> After waiting twenty minutes, we are ushered into a room upstairs. A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. “I know you were told to be here at 8:15,” she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, “but that was just to make sure you got here early.” And, like that, fifteen minutes are lopped from our paycheck. It’s a small but important lesson in what it means to be a “flexible” worker.
> But there are significant challenges to organizing the industry. “Because of the temp nature of work, it’s very easy for a worker who speaks out to be retaliated against,” says Palma. “They might not be called back to work the following day, or have their hours decreased.” That’s exactly what happened to Rodriguez, according to the WWU. After he spoke to the media and participated in strikes over unsafe workplace conditions—leading Cal/OSHA to fine the warehouse nearly $30,000—he was fired earlier this year. Federal charges have been filed against the company, alleging retaliation, and an investigation is under way.
I'm not a fan of labor unions, but I'm not sure what else can be done about this sort of thing. Litigation can only tackle small parts of the problem, and class action settlements leave the lawyers as the only winners. Fines are never high enough to disincentivize the activity. There's a high chance of not getting caught, and even when you do get caught the fine is barely higher than the cost of complying in the first place. Maybe a punishment of public floggings for executives at companies who violate labor laws?[1]
Labour unions are a lot like everything else that works in our society. (Hold your vituperation!)
Labour unions, like democracy and capitalism, are the worst things we've ever tried, except for everything else that failed. We simply don't have a better way to appoint leaders except democracy. It's obviously broken in many ways, but the alternatives are worse. Economically, capitalism is deeply broken, but everything else we've tried is worse.
And labour unions as we see them today are just plain wrong.But less wrong than unfettered capitalism. You either need labour unions or you need overregulation, with inspectors everywhere in a business.
The power of labor unions for low-paid workers is not as strong as you think. Where I went to school (U Chicago), there was a very active mostly student-organized university workers' labor union, but workplace violations were still routine. The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive, and the union's legal clout was no help when the laws were hard to enforce and deep-pocketed employers were your adversary. If you look around at lower-class unions, you see a broad pattern of ineffectiveness. For example farm workers have the UFW but being a farm worker remains one of the most intensely miserable jobs in the US, with constant rule-breaking by the employers, and a lot of unrepresented workers.
We already have a nearly flawless way to increase the welfare of low-paid workers, and that is to redistribute wealth to them through things like the negative income tax. Having enough money to live is the best negotiating position, union or no union. (For example, I think this is why middle-class unions have been so much more effective than lower-class ones.)
The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive
Well managed unions maintain a strike fund so that their members can survive the economic hardship of a strike.
After googling a little I think you are talking about Graduate Students United - their dues are only $5/year, which means they aren't even in the same league as the serious blue collar labor unions.
Actually I was talking about the organization that represents low-paid university workers, like janitors and cafeteria workers. I reworded my post to clarify.
Graduate students are a whole 'nother basket of beans.
farm workers have the UFW but being a farm worker remains one of the most intensely miserable jobs in the US, with constant rule-breaking by the employers, and a lot of unrepresented workers.
I don't think it is fair to blame the large number of unrepresented workers on the union itself. I'm sure the UFW wants to increase their membership past the paltry ~5,000 it has.
I honestly don't know why we try to go after executives at all. It's proven ineffective since you can never mount enough evidence to get a real case and the fines are just seen as a cost of doing business for the company. Instead you need to create labor laws that are enforced in much the same was as moving violations are enforced for driving.
For example, if you are hired as a driver for a delivery company, you, the driver, are responsible for speeding or running stop signs and red lights, not your employer. You never here about a manager telling their employers to speed and retaliating against those that don't speed to make a delivery. On the surface, similar laws may appear to victimize the people at the bottom, but it instead does something very very important. It's places a firm barrier across which almost all workers will push back from since they are the ones that will be left holding the bag when law enforcement shows up and starts handing out fines.
So in the original article, they could create a law that fines the manager some multiple of the amount that every one of those laborers lost. Let's say it is 15 minutes work times 30 employees at $12/hour. That's $90 dollars in lost pay. Now make the fine 10x that value plus court costs and lawyer fees and now every single manager is going to think twice before willingly victimizing these temp workers, and will question their bosses when asked to do things like this.
Laws that make illegal these unethical actions with very real victims would empower workers to stand up for their rights better than anything else. No one would ever have to stick his or her neck out, they can just call the cops anonymously and tip them off to unethical business practices. The enforcement of violations would be handled right there on the spot without ever involving the legal department of the corporation responsible for the abuse.
Not so! I used to drive a 911 ambulance. We we're told to drive safe and not break various rules, but were punished when we didn't arrive in the allotted timeframe of 9min. The punishment was that workers on 24-hour shifts (who normally had a house to sleep in) were forced to post on street corners and not allowed into their quarters. This made the shift miserable and the lack of sleep was a real safety problem.
Ok, however I would imagine that ambulance driver's are in a class very different than most other types of drivers (take out food, FedEx/UPS, taxi, limo, etc.)
In these situations, the main weapon is knowledge. If the law says you have to give people X number of minutes as break, a union rep's job could be to collect records of when that rule was broken. Then you can hold that knowledge over the head of the employers, who often rely on information asymmetry to get away with shit.
It's not ideal, and certainly no UAW, but it's much better than unchecked abuses. You can use funds to buy appropriate equipment like gloves for workers and for their replacement when they fall apart.
I see it as a yin-yang situation. Corporations are a way to organize capital for the benefit of the capital owners, unions are a way to organize labor for the benefit of the labor "owners." In a healthy capitalist system, both are necessary in order to maintain balance.
That's the ideal. In the real world, both types of organizations will seek ways to exploit any advantage in their favor. But that's life.
Corporations and labor unions are not really equivalent.
If you view them purely from the point of view of market power, then yes, they are the same thing. Both create an oligopoly in the market for buying/selling labor.
But corporations also are the way that both capital and labor are organized to produce an actual product. There is no analogous role for unions, except some special unions that play a large role in management.
I'm not sure what you mean by "livable working conditions"
If you are referring to total compensation and hours, this comes under what I referred to as "oligopoly". That is, labor unions can create market power on the side of labor, in order to raise pay.
However, this doesn't benefit society as a whole, and so it is only reasonable when there is market power on the other side. In my industry, there did seem to be an attempt to form a cartel of employer, but Mark Zuckerberg seems to have broken that cartel.
If you are referring to actual working conditions, like workplace safety, I already mentioned that when I talked about special unions that are involved with management. E.g. in very dangerous professions, unions might be part of the "deal" where management and workers agree on how to, as you say, organize labor and capital.
In general, however, and especially in IT, there is no need for unions because the market for labor is competitive, and working conditions can be negotiated between the worker and the corporation.
I agree IT unions aren't very necessary. We have it easy; we're well paid, we're fairly flexible, and if one employer sucks, we can easily can a better job elsewhere.
But plenty of industries don't have that advantage. Many workers are very dependent on a single employer. This is especially the case with workers that have highly specific training and experience that doesn't translate well to other jobs. If they're exploited or otherwise unhappy, they can't simply quit and get a similar job elsewhere, whereas the employer can afford to lose a single employee and train a new one, which makes the employer-employee relationship an unequal one. There, unions can provide a lot of value to keep employers honest.
Unfortunately, the power is in the hands of the temp workers.... if they all stick together. If they all collectively demanded better working conditions and better pay, they could succeed. After all, the work won't get done if they don't do it. Management certainly isn't going to dirty their hands in this kind of job.
And after all what we see, it really is have-nots (proletariat) versus the haves(capitalists/managers).
This is similar to the logic people use with the War on Drugs. As soon as there are enough dead Mexicans and gangsters in the street, eventually they HAVE to lift prohibition, right?
The government can remain irrational for longer than we can remain alive.
Look at countries like India or even China. Countries can survive hundreds of years with high level of poverty.
The key thing is if the situation in the US will get worse faster or slower than the slow mentality shift that is required to considered poor people as disposable.
I believe he's being satirical. Obviously a bad job is (usually) better than no job, that's the point. The whole concept of "exploitation" makes no sense. The businesses that do hire are benefiting people way more than those that don't hire any at all or have replaced workers with automation.
Something like a basic income could distribute money from all those industries at the same time to those who need it. It would solve the unemployment problem, or at least make it more bearable, and improve working conditions for these workers.
Totally agree. As productivity continually improves, I see no way to move forward without a basic income. And this is coming from a person with libertarian-leaning ideals.
The hoe displaced farm workers. Machines replaces lots of farm workers.
Shipping containers destroyed the massive labor requirement and theft of the shipping industry. Several orders of magnitude of jobs destroyed.
People don't just wither and die; the efficiencies offered by technological change turn into new industries and higher quality of life for everyone. Would you really be better off if everyone had to farm or hunt their own food?
So we can give them a living wage, which will accelerate the development of a robotic replacement, so that they can earn a bit more in the meantime, before their inevitable unemployment?
The earlier mass unemployment comes the better. Only that will necessitate some major rethinking of classical employment and welfare ideas, and very likely, finally have us implement basic income.
As opposed to what? Deliberately staggering progress in an effort to maintain a society of contrived busywork so people can slave away for pennies? You might as well just give away the pennies rather than deliberately embrace inefficiency in an effort to keep these jobs in existence.
Agreed. The automobile manufacturers were very successful in improving quality and efficiency via robotics, and were also encouraged to do so by enormous drags from labor unions. Warehouses have also increased automation, but clearly they can improve more. Beyond the warehouse, I'm eager to see their deployment in retail stores and fast-food. Consumers will benefit from efficiencies, and the unhappy workers will be free to find jobs more to their liking.
Keep in mind, a negative income tax/minimum basic income plan only has problems passing until a majority of the population can't find work. History has taught us the results of "Let them eat cake".
While I understand the sympathy here, I'm not sure I agree.
In 5(?) years these jobs will be replaced by robots. They will be safer, more efficient, and cheaper for companies. These workers will not be forced to work under these "horrible" conditions any longer. They will simply be discarded.
Question: Would you rather have this job, fully knowing its negatives, or have no job?
It's not the fault of the industry that certain kinds of labor are cheap. In fact it's nobody's fault, it's just the nature of the market.
The only kinds of response to this situation that make sense are to increase welfare (and reduce the barriers/conditions to obtaining it) and decrease taxes for people on low incomes. Anything else misses the essence of the problem, which is that a large number of people, for whatever reasons, do not produce enough value to earn a decent wage.
Enforcing various laws might help too, but given that all manual work is by nature dangerous, it's not clear that this industry is especially bad.
Hell yeah. Get off your lazy ass, and go spend tens of thousands of dollars getting an education that makes you employable (just put aside for the moment the fact that your years of compulsory education left you good for nothing better than packing boxes). It's that easy, everyone. Economy down? Well maybe you should invest massively in industry and spark a boom so there are more jobs. If you aren't doing that, you're just not trying.
HAHAHAHA. Laugh rather than cry, right? This is simple economics: there's a certain population of people, a certain amount of basic wealth and resources. If an individual figures out how to get a good job and not temp or warehouse work, all they've done is figure out how to be the one who gets that other job. Yes, the overall system can be flexible, but it is IMPOSSIBLE for every warehouse worker to all get good jobs at once. This is a social problem, not an individual problem.
as a business owner and employer of several skilled high tech and unskilled call center workers, i think you're wrong.
it's not easy finding a better job, and it's also not easy hiring better people. in fact it's real hard to do either of those things.
if you have, in fact, solved this fundamental problem of labor market efficiency, please go ahead and collect your nobel prize and be sure to explain it real slow for us dumb underachieving slackers during your acceptance speech.
when the number of people far outpaces the number of jobs, "just try harder" is not a solution to this problem. i'm pretty sure, in fact, that NEITHER conservatives or liberals think this is the solution to a massive correction in the number of jobs like the one the US just went through in the past 3 years.
I'm one of the people who would say it's not that easy, and I'm a little confused by using "but it actually is" as an apparent counterargument. Could you please elaborate?
"U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force"
I guess this is how seeds of a revolution are sown.
I know that no system is perfect. And that capitalism* is better than many others which have been tried so far. But if enough people are frustrated with the given system, all it needs is a trigger to vent out that frustration.
* I guess main problem with capitalism is inheritance. When everyone is on equal footing, a "loser" may not mind the "winner" getting rich either through hard work, or even through occasional luck. But after 3-4 generations, when children of rich parents have inherent advantages (education, connections etc) which are extremely hard to overcome, this system starts becoming unstable.
If you think Capitalism is bad, just try Socialism. Instead of making X amount of people miserable, it makes almost everyone miserable.
The world is not perfect, there is no utopia, and whatever you might think, Capitalism is about as good of product/market fit (human-nature/society-type fit) as you can get in a world that's not based on small hunter/gatherer groups.
It's also keeps us in a state of competition, which is the driving force for innovation and progress like nothing else is.
But don't believe me, just check how all the previous Marxsist and Socialist societies in history turned out.
The balance is of course somewhere in the middle. The good parts of capitalism with the good parts of socialism. You get a much nicer society than with either one t the extreme.
Sometimes, but not in this case. Plenty of northern European countries (Sweden is a popular example) mix the good bits of capitalism and socialism just fine, while avoiding the worst excesses. It's not perfect, but they're certainly on a much more productive path than either socialist or capitalist extremists.
Amazon acquired Kiva Systems to employ robots [1] to replace people for these various tasks. Although taking away a viable source of income for low-income earners during the holiday season probably isn't viewed as "help" by most of them.
Unfortunately, the theory of tax/cost incidence shows what can go wrong with this: since it results in above-market effective wages, that simply intensifies the competition for those positions, probably to the point that workers will offer to do them for less than the current wage Amazon is paying, since they know they'll still make the same from such donations.
Here's a discussion that covered the question in the context of allowing people to tip McDonald's cashiers directly, but the same analysis applies:
Nice point. Even if the money did get to the workers, I don't see why most people would really want to do this, since is equivalent to donating $10 to people who happen to be working that particular job. Wouldn't most people rather donate that money to a charity, whose recipients are presumable more needy than people who at least have jobs.
If I had a factory job, the last thing I'd ever want is for my picture to be put on display, telling the whole world that my lot in life was that of an indentured servant, making $9 an hour to pack your iPad, for a glimmering tip of $5.
I wouldn't be interested in sitting for a professional user profile photo, or a standardized mandatory snapshot. I wouldn't smile for the photo on my ID badge. I wouldn't be interested in having candid photos of me snapped on the factory floor, while my manager, zippy the pinhead, brow-beats me, because I express obvious disinterest in a mundane, repetitive, soul crushing job.
I wouldn't put up a Facebook profile proclaiming that I work at McDonald's. Similarly, if McDonald's had it's own corporate social network at mcdonalds.com, where all the pages are themed in red and yellow, with your choice of one of three background images (french fries, a Big Mac or Ronald himself), and everyone wear's a visor or a hair net in their profile picture, it wouldn't be a social network I'd be interested in participating in. Not even for tips. It would feel a little bit like pan handling for spare change. There's a line of dignity I'm not interested in crossing, when it come to social websites.
When I drop change in the tip cup, as I pick up my morning coffee, it's a token of appreciation that goes untaxed, and unrecorded on a server. That's the way tips are supposed to work. A surreptitious reward as acknowlegement for the indignity of servitude.
If some business did this and it was reliable, I guess we'd need third-party certification that this was real…
As someone else mentioned, the real solution is a Basic Income Guarantee. Otherwise, these ideas start becoming bizarro bureaucratic regulatory wasteful things, even though it sounds nice.
What the fuck does that have to do with paying the people who pack my orders? 1/200 of what I spend on "eligible purchases" (whatever those are) goes to some other organization.
> But there are significant challenges to organizing the industry. “Because of the temp nature of work, it’s very easy for a worker who speaks out to be retaliated against,” says Palma. “They might not be called back to work the following day, or have their hours decreased.” That’s exactly what happened to Rodriguez, according to the WWU. After he spoke to the media and participated in strikes over unsafe workplace conditions—leading Cal/OSHA to fine the warehouse nearly $30,000—he was fired earlier this year. Federal charges have been filed against the company, alleging retaliation, and an investigation is under way.
I'm not a fan of labor unions, but I'm not sure what else can be done about this sort of thing. Litigation can only tackle small parts of the problem, and class action settlements leave the lawyers as the only winners. Fines are never high enough to disincentivize the activity. There's a high chance of not getting caught, and even when you do get caught the fine is barely higher than the cost of complying in the first place. Maybe a punishment of public floggings for executives at companies who violate labor laws?[1]
[1] There's a lot of Singapore worship among certain circles, so they shouldn't mind adopting some of their customs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore.