Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons.
“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”
For those who aren't aware of Pinkerton's history, from wikipedia:
>One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant.
"My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists... Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique." [1, 2]
Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:
* Real-time location from your cell provider
* Real-time AirBnB booking
* Real-time purchases from credit card companies
* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks
* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy
Decades ago in University, I remember an Accounting professor talked about how Wal-Mart used their parking lot cameras to monitor where employees would congregate after work and would have special "employees" who would befriend these groups and make sure they weren't trying to organize unions, or discourage organization if they were.
Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them.
Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.
While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions.
It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]
+1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.
The US works hard to surpress labor history education. We even celebrate Labor Day in September, and as a result most Americans have never heard of the Haymarket Massacre, which is the whole reason it exists everywhere else in the world.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but might a union actually help in this case?
The 30 hour mandate is from the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act. If someone was moved from 40 hours to 29 hours because of this, that's bad, but they were likely not a union member, right? Unions would have a negotiated contract for however many hours they wanted (either more or less than the norm), and would have also already negotiated benefits on the side so the incentive for the employer to cut to 30 hours would be gone.
Regarding the fewer hours points - I wasn't advocating that shorter weeks are always better, but rather that unions are responsible for, or at least contributed to, many of the gains that workers got over the last 150 years, and that IMO have been eroding.
Pretending we lived in the early 20th century, isn't the benefit of 40 hours a week in a factory over >60 hours a week in a factory clear? In terms of health and safety, unions have also made sure that e.g. you were less likely to become trapped and burn alive during the workday [0].
This is an important argument that people miss. Cost increases in health care for government systems are managed at the government level, not at the level of individual companies. That's a pretty desirable situation for companies. Not only do companies make targets of themselves when they downgrade coverage, but the overall compensation is also less transparent to the worker when insurance is tied to the workplace. You get rid of all that stuff in a single payer system.
Withholding health insurance is also a powerful tool for breaking/preventing strikes. While it would save employers money, it would also reduce their leverage, and workers would be able to move on to other demands, or quit
i agree, although it's easy to withhold health insurance by maintaining a part-time, contractor, and gig workforce. That's a much stronger power-play. If anything, single payer alleviates some of their political exposure on gig workers. The pressure to classify gig workers as full employees is, in many corners, driven by the health insurance problem.
"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.
So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.
Whatever you do, do not only read the Manifesto. It was designed as an agitation pamphlet rather than an as a complete exposition of his thinking, and it is almost entirely devoid of his economic thought. As other commenters here have said, Wage Labour and Capital is a good read. You may also benefit from a companion guide if you want the full picture. Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique by Johan Fornas is a very high quality book, and relatively new; published by Routledge.
You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.
As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.
Like others have said, "The Communist Manifesto" is the easiest entry point. My copy also has "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" which some say is the work most descriptive of the US today. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin is a relatively easy and enlightening read as he talks about the nature of the capitalist state, the police, and other topics. "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg is also clarifying as it talks about why reformists have lost the thread. However, there are also many many many leftist podcasts you can listen to that can be easier to digest and will get you the basics, so that way when you read the original works later you have a baseline of understanding.
Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.
However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!
Not, OP, and not well read in Marxist literature either (life is too short), but I can recommend The Communist Manifesto, it's short, quite lucid and of enormous historical influence (and would be worth reading for that reason alone). As you say, the interesting part is the analysis, the proposed remedies do not just look bad in hindsight, after tens of millions of dead bodies.
I think anything before the communist manifest is worth it. But it should always be read in context of the time of the industrial revolution and before.
I don't think Marx always intended revolution and the term changed context later in his life, when reformation and revolution were distilled as two separate approaches. In my opinion this is still a fault line in modern leftist movements.
Capitalism rewards the vicious rentseeker and punishes the virtuous worker.
Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?
Capitalism rewards workers according to the utility of their contribution. Consider Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.
Rentseekers in the literal sense (landlords) are not that big of a function of the economy. Rentseekers in the figurative sense (companies that use regulatory capture to extract wealth from others) are not a feature of capitalism, they are a feature of a mixed economy.
This is completely wrong. Marxism is presented as "scientific socialism" compared with former idealist versions that proliferated in the 1800s. While you can disagree with his conclusions, Marx presents a theory of class society, of the development of productive forces, and how these interact to advance the political forms of society which ends in revolution when the old structures and the new engines of society clash. He doesn't really go deeply into what "socialism" would look like, only that the clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, where the proletariat both massively outnumber the bourgeoisie and do all the work for survival wages presents a contradiction that will be resolved.
I think their point was that when you said “Marxism rewards the vicious and punishes the virtuous“, what you said could make sense when talking about Marx-inspired ideologies / movements (the USSR, etc), but not so much about the actual writings and thought of Karl Marx himself.
I.e. that Marxist scholarship / thought does not have a one to one correspondence with Marxist-inspired social or political movements, of which there are many different kinds.
But the real question is why am I wasting my time on the internet writing this when the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low?
Which isn’t so much a statement about you, dear debate-opponent, as it is about the internet itself.
Getting people to waste time online - the capitalists greatest tool in the repression of the masses! LOL ;)
Maybe we’ll get immortalized in the Internet Archive ;););)
I think my statement applies, or at least is likely to apply, under any implementation of Marx's ideas, and also has applied under every implementation that has been tried. If someone has a real counterpoint to that I'd be happy to hear it and engage with it.
I'm still kind of talking past the other person, and vice versa, but it's hard to have a good conversation about this, and I think it's important to say something to express my opposition to Marxism (though that's debatable---if nothing good/useful can be said, it's very debatable).
I would not have said anything on most discussion forums, but if there ever was a place where it's appropriate to speak up against Marxism when it rears its head, YC News is it. I think I can voice my pro-capitalist position politely and it's OK here, even if there is no traction in the conversation. I wouldn't do that on, say, reddit; I think it would be rude in that context, unless I can actually foster a meaningful conversation.
> the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low
Valid statement about the Internet in general, but culture can change, and we should strive to be better than that. In my own commenting history there are certainly bright and dark spots. I try to do the best I can.
In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.
Pre-COVID it was very interesting sitting in a bar in downtown SF and listening to all the drunk tech workers mouthing off. You could hear a lot of illegal activites, particularly racist or poor hiring practices, boasted of or complained about very regularly.
I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(
I keep trying to get the message out. When your employer sends out these surveys, rate everything at the highest level possible. Nothing good can possibly come from giving bad ratings. If your boss/employer can't figure out how to improve things outside of those surveys, they won't figure it out from the survey. All you are doing is creating a bureaucratic headache for your boss which is going to trickle down to you.
Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably.
All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.
What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?
Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way.
At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.)
I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.
>At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists
Were subjected to police brutality while largely peacefully picketing. Meanwhile the army was called in to do their jobs...
Apparently there was evidence of "excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers."
According to the independent police complaints commission, anyway.
Note the similarities to current protests in the US and similar attempts to depict police as simply reacting to "violent blacks".
If you want to see the full gamut of vicious state inflicted violence you can either be the wrong race, or you can form a powerful enough union and go on strike.
And why are police never punished, because police unions. Unions in their modern form are granted special privileges by the government and use those privileges to extort society. There is nothing wrong with people joining groups, collective bargaining, etc -- the problem is that they are given special privileges by the state.
I don't even understand what you're arguing. Aren't corporations given special privileges by the state? Are you against that well? Can you clarify what you're arguing here?
If any group is being given special privileges by the state, it's the police...
Normally, a union is formed to balance the power of capitalists with the laborers they employ. In the case of law enforcement, there is no capital, nor is their labor being used to produce something of value. If anything, law enforcement defends the interests of capitalists, rather than being subject to abuse by capitalists.
Police unions have no solidarity with workers. They're groups that exist only to protect themselves, and they're happy to suppress strikes when it serves them. It's facile to consider them as part of labour unions.
Well, they did intend to drop the concrete block on his car, the block wasn't dropped by accident or through their gross negligence (in which case it would be manslaughter).
Murder does require intent, but it does not necessarily require an intent to kill that person; if you intend to "just" assault a person but they die, that's murder; if you intend to kill someone but kill someone else whom you did not intend to kill, that's murder.
"extreme indifference to human life" (again, intentional) is generally considered murder - e.g. if you'd intentionally burn down your neighbour's house without knowing or caring if anyone's inside, then if someone dies, it's considered murder. And UK, where the incident happened, has the concept of felony-murder where any death (even if accidental) that happens in the process of felony can be considered murder, because the felony that endangered people's lives was intentional.
> Subject to three exceptions (see Voluntary Manslaughter below) the crime of murder is committed, where a person:
> Of sound mind and discretion (i.e. sane);
> unlawfully kills (i.e. not self-defence or other justified killing);
> any reasonable creature (human being);
> in being (born alive and breathing through its own lungs - Rance v Mid-Downs Health Authority (1991) 1 All ER 801 and AG Ref No 3 of 1994 (1997) 3 All ER 936;
> under the Queen's Peace (not in war-time);
> with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (GBH).
> Well, they did intend to drop the concrete block on his car, the block wasn't dropped by accident or through their gross negligence (in which case it would be manslaughter).
I'm comfortable assuming intent when someone discharges a kinetic weapon at a occupied vehicle. If the car was parked and they assumed it was unoccupied you might have a point.
I wouldn't have any trouble believing there were more attempted murders on the part of the anti-union side, or that this example happened differently than described, but what was described was clearly a (successful) attempt to kill someone.
For sure :). I understand that. I was gently teasing and pointing out that the language you used obscured (as there were no trebuchets, de orbiting asteroids, etc, involved) rather than clarifies.
“Shooting a gun”, or “shooting guns or beanbag rounds, etc”, or whatever is specific and relevant to the topic clarifies thought and improves our thought. The opposite approach occluded and damages our thought.
And since language is how we discuss politics, we need clear language in order to truthfully and honestly discuss politics.
:-)
To quote Orwell from Politics and the English Language:
“ Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
“ Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining).”
>I was gently teasing and pointing out that the language you used obscured
I'd gently suggest it was quite the opposite; used to call attention.
"Understatement often leads to ... rhetorical constructs in which understatement is used to emphasize a point. It is a staple of humour in English-speaking cultures."
“Understatement is a form of speech or disclosure which contains an expression of lesser strength than what would be expected. It is the opposite of an embellishment.”
What’s the “expression of lesser strength” in this case? Confused.
Also, the bit you quoted continues with this as an example of the sort of rhetorical construct used in understatement:
“ For example, in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an Army officer has just lost his leg. When asked how he feels, he looks down at his bloody stump and responds, "Stings a bit."”
That’s a quite different style from the “discharged a kinetic energy weapon” phrase which we are analyzing.
If the Army officer in the Monty Python skit had said, “hmm, there seems to have been an incision made through my epidermis, muscle, and bone, resulting in a reduction of my ambulatory capacity”, that might have been funny in other ways but I don’t think it would have been understatement.
Similarly, while I have no idea of the intent of the author of “kinetic energy weapon” phrase, I argue the language in question is not understatement.
>What’s the “expression of lesser strength” in this case? Confused
Well, that particular Wikipedia article is not a complete guide to the English language or the topic of understatement. Taken in isolation, it doesn't prove the existence of the sort of phrase in question.
I guess if this were in court, I'd lose my case because I didn't spend enough time researching.
> pointing out that the language you used obscured (as there were no trebuchets, de orbiting asteroids, etc, involved) rather than clarifies.
And I was pointing that dropping a large rock on someone is a attempt to kill them. I don't particularly care about it happening to be politically motivated.
[EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EF-IT: The other guy was technically correct. And there are lots of edits here. It’s the “Pale Fire” of HN comments.]
[EDIT: All this because I lost the thread that we were talking about when striking miners in the UK dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto David Wilkies taxi whilst he was driving a strike-breaking miner to work, killing David. Hopefully future HN readers will find some value and pleasure in this thread, however.]
Ah. I didn’t realize a naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals was involved.
:):):)
And with regards to politics, part of Orwell’s point was that our language - how we choose to express things - is political, too. Regardless of our intent.
I wasn’t saying anything about the politics of anyone throwing a rock. And I’m not saying anything about your political beliefs.
I’m saying there’s a political power in how language is used, even if the subject under discussion isn’t expressly “political”.
Finally, to be a complete pedant, although “discharge” is often used as a synonym for “shoot”, I’ve never heard it used as a synonym for “throw” before.
So the correct way to use overly complex language to say “throwing a rock” would be “launching a kinetic energy weapon”. Or “releasing”.
Because unlike a gun, or bow, or whatever, in this case the “weapons system”, if it wouldn’t be a dehumanizing offense to call it such, is a persons arm.
Not a gun or bow or phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range or whatever.
And when we throw things we don’t “discharge” them.
Which is actually a perfect example of Orwell’s point.
To try to call someone throwing something a “discharge” is to dehumanize them, because humans do not discharge things from their arms when they throw them.
We do, however, discharge snot from our noses when we sneeze ;)
We are talking about throwing a rock at a truck, right?
[EDIT EDIT: We are not. We are talking about pushing a concrete block off a bridge onto a car below. Which I suppose, pedantically, is to “discharge” since the stored potential kinetic energy of the block is what makes it a weapon, although “pushing” is still a human thing, but it doesn’t feel as dehumanizing as the “throwing” case for some reason. You were, technically, correct, which is the best kind of correct. Ah well, at least we got a lesson in the relationship between language and politics out of the whole thing.]
I didn’t just write a pedantic magnum opus on the wrong subject because I didn’t realize the other person was still discussing hypothetical asteroids being de-orbited to destroy planets, or hypothetical kinetical bombardment weapons aka “rods from god”, did I?
;)
[EDIT EDIT EDIT: You did not, but what you did is almost as embarrassing.]
Lord, I hope I’m not arguing with a 16-year old on the Internet. It’d be like arguing with my younger self :/
Love the way you've got to reach back literally 36 years to find one example of union violence. The reputation that British unions actually have is for getting shat on by bullying employers.
I think it was a pretty watershed moment in union relations in the UK. It's what a lot of people think of when they think of unions in the UK. They're pretty unpopular here. I was explaining why a British person might call them goons.
The Labour party have been ineffective for a decade and haven't been less popular since 1935. They're at their least popular when their leadership is more aligned to the unions. They were at the most recent popularity when they were furthest from the unions. They have just one representative now in Scotland, once a key area for unions.
OK. At a keyboard now so I'll flesh this out a bit.
In my experience people have a fairly balanced view of unions. There's pretty broad membership. In most places I've worked people join the union if there is one. Some unions where regarded negatively at some points in time but there's also general sympathy for some industrial action. It varies - blue collar workers tend to be more positive and white collar workers (especially in non-unionized fields) tend to be less.
But this guy seems to be implying that that's wide-ranging hostility to unions in the UK - which I've never been aware of. There's a plurality of views as you would expect. I've known plenty of tory-voting union members so it's not even a strict right/left split.
Condemning all unions because some stupid idiots dropped a concrete block one someone? Are you a Pinkerton?
As for the union "goons" well it's safe to assume that the people doorknocking are going to be the ones who haven't been driven away by random verbal and physical attacks.
Also at the time that the leader of the NUM, the striking union, was a self-avowed Stalinist.[1]
It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members.
The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members.
this is part of history and one of the many reasons unions have failed in the UK. and they're still failing having lower number of members every single year.
Probably because of the same sentiment towards rewriting history that's going around now. Rather then learn and move forward lots of people seem to prefer going back in time and judging history through today's lens.
I used quotes because I was quoting my flatmate. She said their demeanor was not welcoming at all, and it felt very aggressive. I kind of wish I was there just so I could have told them what I thought, but spilled milk and what not.
Not saying this is the case, but it occurs to me... that would be a good way to sabotage the start of an union. Just send some aggressive people posing like members of the union.
It is, and there's evidence that has happened in the US.
The Pinkertons have been busting unions for over a century - they have pretty much explored the full range of options for worker suppression available to capital.
False flags can be a powerful tool (but becoming less so, as surveillance makes deniability harder).
Each location should have its own union, grouping them all up allows the needs of the few to get drowned out by the wants of the many, and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps have easier access to spread their messaging to employees across locations while normal employees can only organize within their location.
It also significantly decreases negotiating power. The point of unions is that someone small (an individual) has a hard time fairly negotiating with an organization (a company). Multiple small single-site unions would be just as ineffective negotiating with one large multi-site company.
>>> corpitized unions (anything union organisation bigger then 1 location of 1 employer) are goons.
> Each location should have its own union
You might as well go all the way, and condemn any union with more than one member.
The whole point of a union is to have an organization representing the workers that has enough power to negotiate with the employer as a relative equal. Your "single site" unions would be pointless in many cases. They'd have no power, because the employer's power to close and transfer work between sites would completely undermine the union with little disruption to the employer. Just look at how Walmart handled it's only successful unionization effort:
> The United Food and Commercial Workers is seeking an injunction against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to prevent the giant retailer from eliminating meat cutting departments at 180 stores with prepackaged meat....
> The decision to eliminate the meat cutters came just weeks after the butchers at the Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart voted 7-3 to join the UFCW, the first successful union vote in the country at a Wal-Mart, a company well known for its opposition to organized labor.
> The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Walmart's (WMT) recent closing of five stores was done in retaliation for a history of labor activism at one of the locations, rather than because of the plumbing problems the retailer cited, The New York Times reports. The union is asking the government agency for an injunction that would require Walmart to rehire the 2,200 workers who were temporarily laid off or affected by the closings.
Your "single site" unions would be anything less than a sham to neuter unions was that if businesses were also forbidden from expanding beyond a single site, so each location would have to be a totally independent business. So instead of the Walmart corporation, you'd have 11,496 independent retail businesses with no common ownership or management structure.
> (...) and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps
I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation?
I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?
My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist.
The primary positive effect of a union is its appeals process that keep employers from firing you on a whim.
Nothing about that positive effect requires the union be forced upon you, and if unions had to earn their dues they wouldn't act in bad faith as often.
> My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist.
Who said anything about forced unions? We're talking about allowing unions to exist so that workers are free to join them if that happens to be their wish.
I mean, we're having a discussion on how corporations use their coercive power and influence over workers lives to degrade their lives to serve the interests of a few, and somehow you're expecting to shift the conversation to how bad unions are if we don't get a say whether we join one or not?
Unions can (and, if they're strong and it's not prohibited, often do) make collective agreements with the employer that mandate that the employer will not be permitted to employ non-union workers for these jobs. In a "closed union shop" you'd be required to join the union when you're hired, and if you would not join or if you would get kicked out of the union, the employer would have to fire you. This is pretty much 'forced unionisation'.
Another possible part of such collective agreements is that the employer will withhold union dues and hand them to the union no matter if the employee wants to join or not; to prevent the 'free rider' effect where some employees get the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for the representation (the appropriateness of this argument can be debated, but that's at least the stated intent).
In about half of USA ("right to work" states) such agreements are illegal, and in about half of USA unions can have such practices.
Yeah, stupid laws then. Considering whether someone is in a union or not before hiring them is discriminating and ought to be illegal. Thanks for the background.
How it works in my state is every grocery chain (except walmart) joined an employer union, called allied employers inc, and they negotiated a union contract with UFCW21. (yes, the employer's answer to unions, was to start their own union)
The effect is every grocery chain in the area has the same price-fixed wage they offer, price-fixed benefits, and etcra.
Don't like your wage at Fred Meyers? too bad, the safeway down the road is in the same union contract and thus the same wage.
Get kicked out because an unexpected financial/medical expense killed your ability to pay dues? too bad, none of the other chains in the area can hire you until you pay off the back dues, that you can't pay because you can't get a job.
Union is holding a vote to strike and pushing out misleading information when really the only provision the employer is objecting too is a new one that requires the employer pay the union dues for any unfilled position because the union just wants to make more money so they can vote themselves into a raise? too bad, you can only communicate with people on your shift at your location in your section of the store, the union however has mandated access to break rooms, as well a mailing and email broadcasts.
What people don't seem to get, is that sometimes, the power unions get from getting so large, can be used against the employees, not just the employer.
But you can't even bring that up without getting strawmanned as a republican union hater.
I haven't even gotten into programmer unions, with high dues and 9k initiation fees that get voted for because nobody who votes it will have to pay it as they are already in.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union.
They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization.
A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
> Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.
<sarcasm>Well, then that would be the first and only time that jackass did something skeezy and illegal</sarcasm>
Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.
In my mind they are all the same. I honestly paid so little attention, I didn't even do the research. Everyone just kept referring to the local, but I don't remember what number. This was 2010 time frame. I've slept (a lot) since then.
HN is not the best platform to from anti-capitalism sentiments. There's a lot of privilege here and it makes people pretty blind to how awful capitalism is (and the things it creates, like anti-union sentiment).
Unions aren't anti-capitalist, they explicitly work within a capitalist framework to ensure better pay and working conditions for their workers.
Unions deal in money and don't seek to change that, unions recognize and don't challenge ownership of the business.
What about them makes them anti-capitalist, except that they seek to shift the balance of "who, of all the people working on a business, gets paid what for the operation of a business"?
I'd like to see where they're ensuring long term viability - every group they work with in the US is either facing a pension crisis or is not thriving.
That is simply not true and a common anti-union trope. Unions should have mandatory representation on corporate boards. Broadcom would be my first choice.
They only exist because without them, capitalism and its advocates brutally oppress the workers, keeping them in a perpetual state of poverty. The fact that they are not literally trying to overthrow the regime doesn't mean they aren't anti-capitalist.
Unions are extortion rackets and price fixing cartels. As such, they are not only unethical in themselves and should be illegal, they constitute an attempt to obstruct capitalism.
Amusingly, this hypocrisy is literally embedded in US antitrust law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/17
Literally "price fixing cartels are bad, except when they aren't".
And keep in mind, we don't have a "pure" capitalism like the insane libertarian types would. (Remember how Ron Paul said Civil Rights legislation was unnecessary because the market would have taken care of it?
It took years of fixing the system with child labour laws, union laws, anti-discrimination laws, factory strikes, workers riots, civil rights laws, minimum wage, etc.
Capitalism works in the Nations where it does because of years of regulation to make it more fair and to weed out exploitation.
People wanting to dismantle the state right now (and make no mistake, many of these riots have a lot of anarco-anti-cap/antifa people in them causing the violence) do not understand they will not get a better State. They'll be lucky to get some stable regions, but when a State falls there's a power vacuum. Then you have to start over .. and there will be a ton of corruption until you get everything "right" again.
> Remember how Ron Paul said Civil Rights legislation was unnecessary because the market would have taken care of it?
I wonder how people could make such an argument if they have historical records of business owners rejecting more paying customers and spending more to put together duplicate infrastructure just because they felt that some paying customers had to be subjected to degraded levels of service just because.
> because of years of regulation to make it more fair and to weed out exploitation
Actually it's because of years of union-organising, putting pressure on companies and governments to implement these measures. Without unions, we would have none of these improved work conditions and protections.
Please, go on and continue the propaganda about how socialism and communism doesn't work. Please point to failed nations/states that had communism and explain how they failed due to communism and that it definitely wasn't anything else.
Becoming a communist state is impossible. The leader of the socialist state won't let it happen. Power corrupts, why should we be putting more power in the hands of the state in hopes that one day it will relinquish it?
History isn’t over. If you think capitalism isn’t tending the same way (with the example of China showing how successfully it can work), you haven’t been paying attention.
This does not surprise me. I've been waiting to see corporate intelligence agencies pop up. When you think about it, Amazon had an operating budget last year of around $309 billion [1], already 75% of Germany's at $399 billion [2]. Facebook has an operating budget of around $35 billion, but that is still enough to field a small intelligence arm. Also, that is Facebook..not all Facebook properties combined.
Most of Amazon's revenue is retail sales. Buying a product for $10 and selling it for $10.10 is not comparable to $10 of government spending. After deducting cost of sales and cost of fulfilment you're left with ~$60 billion.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the bulk of their profits are from Amazon Web Services. That is potentially a factor that contributes to this skewed and awkward framing of labor.
These corporations are their own intelligence agencies. Facebook knows who your friends are, Amazon knows where you live, thanks to their line of doorbell camera, and then there's the Google-Microsoft email duopoly.
The vast majority of Amazon's operating expenses is paying manufacturers for the products that people buy, so there's really no comparison to a country's budget. Plus their margins for that are close to 0, and overall they constantly take large losses from their physical retail business in order to expand everything else.
Corporate intelligence agencies have long existed, but they don't call themselves that. They are usually called corporate law firms or PR agencies. Note that the Amazon job description was specific about working with attorneys.
Wasn't there previous news stories of FB doing exactly this? A 3rd party was hired to investigate something. It's all fuzzy, so if I'm totally wrong, someone please correct me.
Beyond the creepiness of the tasks required, what sticks out to me is the persistent use of Amazon-specific jargon:
> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders)
Does anyone who doesn’t work at Amazon know what “L7 + ER Principals” means?
Perhaps these are universally understood terms in some fields, but my guess is that the “error” was posting this publicly, and it was meant to be an Amazon-internal job posting.
Sometimes, for legal reasons, these sorts of jobs are required to be posted publicly, but not in a way that makes the underlying content clear to anyone [0]. So another possibility is that the mistake was posting the job with too many specifics.
I also figured that out by searching, but what does it mean in context? I.e. what is the significance of talking to people at that level vs one above or below, and why, given limited ad space, would you include this detail?
You could try to figure this out by trying to map out all of amazon and see how far away from Bezos your “stakeholders” are, but so what?
It’s a signal that tells some
people much more information than it tells others. It’s either an oversight or a deliberate message that the job is for insiders. Either way, it’s baffling to me, an outsider.
it's not an unusual callout for an Amazon job. Some roles are very technical, you can be heads down working on code or doing data analysis almost all the time and what talking you do is to your teammates. If you need to communicate up in your own org you just tell your direct boss, across orgs you tell a program manager, either of who will be reasonably technical. Other jobs you are expected to present directly to the higher level, non-technical folks. L7 is "upper middle management", so likely have been in the management world for long enough to need some abstraction laid onto the detail.
I see this a lot in job postings; they often use internal language that you need to somehow learn to translate. This is particularly true with positions, which makes no sense because you then need to figure out what exactly “L7” is relative to the scale you have in your head.
>Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company, establish and track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics
>Analysts must be capable of creating and deploying sophisticated search strings tailored to various business interests and used to monitor for future risk; Engaging business leaders (L6+) directly is core to this support, and may cover topics including organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders.
>Analysts are expected to close knowledge gaps by initiating and maintaining engagement with topical subject matter experts on topics of importance to Amazon, including hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor
I don't think people doubted that... but that doesn't necessarily imply that they are a net good. For instance, the Chicago Plumbers Union was fantastic for the plumbers but ensured the city's water supply was poisoned for decades at an increased cost to citizens.
Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman paid Twitter employees to spy on dissidents. He was also the guy that ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. One of the spied-on dissidents was a friend of Khashoggi.
1. MBS was not elected - a qualifier I included intentionally.
2. What Twitter would have needed was a counter-intelligence analyst (reactive), as opposed to Amazon's proactive intelligence post. Now that I've written it out, what twitter needed was better security - not COINTEL.
3. If companies start dabbling with intelligence and counter-intelligence against political actors directly (instead of offloading to state apparatus like the FBI), then we are reaching Deus Ex levels of Dystopia
Yes - Dystopian. You're likely familiar with the dystopian trope where unchecked corporate entities supersede nation-states. I got reminded of that here.
In my ideal democracy, I do expect pushback, but I'd like for it to come from actual voters. If you believe that not only are "corporations are people (my friend)", but should be able to go mano a mano with individual politicians (not lobbying), here's a quick thought experiment: how would you feel if that sentence were from a document by TikTok Inc?
first off, the "corporate entities" are not entirely unchecked. they have shareholders who vote and boards who oversee the company.
second, the "nation states" are on their last legs. the globalization of this tiny planet, the birth of the international citizen, and the truly global nature of the internet will make sure this happens.
the pushback against local democracy by global players is entirely justified considering it's inherently local nature.
on your last point, tiktok, as any other corporation is entitled to act as they see fit.
what we're actually missing is a global government, with global elections that can keep in check both the local governments and the global corporate players, creating a level playing field. this should be the ultimate wealth unlocker.
Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.
I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
As long as we’re offering anecdotes, I’m part of a union and I think they have a positive effect on workers and enjoy a generally positive opinion among the employees. This union is probably less powerful than the one you are talking about as no one is mandated to join, and no one is impossible to fire.
Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
> Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union.
Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations)
> Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
>Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming.
Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with.
>Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
No, you would pay employees using profits in part, and implicate them into the decision-making process. That way the incentives of union-leadership, workers, and stakeholders align. You can also push for union structures that minimize the power of union leadership and instead give it to the rank and file. Basically, making your company a bit more into a worker-coop fixes the issue.
> Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with.
I disagree. Not every company is public, first of all. So not every company is beholden to shareholders who demand endless growth at any cost. There are lots of private companies that are content with the size they are at, and with the revenue they are generating and aren't tempted to start squeezing their employees.
But that's not the issue. The issue is competition. Eventually, you have to cut costs in order to be competitive even if you're very nice, and if you read business administration textbooks cutting employee compensation is often the primary way.
Ok, so then how does a unionized company stay competitive if it isn't allowed to cut costs by reducing employee compensation? You are suggesting only unions know the effective secret methods of cutting costs that business-textbook-writers are unaware of?
It's quite simple. They either cut profits, or offer employees equity in compensation for lower wages. That goes against what the owners want, but it helps the workers and maintains the usefulness of the enterprise.
I believe in the competitive scenario, there are no profits to cut. It's not clear to me if equity is worth anything if there are no profits to distribute and the company is not growing.
I think the point is that whether it is a "nice employer" or a union, the company will be less competitive. This strikes me as a tragedy of the commons which would have to be resolved by legislation to force all market participants to offer the same benefits. (Of course, the difficulty then are participants putside of your legal system, but taroffs could hopefully capture this detail.)
Equity is always worth something, because companies own capital, and capital is inherently valuable.
In this scenario, there is no loss in competitiveness. The union bargains for pay when there is profit, and when there is no profit it bargains for capital. At the limit, when the workers own the company entirely, then their own self-interest will be to reduce their salary in order to protect their equity. In this sense, their salaries will fall in line with what they would earn in another company, or slightly higher, but they will have massively more assets and equity than if they didn't have a union.
Of course, in reality, if there was no growth there would be bigger problems, but you get the gist.
I really fail to see how unions in this scenario make the company less competitive, or create worse conditions for the workers than without the union.
As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread.
"Racism doesn't exist just because one person used n-word! It's just one anecdote!"
... is not an argument.
Anyone with any exposure unions knows they are far from perfect, many of them are quite terrible.
This kind of ideological, wilful ignorance kills any goodwill people might otherwise have among the adult population who will invariably have come up against theses issue probably multiple times in their lives through either personal experiences or acquaintances.
The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective.
They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system).
We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance.
Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel
You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world.
First of all, it's widely known that Amazon already has a rigid employee structure that pays according to the internal pay scale. This alone shuts dispels the "omg unions keep top performers down", because internally your only shot at a pay increase is to run through their promotion obstacle course.
Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power. They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason. Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress.
And, coincidentally, should you ask a person making such statements I am confident that they will place themselves firmly in the "excel" category. Ignoring, of course, that self-categorization does little good when Jobs is calling up Schmidt (wait, calling would be the smart move; they documented it in email instead) to say, "hey, you don't hire our workers, and we won't hire yours. Win, win!" Where's your meritocracy now? I'm not going to say a union would have prevented that particular incident, but a union would carry more weight saying, "remember that shit you and $OTHER_COMPANY pulled last year? Yeah, well, to prevent such things in the future..." than some IC in her manager's office where the manager holds all of the cards.
Great point—every company I've worked at, people have complained about lack of transparency about who gets promoted. HR and company leaders always respond "oh we're trying, it's hard, trust us", etc. But with a union workers would have a seat at the table to change the process.
"You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world."
You mean the 3 decades I dealt with unions?
"Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power."
In theory, they were there to help employees. In practice, they are just as corrupt as any large organization and only hurt companies that have to deal with them.
"They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason."
The only way? Please. We have federal and state employment laws that protect all works. No unions required.
"Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress."
If you are a good employee, you have plenty of power. If you are bad and under performing, you need the protection by the unions.
In countries that have really string unions, it's getting to the point where you won't get hired at all without experience because firing an employee involves a court case and lots of red tape. This resulted in protests/riots in Sweden about 5 or 6 years ago.
It also makes a company less competitive in the international marketplace. Now that the Internet has opened up commerce internationally, companies that pay unskilled workers 4x what they are actually worth don't do so well.
It's difficult for me to change my views on this when I've seen the rampant corruption first-hand and the cancerous like effect unions have on a company over time.
> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel
SAG-AFTRA represents both movie stars and B-list actors you've only ever seen in infomercials.
> Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
SAG-AFTRA represents every American movie star, the same movie stars that can command multi-million dollar contracts with their own terms with the help of the union.
Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy?
Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted).
Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr
Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr.
Average "union" pay is: $25/hr
So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
I'm not sure what companies you've worked for, but salary is almost never based on a 'meritocracy,' it's based on the minimum amount an employer thinks they can get away with. That value has nothing to do with an employee's output, and everything to do with minimizing costs.
Well, speak for yourself and the companies you've worked for, but that hasn't been my experience at all.
At both of the companies I've worked at we got a yearly "merit-based" increase depending on how your manager ranks you vs. your peers. The increase is anywhere from 0-5%, and the manager can only recommend their top employees for the high (5%) merit-based increases. This is on top of other increases (such as promotion-based increases), btw. I've gotten several pretty high merit-based increases back-to-back, and those +5% really start to compound with other forms of increase (promotions, bonuses, etc) after a few years.
That isn't paying by merit, it is a leadership style with financial incentives. An obnoxious one in my opinion, but some people like it. Very common in sales.
If you were paid by "merit", you would be paid by your contribution to the revenue of the company. That is mostly restricted to owners.
I disagree. Unions tend to favor seniority-based promotion over merit-based promotion[0] for obvious reasons (unions can't tell how much merit an employee has without deferring judgment to company managers/execs, but unions can tell how long someone has been working without deferring judgment to anyone).
Some people like unions, I think because they're lucky enough to have had a good experience, or to be part of a union that was not decayed by age or special interests.
Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed.
Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.
The government will never be as in tune with the needs of the workers as the workers themselves.
I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago.
But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense.
I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay.
I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good!
I think worker-owned cooperatives do make a ton of sense and bridge the interest gap between employers and employees. When the interests of the unions align with the interest of society at large in that we want to promote productivity, it fixes a lot of things.
Who supports these pro-worker politicians and holds them accountable? In the US, both parties are very cozy with corporate interests, because that's where the money (and thus ability to mobilize voters) is. Historically, unions played a major role in holding politicians accountable, and supporting those who were more pro-worker. The parties have become more corporatized as union membership has declined. Without the base of support from organized labor, this is a likely outcome.
The average person doesn't have any power over their government. You know who does? Their employers. Given this power imbalance, who exactly do you expect the government to "represent"?
Nice anecdata. Unions are necessary to ensure fair negotiations between employees and their employer, though. Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair, as the latter holds far more power. Unions are a tried and true concept almost everywhere in the world, the Nordic Countries being a particulary good example. It'd seem that being unable to provide basic rights for workers is part of the fabled American exceptionalism -- together with the inability to provide universal healthcare, the monthly school shooting, and war in perpetuity.
> Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair
wow! what a statement.
you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.
i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.
>>Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair
>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.
Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.
If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.
It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.
Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.
Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.
In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.
There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.
By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.
I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.
1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power.
2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.
> You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.
I am not wrong:
"According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...
> I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s.
They are as relevant as they were in 1776:
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith
Isn’t this kind of separate from Amazon’s actions though? Unless you’re positing that Amazon is actually acting in the interest of their employees, or thinks they are?
False dichotomy. Two things can both be true: Amazon is not acting in the interest of their employees, and unions are also not acting in the interest of the employees.
It's possible for unions to be bad for both the employees and the employer, and only good for professional middlemen bureaucrats and national parent union leadership.
They treat part timers the worst. You get to pay dues but get little of the benefits.
As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.
Would you agree that there are some corrupt market-based economies in our world? Would you say that the fact that there are corrupt and inefficient market-based economies means that all market-based economies result in negative outcomes?
Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.
What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year.
As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves.
Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
> Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ...
Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.
Is this argument in any way distinguishable from someone saying 'Nobody is forcing you to work a non-union job. You're free to quit and take a union job any time you want'?
It's always interesting to see the anti-union arguments on threads like these. Half the people say that unions are anarchist thugs who beat people up and bash their heads in with bricks, and half say they're gray bureaucratic paper pushing middlemen.
Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.
The problem is that the needle for "particularly bad" gets moved every year if there's no countervailing force. Short (<3hr) shifts and JiT scheduling were "particularly bad" a few years ago. Now they're probably the norm in the service/retail industry. The new innovation(s) thanks to Amazon seem to be unpaid security screenings and hidden performance metrics. How long until these are just SOP for all large retail companies?
I live in France, being a union member here is incredibly dull, all day long people come with their employment contract, and you pore over the labor code and the various unions contracts to check the legality of various allegations.
at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.
a lot of useless bureaucracy that culminates in yearly standstills via strikes. no wonder unions in France are slowly losing members:
> A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions.
A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers.
The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European
The fact is that there are effective unions. There are also corrupt unions. The problem is that each side will only acknowledge one of those sentences as being correct.
> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.
But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition).
> They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead!
The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.
I am no fan of unions, but I think they were necessary to force business owners to treat workers decently - to make them pay better than starvation wages, and have decent working conditions. Then came the Cold War, and business owners had an extra incentive to treat workers decently: it undercut communist propaganda, and business owners did not want communism in the country where they owned a business. And so workers didn't think unions were necessary, because they were getting a decent enough deal.
Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.
I've heard nothing but bad things about American unions from both management and many (but not all) workers. I strongly believe that we need labor organization, but I also wonder if someone needs to (cliche alert!) disrupt the space with a new model or just new unions that are not run by bureaucratic chair warmers or the mob.
The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.
One of the biggest problems is honestly that. The existing unions are trying to expand into other industries. It only brings the existing mess, ducktapes on some new layers and fucks up more things. They aren't even expanding for the workers at that point, but to increase revenue for their administrative salaries.
Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job.
And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con.
The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.
This is just proof that not everyone is following the same narrative that you’re personally following or understands reality the same way you do.
It’s beyond me how that job post would make sense to anyone besides someone who is disconnected from the usual contending rhetorics Amazon is involved in.
Nobody raised a flag on how that would look like for them? You gotta be pretty oblivious to read that and say “yeah that looks good to me”.
I’m not even discrediting the value or purpose of that particular position since I have zero context besides the ad but I don’t understand how can you sprinkle those terms and reference those specific groups without reflecting deeply how it could be perceived.
Mainly on the optics. I know that’s shallow but I’m commenting on how it looks because perhaps that’s a symptom of something deeper.
Maybe people involved on these projects are so oblivious that it never occurred to them that they may be contributing to something that could be borderline unethical.
What’s kind of ridiculous about this is that you can tell these job requirements were written by a lawyer or similar. People that are trained and presumed to have a somewhat acute skill to evaluate the ethical complexities of a situation.
Why would Amazon want to prevent workers from unionizing? Look what it did for teaching, policing, mail delivery, port security, taxi driving, waste management, public service, and construction.
Ageee. Amazon, walmart and co union bust because they are really really concerned with promoting healthy labor markets. Nothing at all to do with the fact that union workers make significantly more money than non-union labor.
Some unions are in fact quite useful. For example, non-union electricians are often asked to do dangerous work and often have little to no recourse. Truck drivers also have unions and its one of the reasons that driving a truck is still a profession that can provide a good quality of life for its workers. Nobody complains about UPS, and every driver is a Teamster.
Public unions are somewhat problematic, I'll give you that. Police are the best example of overpowered unions. Police forces often have tremendous leverage against local governments which makes it hard to keep them in line. What's happened in NYC anytime minor reforms are tried is a disgrace.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't have a problem with workers trying to unionize while recognizing that unions do have issues. Amazon warehouse workers are on the ground doing potentially dangerous work on fast moving floors with robots flying around. I think those people have a right to get paid a living wage given Amazon's profits.
Basically, if you treat your employees happy, they won't have any reason to attempt to unionize.
I think there is a growing part of america that is coming around to the idea that the path to more negotiating power for laborers is not unions. It is through basic income and social safety nets.
I assume you're asking this question in good faith.
Negotiating power is derived exclusively from the ability to walk away. When walking away from your employment means being evicted, starving, and being unable to afford medical care, your ability to do so is crippled.
I was and all of the replies so far are assuming UBI would cover all basic necessities in the long term in every part of the country. Many people with above avg income TODAY struggle with medical bills and even housing. So I'm not sure I buy the argument that a UBI would be able to cover them unless many other things change first.
Hence the need to strengthens social safety nets too. Universal health care removes the medical costs problem for individuals (I’m not weighing in on its societal cost here except to say that other countries manage it).
A UBI should cover the cost of housing and food, though it does not guarantee that you can live in a highly-sought after area without other income. That must be factored into employee compensation in the same way that it already is for desirable jobs today. It puts more pressure on cities to ensure that close, affordable housing exists for the lower-wage workers like retail and service workers who help make those cities desirable places to live. A job at a swanky downtown coffee shop with an hour commute becomes a lot less attractive if I can ditch that job and the transit costs without worrying about my basic survival. So the coffee shop has to increase pay or lose its employees and close up. Its downtown location and clientele will either absorb the price increase, or downtown will become a less competitive living space due to the loss of the business.
A UBI will not remove all of the reasons someone can’t pack up and leave if the area is too expensive, there are lots of human factors in play, but it will increase people’s ability to move elsewhere without having to fear for their very survival.
Ok thanks for your response. I do agree that a UBI could go a lot further if it was implemented alongside universal healthcare and those two things together would significantly increase your bargaining position as a worker.
Simple, it would mean the employee doesn't need the job as badly as the employer needs the worker. If you don't need to worry about starving, it's a much more powerful position to begin from, naturally.
If healthcare is not tied to your job, you have much more leverage because you are not shackled to a particular employer with an attractive healthcare plan. The cost-benefit analysis of working for or leaving a company no longer includes basic human needs which are held effectively hostage via your employment status.
This can be extended to other social services such as childcare.
It's much easier to quit an abusive boss if you have some income to sustain yourself (UBI). You don't have to put up with the abuse for another month or two until you have a new job offer, etc.
If that were true then how come existing social safety netting in the form of unemployment benefits haven't helped people stuck in this type of situation?
Unemployment benefits only kick in for people who have lost their job through no fault of their own, though state laws probably vary here. If I quit because my boss is a jerk, or I’m not being paid enough, or many other reasons, I am not eligible for unemployment. My employer has a lot of power, since finding a new job can take a lot of time that I may not have given a full workday and other responsibilities.
The vast majority of people who receive unemployment had an unplanned job loss, which already puts them at a disadvantage both planning-wise and psychologically. If instead you KNOW that you will receive income when choosing to leave a job, you are more able to prepare for how it will affect your lifestyle.
Less precarity. If you aren't terrified of losing your job, because you know you won't be instantly devastated without it (losing health insurance, being evicted), you have less to lose in labor negotiations.
The presumption that the ideas we came up with in during the industrial revolutions are the best is preposterous. They might be the best (old idea aren't necessarily bad), but there are also probably modern options.
I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial system. I would posit for any social institution to be stable you need an alignment of incentives.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this idea that adversaries create instability. Stability is the result of all forces acting on an object summing to zero, to abuse metaphor. You can't have that if all of the forces are pointing in the same direction. There is a reason Nash equilibrium is called "equilibrium"; it is stable.
Unions fail primarily because they are a very shoddy bandaid. When you have commodity labor, in which each worker is the same, a union has the capacity to plausibly represent them as a group. That cooperation gives the workers negotiating power. There is A) no reason to suspect that that negotiating power cannot or will not be abused, and B) the premise is usually false. Police are the obvious target here on both counts, as a police union is nothing more than a private army, and policing is far from commodity labor. It matters a lot who my police are. I think that teacher's unions are probably a better example of the problems though because people tend to think of the police as an outlier.
I'd take these kind of complaints a lot more seriously if they were coming from people with substantial experience in unionized workplaces.
The adversarial situation you want to avoid already exists: Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible; you want to get paid as much as possible. All you're doing by disdaining collective bargaining is sacrificing leverage.
I think you're being sarcastic, but most of those industries pay a living wage to their employees -- or they did until some SV scabs showed up -- unlike Amazon's warehouse workers.
I can't speak to unions' effects on taxis -- I don't know if I've ever been somewhere which has unionized taxi drivers -- but I'm guessing Amazon isn't aiming to have a workforce which can shoot innocent people with impunity.
The primary complaints with Amazon though are about working conditions, not pay.
I don't even think it is about ruthless cost-savings, as it is about ruthless efficiency of the system. They are building an automated warehouse/supply-chain, they just happen to be using real-robots for some of it and humans for other parts. They humans are just cogs, with machine dictated instructions. Much of the misery probably isn't even intentionally, but they still are culpable for it. They need more constraints on how humans are used within their system. Just using a minimum rest period (even more gracious ones than state mandates) is not enough, if you presume humans are working at 100% efficiency, constantly moving and doing for the rest of the time. And not to mention that excludes human desires like autonomy. Accounting for that, while not hindering efficacy too much is an interesting systems problem that Amazon's industrial engineers should be spending more time addressing (though I'm sure they already are investing significant effort, just clearly isn't enough).
Is that even legal? I thought the US or most states at least like most other countries have laws against undermining the ability of employees to organise.
If you've ever worked in retail, one of the first "training" videos they show you is an anti-union informational video.
One of the big points of the videos is to report union organizers to management ASAP.
This kind of training is extremely common for low wage jobs in the U.S. If almost all large retailers are doing it, it mustn't be illegal, or not enforced.
Saw these videos during my first job (cart attendant at Target). This behavior happens at every big company, both in and outside of tech.
I remember the video being incredibly weird - they basically posited unions as bad because nonmembers would feel socially isolated from member. Eg - in one clip two workers would be gossiping about info from a members-only meeting and the moment a nonmember walked up to them, they became quiet and it turned into this strange teen drama.
The House has passed a bill [1] that would make it illegal to make these meetings mandatory, btw. Obviously won't pass with a GOP senate, but could happen if the Dems manage to retake government.
Hah. In the US, there are laws, but their effectiveness depends on enforcement. Additionally, there's an entire industry of employer-side law firms focused on union busting, who advise employers on how to do as much as possible without crossing the legal line or getting caught when doing so.
I would be curious to know what European labor laws are like. I'm also curious about what kinds of tactics these companies resort to which are sufficiently legal. Can anyone recommend good labor books?
To paint the American landscape a bit more, the majority of what are called "union avoidance" activities are legal: since employers are employing the workers, they have a captive audience, and use that to the full extent of their ability, usually with the help of outside legal consultants. A lot of what goes on is surveys, videos, forced informational sessions, etc. Much of it can be compared to targeted public relations. Even when an employer stays within the full bounds of the law, they're usually substantially advantaged over the labor organizer: full information about the workforce and a captive audience goes really far.
So where do the violations of law come in? A lot of it comes from very murky, subjective boundaries: employers can't threaten to shut down a plant or time wage increases in a way to interfere with a union organizing campaign. But a lot of what union avoidance specialists' work involves is consulting at exactly how to do the above in a legal way. It will end up in court, and if the consultants did their job right, the employer will win.
Beyond that, you get into activities like firing workers purely because they're involved in union activities: here the labor avoidance consultants will sometimes help with building a paper trail to target workers viewed as problematic. Another illegal activity is spying, either on union meetings or workers and organizers when they're off premises. Oftentimes, employers want to do this on their own volition, and union busting consultants actively work to curtail this (or at least make sure any firings happen in a legal, documented way).
Generally you need to have a minimal number of employees that form the committee of a new union. You register at the Court, inform your employer. Anyone who wants to be represented by the union can join you. The employer must inform you about organisational changes / salaries / etc. You can add your union to a confederacy of unions, biggest of which has a place at the tripartite table during Labor law updates - so it's the state, employer groups and labor unions deciding about yearly wage increases.
It seems perfectly fine and honest to post a job listing and then take it down hours later due to backlash, claim it was a mistake, and refuse to answer follow-up questions on it? What part of that sounds honest to you?
they honestly posted a job, they honestly got backlash, they honestly decided it was a mistake, they honestly refused to answer follow-up questions. What part of that is not honest?
Honestly, I think you simply don't like that they don't agree with you 100% and act as you would have them act, and you should honestly admit that, and honesty would require that you stop accusing them of being other than honest on the basis of what you outlined.
Yeah, (dis)honesty isn't what was noteworthy about this. It's just optically very strange. Like, the fact that they employ people to do this is totally unsurprising to me, but the fact that they're willing to say so in public job posting seems really tone-deaf. Like, what hiring manager thought this was a good idea, and how oblivious must they be of how Amazon is publicly perceived?
This is their business. This is how they want to run it. We can either boycott them or not. I have worked most of my life in mega big corporations, and I cannot say "oh I didn't know that bankA did this and bankB did that". I am either stupid, complicit or indifferent.
Amazon will look after Amazon's interests (aka the shareholders). The little people have rights defined by laws. As long as they are not breached, Amazon (and every Amazon out there) will match on.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I do not condone the majority of Amazon's practices and thus I don't buy from them (or at least they are low in my list of preferred options). But since we got capitalism, and since the US is the HQ of capitalism.. then why is anyone surprised? Facebook will spy. Amazon will squeeze every cent they can, and so on..
It's fascinating how emotional of a topic this is on HN. A lot of people seem to be taking a staunch binary, black-and-white, us-vs-them approach to this issue.
I've known friends that hate their unions (usually retail), and those that love their unions (electricians, UPS drivers etc.) These are of course just a small group of anecdotes and not representative of a comprehensive dataset so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another if the question is "are unions horrifically evil or a godsend that's universally necessary."
The framing of this type of debate doesn't seem to foster good faith discussion.
My only personal experience with being in a union was a call center job I had when I was 18. I don't recall dues being much, and everybody got full health coverage (including dental and vision) at 25 hrs/wk, and that ended up being a big draw for a lot of people in the area. So that was pretty cool.
I've also worked at a lot of places that weren't union where the employees were paid well, received benefits and treated fairly. That was also pretty cool.
I guess to me if I were to have an opinion it'd be something along the lines of "If people want to unionize, they have a legal right to do so, and I don't have any particular issue with that. If it works out with a positive outcome, great! If it doesn't, that sucks!"
I'm definitely not in favor of people being bullied or misled to go either way on this issue. It literally just seems like something people should talk about in good faith and make their decision accordingly. It's just a choice.
There are two separate issues here. They’re only tangentially related.
1) Unions, good or bad?
2) Is it appropriate for a company like Amazon to spy on their work force to stop them from unionizing, as compared to persuading their work force that unionizing would be bad?
The majority of my post was addressing the way that this is being discussed on here. There have been a lot of nasty comments on this issue ranging from accusing people of being Pinkertons and bots, to posts about declining meritocracy etc.
It seems as though this thread has had a whole lot of posts conflating the two issues you mentioned and it just muddies the waters imho.
As I mentioned, I think it should be a good-faith discussion across the board and I'm not a fan of bullying or misleading people.
I could be misunderstanding this but the discussion about your second point has been in some cases in this thread been supplanted by people arguing about who is on the "right side" rather than the more immediate discussion of "is this an acceptable practice?"
Like I said earlier, it's really fascinating how emotional this gets.
While being in Basic Income meetings frequent subject was "what will happen to people rights when AI takes over" sadly this is example of the answer of what is the most probable outcome...
Jeff has a lot of money. Surely workers rights don't hit the bottom line that hard.
Does Jeff not know that everyone will remember him for this behavior?
The error was that they stated so bluntly in a public job listing that they wanted a union buster with an intelligence background. They still are looking for someone like that, of course (or many someones), the error was that the job posting wasn't written in a properly deniable way.
HN title: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’
My thoughts after reading the title: "Oh good, I always thought Amazon was scummy and lacked integrity, but credit where credit is due, they did good here.
.
The actual article's title and body: Amazon deletes their own job listings for union-busters, as a PR response due to public outcry.
It's mind-boggling to me that we allow this sort of thing, and that brazenly putting on a job description that you want to hire someone to help thwart legally-protected labor organizing isn't something a company can get fined -- or worse -- over.
I am surprised from the reactions here. What is the best way to deal with worker union blackmails according to you? I know people like to portray worker and amazon as good guy and bad guy, but I think most of us has seen some demands that are pretty outrageous from them. I think it is best if both sides have contact person with whom they can negotiate.
Don't get me wrong, I think worker unions are essential for pushing the demands of underprivileged and should exist, but nobody should agree every demand from them.
Unions don't end up with outright control over business. Generally speaking, companies and unions do continue to negotiate throughout the term of a contract, which negotiations are formalized in Memoranda of Understanding. And during contract negotiations, if negotiations over a particular issue stall, the law empowers companies to make a "last and final" offer, which is then included in the contract presented to the workforce.
(This is U.S.-specific.)
The idea that a company must "agree to every demand" from a union seems to me a strawman. Bargaining ideally maximizes net value, and true collapses in bargaining are rare.
"Outrageous" demands that are met, therefore, represent a company's unwillingness to reallocate the value of those demands towards other contract elements (that is, to say "we can't do that, but we'll offer this instead"). If they were truly too costly, the company would have either a) refused the terms, or b) failed to bear the cost and gone under.
I think the problem is mainly the methods. Delta, for example, actively runs campaigns to deter their employees for joining the union. I don't know how is that perceived in general but I assume that people in general consider that more acceptable than the idea of running internal counterintelligence to prevent the formation of unions.
The reality is that Amazon is under so much scrutiny that pretty much any program on this area would be criticized.
This is actually a really interesting recursive algorithm: That is, the job listing for analysts to track labor organizing threats turned out to be a labor organizing threat.
Man, it sure would suck if the lowest ranked and most precarious Amazon employees got a bigger piece of Bezo's pie. What an awful world that would be. /s
I don’t know why this is even controversial. American style unions are bad for business, plain and simple. And Amazon is legally required to put the interests of its investors first. Amazon is going to be doing whatever it can to discourage unionization, that’s just what’s going to happen, and I find it hard to blame them.
An interesting thing from Amazon’s labor organizing risk rubric: increased diversity drastically decreases the risk of employees organizing. In case you were curious why all the big companies are so strongly pro-diversity, that’s a pretty compelling reason for them.
As far as my understanding goes, companies of any size have the right to exercise a sort of capital strike at their discretion. The perfectly legal shuttering of The Gothamist after their newsroom unionized a while back is a good example of that (the story is a fascinating read!) (0)
I would honestly love to hear from those that aren't favorable towards unions about why it's acceptable for business management and ownership to punitively destroy jobs and value over ideological issues, but it's unacceptable for the employees to have that option as part of collective bargaining?
Why is this a surprise? If you work in infosec at any multinational you would know activists (hacktivism) and hostile nations/leaders are a serious threat you track. Has no one heard of Dataminr? What do people think it's used for. The "labor" part is a bit unusual but given their business it kinda makes sense.
This reminds me of how back in 2016 right before November US elections,I read threat intel reports and conference style presentations from threat intel vendors talking in detail about Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Steele dossier, this was before buzzfeed decided to publish it (all other media refused at the time). This is all public stuff now but big corps are very interested in learnig about the latest strategic intel so they can adopt. And that's perfectly fine so long as no laws are broken. This is similar to how big corps get a scoop on emargoed CVEs so they can patch before it's made public. A lot of times this is what intelligence community people do when they want to settle down and make money. I'll bet good money whoever they hire has background at FBI,NSA or DIA.
US law does not protect employees' right to unionize? I'm from Brazil where we have some strict (too strict IMHO) labor laws and this type of hunt (and punishment) for union makers is wildly illegal here.
> The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is a foundational statute of United States labor law which guarantees basic rights of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and take collective action including strike if necessary.
It's truly late stage capitalism if companies can impede labor organizing so brazenly in public like this and have only encouragement at the federal level to go further. HN a few days ago (the 787 structural issue) was also talking about Boeing closing plants and sacrificing safety to avoid union labor.
According to the BLS, white collar union members in the US have higher salaries, better benefits, more paid time off, and better retirement benefits. They also report having higher life satisfaction[1].
The same trend exists for blue collar union members, too.
Bemused at the knee-jerk downvotes against anyone who has an opinion on unions in EITHER direction.
As in so many internet spaces, partisan zealots are degrading our ability to converse. I hope the mods figure out how to keep them from turning HN into yet another dunghole.
This is not unexpected. Merely the product of capitalism.
We build an economic system that rewards selfishness and drive for profit at all costs. Successful companies generate profit. More profit is generated by charging the highest cost for the lowest quality product and paying the worker as little as possible.
Unions threaten that profitability. Its simple math. Its cheaper to hire analysts to track and snuff out labour movements than it would be to capitulate to the demands of any labour movements that formed, such as wage increases or benefits.
Why are we shocked and appalled when the system we created does what it does best?
It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that a website for wannabe capitalists views workers having greater negotiating power extremely suspiciously, yet is enthusiastic towards employers having near-absolute power over their employees.
There is lots of support for unions in HN comments. It may even be the majority position by a slight margin. (Police unions are an inverted special case right now.)
Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.
This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
After post has been out for a while there probably is a majority in support. However every single time I read the comments of these kind of threads the first several highly upvoted comments are almost always anti-union. Its not until the post has been on the front page for a while before the comments begin to turn.
Do I have sciencily evidence? Nope. Could it be a confirmation bias or just a coincidence? Sure. However it seems to happen a lot.
You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... If an article is about unions, the first round of objections is probably going to come from the "boo unions" contingent. Once those comments appear, a second wave of objections saying "wait a minute, unions have done good things" (or "I can't believe how anti-union these comments are!") would be expected.
I don't know for sure if that's what's happening in the threads you're talking about but it kinda sounds like it might be.
I doubt it’s a conspiracy or organized comment ring.
The popular narrative around unions is one of the employees versus their employer, but ultimately even the business’ customers or adjacent businesses end up paying some of the price.
For an example that will probably hit home for many HN users, try asking your trade show team about dealing with unions. The restrictions imposed by unions on trade show attendees are unreal. We had to spend extra to use tool-free fasteners and pre-wire our booths to avoid trigger union regulations that only union employees could use certain tools and do certain wiring jobs on the trade show floor. The union even sent someone to watch us to ensure we weren’t using forbidden tools or wiring one year. If we did, they would send us a bill.
Unions have their place, but it’s dishonest to suggest that anyone skeptical of union efforts doesn’t have valid reasons to oppose them.
What's amazing to me about that anecdote is that it seems like such a tremendously small reason to dislike unions, for all they do to improve worker safety, pay, and provide a stop against exploitation by corporate owners.
I would consider not being able to plug in my own gear at a trade show a small price to pay to show my support for unions and union workplaces.
I don't think money is the issue. For one thing, your company is paying you, so it's not like it's free labor. For another thing, it's often just easier to do stuff yourself.
For some tiny job it takes less effort to just do it than it does to ask someone else, especially when there are all kinds of union rules. One task leads to another, and then you need to find someone else to do that job.
I guess you can't let people attach whatever willy nilly and trip the circuits or start a fire. Furthermore, that requirement is set by the trade show not the union right? Surely they take a share from the bills.
A total coincidence that 15 FWD: FWD: UNIon RUInEd My Life stories immediately dominate the conversation whenever a story like this hits the front page.
Yes I too used to belong to a scary union. I was forced pay dues and there was this bad employee that didn't get fired! Now at my non-union job we only have the best employees and managers because we are allowed to fire the bad ones.
Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners, and unions take power away from business owners and can and will force you to do things to the detriment of your business if they deem it in the best interests of the union members.
>Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners,
A lot of small business owners who also happened to work for a union and had a bad experience? That seems like a lot for a site largely filled with software developers. Is HN more mainstream than I'm giving credit?
HN is not mainstream but has a diverse audience. The subset commenting on any story is a self-selected group that likely has more experience in or devotion to the topic. Find a thread about math or physics and you’ll find an outsized representation of mathematicians and physicists commenting; does that indicate the site is full of mathematicians and physicists? No, they’re just self-selected to comment. Same here.
The vast majority of people on HN are people who need to work to eat and keep a roof over their heads, and the companies they work for take power away from them, and will force them to do things to the detriment of themselves if it's deemed in the best interests of the company.
A union is a company that represents the interests of workers in the same way that a company is an entity that represents the interests of capitalists.
Besides, many people on HN work for tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm or eBay, all of which were found guilty of colluding[1] to keep engineer salary below market value.
That lawsuit didn’t require unions, though. If anything, it’s a great example of how our industry can overcome these issues without unionization.
People tend to forget that unions represent the existing employees, not aspiring hires. This can actually work to the detriment of juniors and newcomers to the industry. It can also work to the detriment of teams where it becomes intensely difficult to fire people who are legitimately underperforming. The public school unions keeping bad teachers on the payroll but keeping them idle in empty rooms is a prime example. Police unions defending bad cops is another very relevant example. If you’re an aspiring teacher or police officer with motivation to do well, why should those union employees take a spot on the job that you could otherwise occupy and do better? Switching the rules of the game to favor seniority doesn’t benefit people who rank low on the seniority ladder.
One lawsuit was a Department of Justice antitrust investigation (quickly settled) that required a bunch of lawyers, discovery, and having the conduct run up against the Sherman antitrust act. I think a tech union is very unlikely but would rather things get fixed before they get that far.
My understanding is that the related civil class action suit recouped small fractions of estimated lost wages, though there's a lot of hand-waving there and both sides are going to wave their hands differently.
I might be mistaken; this didn't affect me too much, and I most mostly just amused how incredibly afraid of Steve Jobs everyone was.
> I think a tech union is very unlikely but would rather things get fixed before they get that far.
There is no need to wait for a "tech union" to unionize tech offices. Kickstarter unionized last year under the Office and Professional Employees International Union.
Most of people on HN work at large tech companies. In my experience the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good, but of course that is infinitely debatable.
> the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good
Most people also think they are smarter than average. I have seen people that thought they were great at negotiating their own wages/benefits in a ritualized yearly pissing match with their boss only to be outdone by new hires. Lots of overinflated egos around that would rather rip their own arms of than pull on the same rope.
I don't think there's coordination happening on HN necessarily. There is a very high degree of anti-union propaganda in the broader culture, and many have taken that propaganda on without considering or hearing much from the other side. None of the stuff people say about unions on HN is anything I haven't heard a million times in casual conversation with others.
Entirely possible, but also maybe people who have positive experiences with unions can't be bothered talking about them when the popular narrative of 'unions are bad' means they're inevitably going to have to defend them and explain every bad thing that has ever happened at or adjacent to a union.
I'm a union member, but man do I think twice about ever commenting on anything to do with a union because of the huge negative wave that comes your way.
I for one would like to hear more about the positive experience. The narrative in the US tend to be polarized, and I do wish we can have a civil discussion on the merits and perspectives from both ends.
In my last job, I was a member of a precarious workforce and, during my time at the company, this workforce successfully unionised and won a contract with the employer. This led to guaranteed annual pay increases for members, improved and secure benefits, and a formalised process for dealing with grievances. It really made a huge difference to a lot of people.
We, along with other unions, negotiate a collective agreement with my employer and then do our jobs. The agreement is renegotiated every 3 years or so. If that's the end of it then we're happy. Industrial relations doesn't _have_ to be a fight to the death.
Yeah, it’s discouraging. But Hacker News is a place for capitalists (self-identified) or wannabe capitalists to hold discussions, and the site is run by a venture capital firm, so makes sense. Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.
I agree wholeheartedly, though I'm not seeing much disagreement or discussion, I'm just seeing downvotes on any comment that even suggests the remote possibility unions might actually be a good thing.
> Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.
In theory unions are great. In practice America's implementation of unions end up as a crappy caricature of the theoretical one and are nothing like their European counterparts.
Maybe recently, with many American unions struggling just to survive, but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective and pioneering.
Unions in the western world in the post-war period made historical compromises with industry that helped contribute to 30-40 years of relative labour peace and high middle class prosperity. They purged communists and other radicals from their ranks, took anti-Soviet positions, and adopted cooperative and conciliatory bargaining positions that gained higher pay and job security by dropping some of the more classic demands of shopfloor control and political change.
As a result unions started to look more like guilds than classic unions, they became managerial organizations like the businesses they were attached to, and they often lost legitimacy with their own memberships as a result.
When the economy started to contract in the 70s they weren't in a good position to fight, and their influence waned. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s they lost any kind of bargaining position -- nobody was afraid of the reds anymore, so they didn't need the unions or social democrats or Keynesian liberals to pacify the population and stomp out communist sympathy.
At one point this perspective was fairly counter cultural -- computing technology fused with Alvin Toffleresque third wavism, a tinge of libertarianism but without a suit and tie, some LSD, some cyberpunk, wear jeans to work, "change the world", etc. But that sheen is increasingly wearing off.
The reality under the surface dressing is we are part of an industry with deep military ties, and it doesn't matter if you wear jeans to work and get vegan treats in the cafe, there's nothing particularly radical about computing technology and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way.
We're part of a semi-managerial class that is doing on the whole pretty damn well financially, but there's no reason to expect that to last forever.
A lot of us ran around saying "information wants to be free" in the 90s and so on, it looked a bit naive to me then, but now it just looks comical and sad.
> and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way
There is a good argument to be made that increasing the GDP is a moral imperative [0]. I know it's increasingly trendy to think all of capitalism is evil and we should tear the whole global economic system down (and to tweet about it from your iPhone while sitting in your air conditioned home, eating your meal delivered by Doordash). As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be, and there are lots of things in the world that should be improved, it's also true that for the vast majority of people in the US and around the world, their living conditions today are much better than they would have been at any other time in history. Which is the simple result of compounding economic growth.
Talking about "changing the world" by building an app sounds a bit quaint and too self-serious these days, but I really don't think it's true that the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society.
I don't fully agree with your point, but I've upvoted you anyways, because this is an entirely reasonable response argument to the points I made and that's how HN is supposed to work.
But please note I didn't say anything like "the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society." That's pretty ad hominem, and I don't think that, otherwise I wouldn't work in this industry.
Well I appreciate the good-faith discussion. And fair enough, I didn't intend to put words in your mouth, I was interpreting "not in any egalitarian or progressive way" as meaning "not in any positive way". But I can see how you might not have been making that strong of a claim.
> As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be
I just spent time with a friend who is working two jobs during the pandemic and cannot afford to live on their own in our relatively low cost of living city. They have to ride the bus for 2 hours to get to one job. This isn't even global inequality, this is an order of magnitude income difference between "haves" with high tech jobs that realistically produce no value, and "have nots" who actually make society function.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Well I'm sorry that your friend is having a tough time. But you really didn't respond to, much less refute, any of the main points of what I wrote here.
My point is extracting the maximum value from people by paying them almost nothing because it "increases the GDP" isn't a moral imperative. It's absurd on its face to say that growth at any expense is ethical because of some trickle down bullshit.
It’s partially self-interest, true, but speaking for Americans, there really is no widespread, institutional education on what labor unions are or do, and what benefits they can bring. Most people simply don’t think about them or believe whatever their employers’ PSAs tell them to believe because no one else ever talks about labor organizing to them.
You're talking about union education as if it's equivalent to mathematics or something, like there is an absolute truth to be learned. Surely even the most pro-union people would acknowledge that not every implementation of a union is equivalent? And that some have caused harm?
I would say I'm union agnostic, I'm not against them but I have about the same amount of faith that a union will improve things in a given situation as that the government will. Both are supposed to be a representation of the people, run by the people, and both are often too bogged down by bureaucracy and power seeking to actually do anything constructive. Sure there are great historical examples of unions accomplishing great things, just are there are great historical examples of governments passing landmark laws, but neither of those guarantees that these institutions will do the right thing in any future scenario.
And to the extent that I am going to put trust in one of these institutions, I'd rather choose the government. I'd rather see, for instance, healthcare given as a right to every citizen, than healthcare given to employees in just one industry. And in fact, unions have been some of the strongest opponents of medicare for all initiatives in the US in recent years. They've already negotiated good healthcare benefits for their members and they don't want everyone else who's not a member to get it too. This kind of "us vs them" incentive system doesn't appeal to me. And more fundamentally, I strongly believe that a lot of basic things (again, like healthcare, or disability insurance, or the ability to invest in a retirement account) should be much less coupled to employment than they are today, and unions are a force in the opposite direction.
> You're talking about union education as if it's equivalent to mathematics or something, like there is an absolute truth to be learned. Surely even the most pro-union people would acknowledge that not every implementation of a union is equivalent
Just like in school civics class you probably learned about the concepts of the government is structured, the principals behind it, a bit about other approaches, etc, I don't see why you couldn't learn the same things for unions. Of course the government doesn't really quite work like that, but isn't it better to have a baseline understanding and shared idea? The situation with unions now is that basically the only thing people know about them is propaganda from anti-union groups, unless they happen to be in one. I fail to see how this is better. It would be like if you first learned about democracy from a monarchist telling you how bad democracy is.
The government isn’t a good comparison. Unions hold no illusions about acting in the interests of the general public. Their express purpose is to protect the members of the union, even if that comes at the expense of the general public.
Police unions defending corrupt police and ensuring they can collect expensive public-funded pensions after blatant misconduct against the public is a prime example.
Most unions try to act in solidarity with labor in general, through organizations like the IWW and the AFL-CIO. Police unions aren't labor unions, as the role of police in society is to enforce the current capital distribution. This is counter to the goals of the rest of the labor movement, and there's currently a push to boot the IUPA from the AFL-CIO.
I routinely see people postulate that unions act primarily in the interests of the general public. Unions may not claim that, but at least some of their supporters do.
I don’t understand this desire to dismiss any criticism of unions as ignorance. This attitude that the only way someone might oppose unionization is because they’re too dumb to understand the concept is extremely condescending.
Take a look at the current situation with police unions defending bad cops, for example. The union is just doing its job in protecting the cops, right? But in reality, this can come at the expense of others who are adjacent to the unionized employees. It’s not a simple matter of employees versus their employer.
I am not dismissing any criticism, just the problematic fact that no one talks about unions except corporate PSAs. There are no institutions or traditions to support labor organizing in the way there once was. Like the idea of joining or forming a union is alien to most Americans.
> they’re too dumb to understand the concept is extremely condescending
This is a bad faith interpretation of my post. I did not say people are dumb. I believe the opposite; working class and middle class people can absolutely understand unions. My point is that there are no movements or institutions to bring awareness or organize people, and so people forget the history of labor organizing in this country. People intuitively get what’s wrong, there’s just no longer any vocabulary to express it. It’s not stupidity, it’s a multi-decade effort by capital to erase unions from the public consciousness. People just don’t talk about organization anymore, it’s a social phenomenon, not an individual one.
> Take a look at the current situation with police unions
Police unions are not part of the unionization movement because police are not on the side of workers. Police are tasked with defending property and the owners of property are overwhelmingly capitalists or other relatively wealthy individuals. In fact, many of the most deadly anti-union activities (e.g. attacking strikers) have been performed by police.
Agreed. My high school economics education was limited to supply and demand curves. It would be so beneficial to having a class about household budgeting, loans and interest, credit rating, mortgages, property, investment, stocks, LLCs/corporations, capital, unions, labor law, taxes, government budget, deficit, trade balance, etc. All the things that people have to learn later in life, hear biased people/media who pretend to know the answers, or never really understand (I guess such a course wouldn't get to Quantitative Easing anyway).
> "...there really is no widespread, institutional education on what labor unions are or do, and what benefits they can bring"
I watched the UAW's behavior in Detroit for a couple of decades. That's all the education anyone needs to conclude that unions aren't in anyone's best interest.
The same happens whenever anything is discussed that would actually improve the lives of the very vast majority of Americans - healthcare improvements, UBI, tertiary education that isn't crippling debt, unions, better public transport, etc.
There are extremely rich and powerful people who will sink hundreds of billions of dollars into making sure those things don't change.
Do you mean specifically around their anti union stance?
It wasn’t widely in the news back then. But I also don’t want to be part of an union and most of the unions I’m aware of in North America are not shining examples. So I’d be ok with working there today given what I know.
i wasn't looking specifically at that, but anything they are doing to take advantage of employees, third-party sellers or customers, etc.
that said, i really just wanted to elaborate on the question itself, without expecting a detailed response because i don't think it's fair to single out individual employees for working at a company with issues. even if you can change jobs easily, other companies are not necessarily better, and they may have other problems.
with that in mind i appreciate your response even more.
Unions are probably the biggest threat to Amazon in the long term, as their interests are directly against Amazon, they'd rather there be 100 competitors they can buy out/drive out of business one at a time; then a single union who could easily shut them down (by striking)
I'm sure they could finagle a job description to say this and maybe even get away with it, but unfortunately the job description they did use was unambiguously "spying on labor organizing", which makes it an open and shut case.
Sure, but you're already treading in murky legal waters.
Just this posting could be viewed as Amazon trying to create the impression that it is actively surveilling labor organizing activities, which it's illegal to suggest, even if you're not actually engaging in that practice.
What is illegal in surveilling employees during work hour on workplace or on work device? It's not like amazon is bugging the house of workers. In all the companies I worked, I am pretty sure I signed contract allowing that. It's a different story that I have technical ability to turn off all the remote disable/access software they install on my work device.
It is, apparently, the case that creating an environment where a reasonable person would feel surveilled is in violation of the law.
Concrete things that are highlighted as out-of-bounds:
1) Putting a dummy security camera in a breakroom
2) Hiring someone to sit in a car in the company parking lot and pretend to talk into a phone every time someone goes to their car
Given that wide constraint, I can definitely see how "hiring an intelligence analyst who would specifically be tasked with keeping the company high-level leadership informed about labor threats to the company" could be interpreted, reasonable-person-wise, as the company surveilling organized labor. I don't think it's the slam-dunk some are describing it as, but it's, if you will, "a bad look."
Are we talking about being unethical or illegal? I think putting even a real camera in breakout room is legal in almost all of the world. If the second story is correct, which I doubt, even that could be legal. Attendance system is used by many companies with report being sent to manager.
Apologies; I misremembered the details of the second example.
"having a supervisor sit in a car while observing union activity and talking on the phone, even if the conversation is not a report on the union activity."
Cal. Acrylic Indus., 322 N.L.R.B. 41, 59 (1996) ("whether a video tape was actually in
Saldana's video camera or whether he actually pressed down on the record button .. . the 'chilling
effect' of such on Respondent's employees' Section 7 rights was the same.").
I have lots of friends in the "movie making" business. Lots of crew members like camera department, set construction, etc. Before Obama care, the only way these folks could afford health insurance was to join the union. Even my actor friends have used the medical coverage as their sole reason. They are not looking to be SAG members for SAG work (we're in Texas so not necessary), but use it for the other benefits.
It's the only time it has made sense to me, within my lifetime. Otherwise, I think unions have way more power than what they need at this time. Now, they have to do things to justify their existence. Would things go back to the way they were before unions if they didn't exist?
This article is ridiculous. It makes a bunch of unfounded assumptions and provides very little in the way of facts to support its claims. Did anyone actually read the job postings before jumping to conclusions?
>Monitor various collection platforms for incidents that pose direct and indirect risk to Amazon operations, personnel, or brand;
There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize. This author is naive to think that Amazon isn't dealing with state level threats. They likely need state level intelligence.
> There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize.
Literally from your own link:
> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company
“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...