Amazon Proves Infertile Soil for Unions, So Far

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/technology/amazon-proves-infertile-soil-for-unions-so-far.html?ref=business&_r=0

by hvo • 10 years ago

54 145 10 years ago

The US itself is an infertile landscape for unions. I guess that massive corporate spending on anti-union propaganda is working.

You cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric. Reminds me of Israel-Palestine in that regard, as soon as the topic comes up things get "strange."

When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much. In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.

masklinn3• 10 years ago

I guess that massive corporate spending on anti-union propaganda is working.

And if anyone doubts the anti-union bend of Amazon in particular, just look at their behaviour in Germany, where much of labour law, worker's rights and the work environment in general are based on cooperation between trade unions and private companies (and has been since the March Revolution of 1848).

yeureka• 10 years ago

Who needs unions when you have to wear diapers to keep your job?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-11/poultry-wo...

bduerst4• 10 years ago

Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes

ComteDeLaFere• 10 years ago

Or are forced to donate your liver to your boss?

http://time.com/money/4317132/boss-wants-liver-donor-for-bro...

wott• 10 years ago

When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much.

Perhaps because the borders between US unions/syndicates/mafia were thin?

In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.

That's a classical problem with Lumpen.

cmrdporcupine4• 10 years ago

It doesn't help that the mainstream union movement in North America has had a history of some corruption and some politically dubious practices. Teamsters mob connections, AFL-CIO deep integration into the cold war era establishment, etc.

And most people in North America now experience unionized employees mostly in the form of public sector union employees, which is a rather contradictory situation in that as a 'taxpayer' one is also nominally the 'employer' of public sector employees, and the right has done a great job of positioning the public sector against the population as a whole.

If you want to unleash a torrent of vitriol that you'd normally only hear from a virulent right winger, bring up teacher's unions in any professional/middle-class workplace here in Ontario.

I always find it amazing to hear my coworkers who make six figures moving around letters on a screen and eating catered gourmet lunches in the company cafe go on a screed about the amazingly overpaid people who teach their kids, deliver their mail, or pick up their garbage...

aianus4• 10 years ago

Presumably if these six figure office workers weren't producing more value than their salary they would be fired and that would be that.

Not so for the publicly unionized teachers that make the same money and never get fired regardless of if they're lazy negligent idiots or if they're dedicated molders of young minds. It's completely unfair.

ssharp• 10 years ago

I always find it amazing to hear my coworkers who make six figures moving around letters on a screen and eating catered gourmet lunches in the company cafe go on a screed about the amazingly overpaid people who teach their kids, deliver their mail, or pick up their garbage...

I think most people naturally undervalue the work of others and overvalue the work of themselves. They are underpaid, but people doing X are overpaid. So that plays directly into the public sector union stuff. A lot of people are also vehemently against the taxes they pay, so that also plays directly into anti public union rhetoric. I think those people also don't understand entirely how their tax dollars are spent. We saw that in the U.S. in the 2012 elections when President Obama talked about private companies not building the roads they drive their trucks on everyday. Rather than being logically interpreted as true and understanding that taxes get spent on infrastructure and that helps the economy, it was interpreted as the President telling private companies they weren't responsible for their company's success.

I would have guessed Canada's more liberal attitude might have caused better relations between the population and public unions, but it sounds like many of the same issues exist as they do in the U.S.

te_chris• 10 years ago

The taxpayer is the employer in the same way as the bank owns your house if you have a mortgage. This is just one of those fictions designed to manufacture outrage. Govt is an entity which acts with its own interests.

lr4444lr• 10 years ago

I guess that massive corporate spending on anti-union propaganda is working.

Yeah, it could never be possible that the workers thought for themselves and just weren't interested in the terms.

bduerst4• 10 years ago

Which union were you a part of that you disagreed with? Or are you just projecting your opinion?

UnoriginalGuy2• 10 years ago

I was referring to the general American public's dislike of union and union ideas.

Sure, it sucks that Amazon's Warehouse, has been unable to start a union thus far. But the article sets out several reasons for that including strategic turnover.

vidarh10• 10 years ago

That may explain why they're not interested in one specific union. It doesn't explain why they haven't joined another, or started their own.

JetSetWilly5• 10 years ago

Unions can vary considerably, and depend strongly on local culture. I'm fairly familiar with the UK, but unions here famously had a very antagonistic relationship with the business, in contrast to unions in, say, Germany.

There was a famous case, where Toyota (or some company like that) set up two identical car factories, one in Northern England and one in Germany. The one in Germany had vastly higher output per worker than the one in England, and a lot of the reason was down to the wildly different attitudes of the workers and the union - the one in England tended to put "tools down" for all kinds of silly bureaucratic reasons.

And certainly in other parts of the country and other industries - Clydeside ship building, say - unions were not blameless in helping along their decline - although the incompetence of management and the business helped there as well.

_delirium• 10 years ago

Some of this varies on both sides as well; employers in Germany are also more consensus-oriented than those in the UK, willing to consult unions ahead of time on important decisions, have joint labor-management committees to oversee things, etc. The employers in Scandinavia even moreso, where running the workplace is almost seen as a complete partnership between the employer and the unions, who both approach it in a consensus-oriented way and don't like to make changes without the other side's buy-in.

I suspect Amazon's quite antagonistic relationship with its German unions is in part because it doesn't take a very "German" approach to them as an employer, and tries to run things in a more American-style way instead. Although German employers are not quite as consensus-oriented nowadays than they were in the 1950s-1990s period either.

jtbigwoo5• 10 years ago

I took a couple labor management courses in college. One of the things the professor said has always stuck with me:

"Management gets the union it asks for."

Almost every union in the US and the UK was formed in the face of withering hostility from management. It's not surprising that the union would be antagonistic in response.

EDIT: typo

lumberjack• 10 years ago

You cannot talk about unions online effectively

You should not take what you see online as a reflection of the real political and economic thought of the people in real life.

dkopi4• 10 years ago

"When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business"

That's rarely the case with unions however. They usually work for the interests of a select few. They harm the business, they lobby government for special benefits and protections, and they're often willing to harm employees at the bottom of the ladder (or unemployed people who are never allowed on the ladder) to benefit employees on the top and closest to the union leaders.

pessimizer2• 10 years ago

I understand what the Chamber of Commerce thinks, but do you have any references, or any information independent of them? And by this, I don't mean a reference to the existence of a bad union or a bad union incident, or stories about how your dad told you that every meeting was a bunch of blind drunks voting down training and making up new holidays.

You're making a claim of prevalence, it'd be interesting to know where you got that opinion from.

pc867• 10 years ago

When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much.

Probably because most Americans (myself included) have never encountered a union that works for both the employees and the business.

My working-class father, twice, was working for a union and was forced to stop working for strikes, unpaid. My parents nearly lost their house when I was in elementary school because of it. One of those times the company actually shut down.

You cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric.

Obviously America is more pro-business than most of Europe. But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions. I would argue it's hard (not impossible) to talk about unions online effectively because Europeans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and statements like a poor person disliking unions is inherently against their own self interest.

revscat• 10 years ago

I worked for UPS before going to college. It was a strong union shop, and I have decidedly different memories of it. When I slipped on a set of stairs and hurt my head, my manager immediately rushed me to the doctor and gave me the day off. The pay was good for an 18 year old without a degree, and I had full health/401k.

Chris20482• 10 years ago

statements like a poor person disliking unions is inherently against their own self interest

Original was:

poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests

The tone seems different to me.

themartorana4• 10 years ago

Both parents and wife are teachers, all are at odds with their unions, but are still forced to pay dues to an organization they'd prefer not speak on their behalf. I don't see much of a need for unions anymore (note: anymore - they obviously hold a very important place in US history) as long as the government is actively involved and enforcing things like OSHA. I am also strongly for universal healthcare and maternity leave, to name a couple issues which would solve a lot of what unions are in place for.

crdoconnor5• 10 years ago

My working-class father, twice, was working for a union and was forced to stop working for strikes, unpaid.

And how appreciative were you of the higher earnings yielded from him having a union that was actually prepared to strike?

Obviously America is more pro-business than most of Europe.

Hence why average American wages are in decline while the 1% have gotten wealthier and wealthier and wealthier.

calibraxis• 10 years ago

More of my fellow Americans should read up on the IWW. Which was far more serious about workplace democracy than those relatively right wing, corporate-friendly unions that the US promoted.

But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions.

The US is pretty fundamentalist: over 40% believe God created humanity 10,000 years ago [1] and many have disturbing beliefs about the "invisible hand" (of divine providence, of course), which they try to impose on others. So when people try to talk about these things, highly motivated fundamentalists clog the discussion with dogma, when they numerically dominate.

These two forms of fundamentalism are strongly linked. ("Debt: the First 5000 Years" discusses this.)

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...

brudgers• 10 years ago

Professional sports industries are examples of successful unionization that ordinary people are exposed more or less continuously. The US collegiate athletics industry offers a point of comparison for non-unionized work in the same occupations.

dmm• 10 years ago

My father was a sheet metal worker for many years. He always described the union meetings as a bunch of drunk* old men voting down any spending on training, something that would generally benefit younger men. Even while the pension fund is underfunded and highly dependent on younger men to pay into it.

My only direct experience with a union was when I was working for a federal govt agency. This org was steadily shrinking over the years as automated systems replaced what was once a highly labor intensive process. The leaders of the org worked hard to find a place for the techs who were slowly being displaced, literally offering them paid schooling and training programs. Those who didn't pursue these offers began to feel threatened and voted to join a union of federal employees.

My wife is a teacher. The teachers union exists solely to protect teachers. She has colleagues who are terrible at their job, doing things like failing to teach math for six months. The principals of the school look into firing them and are told by HR it takes seven years to fire anyone. This is in an environment where education colleges are pumping out tons of enthusiastic fresh meat every year. Teachers unions protect the negligent and harm the young.

Does this help you to understand why I am skeptical of unions?

* Literally drunk. The meetings were in the evenings so working people could attend them. Men would get off work, start drinking and go to the meetings three hours later.

brianwawok6• 10 years ago

This is the argument I can't solve.

With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.

Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less.

So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?

mattmcknight5• 10 years ago

"In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests."

Except, it's not always an affront to their self interest. Unions increase wages for their members, not people who aren't in unions. This then tends to increase the cost of the goods they provide.

Unions tend to reduce overall employment, favoring the already employed over the unemployed. They reduce job flexibility, as benefits are often tied to long term attachment to a single company. Unions make the companies more vulnerable to outsourcing. Finally, the public employee unions in the US have conspired with politicians to enact defined benefit pensions that are bankrupting many localities- a problem of short term thinking. Unions essentially create a government sponsored monopoly on labor supply, restricting both workers and companies, which is fundamentally in conflict with the values of economic liberty upon which the country was founded.

germanier• 10 years ago

This all depends on where you are. German employers commonly extend the agreements to the non-unionized to keep people from joining the union for this reason alone.

madgar3• 10 years ago

Unions essentially create a government sponsored monopoly on labor supply, restricting both workers and companies, which is fundamentally in conflict with the values of economic liberty upon which the country was founded.

Literally every word of what you just said about abolishing slavery. Even the bit about restricting workers, because poor landowners were told that owning a slave would enable upward mobility (it didn't really, slavery was a money sink at such small scales, this was just rhetoric to keep poor whites from questioning slavery).

Our country's history of valuing economic liberty has typically made us tolerate some awful behavior by the economically powerful. I wouldn't put it on a pedestal.

crdoconnor5• 10 years ago

Unions increase wages for their members, not people who aren't in unions.

It's funny how basic economics seems to go out the window when it comes to unions.

Pushing up wages in one company that is competing for labor pushes other non-unionized companies to pay more or face an exodus of talent.

Basic supply and demand.

http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

acomjean• 10 years ago

I did construction inspections for landfill sites. I will say the Union Shops felt much better run, with fewer accident (its anecdotal I know, but when construction equipment flips, and you start to wonder how much training the guy on the backhoe has, not a question on Union sites, you know) Union Wages are very good in NY. The migratory non-uinion crews that did liner install where quite happy getting the union wages that were required on the site.

There were a few people (equipment operators) that definitely used the union for cover and would just disappear at noon exactly for lunch, no matter what was going on, actually causing more work. When he was let go, he was at the gate watching to make sure nobody used the same equipment for a week (A rule to prevent short term layoffs and rehires).

Mostly pretty hard working people, doing physical labor, stuff you wouldn't want to do after 50. The laborers had training on site sometime, to keep skills up.

ci5er• 10 years ago

My (limited) experience with unions in Germany and my (also, fortunately, limited) experience with unions in the US were far different. From that (limited/anecdotal) experience, I'd say that unions in Germany were a far better thing than what I saw in the US.

It might just be that you are from a place where the origin, organizational principles, incentives and co-dependent relationship with select politicians are "better" than they are in the US.

specialist2• 10 years ago

"...it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much."

Collective bargaining requires some kind of union. It's just game theory.

"... individuals in any group attempting collective action will have incentives to "free ride" on the efforts of others if the group is working to provide public goods. Individuals will not “free ride” in groups that provide benefits only to active participants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

I leave it others smarter than me to explain the "strange", tortured, counter-factual, misanthropic rationalizations of the anti-union rhetoric.

seanalltogether• 10 years ago

“This is Amazon’s biggest fear,” said Andy Powell, a district organizer for the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers who is trying to organize Amazon fulfillment center workers in Delaware and several nearby states. “The minute one falls and people see they got a better deal, it’s going to be a cancer for them.”

That's a cynical way to phrase it. You'd think a union organizer would describe their union like a medicine, not a cancer.

koolba2• 10 years ago

I'm not against unions, I'm against public sector unions.

Private sector unions can do whatever they want. Let them strike, collective bargain, walk out, sit in. The damage is isolated, the dollars involved are relegated to business owners and workers, and there's competition on both sides of the equation.

Public sector unions are were the trouble is at. Government work stoppages[1] are bullshit as are unfunded future concessions that will have to be paid by our children's children.

[1]: Yes we can all make jokes about how they're not doing anything to start but you know what I'm saying...

afarrell• 10 years ago

One problem with getting rid of public sector unions is if you try to get rid of them all at once on a federal level, that lets them pick their symbolic battleground. They will probably choose Memphis, where Dr. King died supporting the right of public sanitation workers to form a union.

riffraff2• 10 years ago

but then, how should public sector employees ask for better conditions?

I am not a fan of public service, but public sector unions seem to be abstractly as reasonable as private ones.

koolba2• 10 years ago

but then, how should public sector employees ask for better conditions?

The government already has to compete against the private sector. If wages rise there, whether through union action or labor shortages, then government will have to act accordingly. This works in the opposite direction as well (lowering wages/costs).

The main issue is that the current government does not have an interest in long term planning. The current mayor/governor/steward is more than willing to push the true costs of things down the road because they won't be around to account for them. That's how you end up with massive unfunded pension obligations.

Public sector unions are just one part of this problem albeit a big part.

gozur882• 10 years ago

Public sector unions have always seemed iffy to me. They put a lot of money into the political process, and unlike issues with competing interests there's really nobody on the other side, so they usually get their way. It's a case concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.

In California politicians don't cross the public sector unions, because the unions provide money for poltical campaigns. Schwartzenegger tried to reign them in and was pretty much mortally wounded in political terms.

known• 10 years ago

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world is apolitical and better than Unions

vidarh10• 10 years ago

Basic income is entirely orthogonal to unionisation.

ldehaan• 10 years ago

"unions make companies more vulnerable to outsourcing" because outsourcing is a a shark and unions cover you in blood?

the only thing that makes a company vulnerable to outsourcing is assholes in management, uncaring, shortsighted, corrupt and uncaring assholes. that's it.

unions are for the people and inherently by the people, ffs, it's a cooperative effort to run a company, but somehow people think it's the CEO and the whatever-o that make the company what it is.

Companies that think this way, ultimately fail, or loose to companies that treat their people better, unless they have regulatory capture or some other government handout to corner the market, and this causes their employees to realize that the company they work for is shit and maybe they need to form a union to protect themselves from the psychopaths running the company.

pc867• 10 years ago

Perhaps we could have a better discussion about the topic without calling people assholes and psychopaths.

dang• 10 years ago

Well put.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706155 and marked it off-topic.

ThomPete• 10 years ago

Many Americans grow up with a rather biased view of unions and with good reason.

Looking at the unions here in New York when it comes to construction you quickly end up loathing the unions.

Instead of fighting for paid sick days, longer vacation, better healthcare for their members they simply try to expand the number of members they have thus delaying constructions, putting way too many people on the constructions projects etc.

It's a shame because unions do have their time and place when the work is more or less the same and salaries not too independent.

Wallmart employees could use a strong union. Uber could.

But the problem is that once you get into the territory of fluctuating salaries for the same job and more individual employee/employer relationships it's not so easy to establish a shared vision.

Denmark have a model[1] where the employee unions and the employer negotiate minimum salaries, sick days etc. and where the government primarily is there as a mediator.

It's working pretty good although it is showing to be less effective in the more individually based job types I spoke about.

None the less. The US do need more unions but they have to be established across companies to ensure agency.

[1] https://danishbusinessauthority.dk/danish-labour-market-mode...

tn132• 10 years ago

I hope it remains like that forever if Amazon has to give its services for cheaper and cheaper prices.

I come from India which remains one of the most poorest countries and most of the manufacturing sector remains underdeveloped thanks to Labor unions. That evil should be kept out of USA. Cities like Kolkata which were once impotant trading ports of the world is reduced to shit by union politics.

Teacher's union in USA remains the biggest reason why the public education is in bad shape. Doctor's Union aka American Medical Association remains one of the dominant reason why healthcare is expensive.

EDIT: Context.

Amazon Proves Infertile Soil for Unions, So Far

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