From a European perspective, it is simply crazy that 1.6M workers [0] failed to unionize so far.
Not that Unions are simply great and effective - unions bring their own set of problems. But a company this large shouldn't have been able to fight unionization for so long.
I think this comes down to how many in the US see jobs in the general. A job working in an Amazon fulfillment center is seen by most as a kind of "stepping stone" job. Literally anyone can get the job very easily, and as a result its not considered to be a "good job" in the first place. There is an understanding that you work this type of job if you are fresh out of high school with no experience, or you don't have any skills so you can't find better work, etc. So it's considered okay to suffer in the short term, as you don't plan to stay in this type of job for the long term anyway. In fact Amazon leans into this by offering programs to pay tuition for fullfillment center workers to learn tech skills, etc. Part of the draw of the job is that you can more easily pivot from the role into new better roles.
So with this background its not hard to see why workers don't bother to join a union or invest that much in improving working conditions in their current role. They want to be moving on to another job or better role in a year or less anyway.
Disclaimer: I am an Amazon employee, and I am speaking from my own personal viewpoint, not for Amazon.
I don't think this is true. I remember when I was in the Army, I was a commissioned officer, and a whole lot of junior enlisted Soldiers who were discharging were intentionally looking to go work at Amazon fulfillment centers. While I imagine they're not "great" jobs in terms of the working conditions, they did seem to pay better than anything else you could do without specialized skills in the areas they were located in. As long as the job is full time and offers health insurance, that's gold in a lot of places. Keep in mind the cost of living can be extremely low in rural areas. I think back to a good friend from college that came out to LA to live with me 20 years ago to follow his dream of being a television writer. We shared a 2-bed place that was something like $1,400 a month or so back then. Where he was from, Charles Town, WV, the rent on a comparable place was between $100 and $200 a month. A full-time job that pays more than double the federal minimum wage is more than enough to make it there.
It definitely isn't in New York City, of course, which starts to get at the real problem, but this isn't really an Amazon problem. No matter how strong a union ends up being, they're not going to push wages high enough for unskilled labor to ever be able to comfortably live in a place like New York City, but New York City still needs things like Amazon fulfillment centers. This is a problem with cities in general. None of them can house the low-skill populations they nonetheless require to do most of the labor required to make a city livable for everyone else.
I wouldn't say this is how such jobs are seen by most. This is certainly how such jobs are seen by people who have landed a tech job though. We can't all be tech workers, managers, consultants, or other such professions. Somebody has to move the packages around in the real world. To consign this and other essential (to borrow a word from early pandemic times) jobs to transitory, stepping-stone status is the opposite of how it should be. It doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, whether my git commits go in by the end of the week. The professions where it does matter whether something happens by the end of the week ought to be made much more attractive places to be.
Everybody in my extended-family sees these jobs like this, and none of them are in tech. They are in construction, and office work, and health care, and wood working, and farming. Warehouse, retail, fast food, wait-staff, etc, are all seen as stepping-stone jobs. Unless you are running your own business in these areas, they are rarely viewed as "professions" or long-term jobs.
Even with things like construction jobs, which are pretty well liked in my family, you are expected to move up to the "better" jobs like heavy machinery operator, or management, and such.
I have parents, neither are in the tech sector, that believe this. I would say a fair number of people outside of tech believe this too. I have also used vocational rehabilitation services and they don't treat those jobs with such disrespect, but I definitely got the feeling some jobs are stepping stone jobs.
And from my understanding in Europe you can pick whichever Union you like (maybe you can confirm?) While in the US the employer is locked to a single Union.
That single difference explains why they are unpopular in the US.
Every human being is exceptional. You won't convince me otherwise. We are all unique and have something to offer. Your kind of thinking is anti-human and leads to a world where the only options for people in work and society are what someone else has already decided is best for them. I'd rather live my life according to my principals instead of getting the same serving given to everyone else. When I am forced to join a union agency is ripped away from me and given to the collective.
Not everyone has the same beliefs and values as you do, so perhaps a little humility is in order.
Every human is unique in their skills and wants, but not their basic needs.
We all need food, healthcare, housing etc. and it's unconscionable that some jobs in the US don't provide for those basics.
If you join a union, agency is not ripped away from you, it is given to you. Alone, the fast food worker cannot demand a pay raise. Together, they all can.
Nobody is talking about "the same serving as everyone else", this is about raising the minimum serving to be reasonable so nobody has to suffer.
Agency is being taken away by capitalist exploitation, not by attempts to counteract it.
American Union corruption is an ugly story, quite a lot of it in New York, NY .. later Detroit. The battle against communism fits well here, as the far-right criminals who did run NY Unions were the choice of the insider capitalists, versus the serious-Left that thought of the idea.
Proof of this extreme statement? How about a Jeopardy question -- "What New York City famous gangster got his start as a mafia boss with his appointment to run the New York airport union" ..
Funny how people only ever talk about those supposedly horrible unions instead of the nurses and teachers unions that made sure my mom could feed her kids or my family members are paid fairly for their hard work, often hard PHYSICAL LABOR in a supposed knowledge industry.
Actually most of the people I hear that talk about Teacher's union are expressing negative opinions of them, citing things like rubber rooms, and the impossibility of getting rid of bad teachers.
Not necessarily saying I have an issue with unions per se, but the two unions I hear people complaining about the most are the teachers and the police unions. It seems generally people don't like public sector unions from the people I've talked to.
Those examples sound to me like great examples of unions doing thier job: protecting their members. All the places that I've heard of that weaken or eliniate various unions in the name of protecting the powerful shortly produce stories of ever increasing demands for unpaid work and firings for not doing the unpaid work, or firings/censures/punishments for not violating the laws of physics (e.g. my friend who was given a pay cut because every teacher was required to do an hour of 1:1 time with each of their students each week, but her band was 200+ kids).
Can't you see the problem with protecting at least the cops against things such as public scrutiny? They wield enormous power already, they should be held accountable.
> (e.g. my friend who was given a pay cut because every teacher was required to do an hour of 1:1 time with each of their students each week, but her band was 200+ kids).
Sounds like only one side of the story to me and highly improbable.
The mere presence of the union suddenly cuts down on the shittiness of the administration. Teachers stop getting jerked between classes and classrooms. Teachers can't get forced into doing extracurricular activities. etc.
The union also pays the legal bills when teachers get sued by idiotic parents because they had the temerity to teach evolutionary theory in a science class.
And, as I have pointed out previously, a lot of the "can't get rid of teachers" is due to the fact that the administration simply won't file the paperwork to get a teacher fired. You see, if you file the paperwork, that becomes a record and can wind up public information. That record is likely to come up when the administrator is trying to get a promotion or a new job. So, rather than creating a paper trail to fire the teacher, these administrators would rather transfer teachers to a "rubber room" and bury the problem so that it won't haunt the administrator's promotions in the future.
It's almost like you have a very colored opinion of what unions do. Consider where you get the information about unions.
Unions are why when my mother got her job, she was given a paper that showed her most likely pay scale for the next 10 years. Unions are how my mother had excellent health care to take her children to the doctors, despite making just over poverty wages. Unions were there to help her when a student (a fellow student of mine, in my own class, indeed my mother taught me a few times) made baseless and false claims of sexual assault. Unions were there when nurses were being put in harms in an attempt to force nurses to bear the brunt of covid issues. Unions are there when management says "you should be expected to do X" when X is laughably beyond average expectations and also what was in your contract when you signed it.
Unions could have stopped my company from requiring unpaid overtime as "prod support" for our products. Unions could have prevented my work contract from being one sentence that's as vague as possible. Unions could have prevented my company from cutting everyone's pay by 20% during covid despite business being up 100% because we do e-commerce.
> The last people I want working as my nurse or my kids teacher is someone who is entitled to their job regardless of their performance.
And the last person I want working as my nurse is someone who got the job because they are good at boot licking and the previous nurse who cared about patient safety was fired for "being a trouble maker" when they complained about poor quality of patient care.
Or how about a nurse who is overworked because there isn't a union around to see that they get breaks?
Or how about a nurse who is stressed because they can't pay their bills?
Without nurses unions, quality of care plummets.
Or to put it another way, people become nurses because they want to help others. People become hospital administrators to make money. Without nursing unions, the hospital administrators are the ones determining what quality of care you will get.
Unions are necessarily political organisations (who are almost always corrupt), but they also do tend to defend the rights of their workers. Didn’t the UAW protect their workers so well that they are partially blamed for the trouble at GM and Ford? This is a Union so strong that it managed to become a major part of the companies bottom line (instead of all being extracted by CEOs as usual).
The counterpoints to this would include the Geo Prizm and Pontiac Vibe, which were cheap, fantastically reliable cars built by GM union labor from Toyota designs.
Maybe it’s the UAW or maybe the auto manufactures that agreed to it, but in the 90s there was serious waste. Example 1 - if the Big Three laid off a worker, they were guaranteed to get paid 90% their pay. This is why there were so many rebates on American cars, because it didn’t make financial sense to cut production. Example 2 - the drafting workers that worked the CAD machines, their contract stipulated 54 hours of work per week (overtime of course for those 14 hours). There wasn’t 54 hours of work available, so these folks would come in (including Saturdays) and just sit there and read the newspaper.
> How about a Jeopardy question -- "What New York City famous gangster got his start as a mafia boss with his appointment to run the New York airport union"
edit people are mistaking this comment for anti-Unionism.. isn't it obvious that this is anti-"corrupt union management" and nothing about the virtues of working life, protecting workers from exploitation, and a social path to prosperity for a greater number of people? Management corruption IS a problem if you want all of that ! hard to be understood here...
For those wondering, this is not a final decision.
The case will now go to the NLRB board, and then the courts of appeal. The local administrative law judge (in-house NLRB court) is only the first stage.
I would not expect the NLRB to rule for Amazon at the board level, either. The first chance of a friendly court will be at the circuit level.
Amazon isn't even supposed to have a voice in this. The right to organize belongs solely to the workers. Amazon is raising phony claims that somehow, the election wasn't fair to them. Those were rejected.
And whenever the union loses, they say the election wasn't fair to them. It's almost like both sides refuse to believe anyone can have an opposing opinion and everything is rigged
I don't see much of a problem with seibelj's comment, it seems accurate. Just like in American politics, people constantly decry "That's unconstitutional!" about some proposed law they don't like, as if there is any kind of agreed upon definition of what is unconstitutional(there isn't - even the Supreme Court frequently disagrees within itself and is only decided based on a simple majority-rules voting of the members).
My comment is to counteract the knee-jerk HN opinion that "All unions are a panacea!" without ignoring the very real, very well-documented counterpoints.
I wonder how Amazon views this internally. Is it a "failure", resulting from an $AMZN corp employee or group being ineffective at their "job" to ensure worker unionization is suppressed and not achieved?
I don't work at Amazon, but I have a few insights here through insider backchannels. It basically all comes down to numbers and the amount of money spent on opposing the union versus how much money they will save on suppressing wages if the union fails. In other words, it's pretty good ROI to invest in union busting at all costs because the cost of a few lawyers and consultants is much lower than paying living wages.
It's unlikely that Amazon employees will be reprimanded or whatever, but they probably will use a different law firm next time around.
Does the calculation include losses due to people avoiding them?
Many boycott them here in Sweden, in part due to their views on unions. And while they often have the lowest price in comparisons, they are not doing to good economically last I heard.
One genuine question: Will this accelerate the move to more automation by these companies? And of course the answer is yes here, but, what options workers will be left with once that sets in?
Amazon always wants as much as it can automated, they devote an enormous amount of money to that. This is not going to move the needle on something they were already dedicated to.
And that argument is almost always silly. All of these big companies are devoting resources all the time to reducing payroll. It is banged into their heads in MBA schools that "payroll is your biggest expense", and that is a bad thing. With that mindset they are always looking to reduce payroll.
> And that argument is almost always silly. All of these big companies are devoting resources all the time to reducing payroll. It is banged into their heads in MBA schools that "payroll is your biggest expense", and that is a bad thing. With that mindset they are always looking to reduce payroll.
Yes, this strawman you have created is a silly argument. The size of the payroll has nothing to do with it.
The decision to automate or not is decided by profitability. If a worker's wages is less than the cost of automation, then worker is not automated. But once wages exceed the cost of automation the worker will be replaced. So, increasing wages will lead to more automation.
Yes, they're devoting money towards automation, but wage increases absolutely can move the needle. If you're spending a bunch of money trying to get your automation solution's costs below 130% of the cost of labor and suddenly the cost of labor jumps 40%, it instantly becomes profitable to start deploying automation instead of hiring labor.
Amazon already trying its hardest to automate as much as possible in their fulfillment center, union or no union.
This is such a smug take, that the warehouse workers should not anger the big almighty Amazon, or they'll automate their job.
If Amazon need them today, they have their value. This gives the workers even more incentive to squeeze Amazon ASAP, while Amazon is desperate for manpower.
No, because minor increases in labor costs don't change the math much. Amazon is already spending billions to improve automation, these people are doing the jobs that they cannot reasonably automate. If you assume a magic "develop automation faster" button, companies like Amazon are already paying as many people as possible to mash it around the clock. Why wouldn't they?
You could just as well argue that increased labor costs due to unions means Amazon will be forced to spend less on developing automation, since they don't have the budget for it.
Minor increases wouldn't be worth organizing an union over, would they?
Or they are on the order of 30-40 per cent, which no longer falls under "minor" and can turn some kind of automation technology barely, but profitable.
Not everything is matter of "many people mashing the automation buttons". Business involves a lot of trade-offs and the decision making is pretty complicated. Neither you nor me can really predict all the butterfly effects involved.
I wish them success, but presenting the wage/budget situation as totally immune to balance changes is unrealistic.
I can't imagine it'll move the timetable up faster than it was already moving. I couldn't speak to the options workers will have. Historically, the answer is "not many", right?
It's interesting how Americans love complaining that Europeans regulate everything, but Americans regulate unions. A union is just a bunch of people getting together. Isn't this protected by free speech or something?
PS I'm a European who loves American culture. Don't be offended by my observations, I mean it with love <3
> A union is just a bunch of people getting together. Isn't this protected by free speech or something?
Union activity is heavily regulated in the US in favor of the unions. This is because corporations here have a history of union-busting using tactics like surveillance, disinformation, mercenaries, and even bombs dropped from aircraft[1].
For example, Tesla was just ordered to allow workers to wear pro-union clothing to work.
I'd describe it as regulated pretty heavily in both directions, with some provisions to protect unions and some to restrict unions. The two primary pieces of legislation reflect that: the National Labor Relations Act (1935, part of the Second New Deal) mostly protects unions, while the Taft-Hartley Act (1947, passed over Truman's veto) mostly restricts unions.
What a horrible viewpoint to have. Unionization is one of the best things happening (albeit slowly) in these sorts of industries right now. How can you not be for it? Amazon working conditions are terrible and turnover is so bad that Amazon is rapidly running out of people who haven't already tried working at Amazon and decided it's horrible. If working conditions and pay improves, we will all reap the economic benefits -- more capital in the hands of consumers, probably less broken or mismatched packages because workers will have a more reasonable workload and more incentive to do a good job, better outcomes for the majority of the population, etc, etc,. Bear in mind more than one in 10 people works in some capacity for Amazon in the U.S.. That's a huge economic sector if their pay and working conditions improve.
Your argument that AliBaba can somehow come into the U.S. and not be subjected to the same economic and cultural effects mystifies me. If AliBaba came here they would experience unionization, and it would be a good thing. Also given the extent of Amazon's monopoly in the U.S., and anti-china AND anti-middle-east sentiment in the U.S. being as high as it is (AliBaba cannotes "arab" for a lot of americans), there is just no way AliBaba could ever enter this market successfully unless Amazon was broken up into multiple companies and AliBaba rebranded to something appropriate for the U.S. market. So yeah, your comment is really bizzare.
I'm wary because unions in the US start out strong by addressing very real grievances and putting the greedier aspects of management in-check. But it seems inevitable that they become entrenched, bloated, and protectionist to the point of hurting the company's ability to adapt to market pressure and disruptions from non-unionized competitors. I'm not anti-union per se, and I would rather see them structured the way they are in Europe, and particularly, those in Germany.
It's quite simple. Either you believe the workers deserve representation or you don't. Business is the intersection of workers and corporations. You need both sitting at the bargaining table to get anything real done.
There’s not much structurally different about unions in Europe, but they exist in very different legal circumstances. Unions in the US are micromanaged by the NLRB and many complex laws enacted during the cold war.
Unions aside, Germany requires by law that corporate boards have a minimum percentage of representation from bottom-level employees, meaning employees who are nobody’s boss. This law seems to have been invaluable to working conditions in Germany. The catch is that the American ruling class would simply never allow such a law to be passed. Germany has the law as a result of history. Remember the Soviets defeated the Nazis, “first they came for the communists” and so on.
this law is also in effect in a lot of other european countries.
Remember that after World War One and during the interbellum, most european countries had massive social unrest. Giving workers representation inside the company was usually meant as a way to appease to communist/socialist voters during those times.
Mind you, this all happened before world war 2 and the iron curtain.
Some unionization works out well, especially when the union actually has the best interest of both the workers and company in mind. There are many times that self serving unions bleed workers through dues and protect non-productive workers to the benefit of no one, and in some cases, driving companies into bankruptcy.
I am pro-union and acknowledge that some unions will protect workers that don't actually contribute to the business, but I think we need a source on unions that drove companies into bankruptcy. That's a pretty extreme case that needs concrete examples.
Mostly too many stories from family of ridiculous interactions with unions (e.g. "you can't carry your own stuff to your booth. If you don't have us carry your briefcase, your truck's windows are all going to be smashed.")
You genuinely believe that this is a make-or-break line for a multinational with extensive horizontal and vertical integration across multiple industries and it will fold because their warehouse workers demand marginally higher wages and some guaranteed bathroom breaks?
It’s in their interest to fight unionization, but the catastrophizing is just part of that negotiating game. You’re just buying a PR line that they don’t even believe themselves.
As soon as unionization gains a foothold, that same PR will talk up how they have strong relations with workers and that it gives them a competitive advantage in hiring, quality, tenure, and loyalty.
It’s spin today, and spin tomorrow. Don’t take it so seriously, maybe.
Can't we just short circuit to the last part? If it's going to get there eventually, it makes sense to cut to the chase. Doing the song and dance before hand feels so tedious, boring, and pointless.
The thing is, it's not a foregone conclusion that we'll get to there. Amazon believes it's in their interests to fight tooth and nail to prevent unions from forming, and historically, it has been able to do so.
Of course, there's some pretty good evidence that companies that treat and pay their workers well are more successful than those that try to scrape by treating them like disposable machine parts. But it's not, and has never been, all about the money: a lot of it is about power, and classism, and giving mediocre managers someone they can treat like garbage.
The NFLPA and NBAPA are wildly ineffective and are unable to adequately advocate for their players’ needs.
However, I would chalk that up to immature and young guys not voting for their best interests. When you’re up against the best leaders and lawyers money can buy, your union is bound to seem ineffective.
It's also an unsympathetic postion from the outsider. These are multi-million dollar salaries that are making complaints about locker room amenities and what not. Complaining about having to play 3 days out of 7 also falls on deaf ears a bit. You're being paid to play a game at the most elite levels purely for entertainment purposes. Rather than complaining about playing time, how about asking "are you not entertained?" If you're too tired, sit on the bench and let someone else play.
This is like saying your restaurant chain is unsuccessful because it only has 1/5 the locations as McDonalds.
That's still a _lot_ of freakin' restaurants my guy. Costco is the only counterexample that I know of to "all workplaces need unions in order to guarantee workers' quality of life", but I think they might be the exception that proves the rule. That they've grown to be that big and treated their employees that well is a testament to how good economically, long term, it is to treat your employees as the valuable assets they are.
smaller number of SKUs and not consistent. you can find something on a visit, and then it is not available on a subsequent visit. but i now know this going in, and still benefit from the items that are available
The idea is that if you see something that interests you, you buy it now, and there's always something new on each visit. It's annoying for certain things, but at the same time it allows them to avoid having the same stock on the floor because people are on the fence about a purchase.
Depends on how you look at it. Costco had a 20 year head start, and with the way returns compound they should really be MUCH bigger than Amazon if capitalism worked well for the working class.
Personally I spend most of my money at Costco when I can because I prefer giving money to companies that treat their workers better (or at least better than Amazon).
I'm saying that capitalism is designed to enrich the owning class at the expense of the working class. It's just a system to transfer wealth toward those who already have it.
The "rising tide lifts all boats" reaganomics argument is not wrong, but if it reaches the point (where it has now) where the working class is not seeing an inflation-adjusted increase in wealth, then they are (by definition) becoming poorer over time.
which system other than capitalism has worked better, historically? Because the alternatives seem to be worse.
The issue isn't capitalism its the political leadership who aren't interested in creating an environment where workers are rewarded in line with their productivity.
and yet when anyone in the US suggests single player healthcare, higher income taxes, or more restraints on corporations, they get accused of being socialist.
US automakers absolutely struggled in the 70s when foreign car companies showed up and started competing. It wasn't Kia that gave them fits, it was Honda and Toyota. It was 100% an existential crisis, and unions made the situation worse. Which isn't to say that unions are necessarily bad and didn't produce good things for their workers, but they made it very difficult for the US auto industry to adapt.
A link to a long series about the interaction between US automakers and the unions is below. Of note is the story about how automakers' market share declined precipitously in the early eighties when Japanese automakers figured out the US market.
The US auto industry is not a great example of how a union can work with an employer in the face of existential threats.
The US automakers did not struggle because of unions. The US automakers struggled because they were led by incredibly pathetic people and genuinely did not know how to make good cars or run a business.
Unions were not who was responsible for their atrocious offerings during the 70s to 2000s.
US automakers' products were terrible, and there is plenty of blame to go around. But I have yet to read any analysis of that crisis (such as those linked above) that did not include unions as one contributing factor.
Feel free to provide an alternate source. I would love to read it. Please ensure that it is as free from propaganda that it would pass your own level of scrutiny by someone on the other side.
Don't look at the survival of a multinational as a metric, look at its places here. What happened to Detroit and those unionized jobs? Some remain, but much of Ford has been moved to Mexico. So yes, there was some folding and disappearing.
I was mocking the idea that unionization would cause a company to "disappear", not that unionization wouldn't impact the structure of a company or have other side effects.
I mean, Ford is in a pretty tough spot for the future. They couldn't compete in the ICE sedan market. Their cash cow ICE truck market is gone in 10 years. They have a LOT of debt that will cost a lot more to service now interest rates are up. So their only saving grace is a successful pivot to the EV market, but their software and software culture is bad, and they are not procuring very many batteries.
The parent comment topic is the benefits to US workers working on US market products. If Ford's US market footprint and manufacturing workforce has relatively shrunk over the decades, then that is absolutely relevant to the concern of long-term benefit to US workers.
Exactly. When we're talking about US auto unions, the market for those vehicles pretty much is the US market. The rest of the global sales are made with global (typically non-unionized) workers. If Ford can't make competitive cars for the US market, it doesn't speak well to the union vs. non-union competitiveness.
US gov will just ban Alibaba for nationalistic reasons before that happens. Besides, all the crap you buy from Amazon is coming from China already, and a good chunk of it is just straight off Alibaba.
Not that Unions are simply great and effective - unions bring their own set of problems. But a company this large shouldn't have been able to fight unionization for so long.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...