Without knowing all the details , that sounds awfully a lot like communism, and trust me, you don't want to live nor work in such environment. It may look great on paper, but its simply not working long term, we humans are deeply imperfect. If there is law broken, system and its protections should deal with it.
A genuine question - can't people simply stand up and vote for better employer with their feet? Amazon ain't some 200-year old business that whole generations of towns evolved around with no other option in sight. Even then this should always be an option unless you live in some communist (eh) dictatorship.
Honestly? Unless you want to confiscate the money, then you have to persuade the people who already have it that is worth their while to give it to you. Usually that entails handing over some control and some chance of getting paid. You may be able to change some of the terms of the contract, but as an overall structure I don't see any possible alternative in this time and place.
That's the whole point of joining a union it turns a unilateral contract negotiation, where one party has no leverage, into a bi-lateral contract negotiation. The worker's leverage in the negotiation is to withdraw all labour halting production. The downside is that you don't get paid while you are on strike and it only works really well in industries where there is a labour shortage or it takes time to train up new workers who need experience and qualifications that are hard to obtain: pilots, train drivers, doctors, police all have very effective unions in the UK at least.
The difficulty that the amazon workers face is that they turn up and a screen says pick up these things from these boxes and take them over there, put them in other boxes, stick postage labels on and put it in the back of the truck. It doesn't take much training to do, so workers who unionise are very vulnerable to being fired until enough have joined the union to hold an effective strike.
Unions are always going to naturally form in a pure libertarian society where the only rules are freedom of contract. Usually they are restricted by government regulation.
In a pure fantasy libertarian society where the powerful actually respect the rights of the powerless, then yeah, unions would form organically. In the world that has actually existed throughout recorded history, those contracts are "do what we say or starve, we've made sure everyone else gives the same offer", and unions are put down by force.
This seems to logically resolve to "unions wouldn't form, because workers would be preoccupied by starving", which may unfortunately be true, I'm not sure.
I would be interested to understand how unions work in the UK, but In the US, much of their power comes more from regulatory protections than collective labor value and free contracting.
You don't have to be a member of a union to work in particular trade in the UK, apart from maybe Doctors who have to be members of the British Medical Association which I think is a regulatory body and a union combined although I might be wrong about that. For example Teachers, I think there are a couple of different unions they can choose from but they don't have to be in one of them to be a teacher. Is that different to the US?
If you don't like it, you can't pick or make another.
By us law, you are usually allowed to quit the union, if you do, you still have to pay the union part of your salary.
In the US, workers can't join or start a union unless 51% of all workers vote to join them/let them.
If all this sounds crazy, polarizing, and like a recipe for conflict, you are correct. I think the European versions of unions makes much more sense, and are closer to free association
Depends, if you are unemployed in the UK you get some income in social security benefits but only if you are actively seeking work or disabled and unfit to work. So if amazon opens a warehouse in your area and advertises for jobs you basically have to go and have an interview there or you will lose your benefits. You also will lose these benefits if you act like an idiot in the interview or you later get fired for misconduct so people are kind of forced to work there until something better comes along. The problem is compounded if you are living on minimum wage in council housing or a cheap rental in a deprived area because there are long waiting lists for subsidised council houses in parts of the country where there are more jobs available and where private sector rents are totally out of reach for people in minimum wage jobs so you can't easily move somewhere else for a better offer.
If workers are all it takes, why can't all of the workers quit, reform a new company where they control 100% of it, and then put Amazon out of business?
If AMZN is a $2T company and has 1.5M employees, every worker can become a millionaire if they just do this one simple trick. Why don't they?
I'm also confused about what role you think investors should play in business if money is unimportant. What would YCombinator look like? A bank that just loans out money for a fixed interest rate?
>I'm also confused about what role you think investors should play in business if money is unimportant. What would YCombinator look like? A bank that just loans out money for a fixed interest rate?
In my libertarian-socialist days, I have actually gave some thought to this question. The best I could come up with was 1) variable return lending or 2) profit sharing agreements with a sunset duration.
Both seem like a more expensive option for companies in an environment with economic growth. The beauty about selling stock/corporate ownership is that you never have to pay your investors a dime as long as the company has growth prospects. The return for investors simply comes from sale to other investors.
When a company issues a bond or makes a profit sharing agreement, they actually have to pay that back. Maybe in a growth environment, they could perpetually use new loans to pay old debt, but this would put them at the mercy of the outside lending rate.
By way of example, instead YC buying 20% of a company, it could receive the rights to sell a 20-year contract for 20% of the company profit.
It’s a bit head scratch. Is it because local management is assholes, incompetent, or is this something that has been ordered from the high up and employees to be bullied?
> They say QR codes have also been displayed around the building, which, when scanned by a staff member, automatically generate an email to the GMB’s membership department, cancelling their membership.
How does a generic link generate an email that cancel the membership of a specific person ? Or do they have personalized links all around, but then why don't just call those link ? There is something I am missing
(My guess is that it could be a link that opens a web page that deceive the person into canceling the membership, but it is not what is described here)
That "generates an email" line is ambiguous. I hope it's just a "mailto:" link that pre-fills the to/subject/body/etc. without sending.
I wish the article had used clear language like "pre-filled" or "sends", since it could mean either, and those are very different levels of scumbaggery.
> Rosa Curling, a director of Foxglove Legal, which is involved in the case, said workers had been “hustled into anti-union propaganda seminars, then have a QR code shoved in their face that terminates their membership with just one click to quit. If only it was so easy to quit Amazon Prime!”
(emphasis mine)
I don't think this is that unclear. Scan and then a single tap on “Send”.
Giving up Amazon Prime (which i used for shipping more than watching The Boys) has been surprisingly painless. Ebay seems pretty good for free P&P and finding obscure things. On this occassion, it genuinely wasn't that inconvenient to vote with my wallet.
I find Argos to be a good substitute for Amazon here. I choose it 9/10 over Amazon. There is much less product choice which for many products filled with Chinese crap is actually a benefit.
I live very near here - the area used to house a proud Jaguar Cars manufacturing plant. It's distasteful to know that Amazon have come here, and are doing their union busting tricks here too. When Amazon has software engineering recruiters contact me, this stuff, distasteful practices like this are in the forefront of my mind. When people are wondering why AWS or Alexa or other Amazon's products seem clunky or behind, I suspect a big problem they have is retaining talent, because from everything I've read, it seems that their employees are treated badly. They say they obsess over customer satisfaction, but it seems that this does not extend to employee satisfaction. Unfortunately, I am a customer of theirs and stuff like this makes me want to get as far away from their products as I can, and many of them are overall of sufficiently reasonable quality, that I have not yet. But stuff like this happening, almost on my door step is a good reminder to look at alternatives even with the friction from switching.
I haven't worked for Amazon, but have a few acquaintances who work there at different levels of hierarchy (but not very high-level execs).
To comment on quality: Amazon software divisions have very few QAs per developer compared to many other large software corporations. This doesn't really mean they test less, it just means their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated to people with less ability and less aptitude. Most developers would be afraid of their resume mentioning a QA position, as that would imply some sort of deficiency. So, the reason isn't really the lack of testing or even as you suggested, talent retention (Google does even worse than AWS at this, for example), it's low morale.
Also, when Amazon first came to Israel, for example, they didn't just offer competitive compensation, they beat everyone, even very high-paying places by something like 25%. It took petitioning them and signatures of a lot of local / international companies to get them to tone it down, as they would've disrupted local job market substantially and have a lot of local employers in a pickle. So, at least, on this front, Amazon invests into talent.
From yet another perspective: Amazon, from the inside, looks more like a typical US s/w company. That is, lots of red tape, IT department that's trying to make developers' life miserable. Rigid hierarchy. Orders come from above, feedback never propagates back to the management. In other words: they pay a lot, but want you to shut up and do what you are told, don't get creative, don't challenge the PRD, or you might not do so well in the yearly review.
I was contracted with AWS to provide engineering support during their Blink acquisition, back when that was news. It was horrible. While my boss was great, the same couldn't be said for some of the others I had to work with. All around very high stress for everyone, which I think caused a lot of interpersonal conflict. I quit after three months.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadA genuine question - can't people simply stand up and vote for better employer with their feet? Amazon ain't some 200-year old business that whole generations of towns evolved around with no other option in sight. Even then this should always be an option unless you live in some communist (eh) dictatorship.
Surely not even this union is dumb enough to think the workers can control the owners.
The difficulty that the amazon workers face is that they turn up and a screen says pick up these things from these boxes and take them over there, put them in other boxes, stick postage labels on and put it in the back of the truck. It doesn't take much training to do, so workers who unionise are very vulnerable to being fired until enough have joined the union to hold an effective strike.
Unions are always going to naturally form in a pure libertarian society where the only rules are freedom of contract. Usually they are restricted by government regulation.
For example, libertarians do not believe people have a right to food or shelter. You only have a right to keep and use your body and your property.
for example, if you have a scarcity of labor, then labor sets the terms. AI architects could form a union any day they want, they just dont want to.
If you don't like it, you can't pick or make another.
By us law, you are usually allowed to quit the union, if you do, you still have to pay the union part of your salary.
In the US, workers can't join or start a union unless 51% of all workers vote to join them/let them.
If all this sounds crazy, polarizing, and like a recipe for conflict, you are correct. I think the European versions of unions makes much more sense, and are closer to free association
A myth. Employee has leverage.
If AMZN is a $2T company and has 1.5M employees, every worker can become a millionaire if they just do this one simple trick. Why don't they?
I'm also confused about what role you think investors should play in business if money is unimportant. What would YCombinator look like? A bank that just loans out money for a fixed interest rate?
A dude called Karl wrote a book that answers this.
In my libertarian-socialist days, I have actually gave some thought to this question. The best I could come up with was 1) variable return lending or 2) profit sharing agreements with a sunset duration.
Both seem like a more expensive option for companies in an environment with economic growth. The beauty about selling stock/corporate ownership is that you never have to pay your investors a dime as long as the company has growth prospects. The return for investors simply comes from sale to other investors.
When a company issues a bond or makes a profit sharing agreement, they actually have to pay that back. Maybe in a growth environment, they could perpetually use new loans to pay old debt, but this would put them at the mercy of the outside lending rate.
By way of example, instead YC buying 20% of a company, it could receive the rights to sell a 20-year contract for 20% of the company profit.
How does a generic link generate an email that cancel the membership of a specific person ? Or do they have personalized links all around, but then why don't just call those link ? There is something I am missing
(My guess is that it could be a link that opens a web page that deceive the person into canceling the membership, but it is not what is described here)
I wish the article had used clear language like "pre-filled" or "sends", since it could mean either, and those are very different levels of scumbaggery.
Disagreed. It is unambiguous and false - I'll bet.
It merely opens and fills a Compose window.
(emphasis mine)
I don't think this is that unclear. Scan and then a single tap on “Send”.
To comment on quality: Amazon software divisions have very few QAs per developer compared to many other large software corporations. This doesn't really mean they test less, it just means their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated to people with less ability and less aptitude. Most developers would be afraid of their resume mentioning a QA position, as that would imply some sort of deficiency. So, the reason isn't really the lack of testing or even as you suggested, talent retention (Google does even worse than AWS at this, for example), it's low morale.
Also, when Amazon first came to Israel, for example, they didn't just offer competitive compensation, they beat everyone, even very high-paying places by something like 25%. It took petitioning them and signatures of a lot of local / international companies to get them to tone it down, as they would've disrupted local job market substantially and have a lot of local employers in a pickle. So, at least, on this front, Amazon invests into talent.
From yet another perspective: Amazon, from the inside, looks more like a typical US s/w company. That is, lots of red tape, IT department that's trying to make developers' life miserable. Rigid hierarchy. Orders come from above, feedback never propagates back to the management. In other words: they pay a lot, but want you to shut up and do what you are told, don't get creative, don't challenge the PRD, or you might not do so well in the yearly review.
They need reminding that testing != QA.