But going on strike only causes the 10112 mile journey the goods take from source to destination to become a 10188 mile journey. They just route it through some other path. From the company's perspective it's a mild inconvenience that they could suffer indefinitely without ever feeling the need to concede anything over it.
Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid. So they blink first, and the company knows they will, so the union can't gain anything from striking and is consequently useless.
No, they can't, not quickly. First they have to find a large number of new hires (which takes time), then those new hires have to be taught how to use the equipment and do the job in general (which takes time), then it takes even more time until they're fully productive.
> They just route it through some other path.
You have this weird idea that only a single warehouse would be put on strike. Why? Do you think there would be one union per warehouse?
> Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid.
The way this typically works is that workers pay union dues, some of which is used to replace their pay during a strike. Those funds aren't endless, but usually sufficient to force the company to make concessions.
Again, unions actually work outside the US. Why are you ignoring the evidence that they do?
Totally disagree with this. Being skilled at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are skilled at negotiating your pay or working conditions. These are entirely different skills. We all know people who are not as good at their jobs, but are smooth talkers and good negotiators, and vice versa is true, too. I know for sure that I could be making a lot more if I had a professional negotiator, whose job and dedicated skill it was to negotiate, either collectively bargaining or bargaining on my behalf.
Most of the fields I think of when I think of successful unions in the US are ones I consider skilled
-teachers
-electricians
-carpenters
-airline pilots
-actors
Public sector unions are negotiating with a monopoly. In that sense they actually do something. The problem is that the monopoly is the government and then the union is a labor monopoly acting in opposition to the public rather than a capitalist private business. This is great for teachers but terrible for students and parents and taxpayers.
The unions in licensed industries are unions because the law privileges unions, but in practice they're lobbying organizations. Your local electrician doesn't need a union to negotiate with you when you want a generator panel installed in your house. Their actual purpose is regulatory capture, and then you have the same problem as the teachers unions, e.g. the union lobbies to make it harder for people to become electricians to reduce competition to the detriment of prospective electricians and the general public who then has to pay more for the services of the people already in the club.
And then Hollywood is a cartel in need of some antitrust enforcement, which is the one place where unions actually do something useful (but the better solution is still busting the trust).
Given how poorly public K-12 teachers are paid in the US, I don't think this is an accurate statement.
On top of that, teachers unions cause all the usual non-monetary harms, like preventing teachers who deserve to be fired from being fired, or driving off eager young teachers with stale seniority rules.
Asking for sources is pedantic when anybody can type "US median teacher salary" into google themselves, but here it is on the BLS website:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
Median average pay for all workers is $42k compared to $61k for teachers. Saying that they make twice as much money is either a significant mathematical error or intentionally disingenuous.
Moreover, you still didn't address the fact that teachers have a significant debt load
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/depth...
>Overall, educators borrowed an average of $55,800—and still owe an average $58,700 because of low salaries and hefty interest rates—but those amounts vary a lot, depending on age and race.
>It’s worse for young educators. Because of rising tuition costs, two of out three educators under the age of 35 borrowed for college, compared to 27 percent of those 61 and up. Additionally, nearly half of young educators borrowed more than $65,000, compared to 13 percent of educators 61 and over. Nonetheless, many older educators are still struggling. In fact, more than a quarter of educators over the age of 61 still haven’t paid off their student debt. Of those, more than a third still owe at least $45,000.
Entirely disagree. Unions for skilled workers would mean that when you go into surgery for a car accident the doctor who is putting you back together actually had a full night of sleep that day.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
It's not odd at all when you consider how long of an exemption list AB-5 came with.
rather, every law should scale with (economic and political) power, to create fairer markets, better representation, and more equitability, as conglomerates of any sort should be designed to benefit the public at large, not the principals only. for instance, fines for corporate malfeasance should be much higher proportionally than for small businesses (who have little/no market power). some laws try to approximate this with step functions, often a single cutoff (like "greater than 50 employees"), but those practically invite evasion (e.g., by creating 50-employee subsidiaries).
I'm sure there are more productive or fulfilling things for people to be doing than shuffling boxes around.
I guess my point is that the potential for automation doesn't seem a compelling argument to worsen working conditions
The root of the problem is that Amazon's $15/hr minimum attracts talent as a result of the price of things, including rent, continuing to rise, sometimes up to 15% YOY - people are often required to either work 16 hours a day at 2 jobs or work 8-10 hours at Amazon to reach the minimum income needed to have nice-enough living conditions.
Regarding the matter of education, it is not always an option to do what ones enjoy for a living no matter the acquired knowledge and the degree that confirms that. Some work is more valued than other. The market, we, decide that by our selective spending. One can become expert in the ancient history and end up working at Starbucks just because there is no need for their knowledge.
I love the irony that they work in "Fufillment Centers".
You can only collude with someone you were in competition with. Shareholders of the same company by definition cannot collude with each other because they are not competing. Collusion would be Walmart and Target and Costco and Amazon unionizing together to negotiate wages.
Shareholder votes are public, but anonymous. The more typical scenario is that you hold on to the shares and create demand for the stock as a sign of your approval. Unless you own tens of thousands or more shares, you were probably not invited to the perfectly legal but private discussions about the proposals.
Shareholders recently voted against every single proposal that was also opposed by Amazon.[1]
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/final-tally-amazon-shareholder...
I said "can openly" collude, not plain unadorned collude.
Amazon buys a competitor and suddenly what would be considered collusion prior is washed clean, because someone else could bid too? My whole point is how silly this transformation from illegal to legal is, if at the same time you want to prevent unions.
Unions BTW have similar restrictions to your second half of your comment (secondary strikes are illegal).
How often have you seen linepersons diligently working after a heavy storm while doing the pee-pee dance?
I think the problem is that Amazon probably does this completely backwards. Quotas should be based on tracking the output of all your workers and deciding on some percentile to use as a baseline. And this output needs to be tracked when no quotas are in place, so you get an idea of what "normal" work looks like.
Instead, I expect that Amazon essentially says "we want at least X packages to move through here every Y hours, and we want to spend no more than $A on warehouse workers, so that means we'll hire no more than B workers, so they'll just have to work as hard as it takes". That's obviously a recipe for unrealistic expectations and a lot of overwork.
Since you bring up unions, the quotas are almost certainly negotiated by the union, so (hopefully) what's negotiated will be much fairer to the workers. But of course Amazon fights against their warehouse workers unionizing, in no small part due to this.
You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.
This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.
I'm not advocating this. But it's how most management is done. Pushing back only on quotas, without otherwise empowering the labor force, will almost certainly lead to such a regression.
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.
(I don't love this sort of law, but it'll probably give these workers a better outcome than they have now, and likely a better outcome than the law that we're talking about here.)
At 200 per hour each customer paid 18 seconds in salary. At 15 usd/h that is 7.5 cent.
You could double the salary and half the load and pay 30 cents per customer.
i wouldnt care. on 50 usd average order its nothing
It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.
The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.
There is another obvious solution here. Increase budgets for Earned-Income-Tax-Credits or initiate a Universal Basic Income. This would increase the baseline standard-of-living for all workers, so that they would have better alternatives to what Amazon is offering. Of course, this would also mean that the average taxpayer would need to accept his obligations to his fellow citizen, and shoulder the cost of doing so. Not nearly as popular as outsourcing this responsibility to private companies.
1: set of people willing to take a job with decent pay/benefits and then find out over the course of probably months that they are in a current day episode of Black Mirror where the job has been scientifically designed to burn them out.
2: set of people willing to take a job for minimum wage with the "freedom" to hit stretch goals and make their wildest dreams come true!
I claim that set 1 has more people in it.
I offer into evidence the fact that Amazon already chose #1 when choosing #2 would have been vastly more cost effective for them if the sets contained the same number of people.
I agree that set 1 is larger and preferable to Amazon. But if set 1 is outlawed, they will simply transition to set 2 instead. Or give everyone a pay cut and hire more people. Not pay their employees the same wage for lower output.
Entrepreneur B creates a company specifically designed to require minimal labor. He hires only a small number of workers, mostly high-earning and white collar professionals. His company earns $1 billion in annual profits.
I would argue that both entrepreneurs should be equally obligated to support the social safety net. And both companies should be taxed equally to fund the social safety net. Imposing higher taxes and obligations onto entrepreneur A and his company, is a perverse way of punishing entrepreneurs for pursuing labor-intensive business models which create more job opportunities for low-wage workers. If anything, we should be doing the opposite.
Don’t actually enforce current laws on bathroom access and worker safety, and instead, just layer on new laws that “make it more illegal”.
Truly bizarre.