> The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021. [...] While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.
This is the discussion which we need to be having, and one which has been put off since Jimmy Carter failed to put a tax into place on computers so as to budget for worker re-training for folks whose jobs were eliminated by computers.
Instead, you had situations such as the type compositors unions bargaining for sinecures for their members, rather than participating in, and informing the usage of the new systems, contributing to a decade of ugly "Desktop DTP".
On-going automation should reduce the total number of hours which humans need to work to ensure that humanity is housed, clothed, fed, &c. --- why aren't we talking about reducing the workweek? See recent story in Tokyo:
Or, if the U.S. gathered together all the money used for Disability, SSI, WIC, Unemployment, Welfare, Social Security &c. _and_ their administration and overhead, there would be a significant amount of money --- would that be sufficient to fund a Universal Basic Income?
using estimates online, the sum of the cost of those programs is somewhere around $4 trillion. who is ubi for? if it's all us adults, then that's somewhere around 250m people.
I do not know the rationale, but this is the flip side of collective bargaining: if someone makes a bad deal on my behalf I can no longer deal directly with my employer.
Hard for me to imagine any cases where the union does a worse deal on your behalf than you did yourself. Maybe you're talking about only compensation? Unions bargain for more than just compensation: better healthcare, parental leave, more sick days, caps on hours worked, etc.
In aggregate unions exist to get a bigger share of a company's profits for its workers. (Instead of executives and investors)
But if you have examples, I'd love to read about them.
That’s because of the lack of a union. Companies can’t just remove benefits that are in a union-bargained contract. (Assuming that would have been one.)
