Speaking as someone who lives adjacent to Bessemer but who does not work at Amazon, you need to understand that Bessemer is a dying city, a slum. These were the best paying jobs that many of these workers had had in their entire lives, it is no wonder that a majority of them decided not to bite the hand that was feeding them.
"Crime increased following the rise in unemployment and social disruption from the decline of manufacturing industries in the area. As of 2019 Bessemer ranks first in terms of violent crimes for US cities with 25,000 or more people."
Population has fallen from its peak in 1970 of 33k to 26k today.
I hereby humbly move to make Matilda the Chicken (or Mike, the Headless) the oficial Amazon mascot. Votes welcome :)
Funny enough, I have no heavenly idea how, I had actually run into the article on poor Mike before.-
Further edit: Come to think, poor Mike the "headless" would be a great mascot for -at least- AWS, for obvious, ssh-related reasons :)
I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally.
I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain was overriding my logical brain.
I can only assume I'm not unique in this fact; if it comes down to mugging someone or not eating for a week, I'm not 100% sure which option I would choose. I would like to think that I would never hurt someone, but since 2017 or so, I've had a pretty privileged life.
Thanks. It wasn't easy but to be honest having a high-paying engineering job certainly helps. I have no idea how I would have escaped that cycle if I had a lower-paying job.
My escape was doubling my pay, then paying off my debt, then refusing to take on any further debt, ever. Currently closing on a house, paid with cash. Never again debt.
When did tombert assume that poor = "crazy" = criminal? It's a bit unkind to take general thoughts about psychological pathways and unfairly reify them with the use of equality symbols.
I'm sorry it wasn't clear but this seems like a needlessly pedantic distinction.
I never said "poor = 'crazy' = criminal". I don't think poor people are inherently crazy, though I suppose that being mentally ill could conceivably hinder your ability to make a decent income, if we're being pedantic. I feel like you're assuming I said something that I didn't; I really don't think I was being "unkind". In fact, I was trying to have a pretty sympathetic perspective on this. If that was not clear then that's a failing on my end and I apologize.
Yes, you could make an argument is the "more rational" decision is to commit a crime, I read Les Miserables, but keep in mind that my comment was in direct response to someone asking why unemployment led to violent crime, and I specifically did not exclude myself from any category.
Implied? No, not even with the most uncharitable interpretation did tombert even imply that being poor makes you "crazy" or that being crazy makes you a criminal. A hindered ability to think rationally might only make one more impulsive or less able to consider long term consequences.
You are literally accusing the writer of implying things which rely upon a context of your own making, not theirs.
This is interesting - I read that statement exactly like the person who made the post that you just responded to, and thought it to be the clearly obvious interpretation.
I would consider someone that has their rationality stripped (or "greatly hindered") to be irrational. I think "irrational" is a bit more passive than "crazy", but I would personally read those as mostly synonymous.
I wonder why we interpret the same sentence so differently - we may be reading between the lines in very different ways - like the "blue&black / gold&white" dress.
Again, I apologize if it's not more clear, but you do understand that if I implied that they were crazy, that would also imply that I called myself crazy, right?
That's what the following paragraph is about, trying to explain that this could happen to anyone.
Yes? I did understand that - you were saying that being broke can lead one to do and think things that they'd normally consider crazy or irrational.
Are you thinking that I understood your statement to mean that being broke would permanently turn you into a loony? Maybe I generally consider "crazy" to be a temporary state or state of mind that anyone can get into or out of, and you generally consider "crazy" to be a permanent fixture of personality, dividing society into hard lines of people that are either "crazy" or "not-crazy"?
To say one's ability to think rationally is severely hindered, suggests impairment in (for example) considering short term versus long term priorities, or being overly impulsive, or being overly controlled by emotions.
Whereas "crazy" suggests an absence of sanity.
Rational vs irrational. Sanity vs insanity. These are not interchangeable ideas.
> I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally
A lot of comments here seem to think that it has something to do with morals, but from living in poor places, what I gather is that people have no other options when they’re backed into a corner.
If you’re unemployed and you need money for rent and food, what the he’ll are you going to do? Survival mode kicks in, and you’ll do anything to make the next day/week. This could include steeling (to consume or sell) and mugging people (actual money, but probably less of a problem in the near future with everyone using digital payments). Now throw into the mix drugs to numb to pain of living an abysmal life... which are astronomically expensive, so most of the time your only option is to steel and mug more.
> I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams.
They aren't scams, but they are only useful for a very narrow band of people in a very narrow band of circumstances. For the vast majority of people that want one of those loans, they are better off not getting it. It's entirely possible to get the loan and use it as intended, it's just the most the people that need it aren't in a position to do so, and the lenders go out of their way to make it real easy to just roll the loan over into a new ones that kicks the problem down the road to the next payday after this one.[1]
1: It's a dark pattern. "You borrowed $400 the other week and you owe use $500 today? How about we fund a new loan for $400 before your payment, roll that into your current payment, and all you have to do is pay the $100 difference this payday, and you can just pay it all next payday when it's more convenient?" Now, the lender has an installment plan for 700-1500% APR as long as they can get the client to keep doing that (but the client does have to choose to do it every time).
At least, that's how it was a decade or so ago. I think it got even more regulated since then, and they can't charge 25% interest per payday anymore (you can likely thank the NY AG if so).
If I recall, the military had a heavy hand in that. When the payday loan industry has cut into military readiness to the point the generals are talking to Congress about it, it's gone a bit too far.
You mean that it's possible for some people to use it in a personally beneficial way.
That is true without any need to get into intent. I think it's unambiguous that the predatory application is the actual intended usage-- since their business model doesn't make sense without it, they have a massive default rate that only gets paid for with the windfall customers that stay on the treadmill for a long time.
I've found that being poor actually sharpens the mind. It reminds you that if you don't eat, you'll die; clarifies that most laws are just rules crafted by the ultra rich to keep them in power; reminds you that many many people have way more than they need, and can afford to have some it go missing without longterm damage.
It's very rational to choose crime over starvation or exposure, especially when our legal framework (US) is morally bankrupt. Why not turn to crime when crime really isn't such a bad thing compared to the other shit going on.
Sounds like it hints at a nasty feedback loop. "Are they stuck in financial trouble because of poor impulse control or are they stuck with poor impulse control because of financial trouble?" Singular they that is.
It is easier to think long term while feeling secure but not thinking long term can lead to becoming insecure. Not trying to make any moral or blame judgements here - just pondering origins of problems and solutions.
I won't speak for anyone else, but I feel that I normally have reasonably good impulse control, even in 2016; I got into debt because a company I was working for ended up not paying me for multiple months and then shut down, and I didn't have much savings.
I think my lack of impulse control came as a direct cause of me being broke. I had previously never seriously considered any kind of payday loan because I knew they were multi-thousand-percent levels of interest, but that part of my brain wasn't the one thinking. When faced with a really tough situation, I think it's common for your "survivalist" side to kick in.
I never actually did get the payday loan because I was able to (begrudgingly) get a loan from my stepfather-in-law for the back rent, and I very luckily landed a decent-paying job shortly afterwards.
I was absolutely one of the lucky ones. It's not hard at all for me to envision a universe where I was stuck in an endless cycle of debt, and honestly I still have nightmares about that time occasionally. Not fun.
There are many nasty feedback loops caused by severe poverty. Even the most basic things like being able to show up for a job interview in an arbitrary location at an arbitrary time wearing presentable clothing and a relaxed demeanour — try doing that when you can barely afford to use public transport and your daily schedule is rigidly monopolised by whatever terrible job/gig you currently rely upon to literally survive.
For all the criticisms of UBI, I think it would be a net win simply because it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement.
Oh yeah, when I was trying to get jobs, I would look around for cops and then hopped the subway gate multiple times because I didn't have enough money to pay for it. I felt a bit bad for doing it, but I wasn't entirely sure what else I was supposed to do, and I figured it's more or less a victimless crime, so I just did it.
You’ve put this well. But you’ve also highlighted my only significant criticism of UBI. I’ve been poor. So poor getting on a bus was laughable: buying packaged ramen noodles was impossible. The notion that UBI is positioned to replace basic social services means past me couldn’t pay rent and eat again, because no matter how I tried to prioritize shelter rules don’t keep up with reality.
I’ll support UBI when it stops being a libertarian wet dream to eliminate all other social spending and becomes a supplementary cause that lets us re-examine social spending when we can see how it shifts if everyone has “basic needs” covered.
Calling UBI a "libertarian wet dream" is unnecessarily reductive. Personally I try to shy away from using any partisan labels to describe any policies because they are rarely (if ever) necessary. And their meaning rarely translates between people of disparate political views.
I don't support any UBI policy that leaves anyone economically worse off compared to existing welfare. In fact I would expect people to be reliably better off after you factor in secondary benefits such as a reduced time burden upon individuals (time can be a scarce resource when you're poor) and increased ability to prioritise your own needs. The last thing poor people need is fewer resources.
I also don't support any UBI policy that attempts to supplant programs which address disability as opposed to straight poverty.
In my mind the essential benefits of UBI are:
• Less fraud. It's much harder to game a system when everyone automatically qualifies for it.
• Less stigma. It's much harder to be ashamed by reliance on a system when everyone automatically qualifies for it.
• Less disincentive to earn more. Most welfare programs cut out out after you exceed a particular income threshold, so many people have an incentive to keep their income low. (Or to lie about income.)
• Less complexity. It shifts the burden of economic rebalancing away from welfare programs (written by politicians and administered by gate-keeping bureaucrats) and towards a system that already exists: progressive income tax. While everyone qualifies for UBI, high earners are progressively, functionally disqualified by having the UBI clawed back in higher marginal income tax rates.
• Increased mobility and increased incentive to migrate to areas with lower cost of living.
> Calling UBI a "libertarian wet dream" is unnecessarily reductive. Personally I try to shy away from using any partisan labels to describe any policies because they are rarely (if ever) necessary. And their meaning rarely translates between people of disparate political views.
I was responding to:
> For all the criticisms of UBI, I think it would be a net win simply because it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement.
The exact wording of the libertarian wet dream I was recognizing. I wasn’t labeling UBI, I was labeling an identifiable expression.
And I called out where this particular attitude would have starved me and apparently HN would prefer I starved.
I think I may have been unclear. When I said “it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement” I’m talking about the time wasted by poor people as they continuously jump through hoops in order to prove they qualify for programs. I consider it insulting that we actively sabotage poor people by lowering their productivity potential.
If I wasn’t unclear and wasn’t misunderstood, you’ll have to explain to me how this has anything to do with libertarianism.
This clarification helps for sure. And I apologize for not getting it the first time. I’m just so used to encountering the Libertarian version, which is an express desire to use UBI as a full replacement of other existing services. I’m 100% on the same page with your clarified motivation.
No worries, I'm pretty sure I was unclear before. Though I must admit I'm not entirely sure how or why "libertarian wet dream" UBI is so objectionable.
Is it because libertarian UBI might not be so generous? That it's motivated by saving taxpayer money rather than resolving poverty? On that I would agree. That's not the point of UBI.
Is it because libertarian UBI would be an excuse to eliminate more poverty welfare programs than liberal UBI? Because I personally see eliminating welfare programs to be a good thing so long as the UBI isn't intentionally less generous than what it replaces.
Or is it because libertarian UBI would mean Governments no longer forcing welfare dollars to be spent in a "responsible" way? Most of the criticisms I've heard seem to work on the principle that poor people don't know how to look after themselves or spend money wisely. So we need Government to force them to spend X amount on food with programs like SNAP, or spend X amount on shelter with housing subsidies. On this point I'd side VERY strongly with the libertarians. We have far too much paternalism in Government.
> Is it because libertarian UBI would be an excuse to eliminate more poverty welfare programs than liberal UBI?
Close but for me it’s less about protecting similarly redistributive programs and more about protecting services best provided by government that nonetheless cost money and require the government to be empowered to administer them effectively.
This used to be a debate and it’s really not anymore. It was primarily the right that used to argue that the reason people committed crime was because of their attitudes and social norms. But with over the last few decades, large parts of white Midwest and Appalachia are facing the exact same circumstances that inner cities faced for decades. So even some conservatives have started to agree with the side of crime follows economics rather than economics follows crime.
> In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams.
Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver.
Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use it to prevent disaster or rationally extend themselves, lower-income people can too. Not having access to credit isn't a _good_ thing per se.
Whenever people have actually bothered to look into the use of payday loans instead of pearl-clutching about how the poor don't know what's good for them, they've found that much of the clientele is making rational decisions. As bad as a high-interest loan sounds to privileged sensibilities, the alternative is often worse. It's just more diffuse and thus easier to ignore.
Your arguments are entirely theoretical while ignoring the fact that payday loan businesses are regularly shut down for fraud. Just because debt as a concept isn't flawed doesn't mean the people selling debt are moral.
Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry. As a whole though, I feel the industry is quite scummy and often scammy.
> Your arguments are entirely theoretical while ignoring the fact that payday loan businesses are regularly shut down for fraud
I alluded to empirical evidence of their usefulness. Here's a study from the FDIC[1]. It's dated, but there are structural conclusions about the way payday loans work and why their rates are so high.
I don't see the relevance of specific payday lenders being shut down for fraud. Individual cases of fraud should be cracked down upon, and its widespread prevalence in an industry suggests that regulation is potentially a good idea. But neither of these automatically negate the usefulness of a service, just as the bad behavior of the banking industry doesn't make a bank account useless.
> Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry.
Yes, this is my point. The comment I responded to and that I quoted from said:
> I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams
The point of my comment is that they can be useful, and the GP's shame at considering an option he "knew" was a scam is unwarranted and down to midwit elites who are quick to fuck the poor over in the name of paternalistic, performative virtue, but never bother to understand them as agents making decisions that are sometimes unintuitively rational.
In principle, the debt market charges rates that are commensurate with the risk of repayment. Some studies[0] show a relatively high default rate for payday loans. Moreover, the people who borrow from these facilities likely have very poor credit scores.
That's not a comment on the fairness of the rate charged. But if there is a sufficient amount of competition among lenders, and they were effectively regulated and monitored, we could expect their rates are enough to allow them to make a reasonable profit in spite of the risk of default.
In some country consumer credits are regulated and the interest rate is capped. Also it is not legal in some country to grant a credit if the lender cant't pay it back (e.g. in the european union)
>> Also it is not legal in some country to grant a credit if the lender cant't pay it back (e.g. in the european union
European Union is not a country and every member state has their own rules regulating this, there isn't one payday lenders rulebook across the entire EU.
As for what you said - it's true, except that it boils down to a checkbox on the form "are you able to make repayments on this loan?" and that's about it, that takes care of the legal side of things.
Honest question -- what's stopping anyone from entering the market, offering much lower interest rates than that, and outcompeting all existing participants?
The people that take a pay day loan aren't necessarily maximizing for cost effectiveness.
Consider someone who got a flat tire and it needs to be replaced before the person can go to work. The cost of replacing a tire can be $100-$200. The cost of waiting could cost their job.
They could apply for a credit card with 18% interest and a bunch of fees - and the card MIGHT be delivered the next day. OR they can go to a pay day lender and borrow $100 NOW and get to their job this afternoon.
The tire replacement "should" have cost $100 - now it costs $121, and they keep their job.
You might imagine a similar situation for: your fridge broke and you NEED to keep your food fresh, your heater/AC broke, someone broke your front door trying to rob you.
Life SUCKS if you are poor.
Actual story: I met someone who was returning home on a bus, but was kicked off after having a seizure. She and her bf couldn't afford a new bus ticket to get home (to LA). They were stuck in Houston for at least a week, it is possible they missed work and were fired and missed rent and were evicted. If that was you, how much would you be willing to pay for $500 now? I didn't know them long enough to know if they were telling the truth, but I wish I had given them money.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my question.
I'm not asking why the customer doesn't just go to a bank instead.
I'm asking what's stopping you or me from opening a competing payday loan service that charges "only" $110 instead of $121.
It seems to me that this should be a highly competitive industry, the only barriers to entry being some capital, a storefront in a cheap part of town, and a little physical security? What am I missing?
Background: I work at a bank, we specialize in Credit Cards - but I'm in the car finance division. Some of what I have here is an educated guess.
Pay day lenders IS highly competitive. In certain geographies, there are LOTS of lenders. There are some very real barriers to entry:
You have to be credited with certain financial regulators (CFPB and OCC are the 2 I know of) to lend money - and these regulators come with various stipulations (e.g., keep $ in reserve, don't be racist, lend to people who can pay you back, etc)
Many "real" banks avoid this market because the regulators "punish" us - our Credit Card division would be held to a higher standard because we also had pay day loans. Fun fact: during the Obama administration, we also had Mortgages, because regulators "went easy" on the rest of the company. When Trump became president, regulators stopped caring and we sold our mortgages.
All of this being said, if you, right NOW had a lemonade stand lending money to people, you could probably get away with it.
On that note, there is a really interesting shift in the market:
Financial Services As A Service. Imagine: Bank of Small-Town-Maine is a legitimate bank. They know how to stay solvent, they are registered with the right regulators, etc. I approach them and say "let me use your Certifications, I'll use my money, my marketing, I'll buy Identification Services and Credit services - I'll lend money to people and we split the profit".
ACE Cash Express is doing something like this RIGHT NOW - and there are MANY other people doing it, too.
Waiting a day for a credit card isn't the issue. Many auto repair shops now offer instant financing through partnerships with third-party lenders. The problem is that the customers have low credit scores and don't qualify for regular loans.
You are right, and I'll add something, too: the 3rd party financiers will sometimes lend to the low credit score people, but they charge high rates like the payday lenders
And on the point, financing your home appliances is a popular thing (but please, pay up front!)
Note up top that my comment was in response to someone saying that payday loans per se are a scam, a widely-held view in my social circles which I disagree with strongly.
> That's not using debt as a 'tool', that is weaponizing it against those can't fend for themselves.
Are you familiar with the concept of a poverty trap? We're not talking about people whose financial decisions consist of figuring out how to distribute their securities tax-efficiently across their accounts. There are lots of people for whom there are _very_ few degrees of financial freedom, where not being able to pay for car repairs can mean losing your job which can mean getting evicted, and where a precarious but livable existence can become a financial nightmare trap with a single stroke of bad luck and bad timing.
What's the discount rate on a loan for someone in that position? Why are you so confident that, a million miles away from your situation, you can make that decision better for them than they can for themselves? If someone is underbanked (like 22% of Americans), why are you so sure that a time-sensitive $300 emergency expense isn't worth $360, if they're confident they can pay it back (eg, when they get their paycheck)? If you're actually interested in the well-being of those who feel the need to avail themselves of tools like this, the New Yorker wrote an article about it half a decade ago[1]. There are a million other resources and even studies describing the demand side of the story, but it's a lot easier to just pat oneself on the back about how these poor illiterate people are being saved from themselves and then ignore the people whose weakened access to credit further immiserates them.
> I'm sorry but in Ontario, prior to January 1, 2017, the charge was $21 per $100 advanced, an effective interest rate of 14,299% (not a typo)
There are an impressive amount of things wrong with this short sentence and its implications.
1) This is the maximum allowable rate. It's completely consistent for someone to believe that the worst-possible payday lenders are on-net exploitative without claiming the entire industry is a scam.
2) The parent comment I disagreed with did not say "I was going to a pre-Jan-1-2017 Ontario payday lender, which I know is a scam". He said it of payday loans in general, a belief that's widely held in my social circles for the John-Oliver-related reasons I mentioned before.
3) Nothing in my comment said I was opposed to regulation, up to and including capping rates. Most people (poor or not) are pretty terrible at math, and desperation absolutely can push people further towards irrational decisions. Legally capping rates is a decision that, at a given rate, more people are falling prey to their innumeracy than are availing themselves of a costly but necessary emergency life-raft. There's nothing wrong with this legislative judgment call, but starting and ending your analysis at "look how high this number is!!!!" is just cosplaying compassion.
4) Again, the assumption that just waving your hands in the air and saying a number has any connection to the reality of poverty traps and the incredibly steep discount rates they impose upon people. Removing options from people isn't saving them from their misery, it's just displacing their misery into a million diffuse other problems that you don't have to think about.
I dunno, your logic is sound for people who are not in desperate straits, but people make significantly altered (but still rational) risk assessments under duress. If such people are able to get short term funding at any cost, even if they know they can’t repay it, then the personal risk of the consequences of that decision could well rank far lower than the consequences of the alternative, which is for example that your kids starve. That has nothing to do with literacy or saving people from themselves and more to do with access to emergency funding and information.
Even if we accept that payday lending has a place, I think most payday lenders benefit from this equation and certainly contribute to the poverty trap: even if most of the debtors end up getting (likely minimum wage) jobs, they now have the added burden of repaying the onerous rates that they agreed to while under extreme duress. And that duress is the thing that seems to be missing in your calculus.
The problem with payday loans is not the theoretical application of debt theory but the rational risk taking of people with no other (perceived) options: under almost all circumstances, it is better to be starving next week than it is to be starving today.
I agree that there are cases where a payday loan is a good option, and that if people behaved rationally it would be objectively better to have that option than to not have it. The problem is that people don't behave rationally. And behaving irrationally isn't isolated to poor people (lots of people get 96 month loans on expensive cars they can't afford), but it hurts them the most.
Reminds me of an anecdote from poor African countries. Farmers would buy fertilizer months before they needed it, even though it is logically better for them to save that money and only buy the fertilizer when they needed it (assuming the price of the fertilizer was constant). But they knew if they had the money the would be tempted to spend it in the meantime, so they bought it early to avoid the temptation.
Payday loans can encourage people to take out a loan and spend money even in cases where it would be better for them to find an alternative.
Sure, but it almost seems like you are justifying predatory behavior. When people are really desperate they'll do anything to survive, and providing a 14000% loan to people feels like you're just exploiting people's survivalist instincts.
Also, a lot of these payday loans are just flat-out illegal. If you look up usury laws in the US, they typically cap interest at somewhere around ~25% per year[1], and the highest I could find was on the order of 400% per year [2]. I didn't check every state so it's possible there are some that don't have any caps, but my point is that very often these payday loans are literally breaking the law by charging absurd interest rates.
100% agreed, and to some extent people _do_ need to be protected from themselves where irrational decisions are likely. But the comment I responded to referred to payday loans in general as a scam, and anyone who's bothered to study this, qualitatively or quantitatively, firmly disagrees. Note that this doesn't preclude regulated rate caps, which are motivated by the idea that, at a given rate, the innumerate/irrational being harmed outweigh the harm done by removing an emergency liferaft from those for whom it makes sense.
You don't even have to be that smart or read high-quality sources to find this perspective! "Payday loans never provide value" is too dumb for even Vox[1]!
The reason I'm so passionate about this topic is not just garden-variety frustration at how stupid people are. "Helping" people by controlling what they can spend their food stamps on, whom they can have sex with, or how they survive and support themselves should come with a heavy, heavy burden of rigor. History is full of elites destroying the lives of others through their malicious "compassion" and refusal to actually consider that other people live different lives with different problems. The problem with things like payday loans is that the kind of IFLScience midwits that places like HN are thick with won't bother to do the most basic of research beyond clickbaity headlines, eye-popping context-free stats, amd comedy shows that pretend to be informative. It's repulsive.
I guess I am one of those kind of people who get their news from John Oliver.
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic when I said "scam" since they usually do what they advertise. Let me rephrase: they have ridiculously high interest rates that can lead to difficult-to-escape debt, and they are predatory towards desperate people, hence why you usually see them in poorer neighborhoods.
Debt is absolutely a tool and I wasn't claiming otherwise, so when I said "scam", what I really meant was "the worst possible way to leverage debt".
> I guess I am one of those kind of people who get their news from John Oliver.
From your clarifications in this comment, it doesn't sound like you're the type of person I'm talking about. I don't disagree at all that loans can take advantage of people's innumeracy and desperation-driven irrationality. And I consider this a serious concern with excessively high rates. But it needs to be balanced against the bedrock principle that taking a choice away from someone usually immiserates them further, and if you believe otherwise you need a damn high level of rigor to show it.
Tarring the payday loan industry writ large as a scam doesn't stand up to that level of rigor, and there are a thousand qualitative and quantitative pieces of evidence pointing to the fact that the industry does provide value to a portion of the underbanked population.
This doesn't preclude things like capping rates, but this is an explicit recognition that, at the given rate, the cost of the innumerate being taken advantage of is higher than the cost of cutting off an emergency lifeline for people who can use it rationally.
I don't think you and I are especially in disagreement here, given your clarification of what you meant by "scam".
Having access / option for credit may be a good thing. Using a loan rationally may be a good thing.
Not sure where you get your news/experience from ;), but I don't see how any of those arguments apply to payday loan places - in every country, city, society I've lived in, they a) were shut down for fraud and exploitation anytime anybody bothered to look & investigate b) are universally demonstrated and proven to prey upon those who can least afford it. These are not benevolent capitalists trying to help those who nobody else would help - the owners are shameless sharks exploiting and manipulating people into a vicious cycle.
(FWIW I'm not going to downvote, I actually upvoted - your perspective is interesting and must as I may disagree I'd like to hear more and maybe be educated, rather than shut the debate down; but I'd like to see some "counter-John-Oliver" studies and stats to go against the ones I think most of us have seen)
Edit: I mean heck, like with smoking, government here will try their best to talk you out of it; you can still do it, as an adult human being... but it's just a bad, bad idea
Spoken like someone who has never lived paycheck to paycheck and been caught in a debt spiral.
You are correct, not having access to credit is a bad thing. But having access to predatory credit is a WORSE thing. There's a reason we outlawed indentured slavery and "company scrip", and payday loans are a half a step up from that situation.
Please don't cross into personal attack. It's against the site guidelines and makes threads worse. Your comment would be just fine without the first sentence*.
The reason why payday loans are allowed is that just like with drugs - outlawing them doesn't mean people don't seek them out. It's better to have access to a legal and well regulated payday lender business, rather than letting people borrow money from the "pay us back or else" kind. And they absolutely will, desperate people will seek out desperate solutions.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how badly you were provoked or feel you were. It just sends the threads into a hellish spiral.
You’re not stupid you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life.
Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks.
After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out.
The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.
No way out either. In a literal sense. There's no national program for helping people relocate to areas where they can have a meaningful job, a home that's affordable to OWN, and hopefully also community as a result. I'm NOT saying it should be forced, I'm saying it should be an option.
There have been plenty of attempts to do so...but if you thought cache invalidation was a hard problem, welcome to sociology.
One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.
The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.
It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.
New York is very far from the place I envisioned such a program operating. I was thinking about helping nature or farms reclaim remote and sparsely populated areas that no longer work in an era of specialization.
No national program to build where people are, either. Which is a shame, because we're the country that built the Interstate Highway System, and a national rail system before it. The truth is that the hyper-local nature of our politics leads to disparity as much as it does prosperity, and the two often go hand-in-hand. There are too many rich towns filled with professionals and managers with a nearby slum that supplies all of the menial and service labor, but we're probably not ready to talk about what the remedy to that looks like, and I'm not certain we ever will be.
I imagine that we'll continue to try everything that doesn't involve privileged rich, mostly white, people making the slightest concession to allow for deplorables to do more than merely exist. As a reminder we've tried: eugenics, bullshit wars on drugs, shipping people to other states, etc.
A good first step is a country wide housing, healthcare, food, and job guarantee. If bezos zuck musk gates etc can be billionaires we can provide a minimal standard of living for everyone. I'm open to considering any research that says doing so is impossible, but I doubt any such research exists.
Actually this is such a simple thing to implement and also would be wonderful to test out.
Subsidize 2 luggages and a 1-way bus ticket per household member, to anyone that wants to move to a new location. No questions asked. You can do it X amount of times in your life, and anyone with income below (a multiple of poverty rate here) qualifies. That's it.
Meh; a bit patronizing but I get the point he was trying to make quickly and succinctly - problems are relative; somebody who's been close to a desperate situation WILL have much more of an intuitive/experiential understanding of the issue, options, temptations, emotions, constraints involved.
(noting there's a difference between "I'm a student living with parents, I'd like a job but can't get one so I'm unemployed" and "I have 3 kids and a sickly partner and I'm overdue on rent and I'm unemployed and I have no social/family safety net")
I wouldn't call it "not having a real actual problem" - again, it's relative and so on; but a charitable read as "never been on brink of famine/poverty" may be a good interpretation?
But that's still rudely assuming that there is only one kind of " real actual problem in your life", meaning = problem with money and/or unemployment.
Is having to make a decision to take your child off life support a "real actual problem in your life"? How about being told that your visa won't be renewed and you have to leave your entire life, job, friends and family behind and move somewhere else? Is that a "real actual problem in your life"? How about a cancer diagnosis? A cheating spouse?
Not all "real actual problems" in life have to be related to money - you can have plenty of it and still be in an extremely difficult and distressing situation in your life, which won't naturally lead to increase in violence(cancer diagnosis is probably one of the worst events you can have in your life and yet I cannot imagine it's corellated to increase in violence rates at all). I frankly also find the attitude of the previous poster to be condescening and jugemental.
No, the parameters of the discussion was “real actual problem” meaning = “problems that put someone in a position where committing violent crime is preferable to the alternative.” It’s reasonable to assume OP’s intent was not to imply all other problems aren’t real.
And frankly, you don’t have to have experienced anything remotely similar to understand how economic desperation leads to crime, it just requires a capacity for, and willingness to employ empathy.
On the other hand, “Cancer patient goes on crime spree to pay for chemo” sounds like it could be a very funny film, in the hands of the right writer.
I think you may be projecting here. There are millionaires living in Bessemer. Bessemer is right next to down town Birmingham, Hoover, Homewood, Fultondale, Gardendale, Chelsea and a not too long drive from Tuscaloosa. There is so much money here for most industries. The cost of living in the GBA isn’t much at all especially north on I65. Also, while it is true Bessemer is more or less impoverished in the city it has some really beautiful outskirts. People who live there absolutely do not have to work there.
Unemployment itself doesn't cause crime, but unemployment and a weak social safety net will definitely cause crime. I've lived in Western Europe countries with absurdly high unemployment rates, to this American, >10%, 25% youth, and I never felt unsafe, mostly. You got a stipend, subsidized housing, and job training.
But in the US, unemployment, desperation, and easy access to firearms can be a big problem.
BTW, I'm still shocked by the casualness of people who threaten to shoot me. Or like to show they are armed in an attempt to intimidate me.
As a US native I’ve never had someone threaten to shoot me or show me they were armed to intimidate me. I’m not exactly living a sheltered life either.
I have a few questions, sorry if this sounds like a lot I’m just really curious.
What city are you in where this happens? What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior? Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
I grew up in south-central Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s and I witnessed several incidents of gun violence, one of which was fatal, and I was personally fired at on two different occasions. These were all gang related, random acts of violence, though neither myself nor anybody I happened to be near at the time was in a gang.
> What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior?
Standing on the sidewalk, hanging out with friends.
> Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
I left when I was 18.
I'd be happy to entertain any additional questions you or others might have.
Would you happen to know why gangs would bother doing random acts of violence against teenagers standing on the sidewalk? I'd heard that the Italian mafia at least likes to keep themselves out of the public eye, interesting that other gangs don't.
Because they can. Its a game, its a status symbol. Whatever. It doesn't matter what matters is... that it does happen.
They have literal games , such as "knockout". The game is literally to come from behind and hit a random passerby so hard that they fall on the ground... knocked out.
Its some real messed up stuff. I am sure you google.
Either demonstrating dominance or as part of initiation. Requiring recruits to perform illegal acts or even random violence is common. It’s to prove you’re willing to do what is asked of you by your superiors.
Miami. A city with notoriously bad drivers some of them armed. It's better now but was a hell of a lot worse when I was growing up, the 90s. But you can pick any major city and ask a local where not to go, and just don't go there.
Driving, riding my bike, walking. When I was a kid simply walking to school was enough. But people will threaten to shoot you for turning, not driving fast enough, merging, stopping, not stopping. Riding a bike in the right lane.
Growing up down here you get used to it. Far too many Americans have access to guns. Hopefully, they only use it on themselves. But even if only 1% of gun owners were certifiable crazy, that's still over a 1 million unhinged individuals.
I moved to Europe for a time. But career and family brought me back here. And I like money :-)
In my experience it happens a fair bit at the long, long, long immigration lines at US air ports if you are not a US citizen. Guards fondling their gun holster and shouting at people for using a phone or sitting on the floor after queuing for 3 or 4 hours. Welcome to America. I guess you don't experience this if you are a US native.
And also obviously it happens frequently in SF from the homeless people. That is probably more worrying as they potentially have "nothing to lose"
I have traveled extensively to the US (I am French), probably 10+ times a year. The way people are "welcomed" to the US is horrible - I felt like this only in Russia.
Once the border officer asked me (or rather - barked at me) "why are you coming to the US?", to what I said "for business".
"For how long?" - to what I answered "for 3 days"
He then asks "why so short?" to what I answered "I swear if I could squeeze it to one day I would gladly come and go not to spend money in a country that is so welcoming" (it was a very long, tiring flight and I really wanted to go to the hotel, afer having queued up for 2 hours)
He told me that I should not reply like this, to what I said that this is the truth. We had a small staring contest and he let me go.
The other similar case in Russia was when the border guard was yelling at me for not having my passport number printed on my ticket (yes, I do not know either), to which I yelled back to kick me out of their country with a "never return" stamp because I am fed up enough to have a week-end ruined with tha travel. I showed him my hands together (as in "handcuff me") and he pushed me into Russia. The stay was great, people were great.
Had a strange experience in my last entry into the US myself. I have a Canadian passport, but have a US green card.
Officer (in a rather rude tone): "what were you doing in Canada?"
Me (sleepy and a bit disoriented): "sorry?"
Officer (suddenly seems to realize that he has my green card in front of him): "Never mind, you're good to go"
My best guess is that he was just too conditioned to grasp at straws for reasons to give people a hard time, until realizing he couldn't deny entry to a green card holder.
> "I swear if I could squeeze it to one day I would gladly come and go not to spend money in a country that is so welcoming"
This is what greeted my family every time we came to the US. Which fucked up ICE agent will we get this time? Most of them were pleasant but it only takes 1 asshole in the bunch to ruin a great holiday.
And no matter what they say, Canada's ICE weren't much better.
Yeah, I (as a US immigrant) personally had way more problems with Canadian ICE than the US one.
Semi-relevant anecdote: I was traveling in my car with my mom and sister to Vancouver BC from Seattle (back when I was not a US citizen yet). Canadian officer at the border was more than just inquisitive. He asked who i was, where i worked, which team i worked on, what specific product I worked on and what specifically I did (which was already making me feel uncomfortable, because the product wasn't public back then, so I wasn't really allowed to talk about it in general). The questioning itself took like 10 mins and was absolutely unnecessary. Not even mentioning how aggressive he was, I felt like I was an inch away from being escorted to their "office" for additional questioning. And I am saying that as someone who doesn't usually feel threatened much by any interactions with officers.
On the way back into the US, however, it was buttery smooth. The officer confiscated the grapes my mother tried bringing back with her (despite me urging her not to do so), and he was extremely apologetic about it. Then he said "welcome home", and that was it. Took less than a minute overall.
Not trying to generalize anything from this, as, of course, the experiences differ wildly between individual border officers and such. I just thought it was an interesting semi-relevant anecdote.
I was driving from a town in Illinois to Toronto (a very long 10 hour trip as it was). Got to the border, they said that I needed to pay several thousands dollars to import my car because according to them I was a "returning resident" even though I kept saying I work in US and was going to return to US (and had paperwork to prove it, to boot). Nope. They kept insisting I was lying about the purpose of my trip, and eventually decided that because I was "lying", they were going to seize my car (and everything in it, including laptops and cellphones).
They then proceeded to tell me I had to pay $14k to get my car back (or to find a cab willing to come to the border. Without a cell phone. At midnight on a sunday.) Did I mention I had my wife and two children in the car with me? Yeah.
So I ended up scrambling to come up with $14k by maxing out multiple credit cards, got my car and belongings back, and finally got our asses out of there at 2am (with still 3 hours of road ahead of me).
I knew the border officers were full of shit so I filed a formal appeal with the government. Six months later, what do you know, it was actually reviewed and it was determined that the border officers were in fact in the wrong and that I should get a full refund. Better late than never, but boy, that night couldn't have gone much worse.
>BTW, I'm still shocked by the casualness of people who threaten to shoot me. Or like to show they are armed in an attempt to intimidate me.
What? Where in the US do you live? I've lived in the US my entire life and never, not once has anyone ever threatened to shoot me. Thats a felony in itself and I am really surprised by that.
I had a guy threaten to shoot me in Kentucky once when I was working with him on the Ohio River - more of a 'I have a rifle in my truck' than a 'pointing a gun at you' kind of a threat though.
If you commute long enough through places of high poverty you'll have some stories. I'd get a gun pulled on me for driving. I'd also have friends and colleagues brag to me about pulling guns on other drivers. I'd tell them they were crazy but in their mind it's a completely valid reaction.
Except there are two problems with this theory. One unemployment is just as correlated with crimes of passion as it is crimes of opportunity. There’s no reason why a lack of job training should lead to rape.
Two is that America’s high crime rates well preceded the advent of the modern welfare state. New York had much higher crime than London even in the 19th century at the height of Victorian social Darwinism and Dickensian work houses. If anything the disparity has actually decreased in the post war period.
The short answer is America, and in fact the Western Hemisphere in general, is just a much more violent society at its roots than the Old World.
> One unemployment is just as correlated with crimes of passion as it is crimes of opportunity. There’s no reason why a lack of job training should lead to rape.
I think there is a clear reason: nihilism and depression. If you have resigned yourself to being unemployed and impoverished forever, what difference does it make whether you're in jail or not? It's the same reason we argue that jailing the homeless is pointless. They don't care; life in prison might even be better in terms of quality of life. Sure, there's less freedom, but the poorer you are, the less the delta in freedom is. You don't have access to a lot of the freedom that financially healthy people have to begin with. Jailing them is like trying to drown a fish. We don't have any functional punishments for people who don't care about their life (I'm not advocating that we try to invent some).
You mentioned rape specifically. The prevailing theory afaik is that rape is about control over someone else rather than sexual gratification. There are plenty of ways to have sex; the floor on sex worker prices is shockingly low. Doubly so in extremely poor areas. It's not shocking to me that people with almost no control over their lives would lash out in ways that grant them control, or at least a feeling of control. If you're poor and have no safety net, you have little control over your housing (can't afford to move), your job (don't have a rainy day fund to tell your boss to fuck off), your food (you eat what's cheap, or what the food bank will give you), your money (you're lucky if you even have enough to pay bills, much less have money left over that you can pick what to do with), etc. Your life becomes a constant chain of being shunted around and manipulated by people who do have money.
Crimes of opportunity are an attempt to lift yourself out of poverty. Crimes of passion are an attempt to cope with the struggles of living a life that you have almost no control over.
I'm not attempting to absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions, but I can see how someone would make that choice.
Also, suicide is an act of passion, and it's highly correlated with unemployment.
No, that's not quite right. Someone who is depressed is not homicidal and highly unlikely to be violent to anyone but themselves. A nihilist is consumed in the thought that life is meaningless so they would not go around randomly hurting people by definition. A sociopath might but that's different.
> much more violent society at its roots than the Old World
I am originally from Russia, but live in US. I actually feel safer in US than in Russia.
It is far easier to get assaulted as result of road rage or because somebody don't like how you dress in Russia. Hopefully Russia have stricter gun laws, so it's less lethal.
Are you asking why people who have run out of money might turn to stealing? Even if you are trying to be nonviolent a life of crime is hard and eventually you'll find yourself in a situation where you have to use violence because there is nothing else to turn to. You certainly can't go to the cops.
When people don't have legally acquired money to exchange for things they need like food, they turn to other means to acquire those things.
Also when people believe that they can't, by legal and socially acceptable means, thrive, their belief in the current social order is undermined. A lot of society operates on trust in fundamental fairness; for people who find that life is fundamentally unfair, that trust is eroded, sometimes permanently.
Being unemployed may make some turn to crime to support themselves.
Crime often puts people in stressful situations.
People in stressful situations sometimes act violently, even if that's not their default mode of conduct.
As a simple example, imagine someone shoplifting some food from a market, where an employee confronts them and bars their way, saying they are calling the police. The shoplifter tries to leave, and a scuffles ensues while the employee tries to restrain the accused. It's very easy for the crime to become assault while someone is fleeing, and nobody needed to intend for any violence at any point.
Among other things, unemployment is bad for your city's tax base.
Law enforcement can probably withstand some budget cuts before public safety suffers, and leaders probably cut other things first, but at some point it might have an effect.
No income > can't pay bills or buy necessities > desperation > mild panic & muddied thinking while looking for any way to make money > overrides the inner restraint against crime.
Because our species derives from irrational ape-like ancestors and entirely too many of us don't realize we're now an ant colony.
Yes, 10,000 years ago our monkey brains were just fine at navigating the world as it existed. They're not just fine at it today. Today, even some of the simplest jobs require advanced skills in disparate areas, and frankly about 16% of the entire world population is not up to the task. Sixteen percent is the amount of the world population with an IQ at or under 85. These are people who struggle with tasks as simple as folding a sheet of paper into thirds, more or less perfectly, and then placing it into an envelope.
The world we live in, and almost certainly the world we're creating, has no place for these people. Even something as simple as receiving merchandise on a dock in a warehouse requires some basic computer skills, from either operating a Windows or Linux machine and interfacing with SAP, Oracle's JD Edwards, or IBM's AS/400, to figuring out the proper layout of boxes on a wooden pallet to maximize storage space of the warehouse. Something your grandfather or great grandfather did with a 6th grade education, now requires a minimum of a high school education by necessity, if not by design.
That brings me to actual answer to your question... because they don't have the decency to lay down and die. Because inside every human is an irrational desire to live, even when you're no longer useful. I know, know... a long argument can, and likely will, be made that "every life is valuable", etc., so forth. I understand and even accept those arguments on an emotional level, because I am not a machine - I am a man, and because I find it morally repugnant to allow people to die because they have no economic value.
That said... clearly there are plenty of others who do not feel the same way. If you work on AI to streamline a process or aid in manufacturing, you feel this way. The people who employ you, feel this way. You cannot design an algorithm that replaces 7,800 jobs and then throw your hands up and say, "I'm just doing my job." We either have to decide that everyone is worthy of life, regardless of their intellectual abilities and their economic contribution, or we have to decide that's not the case. Right now, because no one is taking Universal Basic Income seriously, we're clearly deciding that your value is mostly - one could argue almost entirely - economically based. We have a few exceptions to this that I can think of off the top of my head - the clergy seem to provide some kind of non-productive "good" that enough people, in America at least, feel is worth the cost of supporting them. But the factory worker who makes widgets for your ConsumerGoodX that you bought, she apparently does not.
I would like to be wrong about this, but our actions as a society say otherwise. We reward companies that reduce their "human capital" and return the money that would be spent on those salaries to either expanding their operations or in dividends to their shareholders. We reward them with higher stock prices and increased demand to purchase those stocks. We reward them by purchasing their goods. We tell ourselves another story, because if you really thought long and hard enough about it, you'd likely have to do some serious soul searching. Most of us don't want to do that.
Perhaps you need me to be more clear. When there is unemployment, crime goes up. This happens no matter where in the world you are. I didn't think I needed to spell that out.
Countries with a strong social safety net will be far safer when unemployment rises out of control. That's just common sense.
It's why Sweden is multiple times safe than the US, regardless of the unemployment rate. They have a social safety net.
Rightly so, but the issue is that the conditions pertaining to work in an Amazon warehouse do not lend themselves to being the kind of work one can do for decades+. People burn out, their legs grow week, and they get no insurance benefits for physical therapy, and that sort of thing. It's just not a sustainable job for most people, sadly.
Amazon is infamous for absolutely driving their warehouse employees into the ground.
I suspect manufacturing is somewhat less casual about their employees’ health because much of it is unionized, and training is more difficult. Warehouse workers are considered disposable.
And the service industry is light years easier than warehouse work, at least based on my time in both.
I would wager the other factor favoring manufacturing jobs is that in warehouse work, the injuries tend to be less likely to attract OSHA attention.
People being carried out of a factory missing a limb are more noticeable than people who stop coming to work because their backs simply can’t sustain the work any longer.
> but the issue is that the conditions pertaining to work in an Amazon warehouse do not lend themselves to being the kind of work one can do for decades+
But why does this work need to be for decades? Why isn't the worker in amazon also educate themselves or upskill, so that they can move to a different career with higher paying prospects?
The days of working the same job for your entire life is gone - and that it's every person's own responsibility to keep improving their own skills and career prospects, continuously throughout their life.
Firstly, if every Amazon worker (or other low-skill job) educated themselves into a better job, there’d be no low-skill/low-wage workers. I think many of us would really dislike living in a world where these sorts of jobs support even a moderate lifestyle. For example, someone doing the dishes at a restaurant. Therefore, we do find these jobs valuable as a society and we want people to do them.
Secondly, are we really sure that if everyone suddenly educated themselves into a better job that there would be enough better jobs to go around? It seems unlikely. Particularly with increased automation.
My point is that the “get a better job” argument isn’t a strong solution to providing for everyone’s needs. We’re pretty clearly getting worse in this area as a society, with stagnating wages and fewer opportunities for entry-level work which can make ends meet.
At a point, if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution when people feel they don’t have another choice. We aren’t necessarily close to that, but if these trends continue, that’s more people making less money with higher prices. At some point that leads to desperation for enough people that violence happens. Just look at Russia or France in the past couple hundred years.
My meaning with that is that it’s not just someone’s own responsibility, but that there is some level of social responsibility for maintaining a baseline.
> we do find these jobs valuable as a society and we want people to do them.
If they were valuable, they would be valuable enough to pay a high price.
And i don't believe that it is possible to run out of high skilled jobs. It may be that in the further future, these higher skilled jobs paid just as much as low-skilled jobs of today, and the lowskilled job of today disappears due to automation. But that's a good future - it means that production and output must be very high for it to occur. And who's to say there won't be even higher skilled jobs? Or brand-new job types that's not envisioned yet? After all, human have unlimited desires which is the impetus for all economic progress.
> if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution
only if society don't invest in up-skilling. I'm a big fan of society helping those of lower skill to increase their skill. Education is one of the most efficient forms of investment a gov't can undertake.
What a tragic way to frame it. The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better so they don't have to choose indentured servitude over poverty.
Edit: Added the bit about all the world governments
In Europe there are a lot of social benefits that mitigate this.
- Health care
- Worker protections
- Required time off
- Sick time
- Maternity leave
etc.
Here its $15. And you're on your fucking own.
If you compare it to completely underdeveloped or dictatorial economies... Sure I guess its way better. But the US shouldn't be comparing comparing itself to that. Its like saying "This engineer is horrible, but he's not as bad as this drug addict that is yelling all day outside our front door!"
No objection that most of EU is better than the US in these regards, but Amazon warehouse workers get some of the best healthcare insurance that I’ve ever seen in the US. Similar to what the top-level-commenter pointed out, I guarantee that the warehouse jobs in Bessemer provide among the best healthcare available in the town.
The US as a whole is awful at providing healthcare, but healthcare is a particular area where Amazon actually is going way above what is normal and is provided astonishingly well for its workers.
I'm an Amazon warehouse worker in North Carolina. As far as health insurance, I pay 100% of the first $1500, then 10% of the next $15,000 (so $3000 total), then 0% of anything over $16,500. I wouldn't call that astonishing, but it is the minimum $0 monthly premium plan. Also, I'm generally happy at work. I basically feel well paid and well treated.
This is pretty much the same insurance that full-time SWEs at Microsoft receive at Redmond HQ (well, one of the two options, with the other one being tied to Kaiser specifically, but most people I know take the one that's similar to yours). 100% of the first $1.5k, 10% until you hit the total of $3k, and then everything is free. $0 monthly premium as well. That's the one I have myself at the moment.
Glad to see someone like you list the real numbers, because I keep hearing "good insurance" when it comes to Amazon warehouses, but this is the first time I saw someone actually point out the specifics. Also glad to hear that Amazon warehouse workers receive health benefits on par with full-time SWEs (not being sarcastic here, I genuinely am happy to hear this is the case).
(you didn't say this, but) nobody here should fool themselves into thinking a $3k deductible insurance is equal between an Amazon warehouse employee and a SWE at Microsoft.
$3k for a Microsoft SWE is a "dang, I wish I didn't have to go to the hospital" situation.
$3k for an Amazon warehouse employee earning $15/hr can often be a "there go my savings, I wonder if I got this injury due to the amount of physical activity my job requires" situation.
I see your point, but to be fair, it is 10% after the first $1.5k. And it is already a much better insurance than most people working in offices I know get.
Essentially, what it means is that if an employee spends less than $1.5k/yr on medical expenses, they don't gain much benefit. If they spend over $1.5k, they essentially only spend 10% after that on all of their medical expenses. And once they hit a hard cap at $3k, they spend nothing at all. 90% off for most medical stuff is a great rate.
Not even mentioning the fact that this kind of an insurance is a godsend to people with major health problems, given that in the worst possible scenario, they would only ever spend $3k of their own money in a calendar year on medical stuff. And that's only if their actual pre-insurance-cost expenses are closer to the $16.5k, because $1.5k + $1.5k/0.1 = $16.5k.
And I am yet to see a better insurance out of any employers (not just warehouse employers). Even the "amazing" student insurance I had back in college (which I had to pay the premium for) was much worse than this.
> Essentially, what it means is that if an employee spends less than $1.5k/yr on medical expenses, they don't gain much benefit.
Nitpicking here, but they probably do, because the insurance-negotiated prices for many services are much better than the prices prices you could negotiate yourself -- and that is assuming you even have the skills and energy to do any negotiating.
I have a high-deductible plan, which on paper covers literally nothing until I hit something over $7k/yr in expenses, which I thankfully never have. However, I usually pay 30-60% less than the uninsured cash price for my appointments and procedures just because I'm on the plan in the first place.
I often (not always) check this with the provider, so it's not like I'm just blindly assuming the discount claimed by the insurance company is accurate. It's usually not, but the discount still seems to be substantial.
In exactly one case I ended up saving like 50 bucks per dermatologist appointment by paying them directly.
HDHPs are the reason for HSAs becoming a thing. I don't think most realize that the Amazon health plan mentioned is a pretty good deal. Most people only look at wage, failing to take into account what benefits are worth. In the US health benefits can account for a huge portion of overall compensation.
It’s for two people over 50 with no aid from the gov’t for the premium (which means we’re in good shape financially). The “Affordable” in the ACA is not for everyone.
You may want to look at your options on the ACA marketplace again. The recent stimulus bill included significantly more subsidies for ACA plans and enrollment is reopened for the next few months.
Microsoft's healthcare plan used to pay 100% of premiums, but over time it either became unaffordable or didn't work with the ACA.
Currently it's something like "we charge you a lot for the first few months but also give you the money to pay it in your HSA", which makes you wonder why they give it to you in the first place. It's not like you can optimize your prescriptions out of your life, so it's not enabling choice.
I don't have any prescriptions or chronic health issues. My HSA is another several thousand dollars per year of tax free retirement savings (I max out 401k contributions also). Sure, I can only ever use that $ on healthcare, but when I'm older I'm sure I'll use it.
Sure, but that doesn't explain why employers contribute extra to the HSA instead of having salary deductions.
Btw, once you're 65 you can withdraw money for no reason without a penalty, so it's no worse than a traditional IRA. Too bad deposits are taxed in California.
That's still a remarkably good health plan being offered unless somehow people are expecting Amazon and other corporations to offer their warehouse workers a better health plan than they or Microsoft offer their own engineering staff. Even a union isn't going to get them that.
Well not quite, because Microsoft also contributes $1k to an HSA as part of the plan every year.
That said, having to pay up to $3k a year in medical costs when you're earning a Microsoft salary is a much smaller percent of your income than having the pay the same making $15/hr at an Amazon warehouse.
HSA is a separate thing that I don't even personally touch, I was talking about insurance itself.
And I agree with your point, that type of an insurance with a fixed cut-off is regressive in a similar way that a sales tax it. So please don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say that Amazon warehouse workers have it just as good as Microsoft SWEs in terms of benefits (or just in general).
They do, however, have the type of health benefits/insurance that is extremely difficult to beat by literally anyone except what other big tech companies provide to their SWEs. And afaik those benefits for Amazon warehouse workers kick-in on day 1, unlike what it's like at many other similar warehouse jobs.
I am not confusing HSA and FSA, but my wording was likely confusing.
When I said "i don't personally touch it", I didn't mean that I avoid it. I just know that it is a part of my benefit package, i get contributions in there, but that's about it. I don't even look at it or interact with it in any way otherwise, because I am not planning to use it until much later in life.
>How much easier is it to keep a job, and thus your health insurance, as a SWE when your body breaks down?
Probably much easier than it would be for a warehouse worker. Though I have no idea how this is relevant to what was said in the message you were replying to.
I'm just pointing out that while it's great that they get pretty decent health insurance, it's a poor substitute for a societal safety net. And for a union that makes sure they're not chewed up and spit out.
Reply to the sibling comment comparing to insurance of MS SWE. While the absolute values are comparable, $1500 is quite a bit more of an inconvenience at a warehouser worker pay level than at a SWE salary level.
Given the physical nature of the work, I'd consider them more enlightened if they provided a lower deductible at the $0 premium level for every warehouse worker across the board. I'm really getting tired of places treating the long term mental and physical health of workers as an unpriced externality that's later paid for by society.
Also, thanks to motardo for the data point. (I will assume you're an actual warehouse worker.)
The monthly premium is the cost of the insurance plan. A "$0" premium isn't actually $0, it means that Amazon is paying 100% of the monthly costs of maintaining the insurance, requiring $0 contribution from the employee. Many companies (especially warehouse type operations) are less generous, and require some monthly contribution from the employee to pay the premium. The worst health insurance I ever had required me to pay 100% of the monthly premium, with $0 committed by the company. That company lost a lot of employees.
> I pay 100% of the first $1500
This is the "deductible". The covered person is responsible for 100% of costs until the deductible is met, although there are many exceptions. For example, a routine checkup might be 100% covered ($0 cost), as well as a range of preventative care procedures described by the ACA.
> then 10% of the next $15,000
After the deductible has been met, the person is responsible for coinsurance of additional costs. An extra $5000 procedure would translate to a $500 bill for the patient.
> then 0% of anything over $16,500.
This is where the "out of pocket maximum" or OOPM is reached. In this case, the most the patient could expect to pay is $1500 (deductible) + $1500 (10% of next $15K) = $3000. After that, all excess charges are handled by the insurance company until the insurance year resets.
In short: Health care will cost between $0 and $3000 depending on how many services are used for the year (excluding fully covered benefits like annual checkup, depression screening, breast cancer screening for women, vaccinations, and other services covered for free under the ACA)
After that, all excess charges are handled by the insurance company until the insurance year resets.
This is an important point. And a related point.
- Because the OOP payments reset annually, there are perverse incentives to over consume medical care after OOP is reached within a given year. Defer preventative health care until after you have a major medical problem that runs to max OOP, then stack up on preventative care before the year ends.
- Related: Insurance is also tied to employer - if you change jobs, all those OOP values reset (to whatever policies are in place with new employer). This causes friction in the labor market - employer-provided and -subsidized health care prevents people from looking for new employment.
Thanks for the explanation. Interesting to compare to Australia, which has a public health system, but where I still pay ~AUD2960/year, after government rebates (at current rates ~USD2255/year) for moderately crap health insurance for my family even with no medical usage.
In general, we wouldn't even use it to access private health care, because we would then face substantial fees to use it (I don't know exactly; it varies significantly by procedure, has a $500 deductible, substantial copay, and has maximum caps), however we're taxed heavily for not having a private policy.
Our family income has recently pushed over some thresholds in the rebate system, pushing up prices even more, might have to shop around to find an even more useless but cheaper policy.
Australia's public health system is pretty decent, but the half baked private system bolted on the side is a mess. Lots of people paying thousands for unusable insurance which is just sent directly to private companies.
Great write up! Only caveat is the limits only apply to in network providers (providers that have made a deal with the insurance company), so if you're on a trip and an emergency happens and you end up in a hospital that's not in network, then you're on your own.
But I assume a company like Amazon is dealing with a large insurer part of nationwide networks like BCBS.
Also, insurance companies have their own doctors and pharmacists that might disagree with the patient's doctor's treatment plans, and will not cover the healthcare costs for those items without a "prior authorization" from the insurer. There's an appeal system in place for this too. Although, this type of thing exists without health insurers too, it's just employees of the government deciding what to approve and not approve.
> Only caveat is the limits only apply to in network providers (providers that have made a deal with the insurance company), so if you're on a trip and an emergency happens and you end up in a hospital that's not in network, then you're on your own.
Actually, out-of-network emergency care is an 'essential benefit' under the ACA, so most plans do cover this scenario.
I actually just screwed myself with this recently. I went to an urgent care while traveling (because that is usually cheaper when I'm at home) and it wasn't covered. An urgent care apparently doesn't count as emergency care. It turns out that I should have gone to the (typically very expensive) ER instead -- it would have been covered 100% because of the ACA!
Why do you prefer the company choosing insurance and paying x% over them paying 0%? Didn't you get the money they didn't pay? I mean what does it matter. Any tax reasons?
From what I understand, order picking there must be god awful, but being the receiving clerk might not be so bad. Being on-site IT might not be so bad. Certainly being the Director of Operations for that warehouse wouldn't be bad... at least I wouldn't think.
Touch choice. As far as I can tell, the social welfare system in Bulgaria covers unemployment, healthcare, sick leave, maternity and paternity leave. The country looks like an amazing place, however it’s population is in decline, it is corrupt and it has variety of huge problems.
Minimum wage is about US$1.16.
No, it means anywhere in the EU for the most part. For example, EU mandates all member states to give workers at least 4 weeks of paid vacation. Many have 5 or 6 weeks, but 4 is the bare minimum.
In Alabama you cannot qualify for medicaid unless you are a "needy child, parent, caregiver, pregnant woman, or elderly/disabled resident". Meaning you can't qualify just for being low income.
While Amazon does provide decent health insurance, most lower income jobs do not.
I make good money, and have good health insurance and it would still cost me over $1k to go to the hospital. Imagine doing that with no health insurance while making $10/hr.
EDIT: You updated your comment so I'll add on. Sure, Amazon provides health insurance, but a lot of businesses don't. In 2020, ~31 million Americans didn't have insurance. Even if you have health insurance, premiums and deductibles can be astronomical.
Ah, my friend, but you can generalize: both from the cultural (Europe in general has stronger welfare states than most US federal and state systems provide), and because members of the EU are bound to EU-wide rules on worker rights. Pluuus, since member states of the EU have freedom of movement within the bloc, companies in the EU compete on these and other factors (like salary), raising the overall standard. (Sometimes problematically, due to brain drain of weaker economies, etc.)
So while your comment is half correct, I think you should give the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt before you try and "well actually" them.
Such a difference between talking about working at a warehouse from the outside vs being born into a life that traps you there.
I think HN struggles with topics like unionisation because most of us have just never been at the bottom of society without a way out. We’re relatively rich and so highly skilled - we lucked out to be nerds in a world of tech, perhaps due to timing or perhaps because our parents were wealthy enough to put us here.
It’s the same phenomena of loving Uber or Airbnb and not understanding the cost to others.
I don’t know how to solve this problem. I don’t personally want to go work at an Amazon warehouse so I can see how awful it is. I work damn hard but I know how lucky I must be.
How do you get the rich to realise that the poor are simply, by definition, less fortunate?
Funny enough, I have often have the same thought. I'm a military officer and the enlisted folks are often living not far from the Amazon warehouse workers. Indeed, the highest paid officers in the military make less than 10x more than the most junior enlisted recruit. These are people who command hundreds of thousands of people.
I think a significant difference is that most folks in tech do not live and work among the skilled and unskilled laborers. In the military, you know the cook, the plumber, the electrician, and the riflemen, the air traffic controller, the network technician. Personally. You've been around the world together, you may have been in firefights together.
In the military, the headquarters jobs with the bean counters are rare. Bean counting is essentially synonymous with 'fat and happy'. In tech, the equivalent of bean-counting headquarters is 90% of the organization. It's extremely advanced bean-counting, but the field units have atrophied quite a little bit.
That's a great reply, thanks. I see from up/down votes that I've hit a nerve.
I really like your perspective. Reminds me of the attempts in new towns in the UK to try to mix different socioeconomic classes on the same street. "Show me and I'll understand." I grew up in a deprived town (but my family was comfortable) and I've worked a lot of awful jobs, maybe that helps.
So a good first step would be to integrate within companies more? Perhaps corporates deliberately avoid that. Much easier to treat warehouse staff badly if your valuable engineers don't know them personally.
The monthly premium is around $20-80/mo for healthcare plans that are seriously amazing compared to other plans I’ve seen in America, ie $300 deductible and $2000 out of pocket (with $500 of it covered by Amazon).
I was on the bronze-level Obamacare plans for years and it was about $300 for bad coverage in comparison to “real” private insurance.
There is so much digging at Amazon I’d like to see the delivery and warehouse work role required performance metrics and work role benefits posted so we can look at facts.
So work hard and get a better job. The fact is that you will not if you have a safety net under you. I lived on welfare and refused to make more money until it was a LOT more money. I finally got off the safety net only when my income increased five fold. Even that was a little begrudging because I had $800 a month in food stamps and free medical care and so all those costs got flipped onto me--not to mention the $6000 tax credit I lost and instead had to pay that amount. There are many families who are pulling down far more in benefits than I was. These safety nets are fucked up, and they gotta go. A better alternative is either UBI or a negative income tax.
The worse job you'd leave still need to exist, it's just going to be someone else toiling in unreasonable conditions. Sure, "get a better job" is something people in low-paying jobs should strive for, but it's selfish only to care about one's own situation and ignore the people you're leaving behind.
There are plenty of jobs in western Europe that will pay similar and won't force you to pee in a bottle or your pants.
That's ignoring the whole healthcare situation... which I think you're leaving out of the equation.
30 seconds of searching indicates the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker.
Amazon Warehouse workers have medical coverage here too. So they're leaps and bounds ahead if you want to go ahead and say that.
Of course the US healthcare system is broken so I know what you're getting at but I don't know that I want Amazon to pay their workers > $15 to subsidize a broken healthcare system for their workers I just want a functional healthcare system and for them to continue to make $15/hr.
>Amazon Warehouse workers have medical coverage here too. So they're leaps and bounds ahead if you want to go ahead and say that.
Sorry, are you seriously trying to claim an HSA is better than universal healthcare?
>Of course the US healthcare system is broken so I know what you're getting at but I don't know that I want Amazon to pay their workers > $15 to subsidize a broken healthcare system for their workers I just want a functional healthcare system and for them to continue to make $15/hr.
I'm not even sure where you're going with this. The original claim was that $15/hr was better than you can get in Europe. I pointed out the hourly wage actually isn't much better, and oh by the way, that wage doesn't include healthcare (which it doesn't). If you want healthcare coverage you have a monthly fee, plus your co-pay and deductible. Not even REMOTELY competitive to western Europe unless you're one of the lucky few who literally never gets in an accident and never gets sick (as well as your entire family).
> Sorry, are you seriously trying to claim an HSA is better than universal healthcare?
It's not an HSA and nothing else. It looks like it's similar to my employer plan which is actually more generous than some universal systems - I/my partner use about the same services here and in Australia and I pay less here. Mainly because universal systems don't always cover dentists/specialists/mental health.
I said it pretty clearly, it's not Amazon's fault that US healthcare is broken. Comparing EU to US for wages is thus largely fruitless. Fix our healthcare then your comparison might be useful.
I was attempting to nicely dismiss your comparison.
It is not Amazon's fault but there is nothing legally preventing them from doing better. That is a choice by Amazon. They offer worse health insurance for more money than I have available to me.
> Sorry, are you seriously trying to claim an HSA is better than universal healthcare?
I think it can be. Depends on the details but an HSA comes with a high-deductible plan. This is normally ideal for young people, who are generally healthy and only need insurance for rare catastrophic illness or serious accidents. Normal, routine care (checkups, immunizations, etc.) can be budgeted and paid out of the HSA tax-free. I don't see why that stuff should be "free" for most people, any more than groceries or utilities or housing should be.
> I don't see why that stuff should be "free" for most people
I do. Having a healthy population benefits me. Having people immunised, cared for and well keeps me healthier and safer. Having people lose homes and jobs and potentially their lives because they can’t afford healthcare is not something I support.
There are actually tons of studies that show preventive healthcare reduces spend later on. For instance, if you pay for someone's routine checkup you might catch a heart issue or cancer early. Both insurance companies and the government (Medicaid/Medicare) would save money by paying for preventative care.
An HSA doesn't mean that you don't have preventative care. I have a high deductible plan plus HSA and there are things like annual checkups covered without going into deductible.
I started with a new doctor after finally getting insurance a few years back. I told them I needed to come in for my annual check-up, and came in with a list of the things that had been bothering me and that I hadn't been able to get looked at (this is common for people who have not had healthcare access). The doctor spent 15 minutes with me, doing the bare minimum of setting up outside testing/imaging - as in, basically no guidance that day - and then coded it as a 45-minute, in-depth consultation ("because of the number of issues addressed"). $250. Before any tests or treatment. For reference, that was about 1% of my annual take-home. For a lot of you, that's like paying a grand or more just for your doctor to direct you elsewhere.
So, yeah, certain things are "covered." But the structure of our healthcare system forces our clinics and hospitals to operate like many other American businesses, which is "in a predatorial manner."
What, exactly, is a preventative check, if not a discussion with your GP about your current physiological status? Given the time described (15 minutes), and the lack of immediate diagnostics, it sounds exactly like what I would expect from a check-in with my doctor here in Canada.
The only other option I could see counting as a preventative check is a physical, which would be more involved than what was described.
It’s a matter of billing. A preventive visit does a set of screening and evaluation of results.
If you say “my knee hurts lately”, then that’s separate as the physician will do an evaluation that is separate from a routine physical.
And it’s not just the US. I have family in Canada and they were told maximum of 2 complaints can be addressed as they can only bill for a certain amount of time. Beyond that the doctor is working for free. Another separate appointment is needed.
So, yes, this is the problem. Healthcare should not be a business. It should be obvious that people who have been denied access before will come in to their first visit with multiple concerns, and the system should be accommodating to that without a massive "onboarding" fee. After all, it's not their fault that previous incarnations of said system did not supply care adequately.
If you view a person and their health in a holistic manner, you can't just say, "Well, I've got you set up to check for diabetes and Crohn's, but if you want me to consider that mole then you'll have to pay me another $300 and/or wait a few weeks until I'm not so booked."
My point was that "free preventative care" is not a panacea. Any time a doctor is incentivized to turn that visit into a money-maker, they'll gladly attempt to. And that's wrong.
So you’re against how universal care is setup in Canada? Each visit has a billing code for a certain amount of work. If you brought up other issues you’d be told to make another appointment.
Of course not. Canada's healthcare system is not, at the point-of-care, a business. Whatever business arrangement that exists is between the government and providers, not me and my doctor, so the latter relationship is not directly constrained by economic concerns, as is the case here in the US. If that appointment had taken place in Canada - and let's be clear first that it would not have, as I would have been insured unconditionally since birth and able to deal with each issue as it arose - the doctor would have either helped set up a treatment plan then and there, or she would have let me know that it would require another visit or two to go over everything, as here.
The difference is that I would not personally be out 1-3 weeks worth of food money for each visit, just establishing my baseline. In neither case would what happened be a "matter of billing" because I would never receive a bill.
It’s the same issue of billing for the doctor in Canada as the US.
The doctor gets paid $X for a preventive visit. If you start adding things on that will be flagged to ensure doctor get paid more, typically through additional billing codes.
The original comment was “why do I get billed more when I bring up issues during a preventative visit”?
Universal Healthcare systems can and do provide a significantly better coverage and vastly more cost efficient system. What you just said is selfish healthcare provision, look out for yourself and to heck with everyone else.
You have no empathy for people who can never afford ridiculous health care systems in private systems. This optimises the failed "rugged individual" philosophy that has only lead to ruin.
If you have a HSA it is just as good as any other universal health care. Depending on what you decide to value you can argue it is better or worse, but either way for practical purposes you don't have to worry about going to the doctor when you need to.
> If you have a HSA it is just as good as any other universal health care.
I’m not American and have only just learned about HSAs and totally fail to understand your comment. Could you explain how they help someone poor pay for medical expenses? Doesn’t the account get low/empty and then you’re out of funds?
When the HSA gets to zero you reach your yearly max and insurance takes over and you don't pay any more.
I'm not sure how Amazon works, but my plans works something like (I'm rounding to make it easy, the reality is slightly more complex) that I pay everything for the first $3000, then for the next $15,000 I pay 20%, and thereafter I pay nothing. My total out of pocket is $6000/year, which is also the most I can put into the HSA per year, and my employer matches some of my contributions to in reality I'm getting $7k/year while only a few rare loop holes can get me close to needing that much. It is very rare for anyone to have more than $18k in medical expense per year (I had a baby last year and still am well below that), so for most people the HSA is another retirement account.
Now the HSA does mean I'm not paying $100/month for my insurance, but instead $600/month. However most of the money is invested using the HSA as a retirement account for my medical needs. The idea of the HSA (which has not worked out in practice) is because the money is mine I'll have incentive to shop around for cheaper medical procedures to make sure there is more money for my future retirement, and this should lower costs (in practice most medical things can't be shopped around for, but a few people do look at their itemized bills and sometimes notice a billed procedure that wasn't done).
Now that $600 is $3-4/hr, which is not insignificant to someone making $15/hr. However here again things get complex. That money is pre-tax income, so your taxes are almost cut in half for the year (granted this is only $500 - and only for a single person who can't claim anything else).
Thank you for this - I get it a bit better and HSAs do more than I thought they did.
It’s a phenomenal sum of money to spend, and while you have clearly considered your options, it really shows how expensive it is in the US.
That said, I was surprised to see how high it is in New Zealand where I am ($4204) and how much less you are spending than the average in the US ($10906).
Average spending isn't very meaningful here because it's just a few people spending a lot - mostly elderly people, which of course has the effect of nobody inheriting anything anymore because it went to hospital bills.
The median person in the US doesn't spend much more on healthcare than the median European and their income is much higher. (Median income in a poor state like Alabama is higher than the UK.)
Plus we have working clothes dryers. Meanwhile in Sweden they're so poor they have to ration the tvättstuga.
> Average spending isn't very meaningful here because it's just a few people spending a lot - mostly elderly people, which of course has the effect of nobody inheriting anything anymore because it went to hospital bills.
That’s the same everywhere though. If you want to record the most expensive year of healthcare in someone’s lifetime, it’s a safe bet that the last year is going to be at, or near the top. Like has been compared with like.
> Plus we have working clothes dryers.
I’m missing something, and I suspect it’s obvious. What’s this about sorry?
> That’s the same everywhere though. If you want to record the most expensive year of healthcare in someone’s lifetime, it’s a safe bet that the last year is going to be at, or near the top. Like has been compared with like.
You're right it is comparable, although it's affected by the country's demographics. I just mean if you're moving to the US as a working-age person, it is not going to represent your situation. A median or age distribution would be more informative.
> I’m missing something, and I suspect it’s obvious. What’s this about sorry?
That's just a fun quality of life fact about the US. Europe has better transit, we have better and bigger housing and our appliances work better. We're more likely to have air conditioning too.
(Clothes dryers don't work very well unless they're vented to the outside, and in older brick buildings like Europe, and for some reason also in Japan, they aren't always.)
the UK healthcare system isn't so great either. It's good enough for a safety net (mostly... the wait times are horrendous for non-emergency work, and I know a guy whose collarbone pokes out at a right angle because his doctor wouldn't fix the break), but if you have a chronic condition that isn't one of the handful of really common ones that all doctors know about (like IBS) then you're mostly on your own unless you go private.
My experience with the NHS has been overall quite good, despite having an exceptionally severe presentation of Crohns and an aggressive leukemia. I’ve never been in a case where I have had to wait an exorbitant amount of time for either acute or routine care. This is across multiple cities and countries in the NHS.
I likewise had some of the best American specialists in GI and oncology. I also ended up with six figures in medical debt despite having incredible insurance and a great job. I also experienced excruciating wait times at emergency rooms that dwarfed anything I’ve encountered at the A&E in the UK.
The NHS obviously has massive scope for improvement and isn’t even the healthcare system I have felt the most secure in (that was the Swiss) but I am confident that the NHS is almost certainly better for the average Brit than the US medical system is for the average American.
Cancer treatment is a really high priority for the NHS these days, I think in part because it was an area where there used to be major issues and people died as a result. There are some really aggressive treatment targets for that handed down from on high and woe betide anyone who falls badly behind on them. Where it usually falls down is chronic and non-urgent conditions - stuff where patients won't necessarily die if not treated immediately, but might suffer long-term harm, maybe even lose a limb or their eyesight, or which seriously impact their ability to take part in normal activities whilst they're left untreated.
I couldn't speak to the US healthcare system, but from what I've heard it's probably much worse for usual medical needs.
I'm glad you've had a better experience with the NHS than I have; my wife has a chronic condition and has had a pretty bad time in the NHS - she hates going to the doctors now from how many times she's been called a liar or accused of just trying to feed a painkiller addiction (despite not actually asking for painkillers). All because many doctors seemingly struggle to admit that they don't know what's wrong.
I just bring this up because I think (and I could be wrong) that some people see socialised healthcare as a panacea but my experience with it is that it's actually very inconsistent and regularly lets people down (not just my wife, a good few others that I know as well). I still wouldn't choose the US system over the NHS though, not by a long shot.
I'm very open to the possibility that my experience has negatively biased my perspective on socialised medicine such that I interpret relative (to the US) praise as absolute praise - "socialised medicine is good" versus "socialised medicine is better than the current US system". I take no issue with the latter statement, only the former.
When I did a month summer education program in Cambridge another student on the trip needed a doctor. The experience was pleasant. What you described sounds like an experience you could just as easily have in the US with one of our many sub-par medical professionals that can't do anything but prescribe antibiotics. Bad doctors will exist no matter the system.
Oh, and granted it was just the one experience, but the wait time seemed on par with an urgent care here in the US.
there wasn't a medical reason - if I remember correctly, the doctor said that if it wasn't causing any medical issues then there was no need to fix it.
I've had other NHS experiences that make this not particularly surprising.
This is typical in the US as well. Last year my girlfriend broke her nose and they said they just let it heal nowadays because it'll probably be fine on its own and they can deal with it later on the off chance it heals improperly.
They nearly universally take that offer (I don't even need to check to state that as a fact, the way US health care is everyone takes what they are offered). That is very different from an offer that nobody takes.
How true is this "Pee in a bottle" thing? It sounds like a single anecdotal evidence widely used as a prop for arguments. Is there a systemic "pee in a bottle" problem at Amazon? I have a hard time believing this.
It is worth pointing out that Alabama is one of the poorest states in the country (using GDP per capita), along with Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Idaho.
Whether its 5th, 8th, or 1st; saying you can't compare US benefits to that of a "wealthy" European country is ridiculous. America IS a wealthy country.
the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker.
Is it fair to compare the average wage of a warehouse worker across the entirety of the U.K. with the starting wage of a warehouse worker in a single deeply impoverished town?
I don't think it's terribly difficult to emigrate from the US to the EU. Aside from plane fare, what's holding someone in the US?
And if it's just plane fare, there are probably a lot of places you can make it with a bus ticket that have better prospects without needing to go to Europe.
> Aside from plane fare, what's holding someone in the US?
Top of mind why someone would NOT want to work in "Europe":
- lower salaries
- much higher tax rate
- stuff in general is more expensive (higher VAT + everything that's imported)
Leave US and owe US taxes on foreign income unless the citizenship is renounced. There are costs to renounce US citizenship as well. Therefore, it is not that simple.
The warehouse workers get the same (extremely generous) healthcare as every other Amazon employee (due to ERISA).
And even if they didn't, through the Affordable Care Act, someone at that income level can buy a "Gold" plan with low deductibles for $75/month. Obviously for Amazon workers, that's irrelevant.
K-12 education is free, and once you factor in-state tuition and FAFSA, university is also basically free for anyone that continues to make minimum wage throughout their career.
You're conflating FAFSA and Pell Grants. FAFSA is an application for student aid. Pell Grants are the federal government grants given to low-income students. The lifetime limit for Pell Grants is $6,3465. As a low-income student, you may also be eligible for Stafford loans, which are federal subsidized loans. Subsidized meaning that the government pays for any interest accrued while you're a part time student, in your six-month post-graduation grace period, or other deferred status.
The estimated cost of attendance at one of the closest public universities, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has a yearly estimated cost of attendance of $28,695 for in-state students.
University isn't 'basically free' for low income students. My parents lived below the poverty line their entire lives. I graduated with my bachelor's degree and $80k worth of loan debt.
Sure low-income students might be eligible for needs-based grants and scholarships offered at their college. But federal support for low-income students is pitiful and college for those students is a far cry from free.
What you’re talking about is highly variable based on college choice and location. Federally, the student aid situation isn’t great, but there are many universities that will fully cover all tuition (and sometimes more) if you are under a certain income threshold. See: University of Texas.
You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other colleges in the area that cost fractions of Bama. And of note, Amazon actually pays for up to 95% of tuition/fees for warehouse workers who choose to pursue associates degrees.
There are certainly societal problems in the US regarding education costs and healthcare, but these are both areas where Amazon is actually providing for its workers way, way above what the federal government provides, and even way above what is normal for most Americans (the health insurance that Amazon warehouse workers get is likely better than the health insurance of most of the people posting in this thread). This is the kind of stuff that needs to be kept in mind to understand why Bessemer residents don’t all see Amazon as evil.
>"but there are many universities that will fully cover all tuition (and sometimes more) if you are under a certain income threshold. See: University of Texas."
The University of Texas's program is:
1.) Recent
2.) Covers students enrolled at the time the program went into affect. It doesn't cover recently-graduated students.
3.) Only covers Texas residents (meaning it's irrelevant to a conversation about Amazon employees in Alabama)
4.) Only covers tuition, not cost of living. Cost of living, of course, is more than half of total cost of attendance at the University of Texas.
Go ahead. Ask me how I know what it's like to be a low-income student at the University of Texas.
> "You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state."
I scoped it to one of two public universities near Bessemer, Alabama. UAB isn't the flagship campus, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. By the way, the other public university near Bessemer is the University of Montevallo. It has a cost of attendance of 27,845 per year for in-state students.
> "And of note, Amazon actually pays for up to 95% of tuition/fees for warehouse workers who choose to pursue associates degrees."
Is that generous? Yeah. To some extent. But keep in mind the following:
1.) It only applies to associates degrees.
2.) The yearly payout is $3,000 (for full-time employees, half that for part time)
3.) You have to have worked for a year to be eligible
4.) Amazon only covers certain degrees
You also have to continue working a demanding job with irregular hours. It's not nothing, I agree. But I've worked other non-skilled jobs with much more generous tuition reimbursement packages (including, but not limited to: eligibility for dependents, unrestricted major choice, applicability to four-year degrees, and more generous yearly maximums).
> "This is the kind of stuff that needs to be kept in mind to understand why Bessemer residents don’t all see Amazon as evil."
I never said anything about Amazon being evil, or whether Bessemer residents see Amazon as evil. In fact, if you look at my posting history, I've been very upfront that I am an employee of Amazon.
Further, 'not being evil' and 'providing more then the federal (or state governments)' is a very low bar to cross. It doesn't obviate the need for a union.
You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state.
Wow, so low-income students should not aspire to go to schools as 'fancy' as U of Alabama?
From the link: "The average annual net cost at a four-year public college has grown by almost 81% beyond inflation over the past decade, to $3,870."
Again, I'm sorry to hear about your personal experience; it's totally valid. It's, however, not representative of the median or the majority of the lower class.
That's ignoring Federal grants. Once you factor in all external grants, the median per-year tuition is half of that, if you read the last link. And that's the median. The bottom quintile is ostensibly much less.
Tuition also does not reflect the full cost of attendance (books, materials can be hundreds or even thousands a semester, depending on your major, and housing can in some cases exceed tuition[0]).
The same source notes that the net TFRB (which I'm reading as cost of attendance, as it isn't defined anywhere) is $15,500, with $6,500 in grants. Or a CoA of ~$9,000 annually. This remains above the 50% number I mentioned.
And it's worth noting that these grants aren't solely federal grants. Universities (and states) offer all kinds of non-need-based aid. The one I'm familiar with, since I'm from Georgia, is the Hope scholarship.
This grant offers 6-10K per year, which is amazing, unless you lose it part way through your education (by failing to maintain what can be a fairly difficult GPA requirement). I nearly lost it my first year. That would have been an additional cost of ~20K over the remainder of my education. That was stressful for me, an upper middle class person with financially responsible parents who had decent savings for my education.
That kind of stress would be compounded for someone who started in more dire financial straits, and who was more heavily relying on the grant money.
[0]: And while some people can live at home, this is not available to many people, and can negatively impact your ability to network and build a social support network with peers at university, which is extremely valuable.
I'm from Georgia as well (I went to Georgia Tech).
In addition to HOPE, you also have Zell-Miller which is even more generous (covers housing, food, and books).
The fact that Georgia's aid is tied to merit is a system that I personally agree with, but understand why someone might not. It's something that the voters of each State should litigate.
FWIW when I said 6-10K a year, I was including Zell on the upper end of that, and it does a great job of helping the people it helps, and as far as I know is one of the superior grant programs in the US (which is to say, you'll have less support in most other states).
> (I went to Georgia Tech)
Then you're probably familiar with at least part of the controversy: maintaining the Zell/HOPE GPA requirement at GT is difficult. So for an above average, but not exceptional student, or a student who doesn't have a strong support network, the rational decision can be to go to a worse school because maintaining the GPA requirement will be easier.
That means UGA (or State or KSU) over Tech for many people. I think that there are a variety of reasons that's a misalignment of incentives (and thankfully there seems to be some improvements happening in this area).
> So for an above average, but not exceptional student, or a student who doesn't have a strong support network, the rational decision can be to go to a worse school because maintaining the GPA requirement will be easier.
Yes, and I don't see a problem with that. The best schools are for the best students. This response shouldn't surprise you, coming from an alumna of Georgia Tech, which is an extremely rigorous and prestigious school.
I understand that values differ, but at some point, personal responsibility and merit need to count for something.
If the net result of this is that an unexceptional poor student ends up going to KSU or Georgia State instead of Georgia Tech, I'm okay with that. KSU and Georgia State are perfectly fine schools, and its graduates go on to lead perfectly fine lives outside of poverty. I recommend playing with this tool which allows you to see, for every single school and major, what the earnings vs debt is: https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-college-graduates-make-th...
Not everyone is entitled to go to Georgia Tech (or MIT or Harvard) for free; and there are plenty of middle-of-the-lane universities that provide opportunities for unexceptional students, at little to no cost.
I went to college (University of Georgia) with Pell Grants for free. 100% free including lodging and dining, both Bachelors + Masters in Physics. My parents were unemployed at the time and we interviewed at the deans office for the grant, I clearly remember when my father broke down in tears. I had to borrow friend's books, use the library scanner to create PDFs of the pages that were important - couldn't afford textbooks.
I am eternally grateful for the FAFSA/Pell Grant program. Without it, I wouldn't be conducting fundamental science and getting paid 6 figures.
I know this is N=1 sample size, just wanted to put it out there.
I think college should be free only for people that cannot afford it. Rich kids should pay.
I went to Georgia Tech, and another huge advantage in Georgia is the HOPE and Zell-Miller scholarships. IMO a model that should be replicated by other States in the Union.
Do they get free university with an interest free loan of which they only have to pay 50% and only up to 10,000€ back? And 20+ days vacation days plus 6 weeks paid sick leave plus 18 months job guarantee in case of a longer healing process while being paid 60% of their last wage? Plus 1-2 years unemployment benefits, also at 60% of last wage? Plus 60% paid for up to a year in case of being on furlough during a pandemic? Plus parental leave of 12+2 months at 67% of last wage? Plus full health care regardless of being employed? Plus no deductibles, limits, or copay for any health issue?
I don't know what this has to do with anything but Germany administered 720,000 doses on Thursday and the Pfizer vaccine was actually developed in Germany by a company called BioNTech.
In Europe free healthcare is guaranteed even if you lose your job, and there are essentially no limitations (if you need an expensive treatment, you get it, no matter what).
That's a very general statement which is false in some countries (e.g. in Poland unless you are a child or elderly and are unemployed, you are going to pay out of your own pocket)
Bullshit. In Italy only the lowest income brackets get free healthcare, everyone else has various degree of copay. And even then you get terrible services, with queues several months long for exams and quality far inferior from what you get going trough the private sector.
And when I worked and lived in Dublin, same story, I had to pay 270€ for using emergency services at a public hospital and was lucky to have them covered by the private insurance my employer provided.
In Italy copay is very limited, almost symbolic, even for those in the highest income brackets. As you point out wait times can be (very) long for exams (at least when there is no indication of urgency), but for serious/complex procedures the quality is way higher in the public sector than in the private one.
Bullshit. Plenty procedures aren't even covered, as soon as you're slightly out of the commonest procedures and you want some quality healthcare you're going to pay, and part yourself from thousands euros.
Proper dental procedures, substitutive hormone therapy, plenty rate stuff require specialists or medicines that mutua doesn't pass. heck if you have a condition that require a specialist during pregnancy you're going to have to pay everything out of your money to avoid the random ginecologist rotation, to the tune of 120€+/visit, and you're going to need ten or more if any complication arises.
This is the typical uninformed comment from some ableist that never actually had to suffer from the Italian healthcare beyond the most basic services.
Utterly false as a general rule, and free is not as glamorous as you make it sound like. Some doctors will refuse to see patients who are on the free healthcare system, too.
> if you need an expensive treatment
Yeah, if you can wait for it. Ever heard of surgery that sometimes take a year to reserve? Well that's the standard in Europe for certain conditions.
I need more information about that health care plan. Last time I looked at the market I was looking at worse premiums, coverage, and limits and making garbage pay.
My plan is $500/mo from me and $1500 from my employer with, iirc, 8000 max oop
Edit: I reviewed the plans they offer. Mine is significantly better, excluding the max oop. Anyone know what the costs are for for the plans?
From past experience at Amazon, it’s anywhere from $20 to $80 per month for individual coverage.
I honestly have trouble believing yours is “significantly better”. One of the Amazon plans is a $300/year deductible with $2,300/year oop, and costs $80/month, and Amazon contributes $500/year towards your HRA. Another plan has no deductible, and $1,500/year oop. Those are some of the best healthcare insurance plans I’ve ever seen in the US, period. I’d believe it if yours was about the same, but it’s pretty difficult to be “significantly better” than those.
Between less/no copays and specific services my employer covers directly my plan is significantly better for me and my circumstances. My previous employer had virtually identical coverage with higher oop and monthly payment. Just a perk of being in a strong union I guess.
E: I'd love to see the official coverage breakdown offers with prices if anyone has them please share, email in profile if you don't want to share publicly.
This is incredibly expensive compared to the Amazon plan.
You understand that you are paying more in premiums than the premium _plus_ out-of-pocket maximums of these plans, right?
A quick Google search gives https://www.premera.com/documents/042884.pdf which indicates $31 per month (or $14.31 per biweekly pay period), which is $372 per _year_, plus Amazon refunds $500 into your HSA.
There is no way your plan could be better for you, regardless of your circumstances. You start off more than $6000 in the hole compared to the Amazon plan.
Also, population for the city is near 25k. A small fraction of those folks enjoy the benefits of this healthcare given by working for Amazon.
Furthermore, it is a bad historical precedent to rely on employers for healthcare. This was a poor side-effect of the wage-hike stoppages during WWII that was later tax-exempted through federal law. It was never well thought out.
Finally, how many people in this town feel they have equal opportunity for social mobility? Decades of economic stagnation and degradation have thrown any plausible arguments towards a "meritocracy/American dream/everyone has an equal chance at success" out the window.
Sure, and healthcare isn't "literally free" in loads of high standard of living first world countries. In France, for example, there's a 20% coinsurance that's paid on all treatments. With a few exceptions, most single payer countries have co-pays.
These plans are extended to every single Amazon employee, including the warehouse workers. Most of the warehouse workers we're talking about would probably choose the Kaiser HMO that has $0 deductible and 100% coverage; all they would pay is $30 co-pay. This is more or less how the single payer healthcare works in Australia, for example.
> Most of the warehouse workers we're talking about would probably choose the Kaiser HMO that has $0 deductible and 100% coverage;
No. We're talking about workers in Alabama, and Kaiser is listed on that very page as regional: Kaiser Permanente HMO (California, Colorado, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Washington)
I'm assuming Amazon charges employees some portion of the insurance premium, as most employers do? Also, there's this:
> Amazon’s benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment.
You're correct that there's regional variation, but that's mostly a function of the medical networks. For instance, UHC's network may have more coverage in the Northeast than Blue Cross Blue Shield (or vice versa).
Ultimately, as full-time employees, Amazon's warehouse workers are entitled to the exact same health insurance as their white collar counterparts sitting in the offices, and they offer extremely above average Cadillac health insurance.
I didn't think so. My company offers us Kaiser as an option as well, but only for folks in states where Kaiser operates (I'm in Michigan). I thought one of the distinctive features of Kaiser is that they offer insurance _and_ have their own clinics.
Regardless, the point of Amazon offering quality healthcare plans to the warehouse workers is still great to hear!
It means the employer has to offer a sufficiently generous benefit so that enough of the company’s lower income employees sign up for it, such that it passes non discrimination testing rules. Which means the health insurance benefit must be good enough that even the lower paid employees find it makes sense to sign up for it.
No, exactly the opposite. ERISA is a Federal law that strictly regulates how plan fiduciaries can operate employer-sponsored health plans. A key element of ERISA is that an employer cannot offer more generous benefits to some employers over other; everyone in the company must be offered the same plans, and within each plan, every beneficiary must be treated the same.
prior to the No Surprises Act just signed (and maybe after too?) ERISA allowed for balance billing. Which means not even California laws against balance billing would apply.
For anyone not living in the permanently-fucked US, an explanation: your health insurance covers you for "in network" doctors at an "in network" hospital. If you go to an "in network" hospital you would assume (wrongly) that you are fully covered. But no. Some random anesthesiologist can come into your room, provide their service for 20 minutes, and stick you with a $5,000 bill because they are "out of network". And you have ERISA insurance and you are just plain fucked.
Anyone getting health services in the US must hang a sign on their door saying "In Network Only". I'm 100% serious. Every person that walks in your room must be vetted. And good luck if they can't find an "in network" surgeon for that emergency service or whatever.
Full disclosure: I work in this industry and am a claims adjuster on fiduciary plans that fall under ERISA
Everything you're saying is partially correct, but it heavily depends on the specifics of the plan. FAANG companies, in particular, typically have extremely generous PPO plans that offer 0 co-insurance and broad networks. You're correct that, out-of-network, balance billing may occur, but Amazon's plans have networks so broad that this is unlikely to happen.
In addition, if you look at Amazon's plan documentation, they also offer a Kaiser HMO for which none of this applies.
There's a lot that can be improved around price transparency, but Amazon is one of the few companies that offers Cadillac gold-standard insurance, and because ERISA requires that all employees receive the same benefits, this extends to their full-time warehouse workers too.
> but it heavily depends on the specifics of the plan
> Amazon's plans have networks so broad that this is unlikely to happen
I mean, this doesn't sound reassuring you know. "unlikely" and "depends on the specifics". That's kind of the problem. No one knows what is covered and what is not. Billing in the US is this labyrinthine thing where hospitals, doctors, and insurance all seem to be making it up as they go along in conjunction with whatever they feel are the laws and whatever they feel like they can get away with. Leaving it up to the patient to appeal after appeal after appeal on a flood of bills they will receive, depending on their operation or service.
You can't even get a detailed bill out of some of these places. The doctors vanish and you're literally stuck talking to one of those robocalling bill collector agencies, which probably has a PO Box in fucking Alaska. It's shady as hell. All of it.
Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. I personally adjudicate claims, and some of the stuff I see is downright asinine.
All that being said...
> I mean, this doesn't sound reassuring you know. "unlikely" and "depends on the specifics". That's kind of the problem. No one knows what is covered and what is not.
"American healthcare in short:
~60% (in good employer plans, generous state Medicaid, or M.Adv/Medigap) have the best healthcare in the world.
~30% have insurance with gaps/risk of big bills.
~10% uninsured must rely on uncompensated care, go without treatment, or risk bankruptcy
The strength of M4A proposals is that they begin with an understanding that the 40% exist and need things fixed.
Their weakness is that they pretend that the 60% don't, and threaten to take away what they have."
Amazon is, pretty reliably, part of that 60%; it offers some of the best employer health coverage out there. Like, it doesn't even compare to public health plans in a lot of the world.
All of the problems you brought up (labyrinthine systems, appeal processes, bill collector agencies in Alaska) are real problems that you and I agree need to be solved, but they're also problems that don't afflict beneficiaries of generous plans paid for by rich companies, and that's what we're talking about in the context of Amazon Warehouse workers.
Most FAANG companies cover all of the premium amount. The only difference is in the deductible. Some engineers might choose a higher deductible plan so that they can take advantage of an HSA and enjoy the triple tax advantage. Warehouse workers are probably better off choosing the $0 deductible HMO plan that Amazon offers.
Meh. I went to an Ivy league, as did my sister. My wife was a grad student at Stanford. My classmates were clever, but they weren't that smart! The standardized test scores can be improved with work.
As for standing out with your essay and CV, I remember a talk from an admissions officer from Harvard. His take was that it's easy to stand out from 99% of students just by actually doing real, substantive work. He wasn't talking about the stuff that's designed to be a student CV stuffer to impress admissions. Do actual, substantive work.
Something like a substantive contribution to a scientific field. Amateurs can still do this. Maybe run a real business. The example this admissions officer gave was someone who dropped out of High School, got a GED, then started repairing motorcycle engines. Then, you also need to make sure your essay is well written, which is another skill which can be learned. Relate your experience back to the academic opportunity, and how this would enable you to benefit society.
There is a problem with this way of thinking of admissions: If you do pursue it in earnest, you might well decide to skip university entirely.
To some extent, I wonder if the perception that your peers aren't that smart is just due to getting adapted to your environment.
I went to an Ivy coming from an inner city public school and I found it a big culture shock in terms of both how well behaved people were in classrooms and also how quick/smart people were to grasp what I was saying and build on it. By the time I was a senior, I had lapsed to the "people here actually aren't that smart" line of thought - but I wonder if I just got used to being around more intelligent people.
I did not go to an Ivy, but I went to the 1-2 ranked public institution in the US (for CS). The baseline is definitely higher, but there is a big gap between people who got there by their own grit and determination and people who got there almost helplessly due to a tidal wave of fortunate circumstances (e.g. parents were in sweng, went to cushy private schools that inflated grades, "did" a bunch of charity work / extracurriculars to pad their resume for college).
The "not smart" people are the latter category: they can still pick things up quickly, but they viewed getting into the institution as the last hurdle they'll have to go through in order to be set for life. They just coasted and got Cs and didn't really care about learning new stuff because they knew the university's name on their degree alone would land them some cushy PM job where they wouldn't need that pesky coding ability every again).
It was actually infuriating because I really enjoy CS and getting paired up with these folks who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths but didn't care was disappointing. Most of them were uncomfortable with the mental struggle of doing difficult group projects, often just showing up for the "design session" but skipping out on most of the coding. I made a lot of enemies out of them when I told the profs to look at my (GPG-signed) git commits and consider how they want to distribute grading points.
> I made a lot of enemies out of them when I told the profs to look at my (GPG-signed) git commits and consider how they want to distribute grading points.
In most cases it did: I even wrote a python script to use matplotlib to generate a few "contribution graphs" like one sees on github. That visual was usually enough to tell the profs to not give my teammates any credit when they didn't do diddly squat for code.
I learned most of the "defensive git" tricks during this time because I caught one of these guys trying to rewrite history to claim credit for my commit. That guy got referred to the university's "ya dun messed up bigtime" committee (I forget the actual title) and I think he was kicked out for academic dishonesty. Ever since then I gpg sign all my commits!
I was in a group project for a Psychology of Business class. This 4th string quarterback/son of a politician or some such just told us on the 1st day, "Well, considering we're graded as a group, I want to tell you I don't care what grade I get, so you guys are doing all of the work!"
To some extent, I wonder if the perception that your peers aren't that smart is just due to getting adapted to your environment.
I've met people who I would describe as "bonkers smart", as the comment I was replying to had it. That is, people who are literally 2-3 times faster at getting to the next step, and just leave the entire room behind, when the room contains a dozen graduate students. They are not that common, even in a place that's supposed to be populated by the intellectual elite.
how well behaved people were in classrooms and also how quick/smart people were to grasp what I was saying and build on it
The same is true at the in-state universities. At that salary, your kid can study at University of Alabama (a perfectly fine institution with great campus life) basically for free.
The University of Alabama also has surprisingly good merit scholarships for students who are from out of state. I was considering going there and they offered me full tuition + 2 years of housing covered + some other grants (and I wasn't even that good of a student, definitely not Ivy caliber).
Not everywhere in Europe, and "free healthcare" is largely a myth. It's free until it's not. You need glasses? Out of your pocket, and it's super expensive. You need to stay in hospital? It's not going to be anywhere free. And they will kick you out as soon as they can as they are starving for beds and resources. Good luck with that.
Sure, you can always go to the emergencies to get free treatment, and wait 10 hours to see someone who is overworked to diagnose your issues.
Basic glasses are usually at least partially covered, and whatever extra you need to pay for frames is very affordable unless you want a designer brand.
Nobody is ever going to kick you out of hospital. It's covered and the stay is usually longer than in the US where they kick you out right after you wake up.
The wait times are not worse than in the US, never had to wait more than 2-3 hrs in the hospital.
Neither you would ever receive a surprise bill from the hospital.
That and more:
1. universal disability benefits
2. usually min 20 days of vacation
3. pension
4. unemployment benefits incomparable to the US
5. unpaid overtime is usually taboo
I live in the US (originally from EU) and I don't like people arguing the EU healthcare sucks without experiencing it themselves.
No matter what your job/status is, you don't have to be scared to see any doctor - dentist, specialist, eye doctor...
Well, specifics vary; like in the U.K. - good luck on finding an NHS dentist. Virtually everyone I knew in the U.K. had private dentistry despite it putatively being covered by the NHS.
in the US a "simple" no frills root canal and cap costs $600 for the drill and fill, and about $500 or $600 for the cap/crown/whatever milling. That includes anesthesia, post care prescription (not the medicine itself, just the scrip), x-rays, etc.
Usually you know when you need a root canal. It's usually because just getting a tooth filled is more expensive than getting it pulled, and most 'decent' dentists won't do pulls, because it eventually, allegedly, leads to all of your teeth shifting and falling out.
I've had dental insurance a couple of times, and while it was $20 to get a full cleaning and xray or whatever, they wanted me to get braces for $2500 out of pocket. I've never had another dentist i was paying for myself ever mention braces or anything else. from 20-38 i went to the dentist like 5 times, 3 cleanings when i had insurance, and 2 wisdom extraction. I'm well aware i lucked out in the dentistry lottery, most people i know have way more problems with their teeth, and i am unsure why, so i never judge people on their dental accoutrements.
> You are not taking into account that in Europe you get free healthcare
Single payer health care is not necessary 'free'. Here in Czechia one pays mandatory 'health tax/insurance' in addition to regular income tax. But still (IMHO) better than US system.
Ok, this is perhaps a pedantic rant, but this term "free healthcare" is not valid. Money came out of citizen's pay checks to pay for the healthcare.
Why do we keep using this term? There is no such thing as free healthcare. There is taxpayer paid healthcare. I'm not being critical of taxpayer paid healthcare. Those countries made that choice as to how they would pay for healthcare. Cool. Sounds like a good choice. But can we stop calling it "free" please.
Education is also not free... Rant off. Sorry for the interruption.
Free? Nothing is free, what do you mean? Healthcare and education don't grow on trees. Dublin income tax is between 30% to 40%, you pay one way or another.
I don't think most of my colleagues in academia could physically complete a shift in an Amazon warehouse. Is that a skill?
The labels unskilled and entry level are used to depress wage expectations not accurately represent the requirements of the work performed because the work is deemed to be of low economic value.
It is called unskilled because there is no particular set of unusual credentials, rare talents, or uncommon training required. The entry bar is very low in that respect.
It doesn’t mean, and has never meant it was easy work or anyone could survive doing it for long - rather that the necessary skills (for the majority of the population who doesn’t already have them by dint of existing) can be taught in about 5 minutes by someone not trained in teaching it to you.
Ditch digging is ‘unskilled’ because anyone who can figure out a shovel can do it, and theoretically any random passerby could do it (for a time) to a competent degree. This is unlike a ‘skilled’ trade, or craft such as electrical work, surveying, etc.
It’s something very few people could actually sustain for very long - I spent a week ditch digging before when I was younger - but part of why the pay is terrible and the work is hard is because any rando who needs some cash this week can do it. There is a ton of competition keeping prices low and conditions hard.
I did tour of Amazon warehouse (they used to run public tours) and most workers there did not look particularly fit or athletic. I would say that people in typical tech office looks more fit. Also Amazon gives you time to ramp up - while your collegues in academia may struggle first week, they will shape up pretty fast.
Most of your peers in academia could build up the needed physical fitness in a few days and within a week be just as productive as someone else who has been there for years (assuming similar body - obviously someone who is physically disabled can't compete). By contrast it would take the warehouse workers years of study to write software that is any good.
If the post above about average houses costing $90k there are true, then the Amazon workers are earning about $26k a year, that's around 3.5x salary to house cost.
I live in the middle of The Netherlands; the average house price is 360k and the average wage is 36k, that's around 10x salary to house cost.
One important point: in almost all cases in NL both partners work, the general rule is that women work part time and increasingly couples under 40 both work full time. That's how the insane house market is propped up.
Healthcare costs are around 200 EUR / person / month at the limit (you pay ~110 and the deductible is about 900 EUR a year).
Cost of living in the middle of nowhere in the US is almost certainly less than nearly anywhere in Western Europe. The media home value in Bessemer is like $90,000.
Food and housing is extremely cheap in America. Americans have an extremely low cost of living and low taxes compared to every other wealthy country. Also higher wages for similar jobs.
One reason everyone thinks it's bad is journalists are 1. naturally neurotic people 2. all have student debt 3. all live in expensive cities like NYC and 4. their industry has fewer people earning less than they did 10 years ago. Similar for some other activist classes, though not all.
Healthcare is likely less expensive at that income level. An ACA silver plan in Alabama for a single person making $30,000/year is expected to cost $85/month with subsidies: https://www.kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/
That’s 3.4% of income, lower than the typical health insurance tax in European counties.
Food in America is cheap. Transportation is pretty cheap because gas is cheap and old Japanese cars are low maintenance. At $15/hour healthcare is cheap because everywhere in the US has subsidized healthcare through the ACA.
Up thread there were claims of reasonable (by broken American healthcare system standard) zero cost insurance plans offered by Amazon. Was that true or false?
Every state I’m aware of has workers comp, federally everyone gets COBRA, Medicare, Medicaid, SS disability, short and long term disability- these are all things.
Are they perfect? No. Pretending the systems flaws are somehow Amazon being evil vs the American medical and safety net being a morass of bureaucracy and bullshit is just wrong though.
energy is cheaper in the US: electricity and gasoline (half price or cheaper). Groceries are significantly cheaper (food is of lower quality, but at least cheaper). Sales tax is around 20% in Europe vs 4% in Alabama. Property tax is a quarter of what it is generally in Europe...I can go on and on. If you are not a felon, you own a car and are healthy, life is pretty easy in the US, even for a low wage worker.
You should include car costs ( + gasoline, maintenance, insurance) vs walking/biking/public transit. And healthcare costs, and education costs, and social safety net ( meaning that you need less of a savings account to be able to avoid disaster ).
I'm certain that a small town in Italy or Spain could come out cheaper.
That the labor conditions being just as one would imagine for a near-trillionaire's empire creeping on the distressed poverty of a white supremacist soul devouring harvester.
Why ... what did you think that the subject was, dear ?
30 days of vacation... With that many their effective hourly wage goes up 10-15%. How many vacation days do you think amazon workers get? The parent post might consider amazon warehouse workers to be slaves, but that is likely more due to the harsh working conditions rather than their pay.
Munich is one of the most expensive cities in Europe - cost of living in Bessemer is probably 30% of Munich. You can buy 3bdrm 1500 sq ft house is Bessemer for 60k. You will pay in one year that much to just rent comparable house in Munch.
In Europe, workers have workplace safety protections that these Amazon warehouse workers don't have. Amazon workers are treated as disposable, and unlike Europeans, their healthcare benefits don't extend beyond their usefulness to Amazon:
That's entirely possible, and very likely. However, that does not do away with rationality completely. For some given situations, with data on the situation and a set of options, we can deduce pretty quickly what is rational to do, what is right to do, and what is in one's interest to do. This is how we (and that includes me and you) are able to criticize people on those grounds all the time. If someone is poor and has a choice between buying a stereo system and saving the money in a high-interest bank account, I doubt you'd have any problem saying that it's in their self interest to do one of those options and not the other. Economists talk about the principles of economic rationality all the time.
So yeah, you can have your own opinion. That doesn't mean that the opinion is beyond criticism, nor does it mean it's a rational thought out opinion from all points of view, considering all the facts.
> If someone is poor and has a choice between buying a stereo system and saving the money in a high-interest bank account, I doubt you'd have any problem saying that it's in their self interest to do one of those options and not the other
Curious, what would you say is better to do? I could see either one of those choices as being equally rational and justifiable. I honestly lean a little more towards the stereo. Your answer depends on your outlook in life and your interests and wants/needs in the moment. It's not so simple as objective 'data on the situation'. Furthermore, claiming that you can deduce quickly what is rational and right for someone else is a little condescending.
You mean like all those inner city women who constantly vote for gun control despite easy access to hot lead being the best way they can protect themselves from violence?
Or are we talking about the hicks that vote against government healthcare and social safety nets despite the fact that they would themselves benefit?
"Voting against their interest" is just how the ivory tower crowd derides the poor for sticking to their ideological guns even when it doesn't benefit them. The poor have opinions and beliefs and making sacrifices in the name of their beliefs does not make them stupid.
The scope of what you're considering to be their "ideological guns" is very historically recent. Before the Southern Strategy [0], the things that people typically associate with these "hicks" in rural parts of the US were not politicized; most of these hot-button ideological issues were considered to not be the domain of politics (e.g. abortion).
In fact, the people who were the first "rednecks" would most likely reject all of the fascist bootlicking that goes on for most conservatives (not that neoliberal bootlicking is better, just less prevalent; I don't see hordes of foaming-at-the-mouth Biden supporters screaming adoration about Biden with some goofy flags and apparel on the street corners, while I still see the Trump folks doing the same cult worship of their new "god"). The original rednecks were miners who violently opposed capitalist exploitation [1]. This culminated in the battle of Blair Mountain [2], in which miners living in exploitative conditions violently rebelled against the authoritarian private police (the "Pinkertons") in their attempt to form a union. This is also the first time that aerial bombardment is used on American soil (preceding Pearl Harbor).
Needless to say, I think the original "rednecks" have nothing in common with those who pretend to espouse some sort of "rural identity"; the original rednecks would not have looked to the state to force their own restrictive ideas of living on other people.
It's fine for people to have their own opinions about these things, but when these people who stick to their ideological guns do so in the face of facts (e.g. all of the cult-of-trump people who intellectually contort themselves to see him as some skilled businessman when he has a history littered with business failures, including losing money on a casino!), it's a little difficult to respect their opinions; this is especially true when their opinions are incoherent (e.g. the GOP celebrating Goya and that my pillow guy for "getting involved in politics" when it benefits them, while deriding companies looking to boycott states that plan to impose Draconian voter suppressing laws to "stay out of politics") and involve restricting the liberties of other people to comport with their own strict world view (e.g. restricting the right of other people to get same-sex married, as though that is somehow an "attack" on hetero marriage).
Ultimately it's about being able to accept new evidence and change one's mind, which I think these people who vote against their own interest (hicks or not) are not wont to do. Just as not all people in the GOP are fascists, but all fascists vote for GOP candidates, not all people towards the liberal end of the political spectrum are open to new ideas and changing their mind, but all people who are open to learning and change are on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
I live in deep deep Trump country and know a good number of the Maga hat, Trump flag flying folk. None of them “look[ed] to the state to force their own restrictive ideas of living on other people.”
I mean there are plenty of people alive today that lived through a time when interracial marriage was illegal, too [0].
Even if the path they use for their goal appears to be deregulatory, they're more than happy to call in the cavalry when that same deregulation allows actors with whom they disagree to also partake in the newfound "freedom":
* Whenever some state capitol puts up the commandments in the state house because "wE'Re a ChRiSTIaN NaTiON" under the guise of freedom of religion, then gets upset when the church of satan wants to put one of their own symbols right next to it [1]
* They were more than happy to stand on the ground of "A company is a private business and should be able to operate as it pleases" when it was about a bakery and a gay wedding cake, but now that Twitter is kicking off right-wing wackos, all of a sudden they pull a complete 180. Not to mention that this was the same mindset of the Jim Crow "separate but equal" disaster in the US's history.
I prefer indoctrination that improves people's wages and working conditions as opposed to the present anti-union indoctrination that only serves to empower bosses at workers' expense.
Is it beyond your imagination that perhaps those workers have a better idea of their own self-interest than you do? I understand that you're well intentioned but you need to consider that someone can be an informed, intelligent person of goodwill and come to a conclusion that is different than yours.
And while I don't know you, I'm gonna assume that you don't work for Amazon in Bessemer. Neither do I. So our responses to the situation might just be more about us and our baggage, than the actual facts on the ground in Alabama.
Anyone who doesn't want higher wages or better working conditions isn't defining their self-interest very rationally. And anyone who doesn't believe the union is the best way to get there is probably being persuaded by anti-union propaganda rather than sound arguments.
Perhaps if higher wages and better working conditions are the only items that define your self-interest. I suspect while those two items may be important or helpful, they are by far not the only factors that define my self interest. I have given up both willingly and much happier for it. Perhaps my happiness is not rational but it’s damn sure more important than money and whether or not I have a 1” or 2” standing mat under my feet.
Condescending is opposing giving low income people more money and better working conditions because of some abstract philosophical argument used to justify redefining self-interest in a totally bizarre way.
People in this thread are all like, "Don't tell me giving someone food is in their self-interest! What if they want to starve?"
You are framing the argument disingenuously. This isn't a simple formula where union = better. There are reasons why people don't think a union is in their self interest. Contrary to whatever you're parroting, there are actually people who have good reasons why they don't want a union--including things they have actually experienced. The fact that you can't possibly see the other side of it and can't even fathom an argument against it just shows how biased you are. The fact that you don't even think other people can make their own rational choice shows how condescending you are.
I’m pretty sure that if labor costs in Bessemer AL == Labor costs in another location, say.... Seattle? Bessemer, AL wouldn’t have the worry about the anti union indoctrination and would have to worry about starving again.
For these communities, these are well paid jobs with great benefits compared to what they would otherwise have.
Saying you don't need a union because your wages are good is like saying you don't need democracy because the king is nice to you. All that can change very quickly, and when it does, you're going to want the power that collective bargaining gives you in those negotiations.
Not disagreeing with you - if you have a mortgage and kids keeping you somewhere and a king that will abandon you and leave you to starve if you vote for Democracy - you can die on that hill if you want to, and the King probably won’t care. He’ll move next Area over, have the same or better deal, and you and your kids will starve.
At that point the question is - why should you starve so someone else can be happy about Unions?
These issues only get solved with society wide action. The poor sap casting their single vote here can’t afford to make this call on their own, and they’re just happy their particular king is generous enough to grace them and not more abusive. Because there are a LOT of more abusive ones , and they’ve probably seen that first hand unlike most of the posters here.
Unions outside the US are "society-wide". We have per-company union organizing because of quick hacks applied to the legal system, the same way our healthcare system was created. Sectoral bargaining systems like Europe are less antagonistic and the employer has less motivation to fight against them. It can make the company more efficient since the execs don't only hear what middle management tells them.
There are a whole ton of asterisks on that kind of statement. Most European unions are at most national (which geographically is more equivalent to a specific US State than pan-EU). Many of them are regional, which is even scoped more like a city.
Conditions for a laborer in Bulgaria, Romania, and the UK are on a completely different level. This is not that dissimilar.
Things can also change when rising costs of manufacturing due to a unionized, aging, and over-paid workforce cause the company to decide to shut the factory down. It works both ways.
I'm wondering what sort of education exactly would prepare someone to decide if they should vote for a union or not. I'm assuming the would-be union would have made its case beforehand and Amazon hasnt been idle with their PR. So again, what education helps in making the decision?
Generally unionization of an organization fails when the union does not make a sound benefit case for their presence or the company already provides wages and benefits that meet or exceed the local market.
Contrary to what folks seem to think, unionization is not always a “no brainer”. Been through two orgs that went through the process, considered joining one because they presented a good case, rejected one because there was no value to the $50 the wanted to pull from my paycheck.
One of the things we discovered in the 20th century was that people do not always act rationally, even when it's in their own best interests. This cuts across political ideologies, education levels, income levels, race, religion; whatever. It's a feature of human beings.
Often when I hear that people need to be educated about some issue, what I understand the speaker to be implying is that the reason a person disagrees with them is due to ignorance, when that's often not the case. We may think we arrive at our opinions based on cold logic and inarguable facts, but in reality there are many more factors that influence all of us.
Most rich countries take good care of their poor. In the US, most states will pay for food, heating, sometimes even internet access, not to mention healthcare, if you are poor. Indigent children also have separate healthcare programs targeted towards them and receive free lunches at school to encourage them to concentrate on school. Furthermore, there is also Unemployment Insurance which provides for months of basic income if you become unemployed. Finally, there is disability payments. This is the situation where you are severely disabled and can't work, in which case, the government will pay you a basic income for the rest of your life. Most of these programs are well-run and disburse money efficiently.
Fraud to get disability payments is very high. People who are unable to rejoin the job market sometimes make the difficult decision to connive with sympathetic doctors to get this. But once you do this, you can never go back to work in any official capacity. This is the one case where people who are chronically unemployed give up and become wards of the state. So the 'desperately poor' are actually taken care of in some fashion in the US.
The problem is that the people who are the 'working poor' often get shafted. These are the janitors who are working all hours of the day, the baggers at the grocery store, the short order cooks, the security people who patrol industrial and residential facilities, etc. Even though their children are eligible for all the benefits above in many cases, it's still difficult to raise a family if there is one breadwinner who makes minimum wage. These people are not eligible for many benefits programs and also do not generally get healthcare from their employers (employers deliberately keep hours/week down to avoid this expense). The problem is, 'taking care' of these people is very hard: they are the majority of the workforce, and I suspect that there is not enough money to fund programs for these people because of the sheer size of this workforce. Also remember that this group oftentimes does not have powerful unions (many subgroups do), which means politicians do not have to listen to them.
I agree though. If we ever want to have a chance at closing the gap between low and middle classes, then we need a basic income for people making under a certain income. Taking away the hardships of deciding whether to put gas in your car or get groceries isn't a decision someone should have to make. An extra $500-1K per month for those people would make a world of difference and ease a lot of those everyday decisions.
The utopia would be having low income housing running on solar with affordable EV's for people under a certain income level as well. Combined with a basic income, it would certainly make a huge decrease in poverty and allow these people to bootstrap themselves into the middle class.
Can I ask where you heard that we could have given every person in the country a million each? I've seen that quoted all over the place, and can't figure out why, given that it's off by a factor of about a hundred.
That's completely incorrect. If you take the us population over 18, that is 209 million. If we assumed 5% are wealthy, that's 198 million who would need to get 1 million dollars. If you multiply 1 million by 198 million, you 198 trillion dollars.
Well reality so far is that things will stay unbalanced for a while.
I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago.
Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...
I don't get how people keep saying this. A UBI is effectively a tax credit. You fund it with higher nominal rates. These mostly cancel out for working people, netting to zero in the middle. People at the top pay on net so that people at the bottom receive on net.
It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means-tested benefits for low income people, but without the poverty traps, perverse incentives and excessive bureaucracy.
a) Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability. People who have run the numbers tend to realize how inviable it is. Those who don't, also think you can just endlessly print money or just tax people more until you get to the happy number. Which leads to b)
b) Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop.
Given a country's economic output, laws, culture and a thousand other factors, there's a hidden function that determines the maximum tax rate you can employ where anything more than that is counter-productive with both short-term and long-term results, the latter often including reputational damage that can be nigh impossible to repair, soft-capping your economy far below what it could've been. See: Laffer Curve, and the shining example that is Argentina.
> Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability.
For a $12,000 UBI that would yield a flat tax rate of ~22%.
In real life it's more complicated than that, but not so much more complicated that the number is going to be off by an order of magnitude. It's completely viable. People are already paying nominal rates that high.
> Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop.
The primary causes of this are that higher taxes give people less money to spend which hurts the economy and that higher marginal rates deter working.
A UBI is a transfer payment, so on net nobody has any less money to spend and in practice people with less money would have slightly more and those people are more likely to spend it. So this factor goes in favor of economic growth.
Meanwhile half the point of the UBI is to get rid of the crazy marginal rate cliffs created by means-tested benefits programs. The status quo deters work more than a UBI would, e.g. you lose unemployment if you take a job. Terrible incentives that would go away.
Higher marginal rates also reduce marginal outsourcing of labor. At a 40% combined federal and state rate, in order to pay a tradesperson $150 to come do some minor repair task at my house, I have to go out and earn an extra $250 to get that repair job done as compared to doing it myself.
Make the combined marginal rate 60% and now I have to go earn $375 in order to have $150 extra to pay for the labor for that repair. For the equivalent of $375 in wages for a service call, there's a lot of things I'll bother to learn how to tackle myself.
Marginal rates are weird because you can compare your marginal rate against every decision, but at that point, you aren't comparing every dollar earned to every dollar spend, so effective rates seem to be more useful (marginal would be useful if I was considering working more, I think). Anyways, as someone with a high effective tax rate, I'm totally fine only keeping 60% (or keeping 40% if we added another 20), if in return we all got UBI.
Again, a UBI will in many cases reduce marginal rates, because no more means testing. Right now if you want to hire a maid to clean your house, you have to overcome the loss of government benefits to them from taking on more work hours.
Meanwhile at the top the difference would be less than an increase from 40% to 60% because the UBI is replacing all of these other programs which would no longer have to be funded, or could be made strict alternatives to the UBI which would make the UBI less expensive.
People whose marginal tax rates would be reduced by the implementation of a UBI are probably not hiring maids either before or after the implementation of UBI.
To get the maid to show up, you have to cause their bank balance to increase by at least $10, after taxes. If the government is taking 80% of what you pay them away in food, housing and education assistance, you have to pay $50 to get them their $10. Get their real marginal rate down to 40% and you can pay $20 while they enjoy a surplus of $2.
> For a $12,000 UBI that would yield a flat tax rate of ~22%.
Yes. And that is absolutely monstrously huge. You just doubled the US tax rate!
Sure, you could cut spending elsewhere, or whatever, but once you do a program that is on the scale of literally doubling the US tax rate, you are definitely at a point where the costs of the program are very high, and likely unviable.
The total tax burden in the US (federal, state, local; income, sales, property) is closer to 50%, and most to all of the 22% would be in replacement of existing programs.
(Half the funding for many of the existing programs don't even show up in the federal budget, even though they're federal programs, because the feds condition the program on the state government providing matching funds, but the state's taxpayers don't get any refund of their federal taxes if the state doesn't implement the program. So the states are coerced into funding inefficient programs, and those would go away.)
> most to all of the 22% would be in replacement of existing programs
I think people are reasonably skeptical of this part. I've never seen someone show me the math around how all those programs would be rendered redundant by a UBI. Before getting to the political problem of dismantling benefits, some of which pay out more than $12,000 a year and have a vocal, sympathetic minority willing to fight for them.
>I think people are reasonably skeptical of this part
I think that understates it: some enormous fraction (like 45%) of federal government spending is for retirees (Social Security, Medicare and government funded pension) who represent only about 15% of the population.
It's actually pretty easy to solve, because it long-term replaces social security.
Social security has a dumb design if it's supposed to be a safety net. It pays out in proportion to how much money you made. That's not a safety net. If someone who made $20,000/year when they were working can survive on a given amount of money, someone who made $80,000/year when they were working can survive on the same amount. If they want more they can use the extra money they made to buy an annuity. And that's why social security costs so much -- it pays out more to people who, by and large, need it less.
Now, you're not going to pass a repeal of social security. The people currently receiving significantly more from it than they would from a UBI would revolt.
So you do this. You give people an election between a UBI for life or social security after retirement. Current 65 year olds are all going to pick social security. Current 18 year olds are going to pick the UBI, because the net present value is higher. That means social security long-term goes away.
In the short term, social security has a trust fund. It gets spent down to make up the difference between what existing retirees would get from the UBI and what they'll be getting from social security. In the long term, when all of the younger people who chose the UBI over social security reach retirement age, the high cost of social security goes away because nobody wanted it.
>Social security has a dumb design if it's supposed to be a safety net. It pays out in proportion to how much money you made.
Well, sort of. There're two bend points where the proportions go down fairly sharply (90%-32%-15%). It's extremely progressive from that point of view: those with lower average lifetime earnings get a much higher proportion of income replaced than do those with higher lifetime earnings.
Median annual Social Security benefits for 2020 are about $15K, vs. mean of about $18K., for example.
>So you do this. You give people an election between a UBI for life or social security after retirement. Current 65 year olds are all going to pick social security. Current 18 year olds are going to pick the UBI, because the net present value is higher. That means social security long-term goes away.
It makes a big difference where you set the level for UBI, and which entitlements programs you claim it replaces. Without knowing the specifics of the proposal, you can't get good numbers.
But it sounds like you're saying UBI will replace Social Security. Let's assume UBI pays $12K per year to every adult, which is less generous than a lot of numbers I've heard. This means it would replace about two-thirds of the average Social Security benefit.
Based on U.S. life expectancies, that UBI number and average Social Security benefits, I think that puts the break-even point for lifetime UBI to equal lifetime Social Security about 56 or 57. So let's say that everyone 57 or over stays in Social Security.
>In the short term, social security has a trust fund. It gets spent down to make up the difference between what existing retirees would get from the UBI and what they'll be getting from social security.
Social Security's "trust fund" was about $2.8tn at the end of 2020. That's 2.61 years of payments. The idea that Social Security is, in some sense, pre-funded by payroll taxes is completely false. It is effectively a pay-as-you-go system with a small buffer.
Under the assumptions above, you will exhaust the trust fund in less than 8 years, which is a problem as life expectancy at 65 in the U.S. is almost 20 years. So you now either have to stop funding the gap between UBI and Social Security (politically impossible) or raise more taxes.
Over to the UBI then. Social Security brings in taxes of just over $1.06tn year year. Let's just call it $1.1tn. By the way, non-benefit costs for Social Security are only about 0.05% of the program cost, so there's very limited opportunity to make gains by streamlining administration as is often claimed for UBI.
US population is about 330m. Take out the child population (about 19%; they aren't getting UBI) and the over-65 population (about 16%; they're retired and are getting Social Security). So you now have 215m people who will receive UBI.
Your $1.1tn of payroll taxes funds only about $5,100 of the $12,000 that's supposed to be paid in UBI. Payroll taxes would have to increase by 2.35x to cover the cost of the UBI, and that's before you plug the Social Security gap.
Making UBI less generous encourages more people to stay in Social Security which means your funding gap gets wider.
> Before getting to the political problem of dismantling benefits, some of which pay out more than $12,000 a year and have a vocal, sympathetic minority willing to fight for them.
The best way to handle this is to give people a one-time election of whether they want the UBI. If they want the UBI, they're disqualified from all of these other programs, for life.
Then nearly everyone picks the UBI. The person receiving $500 from other programs certainly does, so does the person receiving $10,000, probably even the person receiving $12,500 because they get to avoid doing the paperwork every year for all the other programs.
You're left with the negligible percentage of people who actually receive non-trivially more than $12,000 under other programs, representing a minority of the existing funding. This could also be assisted by dropping some of the less sympathetic programs immediately and further reducing the number of people on the other side of the $12,000 line. And the percentage shrinks over time, because someone picks the UBI at age 18 and then 10 years later discovers they might have received $16,000 this year from some other set of programs, but they've already made their choice. After a few years the other programs have so few people using them that there is no political will to continue them at all.
And recall that one such program is social security, which is currently funded by a 12.4% tax. That by itself is more than half the way to 22%. And all the existing retirees who choose that over the UBI would then not have to be paid the UBI.
Perusing the Wikipedia page for the Laffer Curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve), it seems that most studies find we could double our current tax rates and still be on the left of the peak (65%-70%). Given that our current federal revenue is appr. $3.5 trillion, it seems we could afford Yang's $2.8 trillion in UBI without issue.
Source for UBI total cost: https://freedom-dividend.com/
note: I ignored his ~$0.9 trillion in predicted savings/economic growth but that would lessen the bill even more.
You can ballpark these numbers just fine. 500/mo UBI for 350 Million recipients is $2.1T per year. US GDP prior the pandemic was ~20T. Expenditures were about 4.4 trillion, revenue was 3.5 trillion (2019 numbers).
500/mo or 1k/mo UBI does require raising taxes and consolidating programs (a polite way of saying cutting). At 500/mo you'd raise the total tax rate (as of GDP), but it'd not be an unreasonable raise (as compared to 2k/mo UBI for all citizens which would need taxes at 40% of US GDP).
To make this simple, because quintiles comprise an equally populated group of people, let's imagine that instead of there being ~32M people per quintile, that our nation has 10 people, where 5 people don't work, and each of the remaining 5 falls into one of the quintiles.
If we wanted to define a UBI of $18,000 per person, we need to somehow come up with $18,000 * 10 == $180,000 to distribute to everyone equally.
If we fund this progressively, each individual would have to pay:
Unemployed #1: 0 (statistically, a child)
Unemployed #2: 0 (statistically, a child)
Unemployed #3: 0 (statistically, a retiree)
Unemployed #4: 0 (statistically, a retiree)
Unemployed #5: 0 (statistically, a disabled person or stay-at-home caretaker)
Lowest: $8,000
Second: $12,000
Third: $21,000
Fourth: $36,000
Highest: $103,000
Total revenue: $180,000
Then consider that everyone here is receiving back 18,000 under the UBI. The highest quintile earner’s net take-home is, thus 233,895-103,000+18,000 == $148,895, which effectively renders their effective tax rate approx 36%. If you run this breakdown across all quintiles:
You'll notice that the top 2 pay a tax rate that’s comparable to today’s. We wouldn't necessarily need to increase everyone's taxes by the above amount, because there's some wiggle room in the Federal budget. Examples: we can probably eliminate Social Security (which would just be replaced by the UBI), EITC/CTC (basically already a BI), and food stamps (ditto). Medicare, which is an in-kind benefit, can either be eliminated, or it can continue to exist but be paid for by the UBI. Ditto Medicaid.
Also notice that because the lowest quintile still ends up with more than the unemployed person after their taxes, there isn’t a disincentive to work.
This math also assumes that we're giving people $1,500 per month, and also assumes that children will receive the same amount as adults — a UBI may only pay $1,000 per month to adults, and $500 per month to children, in which case the effective tax rates would be lower.
This math also assumes there is 0 VAT. This math also ignores payroll taxes, which account for 35% of the current Federal revenue.
We can play with different levels of progressivity and generosity, but the idea is the same. We can scale up from single-person quintiles to million-person quintiles, but the percentages don't change.
China owns about $1.1 Trillion in US debt compared to the $28 Trillion in total debt. Most debt, ~85%, remains owned by Americans.
Also, China has been trying to unwind their US position over time, but it is a difficult task because they have to do something with the US dollars that they get due to the trade imbalance.
Are you sure this is realistic, or would it end up being a net negative for people earning above $20k-$25k? There are a lot of people who are opting out of paid employment, one way or another, under the current model.
The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax, like VAT, because with the UBI it's still a net transfer to lower income people. How are the people at the top going to avoid VAT? By moving all their customers to a tax haven?
Also, in this context "the top" is anything above the middle. Are lawyers and petroleum engineers going to move to a tax haven?
> Are lawyers and petroleum engineers going to move to a tax haven?
Yes? I'm not a particularly special engineer, and a significant part of my decision to leave California was the income tax. I'm certainly not alone there.
Also bear in mind that "tax haven" is a relative term. Canada can become a tax haven if their taxes are lower than ours. Europe can be a tax haven if their taxes are lower. If my net income in the US (taking into account higher salaries) comes out the same as what I would make in Europe, I'm moving to Europe. I'd much rather have the safety net than UBI.
> The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax.
I think this takes more thought. I agree that we want a progressive curve, and that UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives us a progressive curve, but I don't think we've established that it gives us the curve we want. Moving from the ideal curve to the (potentially) less than ideal curve for the sake of easier enforcement may still be worth it, and may still produce a system that we'd prefer to the current one, but we have to actually establish that.
UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives a very nice curve, and on top of that you can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by adjusting the amount of the UBI. A larger UBI with a higher flat tax rate is more progressive.
It's mostly just not that compatible with confiscatory-level taxes on very high income people, but the cause of the trouble there was never really the taxes (once they were paying the same rates as ordinary people). The problem there is regulatory capture and inadequate antitrust enforcement leading to abusive consolidated corporate empires.
It gives a family of curves, and as you say you have a knob you can turn...
I don't have a strong opinion about exactly what shape the curve should have, but I do have a strong opinion that it's probably important and I've noticed a tendency (first in myself!) for UBI proponents to be satisfied having checked the "it's a progressive curve" box without having looked carefully at whether it can produce the particular progressive curve we (more broadly) want.
Edited to add: I suppose if we do find that we need people to be taking home marginally more for the first N dollars earned, we could add a rebate based on reported income. Small fraud ("I reported a little more than I actually made") winds up pretty bounded in the amount it can walk off with; larger fraud ("I invented 500 people who are reporting income") isn't that much bigger a concern than it would already be with a UBI since the maximum rebate is probably much smaller than the stipend that would otherwise be expected. Note that I'm not calling for this, just exploring the space.
The amount of money spent doesn't mean anything. The US also pays insane amounts for their health system but the result is a system that's far more expensive than in other countries.
The people need to take care of themselves first, then their family, then their immediate surrounding, then their region and their country. Reversing the dependency on a large scale is not sustainable. Someone's right is someone else responsibility, for someone to receive money, someone else has to provide it. The government is a middleman in this transaction that wastes a substantial share of the value in the process.
The problem with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking is that it ignores being born into the problem. Sure, some people can work their way out of a rut that their parents were in, but the majority can’t.
Should those at the bottom be condemned to poverty?
The lesson of the GINI coefficient and the psychology of relative wealth, is that absolute, material well being isn't the issue. The issue is whether people think the cards are so stacked against them, that they will never win.
So the answer is no. We know that condemning those at the bottom will result in civil unrest. Everyone needs to live in dignity, or there will be violence. Psychology has pretty much determined this to be a fact of human nature.
However, this doesn't mean we should have equity. People should be rewarded, and people should also have something to strive for. It's the dignity of the common person which has been eroded over time.
The actual discussion is about the degree of which government should handle re-distributing wealth to the lower class and to what degree the middle and upper class is responsible.
The “divide” is that politicians on both sides who’s actions don’t always match their stated positions.
yeah as long as they keep the conversation on the extremes they never have to give up anything. If you ask them to give up a 4th car for someone to have food then they are evil for saying no. So they say "Oh we have to give up EVERYTHING and live in the DIRT because of your RADICAL EXTREMISM!"
Sure, there are limits to the extend in which people can take care of themselves. For example if they are born with a low IQ they may never be able to do provide a net benefit to any job or almost any job. So that they are effectively unemployable. But if you are able to do anything of benefit to the society then you should do it. And having a job is the way to do it and be sustainable.
The problem with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking is that it ignores being born into the problem.
This is both right and wrong. Asian immigrants are notorious for arriving on foreign shores, penniless, then winding up owning businesses and sending their kids to top tier schools. The problem isn't being born into not having money and things. The problem is being born into an environment that sets children up for future failure.
The good news, is that such cultural practices aren't attached to race or ethnicity and so can be learned and adopted. There are historical precedents for this.
The bad news, is that other cultural practices can do the opposite, and insulate groups of people against things like valuing education and a work ethic.
Most people who are immigrants have almost by definition a better-than-average work ethic. You can see this if you know a bunch of people from country X when you live in country Y (where Y is usually a country "better off" than X), and then you go visit country X. You'll see that the "expats from X" you see while living in Y may be of a higher caliber (e.g. entrepreneurial, in your example), the people who did not expatriate do not often contain the same values.
As someone who lived in the US for a long time and now lives in Europe, I can tell you that all of the Americans I've met over here (who are not vacationing) are incredibly driven and entrepreneurial. They do not at all reflect the average American back in the US (e.g. I don't know a single Trump supporter over here; the Democrats Abroad caucus typically goes far more liberal than any state, supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 by a very wide margin).
Not sure how true that generalization is. If you look at Germany, you'll see high unemployment rates (and less education) among immigrants from Turkey and Arabian countries, while you'll see significantly more success on all fronts for immigrants from e.g. Vietnam.
> If you look at Germany, you'll see high unemployment rates (and less education) among immigrants from Turkey and Arabian countries, while you'll see significantly more success on all fronts for immigrants from e.g. Vietnam.
Are refugees counted as immigrants? A lot of the refugees from Syria come through Turkey, so I'm curious if that's throwing off the numbers.
Refugees and immigrants aren't really comparable. The most stark difference is that refugees can (and likely will) be sent back when their country stabilizes enough. If you're a refugee, there's little point in building up a new life when you know it will all come to an end.
> Are refugees counted as immigrants? A lot of the refugees from Syria come through Turkey, so I'm curious if that's throwing off the numbers.
No, it's about immigrants from Turkey (who came mostly in the 60ies as regular working migrants to both feed Germany's hunger for workers and buy Turkey's entry into NATO). The Vietnamese on the other hand were often refugees, much poorer and with much less support.
There aren't any relevant numbers about the migrant crisis '15 yet, it's too recent to get meaningful statistics.
> The most stark difference is that refugees can (and likely will) be sent back when their country stabilizes enough.
True, but that very rarely happens in Germany. It's considered cruel to deport someone who has lived in Germany for a few years.
Deportations of asylum seekers usually only happen for so-called "safe countries", e.g. Balkan states, when the request for asylum is denied.
I think both can be true: people who emigrate from a country to pursue better career / life opportunities typically are more industrious in my experience than are those who do not (on average; there are plenty of people who don't emigrate who are just as industrious; it's just that those who are NOT industrious do not emigrate at all), while at the same time some immigrants will differ in industriousness based on their country of origin.
Not to detract from your main point, I agree that people who change countries are going to tend to be more driven than those who don't, but I don't comprehend how "supporting Bernie Sanders" maps to "entrepreneurial".
It was more to say "expat Americans are not proportionately representative of non-expat Americans", i.e. I have not met one Trump supporter while abroad (or if I have, they have kept very quiet).
> I can tell you that all of the Americans I've met over here (who are not vacationing) are incredibly driven and entrepreneurial. They do not at all reflect the average American back in the US (e.g. I don't know a single Trump supporter over here;
This is a strange observation to me because Trump did very well with the small business owner demographics.
I would guess that the interests of SMB owners for US residents and expats differ. SMB owners in the US probably think more short-term and think that policies from Trump will help them (which they may, but will ultimately continue the steady decline of the US workforce, e.g. lack of a social safety net, upward mobility, lack of education, a broken patchwork of poorly-maintained car-centric infrastructure).
SMB owners who are US citizens abroad, however, are driven by primarily one thing, regardless of party affiliation: who will be most likely to support a rewrite of the punitive tax laws that the US places on its expatriate citizens (which no country other than Eritrea does).
Amazon moving into these impovershed areas, becoming the majority employer, and having absolute influence over the local governance and electorate they themselves employ makes these places de facto a company town. Brilliant move, totally evil genius move, but brilliant.
It's complicated. When you're the only game in town you enter an ethical gray area where the community is your hostage. Things seem alright now but what happens when the mines run dry?
What a ridiculous way of looking at it. Companies are damned if they do, damned if they don't in the eyes of some, just by the very fact that they are a private entity motivated to make a profit.
Nevermind the fact that from my eyes looking at America from overseas, it seems like companies are the only institutions/organisations that are functioning even remotely in a socially optimal way.
Your government is a disaster and couldn't meaningfully manage the pandemic at all, academia is a disaster and is bankrupting your future, military is a disaster and has heavily underinvested in next generation weapons programs so they could spend more time bombing the middle East, your unions are self-serving enterprises (aren't schools in your most populous state STILL closed due to teacher's unions?), your newspaper are incredibly corrupt across the spectrum.
The only things that seem to work correctly are your companies which are still world-leading and world class. Amazon is a gem in your society, but demonised as if it is the source of all problems.
Assuming 60% of the population is employed (roughly more than the US average), that's just under a tenth of the workforce of 16k. Assuming 50% of the workforce is employed by small businesses (slightly more than national average), that makes them a fifth of all people employed by companies large enough to afford to really push local politics around. It's enough numbers to swing most controversial issues
It's not company town level of influence, though. A defining feature of which IIRC is that the company owned most or all other businesses in the town and often extracted most of the workers wage through extortionate pricing of basic goods and services.
>> Didn't Walmart do this in a lot of small towns? And sometimes just pack up and leave? What happens when they leave?
I think a good question to ask before is what happens if they dont come in the first place? If I were a resident in a town wanting jobs, i'd probably be more excited about jobs arriving than the possibility they might eventually disappear.
Walmart doesn't go in blind, they are in the business of extraction. Typically they look to setup a regional store in an area where towns already have optometrists, florists, sporting goods stores, grocers, bakers, homegoods, electronics, hardware, autoparts, the entire town basically. What happens if they didn't come in the first place is life continues in a more decentralized and localized manner, and less of the taxable profit is carted out of the county. Presumably these optometrists and sporting goods store owners of the past paid their income and property taxes from their salaries locally in the area.
I dunno, there doesn't seem like a simple answer to this. If the choice is between starving or working for a heartless/soulless corporation doing the bare minimum, the system has failed miserably
> So let me get this straight: companies shouldn't be investing money into revitalizing impoverished areas?
No, they should do so, just not be so exploitative about it (e.g. deliberately going into areas full of desperate people, for the reason of using that desperation to exert maximum control with minimum accountability).
The lowest paid person at Amazon is earning well over the median wage in Bessemer, Alabama.
Amazon could probably have no problem staffing the center at $11/hr there, but they're paying $18-$22 instead. How on earth can you define that as 'exploitation'? It's borderline charity, given the observable labor market equilibrium there.
Is the lowest Amazon job as easy and safe as the below median jobs in Bessemer?
Speedwalking an Amazon warehouse carrying objects, run by hyper-optimizing automation that times tasks to the second, is different from leaning on idle cash register at McDonalds, or slowly pushing a vacuum cleaner.
So your issue is specifically with the mindset of the company, not the actions themselves? Why would a company ever do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? Shouldn't we just be looking at the result of them following market incentives?
Of course companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Companies will do as much evil as they are allowed to and as much good as they are forced to.
I am trying to say there is a contradiction in what you are saying. You claim to want companies to move into impoverished areas, but also say doing that is evil. No company has ever moved into an impoverished area to help people, they have always done so out of self interest.
So which do you want, companies to move into impoverished areas (acting evil), or not (acting good, according to you).
And paying for time spent in security checkpoints, and not counting "walking from workstation to break room" as break time, and compensation for workplace injuries.
This assumes that everything that is benefits a company is evil and everything that hurts a company is good.
Luckily, this isn't true. There are absolutely areas where companies can do good and profit. Moving good jobs into a blighted area is a classic example of a win-win. The company gets low wages, and residents get some of the best jobs they have access to.
So, I think I mostly agree with your stances here, but I take major issue with this:
> Why would a company ever do anything out of the goodness of their hearts?
Because a company is made of people. I won't fault a company for following market incentives, but questions like yours sometimes imply that a company shouldn't do anything out of the goodness of their heart. Then you get people saying stuff like the company's goal must be to maximize shareholder value and stuff, and getting angry when a company does something out of the goodness of their hearts, which I take issue with. <end rant>
Have you ever shopped around for lower pricing? The collective population of the world does this when we chose to purchase things for cheaper prices made in countries with more lax environmental and labor laws.
It's one thing to shop for a lower price, it's quite another to notice someone's desperate and take advantage.
> The collective population of the world does this when we chose to purchase things for cheaper prices made in countries with more lax environmental and labor laws.
An a lot of people object to that, too, and they often lack the power to make any other decision.
When you shop around for price you are shopping around for someone to exploit with the lower price. There is no difference, zero sum, if you get a product for less, somewhere in the world someone got less money.
The economy isn't zero sum (from a capitalist PoV) and reducing someone's profit margin isn't exploiting them (from a Marxist PoV). It's important to avoid thinking partial equilibrium effects are the actual effects of something.
Carpetbaggers carpetbagging is a story as old as time. At least they're creating jobs and distributing money into the community. It's not like there's a long list of others who would willingly pick up the slack if they went elsewhere.
The way to solve this is with Federal worker's rights reforms specifically around working conditions. It is hard to see that happening with the government very pro-corporation right now.
As someone whose great uncles worked in the steel factories nearby, whose parents before that labored in the cotton fields, I can also testify the multi-century efforts of Black workers who fought the “hands that was fedding them”. America's Johannesburg [1] and Hammer and Hoe [2] for reference.
I was a union member back in the last 1980s through 1990s early. I was in a low skilled job where we paid our dues and got exactly nothing for it. Oh we had a wonderful contract that specified it all. It was great for basically keeping anyone new boxed in. Each quarter if we were lucky we got a visit by our local union rep in her Mercedes which cost more than many of us made a year. So I am so not a big union supporter and lean against them.
On another personal note, they spent decades harassing my uncles, now cousins industrial roofing business calling OSHA and other inspectors out to where even the OSHA representatives joked about it. It became a coffee break for them. All this over a company with less than thirty people at max.
So while they may have some application on higher paid jobs when you are low wage there isn't much they do for you other than suck two hours of wages or more from you each month.
People here glorify unions have no experience with them at the level that would have been seen in Amazon. They have these grandiose ideas how everyone benefits. Oh don't get me wrong, you are likely to get some changes that are beneficial, but in the end you are still exactly where you are before but now its all in nice pretty print writing which spells out exactly how you aren't going anywhere fast. Oh, don't forget the monthly payout (could be weekly in some places) and don't expect much if you ever actually reach strike stage.
Unions also start boxing out new experienced employees. The railroads have no way to bring in experienced workers from other industries because everyone is mandated a certain starting wage by the union...entry level wages ($50k) plus overtime. Looks exactly like regulatory capture.
You see this in a lot of industries that are unionized, if you move across the country or have a life change and are in a unionized environment you can be screwed by a) losing seniority and b) comp can drop.
Had a friend who was a pilot. Personal situation - moved, wanted to live in base rather than deadhead yadda yadda - you start off at ground zero at the new airline - literally next to guys with no time on type (and you could have thousands of hours on type - which is years of work).
This is what happens when union reps are in bed with the company they're supposedly holding to account. It happens because of corruption and nepotism, not because of unionization.
I might recommend to watch Waiting For Lefty to understand the distinction.
Are "dying cities/slums" a purely American phenomenon, in terms of rich first-world countries?
Is there similarly a "rust belt" in Germany, of cities that had an economic collapse after manufacturing died out? Are there rich European countries with flailing cities that devolve into crime and poverty? Does Europe have its own Bessemers, Detroits? (though I do hear Detroit isn't as bad as it's made out to be)
>Are "dying cities/slums" a purely American phenomenon, in terms of rich first-world countries?
The UK definitely has declining factory towns (often called mill towns there) similar to the US. Northern England is like that for the most part. Less of a rust belt and more of a rust hat.
America's "Rust Belt" cities all tend to have one thing in common: a large black population that originally migrated there in the 20th century for industrial jobs that largely no longer exist. Think Detroit with the auto industry. Camden NJ with New York Ship, Victor, and Campbell's Soup. Gary Indiana with US Steel, etc etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Works
> America's "Rust Belt" cities all tend to have one thing in common
Not anti union, but these also had high union activity, which some explain as a cause of their 'rustification' as companies moved production elsewhere (like Alabama) to avoid.
Not sure what point you are making here. Most of these seem to be segregated unions for AA people that existed in the same places as the corresponding non-AA union run by the same overarching organization (e.g. AFL-CIO, etc).
Not even Alabama but overseas where not only is there no union, but companies can get away with paying starvation wages to effective slaves. How an American is going to compete with a guy willing to work for $0.50/day on an 18 hour shift 7 days a week is a mystery. He doesn't even ask for healthcare, and when he dies of exhaustion there are hundreds more waiting to take his place because that's a huge amount of money for them.
One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it. Otherwise it is just a race to the bottom.
> How an American is going to compete with a guy willing to work for $0.50/day on an 18 hour shift 7 days a week is a mystery. He doesn't even ask for healthcare, and when he dies of exhaustion there are hundreds more waiting to take his place because that's a huge amount of money for them.
Well, that guy would do a really bad job, especially after he dies. You can compete with him by staying healthy and being much more productive.
That's not an accurate description of overseas labor though, those people are skilled at what they do and their PPP-adjusted pay is better than that. (Sometimes overseas developers aren't skilled at enterprise development, in that case their skill is scamming the outsourcing manager.)
> One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it.
That's not what a tariff does, a tariff makes foreign companies' products more expensive for domestic customers. It's just a pointless tax increase. And when the other country fights back it makes your products more expensive for foreign customers, hurting you.
Keeping jobs domestically means doing the opposite, increasing foreign customers for your stuff. This falls under industrial policy and it's what the overseas countries taking your jobs did better than us.
The thing about Trump's tariffs is the rhetoric didn't match the way it was actually used (to the extent there was a strategy at all, it seemed like moving production from China to other low-wage countries was a bigger priority than protecting pay and working conditions in the US).
In the former "rust belt" of Germany unemployement rate is higher (~12%) compared to the rest of Germany (~6%). And although we had social reforms in the 2000s cutting unemployment benefits - today with unemployment benefits, "free" health care and social security payments you can live from (though should be higher), areas with higher unemployment are not comparable to the US.
(Also German carmakers have - at least until now - done much better than Detroit for a variety of reasons).
It happens everywhere or almost everywhere in the West. Some country simply lose population due migration to other countries.
Inside immigration is also big. Small towns/cities are losing population while big cities/capitals are rapidly growing. We have hundreds of towns that once had thousands inhabitants and now they barely have a couple hundred and haven't seen a kid in more than a decade.
But as far as I know, there's no Detroits in Europe. The cities with most crimes are also the ones that are attracting more people and immigrants. The abandoned places are quiet and peaceful.
There's also growing trend of trying to revive those places by people that just can't take big cities anymore or people who work for home, etc. Why would they pay a huge chunk of their salary for a crappy shared flat on the city when they can live on a nice house with garden only 5 hours away?
Detroit is growing back these days. Even though a lot of it is abandoned, it's still hard to buy the old houses because you have to pay their back taxes or something, but it is coming back thanks to companies like Quicken.
As for crime, it's some economic and some that Detroit was the center of the car industry which means everyone was huffing leaded gasoline fumes for decades. In Europe everyone is still breathing in diesel, which just kills you rather than makes you a rage monster.
Most of Japan is dying as nearly its entire population moves to Tokyo.
And that's only a slight sprinkle of hyperbole. Other regions are sustained only by tourism or by other industries where the average worker age is past 60.
Government employment and construction (buoyed by frequent government spending on infrastructure) are also major sources of employment outside the Tokyo metro area. Osaka and Kyoto also have fairly decent numbers of jobs, I think.
Charleroi Belgium comes to mind. Once a prosperous industrious town, now the glory is gone. Recently read somewhere there is a bit of revival, culturally at least. Economically I’m not sure. A bit like Detroit maybe.
Lots of dead industry in Sweden too because there was a major shift during the 90s and 2000s that remotely located industry in the Swedish forest could not keep up with.
I don't know more details, I am only speaking observationally. Someone else might tell you why this happened.
I would assume it has to do with globalization and other nations being more competitive than local business.
Chinese cities in the northeast Yellow Sea area (like Dalian) were historically industrial centers, but are now somewhat of a Chinese rust belt while the industrial gravity has moved south (ex: Shenzhen, Chongqing).
I believe the Ruhr valley experienced some rust belt like phenomena. Abandoned factories and such, but not like NAm. Germany’s economic might rests on their mittelstand midsized businesses (KMU) typically family owned or run and which are to some extent protected by the gov.
Not yet, but we are doing out best to deliver that in the near future \s
What we do have is sort of a coal belt. The Ruhr Area, where coal mining used to be big but has died out. Some regions did not recover from the closing of mines, Gelsenkirchen for example.
I don't have any first-hand experience, but here in the Czech Republic (not rich by any means, but still pretty up there) there are some places that have the reputation of ghettos. They're mostly located in border areas, which had a sizeable German population a were annexed by nazi Germany. After World War 2, most of the Germans were driven out and "resettled" under the communist regime. Add heavy industry and mining activity sometimes destroying the original towns and you can see how the region might not be the most cheerful place. Someone also had the brilliant idea of moving all the Roma from a town to a separate ghetto, which turned out as expected.
It's not that any city is altogether full of crime and poverty, personally I'd say they're just less desirable with full-on "crime and poverty" being noticeable only in some hotspots (but then again, I don't live there and only ever visit for short periods of time, so really all I can say is "it doesn't seem that bad").
we have dying cities and poverty in Europe, but it does not devolve into crime.
Each city in Europe have at least a suburb where crime is more prevalent, poverty is a contributing factor but not the only one.
Reasonable point of view. However, have you asked why Bessemer is a dying city and/or a slum? Was it always a slum? Were there no businesses there since it was founded and incorporated?
And if it was such a hell hole, why did Amazon choose to open a warehouse there? Out of the goodness of their hearts? We need to ask questions as to why Amazon had to become a "savior" for the City of Bessemer. Not just focusing on effects but looking into causes too!
Bessemer appears to be in the outskirts of Birmingham. Seems like a reasonable place to put a fulfillment center: land is cheaper than somewhere more central (but a warehouse doesn't need to be located on expensive, high demand, centrally located land). It's also probably a reasonable commute distance for many in the Birmingham metro area.
Definitely... and I'm sure that there are many other cities in Alabama just like Bessemer.
My comment isn't about Amazon specifically as much as the fact that there are so many cities all over this country (supposedly the wealthiest in human history) that have fallen into so much disrepair and so much distress that they need companies like Amazon to come "save" them.
What exactly would the retribution from Amazon look like, had this passed? They can't pick up the fulfillment center and move it somewhere else (without inconvenience, time, and expense, of course). They will need workers willing to travel to Bessemer for work, which presumably are people who live near or adjacent to Bessemer.
They could suck up the losses of closing a 1 year old warehouse to send a signal. Walmart has claimed unfixable plumbing problems at union stores and closed them in the past.
I've lived periods of life in different cultures, income levels, etc... It's interesting how people see things in such a binary sense (eg: x is good while y is bad, universally). Everyone does it and it presents itself differently in each perspective, but it's been an interesting watch.
As I've grown older I've tried to resist the urge to marry myself to these stark beliefs. Following this thread there's a lot of good information on what those competing perspectives actually entail. In my current area, which is mostly liberals of varying degrees, unions are almost universally championed. If you ask about the downsides or present an example of how they can be bad you can face people who think you're some kind of oppressor, or that you must be conservative. Where I'm from, which is mostly various flavors of conservativism the mention of unions causes similar outrage but in the other direction. If you mention how a union could be useful or various implementations that are non-stock (such as unions that don't try to practice authoritarian control over pay and just maintain representation for working conditions) then you'll be demonized for being a socialist. I used to think, "these are bad people of varying variety" but I've come to understand they're just people without experience in each other's geography and problem set, so it becomes easier to speak dogmatically.
Sometimes a union can be good, sometimes it can be bad, sometimes it's a bit of both pending nuance and implementation details, but at the end of the day this is a truth: the only people whose opinion matters is the people whose lives it will directly affect.
It was pretty good in the postwar era if they were white, since the average worker came back from the war on the GI Bill and got free education and subsidized suburb buildouts.
No one is living like kings on $15 per hour anywhere in the US. Unless your definition of kings includes lack of retirement security, income security, health security, and working back breaking shift work at odd hours. They will especially be vulnerable in their 50 to 65 years, when they will become unemployable for manual labor work.
They'll be able to put a roof over their head, and not worry about their kids' next meal or maybe even their kid breaking their arm. But they're not going to advance to the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
Two parents working at Amazon almost hit median household income in the US. Houses in that part of AL cost <$100k, so ownership is within reach. Retirement is provided by social security (pays better than Canada’s public pension does). And they get great health insurance from Amazon.
You’re painting way too bleak of a picture based on zero data.
My best friend growing up in the 80's - his dad made around $20/hour, working at a GM factory in the union. Mom was a stay-at-home mom. House was paid for, everything they bought they paid cash, pension, the works.
This was basically the norm from 40s to late 80s after reganomics started widdling away workers' rights.
This is the way it should be - 1 parent at home, 1 bringing home $$.
Else, the government should cover child care, or pay stay-at-home parents a salary for providing their own child care.
Above the median income in a small town doesn't mean you've got a great absolute standard of living, it just means you're better off than others in your town.
If a company can sell its products two towns over for 2x the price Bessemer can afford, it's not going to slash prices in Bessemer just because everyone there is poor.
It's exploitation- people are attracted by $15/hour work. Unfortunately, the work in unsustainable on your body. Eventually you go on disability. This seems to be biggest complaint [1]
Find a dying city with huge unemployment. No problem finding workers for a factory where most employees don't require anything more than ability to walk and read.
I think Amazon fulfillment centers are a special case. Most people working there either move packages around or drive a truck. At least that is my understanding, somebody with better/first hand knowledge would be welcome to share.
Normally having a huge employer would be a boon to the city, but most of these people are going to be working for close to minimum wage and Amazon most likely negotiated with the city so they don't have to pay a dime.
Amazon pays significantly over minimum wage in Alabama, since they don't have one and use the federal $7. This is Amazon's advantage over smaller companies - they're more efficient and so they can afford to pay more.
I had a feeling most people were looking at this as a vote for yes is a vote to close the warehouse. They would never see the benefit of the union because Amazon would just close the whole place down before they let other distribution centers see what a union can do.
Possible. As others have noted, WalMart has done similar things.
I think a retail/warehouse workers' union only really works if it's a national sort with local chapters so that a company can't hire except through a union.
I'm not saying such a situation isn't rife with its own problems, but as long as these unions are essentially on a per-location basis, a company with the resources can always close one location and open up down the street to avoid the union.
Unions need several things to work: two of the big ones are a job such that you cannot replace someone easily; and a sense that "we are all in it together".
If you don't have the first it is easy to replace anyone striking, and the union doesn't have power. If you don't have the second the better employees will want more money and so they won't work with the lesser ones
In retail it is generally easy to replace people. It only takes a few minutes of training and the new person will figure it out.
In retail there are a lot of different jobs. People who can do more (and have been around longer) are worth more. Many of the jobs do have metrics that can be measured to say who is better. While the pay this results in isn't much more, it is enough.
That isn't to say you need the above to have a union. There are counter examples that work, but they are less powerful than unions that have those factors because they find it harder to get everyone to stand together.
As such retail unions have trouble working. It is too easy to hire someone else if they go on strike.
Yes. This is why unions have to be big to be effective. The union has to be big enough to cover anywhere the company might be able to move to. This is why the Teamsters work so well, you can't outsource US trucking to Namibia.
This is also why the UAW started dying once containerized shipping made it practical to move factories overseas.
That Union couldn’t manage to get the starting wage for their members to $15. I think that says it all about how ineffective they are as an organization.
All the while, the hand was spending many multiples of their yearly income on telling them all the things they would have to go without when paying $500 in dues yearly.
Are you saying the campaign cost multiples of their yearly labor expenditure, or the whole plan multiples of the yearly pay for one employee? If it’s the latter I don’t see how it makes them rotten. That’s an incredibly small expenditure, much less than would be paid in dues for instance
"Here's exactly how these people should have voted" – legions of San Francisco software engineers making $550K/yr convinced that they know everything about the lives of warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama making $15/hr.
Yes. Incredible arrogance and clearly insinuates that the people of Bessemer are unable to think for themselves. 71% said no. That is a very clear majority. I think we need to trust the people on the front line with the discernment to make their own decisions. I've been around a lot of people without much formal education who were much wiser than most.
And please don't yell about Amazon misrepresenting things. I suspect these people are quite capable of detecting company BS. Give them some credit. Just because you don't agree with their choice doesn't mean their choice is wrong.
Just “misrepresenting things”? Amazon did everything they could to crush the effort.
“The retail workers union said Amazon was trying to surveil employees in Bessemer and even changed a traffic signal to prevent organizers from approaching warehouse workers as they left the site. Last month, the New York attorney general said in a lawsuit that Amazon had retaliated against employees who tried to protest its pandemic safety measures as inadequate.”
> And please don't yell about Amazon misrepresenting things. I suspect these people are quite capable of detecting company BS.
Are they? Not saying that this is the case here but recent elections (Trump) and referendums (Brexit) have shown that you can absolutely manipulate and mislead the masses. Again, not taking any sides here, but assuming that those decisions are well informed or won't be taken against their own interest seems naive to me.
"I know better than those people", posted a thousand miles away via the latest iPhone, while binging Netflix and waiting for their 2nd Amazon delivery of the day.
Just to make the comparison easier for people like myself, at 40h/week and 52weeks/yr, that would amount to $264/hr, and a slightly more humble $150K/yr is $72/hr
It was clear getting these workers to unionize was good for the union... it was much less clear why it would be good for the workers.
People can say what they want about Amazon but the reality is they provide a far better job, wage, and benefits than most. Apart from the broad sweeping messaging around corporations = bad, unions = the answer, it wasn’t really clear at all why a union would benefit workers here. As such the result isn’t terribly surprising. The result isn’t even close.
Once the workers organize as a union, the company is forced to treat everything as a negotiation with the union instead of the employees. The union views their job as to always ask for more and push back on the employer, so the employer is incentivized to hold back raises, benefits, and concessions until it's time for negotiations. Giving away all of your bargaining chips before negotiations start is not a good strategy.
When you see headlines about unions negotiating certain benefits or raises from employers, it's often framed as a victory that wouldn't have happened without the union. The reality is more nuanced, as the union's existence forces the company to play hardball during negotiations so they have something to negotiate when it comes time to do the negotiations.
> the employer is incentivized to hold back raises, benefits, and concessions until it's time for negotiations
The employer is incentivized to hold these back in any case, absent some countervailing pressure (e.g. retention against competing offers, if they exist, etc.). This is why the largest raises (in tech, at least) typically come when jumping companies.
> The employer is incentivized to hold these back in any case, absent some countervailing pressure
The countervailing pressure is that non-unionized employees are more likely to leave.
Most unions in the US place a high value on seniority. The more seniority you have, the more benefits you get from a union. Good for people who have been there for 10 years, bad for new employees looking to get jobs. This makes unionized employees less incentivized to leave and more incentivized to stay and strike. Leaving (even if for higher pay) would sacrifice that union seniority that many members value.
The problem with Boeing is that there are not many aerospace employers to got to. An aerospace engineer can probably only work for 2 or 3 aerospace companies in their career. Not to mention they may have to completely uproot their life on each change of employer.
this isn't really true. To change companies you might need to move cities, but there are a ton of different companies that require aerospace engineers:
SpaceX
Blue Origin
Space Systems Loral
JPL
Boeing
Embraer
Airbus
Cessna
Northrup Grumman
Lockheed Martin
General Electric
Raytheon
Boom
Rolls Royce,
Honeywell
Eurocopter
Bombardier
not to mention the adjacent fields of
Green tech (wind turbines)
Drones/UAVs
And all the vendors and suppliers that supply to these companies. The number of suppliers very well would exceed into thousands of small and midsized companies scattered around US.
Because crying victimhood over every perceived slight becomes the boy who cried wolf - sooner or later everyone realizes that the only way a union can justify itself is by creating problems where none existed. Otherwise, why waste money on union dues for something that isn't needed?
I have no knowledge of Boeing's internal state, so tried to get a proxy of their general attitude [0].
Every company big enough will have its share of shitty issues, but even taking it with a grain of salt it doesn't look to me like a company that needs no employee representation to counter-balance the management.
That Charleston plant has terrible quality control compared to the more mature, unionized group in Everett. Some airlines have refused shipments from south Carolina in preference to the Washington group.
For what it’s worth, I noticed a correlation between bad company news and union disputes that started about 10 years ago with Boeing. I remember visiting Seattle as you drive by the Boeing facility on the way in, my cab driver was telling me how Boeing was going to shut down the plant and move everything to South Carolina.
On that same trip, I was staying at a hotel with a view of city hall from my window (The Artic Club). I heard a bunch of horns blowing and looked out the window to see a line of cabs parked out front honking for about 1 minute before they drove off. News crews were there so I watched the local news that night.
That clip was there but the news made it sound like the drivers had been there all day blockading and honking. It was nothing more than enough time for a news clip (protesting Uber).
At that point, it became very clear to me how unions operate.
I'm not disagreeing with your assertion (though I do expect it's not as widespread as news articles make it seem), but...why didn't they vote to unionize then? Seems like if the unions said "we'll make sure you get bathroom breaks", then that'd be enough.
But I think this is a clear example of an issue where pro-union rhetoric has diverged from the reality of the situation. Are there any workers who actually prefer formal, timed bathroom breaks over the "go whenever you want as long as you're meeting your productivity goals" model?
What?? I don't mean "formal, timed bathroom breaks". I don't even think that exists in the real world. I mean they don't have enough leeway in their incentive system, to the point where workers have to pee in bottles out of fear of missing quotas and losing their job
You're universalizing something that's by all accounts a very rare occurrence, which I think is again part of the disconnect. If union organizers go around saying "we have to pee in bottles because they don't give us restroom breaks!", that's not going to be very persuasive to the vast majority of Amazon workers who take breaks to use the provided restrooms.
What? I don't mean scheduled bathroom breaks, I mean they aren't given enough leeway during the day to even use the bathroom. There are many reports of them peeing in bottles and shitting in plastic bags.
I certainly agree with you that those stories are shocking and horrific, those reports were about delivery drivers, not warehouse workers, so it’s not really relevant to this particular discussion.
The warehouse workers have similar issues, according to stories I've heard they can get reprimanded for using bathroom outside of lunch or one 15 minute break per shift.
These are stories few and between. Literally hundreds of thousands of employees wouldn't remain quiet for not allowing bathroom breaks.
You're pursuaded by anecdotal evidence of certain incident that may have happened. It is difficult to believe hundreds of thousands of workers around the world working in Amazon warehouses have not enmasse complained they can't go to bathroom.
This is a media-driven narrative. Squeeky wheels make more noise.
Collective bargaining lets the employees push back against issues that would otherwise risk their career. For example, an individual speaking up against horrible working conditions, metric-focused managers, and ignorance of unsafe practices would risk getting fired, so the issues would persist. A union would have the leverage required to push back against such issues.
While you're correct, Amazon is so large that this single center being nuked from their org chart would have been an inconvenience. I think it's very easy for us to say "this would help you" but the reality is, it might have drawn a line in the sand, at the cost of every single employee's job.
This is exactly why the vote was probably the most pragmatic decision. A vote for unionization would have been brave and symbolic. But why should blue collar people in Alabama have to sabotage their livelihoods to make a point?
When is the last time busting a union brought any additional scrutiny from the US government, in a material sense?
While there are some stories lately about how much tax Amazon pays, the government is very much in the business of keeping Amazon (and all major US-based corporations and firms) happy... by contrast, the US government almost certainly cares very little for a warehouse worker in Alabama.
What's the cost, though? At $1/month a union membership would be a no-brainer, at $100/month people would probably think twice.
Unions are in the business of recurring subscriptions, and the pitch had to reflect that. Sounds like in case of this specific workplace, the cost-benefit analysis was either high on costs or low on benefits.
The short version is: while the Bessemer campaign was a good thing, the vote (according to this person --- everything I'm writing here is according to Yeselson and subject to errors in my understanding) was not. To wit: if a skilled organizer effort isn't sure it's going to win, they pull the vote, reorganize, and try again when they're sure they will.
There's further evidence in the threads that nuts-and-bolts organizing, "101 stuff" to use the term I got from labor organizing blogs following up on this, wasn't done; that in fact the worker opponents to unionization were only weakly opposed, and under-educated.
Another fun Google search that I found from this thread: [union "hot shop"].
Unions don’t always contribute to a better outcome for their workers, and it looks like working conditions wasn’t a strong enough driver for the majority of the workers. It’s hard to motivate a vote for unions when Amazon pays double the federal minimum wage.
Yeah, but this is the problem with the current debate around unions. Pro-union individuals aren’t willing to say, “Unions have some serious drawbacks“ and anti-union individuals aren’t willing to say, “Unions solve some critical issues for modern employees”.
Instead, both sides (rightfully) call each other out on their biases and no voter feels able to trust either side.
I don’t think the debate is over whether there has ever been any benefit or downside from any union, but rather what the expected net benefit or downside is from any given union, and perhaps even more importantly, what rights union organizers, union opponents, and workers ought to have.
I think it’s pretty silly to quibble over whether someone will answer gotcha questions like “can you name one good/bad thing that has ever happened in a unionized/non-unionized workplace.” That’s just not relevant.
I’m not talking about whether or not unions are objectively good or bad. I’m talking about perception. If one side is attempting to withhold facts are that obvious and self-evident, then no one is going to trust that side even if they’re objectively right.
Consider Obamacare. Objectively, it was an awesome law that covered millions of previously uninsured Americans. However, it was a PR disaster because people were told they could keep their plans and their premiums wouldn’t increase. Because of how impossible it was to lie about those two things and because the Obama administration lied about them anyway, people greatly distrusted Obamacare, even though most of them actually liked the law and its outcomes.
Similarly, if a worker is told by a pro-union advocate that no one will lose their job with a union but that worker also readily sees that many workers lose their jobs when unions cause companies to collapse, that worker is going to feel lied to despite knowing that union membership is probably in their best interests.
That's a false dichotomy. The solution to a badly run union is to run it better, not dissolve it and surrender all your power to your boss, just as the solution to a badly run republic is to elect better leaders, not abandon democracy and go back to the bad old days of monarchy. Unions are workplace democracy. Opposing them is by definition supporting workplace monarchy.
This is extremely ideological to the point of simply being untrue. The best outcome for everyone is no union and a supportive employer that gives you a fair deal so you don’t want one. Unions are a huge tradeoff and better as a last resort.
I don't see how "you should just hope for an employer who is benevolent in spite of every possible economic incentive otherwise" is less idealogically motivated.
But anyway yes in my case it is idealogical and I won't dispute that at all. Anything that reduces the power of companies or increases the power of works is something I favor regardless of political practicality.
I didn't say anything about managers. My beef is with the power of owners not their deputies. Managers are in some sense workers and are welcome to the fight if they're willing to roll.
"The best outcome is no democracy and a benevolent king that gives you a fair deal so you don't want elections. Democracy has huge tradeoffs and is better only as a last resort."
You're right. It's ideological. And you're on the wrong side of it.
You state it as if it is somehow obvious, but really need to show your work here.
If it is just some reductionist claim about not having a third party consuming resources, that's almost too silly to respond to. But if you also want to forbid employers from hiring lawyers, at least you'd then be consistent.
> The best outcome for everyone is no union and a supportive employer that gives you a fair deal so you don’t want one
This is extreme wishful thinking. The very nature of corporations like Amazon is in conflict with giving workers a "fair deal". Thus, exploitative labor practices exist.
A lot of unions ended up being just another means for the mafia to steal from the poor, skimming off the top of pensions funds and the like. Similar corruption exists today. It is inevitable.
The employees of Amazon have never been slaves and the comparison is disingenuous. Saying he was never tested on his competency is ridiculous. There were literally millions of people in the USA richer than Bezos at the time he started Amazon. There are many people on Wall Street who were *orders of magnitude* richer than Bezos that tried to start internet companies that crashed and burned.
This is extremely naive. There are lots of failed CEOs and failed companies. Amazon survived AND grew over 20 years while actively fighting off competition from Walmart, Google, etc.
But luck is a major factor in this. If in ten years, Amazon tanks, history will say Bezos was a bad CEO. There is never a real demonstration that skill is involved. Some companies win and some companies lose.
I really don't like democracy mixing with my business. It's the best, terrible system we have for when we have no other choice but to come to a mutual decision. But it really should be your last option.
I'm not sure why it should be my last option. There are several problems with autocratic leadership, one of which is that many times, the whims of the autocrat are fundamentally at odds with the good of the people he manages.
Many times, maybe, but I suppose I'm arguing it's a corner case.
Perhaps that those power structures are so natural to us implies just how successful they've been in our history. And not in the sense that fear is a good motivator, but because the reality is that most principals aren't all that far removed from their agents.
Are...are you holding up Hollywood as an example of pure, legal employee protections? You know, the industry largely stood up by largescale money laundering schemes?
Perhaps but this ignores the million+ dollar campaign Amazon leveraged to push people to vote no. It's not like it explains all the vote but it's definitely a component.
I have little expectation that a propaganda campaign could meaningfully shift worker-voter perspectives for this specific vote. They're working off of the old propaganda over the past decades and their perspectives on the ground. The recent ads and such we're seeing are about the greater narrative and trying to set the stage for union-votes 5-10 years from now.
I'm confused, why did they need a vote to start a union? Here in the UK pretty sure if a load of workers want to start a union, they can - irrespective of whether they're in the majority or not. Sounds to me like the circumscription of a need for a majority itself comes from anti-union legislation.
The vote was to unionise the workplace, not to form a union.
You can form a union whenever you want, like you can form any other group of people a club. You just can't unilaterally force an employer to deal with you.
I hate to say it but I think the UK system is better. No closed shops, but if enough of the workplace (50%?) join the union, the employer has to deal with them.
Is that meaningfully different from a vote, then? You get the majority, you get the union. If you’re a recognized union, NLRB says the employer must deal with you.
Well it's not meaningfully different from a vote in that it forces the employer to deal. But it does mean that there are no closed shops, so nobody is forced to join a union just to work in a certain place.
In the US that varies state-by-state, but Alabama (where this unionization effort occurred) is a right-to-work state, which means no closed shops — so it’s probably a pretty close parallel to the UK system.
it's significantly better because union can grow gradually and organically if it's delivering benefits, there is no need for a single áll-or-nothing' vote where you can apply the FUD
Of course, the reason the UK no longer has closed shops is thanks to some aggressive (though probably necessary) union breaking by Thatcher. In fact, there's an argument to be made that the damage done by unions directly lead to Thatcher gaining power... The US seems to be heading in the opposite direction under Biden, with his infrastructure bill attempting to ban right-to-work laws in states and reinstate most of the practices Thatcher's union-breaking eliminated here. Could lead to some interesting times; most American Democrat supporters and HN readers are, like me, probably too young to have seen first-hand why those restrictions existed.
In the US they still have closed shops (where you have to be a union member to work there), and in the UK you still need to reach a threshold of membership before the employer has to 'recognise' them and negotiate with them. The situation isn't as different as you are making out.
I believe there can only be one union per type of worker — you can’t have some warehouse pickers be repped by Union A and others by Union B. The vote isn’t just to unionize, it’s to unionize with a specific union. It’s entirely legitimate to put that to a vote, to ensure employees get to choose their preferred representatives.
It's not conflating all unions, not even all unions in Alabama, it just mentions "in Alabama" since much less people would know where they meant if they said 'in Bessemer'.
Like others have indicated, the vote is to force exclusive representation. Workers can always form non-exclusive unions and negotiate as they see fit, but they can't force all workers to be represented unless they vote.
Why it came to be that? I speculate that both existing unions and non-unionized businesses preferred the election accompanying single representative system, since it entrenches both. It preserves the status quo mostly, and gives power to existing unions that can run expensive election campaigns over a simple group of workers bargaining.
Good. I have lived in 3 continents and 4 different countries and I have yet to see a union that is not run by and for the lazy and incompetent, ultimately to the ruin of all involved. I hear Germany cracked the code on that one, but in the US unions seem to be pretty much like everywhere.
I have a few German customers and I also get the impression that their unions seem to work.
It seems to be a result of multiple factors:
1. "Mitbestimmung" or co-determination. German workers elect the board of directors.
2. Labor reps vote alongside shareholders
3. Laborers in the same strata form "work councils" and choose reps to bring issues to managers or higher up the chain
4. "Betriebsverfassungsgesetz" federal laws giving workers the rights to form these work councils
The people i've spoken too (anecdotal, I know) don't seem to have the same hostility to the unions. It is just kinda accepted and "normal" that the union is going to be there so they seem to work with them instead of fighting them at every step.
Unions have been trashed beyond repair in the US. American needs a "free market" solution and I think the next step is for employees to organize and form their own corporations. If a union demands better pay, healthcare, working conditions, they get attacked for be being greedy\lazy\entitled. A corporation that provides great pay, healthcare, and working conditions wins awards for "top 100 places to work".
"BREAKING: @RWDSU says that Amazon illegally interfered in the #BAmazonUnion vote in Bessemer, and the union will be filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB."
You think every union vote involves the company secretly and illegally cajoling the USPS to install a mail box, monitored by the company, right by the warehouse entrance?
As is their right to do, but I’d think with such a massive drubbing they’ve taken here that they’d pack it up. More than a super majority of workers have rejected the unions attempt to infest their workplace with leftist, conflict politics.
The only question now is how Amazon punishes the organizers and reward the dissenters.
It would be interesting to hear from them why. I think we all have opinions (I certainly do). But I've never worked at amazon so my opinion is low value...
I'm curious if it's the same reason I put up with !@#$ earlier in my career: I don't have the luxury of taking risks and I'm just really not interested in upsetting my employer.
You tell me there's a better world on the other side of the hill, but I'm just trying to keep my children from starving this month. I can't even begin to think about the uncertainty and risk of trying to get there.
Some commentary: I think this is one reason why social safety nets are tremendously valuable. The reason I eventually took the risk was because being without a job was not a potential death sentence. I would have unemployment insurance for a while and universal healthcare would take care of my kids if they had sudden needs.
In other countries not hiring someone because of their union affiliation is flat out illegal. (Thanks to union and political struggles to protect collective bargaining as a right)
In the US many would argue that it's not collective bargaining if you are making the employer accept an union; it's putting a gun to the employer's head in the negotiations. Employers are people too! And an employer could be a small to medium company that is barely surviving against overseas competition.
I understand others would say that the employer is more powerful to begin with and thus it's just a way to balance things. And without that, workers would be exploited and society would be worse off.
The reason I'm writing this is that there are two sides of this discussion with pretty good arguments. So just because other countries think differently, it doesn't mean that they are doing the right thing.
Alabama is an at will employment state. Amazon doesn't need to provide any reason for employment termination. If this warehouse unionizes, Amazon may choose to relocate their warehouse. This is in a suburb of Birmingham, population over a million. So the workers probably aren't unusually desperate for work.
> I'm just really not interested in upsetting my employer.
This is the purpose of a union! Because you band together, the employer can't punish you individually. Sure they might be able to fire/replace everyone, but without a union they could target you specifically and there would be no leverage or help.
Yeah I can think of lots of reasons for this loss.
1. It's always harder to get people to vote to change the status quo. Even if people think the change is going to be good, people are usually risk averse so you need to work harder to change things vs stay the same.
2. Their general opinion about unions is poor.
3. Their specific opinion about this union and the unionization effort is poor.
4. Dues were too high vs benefits.
5. Worry about retaliation from Amazon.
6. I imagine a lot of people don't really think of their Amazon warehouse job as a career. Most people working there probably only plan to do it for a few years, in which case the value of union membership falls dramatically.
My guess is the messaging about dues. Lots of people focused on the short term hit to their paychecks. Most of the stories reference $500/month. That does seem high.
Data I can find for other unions shows somewhere between 1 to 4 percent of gross pay as typical for union dues. Assuming $15/hour, 4 percent of gross pay would be $144/month. But, if $500/month is accurate, it's 13.8% of gross pay for $15/hour workers, and 10.4% of gross for $20/hour workers. That's very high.
Edit: $500/year. There were many news stories with the inaccurate $500/month quote.
Is there anything preventing a competitor from funding union dues? Paying dues on half a million Amazon warehouse employees is not cost effective, but starting a snowball rolling in warehouse unionization may be possible. ~2k employees per warehouse x $100/month. Walmart could fund union dues for one warehouse for a year for about 1 million dollars.
Walmart is historically just as anti-union as Amazon. No idea if it's still true, but anti-union material used to be part of every employee's initial training.
What is this supposed to demonstrate? Searching 500/lifetime would also turn up Google results. Still haven’t seen an actual article reporting the figure as monthly
For someone making 20 an hour that would amount to about 400-2000 less per year (1 to 4 percent). With nothing to really show for it at first. At my current pay scale I would grumble about that amount but not be too worried about it. But at the lower end it matters more and I would probably be very angry about it.
If that is indeed the primary motivator, that folks are literally getting paid so little that they can't afford the union dues then two things should happen
The union should wave union dues until wages rise
and ???
This seems not unlike Walmart informing employees that it is paying them so little that they qualify for Food Stamps.
Looking forward to the Amazon paper, "Pareto Optimal Employee Compensation for Maintaining Fluid Labor Markets"
I'm trying to look at it from the workers' perspective.
I can't trust the Union to waive dues. Especially if they haven't said they would. Even if this would benefit me in the long run, I kind of need a place to stay, food to eat, and transportation to work in the interim and if I'm already one bad day away from being destitute, It seems like throwing that extra $5 - $10 a check is only going to exacerbate that issue.
I've been in tight situations. Where I've had to juggle 0% financing and dick around with minimum payments just to keep myself at level. Charges I had to incur due to various emergencies at the time. I wouldn't have been able to afford to unionize in those days.
Now I have a much better job. I just moved into a pretty nice house and my biggest concerns are whether my curtain rods are going to arrive before my curtains and if a larger TV wouldn't be more optimal for the living room. So I try and be cautious about not going too "Lucille Bluth" when I hear that what I would now consider a small expense be a major factor in someone's decision. I realize my situation has changed a lot compared to where I started.
> A union is an exclusive collective bargaining agent, which means that it must fairly represent all of the workers in the bargaining unit, including those who have decided not to be members or pay dues.
Well, yes. But enough people have to vote "yes" for the union to do so. And fear of high dues could be a reason why many are voting no. Even though voting yes doesn't require them to do so.
No idea, but the figure is in many news stories, and I don't see the union disputing it.
The $500 figure seems to have come from the now defunct "doitwithoutdues.com" website that Amazon made. Strangely, it just says $500[1], and not "$500/month". But, "$500/month" is indeed in a lot of news stories[2].
Pretty sad for the union if the true figure is lower, and they failed to get that message out.
Edit: Apparently it is $500/year, though many news stories are saying $500/month.
I also found 500/month articles when searching for dues that workers would have to pay.
Seems to me that union had worst PR campaign possible. Maybe it's good that this union is not representing Amazon workers.
For reference, I searched UPS union dues and it comes up right at the top - 2.5x base salary.
I would guess, fear of retribution from amazon. If the voting was nationwide it could have lowered the fear that amazon could treat one location better in things like expansion.
I absolutely do not understand why you would vote against your own collective interest for a small amount of union dues. That is not snark, it's a real statement. I legitimately do not understand it.
Can someone who works/worked one of these jobs please explain it to me? I am so confused by how lopsided this was.
I think reasons will vary, and I didn’t vote in this event. But in previous situations I’ve not supported unionization due to how it favored existing workers in ways I thought were unfair in that all layoffs were due to seniority not performance so older workers would be kept and younger workers laid off, no matter what.
It also established more rigid pay levels that were better on average but not as good for high performers, and I always got much higher than average raises and bonuses.
To a lesser extent, I didn’t like the idea of union leadership who were paid for things I didn’t think added value.
So my overall take was that it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
A good one seems to be that they are afraid unionizing will push Amazon to close the delivery center. This has happened before when other companies (see Walmart [0]) just closed the location once the workers voted to unionize. And unfortunately it's less likely US law will protect the workers to the same degree as Canadian law [1].
> it was good if you were in the union and employed, but was much harder to get work and join the union.
This is my fundamental problem with unions—it helps the insiders and hurts everyone else.
Amazon’s working condition are rough (and I really hope that changes), but there are plenty of jobs out there that are much worse and don’t pay nearly as well. They just get all the attention because of their size and impact.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug. In that I don’t think it’s a problem.
Labor is subject to markets like many things, and shouldn’t be exploited. But there’s some work that’s hard and doesn’t require specialized training (eg, hauling stuff around warehouses all day). Some people are willing to do this and they do, if they don’t want to they can do other things.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but having the ability to provide more jobs with more options is the solution I think.
I grew up in a small town and it sucks for work. If you think working for Amazon sucks, you should try working in the warehouse of the only grocery store in town. The one run by a racist jerk who knows you have no options.
firstly, why is being abused and peeing in a bottle inevitable? Your post basically reads like how someone in 1500 would look at serfs and peasants in mud huts and say "that's as good as life of a common man is gonna be". Same goes for Victorian workhouses and children in coalmines.
Secondly, what is low skill exactly? Can these people not read, write, use Excel and email, could they not do secretarial and other jobs? I bet quite a few of them have degrees. Some countries have free education / upskilling specifically to avoid people getting trapped in this situation, and to improve overall productivity of the economy.
We’re talking about warehouse workers, not delivery drivers so I’m not sure if peeing in a bottle is the right argument here. Warehouse workers get breaks and can presumably use them to pee, etc. That being said, I’ve done some delivery and work where it was a pain to get to bathrooms and peeing in a bottle was pretty common and not the end of the world. I maybe did it a few times a week but there wasn’t an easy solution as I was driving for long stretches and there wasn’t a bathroom near. Or I’d rather just get there sooner.
By unskilled I mean that you can be trained on the job in less than a day. It doesn’t mean that the workers don’t have degrees and skills, it just means the job doesn’t require anything. By all means, they can certainly take other jobs but good luck finding a secretarial job for $15/hour.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has a lot of info on how they classify “low skill” jobs [0] and even tracks overqualified workers who have more skills but work in jobs that require fewer skills.
There's nothing optimal about the level of pressure being applied to these human beings. The same job could exist for the same pay, with the same overall tasks, with 10% less robotically-enforced (literally) pressure, and Amazon would take a tiny hit to productivity in exchange for a workforce that gets to live relatively sustainable and healthy lives instead of burning out after 6 months.
The current state is optimal for Amazon only. It's far from optimal for society.
Providing busy work for people that to prop up Amazon’s selling boat loads of knock off garbage.
Amazing. Surely because “that’s how it worked in the past” isn’t the only option for social organization?
Why not stop believing in Bezos and solve our human problems generally?
Why not a mandate to provide education and healthcare and we provide THOSE jobs?
Because Bezos and Musk are able to get real access to politicians, resulting in the rubes being fed fiscal economic policy that continues to protect them.
I think it's important to consider the state of the whole system, not just the direction of the change.
"helps insiders and hurts everyone else" sounds bad, but if the insiders are being exploited by everyone else, it could be a good thing.
In general I'm sympathetic to your point. However I think Amazon is perhaps a special case, or at least occupies a different point on the than most companies.
Amazon is an Aggregator[1], which spins up its flywheel by providing a great experience for consumers, and commoditizing its suppliers. This naturally drives towards a monopoly.
Aggregator monopolies have an interesting property in that unlike historical non-Aggregator monopolies, they are great for consumers, rather than resulting in consumer harm through higher prices (like Comcast, say). US antitrust law is focused on preventing consumer harm, not just preserving competition for its own sake (as the EU laws are). So US antitrust is somewhat less well-equipped to deal with Aggregator monopolies.
If the corporation, consumers, and legal system are all pointing towards exploiting a group of workers, it's hard to see how anyone is going to vote to make things better. So unions could be more appropriate specifically in the case of Aggregators.
(Worth mentioning that you could perhaps just mandate higher minimum wages, and avoid the need for unions; I'd prefer to make the minimum viable change that prevents exploitation, and leave the market free to optimize everything else. But if not unions, who drives the political fight for minimum wages?)
I don't think you can definitively state that they are great for consumers. When I buy something from debenhams, I know there is going to be a certain level of quality. Amazon is like a dump of products, most reviews are fake, the description of a monitor has different resolution in heading and it's body, a friend of mine bought an electric kettle with a thermometer and temperature control that, when set to 100, boils forever and never turns off. It's full of counterfeit products too.
All this mess devalues the manufacturers willing to produce quality items, they are lost in the noise and never make money.
The meme "Amazon is a dumpster fire of counterfeit goods and fake reviews" is popular around here, but I don't think it has much impact/traction with John/Jane MainStreet.
Maybe it would if it was better-known? But I think if folks found counterfeit goods or fake reviews to be a huge problem they would go back to Debenhams/Walmart. But by revealed preferences, we can tell they prefer the value prop of Amazon.
Regarding union leadership, there are union employees who are paid out of dues. My experience with them was similar to a pointy-haired boss in that they were not very helpful and it was frustrating to know that my dues would pay for these individuals to just exist and not produce value.
It may not be rational as maybe they did great stuff and I couldn’t see their value, but I would see them get high salaries compared to workers and serve in positions for very long terms.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but your comment reads like you were operating in a much nicer career than these workers. If your job was good enough they gave you the opportunity to negotiate your pay, you're in a totally different social class than the subjects of this vote.
It was manual labor. I’m not sure it was nicer than these workers but I was able to negotiate my pay by “working harder” and producing more than other workers.
I wouldn’t say it was a good job and I certainly don’t do it any more. But I just tried to explain my thinking.
Maybe so, but this was indeed just their experience on voting not to unionize in their job. Maybe some of the workers in this particular case will share why they voted 'no'.
I negotiated individual raises at first hourly job when I was in high school with a major national retailer...
I was one of the few High School employees they had that was reliable and always did what I was asked, this enabled me to get not only higher wages but ever increasing job titles
> I absolutely do not understand why you would vote against your own collective interest
The answer is in the article
> Some workers who voted not to unionize said they ultimately didn’t see how a union would improve their pay or working conditions.
They looked at the issue and felt it would not be better. We don't know what the union was promising them, and what they had seen through the process.
I came here to find this comment because the "vote against their interest" argument is very predictable. It assumes that people should have no agency. That they're supposed to be robots that only vote one way on issues because of their demographic, and if they don't, then they must have been hoodwinked. It's condescending.
They looked at the issue and felt incorrectly that it would not be better.
Look, I get the good intentions on all the discourse about not judging what's in another person's interests because you can't possibly know what they value, but it sure seems indisputable to me that a union would've delivered better pay and working conditions. I'm not sure in what warped universe voting against that isn't a vote against your interests and I don't think it's at all disrespectful to say they were victims of propaganda to get them to vote against their interests because when I look at the facts, that's what I see.
They probably just examined the same facts as you and came to a different conclusion. They are closer to their own situation, which doesn’t always mean they will make the right decision, but I would be very careful about telling someone how to live their own life.
What set of facts could possibly have made unionization a bad idea? I genuinely can't imagine a single hypothetical which would make voting against this a good idea and would love to hear one.
From the article:
“A lot of us are in agreement that we don’t need anybody there to speak for us and take our money,” said Cori Jennings, 40 years old, who works at the Bessemer facility and voted against unionizing. Ms. Jennings said she and many of her colleagues were also eager for the national attention to fade: “We want our lives to go back to normal.”
> Closing it would almost certainly be a lot more expensive than meeting union demands, so I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that is likely.
Not if Amazon thought swift action would act as a deterrent in other locations. This specific thing has happened with other companies, so I don't think it's unlikely at all.
> Regardless, it's a decent argument for a nationwide union to avoid race to the bottom effects.
OK, but the question is whether these specific workers could possibly have any reason to vote against unionization. Maybe they don't find it plausible that a nationwide union will form, or maybe they don't want to deal with the interim turmoil that will befall them personally, even if they would support a nationwide effort. All seem like perfectly fine reasons to me.
"We can't win, they'll just crush us" is 1. wrong on the facts more often than people think and 2. even when true, a good argument for organizing more effectively, not giving up and accepting the shitty status quo forever.
Yeah, how is this relevant to the thread? It's not about why you think we should have unions. It's about the claim that there's no possible rational reason for these workers to vote against the union.
It's not reasonable to assume the hypothetical retaliation you mentioned is likely because there's no evidence that it is. It's certainly understandable why someone would fall for that argument, because it is persuasive on an emotional level, but it's not a good argument in the same way that logical fallacies can often be persuasive even though they shouldn't be.
Walmart is famous for doing exactly that. I'm not sure what else I can tell you if you (a) claim that a certain outcome never happens, when a cursory search shows it does, and (b) actually think that your political opinions are the result of some kind of pure logic chain. They're not.
It's not a 'logical fallacy' to not want to risk disruption of your livelihood, and that's the only relevant question to this thread: is there any set of facts that would reasonably lead the workers to vote against unionization? I think clearly there is, and there's no point arguing over subjective prioritizations. The workers are not 'irrational' for prioritizing their own jobs over the 'national action' that you seem to want. They may even consider that harmful. Not all workers have the same political opinions.
Well to be clear, I would agree with you if I agreed that closing up shop was actually likely. If we assume that just the very act of forming a union, regardless of its demands, would inevitably lead to closing up shop, then of course I agree that forming the union is counterproductive. Where we disagree is on whether or not that hypothetical is very likely.
Really, it seems indisputable to you that someone who’s job is on the line and who probably spent quite a bit of time looking into what was being proposed ultimately decided to vote no must be wrong? I’m curious what better information you have (especially to compensate for the lack of skin in the game so to speak) to come to that conclusion.
Aside from the common sense that collective bargaining obviously puts you in a stronger negotiating position than individual bargaining for the same class of job, there is also plenty of data out there showing that unions deliver results. Anti-union people counter that by flooding the discourse with FUD propaganda that is often very persuasive but just because it's persuasive doesn't mean it is true.
Collective bargaining is 100% better than individual bargaining.
But, collective bargaining is only a single aspect of unions. They're not voting against it because they dislike collective bargaining, but because of other reasons. Collective bargaining is likely not a significant motivator for them because their salaries really are fairly high for the area.
I think in many cases unions are good, and in many others they are bad. I disagree that you can point at overall data and use that decide a specific case. Union data likely has severe survivorship bias, since unions likely tend to exist where they are more helpful.
That might be true on average, doesn’t mean that specific cases could have vastly different outcomes.
I don’t see how a propaganda campaign can push the vote to 70%, this is not Soviet Russia. Money does help but not on this order of magnitude (see Mike Bloomberg or many failed ballot propositions with tons of money behind them).
They had anti-union propaganda everywhere, even in the fucking bathroom stalls. Plus it's a very conservative part of the country that has been drowning in anti-union propaganda for decades on top of the fact that the average moderate American swing voter is also pretty hostile to unions and even a good chunk of the center-left side of the Democratic coalition is too.
Pro-union people have a lot of work to do to restore the reputation of unions more generally. We need to up our propaganda game a lot because we got crushed in the Reagan era and never recovered.
The unions asked them if they wanted to unionise. They said 'no thanks'. Why isn't that enough for you? If you support workers' right to have a voice then listen to them when they use it. Some individuals are even quoted in the article - they want the unions to leave them in peace!
I don't know your life experiences but I think you've got a funny idea that unions are some kind of perfect good descended from heaven? In reality in most cases unions come with a lot of unpleasant people and politics and aggravation. The workers are already seeing that aggravation with all this unwanted attention. That's one extra problem than they had before, and they don't have any confidence the union will reduce any problems they already had. And the union wants to be paid hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege! What a joke and no wonder people are hostile. I bet people are going to be even more hostile at the next factory these unions turn up at.
You say "leave them alone" like fighting to improve people's lives is somehow victimizing them. It's truly amazing how right-wing anti-union propaganda has brain wormed into so many people.
If someone tells you to leave them alone, then you should leave them alone. If at that point you don't then yeah you're harassing them and they're a victim.
From the workers' perspective, there is an endless supply of people who will offer to take their money or the little power they have in return for supposedly 'fighting to improve their lives'.
Most of them do not really share your interests, and many are actively trying to trick you to use your money and power for themselves.
See for example the majority of politicians.
So far this union has uninvitedly hassled these workers for months, and then reacted angrily when they said 'no thanks' in a vote, so I can understand the workers are not buying now even if they were considering it before!
Unions have a long track record of working well to raise wages and improve working conditions. But I suppose that's not easy to know if the only info a person consumes about the topic is right-wing propaganda.
Assuming you're not an Amazon warehouse employee, but they have more skin in the game than you. So presumably their opinion is more informed and reasoned.
I don't think its as clear cut as "in your interest". I certainly wouldn't vote to unionize my profession and I would even go as far as avoiding unionized fields. I prefer to have a direct relationship with my employer. I stay away from organizations that have a table that will tell you how much you'll make after N years. It's just not a dynamic place to work. Or at least that's my impression when dealing with unionized groups in large banks.
Your union needs seem much different than the typical warehouse or factory worker. Especially if you're on HN — I'm sure most everybody on this website would benefit more from "a direct relationship with my employer". A random overworked Amazon warehouse worker doesn't have that sort of managerial access or a skill to leverage for negotiating.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Turnover among low paid staff is extremely high. For instance, take McDonalds workers:
McDonald's Mr. Floersch the managerial turnover was at 20% globally while that of the crew members averaged between 80 percent and 90 percent. [0]
That high turnover means that low paid employees are much faster to leave. Some don't even show up to their first day of work. It's also selection bias sure. But if you talk to anyone who manages low paid employees, the primary skill set they have is interpersonal relationships with their staff, or at least the good ones. The fixed costs are very high to hire someone, regardless of salary. You have to pay a recruiter or even spend time looking through resumes, running expensive background checks, interviewing etc.
Now consider the Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst. They get paid extremely well and get treated like crap. Do they have a "direct relationship with their employer"? Hardly.
If you're making $10 an hour its a lot easier to find another employer paying you a similar amount than it is if you're making $200k a year.
Not only this (which is super accurate in my limited experience with these types of jobs in HS/college), but that high turnover even among managerial staff means that really to advance at least a few levels in the organization, all it takes is 1) sticking around; 2) not being bad at your job (not even being really good just be decent).
Hell, I used to be a dishwasher then line cook at a Friendly's (east coast family restaurant, primary PA/NJ/NY/CT/MA) for two years and by the time I left for college I was the most senior person there who didn't have a key to open the building. And two of the three cooks who had keys were still in school, one HS and one college.
Managing a restaurant is super demanding work but it's not that far off from median salary. It's not as much of a dead end as people think it is, especially if you start at the bottom and work up.
That's true, but unionized spots have such a strong individualistic component to the work. However, in industries such as warehouse workers, the employee ability is a lot more uniform, so I doubt there would be provisions for superstars to negotiate salaries.
It would more likely be something akin to a teacher union, with teaching being in between performance athletes and uniform workers. And even there I don't think individual teachers have much power to negotiate salary, but I could be wrong.
Why do you think the vagueness is in your favor? Especially for a warehouse worker, the job is doing rote tasks forever. Why wouldn’t they be able to project your salary into the future?
I think for a warehouse worker or any other job where people are basically fungible, unionizing is a no-brainer. Individuals have no leverage.
Unionizing can make sense for other types of jobs as well. The person I responded to mentioned their preference for having a direct relationship with an employer. To me, that means other types of places than warehouses because I doubt very much that many warehouse workers have a relationship with anybody above their direct supervisor.
I'm suggesting that if you are a valuable enough employee where you have a direct relationship with your employer (as the person I responded to said), you may still benefit from having a union like baseball players or screen writers. The wage table for those professions establishes a floor.
A warehouse employee is not likely to have any kind of relationship with anybody above their supervisor. They can only bargain collectively.
>I absolutely do not understand why you would vote against your own collective interest
It's because unions in America cannot guarantee the existence of the job. Yes, unions can force negotiations but they have no power to force the corporation to keep the factory open. (E.g. workers of Bakers union go on strike and in response, Hostess closes the factory.)
That's the tradeoff of possible negative consequences that many armchair observers totally leave out when they only emphasize benefits of unions such as "higher pay, better work conditions, etc".
I'd contend that observers who are confused why workers would "vote against their self-interest" and being "illogical" -- do not truly empathize with the poor workers' plight. (Or the observers are from Europe where unions work differently than America.)
So the workers (Volkswagen workers in TN, Nissan in TN, Boeing in SC) that voted to reject union representation weighed the game theory tradeoffs of:
(a) jobs continue to exist with better pay and conditions
... or ...
(b) jobs are eliminated leading to layoffs and pay of $0
The possible outcome of (b) becomes even more perverse in that the workers pay dues to have their jobs eliminated!
Yes, but if workers don't form a union -- "it's a race to the bottom!". Well, repeating memes is the currency of pundits rather than real cash that puts food on the table. Workers, understandably, make local decisions because they want a paycheck rather than worry about some global abstraction of "race to the bottom".
Other fields such as NFL, NBA, superstars have leverage in union negotiations. Faceless workers have much less leverage. E.g. baseball umpires (faceless and less leverage) strike but the MLB just accepts their resignations and hires replacements. The unskilled line workers in factories have even less leverage.
Hard to believe this isn’t the top reply. You don’t need to go off into some long discussion about the philosophy of collective action. This vote was no because if it had been yes the likely consequence would have been all the voters being out of a job.
Maybe. Maybe not. Let's take for the sake the argument that yes, it's a problem.
Should Amazon be prevented from closing the factory? For how long? Do they have to send as much product there as they did before? Can they open a non-union warehouse in Columbus, MS less than two hours away? Any temporary/sunsetting requirements just get factored in to the new math of how much a union would cost them. So maybe you buy the workers six months but the same thing happens. So if you actually want to "fix" things (again, from the assumed standpoint that shutting down the factory is a Bad Thing) the requirement has to be permanent. So is the requirement then that Amazon has to keep this one warehouse open in perpetuity just because its unionized? What if Amazon goes bankrupt? What if Amazon sells its fulfillment and shipping components to another company? What if that company buys everything except this one warehouse?
The argument of "they shouldn't be able to close the factory" falls apart pretty quickly when you think of how you would have to enforce it.
Maybe. But it’s not some deep mystery why the vote was no. All the threads and sub threads discussing it as if it were a deep mystery puzzle me. I’m always bemused at smart people with strong opinions on subjects where they don’t even have a grasp of the basic factual landscape.
> why you would vote against your own collective interest
Maybe they are not sufficiently confident that the union will act in their interest?
Is that so crazy an idea?
If you're in favour of unions then I guess you're in favour of workers being able to have a say in how they work. And if they don't want to work with a union then I can't understand how you can rationally do anything but say 'ok thank you for saying, if that's what you want no problem we'll do it that way'.
You are saying in expressing the right to have a say in how they work, they chose to vote to not have a say in how they work?
It's a pretty simple calculus. When the company spends twice the yearly payroll of the entire place on preventing the lowest of low workers on the totem pole from forming a union, maybe the company isn't acting in their best interests.
Equating a specific approach with _the_ solution to the problem is the oldest trick in the book. You’re implicitly assuming that this specific proposal to form a union is equivalent to “having a say in how they work”. That’s definitely what people proposing the union would have everyone believe, but it’s not necessarily the reality. There are many other outcomes possible, and on the balance the people disagreed with that framing.
They said that they did not want to be represented by these specific people with this specific deal. Maybe they'd be happy to be represented by someone else as part of some other arrangement? I don't know, and neither do you.
But if that's what they say when asked what else should we do except honour that?
If you think it's absolutely inconceivable they could legitimately vote against it at all... I mean then why have a vote at all? Might as well unionise them by force against their will and impose the union leaders as unelected and unwelcome representatives? That'll empower 'em, right?
Ironically I think this is a good example of one of the weaknesses many people see in unions. Here we have a group of people who have voted "against their collective interest" (which is a dubious claim imo, but let's assume that it's true for the sake of argument). If they were already unionized, what's to stop them to similarly keep voting "against their collective interest", as viewed by one individual within the organization? All of this to say, I don't trust a large group of other people to vote for what's best for me personally. See also: US presidential elections, usually close to a 50/50 vote, where most people consider "their side" to be unequivocally aligned with their own interests, and the other side to be heinous and corrupt. Peoples perceptions and the objective truth are rarely aligned when there's money and campaigning involved.
(Throwaway because being anti-union is unfortunately taboo)
I like to think this is due to the bad reputation unions have.
Digging a two mile tunnel eats half of the state budget? Police refuses to wear body cams? Schools are slow to reopen after covid? Rightly or not, in many people's minds unions are to blame.
I agree, but there are other dimensions to public sector unions that makes them worth keeping around: deterrence of the spoils system in politics, and the legal monopsony the state has on the labor and monopoly on credentialing in many cases.
> Digging a two mile tunnel eats half of the state budget?Police refuses to wear body cams? Schools are slow to reopen after covid? Rightly or not, in many people's minds unions are to blame.
If you were a contractor to a state and you scored a contract worth half the state's budget, would you consider that a success or a failure?
You would consider it a success! The examples you give show exactly how unions work in the self-interest of their members. If the tunnel costs half the state's budget, the tunnel workers are surely well-paid, police officers rather not wear body cams so that they can whack people with their batons without being prosecuted, and teachers rather not return to schools as long as the epidemic is ongoing.
> I absolutely do not understand why you would vote against your own collective interest
The whole "voting against your own interest" is hugely paternalistic and anti-democratic. People have their own set of values and interests. As an outsider without knowledge of the people to accuse them of voting against their own interest because they did not vote the way you wanted them to is the height of arrogance.
Relax. I guess I should've said - "What I perceive as your own collective interest," although I would argue that was implied.
I didn't intend to be arrogant at all, I am legitimately confused. The two jobs that I was in a union, the union was massively beneficial to my life. That is where my perspective came from.
"The two jobs that I was in a union, the union was massively beneficial to my life."
Just because the union was beneficial does not mean it was better to have it around than not to. You only experienced one side of the coin in those situations.
I didn't feel like typing out everything involved, but yes, it was better than not having it. Both positions became unionized during my tenure with those organizations. The pay, benefits, and time-off benefits were much better as a union shop than before we unionized.
I know it is just my experience, so it's very anecdotal evidence at best. And that was my point - that is my experience, which is why I'm confused by the massive vote against unionization. I, personally, do not understand it and would like to.
I dunno, it’s better on HN to give people the benefit of the doubt. The overlap of software engineer and conservative punditry consumer is pretty small relatively speaking. It’s not like the ideas put forth are too convoluted for somebody to have on their own.
I mean, it is possible for one person to know certain things that another person does not, and further possible that the latter person WOULD act differently if they had that knowledge.
And that's paternalistic, isn't it? "They voted against their interest" implies that OP knows/decides what their interests are.
Personally, I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions. It was always the people who only talked, read and wrote about workers that were flabbergasted. Source: worked as a consultant for a union in Europe for a decade.
OP was implying what his/her interests are, or rather, would be, s/he believes, in this case. Source: I am OP and that was my intention.
That's why I asked for someone with direct experience to comment. I am confused, based on my own viewpoint and experience with unions.
>I've never met someone who knew workers that was fundamentally surprised by their decisions.
I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. What is workers? Who are workers? What group of people would you consider workers? I've been part of two unions, both of which benefited me, personally, immensely. These were knowledge jobs and not hands-on jobs. Am I a worker? My father is very blue-collar manufacturing and he has been both anti- and pro-union, depending on which shop he worked for. Is he a worker?
I don't understand what you're saying. Honestly. It sounds like you're the font of some mystical knowledge about a mythical group of people. What do you mean by your statement? I don't get it.
> I don't, genuinely don't understand this sentence. What is workers? Who are workers?
Workers are people who work in the rougher jobs, blue collar if that's what you prefer. White collar unions are very different in my opinion.
My experience is this: I've worked with people who were workers and then transitioned to working for the union, either because they were natural organizers, or because they had accidents that made it hard to work their job (a surprising amount of them had lost a finger or two). When they spoke about these kinds of things, like votes or organization rates, they were quick to give plenty of reasons why their colleagues would make some decision because they knew all the arguments and feelings.
The other type I met at the union was college educated, usually political science, spoke a lot of class consciousness and collective interests and had never worked the jobs the union represented. When you talked to them, they didn't understand why workers made some choice, it was always some nicely worded version of "they're not smart enough to make the right choice" or "somebody fed them lies".
> Can someone who works/worked one of these jobs please explain it to me? I am so confused by how lopsided this was.
It's a result of how unions are structured in the US. (It's different in Europe from what I understand, and they're more popular there as a result.) In the US unions are structured as a monopoly on labor which then nominally has more negotiating power with the employer.
The problem is that monopolies are inherently an industrial scale fail factory and everything about them makes everything worse.
You then have effectively two possibilities.
The first is that the employer is competing with a hundred other local employers for labor. In this case there isn't really anything for the union to do, because the employer will already have to offer competitive working conditions or employees will go work for somebody else. And the employer in a competitive market won't have thick margins for the union to extract from, implying that the union's overhead will be larger than what they can extract from the employer.
The second is that the employer is, itself, a monopoly. In theory it now has thick margins that the union can extract concessions out of. But then you have two monopolies negotiating with each other. It's a battle of attrition. Can the employer afford to have their facility closed for longer than you can afford to be on strike? You know the answer to this is for large multinational corporations. The corporation will barely even notice the complete shuttering of that facility because they have a thousand more to pick up the slack.
A monopsony employer is still a big problem, of course, it's just not a problem that unions are a solution to. Try antitrust, or lower regulatory barriers to small businesses so that there are more competing local employers etc.
> A monopsony employer is still a big problem, of course, it's just not a problem that unions are a solution to. Try antitrust, or lower regulatory barriers to small businesses so that there are more competing local employers etc.
I like your comment, but unions aren't necessarily meant to solve this problem. Amazon imposes terrible working conditions on its warehouse workers, which a union absolutely could address.
> Amazon imposes terrible working conditions on its warehouse workers, which a union absolutely could address.
How? The union's negotiating power comes from the ability to go on strike. They make a demand, Amazon says no, they go on strike, Amazon closes that warehouse and sends people their cheap junk from a different one.
All the union can get you is the unemployment line, unless you do something to increase local competition for labor. In which case you don't need the union because employers have to compete through better working conditions.
I absolutely abhor modern day versions of unions. They have not done enough to separate themselves in my eyes from the misguided activities that brought them their current negative reputations.
However, I absolutely understand the need, and feel sorry for those stuck in a sitation where union type help is needed. If there was a way to wipe out existing unions and start fresh where nobody from leadership of exisiting unions were allowed to have influence, then maybe just maybe I would start leaning towards unions. But at the current implementation, it's a nope from me.
The more I read about Unions in America the more I am befuddled. Don’t you have membership elections for the leadership? How do you even decide who the leadership is then?
If you do have elections, then your comment is akin to a republican proclaiming that democracy doesn’t work, but would work in principle but only of the current leadership was replace with Donal Trump.
>Don’t you have membership elections for the leadership?
So does Iran, Russia, etc. Do you feel like those elections are free and fair? I don't feel like union leadership votes are. Again, there's a lot of baggage associated with current unions. New unions are needed, not new leadership of existing unions.
"I absolutely do not understand why you would vote against your own collective interest"
Union execs become a bunch of corrupt fat cats. They are terrible [1][2][3]. The union execs will go on fancy dinners with amazon execs and decide how to "make a deal". You pay dues to a bunch of fat cats (out of your horrible salary), THEN, good luck getting any kind of promotion without fat cat approval. Promotions will quickly be based on seniority. Production will soon slow then the company will decide to shut down these unproductive plants. Read about "flint michigan" to learn how awesome unions are in the US.
Maybe they're worried that Amazon will not want to do business with union labor and just hire people willing to work unrepresented for 15/hr. minimum.
Maybe work-life at Amazon low end is not as bad as the media sensationlizes. Why should it be your default to consider this as paradoxical rather than evidence?
Other than dues and having control over pay grades (maybe workers think they can do better than union-negotiated flat pay scales), unions can vote to strike and force you out of a job.
And at the end of the day, the workers just weren't particularly unhappy, and those weren't palatable risks.
I would try working one of "those jobs" at some point in your life.
I repeatedly voted against unionization in previous lives of blue collar jobs: bus building, commercial roofing, and sheet metal workers.
First, Union leadership is bought out and pursuing their own interests. They're not "for the people" as repeatedly braindeadly repeated in the comments section ad infinitum. Union leadership is out to benefit themselves first and foremost, and workers might benefit if you contribute to their cause, but it's a fantasy to pretend union leadership has everyone's best intentions in mind.
Inevitably, this leads to the second, which is escalation of costs at the company. This is only partially wages; business decisions get delayed at committee, competitive advantage on market timing goes away, old-timey boomers get mad when something changes, and your company's innovation becomes stagnate. Your company falls behind and wages stagnate, and union leadership blames literally everyone except for themselves.
Finally, the benefits are stupid for the price you pay. If they were measured on charity navigator, they would be listed as some of the worst run. The money gets funneled into union leadership pockets and their golf buddies. Nepotism runs wild; promotions got to whomever is slapping whom's ass or giving it out to their kid. It's a "tax" you can't vote yourself out of except to quit your job.
I wonder if it helped democracy if voters would be able to add "justification" to their vote. Then there would be less room for speculation about the reasons.
The data would be nice, but it seems like this would have a chilling effect on the vote itself. The extra context of a justification would make it easier to tie votes to groups or even individuals. I'm not sure why, but polls as a separate, voluntary activity seem like a safer way to do it.
Unions will only work in a few scenarios. The biggest of which is that the people with the skill need to be 100% together in starting the union, and willing to not work when the union says to not work. The facts remain that most of these employees most likely can't afford to not work. They can't afford to be without the stability of their employers paycheck. Additionally, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people willing to replace these workers. Sadly they don't require any trade skill to pick/pull/pack. So there is no barrier for new recruits to be hired and replace the missing union workers.
I absolutely do not understand why someone would vote to be collectively represented instead of being able to act as as individual in your own best interest
You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest, this is simply false
The union has supplanted individual choice for collective voting, and if your interests align with 50.1% of your fellow co workers than great but if your needs to not align with the majority of your co-workers then the union will screw you to serve the collective, and that is the best case.
>You claim not voting for the union is against your own interest but that assumes that the union will 100% of the time be looking out for your own individual best interest
No, and that is a pretty far stretch from what I said. Please re-read "your own collective interest". It's easy to win an argument when you misrepresent what is said. Collective interest implies that it is the greatest good for the majority of people. Not the most good for you every time.
Question for you:
>I absolutely do not understand why someone would vote to be collectively represented instead of being able to act as as individual in your own best interest
Do you really not see how it may be easier to negotiate as a group, rather than as an individual? In high-skill, high-demand jobs, yes, it is probably much easier to negotiate for individual benefits, because you have the power as the worker. But in low-skill, or high-supply jobs, the employers have all the power. I don't understand what you're saying.
While low skill / high supply jobs can be more challenging in some cases to negotiate, I know many many employers that are having problems finding people even for the most entry level jobs.
Further good employees, even in low skill jobs, are very hard to find and even harder to retain. employers want to keep them, unionization often limits their ability to retain these high performing employees because they are not allowed to give bonus, raise or any other incentive beyond what is laid out by collective bargaining.
So I really do not see how it is easier to negotiate as a group. my personal experiences matches what have have observed in employment rations through out my career from when I was in a entry level position to now where I am in a higher skilled position
I personally enjoyed the flexibility of the "at-will" job.
I grabbed a position at a Minnesota warehouse as a post-college graduate with no fulltime job. Kinda just wandered in off some job posting online and they just brought me on.
Feels like people just don't want to mess with a good thing tho? A lot of my friends came from super different walks of life, but almost all unanimously enjoyed coming in for shifts and shooting the shit with their friends. Might just be a perception that change means that things will get worse and no one wants that.
They're underpaid enough as it is? Seriously, that's usually what it comes down to: Nobody wants to give up a dime for union dues when they're already barely making ends meet.
> ZipRecruiter shows the average in all states as under $15 [0] so an Amazon worker will likely make more than a worker in other warehouses.
Amazon workers make more than other non-unionized warehouses in the area, but they still make less than unionized warehouses. For example Piggly Wiggly warehouses make $20/hr on top of having vacation days and medical benefits.
making $15/hour doesn't mean you suddenly have lots of money to make it rain. $15/hour means that a lot of people are just now at the point of barely making it vs the completely snowed under they were in at minimum wage
I think it depends on your circumstances but I don’t think $15/hour is a ton of money.
Warehouses are frequently in rural settings and $15 isn’t so bad. I have friends who are doing ok on $12/hour but they only have $300 rent and really low expenses. Rural America doesn’t have many upsides, but being cheap is one.
And my point wasn’t that Amazon was wonderful, just that it pays more than the alternative since the average pay is much lower ($11 vs $15 I think) at other companies.
But there's a massive difference in working conditions. There is no warehouse floor worker that will be making $15 an hour indefinitely. Eventually, their bodies will succumb to injuries while trying to keep up with the brutal pace of work mandated by Amazon.
So then what's worse: $11 an hour at a job you can work indefinitely, or $15 an hour at a job where your body will eventually fail and you may be left with a permanent injury which Amazon will not help you with?
> So then what's worse: $11 an hour at a job you can work indefinitely, or $15
I think people can make that decision when they choose to work for orgs.
I’d like to see info on how long warehouse workers last in the job.
But Amazon does provide disability insurance [0] beyond social security, so they do help with permanent injury for all their workers. If it’s on the job there’s also worker’s comp.
It's a trade off. A union would very likely benefit me financially but every union I've ever had the opportunity to join has had a very progressive bend. Do I gain financially and lose morally or hold morally and miss out financially?
Edit: I would be very enthusiastic about a union that stuck to just labor issues, no unrelated issues.
"why you would vote against your own collective interest for a small amount of union dues"
Ignorance of their own reasoning is rooted in the presupposition that the union was in their best interest and the dues were worth it. Obviously, the employees in this case did not agree it was in their interest. People think differently than others and that is OK.
Funny how some resort to calling workers gullible when they don't vote the way they're supposed to. You're saying these people have no agency and no understanding of their own situation? How patronizing! I thought accepting the will of the people is the whole goal of democracy?
You take the Union and then shape it to your will. Now they for sure have no agency and no options. It’s a stupid decision no matter how you paint it. It’s also not my problem. They can piss in bottles if they like.
Maybe. They sure will threaten to. But fact is, Amazon has quite an investment in these warehouses and wages are really just one aspect of the calculus for whether or not to keep running the warehouse.
Plus, if unionization makes its way to every Amazon warehouse, then everyone will compete on equal footing vis-a-vis wages.
It is "right to work" and I do not see how it is insane to not _force_ people to join unions. In the US we take our freedoms of association seriously and forcing a citizen to associate with an organization they do not wish to associate with is tantamount to an unconstitutionality.
Now, one school of thought is "these are the tools we have, use them" another school of thought is "this is self-defeating weirdness", I am not sure. But it certainly isn't so clear cut that "of course right-to-work" is bad. Regardless of everything else, it was an anti-labor cudgel created in bad faith. Any solution that finds union compulsion icky but doesn't do something about the monopsony power of employers is not to be taken seriously.
My theory is that rich people and well-educated people vote according to self-interest, but poor and non-educated people according to identity. Billionaires votes for whoever lowers their taxes, academics for whoever secures them, often tax-funded, jobs, but poor people for whoever they like personally.
I'm positive that education was strongly correlated with voting in favor of unionization. This is something the left everywhere struggles with enormously. When poor people are too dumb to vote according to their own self-interest, the left's worldview falls down. The left then claims that poor people are brainwashed by capitalist propaganda. Yeah, maybe, but it can't explain completely disastrous results like this unionization vote.
Misguided people will claim that unionization is not in the self-interest of most workers. Those people are wrong as there are about a billion studies showing that unionization improves both salaries and working conditions. For example: https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/ The science is incredibly clear-cut and these workers who voted against unionization voted against their own self-interest.
Poor people vote in their own interest just like anyone else but their options are limited and often the opportunity to consider all their options is truncated by the vagaries of life on the edge of dissolution.
Empirical argument: The biggest unions in america are for the most poorly run and corrupt organizations. Teachers, Police, Firemen, Government workers, Health, public transportation. All with massive costs to the consumer, corruption, service disruption, closed shops, etc.
Microeconomics argument: The only meaningful way unions increase employees wages is by artificially restricting supply. They can only move the point of equilibrium of demand and supply in their favor by restricting supply, thus unions always have in their interests on: increase minimum wages, licensing, closed shops, etc.
Political Economy argument: What is most interesting for unions is to survive as unions, which means that even if sometimes they are adversarial with employers, they are often allies to the structure. This is because at the negotiation table between unions and employers there are some actors missing, namely, the consumer.
Political argument: Unions exhert force only by destruction: by refusing to work, by boycotting, by collecting administration fees to maintain its structure. The proliferation of unions is the proliferation of destruction. Giving special legal status, protections, considerations, rewards to unions, you are proliferating unions and proliferating destruction.
Meanwhile the Teachers, Police, Firemen, Government workers, Health, public transportation workers do not live in a state of wage slavery where the best job they can get doesn't even give bathroom breaks (i.e Amazon)
The arguments against come from uncertainty, "there are clearly trade offs" "I don't know but people with skin in the game are against it" "This will cause problems in the long run"
The arguments in favor are certain. There's is no mention of downsides; the only talk is of more money and more security with at most a mention that some dues will need to be paid (though on balance the worker will come out ahead).
I agree with you. Elections everywhere are full of people voting wrong, against their self-interests and against everything I hold dear in life. I am Abel to vote in two countries and I can see this every year.
Most of the folks who vote aren't really the type to sit down and think long-term. $50/month in dues getting them +$2-3k more annually every two years? They won't do the math and see they'd make a net profit of whatever that annual income increase is minus $600.
There was some great video floating around recently of a forklift operator or something who explained what his union dues got him and he was so informed and unphased by the dues he was paying.
> "...why you would vote against your own collective interest ..."
> "...Most of the folks who vote aren't really the type to sit down and think long-term..."
Why do people call others dumb (and let's not kid ourselves, that's just what these phrases are a cultured, genteel way of saying) and then are surprised when said others don't vote for the causes they believe in?
Don't they realize that casting aspersions on the intelligence of others to their faces is "against their own collective interest"? If you want people to vote for your causes, work harder to prove that it benefits them instead of denigrating them.
I don't think you'll find many of those Amazon warehouse workers on this site. Also, it's not said with malice, so don't reach for a fight.
Most of these workers slave for long hours. And then they work another job on top of it. And then they wonder why they STILL aren't making enough to pay TODAY's bills. Their mindset is myopic because they live paycheck to paycheck. You tell them they're losing MORE money out of each paycheck, that suddenly makes them worry exponentially more.
I'm friends with people living this dilemma monthly. They don't have the luxury to think what the long-term return on investment is.
And to say they're under-educated isn't calling them dumb. The ones I know are high school dropouts/graduates only. High school doesn't teach you personal finance the way a finance course at a college might introduce you to it. It's just statistical correlation.
> Why do people call others dumb (and let's not kid ourselves, that's just what these phrases are a cultured, genteel way of saying) and then are surprised when said others don't vote for the causes they believe in?
How does calling people dumb affect the way they vote? In fact, if me and others calling people who vote against unionization dumb makes them more likely to vote against unionization, it clearly means that they are not primarily considering their self-interest, since whatever I and other leftists say or think is completely irrelevant.
If I say "you're an idiot for voting for Trump" and that makes you more likely to vote for Trump, then, I'm sorry to say, you proved my point.
If the vote is for union representation and the folks who will represent you have the attitude that “if you don’t agree with me you’re an idiot” how could they be trusted to represent your views? They will only ever represent their own interests.
2 + 2 = 4. If you don't agree with me then you are an idiot. Yes, union representatives look after their own self-interest. That's the point of unions! Their self-interest is getting reelected and they aren't reelected unless they look after the self-interests of the union members. What you are arguing for is that people should lie and obscure the fact that someone who denies that 2 + 2 = 4 is an idiot. I don't think people are such snowflakes.
That’s not how tax brackets work. It is, unfortunately, how some welfare programs work. This results in benefits “cliffs” where you can lose thousands of dollars of welfare for earning a single additional dollar. If those welfare payments are how you keep a roof over your head, it’s pretty easy to get trapped right below the ceiling.
That said, you are unlikely to be eligible for these benefits at all if you are a full-time warehouse employee. They are aimed mostly at those in genuine poverty.
That’s a common misconception in 99% of cases, save for some welfare cliffs for really low earners. Tax brackets are graduated tiers, so not everything is taxed at the same rate.
This never happens in the USA because this is not how tax brackets work. When you hit the next tax bracket, you only pay the higher rate on the income over the bracket threshold. Any income under it pays the lower bracket(s) rates.
That's not at all how our tax system works. Progressive tax brackets only tax you at the new rate on the money that you've made within that tax bracket. Getting into a higher tax bracket does not result in you making less money. Ever.
Your take home is what most people consider "making" even they know their actual salary is what they "make". I made a higher salary working in a state with state income taxes. Took a pay cut to move to a state without state income taxes. My take home went up (obviously). So I "made" more in take home by "making" less.
You changed what tax rules applied to you by moving, and thus your tax situation changed.
The point remains: under normal income circumstances (i.e. not related to welfare or equity), there is no way for you to get a raise in your real income and have your take home income decrease due to your federal income tax bracket.
And in this case your take home would go up 100% of the time you got a raise - only the raise amount itself would decrease proportionally to your increased income.
The assault against unions for the past 50 years in America meant that there was only one likely outcome of this vote. Amazon is a powerful entity and they used their might to suppress this vote and it worked.
Why are people in comments treating Bessemer as small town America. It is a part of the greater Birmingham area and Job opportunities abound. It’s 10 or 15 minutes from Healthcare/Banking center clad Birmingham. If you can stomach the crime between Bessemer and parts of Hueytown, you can make an absolute boat load of money. I live like 15 minutes from Bessemer myself and have had to go there or through there many times.
Ah, the union vs anti-union discussion again. Seriously we should TDD our way out of this discussion. There are clearly some union policies that work and some others that don't. Can't we work out just the beneficial ones and enforce them as a baseline while discarding the bad ones? Print that as a standard and boom! You've got a compliance measure to rank unions :)
Incognito tab didn't work, googling it didnt work, and outline.com didn't work. Anyone have any other tips or tricks for finding the article to read it?
Thank god and whoever else for this. This is amazing. I realize and understand a segment of HN readers are sympathetic to unions(the American version too), and some are vocal advocates as well, but I am absolutely elated at this outcome.
Edit: Question: Can this vote also be taken as a proxy indicator of the working conditions not being anywhere close to what the sensational and click-bait media pieces point out to be?
Especially in that region, I would take this vote rather as an indicator of the lack of alternatives. Amazon is so large that they could simply scrap that location without being that bothered, yet the workers do not have that freedom. The choice is between taking what you can get even if it is tied to bad working conditions or having nothing at all.
To answer your question, probably not. For a fuller answer, I'd read this breakdown by Jane McAlevey, who wrote the extremely well-sourced "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age" about the importance of actual organizing, rather than just trying to drive an approval vote: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/bessemer-alabama-...
Basically, there were a number of really bad tactical errors made by organizers throughout the process.
Most of the work policies we have are the outcome of unions and left politics. If you yote against them you are voting in the interest of your employer which does not care about you, a replaceable warehouse worker, at all. If you have psychological issues because of stress at work and your back is damaged for your lifetime you are just replaced with someone else.
So, leaving aside why someone would or would not want to join a union, why is this a majority vote? If 49% of a workforce wants to unionize, why can't they?
Without force the unions can’t exist. It’s like a lot of things with government involvement: Unless you are forced to do it, many people, especially if money is involved, will eventually decide not to. So in order for the union to survive and have power they have to force everyone to join, everyone to pay, and everyone submit to its system whether they like it or not. What I see in this union vote is that people didn’t want to give up their autonomy to someone else. I think anything that asks citizens to give up some kind of autonomy - especially now - is going to incite people negatively.
Unions operate on a voluntary membership only basis most places, and plenty of countries with such systems have far higher unionisation rates than the US.
Not a lawyer or organized labor person, but a favorable vote would turn the warehouse into a "union shop," where the union negotiates on behalf of everyone, member or not, with regard to wages and working conditions and collects dues from everyone, member or not. In my very limited experience, the union offers some benefit like vision coverage to encourage people to join.
Mostly correct, although Alabama is a “right to work” state which means you cannot be forced to join a union in order to take a job. You may be compelled to pay “agency fees” which are generally lower than full membership dues, though.
IANAL but my understand is that it's the difference between the company being allowed to fire those individuals for not doing what is asked of them, and being legally required to negotiate with them.
They can, but members-only unions of the type most common in e.g. Europe have mostly disappeared in the US after the National Labour Relations Act 1935 made the current system possible.
On one hand I can see why it was attractive for unions to push for it, given how brutal anti-union efforts were in the US, but it seems to over time have had the effect of making unions focus on drives to win workplace by workplace and ignoring places they don't see a chance of winning a full-on unionisation vote.
Unions in the EU have very different rules than unions in the US. In particular, American unions can essentially force an employer to become a "closed shop" through a majority vote. Everyone who works there then has to pay union dues and accept a union contract. EU unions involve more worker choice.
In Poland it's not normal outside of some industries, and the unions there can be a mixed bag (old people from Solidarność being detached from reality for example).
People in America have been subjected to nearly 100 years of very successful anti union propaganda. They used to be very strong, but have since been eroded and vilified by capital.
If (when) we have firing decisions made by AI, and anyone - including senior managers and founders can be fired, I'll be those folk would (will) take a difference stance on unions.
there are valid points against unions, but when the balance of power in this country politically and economically is sooooo slanted towards the capital and those with wealth - I don't find any anti-union argument remotely compelling
if the balance of power was more evenly divided maybe, but unions are almost non-existent and government regulations don't favor labor - that making such arguments feels naive to the reality of the situation
The workers exploited by Amazon will have my utmost sympathy and support.
Up until they make a decision that's not in accordance with what i, the great armchair warrior, decide is good for them. Rejecting my unsolicited advice, means they are ungrateful fools unworthy of my elevated consideration.
All of that went through my head the moment i read the headline. I'm surprised at how intolerant i really am. But with second thoughts, these workers had a choice, they made it. Who am i to say that they are wrong.
My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc).
So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? If it is grapevine, what was the original source?
Please don't post spurious generalizations about the community. The community is (pretty straightforwardly) divided on divisive topics, but everyone with a strong opinion thinks that it's "very consistently" against them. This is cognitive bias, not reality.
Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all (the guy doing the bare minimum job description gets the same raises as you), wayyy too much focus on seniority (for promotions, vacation selection, etc), and overall just too many rules (for example, "unlimited vacation" works great with my current employer but would absolutely not work under a union.. sick days have to be tracked, PTO banks calculated down to the quarter hour, etc).
On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings.
There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.
I think that the value of a lot of unions is obscured by how well-established they are. Historically, unions are a solution to a specific problem - the employer can (for one reason or another) get away with jerking employees around and treating them badly. But if you form a union, and the employer is forced to stop some of their the worst behaviors, and then it stays that way for a generation or two, it feels like the union serves no purpose.
To take government work as an example: you mentioned some minuses that are very obvious. But you didn't mention what I consider one of the biggest pluses: not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties. That still happens in leadership positions, but it used to happen to rank-and-file workers as well; I believe it's the public employee unions that stopped that.
I don't work for Amazon and I don't have a dog in this fight, but it would've been very interesting to see what happened if this site had unionized. It's not really clear to me whether/how much Amazon is jerking its workers around; are there plants really unsafe, are people really miserable, should they be paid more? Having one site unionize for a couple of years would probably answer those questions better than a million forum posts.
> not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties
Rewarding supporters with cushy jobs (and firing the old workers) en mass is known as patronage and is a minor abuse of power, akin to corruption. Well-developed democracies take steps to prevent it, not because it's bad for the workers, but because it is bad for the fabric of government. The US enacted these reforms more than 100 years ago, starting with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act. Public sector unions had very little to do with it.
I think a lot of the obscuring is intentionally done by corporations who seem to be run by sociopaths. It seems likely that corporations actively make workers feel like a union would be useless.
In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
> your merits don't matter at all
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
> wayyy too much focus on seniority
At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line.
> overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO)
Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO.
I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.
>There will be false positives, but the rate is low
What do you base this on?
My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity.
I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions.
I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is:
Sorry, just look at which school systems are still closed to this day regardless of the science. NYC union leadership rebuked the CDC when their guidelines did not meet NYC union rules.
Where as much of the rest of the country has had children in schools just fine for months.
You can damn well place a lot of blame on the unions because they are not there for the welfare of students and no action they have taken shows otherwise. If anything they guarantee the least needed teachers will ever end up in schools desperate to have them. They will go after any alternative means of education which includes home teaching, something they have effectively now forced on many minority families in our largest cities.
The science is not clear-cut. Many "minority families in our largest cities" have been polled and support continued distance learning while the pandemic is ongoing. In the urban district that I grew up in, I know this to be the case, I am not sure about in NYC.
I think it is funny that outsiders on an anti-union crusade will continue dismiss what students & parents who actually go to schools like these say many of the problems are.
e: And I'm not saying unions are entirely unproblematic. I had a few (2 or so) teachers who were protected. But they are so far from the root cause of the dysfunction in our urban schools. Informal segregation is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
This gives me new perspective. I wish we had more discussion like this.
If all media could list facts and stats, and lay out all kinds of reasons and assumptions. Unfortunately, both left and right media are doing the opposite. For instance, some right labels NYC teacher's union as a woke entity. The teacher union said that reopening school was racist. And Twitter, oh, the almighty righteous Twitter, simply bans the accounts who are opposing CDC's guidelines. It's just so hard to see influential medias and platforms to engage nuanced discussion.
* Evidence that minority parents in my school district favor distance learning while the pandemic continues. I couldn't find the original stat because the thread was deleted, but here is a similar poll showing the same thing (https://www.the74million.org/article/as-more-dcps-schools-op...)
Thanks. I was not challenging your comment. Instead, I was trying to compliment yours, as it gives a new perspective on why teacher's union didn't want schools to open. Otherwise, I had this impression that the union used racism to hide their true motives.
Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
> how does desegregation help poorer performing school
1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds.
2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs.
3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor.
It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students.
I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
> I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain.
It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district.
If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids.
We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood?
I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all.
Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.
> here's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back.
Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback? If you look at recordings from Boston parents during the busing protests, they're quite clear about what their issue is ("n*****s").
> If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school
This sounds intuitive when you hear it for the first time. And I did alude to it in my previous comment. But I don't think we should overstate the effect. From 21st century data, at a macroscale, enrollment does not really drop when you integrate, even when that integration involves sending kids to schools that are not the closest neighborhood one.
Cambridge, MA has implemented a '21st-century busing' controlled choice approach and saw no decline in enrollment. [0] Parts of Brooklyn recently did the same and saw no change in the enrollment of white students. [1]
It's hard to say exactly why this is the case - perhaps racial animus has declined, perhaps there is a growing awareness that attending a racially diverse school is not actually harmful for educational outcomes, perhaps white flight in the 80s and 90s wasn't caused by busing in the first place, perhaps the benefits to remaining in cities are increasing, etc.
Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
I don't buy that de facto segregation is an inevitable result of freedom of mobility. The evidence strongly suggests that it is related to policy choices and that it can be changed. Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
Sorry for waiting over a week to respond, but I wanted to address your example about Boston.
>Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback?
Not wanting to send your kid to a bad school in a bad neighborhood? Let's be specific here - these were parents in South Boston worried about sending their kids to Roxbury. (Yes, ironic given Southie was also a bad neighborhood.) Sure, plenty of them were racist as hell on top of that.
To the larger point - were these privileged kids living in Southie? No - they were also poor and working class, just like the kids in Roxbury. So where are these privileged kids living? In the suburbs. Which didn't have busing into inner city schools. And where affordable housing means paying half a million dollars for a condo instead of a million dollars. And there's very few POC who can afford living there. Are these families racist? Maybe not overtly, but they certainly aren't challenged to living along side POCs.
> Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
So it failed in the 90s instead of the 80's. Roxbury and South Boston still have bad schools (although both are less crime-ridden than the 70's)
Interesting enough, Cambridge and Brooklyn have grown in affluence starting in the 90s, which more affluent families moving in. Lo and behold, the schools improve across the board as the city can bus kids and resources around to poorer preforming schools.
> "It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students."
I could not disagree more, not with our current approach to inner city schools. Desegregation through busing among bad neighborhoods didn't improve bad schools. Affluent families moving into those neighborhoods did.
> Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
Given the current trends, I'm not seeing the interest in making these poorer communities less poor. It would be bold to see an attempt to bus kids from affluent communities into the city, but that is very unlikely to happen.
While not addressing the problem directly, school desegregation efforts usually also spread socioeconomic classes more evenly. Poorly performing schools almost always have poorer students, and bringing in more well off parents allows for things like fundraisers and increased parental involvement in things like PTAs and band/football/etc. organizations. Despite the "Karen" meme, more involved parents can also lead to problems (bad teachers, broken facilities) being addressed that would otherwise go unacknowledged.
> a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living i
Yeah, right. It's all about racism. As for volumes of research on performance management and management in general, they are just charade by white supremacists, right? Oh, and what about Asian people, in particular Indians, going all the way to CEOs and college principals and high-ranking government officials? Let me guess, they are white? If you think so, well, let's just say some people are racists to the bone, no matter how "progressive" they say.
And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise.
>unlimited PTO
This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
> This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine.
Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited".
But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)?
is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO.
But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*
What's interesting about that Workforce article is that the tone is completely different from the sources it cites. The "2 days less per year" article by Namely that they cite is about how to effectively implement an unlimited PTO policy that doesn't have that side-effect. In the Fast Company article they cite, they found this:
> In a survey we conducted just before we hit the one-year mark, our employees ranked unlimited vacation third-highest among the benefits we offer, just behind health insurance and a 401(k). It beat out vision insurance, dental insurance, and even professional development, all of which ranked highly in their own rights.
Their Unlimited PTO policy didn't move the needle at all on how much vacation people took, but it had a huge impact on how people felt about it. In short, they appreciated being treated like adults.
How the author of that Workforce article got from the two sources they cite to the extremely negative article they wrote is beyond me.
> "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.
Then work for a company with fixed PTO. There are plenty of these; the vast majority, actually. Why are you so hell-bent on denying that choice to people who wish otherwise? Even worse, you're telling these people that they are wrong and that unlimited PTO cannot possibly be a good fit for them. How can you expect people not to disagree when they have first-hand experience of the contrary?
You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either.
>In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally.
>And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop.
Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
That's a story about overzealous productivity metrics coupled with a non-thinking management class. It's hardly an argument for or against being able to identify bad performers.
I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.
Good point. But the managers make most of the decisions, and they usually can't recognize performance. So if you have a 10x developer who is admired by all coworkers but disrespected by management, they probably won't get raise (unless they change the job).
The situation you're describing is going to be far more about the specific personalities and power dynamics than anything related to accurate performance estimation.
I have repeatedly seen companies treat their contractors with lot of disrespect, such as repeatedly sending their salaries too late, or extending the contracts for the next year at the very last moment (in one case the papers to sign were delivered literally on December 31st in the afternoon). Some of those contractors were the best developers in the company. The company employees who did the paperwork simply didn't care.
In the most absurd case, the best developer got a contract offer from another company with deadline to sign at the end of November. He wanted to stay at the current company, and the managers were telling him they wanted him... but he was unable to get the contract extension on paper. So at the end of November, he was like "okay, screw it, I wanted to stay here, but I am taking the other contract, to avoid the possibility that I would miss that other offer and this company would not extend my current contract here". So he signed that other contract (starting from January), and when towards the end of December this company finally offered him a contract extension, he was like "sorry guys, but I already signed a contract with someone else". He left, and the managers were all surprised "but we told him we wanted him, why couldn't he wait?" During the following year, a chain reaction started, when his closest coworkers left too, then more people left, most of them reasoning like "I was already considering a change of job, but I stayed here mostly because of good friends at workplace, now that the friends are no longer here, I might leave too". The company lost most of their developers... because there were not willing/able to extend their best developer's contract two months before expiration instead of the usual one month.
Another example, this was an internal employee, there was a super talented guy, freshly out of university, but incredibly experienced in some technologies. Also super helpful, whenever someone in the company had a technical problem, they usually asked him for help, and he always helped. The whole company changed their technological stack based on his recommendations. Then, one day, another company approached him and offered double of his current salary. He wanted to stay, so he went to management, described the situation, and asked them for 50% increase (which would still be only 3/4 of what the other company offered him). The managers refused; as I later learned, their conclusion was that "a person this young does not deserve such high salary". So the guy left.
Maybe this is "specific personalities", but those personalities seem quite frequent.
It's not a matter of identifying the obviously worst performers. It is about insulating the majority of middling workers from the whims of their bosses so they can't be fired at a moment's notice for a vaguely defined idea of "poor performance".
I'm specifically talking about dismissing concerns about how bad employees are protected or how promotions are handled.
> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either.
Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed.
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.
And even worse, schools can't be shut down. It's okay for companies to have unions. In the worse case, the company closes doors, so ultimately the union needs to work with the company one way or another. In government entities, unions are tumors as they don't need to worry about their employers going down.
On the flip side, I've been a student in a school with a teacher's union (NYS public middle school) and a school without (South Carolina public high school) and there was an absolute world of difference between the two. My NYS teachers were almost universally better, whereas in South Carolina good teachers seemed to be the exception. My good SC teachers made 20k/year less than my worst NYS teachers, iirc
There are a lot of confounding factors here. New York state has higher median income, lower violent crime, etc than South Carolina. It is more than possible that the unionization of NYS education is a result of its better education system rather than its cause.
You make it sound like everything is subjective and there are no bad or good workers. And since we can't accurately, objectively measure performance, let's just pick metric we can measure even though it has no correlation with performance.
Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
This is only for people who just apply to "jobs" and accept whatever money is given. You're entirely in control of negotiating terms and it's easily possible to negotiate wildly different employment terms than your coworkers at medium to large companies.
Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination.
I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that.
You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.
> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.
> not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that
You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment?
Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.
I guarantee you that the people at the top of companies understand well that good paying positions are popularity contests. It's the people who just have a strong need to feel that merit matters that they can typically gull into working like dogs for table scraps.
Granted, I have seen the other side of things, and free riders are a problem. It sucks when you care about doing things right and don't get anything better than the people who just dial it in. But there are always going to be free riders: either people who figure out how to game the system because they're just there for a paycheck, or people who run the system and soak up all the value while delivering little, because their family knows the right people at the country club.
Now, when a company is new, small, and nimble like a startup, you can control the nepotism and free riding somewhat, but any bigger shop it's just going to get baked into the system either way. Try to really solve this problem, and you'll threaten those with real power and get shut down.
Sometimes you get leapfrog moments from companies like SpaceX that demonstrate just how much drag the corruption has caused on progress, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. And, any comments about Elon as an individual aside, the powers that be have not been shy about using a bunch of media mouthpieces to spread FUD about disruptors like SpaceX and Tesla. (Again, not going to even touch on whether those are good or bad companies, or whether Elon is a good or bad person. But they are causing a ruckus in their respective industries.)
So again, you may be doing a lot better than some people at your job, and that's commendable. But it will be used to manipulate you more often than not, because you care.
I worked WITH UAW for years, I too personally saw pretty much every Union complaint out there. So, IDK, I’m never surprised how many people there are to tell me my experiences are wrong.
I’m not qualified to say if they have a place still, but I know anyone pretending it’s all rainbows hasn’t actually suffered like I have.
I think it is important to note that you are describing some unions, not all unions. Being locked into one caricature of what a union should look like is a huge driver of anti-union sentiment. People learn to think that this is the only version of a union that does or can exist, because anti-union messaging pounds these points over and over.
By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members. The question should be, how can we retain or enhance those benefits while also minimizing the well-known downsides?
I’ve worked for a half dozen software companies and they were all merit based and fired bad performers. They certainly weren’t perfect and mistakes were made, but as staff I perceived that pay was strongly correlated to performance and as management I worked to have pay correspond to performance and had access to data that demonstrated that.
I’ve worked for orgs where this wasn’t true and I avoid those orgs and prefer environments that are merit based.
I feel bad if people really have never experienced this as it’s really disheartening to work in an org where performance doesn’t matter. That must really suck.
I think it’s hard to objectively rate performance consistently across large orgs, but I was referring to being able to view HR records with performance review history and other records.
I find it really surprising that you think this happened at all companies you've worked at. In my experience, the difference between good and bad companies was exactly how much they recognised merit and fired bad performers.
Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer.
And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.
Could I restate your view as: Competition keeps orgs and people honest.
The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.
I think that is true...
but man, if that was 100% of jobs? I don't think a lot of people would love that. You have to have a certain mindset to want to fail over and over again until someday you fail upward.
I agree with all this, but it's not like the alternative actually solves these issues. Instead of a boring list sorted by seniority it becomes a boring list sorted by arbitrary internal politics. There isn't a company on earth that can accurately determine who the top performers are once we start talking about any mildly subjective role. Programming performance is especially difficult to quantify, mostly because the people doing the bean counting have no idea what programming really consists of.
You are held accountable for performance of your team, directly or not. I have worked with people who were a net negative - try to push their work on me, or just being an asshole in general. The productivity would have been higher if they were not there, and I would be much happier.
I guess to some extent it's about some aspect notion of "fairness". Another concern would be if their poor performance spills over into my own role and that prevents me from pursuing more interesting tasks that are more aligned with my growth/interests.
More practically, if I'm working at a place where my team has fixed head count I'd rather us have the ability to replace someone who's not contributing to the success of the team.
This can definitely be a burden, though on the flip side of the coin if the team is constantly churning due to cooking under a performance magnifying glass all the time, you still end up with lots of newbies who only just get up to speed enough to contribute for a bit before moving on because it's miserable. So sometimes it's better to deal with the problem you know, and just move them out of the critical path.
Because I actually want to make an impact at my job and constantly carrying idiots on my back is a horrible experience.
Thankfully my workplace is not unionized and I have great team members. Whether union or non-union workplaces can encourage that, I don't know, but that is an example of why an employee would care.
> Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money.
Compensation often includes stock; so you do get something when somebody else makes the company money. And if nothing else, the company doing well may help you feel job security and be better able to make plans for your future.
You also may enjoy making the best product you can. When another employee gets in the way of that, it can make it harder to enjoy your work.
That unions can be bad is not news to anyone. But what's clear is not having unions is much, much worse. A simple comparison of wealth vs union membership tells it all:
I wouldn't exactly take Robert Reich's word for it...It's not so clear at all.
There's plenty of other variables to consider here and he just graphed two of them. Corporate taxes were much higher. Also it looks like share of income going to the top 10% hasn't really changed much at all in the last 100 years. 40% +/- 10%. That needle hasn't moved very far.
If you care to read the article you'd find links to a more detailed study that demonstrates the exact portion of income inequality that is known to have been caused by de-unionization.
That's not how this works. There's no study here showing how they were able to discount all other variables and show a provable link between A and B.
This is data cherry-picked to support a conclusion and published by a lobby group (a pro-union one and publihed on labor day, no less. It's flashy!). You may agree with said conclusion, but this is research presenting a theory not a proof.
There is no causation being shown here. It's a possible theory, but that is all that it is.
Do you have any proof that the lack of unions is causing the top 10% to make more? There are variety of different things that started in the 50s such as outsourcing to cheaper countries.
My anti-union sentiment arrived from my experience working with a large established union in an industrial plant. The union protected some of the worst, laziest, most unsafe workers I had ever witnessed in any job before or sense. It blew my mind how difficult it was to remove obvious bad apples, and how the best workers were forced to wait in years-long "seniority" queues before they could get promoted. I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.
Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures.
I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.
> I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.
That whole thing about requiring union workers to do tasks is stupid. One year I was attending a fan convention and decided to check out the rules for vendors. The convention center used unionized labor so one of the rules was that the vendors were limited to carrying like one case of stuff over to their spot. All other moving and setting up had to be done by the union workers. I get what the protection here is, it prevents loopholes for getting around using union workers at all (which, if it was possible to do, would make a union ineffective). But hell, why can't they pay the union workers as if they would have to do all the work but then let people decide if they want the union workers to actually do something or not?
If I, as a vendor, could have my people do the work of moving and set up and elect not to use the convention center staff, then there's a way to circumvent the convention center staff and fire them all.
You just hire a "vendor" with their own crew to do all the stuff. With no actual work to do, it's justifiable to fire the convention center staff.
If people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need such weird rules. But then again, if people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need unions either.
Why does a convention center have enough staff to do that setup? That seems wasteful in itself. Sure they need a few janitors to sweep up afterwords, and someone needs to know how to flip a tripped breaker, so they can't be staff free. However the needs of each event are different enough that staff for vendor setup doesn't really make sense.
What do you think of the Screen Actors Guild? That seems to have been a huge win for workers in the industry, seemingly without the negatives you describe.
In general the Hollywood unions are very good for their members.
If there's a downside, it's that they used to act as a bit of a moat for the incumbent studios. Studios have entire departments devoted to processing issues raised by union members, which is of course expensive to do. And union members can only work on union productions, which meant tiny indie films could have problems getting talented people budget-wise. It's not just pay, it's meeting the requirements of the dictionary-sized "Basic Agreement" in terms of other aspects of production. That said, SAG has led the way to finding ways to accommodate smaller budgets and it's not as difficult as it once was.
There might be a difference. Studios must first look for actors in the actors guild. That said, a studio has freedom not to use an actor. Similar, a studio does not need to use a bad script, and the studio does not need to pay a writer if it doesn't use the writer's work. In contrast, a factory has to pay for a worker, or even assign some work to the worker, no matter how bad this worker performs.
It’s not a binary outcome. Of course all large organizations will have people of varying types. But it’s an order of magnitude easier to clean house outside of government and union shops.
Am big fan of Peter Drucker. Believe management is a technology.
I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics.
My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.
All of the ones that last. If you don't handle your bad apples and your business requires generating a profit to survive, you will not prosper for long if you don't prune the bad apples (and you may not even survive, unless the business throws off such huge profits that it can afford to carry the dead weight).
It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?
Every non-unionized place I've worked suffers from many of the same problems. These are real problems, but don't outweigh the benefit of unions to people's material well being.
My spouse (medicine) and several of my peers (journalism) have and they would disagree. Spouse has experienced both sides of the coin, and has seen better benefits and better pay in the unionized workplace than the non-unionized one. Very much the same story for my journo peers, but in their case, they unionized the workplace so the only variable that changed to improve their lifestyle was the introduction of a union -- not a change of location or management that a bad-faith FANG-worshipper would use to muddy the comparison.
I'm sure those aren't valid examples anyway, as the only unions that matter in discussions on this hellsite are the ones that also exist in Randian works of fiction.
You are only considering one side of the question -- and actually a limited form of that one side (namely, the material benefits/pay for the unionized employees).
What about the productivity of the firm and workers? The profits? The cohesiveness of the market strategy? The sense that the workers were participating in the success of the firm itself (and not the success of the union)? The creation of healthy relationships between management and labor?
It's probably beyond dispute that unions introduce a "middleman" between management and labor, but we are probably arguing about whether or not that middleman is (most often) a good or bad thing. (I do not dispute that sometimes unions can be healthy and might align its incentives with company success, but I tend to believe that this middleman is not usually a good thing except in extremely unhealthy companies -- perhaps like Amazon, and I must confess that in working with about 50 companies, of which less than 10 were union shops, I've never actually seen a union shop where labor didn't put union goals over company goals, to the detriment of both.)
I guess it depends what outcome you want, higher income inequality or not. I happen to think higher income inequality that directly follows from the lack of unions is a bad thing:
The ultimate solution to wealth inequality is to destroy all wealth. Bring it to $0. Everyone's equal. Is that a win? Or is there perhaps more to the story worth considering than inequality? Overall wealth, number of jobs, ability to get hired and promoted...? If you have charts on those things I'd be interested.
From what I can tell, a lot of people in tech are anti blue collar union, but mistakenly assume that blue-collar unions are all unions.
For example, just in the replies to your comment people are saying they dislike unions because they protect the incompetent, stifle progression, give preferential treatment purely on seniority, etc.
But then go look at Hollywood, with the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the PGA, etc. These are unions that have some of the most highly paid and richest people in the world as members. The same is true in the sports world.
And sure, these unions are not perfect by a long shot, but they are doing a huge amount to hold what is ultimately a very exploitative industry to account.
Of course, companies like Google, Amazon, and the like would much prefer software engineers continued to think that all unions were like the Teamsters. They don't want you to know that there's a whole class of professional unions serving some of the most highly paid people and engaging in collective bargaining.
Guilds are a little different from unions in practice. They set minimum standards but there's no group negotiation based on seniority or anything like that. Studios are free to pay some hot rising star 100x as much as the guy who has been a character actor for 30 years as long as he's making the minimum and getting his breaks and meals and stuff.
It's also a challenge to get into a guild, SAG has minimum requirements for having already performed. A union is generally just something you have to join when you take a job at a unionized company.
This is not a value judgment, just wanted to point out the differences.
>SAG has minimum requirements for having already performed.
Other unions do the same, such as longshoremen. You can work next to unionized longshoremen, doing the same type of job, yet not be part of the union because it strictly controls who can be a member in order to keep membership low and compensation high.
He pointed out that not all unions are the doom and gloom version where you can't carry lightbulbs (seriously people, don't ever use that example, it's right out of the anti-union video, obvious tell) and good people can't get promotions because of blah blah blah.
You then responded by saying it doesn't count because it's different.
Yeah, that's the point. A "union" isn't a thing like gravity. It doesn't only work one way. It a collection of workers who want to collectively bargain with an employer to bring some balance to the power dynamic between huge companies and individual workers. Whatever rules the union wants to set out are up to them.
Lol not every comment reply has to be an absolute refutation of the parent comment! They were agreeing with the person they were replying to... wow can't have that can we!
The contract provisions described regarding these high end unions are doom and gloom though.
Contract provisions that screw over newcomers, and set up additional barriers to entry are not good.
I do not want the tech industry to discriminate against new comers, or developers who don't have a CS degree, or H1Bs more than it is already doing so.
And that is what those kinds of unions do to the industry. They setup barriers to entry to target these groups.
So, do you know anyone say 20 something and trying to get into the SAG? Dealing with the drama of union vs off union jobs in NYC? It's usually something like:
Work the union job for $10 an hour, earn credit towards joining the SAG. In 10 years I can actually join the SAG and make actual decent paying jobs, and actually get health insurance.
vs
Work a non-union job for $20.
It feels very much like a way to exploit people to let them someday get the magic card. The numbers are very approximate, but the sentiment I have gotten from people actually with boots on the ground. Do I want this as a developer? No way!
Everyone points to SAG as an example of a good union. But how many of these are there? If there are dozens of examples of "bad unions" and a single example of a "good union", that doesn't exactly give someone voting to unionize high confidence.
This didn't happen in Germany, this happened in the US. For whatever reason unions behave differently here, and it's the union model in the US that people rightfully evaluate against.
That's because SAG is a guild, not a union, and it works because every known actor is voluntarily a member, so you can't make a movie without agreeing to their rules.
SAG-AFTRA meets the definition of a labor union under federal and state law. It negotiates working conditions, compensation, and benefits with production companies and studios. It is treated in the manner as other labor unions such as IATSE, IBEW, and Teamsters.
The union Amazon warehouse voted against (the RWDSU) is a blue collar union.
Your point is a good one when we see the backlash against unions in software engineering and related fields. I just wanted to bring it back around to why anti-union comments on this story specifically would be right to cite their problems you listed in the 2nd sentence.
Even the high end unions have pretty big problems.
Things like the actors guild are simple rent seeking at the expense of newcomings. They are setup in a way where only insiders are allowed to get jobs at certain places, and there are large barriers to entry to becoming an insider.
If we were to apply this to tech, it would be contract provisions that keep out engineers that dont have degree, or discrimination against H1B immigrants.
And I don't want the tech industry to have contractual provisions that discriminate against these groups, and would be willing to spend a huge amount of effort fighting people who want to do that. (And based on comments that I have read on hacker news, there really are a lot of people who want to screw over self-taught developers, or immigrants)
Why would I ever join a union that didn't protect me from rampant undercutting via importing more workers? That is the whole reason I would join a union.
And conversely there are plenty of good employers who don’t require unionization to treat employees well.
The point is that these situations are often framed as the angelic unions vs the evil capitalist employer. In reality, there are plenty of bad unions just as there are plenty of bad employers.
For me, it is all anecdotes from my dad (some of which I observed first hand). He worked for unions for half of his career and then intentionally uprooted us to move to a right to work state purely to escape the unions. He moved up the ranks and ended his career as the general manager of a manufacturing facility. The next county over was heavily unionized. The contrast in the two counties was notable. The industry in the unionized county was run-down, falling apart, constantly in and out of bankruptcy.
The industry in the non-unionized county was literally some of the best in the world in what it does. The plants were clean and well run. Early on in the management-part of his career, my dad hired some formerly unionized workers who had moved up from the unionized county in order to find work (jobs were disappearing in that county due to the bankruptcies). They were fired in a few months because they wouldn't show up on time, were constantly dropping the ball, etc. In his opinion, their work ethic had been ruined.
I'm actually not anti-union, but I'm mostly anti US union. I think if we adopted a non-antagonistic model similar to Germany, it'd be alright.
How much of that difference was due to capital preferring to invest in the right to work environment while deliberately neglecting the unionized jurisdiction? It is hard to use purely observational evidence to determine causation. You need sophisticated statistical techniques, and many observations, to conduct meaningful observational studies.
I'm pro-union, but I think its worth noting that the type of average commenter here isn't in a position where unions provide large tangible benefit. Unions work extremely well in places where the employer holds a disproportionate amount of power to the worker. Fortunately, as things currently stand for the tech industry, the worker maintains a lot of power in that they can easily find new work of sufficiently equal pay/benefits. For us, if the employer is shit, we move up the street, but in places like factories where the employer can re-train labour on a whim, the union provides far more benefit.
So merely by nature of the type of individual you'll encounter on HN, you'll get a strong bias towards the anti-union.
On the flip side I wonder how many of the pro union voices I see on Facebook or elsewhere, especially millennials & gen z, have ever worked a union job and seen what a seniority system or non-at-will employment actually looks like in practice.
Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the warts. That’s a kind of nuance I’m not seeing from the “eat the rich” crowd which makes me think they don’t have direct experience.
Wouldn’t it behoove people to learning about subject before forming such strong opinions about it? Perhaps by talking to people with direct experience?
Yeah honestly I'm pretty shocked at the number of people that think being able to be fired on the spot anytime for practically any reason is a good thing.
That's probably the most absurd thing I've read in these comments.
Like your smartest citizens leaving to start companies in the US? Restrictive labor laws and high payroll taxes make EU countries an unappealing option for small companies.
And it's worth noting that the EU is very, very different from country to country, so it's a bad idea to generalise.
None of them have at-will employment though, so it's an appropriate comparison to make.
I think the real difference here is what people value. Personally, I value having some advance notice that the boss hates me and wants me gone. This reduces my stress, and allows me to find another job before I stop earning money.
Perhaps other people value the efficiency that comes from being able to change staffing on a whim. I don't think either of these is wrong, they're just different statements of values.
And note that if we're talking about tech people founding US companies, it's driven predominantly by access to capital rather than anything else.
> Like your smartest citizens leaving to start companies in the US?
I think European unions work a little differently in practise than American ones. American unions seem exclusively a tool for collective bargaining. European unions seem more directly an outgrowth of the guild system, which was also concerned with preserving standards and best practises.
I’ve heard similar things from others (though less so in Southern Europe). However, I don’t think you get there from here by just expanding existing US unions. It would take a bigger culture shift.
You don't need unions for that, just legislation. In Ireland, you are essentially at-will for the first six months of any role, and after that you are "permanent".
This essentially means that there needs to be a process to fire you. You need to supply at least one verbal warning on stated grounds (backed up as a written), then another one and then you can fire someone.
It works reasonably well (not always, obviously) and it's super bizarre to me that you don't have that in the US. To be honest, when my previous employer wanted to move me to the US, this was one of my concerns, especially when you're dependent on the job for a visa.
It just seems that its a bad trade-off for US people in general, and it's odd to me that it appears to be mostly unquestioned.
US companies fear lawsuits and firing employees includes a lot of data to back it up, from what I’ve observed. There are so many protected classes and reasons why firing is illegal, and people are so litigious, that months of documentation, warnings, improvement plan, etc. is required to fire someone with HR’s approval. And even then usually you give some severance to ensure lawsuit isn’t filed.
The paperwork that nervous HR makes American managers go through is an entirely different world then the process, say, a police officer or teacher is entitled to be a combination of civil service laws and their collective bargaining agreements. I do not exaggerate when I say it is in practice easier to put someone in prison than fire a police officer.
So partly whether or not it would be a good idea would depend on the details of the proposed law, and how they would end up being interpreted by judges.
I'm not actually talking about public service unions here, just at-will employment. I personally think that lots of people in this conversation seem to believe that it's either at-will, or the public sector process when in fact the European experience demonstrates that there's a lot of space between these two opposite poles.
My position is that given all this HR dance to prevent lawsuits, at-will doesn't really exist in professional jobs, so it might be worth ensuring that this is standard across all roles rather than just those where the fired employee might sue.
I'm in academia at a university. I'm part of a union and I hate it. Union meetings are mostly members nitpicking minor contract issues and complaining about being underpaid. The union's purported main goal is to protect free speech, but everybody knows it really only exists to (unsuccessfully) negotiate for better pay.
I worked about a decade in industry and never felt like management was the enemy. We didn't expect management to coddle us, though. We knew we were there to do a job and if being there wasn't worth the benefit, we'd leave. Being in union, it feels like an artificial wall between management and union has been erected; that it's us versus them. Like the vice presidents are fat cats smoking cigars in their high rise offices while we, the proletariat, fight to get what's fair. Its as if union members think there's some reservoir of money we could get in salary if only we could break down the dam that management is using to hoard all the money.
I'm in a right to work state and technically don't have to pay union dues. But, I pay my dues because if you don't, your name gets published publicly and there is a lot union members can legally do to make life difficult for you if you don't want to join the club.
> So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from?
From speaking with family members who work or worked for Unions.
From a management perspective it is untenable to not be able to hire who you want (because you must offer the job to any "qualified" union employee before you can hire externally), not be able to fire who you want (because you must meet arbitrary requirements set by the union).
From an employee perspective I've seen situations where they want specific or custom arrangements with their boss and their boss would like to give them but they violate union rules so they are either forced to work around it (and face repercussions if they are found out) or refuse to accommodate situations that both the manager and the employee agree upon.
I will also say that I find the anti-anti-union rhetoric very distasteful. I fundamentally agree that employees have the right to discuss their desire to join or form a union but I think that companies have the fundamental right to advocate their position as well. Virtually all of this get's called out as "anti-union" propaganda and I find that very distasteful and disingenuous. Most of the "propaganda" videos I've seen I found to be actually quite reasonable arguments, while most of the anti-anti commentary I find to be disingenuous appeals to emotion.
There are also many industries where unions are massively corrupt. I know nothing about the union here so I won't speak about it, but I do have personal experience with this.
Finally, I will also say that my opinion of unions skews heavily against larger and more diverse ones. Had this been Amazon Warehouse workers choosing to form their own union vs join an existing union, I feel that would have been more successful by virtue of being smaller in scope and more targeted.
I would not say that I’m anti-union but my experience working with a large union was pretty universally negative. It was just one more layer of bureaucracy that never really advocated for anything good. They consistently failed to deliver pay or benefits increases but would tote meaningless symbolic victories. The union was generally out of touch with the workers.
Personally I really like the idea of a workers association that would actually bring benefits to employees and focus on personally and community development as well but I don’t see a lot of innovation in how labor unions treat their constituents.
Unions are employee cartels. They are a tool for correcting an imbalance between employers and employees. Sometimes unions are good, because the employees have no leverage. Other times unions are bad, because employees have plenty of leverage. Workers are not saints. When given leverage, they use it to advance their own interests, which are not always reasonable.
People disagree over whether Amazon is a situation where unions would be a benefit or a detriment. Make an argument instead of diminishing people who disagree with as you misinformed.
I know a number of people in a large teacher's union and the stories indicate the union is bad for both good teachers and students. I've personally seen many great teachers leave for private schools and other public systems. The union rewarded the incompetent and did little for rampant administrator abuse.
I was a public teacher for 9 years, 2 years in a union and 7 years in a right to work state. The union experience was better as an employee. I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards. The one thing you gain going to a private school is freedom to do as you want, and no standardized testing. Anecdotally the people I know who went to private schools had someone else to support them financially and could choose the easiest route available.
> I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards.
I don't know where you lived, but this is the opposite of the situation in most places. Private schools attract people who will pay private school tuition because they offer higher standards.
In my limited experience with private schools, it was relatively easy to poach good teachers away from unionized jobs precisely because the school had freedom to offer them higher wages and better benefits. Many of them were also sick of dealing with the issues that come with unionized labor and union membership.
It might not be accurate since many religious institutions have schools where nuns, monks, priests, etc work as teachers. They often times do not get paid or make basically minimum wage. Do you have any numbers that take that into account?
They have higher standards for decorum and appearance, but not higher academic standards. One of the advantages of private schools is that they are essentially exempt from standards. Their students are generally not required to take standardized tests, and the schools generally are not required to follow prescribed curricula. I agree that private schools generally have a higher standard of cleanliness and facility upkeep. And although the families have to pay more for students to attend compared to (free) public schools, teachers as a broad class are paid less, not more, at private schools. There are numerous reasons for this. For one, a prospective employee has even less leverage than they do when seeking employment at a public school.
I know a number of people in a large teacher's union and the stories indicate that the union is good for both teachers and students. I've personally seen many great teachers stay in public schools. The union rewarded the competent and pushed back against administrator abuse.
I find it hard to believe the part where you write "the union rewarded the competent". I've never seen an education union stick up for someone based on competence, it's always connections.
Sometimes I've seen them push back against bad management, but it is frightfully rare. Bullying, discrimination, favouritism, giving young/non-clique staff the worst jobs: all good.
I don't think public sector unions are very good stewards, partly because everyone is in the union. They push against govt objectives (control wages) and politics (push whatever rhetoric of the day is) and seek to gain public support (teaching/learning is essential for society etc). Unless you're a cog in the union machine, they won't be present except to prevent you being fired or make you work extra hours.
This became very evident during the pandemic: unions stuck with (1) better pay, (2) keep leave. While (1) is essential, the real problem was (3) death. But adjusting the school year, virtual teaching, classroom ventilation, support for students: nothing, except opposition. They wanted nothing to change. It was bonkers.
Personal experience with unions. The unions at Boeing protect workers who do drugs and sleep on the job. The teamsters union in Boston prevented my small company from unloading a small amount of equipment from our truck ourselves(enforced with veiled threats). The longshoreman's union hands out jobs to well connected members and runs a racket.
I'm not saying all unions are bad. I think many industries might benefit from well run, transparent, regulated unions. But I have seen many examples where they are bad.
Compare the scale of the harm that you see to the direct benefits: these huge unions getting each and every member a solid benefits package, and better pay rates, overtime or limited hours. Even non-union jobs pay better in areas with high union membership. Its one of the only tools with broad benefits to working-poor and lower-class at the cost of the non-working rich.
I think it's an unfair argument to say that unions need further regulation. Regulating them is how we've lost millions of union jobs to contractors, and where we keep seeing large strikes broken up by governments. Regulations often benefit large players over small ones. We'd rather see a plethora of smaller, niche unions, than just one massive union. Competition breeds capability.
My "original source" is my wife who grew up poor and started working at 14 to pay for things like clothes for school. Every dollar her union took was money she couldn't use to pay for necessities and they never once did a single thing for her or any of her coworkers, no matter how egregious the discrimination or behavior of the store's management. Their union rep would 100% ignore every single complaint. But they always got a cut of her meager paycheck.
Is that a good enough source for you, or does that not count?
I'll never understand the people who think "You have a differing opinion. It must be because you don't know what you're talking about and have just consumed a bunch of propaganda".
I went to a school where the teacher's union made it impossible to remove incompetent teachers. Teachers who got consistently poor student results, didn't control the class, took several months of "sick" leave, etc.
Mine is experience working in an union. I generally really disliked the effects of the union and saw no benefit to me at all. My career progression was capped, lots of nepotism (eg manager holding a position for his son), people are generally coasting etc.
I absolutely abhor being passed up due to nepotism, it’s incredibly frustrating.
When that sort of thing happens it makes me wish that there was a clear agreement between management and employees that codified when/how/why promotions happen so that people who have worked hard and performed well would be favored. It’s really awful that that union precluded that from happening.
Saw this at r/Costco from an employee who worked at a unionized store, straight from the source...
"Next, the union dues. I know this isn't a problem at every location but mine is part of the local teamsters union, and having to pay $450 in initiation fees and $40 on the regular adds up, especially for someone who is in real need of the income. I wouldn't be complaining if I saw the tangible benefits the union provides, but after speaking to several coworkers, many of whom have worked at my location for 20+ years, I am of the impression that the union does not actually do anything to improve working conditions at Costco. If anything, it seems to me that the union locations simply serve to protect the wages of those who are not unionized by playing into Costco's desire to prevent the unionization of said locations. Yes, the union makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people, "guarantees" you won't get scheduled for 7 days straight (have seen otherwise at my location), etc. In my view, this only contributes to my previously mentioned point that many long-time employees feel protected from termination regardless of how they perform or act, and as such they bring subpar attitudes, service, and effort into their work."
"only one union representing a group of employees at a time" is a rule enforced by government, not a natural property of unions. The NLRA process [1] is predicated on a single, exclusive representative organization for any given unit of workers. It didn't always used to be this way, before such rules, there were times where multiple competing unions historically had ground industry to a halt because it was impossible for a company to make a contract that would apply to everyone and get the business back running. I find the NLRA's solution very elegant because it both improves the democratic nature of unions and helps get industry moving.
By that definition, companies are workplace monopolies. So are you against companies ? If you want to argue you can choose a different company, by the same token you can choose a different union by choosing a different company.
The economic term for is "monopsony," where a single buyer has disproportionate leverage. However, there isn't much evidence this occurs in most labor markets. People can and do often leave Amazon for another job.
Imagine if most employees bring a contract of their choosing from one employer to the rest, and employers are the ones maybe hagling over specific provisions. Really imagine that. Totally different world right?
That's what it would be like if employees had more market power.
I don't think it is absurd or inconsistent. The UAW works very hard and effectively at ensuring that GM, Ford, and Chrysler hire as few non-union employees as possible. The UAW has monopolized the autoworkers labor market and thus have historically been able to extract great rents from it.
GM, Ford, and Chrysler on the other hand can do practically nothing to prevent a machinist or welder from leaving to work at literally thousands of other companies in dozens of industries across the country that require those skills.
The union doesn't bargain with the workers. It bargains with the company. All unions I'm aware of that have real power maintain that power by preventing their employer from hiring non-union workers.
I believe what GP was alluding to is that if a workplace is unionized, the worker does not have a choice of wanting to be a part of the union or not(in a non right to work state), and so essentially a monopoly. IF the worker wants to work for that employer, he can only do so via the union. No way for the worker to work for the employer and not wanting to do absolutely nothing with the union.
>> By that definition, companies are workplace monopolies. So are you against companies ? If you want to argue you can choose a different company, by the same token you can choose a different union by choosing a different company.
> I believe what GP was alluding to is that if a workplace is unionized, the worker does not have a choice of wanting to be a part of the union or not(in a non right to work state), and so essentially a monopoly.
That's a distinction without a difference. If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace. It's just another condition of employment, just like all the other conditions of employment you'd have to abide by without a union.
Which basically reinforces GP's point about it being a monopoly?
> If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace.
Or, if unions weren't forced down onto the workers, they might choose to work with the same employer and not deal with the union.
Why can't workers have a choice - whoever sees the union's being a better fit can join the n number of unions operating at a single employer. Whoever wants to remain free from the union can choose not to join, and negotiate with the employer directly.
> Or, if unions weren't forced down onto the workers, they might choose to work with the same employer and not deal with the union.
Let me put it this way: if managers weren't forced down onto workers, maybe I'd work with a different manager or no manager at all. The employer used its "monopoly" over its workplace to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
> Let me put it this way: if managers weren't forced down onto workers, maybe I'd work with a different manager or no manager at all.
Most employers will allow changing teams/managers internally. Also, you can discuss it with your employer and if you can convince them that you will be able to be productive and relevant without the need for a manager, some employers will actually entertain this request. Several startups actually have a very flattish structure and very loosely defined hierarchy.
> The employer used its "monopoly" to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
> Most employers will allow changing teams/managers internally.
So? It's totally at the employer's discretion, and there are a million other things that are non-negotiable.
> It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
> In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union. However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job. It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
> So? It's totally at the employer's discretion, and there are a million other things that are non-negotiable.
Sure. But it is between you and your employer, and it is not unilaterally dictated by you or by your employer. Also, an unrelated third party doesn't have a say in the agreement you have between you and your employer. If there are some things that are unacceptable to you(for eg, having a manager to report to), you and the potential employer can shake hands and go away from each other.
> Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
From discussing a legal binding around closed union shops to opposing "all labor laws" is quite a leap and also a strawman. But to answer your question, no I don't oppose such a law that says children cannot be employed in dangerous conditions like mines etc.
> That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union.
Yeah so clearly something that can and should be between you and your employer has to now involve other colleagues and you end up with varying degrees of coercion basically.
> However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job.
Or, the easier and simpler route is to leave the union and possibly join another union operating at the same place(if such a thing were to be allowed), or not join any union at all and still work for the employer. More freedom/choice for every worker, lesser or possibly no coercion and less disruptive for the employer, and more importantly, less disruptive for the worker.
It is absolutely absurd that just because set of workers are happy with their working arrangements, a different set of workers cannot get their working arrangements that are more suited to them. Or, in other words, two functioning adult parties are ready to come to a potential agreement that concerns just them, with both of them getting what they want, but some third party who is not and should not be privy to this agreement will not get what they want, and so the actual participants in the agreement cannot make the deal they want, and instead their options are to be coerced into a deal that they wouldn't want, or drop the deal altogether.
> It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
Certainly unavoidable if its a closed union shop no? Which is the very thing that we are discussing. And I am glad that they are rare.
Sorry, should've been more explicit, but I wanted to say that a union creates a workforce monopoly.
Once an employer can no longer hire non-unionized employees, it has to either surrender to the union requirements or close altogether. This is a monopoly in its best.
Yes, the original problem is how did the employers get such monopsony power in the first place. If someone is proposing fixing that instead, I'd love to hear it!
Can you point me to one Amazon fulfillment center or Walmart superstore that doesn't have any restaurants, grocers, autoparts stores, hardware stores, janitorial services, shopping centers, retailers, courier and delivery services, or warehouses within 20 miles? All of those businesses draw from the same labor pool and compete with each other. I don't think your claim that Walmart and Amazon have monopsony power is accurate.
I work at an institution that has a strong union presence (education).
It is absolutely a cancer of the place. Granted, I think that probably in a lot of places that have unions they can easily become a scapegoat to all of the organization's problems, but some of the ones that I deal with on a daily basis are really hard to pin on anything else.
In an idealized world, there would be infinite competition both on the demand and supply side of labor. The argument for unions, at least, is that in the real world the balance tips in favor of the demand side, and I'm sure in many organizations this makes a ton of sense. But at a place like a small learning organization where I work at, it just ensures that nothing ever happens. You have a fantastic faculty member that you want to compensate above and beyond market rate because they deserve it? Union will make that an issue. You want to fire a severe under-performer? Union will make that an issue. You are a non-union manager who has energy and wants to improve things? This sort of stuff will destroy your morale. Over time, the really good people who want to be recognized for their work individually leave, the people who care and want to actively promote change ALSO leave, and what you are left with is an assorted collection of folks going through the motions and heavily invested in not rocking the boat out in any direction. It sucks.
I posted the story here before but my only experience with unions was when my friend and then-roommate was waiting for his teaching license to transfer over from SD to WA, so he had to have multiple part-time jobs to survive in the interim. one of the places he got a job at was one of the Redmond QFCs. he worked there as a cheese monger and was paid minimum wage for doing so. (it's statistically likely that a nonzero number of readers of this comment bought cheese from him sometime in 2015–2016 lol).
we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there.
like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.
I was part of a small union. I joined the bargaining committee, and ever since I have hated unions. It was incredibly stressful, and made me hate my job. Fighting for better wages/vacation with upper management, who showed how much they don't care about you, is very disheartening.
And in the end, all the bargaining didn't really get us any better than what we would have gotten without a union. So now I got a little raise and I hate my company and I'm telling everyone else how shitty the company is.
It started during a student summer job. I was taking care of lending canoes to people in a park. One canoe got visibly dirty so I brought a rag and some cleaner from home and just cleaned it.
I was reprimanded by another worker because according to whatever union full-time employee had, cleaning a canoe was a union job and by bringing my own rag and cleaner I was violating the union's chart of some shit.
Your comment (like a few others) reads as though you've discarded the possibility of some in the HN crowd having first-hand experience with unions.
> HN is very consistently anti-union.
I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.
I formed my opinion of unions from watching the news. Union bosses drawing exorbitant salaries while trying to negotiate wage increases completely divorced from reality and current market conditions.
People like to shit all over Margaret Thatcher and her policies but they forget that it was the actions of the unions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) under a Labour government that got her elected in the first place.
Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished.
> Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished.
Writers Guild of America East (for journalism), or the Authors Guild (novelists). You can become a journalist or a novelist without being a member. But both guilds have collective bargaining agreements with publishers.
>workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished.
This is the direct purpose of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Unions are required to represent employees regardless of whether or not they pay dues, meaning other members shoulder the costs of collective bargaining. This is called the "free rider" problem and is one of the biggest ones facing unions today. It's also one of the main targets of the PRO Act.
The worst thing that ever happened to unionizing was the AFL and the CIO.
The value compromising was great for short term growth but here's where we are now.
I've long thought the Samuel Gompers strategy was the right approach to coalition building. I've really started to question it probably just this week.
The short term gains are substantial but it bites back hard
I mean look at all these comments. Most people want the political power dynamics of syndicalism. But our compromised manifestations soured their dreams
The HN crowd are generally in an advantageous position regarding the job market. Most people here can negotiate their salary and conditions, so having a union negotiate these for them would not make much sense.
As for Amazon workers, since there was so much resistance coming from Amazon on this case, the workers probably feared that Amazon would have closed shop if they chose to unionize.
Personally, I have no need for one as I've been perfectly capable of advancing in my career without the baggage that comes along with collective bargaining. I'm compensated very competitively, get raises, negotiate PTO, sick days, etc. I also do not like my freedom of association to be infringed, by being required to join a union and dues extorted from me that I do not want to pay for.
History and reality. Look at union run cities like Chicago and union run industries like the auto-industry that got demolished by foreign companies.
Personally, I think unions have their places... but in 99% of cases these days? The bureaucracy, red tape, added expenses and other assorted BS are more net negative than the few positives that unions offer.
I don't like them on the basis of principle. It is my belief that monopoly cartels are a net cost for society whether they deal in oil like OPEC or in labor like the UAW.
I replied to another poster but let me double down the fun.
Well first off, especially in low wage jobs, there is little they do for you and it can cost nearly two hours of your pay per month for the benefit. You get this wonderful set of rules which spells out what your employer can and cannot do but it also limits you as well. I got first hand experience in a union shop from late 1980s to early 1990s. My reward was seeing our rep once a quarter if we were lucky in her Mercedes which cost more than we made.
However for every complaint about people being anti union and listing off "Bunch of facts" you never see those same people list their facts that support a pro union stance. Most of the time its little more than what people already have with some variation of something they won't even get when unionized.
The simple fact is, in the US they are more political than worker oriented. They feed a ridiculous amount of dues and even state funds into political coffer so they come replete with lots of wonderful political supporters and press who love to lay the claim that workers will be better for representation. The benefactors are political appointees, elected officials, and union leadership. The workers are mostly pawns.
What I read about European unions would be very nice to see in the states but what I experienced, family members have experienced, is not this fantasy that some people have of what its like here.
Are you questioning the source of a specific piece of data you interpret to be anti-union or you questioning what is the source of peoples opinion on why they are anti union.
If you are questioning the source of a specific piece of data than be clear about what that data is.
If you are asking people to cite a source for a general opinion they personally hold, they don't owe you that.
There are pros and cons to unionization, but imo not all workers should unionize. Most of my hardcore union friends think I'm "anti union", even though I think some workers should unionize for their own good (I'm looking at you, non-tenured college professors.)
I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG.
The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions.
Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run.
However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real.
Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off.
It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers.
The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be?
Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal.
SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies.
Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial.
Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.
> My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc).
Realistically? Probably libertarian advocacy literature coupled with a few confirmatory anecdotes that may or may not be from first hand experience. When I was anti-union, that's where it came from.
You also have to keep in mind the HN is run by a VC firm, and a lot of its culture was set by aspiring capitalists hoping to win the startup lottery. That's going to lead to certain predicable biases (e.g. taking the perspective of a business owner even if you're unlikely to ever successfully be one).
HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people who have bought the idea of meritocracy, mostly by being born wealthy and desperately needing to explain away the growing gap between them and the rest of the world. They have by and large managed to wriggle their way into careers that pay slightly above average (but still well below the actual earners), and need to believe this has some connection to actions or behaviors they personally undertook along the way.
One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation.
Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin.
Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.
The fundamental reasons is the entrepreneurial brain rot that is startup culture that makes all these "temporally embarrassed billionaires" also "temporally embarrassed business owners".
Yes, there are people here that have had bad experiences with American unions, many of which do suck for a variety of reasons, but their stories confirm a prevailing narrative not create it.
My parents had to be in union (during USSR days). In their experience, unless you are a buddy of union leadership you got to go on vacation during worst times of the year to the worst (if any!) places only. You are also getting the crappiest job assignments. And yes, you had to give up a non-trivial part of your already miserable salary as union fees. Basically being friends of union leadership was absolutely critical.
Maybe a controversial or skewed observation - But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet. They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them, incase they're next inline to make it big :/
> But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" trope gets repeated often online, but it's largely unfounded cynicism. It's true that we need to fix our health care system and bolster our safety nets, but the reality is that average Americans are relatively wealthy and even the median worker has significant career opportunities that are harder to come by in some other countries.
Look toward the professional trades like software engineering and the differences are even more pronounced. I worked at a company with US and European offices for a while, and the European employees were routinely stunned to learn that the US office had to pay employees so much more for the same work.
> They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them,
The situation is more nuanced than what you read online. The reality is that these moves aren't as unilaterally good as presented. It's more honest to approach them as tradeoffs.
In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the workers casting these votes did more research and have a better understanding of the situation than the internet gives them credit for. The idea that they're all voting against their self interest because they're dumb, or that we know what's better for them than they do, is very presumptuous.
Why can't we accept that these people are really voting for what they believe is in their best interests? Why do we have to conclude that they're not smart or that they're voting against helping themselves? The reality isn't so simple, and we're not in a position to judge after reading a few paragraphs on the internet.
Yeah, those are valid points. That's why I was a bit apprehensive to post my original comment.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about the US! I wouldn't hesitate to move over there if I had the chance - know anyone who could sponsor a visa, by any chance? ;p
But it does seem like an exceptionally easy place to slip through the cracks of society, but if you're not in the lower percentile you've probably got it better than most people in the world.
The one point I would have to disagree with the the reasons for voting against their interests. And the only reason for this is seeing the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. What happened there is people who set themselves up as figures of authority and told the people Brexit was in their interest. They made the fishing industry into the poster child of their campaigns and convinced them they would benefit. The fishing communities in particular where overwhelmingly in support. Perhaps some did try do their own research, but a large part of social media and the mass-media where all pushing the agenda and using scare tactics and any concerns were batted away as "project fear". When you have figures of authority pushing an agenda it's understandable that people will believe them - Why would they lie? But as Jan 2021 rolled around, the fishing industry in the UK is all but decimated (YoY Salmon exports were down 98% in January). So from that perspective, I wouldn't call the voters dumb because it's easy to get caught out by the disinformation that's out there, but for the most part I would say many were naively trusting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess they disagree with you on what the benefits are?
If the goal of the vote was to give these workers a voice then... I guess mission accomplished. You can't reasonably then say you don't like what they say with their voice!
The poverty line in Alabama for a family of 4 is $26k. [0] So even if the worker in Bessemer is a single parent they are above the line. And if they are part of a two income household then they are above the median income of $51k. [1]
It’s interesting to me how people generalize incorrectly without considering the local situation of people impacted. Clearly incorrect statements like yours should be adjusted to have greater impact.
The whole country doesn’t have the income and expense characteristics of where I live.
Am I the only one who thinks $500/mo seems excessive for union dues? That's $60k/yr in dues for every 10 workers. Does a union really need a full time rep for every 10 or 20 members? If, perhaps, half of that goes to "strike insurance", that would mean $15k/member over 5 years. Which would be enough replace wages(at $15/hr) for six months. Do they really anticipate a six month strike every 5 years?
Actual dues amount for the union weren't proposed yet, afaik. The two figures floating around were based on two different interpretations of the Amazon anti-union website doitwithoutdues.com
> She said she felt insulted by some of Amazon’s anti-union efforts, particularly the company’s statements to the staff that they would be required to pay nearly $500 in union dues every year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/business/amazon-union-bes...
Holy, that is probably the sole reason for a majority of the 'no' votes. You're talking a job that pays as little as $15 an hour, so 500/mo is nearly a week's pay (~33 hours).
Conservative Alabamans fleeced into voting against their own self interests time again? I'm shocked.
In all serious, the political theater espoused on these people has eroded their critical thinking, and this will come back to haunt us when there comes a time for serious leadership in the face of a changing climate, and all we have at the helm are grifters protected by their blind sheep majorities.
Maybe your critical thinking is eroded if you refuse to try to understand why people would vote against a union. I'm not saying you have to agree with their decision, but it's ridiculous to assume everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
Are you an Amazon employee at Bessemer? I'm pretty sure any employee there is more qualified to make a decision about their own lives than you.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union hasn't always worked out for those workplaces that have brought them in.* In this instance, maybe unions aren't the solution to the "problem" or maybe the problem doesn't really exist?
You gotta be kidding me... this "Centre for Union Facts" is a 501(c) doesn't disclose it's donors. I'd bet dollars to donuts it's funded by businesses like Amazon and Walmart to do in their employees who want to collectively bargain. Probably a terribly biased source, for anyone who wants the real facts about unions.
11 union decertifications since 2009 is 1 per year. That's fine, great, people should decertify their union if it's corrupt or their needs change or whatever.
There's a separate point about 'unionfacts.com' with a bunch of anti-union stories on their website clearly being a propaganda op.
I don't know anything about the "stories" you're referring to, but the website I linked to also provides data on the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union's:
Check their home page for lots of provocative 'stories'.
I'm not an expert on this matter, but if a website smells like a propaganda op, I start wondering about data selection, spin and other forms of bias.
So you found some stats... great! (I can't see them, tabs don't load, I think you had a particular union in context somehow) How would I put that in context, is it possible that they're highlighting the worst things they can find, and spinning them as hard as they can, in the service of 'union facts'? Why do they have a 'crime & corruption' tab for every single union, is there a dollar figure? What went into that aggregate dollar fiture?
Where's the positive side, like 'new union contract increases pay' or whatever? It sounds like the only stats provided have a negative spin based on title alone.
I did notice that they helpfully linked to this website as well: http://aftfacts.com/ -- check out that homepage while you're at it :)
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