Ooh scary ... is the employment contract signed by Amazon's employees not legally binding? How is it Amazon's business what their grown-ass employees can or cannot sign?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are providing the ALU your personal information.
Like Amazon monitoring my spending habits?
> By signing a card or filling out an online authorization form, you are authorizing the ALU to speak on your behalf.
And thats terrible how?
> The ALU is not part of Amazon and does not represent Amazon
Thats the whole point.
Of course, this is Amazon we’re talking about, so they may just go for it and plan to clean up the mess later. Walmart got away with that approach for decades.
Your language, IMO, is value-laden. Card-signing is a common "tactic" for unions like the presidential election is a "tactic" for deciding the next president.
-- Bezos in helium voice
I remember quitting from Krogers bagging groceries when I was a kid. I forget why, but I did give less than 2 weeks notice. Mr. Manager gravely conveyed that if I did this, I'd be barred from working for them again forever. Pretty sure my poker face then was not what it is now, but in any case I did not find that to be anywhere nearly as distressing as he seemed to think I should.
Despite the colloquial use of the word "contract," there is generally always going to be an employment contract (agreement) in place.
Similarly, people colloquially talk about having a "contract" for things like cellphones meaning a fixed term, but there is always an actual "contract" (agreement) with the terms of the service regardless of whether the plan has a fixed term or not and regardless of whether it's prepaid or not.
It would not guarantee a term of employment, in the standard form (but could, if it were so modified).
“But they didn't sign anything like a contract,” one might object.
They accepted an offer to do work of some specification for pay of some specification. Even if there was nothing in writing and no other explicit terms, that's sufficient to have a contract.
You really can't see the issue with authorising a group you have little to no control over, speak on your behalf ? I can totally understand that people share some views with what unions are currently defending.
But the requirement on signing a paper that says "whatever the union currently says and will say in the future 100% represents my point of view" is a fair criticism of the union model.
A union authorization card is simply a means of demonstrating the 30% employee support required for the NLRB to order an election. That’s it. Unions will generally not hold elections until 60% of employees have signed cards, because a majority vote is required.
From the anti-union National Right to Work Foundation:
“You have a legal right to revoke any union authorization card that you have signed. It is illegal for a union to restrict your right to revoke a union authorization card that you signed.”
Is that what it says? It says that you have to agree to be legally responsible for the union's opinions on netflix shows, or of your cousin's marriage?
No, it says that you're agreeing for them to represent you with the company, not some made-up all-encompassing scaremongering paraphrasing of that.
Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.
I live in very liberal SF but outside of my bubble, I hear people complain that it’s not possible to hire Nannies/housecleaners/employees anymore when Amazon and Starbucks pay $18/hr. Seems like the answer is easy: pay them more or make the job more desirable.
Amazon working conditions are challenging, and they have been super anti-union. But they’ve also done more to increase wages in the US than anyone in Washington in the past 15 years, arguably second biggest in past 40 [1].
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
I’m not here to say that Amazon is doing a great job and we should all be singing Jeff Bezos’s good graces. But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but on everyone who could want to work at Amazon but can’t because their jobs are more scarce, and by everyone who buys things from retailers (Amazon or not) in the form of higher prices.
Unionists like to talk about how the labor movement provided a lot of basic protections for workers and the 40 hour work week. What they like to talk less about is American unions’ frequent associations with organized crime, it’s history of racism and sexism, all of the environmental bills it has fought against. I could go on.
A union-free Amazon has driven up wages for workers throughout the economy. And it has helped keep prices low for everyone else so that even if you don’t earn as much as a Amazon warehouse worker nor shop at Amazon, you can still afford many basic necessities. So yes, I’m saying we should be singing the good graces of competition.
Warehouse workers before Amazon were making over $20/hr. Amazon seriously depressed wages for that kind of work. How do you think they got so profitable and outcompeted everyone else in that space?
Amazon has to pay more because their jobs are shit. They aren’t doing anything to raise wages they’re just trying to get people’s asses in the door. I’m sort of shocked you linked to the department of labor’s historical page as some sort of proof of your idea.
I can guarantee that wage is the minimum they can pay to get people in the door for the level of work required by them calculated by a legion of economists.
The fact you think Amazon jobs are competing with “Nannies/house cleaners/employees” is equally strange. Like somehow these jobs are related?! Why do you only compare those jobs to Amazon factory jobs?
What? You think overseas manufacturers are paying $30 an hour?
It wasn't high-skilled manufacturing that was outsourced. Welders and machinists still have near zero unemployment and make about as much as a software engineer. It was low skilled manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to China. Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
> Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
Auto factory jobs (which were outsourced) certainly paid that much and more in inflation adjusted dollars. From a book studying the auto industry describing average wages in Detroit,
> At $11.62 an hour in 1982 wages, Detroit's autoworkers, according to U.S. car companies, were simply too expensive, particularly with the added cost of pensions, health insurance, and union-negotiated work rules.
This is already over $30/hr in 2022 dollars.
At that point, the factory owner is going to be focused on automation and robotics, so most of the jobs they offer will be for highly skilled positions (and pay more than welders or machinists make).
That's a big IF. Unions were invented after the onset of the industrial revolution to combat truly unsafe work conditions in industrial settings where worker's dying was common.
OSHA did away with all that.
The current generation of "bad work condition" complaints is around getting adequate bathroom breaks.
Is it what usually happens when workers unionize? It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well.
Can you substantiate this claim?
With the vast majority of goods the price is set by the market, i.e. higher wages would indeed result in a smaller profit margin and not in a higher price.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-auto...
Sure. So the customer buys less product, the company makes less profit, and the shareholders eject the executives.
But there are huge delays in these chains of causation, which provide opportunities for arbitrage.
Based on retail business profit margins, it would mean higher prices for customers. Not that that is a bad thing, less consumption would be great.
The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes. Prices are no different than anywhere else.
Right now these workers work at Amazon, because that's the best paying job they can find.
If you don’t like supply chain issues and inflation right now, you won’t like the model you propose.
The simple truth is warehouse employee salaries aren’t significant because of throughput. Someone making 30$/hour vs 15$/hour sounds huge but when people are picking 300+ items an hour that’s 5 cents a pop. But, more realistic unionized job would be 17$/hour but only 250 items a sub 2 cents increase.
A lot of people, even economists, conflate the freedom of trade with the free movement of capital. They are not the same and not equivalent. I like to point people to this comic [1] that someone made when the TPP was hot news as it accurately describes this in a very accessible way.
Neoliberalism serves the interests of the capital-owning class.
Unrealistic, in neoliberalism.
They’ll eventually build higher labor costs into their financial projects and pass along some of the costs. Shareholders probably won’t care much, because Amazon is still a good investment.
If everyone gets paid tomorrow 100 USD/hour, everything around you will start costing 10x more. Look at Switzerland.
2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
What a strange comment imo. I can’t take the ‘everything will go up!’ stance seriously while higher ups are buying 10 houses and private jets. The wage gap is atrocious.
By the way, Switzerland’s GDP is 748 billion vs the United States’ 20.94 trillion. Comparing them like that is meaningless and silly.
If wages at the bottom go up and that causes inflation, the overall impact of that is wage compression, or in other words, reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.
Limiting cross-borders money flow is a very good way to keep social contract intact.
My parents had good experience with their unions. Every interaction every person I know in my generation has had with them (CWA, UAW, teamsters, railway unions, etc, etc.) has been strongly negative.
The Amazon workers should form a new union if they want representation.
Cards from existing corrupt national unions are definitely a trap. Once enough people sign, they will swoop in to extract dues, bribe politicians on unrelated issues, and alternate between sabotaging Amazon's work environment and negotiating away whatever current benefits the workers get.
People that are good at negotiating union politics will somehow become unfirable, and just stop bothering to do their jobs.
If history repeats itself, the union reps will then work with Amaozn to create an underclass of ununionizable jobs and hire people at minimum wage to do the old $18/hr work, while the union cronies "supervise" for $25+/hr.
That doesn't mean unions are bad or useless. It would be like saying that since democratic governments can be corrupted, we should do without democracy.
Yeah, they were great at listening before.
Also, where are these unions where the people in it aren't the people it represents. Recently, a school board election ad, "we have to stop the teachers union and start listening to teachers." Well, who the hell is in the teachers union if not teachers?
Professional bureaucrats.
Teachers unions in public schools are the worst. They hold our childrens’ futures hostage and get paid out by politicians buying votes, who pass the bill to the next generation.
Are you confusing the school board with the teachers union? One sets curriculum, class size, and budget. The later really only influences salary, benefits, and working hours.
well, union higher-ups are basically politicians, they're not usually working in the job by that point
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[1] "The [NLRB] hearing officer also found objectionable Amazon's distribution of "vote no" pins and other anti-organizing paraphernalia to employees in the presence of managers and supervisors. ... U.S. labor law forbids companies from spying on organizing activities or leaving employees with the impression they are under surveillance. It also prohibits other actions if they are found to be coercive." https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-interfered-with-unio...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1022384731/amazon-warehouse-w...
And today's SCOTUS seems to want to defang all government agencies' ability to rule on or enforce . . . anything, really, based on their rulings on the EPA and the SEC. Well, unless it's the government trying to enforce on reservation land - that is newly allowed.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
The general idea, yeah. It proves how strong a union can be.
The implementation? No. A union for people who have monopoly on violence? No. A union that protects people who are actively hurting civilians without recourse? No.
Been burned big time by that.
Police are civilians too. Using "civilian" in this way is supporting the militarization of police, and is not a good thing.
I lost control of my health, my hair turned white, and during that time I lost most of my friends. It’s obviously my own fault for letting all that happen.
Of all the companies in the world, Amazon is probably one of the coldest, soulless places.
Management is riddled with politics and third rate talent who’ll often knowingly do the wrong thing, just to get promoted.
The people who actually drove the innovation, who weren’t necessary easier to work with but at least had some technical vision and production vision have all left.
A significant piece of the company is all just legacy systems and tech debt, supported by Indian H1Bs who hire more H1Bs.
If the government breaks up AWS and the rest of Amazon, most of their domains won’t make business sense anymore. There are too many middle men who are against this though - everyone from companies that help people relocate, to vendors that provide special tax services for the H1B army.
I hope Amazon fully unionizes. Even in tech, it was a grueling, toxic place to work.
Until Amazon can start treating workers well, it seems to me the best move is not to pay them to abuse people.
this should be illegal.
