"We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship" [lengthy justification] "is best."
OK so if it's not the employees, I'd like to know, in the universe of this quote, what people or entities are promoting a union and creating this "risk" of uninionization? Out of this whole story this is the most disingenuous bit that annoys me the most. If the majority of employees were against the union, they would stop it themselves without company help, wouldn't they? Still, it's very generous of them to look out for employee interests like that, large eyeroll.
That seems to be the crux of the issue. If management was great, and everyone loved their wages a union wouldn't be alluring. Since corporate management is the default union.
Not strange. It's cheaper to bust the union and fire those involved, and pay out for the ensuing lawsuits (whether just to lawyers or lawyers + settlement) than to pay higher wages and provide better benefits. Or at least, that's what they think, and I'm sure someone has done some sort of math to validate this course of action (whether or not it's correct).
And companies rarely care about their employees or anything other than profit / bonuses they get from that profit.
> The big advantage of not having to deal with unions is being able to quickly make changes in reaction to changing market conditions.
You could say similar things about authoritarian governmental forms. Like democracy, unions give a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes.
Well that is 100% not true. Democracy in no way gives the people a voice, many many studies have proven this.
>>unions give a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes.
In theory that is true, but that largely depends on the size of the union, and the size of the company the union is negotiating with. I have seen more than a few companies put completely under by unions that believed the economic health of the company was better than it really was and those "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain for was just out to "get the workers". The conflict lead to an economically unsustainable business
> Well that is 100% not true. Democracy in no way gives the people a voice, many many studies have proven this.
Citation most certainly needed. While democracy is admittedly imperfect, it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.
The only plausible theory that supports your claim is that all decisions in democracies are made to benefit some corporate/financial elite, but the election of Trump rather than Clinton (which none of these elite groups wanted) is pretty strong and straightforward evidence against that.
> I have seen more than a few companies put completely under by unions that believed the economic health of the company was better than it really was and those "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain for was just out to "get the workers". The conflict lead to an economically unsustainable business
Maybe it was true that union was wrong in that case (your story is far too vague to verify), however it's plausible other unions were right in other, similar cases. Typically, management's priority is to be as generous as possible to the shareholders, not the workers.
> "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain for
My comment was a pretty straightforward observation that people with power tend to make decisions that benefit themselves, tend put far less weight on the interests of those without the political power to influence them, and a solution is to spread political power more widely. How exactly did you jump to that conclusion that I have "disdain" for "leadership classes"? You're reading in emotions that aren't there, and if you're going to to that, you're not worth talking to.
They basically show that public desire over a given law has almost no impact on the probability of that issue being passed, and inversely public dissent on a given law has almost not impact on the probability of that law failing to pass.
>it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.
Is it obviously false? The current situation shows that democratic governments are more than capable of exerting Authoritarian control over society, sure you will argue that it is a "good reason" right now due to pandemic, but the fact this control is even possible shows where the power is, and how little freedom people really have. If people in a democracy were really free what control we see today would not even be possible. It is but with the grace and consent of the government do people have freedom. That is inverse of how it is suppose to be, where by the government is formed on the consent of the governed.
When we have teenagers in Wisconsin being threaten with arrest for disorderly conduct for an Instagram post I think we can safely say we have transitioned into an Authoritarian form of governance, that is just one of 1000's of examples I can cite
> How exactly did you jump to that conclusion that I have "disdain" for "leadership classes"? You're reading in emotions that aren't there
I did jump to an assumption based on past experiences here on HN and the context around your comments.
> They basically show that public desire over a given law has almost no impact on the probability of that issue being passed, and inversely public dissent on a given law has almost not impact on the probability of that law failing to pass.
I read the abstract, and that doesn't seem to contradict what I said, which was "...democracy, ...give[s] a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes." I didn't say it'd always give the people the biggest seat, just a bigger one than they'd have otherwise. Furthermore, even if that study is correct, it would have a big blind-spot, since I can't imagine that it covers policy that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests" would want but was never pursued by the government because it would be so contrary to public desire (and thus would never show up in any empirical data set). It's quite plausible that elite/business interests dominate certain areas of policy most of the time (probably the smaller and more technical types), but are overridden occasionally but in a big way by the public when it comes to certain large policy changes.
>> it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.
> Is it obviously false? The current situation shows that democratic governments are more than capable of exerting Authoritarian control over society, sure you will argue that it is a "good reason" right now due to pandemic, but the fact this control is even possible shows where the power is, and how little freedom people really have.
Yes. I, a member of the public, along with many others fully support stay-at-home orders, etc. Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."
> I did jump to an assumption based on past experiences here on HN and the context around your comments.
>>Yes. I, a member of the public, along with many others fully support stay-at-home orders, etc. Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."
so do you support 100% of every measure, every state government has taken, or is that just a board support over closing the entire economy and putting millions out of work?
Do believe there are any limits on government in a time or crisis, or more to the topic at hand do you believe in any limits on democracy or just pure 50.1% can tell the 49.9% what to do?
I will admit I am not a strong supporter of pure democracy, I do prefer Constitutional Republics with strong protections for the minority from the excesses of the majority, the minority being the individual.
History has shown the majority can not be trusted to rule over others any more than dictators can
>Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."
In a free society you can as that "dumb thing" is not directly, and provably a danger to others, and there is some libertarian arguments for for some of the stay at home orders. However many of them have gone well beyond public protection and are a clear power grab and should be unconstitutional and are a clear violation of natural human rights
But the prevailing opinion by the "majority" in this democracy is that your rights end when the crisis begins, meaning you have no rights at all, because in times of crisis is when you need your rights more than ever, right scan not and should not be "suspended" because of crisis, if they can they are not rights at all but privileges
Of-course a democracy does not have to be a free society, most people associate democracy with freedom though
Very important distinction and thank you for making note of it. While our government is inspired by democratic (rule by the people) values and allows representation through the Legislative branch, it is also designed to protect basic rights and to delegate much else to the States.
I think direct democracies work in small, culturally homogenous countries like Norway or a place where everyone is "on the same page" like Switzerland which really does have a direct democracy, but in such a large and heterogenous federation like the US it could get pretty scary pretty quickly. There is a mysteriously frightening dimension to crowd thought and mob rule that I think individuals don't think about until it's too late, too late to consider what the long-term repercussions of 51% suddenly agreeing on one thing might have.
> so do you support 100% of every measure, every state government has taken, or is that just a board support over closing the entire economy and putting millions out of work?
Who knows? That's a pretty overbroad corpus of material you're citing. That said, I'm pretty comfortable with the state-level responses so far, given the federal government response has been so inept that it required such drastic corrective measures from the states. It would be insane to knowingly choose to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands on the altar of the economy.
> Do [you] believe there are any limits on government in a time or crisis, or more to the topic at hand do you believe in any limits on democracy or just pure 50.1% can tell the 49.9% what to do?
There are, but those limits also cannot be understood to require a dysfunctional response to a crisis. Ultimately, the government has to be able to do the reasonable thing. And yes, "reasonable" is something that requires judgement and often cannot be mechanically predefined.
> I will admit I am not a strong supporter of pure democracy, I do prefer Constitutional Republics with strong protections for the minority from the excesses of the majority, the minority being the individual.
It's pretty clear that we haven't been talking about some fantasy unchecked majoritarian direct democracy, so it's a bit of a straw man to start injecting that in.
> In a free society you can as that "dumb thing" is not directly, and provably a danger to others, and there is some libertarian arguments for for some of the stay at home orders. However many of them have gone well beyond public protection and are a clear power grab and should be unconstitutional and are a clear violation of natural human rights
Eh, I disagree. Also those arguments that the government should only be able to order confirmed cases to stay home are pretty unreasonable, given the fact of asymptomatic carriers and woefully inadequate testing capability.
> But the prevailing opinion by the "majority" in this democracy is that your rights end when the crisis begins, meaning you have no rights at all, because in times of crisis is when you need your rights more than ever, right scan not and should not be "suspended" because of crisis, if they can they are not rights at all but privileges
See that's where you're misunderstanding things. Those rights are meaningless if the system that secures them is so rigid that it invites total rejection. You're right that a crisis can be a risky time, but fundamentalism is not necessarily the safest response.
Well that tells me some of my earlier assumption are infact going to end up being correct in that your political and economic positions lean pretty close to Authoritarian Socialism vs my Libertarian Free Market views
I completely reject this idea that the economy should be ignored in a time of crisis, and I also believe that if the lock down extends beyond the 2nd week of may the actual death rate due to economic loss will be higher than that of the virus. Unemployment does direct cause death, both due to increase rates of suscide, property crime, homelessness and other conditions.
This idea that the economy is some religion that we want to " sacrifice people lives on" is a completely disingenuous comment and appears you are the one making assumptions now about my beliefs
I think there was and is a better way to handle pandemics. Better than simply shutting down the entire economy, locking people in their homes, putting millions out for work, shutting permanently thousands of business, destroying Families, etc all the while expecting fiat currency printing and debt to get us through.
The economy does matter, livelihoods do matter, that is not a alter for people to be sacrifice on, it is reality. Ignore it at your own peril. I suspect given the general user base on HN, that your job (like mine) is insulated from the economic effects of this, I may see a 4-8% reduction in income this year over last. Where we differ is I recognize that not everyone is as lucky as I am, I am not about to scream "let me eat cake" and ignore their economic hardship like you seem to be able to do easily
> Well that tells me some of my earlier assumption are infact going to end up being correct in that your political and economic positions lean pretty close to Authoritarian Socialism vs my Libertarian Free Market views
LOL! You're funny!
> I think there was and is a better way to handle pandemics. Better than simply shutting down the entire economy, locking people in their homes, putting millions out for work, shutting permanently thousands of business, destroying Families, etc all the while expecting fiat currency printing and debt to get us through.
There could have been, but many groups without foresight worked to fuck it up. You can thank them for your stay at home order, which is now necessary and reasonable:
> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.... In 2014 ... Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
Not to mention the inept response and denialism at the federal level that wasted the lead time the US could have used to prepare for this pandemic, and that have continued to the present.
In some ways is not about the direct costs of the union, it is about the indirect costs that a union brings. The work force becomes much more inflexible, and everything has to be negotiated at the group level. Most unions also bring in Seniority over merit which make its harder to replace long tenure employees that have become complacent, and often people use the Union as a shield from Disciplinary actions.
I known a few people that have went through the union fight, they thought everything would be better with the union. After the voted in the union their insurance was reduced, they did get a $1 / hr raise, but the union dues were about $0.90 per hour so.... Productivity and output at that factory dropped like a stone as people believe (and proved to be true) that the union would protect them from termination. with in 3 years the factory was closed.
I would say this is largely because business management and ownership are only interested in short term returns. They have an extreme amount of incentive to only return "now," with no thought as to the true cost. That is to say, they won't be around long enough for the externalities to materialize on the balance sheet so they don't care.
That’s how the ruling class always tended to operate. History is full of examples where the peasants were starving and the rulers spent a lot of money on squashing insurgencies instead of just feeding the people. If you only care about your profit this may make sense.
If crushing an insurgency costs X$, feeding the people costs Y$, and X$ < Y$, then the optimal choice according to free market capitalism and rational actor economic theory is to crush the insurgency.
As a heuristic (as in a psychological shortcut, not necessarily a generally-correct rule of thumb), I'm guessing one just assumes that it's always less expensive in the long run to crush the insurgency. Because you assume that's a one time expense, whereas feeding the people requires accepting permanently higher operating costs.
It's more of a "give a man a fish / teach how to fish" problem.
If you fight an insurgency today, there will be a worse one tomorrow for you to fight. But if you fix your economy, you'll have a healthier economy tomorrow to tax or sell into.
But well, as you said, it costs less today. Tomorrow you can always flee the country or sell your stocks before the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, but much of the time X > Y, and the ruling class chooses "crush workers" anyway. One of the big reasons we call them the ruling class is because they consistently choose power over wealth.
The reason they state for this, is not because they don't mind payment workers more(warehouse Amazon jobs often pay more than equivalent jobs elsewhere). It's because they don't want to consult unions for changes in their business as it can take awhile.
This is literally the same reason that every nonunion shop gives. They usually couch it familial language, and paint the union (i.e. the workers they're employing) as an outside agitator.
I actual just had an experience with the opposite. I'm a graduate student in a non-union department and the university made an announcement that they would cut student pay and hours. Mind you that students are still working the same amount of time and for TAs are working longer hours because remote teaching requires even more effort and preparation. However, the university was planning to cut already our already low pay rates.
The student union organizers circulated a petition which included demands for pay, sick leave, healthcare, and funding extensions. When the petition hit like 800 signatures the university sent out an email announcing a pay raise instead of a cut, healthcare, and sick leave without a single mention of the petition. It's probably a peace offering to keep people from unionizing in the long term.
Because it's likely cheaper to bust unions once in a while than to raise standards overall and forever. Or, at least, that's what the executives think or what their right-hand people tell them. Ultimately, you could probably gather some data and prove that increasing pay, providing good vacation time, and other benefits would improve the quality of people's work and morale... But you'd have to get through to the billionaires at the top first.
Raising work standards and treating employees well is a good way to prevent unionization but it’s not always enough. Whole Foods does (or at least used to) treat their employees exceptionally well by grocery standards, and Costco famously does the same, but that didn’t stop some Costco stores from unionizing.
I had a friend who worked for a union supermarket chain. It went bankrupt as it had trouble competing with non-union chains like Whole Foods who pay their staff half of the old chains but somehow get a reputation for treating employees well. It would be good to know which stores are union and which ones aren't because it isn't obvious.
Meanwhile Safeway and Kroger are both unionized and seem to be doing just fine. Unions alone aren't the issue, though it can definitely be a cost. I wish everything in the US wasn't a race to the bottom.
Unionization isn't exclusively about pay. It's about workplace power and voice, the result of which is often higher pay but not exclusively or always. In the recent crisis having a union at Canada's major grocery chains meant they were able to demand a whole series of safety measures and accomodations (plexiglass shields, hazard pay, sick day flexibility etc.) that would have been far more difficult to obtain otherwise.
The origin of the modern union movement (as opposed to old guilds) has a lot to do with the demand for 8 hour days, weekends, and regulation of child labour -- not exclusively issues of renumeration.
Unfortunately part of the post-WWII settlement between labour and capital in the US and Canada had to do with giving up a lot of the shop floor power that unions had won during the 30s, the war, and immediately after it -- in exchange for compensation and job security. The AFL-CIO took a far more moderate political line, and clamped down on socialist and communist agitators within its organization. And when the right wing and austerity forces became more ascendant in the late 70s and into the 80s they were left with no real political tools to fight it with. Unionization, and compensation, declined. And unionization got its reputation as a bureaucratic and often corrupt practice as it failed to do much to help its workers.
Looks like they are being paid roughly 42% more hourly.
I had no idea until now, but with this in mind, I imagine unionization at Amazon will be an incredibly hard sell that is unlikely to happen unless that 42% gap shrinks significantly.
I know that I've seen union badges on employee uniforms in the public sector. Maybe not at the uniform level, but even a plaque or playing it up in advertising now that buy local is a massive thing.
(Of course, half the US population seems to reflexively shudder at the word "union" these days, so how successful this would be is... debatable.)
That may be true, but even if unionization ends up not working out it clearly should be the right of workers to choose to unionize if they want to without management interference.
Sometimes it even seems counter-intuitive. The one and only time I ever bought a new car, I ended up with an "import", because it was one of the few ones I could find that was assembled by union labor, and at a factory reasonably close to where I live.
Whole Foods seems particularly difficult, though. In my area, there aren't a whole lot of places that occupy "that" corner of the market. (Organic, sure, but the main thing I'm looking for is clearly labeled local produce, bulk bins, and some harder-to-find ingredients such as vital wheat gluten.) The only ones I can get to by public transit in less than 60 minutes are Whole Foods, and a grocery co-op. And I'm inclined to guess that, however crappy Whole Foods may be about this sort of thing, their compensation is still way better than the "15% off your groceries as a thanks for volunteering, and the satisfaction of being more involved in our community" that the co-op is offering to the people who work their registers.
This is why unions try to organize within an entire geography all at once, so that the store they're organizing isn't at disadvantage from competition.
Sometimes I wonder if we will ever reach the point at which the people that Amazon would never employ combined with the people who would never agree to be employed by Amazon leaves them with fewer people than they need.
Amazon makes the front page because of a variety of reasons, but there are thousands of large employers that are worse in every way. We have a loooong way to go before Amazon's policies are an actual disqualifier for people who work these jobs. Walmart is still training employees on how to file for public assistance. Many large chains still won't employ you based on your sexual orientation. So many small and large employers steal wages, deny benefits, pay under the table and more. All of that and unemployment is hitting record numbers right now.
Imagine my business is feeding wood into chipping machines, and I train every employee in how to apply a tourniquet if they chop their own hand off.
For an employer with a great safety record, that would be slightly unusual, but safety training covers the unlikely all the time. Nothing wrong with that!
On the other hand if three of the hundred guys I employ have lost a hand, the same training takes on a completely different tone: It would evince an acceptance the same accidents will happen again, and an unwillingness to improve safety.
Presumably, prospective Walmart employees are well aware that they aren't well off people, and that getting public assistance would be of substantial benefit to them. I don't think they'd find it an issue in the same way that they would for example an employer where a bunch of people lose their hands in accidents.
The problem is that while you can make the argument that they are doing their employees a 'service'; anyone who has paid attention to how businesses run understands they wouldn't have even bothered doing this if it weren't being used as a means to get a leg up on the competition. I.e, they are relying on government benefits intended to be a safety net to pay their employees for them instead of actually paying competitively in wages and benefits.
It's scummy, but makes the balance sheets look great.
Yes, every employer provides their employees perks as a means to get a leg up on the competition. That's precisely one of the main point of perks (the other point being to remove sources of stress from employees' lives so they are more productive). I don't see what's scummy about this.
The scummy part is that they're effectively subsidizing their payroll with taxpayer money, and they are doing this very intentionally and know exactly what they're doing.
Ah the old 'Not my problem' argument. A couple issues with this -- companies actively campaign against legislature which increases wages, so it's not that they are just ignoring the welfare of their workers they actively push against it.
And why is it not the hiring manager's job to ensure the welfare of their workers? What makes that axiomatic to you? That seems like a social construct that we've (maybe) generally settled on, but nothing says that's necessarily the way it has to be.
> companies actively campaign against legislature which increases wages, so it's not that they are just ignoring the welfare of their workers they actively push against it.
That's not true in the case we're discussing though. Walmart often campaigns for increases to the minimum wage, because they know it will hurt their competition.
Walmart has (recently, as far as I'm aware) began lobbying for it because they know they can absorb labor costs more readily, sure. But the largest business lobbying group in the US advocates against raising the minimum wage, pushing back against workplace safety, and other work welfare initiatives: https://www.uschamber.com/labor
The nature of relationship between a business and an employee is such that it is not reasonable to expect that a business would even have the information necessary to take on that responsibility. Furthermore, many of those information gaps are intentional, to prevent discrimination.
If you were interviewing me, how would you determine my appropriate wage?
You don't need demographic information to take care of your workers. Everyone needs health care -- cover it. Even if not everyone needs parental leave -- cover it. Vacation policies and sick time -- cover them.
Base your wages on the value of the labor, and try to maximize what you pay workers rather than paying the minimum pass the threshold they will accept.
Limit the wages of your company's highest paid workers relative to your lowest paid workers.
That is wildly vague. How much coverage is sufficient for your employees?
> Base your wages on the value of the labor, and try to maximize what you pay workers rather than paying the minimum pass the threshold they will accept.
That sounds good, but it’s not very quantitative. How do you specifically propose that someone calculate “value of labor” independently of the wages accepted by your workforce?
Also, how would you ensure I can afford the above-mentioned food and housing? While vacation is nice, food and housing are certainly more immediate needs.
The fact that Walmart trains their employees on how to get public benefits is an implicit admission that they know they aren't paying them enough. Maybe defining "enough" is hard, but they're not even trying, and are instead explicitly pushing the burden onto taxpayers. That's reprehensible; I personally do not care to subsidize their workforce just because they want higher margins.
Even just raising wages and watching how much attendance at these "welfare training sessions" declines would be an improvement.
While I definitely think wages should be higher, I don't think your assessment of the situation is accurate. Walmart didn't invent welfare. Walmart lobbies for higher wages, and pays higher than many comparable jobs. Them doing their employees a favor isn't a bad thing, they could just as easily pay low wages and not bother trying to help their employees with public assistance.
Small businesses are the reason the minimum wage is still 7.25, not Walmart.
I think a employer should just pay fair wage and not suggest the employee to ask for benefits from the government to have enough income to cover bills.
They do it as a direct response to the fact that they know they don't pay their workers a living wage.
I suppose it's nice of them to help their workers get access to public benefits, but in general they're just a terrible societal citizen for not paying their workers enough to live off of.
> people who would never agree to be employed by Amazon
The number of people who would never work for Amazon out of principle is extremely small. The vast majority people choose jobs rationally based on the pros and cons of their work options. Amazon will be able to hire people as long as they have the cash to entice workers.
The people who would not work for Amazon are rational, too, they just have different values than you do. I'm one of those people, and I'm not some raving lunatic.
Choosing to not work now at Amazon based on a current weighing of pros and cons, moral or otherwise, is a rational choice.
Choosing to never work at Amazon is not based on reason, but prejudgment. One cannot rationalize the unknown. This is what my original statement was in reply to.
Sorry, I'm a bit quick on the gun here because HN readers tend to be really 'libertarian' and don't understand the idea of someone not wanting to drop their ethical standard to work for a lot of money.
Clickbait title. They aren’t tracking employees, just stores.
As to what they’re actually doing, it seems like a good thing if they proactively find stores with potentially larger employee resentment and find ways to make conditions there better, but it’s rather unseemly that they would only do that with the purpose of preventing unionization efforts.
If unionization is a significant risk to a business's share price, it is malpractice to fail to assess it and plan accordingly. This sophisticated approach seems like a positive signal to investors. It's like tax avoidance, financially and ethically.
If I close a store in city A and open one in city B because of more favorable taxes, that's tax avoidance without any corruption needed anywhere. The same is true if the motive is a lower risk of unionizing. No dishonesty or hidden payoffs are required.
Corruption is like the air we breathe -- it's everywhere, and we've all gotten so used to it that we don't even notice it anymore. You don't think state and local tax rates (in City A and City B) are also driven by corporate money?
My point isn't that Politician X took a bribe for Corporation Y and that's why taxes are low. I'm saying that laws have been designed in a way that favors those who currently have the most political power. It's so engrained that it's difficult to imagine a system without it. Now, that's not to say that this can't change over time and different groups can't acquire more political power through organizing or otherwise, but in my view the state of things currently is that corporate money dominates politics.
You call them "anti-worker laws", but they are just lobbying for laws which they believe will further their interests, which is exactly what unions do on the other side. Perhaps Whole Foods should not be permitted to lobby for favorable legislation and regulation, but the same restriction should be applied to their counter-parties (the unions).
I'm not arguing that corporations shouldn't be allowed to lobby. Of course they should. I'm arguing that we have a corrupt system that is terribly biased in favor of corporations and against working people and that it results in terrible laws that are easily exploited... and when companies get called out for anti-worker attitudes, they then turn around and blame the very laws they helped enact!
Edit: Even though I don't want to ban lobbying, it's worth pointing out that a quick google search (with more time could find better numbers admittedly) shows how ridiculously unbalanced lobbying is. So, I mean, doing so wouldn't be good but is more radically pro-labor than basically anything that unions are asking for. Corporate lobbying: $3.42 billion. Union lobbying: Less than $50 million. So, like 70X.
The company represents people too; those people just happen to be shareholders, and not employees. There is also a spectrum of companies, from mom-and-pop corporations and sole proprietorships and worker-owner co-operatives through member-owned co-operatives, all the way to publicly-traded corporations.
Worth noting that there's not some Law of the Universe that says corporations SHOULDN'T represent the workers. In the United States, we've made political decisions that they shouldn't, and should instead only represent shareholders.
But other countries have decided differently. And there are calls, for example, to have workers represent 40% of many corporate boards.
You comment makes it clear WholeFoods is looking after their shareholders very well. Excellent.
Are they looking after their employees as well?
Do you want to live in a world where shareholders are the priority, or employees?
Keep in mind, you and everyone you love are employees. So are the people down the street struggling to pay rent, and the guys across town with little food and nothing to lose.
"you and everyone you love are employees" This is a weird forum to make a blanket statement like that.
(I generally agree with your sentiments, incidentally, I would just expect that the ratio of independent freelancers, corporate founders, and outsider oddballs here is extremely high)
I've worked in growing, static and shrinking companies, and don't think it's coincidence that I've been much better treated and compensated all around in the growing ones. To the extent that correlation is causal, employer and employee incentives align.
I wonder why they suggest that racial diversity has an inverse relationship with union formation. Is this because of a broader range of employee perspectives on work? Are employees in diverse environments less comfortable talking to one another? Both? Something else?
If I've learned anything from growing up in the South, it's that having both poor white people and poor black people makes it much easier for those in power to convince both groups that the other is the source of all of their problems instead of it being the rich and powerful.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson
I would be curious to see the numbers and whether they truly mean "diversity" or if it is being used as code for non-white. For example, would an all Latinx workforce be more or less likely to unionize? If they are using the dictionary definition of "diversity", that indicates something interesting about people's ability to empathize and work together with people of other races. If "diversity" is just a code for non-white, it might simply be a substitute for a variety of other socioeconomic factors that we know correlate with race that might impact an employees' likelihood to unionize.
Carnegie definitely tried to keep a diverse workforce in his steel mills as part of his strategy for fighting unionization.
I'd expect the main driver would be different groups within the workforce feeling that they're different sorts of people hurting efforts to band together, for which it's mostly subjective diversity that would hurt. The sort of thing where a mix of old-stock Americans, Irish-Americans, and Italian Americans would have considered themselves racially diverse in 1920 but not in the modern day.
Other potential things would be different languages, different notions of fairness, attending different social organizations, etc.
All other things being equal (and of course they never are), it seems like organizing in a homogenous cultural environment would be much easier than otherwise.
You could also have some economic pressure (low wages from whole foods) causing fewer ethnicities to self select into the job because they have better options elsewhere [1]. Then the workers realize things aren't so great and try to improve their situation through unionizing.
Interestingly, various Greek tyrants were known for intentionally diversifying their cities in an attempt to break the solidarity of a population that might otherwise rise against them.
Thucydides noted: "A crowd like that are hardly likely to respond unanimously to any proposal or to organize themselves for joint action"
I've also read the "conspiracy theory" that racial division is pushed in an attempt to disrupt solidarity based on economic class.
I was more referring to the "conspiracy theory" that such a tactic is currently in use by the powers that be. Not a topic I am familiar with so I certainly won't dispute that it occurred historically.
There were several rocky points in the history of unions relating to the transition of some large, existing unions from "white only" to "all inclusive", likewise from "male only" to "all inclusive". The TLDR is, "There are a lot of bigots who would rather hurt themselves than help someone they don't like."
Unions don't have the same reputation in all countries. They're viewed very differently by much of the general population in the UK and US than they are in continental Europe.
The article directly contradicts its title. They aren't "heat mapping employees" they came up with a scoring system to estimate the most likely stores to unionize.
"The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, "tipline" calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."
Whatever they are doing to avoid employees unionizing, it isn't "heat mapping" them. It isn't even heat mapping stores. That would imply some sort of density+value combination. This is a ranking based on weighting various data points into a single score.
Yeah, but it's business insider we are talking about.
A title like "Retailer give points to each of their store" (which is exactly what the article explains) does not sound nearly as scary as anything containing the words "heat mapping employees" (which the article explicitly contradicts).
You can't really expect "chief correspondent" specializing in "breaking news, analysis, and in-depth investigations on large public and private companies" to resist the temptation to drive clicks by writing the most sensationally wrong title they could find.
Personally, I consider this heat-mapping, since I think of heat-mapping as any value over area, regardless of how the value is derived. What specifically makes you feel this case doesn't qualify? Also, do you think there is something nefarious about the term "heat-mapping"?
They are - at best - heat mapping stores, not employees. And heat map have a sense of density over a region, it is by definition continuous values where the area has a major impact on the final value.
Here they just rate each store. If this is considering "heat mapping". Then basically anything that gives score to stuff that can be placed on a map is also "heat mapping". This includes :
- Your company "heat mapping" their clients according to the revenue they generate
- The US department of education "heat mapping" the students based on the SAT scores
- My mom "heat mapping" her next holiday destination based on price
When we think about heat-mapping a person, we immediately imagine tracking where that person spends time. Until I read the article, I was imagining whole food setting up cameras in their store to see if employees spend time congregating. And that would be a horrible thing to do. But giving points to stores based on - among other signals - how many sales they generate. Well... that is the least worrying thing I read all day.
So the whole point of the article is to instill fear into the reader by - willingly - using the wrong terminology to give a bad image to a known company - even going as far as adding "Amazon-owned", just for the sake of it - until the astute reader notice of deceiving the article really is.
And if you did not take the time to fully read their "article" (I have other words that are far less nice to describe that kind of writing) well your judgment of a company just got biased without any ground.
While I agree that "heatmapping" can be interpreted the way the article used it, I don't think that this is what comes to people's minds when they hear that phrase, so I would call it misleading at best.
But saying that they are "heatmapping employees" is blatantly wrong. They aren't heatmapping individual employees, they are scoring/heatmapping stores.
yeah, but what are they measuring? The building? The profit-loss statements? No. They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store. If you're measuring the employees in a store, it is perfectly reasonable to say you're measuring the employees. Sure you could change policies and affect P(union), but you'd still be measuring the effect on employee attitudes.
>They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store.
You answered your own question here. This is the exact same thing all corporate surveys and evaluations are measuring.
When a company does performance reviews, annual surveys to get employees feedback on things, re-evaluates what kind of candidates they need to attract and how to adjust their recruiting efforts appropriately (e.g., "we hire too many people from target schools, we need to start reaching out more to the talent pool outside of those"), etc. It is all the same thing, and every single company over a certain size does it.
You don't think McDonalds or Home Depot or Kroger do a similar kind of "heatmapping" to evaluate the state of their branches and the employee feedback? Even at tech companies, it is a thing. My employer does an annual company-wide (anonymized) survey, asking all employees for their opinions on their work engagement, fairness of compensation, etc. And from what I heard from my friends working at other tech companies, they all have something similar.
I’m really confused now. Is it “blatantly wrong” to say they’re measuring employees or not? Because it sounds like you’re trying to split a hair, but there’s no hair to split.
>Is it “blatantly wrong” to say they’re measuring employees or not?
Yes, because they are not measuring each employee individually. At no point in the decision-making process individual employee data is used. They are obtaining and using the data as an anonymized aggregate and then draw conclusions based on it.
Which is very different from what "heatmapping employees" would imply. If it was "heatmapping stores" in the original post title (which was changed since I posted my first comment in this thread), then I would have no issue with it whatsoever.
I'm pretty sure that producing a single score tracking the liklihood of a unionization movement at every store is "heat mapping" up to isomorphism. Your density values are provided by physical location.
OK so if it's not the employees, I'd like to know, in the universe of this quote, what people or entities are promoting a union and creating this "risk" of uninionization? Out of this whole story this is the most disingenuous bit that annoys me the most. If the majority of employees were against the union, they would stop it themselves without company help, wouldn't they? Still, it's very generous of them to look out for employee interests like that, large eyeroll.