In 1920 Appalachia, coal companies owned all the land, the homes and stores. They also paid workers with their own special money (that was useless everywhere else). The security companies they hired where armed and violent towards miners and their families.
Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.
This is where the Tennessee Ernie Ford song comes from, "Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store."
There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
I would be remiss not to mention that Sixteen Tons was a Merle Travis song, recorded for the bona fide classic album[0] Folk Songs of the Hills. Both songs are classics, but the Travis version deserves to be heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I15_KUsOzs
0: The album was released in 1947 prior to the introduction of the 12" LP, so it was originally released as a literal album of multiple 78rpm singles. It is one of the first concept albums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Songs_of_the_Hills
This reminds me of a similar, and quite popular, 90's rock song in Australia called "Blue Sky Mine" [0]. It refers to the horrible exploitive activities of CSL on an asbestos mine in the Pilbara region of Australia where they controlled their workers in a similar manner to what you describe here.
Whether someone owns the land by property right or "owns" "common grounds" by administrative right, the result seems to be the same: Oppression of those, who don't.
And this is why a strong opposition is important. It makes oppression much more difficult.
(Probably) The first aerial bombardment on US soil was when private planes dropped homemade bombs on striking coal workers at Blair Mountain in 1921. The US has a looong and brutal history of breaking up labor movements.
> A far better documented incident occurred in southern Illinois in Williamson County in November 1926. "Bloody Williamson" had already garnered national notoriety during the 1920s as the site of labor unrest among coal mine unions, one of the bloodiest Ku Klux Klan wars in history, and gang warfare between two rival groups of liquor bootleggers. The Birger Gang, led by Russian immigrant Charlie Birger, and the Shelton Gang, led by brothers Carl, Earl and Bernie, had been involved in a bloody turf battle for domination of the southern Illinois liquor racket for several months. Their ever-escalating arms race had evolved from shotguns to tommy guns and even homemade trucks covered with armored plate used to shoot up each other's roadhouses.
> The warfare turned particularly violent in November 1926 as a series of shootings, bombings, and destruction of property caused terror throughout the county. Upping the ante once again, the Sheltons embarked on a bold plan to destroy the Birger Gang hideout, a place known as Shady Rest. They approached a pilot on a barnstorming tour and coerced him into taking a member of the gang on an overflight of the Birger roadhouse. On 12 November 1926, gang member Blackie Armes climbed aboard the old Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane carrying several bombs, each made out of dynamite sticks bound around a bottle of nitroglycerine. While passing over Shady Rest, Armes lighted and dropped three of the devices. Only one exploded, missing its intended target and instead killing Birger's favorite bulldog and pet bird. Though initially stunned, members of the Birger gang fired back but did no damage. The shocked pilot flew back to the airfield, let the gangster off, and then immediately took off again, probably fearing for his life!
It's definitely either Blair Mountain or the Tulsa Race Massacre; there are some disputes about there actually being planes bombing in Tulsa but there was definitely a bomb dropped at Blair because one dud showed up in court. Both were in 1921 though which beats your thing by several years, didn't know about it though it's a wild story.
And let’s not forget why we have a separate Labor Day in the US:
>Labor Day has conservative roots. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland pushed Congress to establish the holiday as a way to de-escalate class tension following the Pullman Strike, during which as many as ninety workers were gunned down by thousands of US Marshals serving at the pleasure of railway tycoon George Pullman, one of the time’s most hated industrial barons.
>Cleveland was wary of the response to his actions. He signed Labor Day into law a mere six days after busting the strike.
That was thrown right not air dropped? I was mostly using it as a punctuation point about the violence and power imbalance applied to stop any labor movement in the US. But yeah there's a deep deep history of the government coming in to violently break up labor strikes for capital long before and long after 1921.
If getting your health insurance through your employer creates dependency and gives your employer more control over you (and it does) then why is it a good idea to give this power to the government?
Your employer can mistreat you under the threat of losing your employer-provided health insurance. If everyone had government-provided health insurance, then employers would have less leverage. Government-provided health insurance can also ease the burden and risk for people starting new companies.
It also maximizes the number of people paying into the insurance pool.
> If getting your health insurance through your employer creates dependency and gives your employer more control over you (and it does) then why is it a good idea to give this power to the government?
Does your government have due process? If it does, how would that government use an obligation to provide you health insurance against you to influence your decisions?
People quit jobs far more often than they quit countries, and employer provided insurance does tie you to more strongly to your employer (e.g. I knew someone who needed a heart transplant who would literally die if he went without insurance, because he depended on a heart pump).
Also, you have to get insurance/healthcare from somewhere, and in a democracy the government is far more accountable to its citizens than an employer typically is to its employees [1].
[1] This is very clear in the typical case, but less clear for people with rare in-demand skills (like software engineers).
We also had the ludlow massacre where the local militia and mine company guards attacked the miners with machine guns (pre nfa...) and dynamite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre.
It's important to remember that the strikers started the violence:
>>When leasing the sites, the union had selected locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps in order to block any strikebreakers' traffic.
Blocking strikebreaker traffic amounts to using violence to obstruct others' freedom of movement.
Strikebreakers were often assaulted and sometimes murdered.
The fundamentally coercive nature of historical striking activity is heavily glossed over, and modern day anti-free-market ideologues go to extreme lengths to try to justify it.
For some reason, the history page on the Pinkerton website has a big hole in it between 1907 and 1962. What could they have been up to in the early 20th Century, I wonder?
https://pinkerton.com/our-story/history
Is there anything stopping workers from crowdsource their own protection anonymously? Does it have to be some kind of formal union?
If you think about it, work is just a business deal and wouldn't be possible for employees create some kind of company that deals with the companies they are employed? Pretty much like an agency, I guess.
Oh, do you honestly think such an "secretive, radical union cell" funded by "dark money" would be allowed to exist and interface with corporates? (words in scare-quotes would be how this would be framed by employers and the media - they may or may not throw in foreign funding, Venezuela or China could get name-dropped with zero evidence).
It doesn’t have to be secret, just your membership is secret.
It can have open plan offices in a cool neighborhood, pay politicians and all.
Just have centralized Emlpoyers information management system where information about employers, like salaries they pay business they do, the good and the bad to work there etc.
So when you are getting a job you apply to your not-union and they tell you what to expect and how much to ask. No more guesswork.
It’s like an HR that works for you. So it’s BR, businesses resources.
Then the companies begin to fire employees that they find are part of this system and hire organizations like the Pinkertons to infiltrate and destroy your business resource system.
Anyway, the idea is to have a coordinator that work on your benefit. Companies, even the large ones are simply people coordinated by the capital owners.
The not-union is a coordinator for the people who are not the capital owners but those who deal with the capital owners.
The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners.
> The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners.
This sounds similar to "the aim is to be good, not bad".
Your assertion does not lie on facts but on your personal moral interpretation and even prejudice against a label.
Unions are organizations whose aim is to represent workers and defend their best interests with the company's representatives.
Sometimes the company's goals are in direct opposition to the workers's best interests. How do you expect the negotiations to go if the company plans to strong-arm and coherce their workers into submissions.
Well, this is not a union therefore doesn't match all the features and objectives. The not-union aims to relieve inherit disadvantages of individuals v.s. corporations while preserving individual freedoms and free market dynamics. Just like companies coming together to fix a price and specs of their products thus leaving consumers with no options, workers coming together to force their own preferences by leaving companies with no options is also unacceptable.
If the unions actually do the things that you describe and people are happy with it, they should opt out for unions.
Sounds like a talent agent. Sectors that utilize talent agents often still have strong collective bargaining agreements and unions in place. Part of the power of a union is the ability to deprive a business or industry of labor. A talent agent alone does not provide such leverage.
See, it's not a union. Unions are apparently uncool in the USA. Think of it as Musk inventing the Tube by removing the engineeringly silly parts of the Hyperloop and adding a sharing economy feature to the result :)
Why would you share your "not-union" membership with your employer? Instead, use it as a coordinator between your peers to prevent being underpaid and overworked do to information disparity you normally have in your relationship with you employer and if you get screwed it turns out you have access to lawyers.
The issue is that being in a "not-union" isn't a protected class, so you could probably get fired for it after your employer sent the "not-Pinkertons" to do some intel.
To prevent this, you'd have to get your "not-Union" to either have huge solidarity, or lobby the government to make that a protected class.
Maybe if you went for the first you could make a song about it, how about "Solidarity not-for-finite-periods-of-time"?
Why would they fire or investigate you? It’s not like you’re organizing strikes or anything like that. You are simply benefiting of the same knowledge that companies have to have a fairer deal.
How are you going to negotiate without striking (or threatening a strike)? Why would the company care that you know you're being underpaid if you're still going to do your job either way?
Individuals make their ways up and down the stack all the time. This doesn't change the income distribution. [0] Knowledge isn't the only power. Solidarity is also power, and it can change the income distribution. Unfortunately, knowledge of this has been lost.
Because you leveling the playing field is a net loss for them. Companies like to use their information and coordination advantage, and exploit it to their benefit.
It's why some companies will try to find ways to fire you if you share your salary.
Thanks to the not-union, the other party is not simply a single worker relying on an hourly wage job. Instead , the worker knows what can reasonably get from the company and if the company wrongs the worker, the not-union has the resources to help thanks to the subscription fees collected from the large number of members(potentially billions just like the companies).
It’s not about extortion, it’s about fair deal. The knowledge is useful as market research, in a similar way knowing rent prices in the neighborhood when renting.
In the current situation, companies have access to this and employees don’t.
He's referring to organized crime/racketeering. Your 'not-union' scheme seems like organized crime if you squint a bit and imagine that it would be backed up with violence.
Populist tough-guy shakes down businesses to get back at The Man or some such.
Plus unions in the US have often been infiltrated by organized crime.
This is a not-union, it doesn’t have those elements at all. It has a fancy office, a responsive website that nags you to use the app instead, and blogs about how they implemented the latest FUD and does have open source projects.
It has a Twitter savvy CEO a it’s mission is to make the world a better place.
I respect a history lesson, but honestly, I think old comrade tales are not helpful.
I don't mean that it's irrelevant, strictly, but we hear more of these than 2020 tales, 2020 strategies and concerns. This is 100 year later, and despite of how many union die hards see it... most workers aren't likely to buy int a centuries long struggle. They're interested in their own lives & jobs.
1. Their own struggles aren't new: companies have been trying to fuck workers over since time immemorial, and
2. There is a well-known solution to these problems: unions.
Are you working 16 hours a day, barely able to afford rent + food + utilities, and slipping further into debt every day? It doesn't have to be that way, and we have a really good idea, based on historical facts, about how to fix it.
Nobody claimed a utopia. Extracting natural resources is always going to be a tough job that is ripe for exploitation.
Did unions improve the lives of members? They certainly did where I come from. American labour history is more complex (union corruption and take over by organised crime seemed to run deeper)
That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives
But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people
Where unions are more focused on their own political power than helping workers
Or even if in general the union helped the "average worker" the collectivist nature of unions means not everyone will be better off. For example Seniority, and "personal connections" are often more of a driving factor in Unions than merit or work performance. In fact highly efficient hard workers are often driven out of unions or forced to "work slower", etc.
>That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives
But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people
The answer to this is not airy theorizing or anecdotes but statistical evidence. There are many people who do this. See for example figure 9 here:
Right, I think the point is that while things have improved since then, workers are still exploited. The only way to change that is for people to band together. Large, diverse, unified groups can bring about change.
The coal miners were mostly Irish and German immigrants and African Americans. They all joined together and brought about changes that workers still benefit from today. People in 2020 can do the same.
I get that 100 years sounds like a long time, but the coal miners unionization stories are my grandfather's. Things change fast and it is good to keep the past in mind when evaluating the decisions we make today.
I'm all for the Amazon hate train but this is pretty weak. The journalist first says Pinkerton was hired in Poland to investigate irregularities in their application process. Amazon says they only hire Pinkerton to "secure shipments". The "acquired document" says that Amazon tracks social media information about labor organization and strokes. It's all over the place, and even assuming all parties report the truth, no one actually says that Pinkerton is doing surveillance related to unions.
Maybe NPR is missing something from the original article, which I couldn't find linked, but come on.
One of the common threads in media critiques like Manufacturing Consent and Hate, Inc. is that direct editorial control is not necessary in order to promote your agenda. Control of money and access, along with ideological indoctrination of journalists at elite universities, is all that's needed. See also my comment below about NPR listenership and trust in Amazon as an institution.
Semi-off-topic but Manufacturing Consent really changed the way I see the world and think about media. As a kid I never questioned that Iraq War-era Time magazine article with diagrams of a mobile nuclear weapons facility. It should be required reading.
> You actually believe that Amazon has editorial control over NPR and specifically exerted that leverage to make this article incoherent?
You don't have to have editorial control to have influence.
For instance: how smart would it be for you to complain about your employer in public forums under your own name? People call that "biting the hand that feeds you." So even if you have a legitimate grievance or have witnessed clearly unethical behavior with your employer, maybe you decide to keep quiet because you need the money from your job.
Your employer just influenced what you write without having any editorial control over you.
This is the story of our entire media. No, they didn't line by line come in and edit the article, but any media outlet is going to self-censor to not lose a big sponsor. I think that's pretty self-evident at this point. The classic Manufacturing Consent does a deep dive into this dynamic.
Related, newspapers are historically unprofitable. Why would someone like Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Like any investment, he expects some kind of return. And the return in this case clearly isn't direct revenue.
Do you have any proof of that? Otherwise it's just conspiracy theory. Sometimes people do things that don't benefit them. It's called charity. I don't think that Bezos is a saint, but I also don't think he bought the New York Post to be his mouthpiece nor would the editors allow it.
I think you would find that the book or two hour YouTube documentary “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky provides compelling answers to your questions. I do understand it can be irritating to hear “watch this two hour doc” as a response to an internet comment, but it really is a master work on the subject. I haven’t seen it in a few years so I can’t do its arguments justice, but it completely changed my views on how media works. I have been meaning to watch it again though.
For a different take there is a YouTube series from “Crash Course” on “media literacy” that I suspect goes over this, but I haven’t gotten that far in the series yet.
And then there’s also Michael Parenti, another author who has written and has YouTube talks on the subject.
Either way I just want to say it’s not wild conspiracy theory. It is an established body of work people are talking about here.
NPR's CEO previously was in charge of external propaganda: "From 2015 to 2019, Lansing served as the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the independent federal agency whose programming reaches an average weekly audience of 345 million people in 62 languages." [0] Now at NPR he coordinates internal propaganda. Angry Bezos emails will be career-shortening for NPR staff.
NPR is on the record [0] as not even informing their editorial staff of their 175+ sponsors, which causes other issues (for which there is actual evidence, which, while reasonable, I haven't seen for your theory):
> That lack of awareness has led to some embarrassments in the past. Online spots from America's Natural Gas Alliance once ran next to a series on fracking, for example.
Some excerpts that I liked (keep in mind, these are out of context, which is largely focused on why we should keep a very close eye out):
> Companies are most interested in getting their name before NPR's audience. They are, in other words, more interested in you than they are in NPR's journalism.
> The staff that sells sponsorships does not contact the newsroom to ask for coverage favor for a corporate client. To do so is a firing offense.
> Companies and marketers almost universally know not to ask journalists for coverage favors in return for sponsorship and advertising. To do so would be an insult—like asking a professional journalist to be a prostitute. It would invite distrust and negative coverage. It also would undermine the independence that attracted NPR's coveted audience in the first place.
> "Rote disclosures of every connection to a sponsor would not only clutter our programs, and be rendered meaningless in the process, but would also require producers to have an awareness of our corporate supporters that could actually be counter-productive and erode our firewall."
There's no need for anything so obvious as a request from the sposorship sales staff to the newsroom, or corporate sponsors asking journalists for favors. It could be an unspoken, unwritten understanding, subtle enough that the newsroom staff and journalists might honestly deny it exists. Just knowing that Amazon is a major sponsor of your employer (and hence, your job) is going to affect how you write about them, whether or not any overt favors have been requested.
I mean this with all due respect, but highlighting NPR's own defense of their editorial practices is hardly convincing.
NPR routinely runs editorial pieces that were pitched to them by corporate sponsors or their fronts like think tanks. They likewise have have discussion panels featuring these groups' talking heads. Listen to a few episodes of Marketplace if you want the most obvious corporate propaganda imaginable. Their impartiality is laughable.
It's a distinction without any real difference. You could make the same argument about Planet Money, an NPR show, that went out of the way to provide cover for the banks during the financial crisis, had their host attack Elizabeth Warren in an interview, all while taking money from the same industry. Adam Davidson (the host who attacked Warren) of course then also went on to collect all kinds of "speaking fees" from financial institutions.
It's a distinction with a difference. And no, I could not make the same argument about Planet Money, since that show is produced by NPR.
If you say "American public radio", do you also include Democracy Now? Do you include shows produced by other local stations, including the ones that do not get distributed? NPR is not the totality of "American public radio".
Understanding the structure of public broadcasting in the USA is critical to understand why it works the way that it does. NPR is a distinct organization, even from CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), even if its sensibilities are echoed in other public radio organizations (like MPR/APM).
As for your points about Adam Davidson, I don't find that shameproject.com page particularly persuasive. It's clear that Davidson's worldview does not align with that of the people/person who wrote the page/manages the site. I don't find this particularly remarkable or even particularly interesting. Davidson's worldview doesn't really line up with my own either. But there's a bunch of stuff on that page (the quotes in particular) which lack context, and a lot of other stuff that consists mostly of deeply subjective assessments and assignment of motive to Davidson without much evidence.
Not taking money from the people you’re covering is the barest minimum of journalistic ethics. Regardless, of whether you or I agree with anything else on that site, Adam Davidson, or whoever else, failing to meet that basic standard should be patently disqualifying. The fact that he was the host of a flagship, economic reporting show, even more so.
There are many other reasons I find it hard to take NPR’s claims of impartiality seriously, but this one is so glaringly wrong that it speaks for itself.
I don't accept anyone's claims of impartiality. This notion of objective journalism is a US disease, and it needs to be stamped out as rapidly and as widely as possible. I view NPR as an excellent source of reporting on "people's lives as they experience them" and "the political status quo". I would never dream of considering NPR to be how I found out about ideas and practices outside of the political status quo - that's just not what they (or any other mainstream media) does.
If you read something like the Financial Times, it’s actually far less propagandistic than most “business news.” It mostly just reports the raw, unfiltered reality of Capitalist exchange. There are actually quite a few Marxists who like the paper for this reason.
When contrasted with something like Marketplace, which ceaselessly and glibly spins the darker realities of our economy to somehow be “upbeat” or “positive,” the difference becomes more obvious. And this is an editorial and ideological choice made by NPR, pursuing this framing.
Who needs to be coherent or honest when you can thrill your listeners by smearing some company you both already hate? Things like honesty and integrity are wicked when they fail to serve the cause; this is a time for deliberate obfuscation!
— npr, probably
Geez, guys. There's so many good reasons to go after Amazon; you'd think one of them would be enough, but nooooo.
Amazon was recently polled to be the most trusted institution among US Democrats [0], which comprises the majority of NPR's listenership and donors. They know what they're doing.
(1) That poll is from July 2018, and while that's technically recent, in terms of news about big tech that can affect perceptions, a lot's happened in the last two years.
(2) According to the poll, Amazon was the third most-trusted institution among US Republicans, just behind "military" and "local police", and was the second-most trusted institution behind the military across all respondents. I think you're putting more emphasis on partisan affiliation here with respect to Amazon than the data warrants.
That, or, Amazon knows from history (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, even going as far back as Standard Oil) that the public trust is not to be taken for granted. They have strong incentives to stay ahead of any negative sentiment that might arise.
There have been sporadic reports for about a year of major hiring/contracting related to internal security and union activity. EG: publicly posted positions that said the "quite part out loud," anonymous whistleblowers and some leaked docs.
I think this article specifically relates to a report by motherboard a week or two ago where they got emails leaked to them from Amazon's "Global Security Operations Center."
Here's a better article by Vice. They Pinkerton hire seems to have been confirmed by amazon spokesperson.
"Internal emails sent to Amazon's Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division's team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action)"
It just astounds me that the Old Timey Pinkertons are still around, to be honest. That is a company that my 98 year old grandfather tells stories about from his childhood.
I know there are other old companies, but Pinkerton is one of those that just sounds old fashioned.
They're owned by Securitas today, the Swedish security guard company. Which makes the decision to continue using "Pinkerton" as a _brand name_ even more of an intimidation tactic, IMO. And I think it ultimately results in demonstrating how committed Bezos is to fighting this.
I was reminded of their continued existence earlier this year when, in a strange reversal of fate, a Pinkerton shot and killed a pro-law enforcement protestor:
Really disappointing to see the "Well, what did you expect?" comments already. Just because companies have been trying to prevent organization of their labor for over a century doesn't mean it isn't still messed up now. It's easy to say that it's just the way the world works from your desk, the people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions don't have that luxury.
“What did you expect?” is my least favorite conversational trope (it’s more disappointing on HN because in general I have higher expectations here, but it’s common everywhere).
On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it.
I suppose it is relevant to whether something makes good content, but hopefully most of us aren’t here primarily to comment on our judgment of content marketability
I think the most common place I see it is with surveillance conversations
Though I should note that I’m not seeing those comments towards the top anymore, so that’s good
I love the common tropes, you only have to learn a single response that allows you to control the narrative.
> What did you expect?
Well, geez, I don't know basic human decency probably? Are we all so numb to asshattery that we're not surprised or upset when we learn about someone using power to hurt or control the little guy?
This brand of cynicism where you claim that everything is expected can also be a way to protect yourself from negative information. If you care about say privacy and you constantly receive news about surveillance, it can be disheartening, so it's easier to dismiss the news with "well, what did you expect?". I know I used to do that, in my head at least. I'm not advocating for cynicism of course, just saying that people might be doing it for deeper reasons than sounding smart and world-weary.
> “What did you expect?” is my least favorite conversational trope (it’s more disappointing on HN because in general I have higher expectations here, but it’s common everywhere).
> On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it.
Yeah, it's pretty much just a lazy dismissal of the issue, and maybe even an attempt to jam up the discussion.
I have stopped ordering from amazon.com but do still use AWS. I should probably evaluate other cloud providers, when I made the decision to use AWS about 5 years ago there were no other providers that offered all the functionality I wanted. It was also easy enough to throw a rock and hit a certified aws consultant.
My company is on DigitalOcean, but we're not exactly web scale yet, so I can't vouch for them on that level. Their support is nice and responsive, though, and their management interface is very nice. They don't do everything AWS do, e.g., they only just added an S3-compatible object store and I've yet to come across anything like secrets management or IAM for their virtual machines.
Our prototype was on DigitalOcean but we started collecting issues and feature requests that were solved more easily by AWS. Including IAM, we were an early adopter of S3, it's a great product. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to open an issue to evaluate the other cloud providers. But honestly, the team is going to hate me, they have all spent a lot of time learning AWS.
> But honestly, the team is going to hate me, they have all spent a lot of time learning AWS.
This was another motivation for going with DO: there's just less of it. Less to learn, less to get lost in. We've got a couple of juniors on the team who are brand new to actually having to get the software they write to run in production, and I don't think the AWS control panel is a very good place to send someone like that.
For those who identify strongly with unions, union-busting stuff like this is triggering... like "bringing up the war" in a war traumatised nation.
I get that. But... 2020 isn't 1920 or even 1980. Fresh eyes might see more clearly.
To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today. Surveillance is easier too. IDK. Yes, Bezos does not want an amazon union and won't just let it happen without a fight. Same as always. That said, if people want to hear what an amazon union organiser has to say... it's almost impossible to stop it.
I don't think the central factor here is Pinkertons. Union organising is the actual determinant. If they can get enough amazon employees interested, they'll probably succeed regardless.
Democracies or not, regardless, I think the key for citizens is to have both a scientific mind as well as a fighting spirit. Lack of either would be a disaster.
So that it's pretty costly for the ruling class to push ordinary people around. Not that they can't, I mean they still control the army and police so technically they can still do whatever they want, but in reality it's going to be very expensive, financially and politically to push people around if ordinary people possess both qualities.
Didn't stop Google from firing two employees in regards to union organizing. It doesn't matter what they did, if the NLRB is backing the employees, the company is in the wrong. Having to wait for a government agency to respond to your case of being wrongfully terminated is a PITA as it is. The fact that they determined the employee was conducting protected behavior which Google actively disagrees with just goes to show these companies are so large they're more than willing to just eliminate union organizers and wait for the government to tell them they broke the law as opposed to ensuring they follow it in the first place.
For those who are not familiar, Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with one another to keep tech worker compensation below its market value[1].
In reality, bezos and any future amazon union are opposed to one another. That's a pretty firmly embedded truism in union thinking too. No point getting outraged over the trite.
Also, this is not even amazon getting serious yet. Imagine what happens when/if amazon union organisers ever make a credible effort.
Maybe, but that doesn't make it right, and it won't change unless people are aware of it and fight against it, which is why this article is pointing it.
Depends how you fight. Some union busting tactics are illegal, others legal and a few skirt the borders of illegality.
Even if they do do it illegally, the justice department has to be motivated to go after them. Which, with a Biden administration that is close to Bezos is unlikely:
If employees know that discussing unionizing or showing any pro-union tendency or behavior is going to arm their career prospects (or maybe even make them lose their job altogether) it's definitely going to be a lot harder for them to organize.
I can't believe people here people here manage to justify this abject behavior as "business as usual". This is not normal, not legal and shouldn't be accepted.
It’s HN. Every time there’s an article about FB going too far, everyone seems to chime in about how FB is evil and anyone who works there must be evil as well, “so what did you expect?” It’s the same with Amazon or any FAANG company, and it gets quite tiring sometimes.
I don't think facebook is evil. It's just run by a naive dictator who isn't willing to make the tough decisions that will allow democracy to continue. The intentions aren't bad but the outcome is horrible.
> To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today.
But that's a double-edged sword. It's also an advantage to employers and businesses. And recent history has shown they have the advantage: they been successful at thwarting union formation (see Wal-Mart, the movie American Factory, etc.) and even labor laws (e.g. Prop 22).
Well if you thwart union formation and legislation by using communication to persuade people that you're right and to vote for your side, that's called democracy.
> Well if you thwart union formation and legislation by using communication to persuade people that you're right and to vote for your side, that's called democracy.
That's neither here nor there. The point I was disputing was the idea that changes in mass communication technology gives an advantage to unions.
However, to your point: your phrasing "using communication to persuade people...to vote for your side, that's called democracy," obscures some important distinctions. If your success at persuasion stems mainly from the greater power you have to project your message (e.g. via wealth), then that's arguably not actually very democratic. That's pretty easy to see when greater political power is used (e.g. the CCP suppressing dissenting voices and successfully persuading the people with a thick blanket of weakly-opposed propaganda), but there's a similar dynamic when one side can greatly outspend its opponent, since wealth is a kind of power [1].
For a union vote, the employer typically has both greater wealth and greater political power: it can blanket the workplace with anti-union messages and require employees to repeatedly attend anti-union "education" sessions during work hours (which is typical before a union vote), while the union organizers have much more limited access, and must try to reach employees outside of work.
[1] this is an area of tension in liberal democracy, where trade-offs need to be made.
> To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today. Surveillance is easier too.
For those of us who are working from home due to the pandemic (or other reasons), we don't have any way to communicate with our co-workers except via electronic channels that can be logged.
Pre-covid, one could reasonably expect that if one were to mention unionization in conversation over lunch, there wouldn't be a permanent electronic record of it. Now, it's just not something you can discreetly discuss with someone unless you have their outside-of-work contact information.
That said "communicating via electronic channels" is not an insurmountable problem. It could be turned into and advantage. If union organizers post a letter, video or whatnot... amazon employees can see it. If people want to sign up to an unsurveiled "stream," they can.
The reality of secrecy and anonymity are what they are. Amazon are feisty, but they aren't the KGB. Secrecy is hard, probably unattainable. Anonymity is doable, but not default. Circulation is easy, assuming recipients are into it. etc.
> It's easy to say that it's just the way the world works from your desk,
Its equally easy to be disappointed and show some virtual outrage via social media. To me if office workers are not putting their money where their mouth then it is not of much consequence whether they are disappointed or world weary.
it's not just the way the world works. it's the way capitalism works. I don't think it's unfair for people to be fed up with watching these things happen while the root causes continue to be largely taken for granted.
The interesting thing about moderation of this comment (and please note this isn't a complaint about the moderation) is that it was up-voted heavily when during Western European office hours then down-voted heavily during SV office hours, which is a correlation to the different cultural opinions I've also observed between SV and Europe when it comes to discussions regarding capitalism.
...so far. Other countries have some mechanisms - legal and cultural - in place that have resisted the creep of capitalist power concentration better than the U.S. has. But I'm pessimistic - I think globally we'll continue to see taxes cut, social safety nets dried up, and privatization of benefits, like has been happening in the UK. It just seems to be the tendency of capitalism.
edit: I invite downvoters to let me know why they disagree, besides "capitalism good"
The ironic thing about the UK is we are seeing the same people advocating deregulation at the national level, while also campaigning for greater government intervention at the local level.
Or at least that's been the general sentiment I've seen in many of the Tory strongholds in the counties surrounding London.
this is always the right-wing rhetorical contradiction:
"less government!"... when it comes to limiting the power of capital, and redistributing its profits to society
"more government!!" when it comes to squashing dissent to capital and existing hierarchies
it's not really a contradiction, it's part of a consistent authoritarian ideology ruled by capital and other oppressive social structures, but it is outwardly hypocritical and often goes against the interests of the people who parrot it
"Because capitalism" is always a terrible argument, whatever your position.
It's a very nebulous term. Does it mean free markets? Does it mean private ownership of the factors of production? Does it mean laissez-faire? Does it mean economic organization of a professional manager class, with management separated from ownership, and ownership characterized by tradeable claims on assets?
It has a specific definition that you can find by googling: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."
Don't assume that others are naive, imprecise, or uninformed about what capitalism is and how it affects the world, just because your own understanding of it is limited.[0]
My point is not that googling it will reveal everything about it, but nice bad faith. My point is it has a dictionary definition and there are plenty of people who understand what it is. It is not a nebulous concept just because you aren't informed about it.
If you want to get started learning about it, I recommend looking up Richard Wolff
I must not have been clear, because you seem to have missed my point.
I don't believe that capitalism is a nebulous concept because I am not informed about it. I believe it is a nebulous concept because I have actually witnessed people in arguments using it to mean different things. Some people consider capitalism as simply a rhetorical foil to Marxism. Some people consider capitalism an economy that while capital is private, the economy may be mercantilist. Others insist that free trade is part and parcel of capitalism. Etc., etc. That's all I meant.
And there's a (not small) difference between bad faith and sarcasm. And tossing around Dunning-Krueger after one extremely shallow interaction is the height of irony.
when you say '"because capitalism" is always a terrible argument', you're doing more than observing that it's used nebulously sometimes, you're saying that by definition it cannot be used unnebulously, which is just false and is what I was responding to.
Your original comment was aggressive but I admit quoting Dunning Kruger, while not misplaced, was also aggressive and escalatory.
Agree that the root cause here is not Amazon, it's a system (unregulated capitalism) that incentives this behavior. I think it's still fair to criticize actors in such a system, especially if such criticism is done with the context that these companies and their bad actions are the product of that system and that it would be positive for most of the workforce for that system to be better regulated.
It really is amazing that people really refuse to understand how freaking privileged we are to have good pay, good mobility and the reality of people who don't. Competition for "unskilled", ugh I hate that word, jobs is fierce and when you're living on the verge of homelessness you have neither the time nor money to invest in yourself.
People that cannot find a better alternative in their current personal situation.
Sure they are not "forced" in a precise linguistic sense. But when it's this or nothing there is really just an illusion of choice.
Why is it Amazon’s problem that they have no alternative?
If Amazon went away, would their situation be better or worse?
I believe that as a society we must ensure that people have enough money to live, but why should the employers on the bottom of the skills spectrum be forced to bear the brunt of it?
Every employer should be required by law to provide a safe workplace free of discrimination and harassment. But hiring unskilled workers at a market wage doesn’t make you a bad actor.
Because Amazon are use their disproportionate position of power to abuse these employees. It is far from an even playing field. This very article we're commenting on shows that Amazon are trying hard to keep it from becoming fair and equal. I find your lack of compassion for underprivileged employees astounding.
> Every employer should be required by law to provide a safe workplace free of discrimination and harassment.
And who is going to sue when they are underpaid and have no other job options available? Litigation is time consuming and expensive and rent won't wait.
Your question was literally "who is being forced?" I responded to that and nothing more.
> But hiring unskilled workers at a market wage doesn’t make you a bad actor.
No, but artificially preventing the market conditions (wage + others) from raising by blocking people's basic right of association will make you a bad actor.
If given a free choice of literally anything they could do to contribute to the world, do you think Amazon warehouse employees would put Amazon warehouse work as their primary choice? Something they said they wanted to do "when they grow up"? "Something with dehumanising conditions, please!"
If not, what is your answer to the quesiton "why are they doing this job at all"?
Because they have to do something, and this is the best they can do? Then "have to do something" is the force, and they are the forced.
I didn't say "Amazon is the (one and only) bad guy", or anything about bad guys at all. I said "if they aren't opting out, there is a force compelling them to be there".
You say "who is forcing them? Why don't they quit?" and yet ... they don't quit, and you (apparently?) think there is no reason why.
I don't think the force is a single person or company. I think it's the economic and social system we live in has become (intentionally or not) tuned to keep as many people as desperate as it can, because those are the kind of people who will work longer and harder for less money.
They used to offer them alternatives but Amazon put those companies out of business. The idea that it’s Amazon or homelessness doesn’t really make Amazon look better.
You’re mixing the general and the specific. Specifically yes, you don’t have to work for Amazon, but in general yes you are in fact forced to work or die in a capitalist system. In some situations Amazon may be the only viable employer.
"but in general yes you are in fact forced to work or die in a capitalist system"
registered an account just to inform you what an utter crap of a statement you've made there. since i've bothered thus far, i made it a point to review more of your presence here. the conclusion i've come to is you are quite the twat. in a most general sense - a cunt of the dunning-kruger variety.
Where do we draw the line? What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them? Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?
> What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them?
They don't have a right to combat them at all. Union organizing is literally a human right. Of course ownership doesn't want them -- the feelings of ownership are (supposed to be) irrelevant.
It really amazes me what some people think qualifies for a “human right”. If you are paying someone and they are doing something you told them not to do isn’t it your “human right” to stop paying them? Where do you draw the line with what a “human right” is?
Think about it this way: both sides have the right to freely negotiate a contract, and then decide whether or not to enter into it. The CEO can't prevent the workers from talking to each other and figuring out what they think a fair contract would be, and the workers can't prevent the CEO from talking to other CEOs for the same reason.
As you observe, workers talking to each other to agree on prices for labor is the flip side of the coin from CEOs talking to each other to agree on prices for labor. But the latter is in fact illegal. CEOs can't talk to each other and agree to pay $10/hour for warehouse workers. Coordinating with others to set prices for labor or goods isn't viewed as within the scope of freedom of association. Union activities are in fact specifically exempted from anti-trust laws because otherwise they would fall within the scope of them. Workers can agree with each other not to accept less than $15/hour for warehouse workers.
You need something more than freedom of association to justify unions, rooted in the recognition of bargaining disparities between employers and employees.
The way I'm thinking about it, you don't need anything extra to justify unions, but you do need something extra to prohibit wage fixing. I agree that freedom of association, when considered alone, would allow wage fixing and price fixing and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.
We're moving away from areas where I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, but I think as a society we've decided that while anti-competitive laws do infringe on the rights of business leaders, we're trying to balance their rights with those of everyone else, and the laws are necessary to prevent a permanent class divide between business leaders who cannot be challenged, and workers under them. In the long run, allowing complete free association among CEOs would limit the freedoms of the rest of society.
Society is a constant project of balancing various conflicting rights, and this is one of many cases where we limit the rights of a few to defend the rights of many.
You've got it the wrong way round. You start by assuming everything is permitted and then you selectively (and ideally reluctantly) bring the weight of law to bear when you discover that it's a net benefit to society. It's a correction for gross inequalities of power.
That's something the libertarian left and libertarian right surely agree on - minimising the application of the monopoly of force and all that.
So you assume both employers and employees can freely organize and associate. That's your starting point.
Now - we've decided that the right to join a union should be protected (it evens out an existing power imbalance) and that collusion to force down wages should be illegal (because it amplifies an existing power imbalance to the detriment of society at large)
Sure but if both sides have the human right to freely associate, then the employer should surely have the right to reject associating with the union at all. But that's not afforded to them under US law, per my understanding.
"Associate" has a specific definition here that's a little narrower than normal conversation. It refers to being a member of a group, not just being connected to it in some way. The CEO is free to not join the union if they don't want to. They can also quit if they don't want to deal with it at all.
By the same token, the company’s management is free to fight union creation, by sharing anti-union messages. Freedom of speech and assembly on both sides.
"I heard Donny got both kneecaps busted after he passed out a union flyer last year" said the manager conveniently holding a baseball bat from the "baseball club" he just so happened to be involved in.
I think this is legally the case in most places, but IMO it is extremely unfair to give ownership acting through the corporate entity the same rights as employees, which are actual people.
You are paying someone to work 18 hours a day, every day. They would like to not work 18 hours a day anymore, and stop working at a mere 12 hours; they are even willing to accept less pay. You fire them, because you clearly told them not to do that. They organize with other workers and demand the right for a 12 hour day, with this right enshrined in law and with penalties for employers who do not comply. You say “they are free to work for someone else or quit if they don’t like it!”
Fast forward many decades later. This is a right you and I both enjoy. (This is also why we both have time to shitpost on HN.) If there was a serious proposal to take it away, you and I would probably be standing side by side on the street demanding our rights back.
It’s easy to talk a big game about human rights when your rights aren’t on the line.
In the real world, "rights" are not inalienable. I mean, who among the lower classes wrote the US constitution? Not a single one. That's because it was written by the bourgeoisie who were protecting their interests.
Who do these people, the "United Nations", writing their "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," think they are with declaring union organizing a human right? (https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ - article 23)
FWIW, You can pick out any other number of declarations of human rights and the right to form and join trade unions is in them. It's very widely considered to be a human right, not some fringe thing.
Just to add, most of the bathroom related ones are other employees complaining, not management. Management has to respond to that. This is because US culture insists on separate gender bathrooms.
In the context of Amazon, though, performance quotas are inhumane, warehouses are huge, bathrooms are sparse, so employees aren't able to use the bathroom without taking performance demerits. So you get people passing out due to dehydration because they don't want to need the bathroom.
His point is it doesn't matter what you are "guaranteed" simply because if the real world was so black and white in regards to how laws were interpreted and followed, we wouldn't be having these arguments.
> What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them?
In the US they could improve working conditions to the point that employees are happy with the status quo. Unionisation efforts are typically driven by employees who are stressed by unhealthy/unsafe working environments, employee mistreatment, or poor pay. We see the opposite of this in the tech sector, where decent pay, safe environments and plenty of benefits leads to a rather union hostile attitude.
> Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?
If we accept that unions act to address the power imbalance between employees and employers and unionisation is mainly driven by employers exploiting that power imbalance then I think it's both good for society and in line with the spirit of the laws that exist in many places that make various forms of union busting illegal.
At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law. I don't know what's the situation in the US but in Europe that means that conditions cannot be horrible to start with if the company acts within the law (which would be expected of a company like Amazon, but maybe I'm optimistic).
Unions are a way to negotiate a better deal than the legal minimum for unskilled labour.
> At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law
Are they though? There are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.
Obviously working condition protections are much better than they were before 1950s-ish, and the existence of a minimum wage is greater than zero (where applicable). But neither of those inherently meet a bar as fuzzy as "decent".
> here are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.
That's right and most of their work in Western Europe is helping workers enforce the law.
Depends on the country but _tentatively_ yes, America has a infamously anti-union, anti-worker history though so there's significantly more holdover of it actually happening, what most other countries don't have is services like the Pinkertons, previously a literally rifle-armed military/police force for the purposes of seeking out and often murdering union leaders and breaking up strikes by force.
What I was taught was that generally most older countries already had established police forces that wouldn't allow groups like the Pinkertons to exist by the time the union movement came along where America didn't and instead their police actually came _from_ groups like the Pinkertons.
But I'd take that with a grain of salt given that it was second hand summarized information even when I first got it.
It is basically correct that the US police descend from a mixture of slave patrol remnants and strikebusters near the late 19th / beginning of the 20th century (though sometimes in opposition to them, the initial state police ranks were still largely drawn from private police, racist "town watches", and militia forces).
England and the rest of the Anglosphere adopted what are often called "Peelian principles," focused on policing by community consent, 50+ years earlier than that.
Do you have sources on any of these? In the 'defunding' era, I often see this claim about the origins of police but a) it seems unlikely to be generalized (police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants" and b) it seems irrelevant since whatever the police was in the past doesn't mean that's what it is today and it doesn't mean the goals or the culture are the same.
In the North, rich merchants socialized the costs of the guards they hired to protect their assets in port cities through municipalization. In the South, that wasn't the case, and the police are direct descendants from slave patrols.
From Time's "How the U.S. Got Its Police Force"[1]:
> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.
With regard to police originating from strike breakers, that's also true.
> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.
heavyset_go has provided a good source for my more general statements but I want to specifically address
> police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants"
This is a common misconception that the north was "free" even as the south kept enslaving people. It's true that the north also had other economic forces influencing its policing, but the Fugitive Slave Acts gave plenty of legal cover for anyone wanting to make a buck by finding "escaped slaves" (often just whatever black people they found) in the north.
What if I run the most worker-centric paradise, with employee empowerment, great wages, benefits and conditions?
And what if the national organization of an umbrella labor organization considers my non-union workforce as a threat to both their budget and their political power? And what if they provide materials and advisors promoting unionization, despite the fact that they are acting in the interest of the union organization itself, and not the workers they hope to represent?
If you “ran” the most worker-centric paradise, you’d be the elected CEO of a co-op where the workers had democratic control of the means of production. In such a place, there’d of course be no need for a union because the workers would have the say in what happens already.
Now your strawman benevolent dictatorship could never exist since you would still be denying workers control over their workplace. Thus they may form a union to fight for that control.
If you are such a wonderful, caring employer what difference would it make if your employees were unionised? I think that part of the problem here is that the history of unions and union busting in the US appears to be one of corruption on both sides; but this is not a necessary or inevitable feature of unionisation.
There's a huge difference between "argue against" and "actively try to sabotage".
Here (Italy) unionization is a constitutionally protected right. My employer can try to persuade me not to join one, but is absolutely not allowed to retaliate against me if I do, discriminate basing on union membership, etc.
They could do whatever they're doing with their tech workers. Around these parts any talk of unionizing developers is usually meet with skepticism or derision. So whatever big tech is doing is keeping most of their tech workers happy and unwilling to unionize.
They could do the same for their warehouse employees, but that would mean paying them very well and giving good benefits.
Nobody is asking that warehouse workers or store clerks be paid ridiculous amounts like $120k/yr, a fair liveable wage will do, failing that a lot of the problems would be resolved if such companies scaled back whatever policies they have that lead to news stories like Amazon workers peeing in bottles because they can't take toilet breaks, but as neither of these things happen you get exploited workers who naturally want to unionise.
It's also not that feasible to pay developers $120k/yr as the rest of the world has found out, America manages it for a number of reasons and because of this you likely won't see developers unionise any time soon even if you guys do have some very questionable contracts.
But it could be feasible to pay them more than a poverty wage. Something where working full-time would reasonably cover housing and food costs (and ideally healthcare as well) without needing government assistance.
That's not really my point. My point is that workers wanting to unionize is not some inevitability that Amazon must be forced to deal with. If their workers are happy they may not want to unionize. I think it's telling that white collar tech workers generally are against unionizing while Amazon's blue collar workers are trying to. So you have workers in the same company, some who feel that it is unnecessary to unionize and some who feel it is.
I have not seen any convincing evidence that Amazon’s warehouses have “terrible working conditions”, do you have a source that might change my opinion?
The Center for Investigative Reporting has, through its online publication Reveal, covered Amazon for quite some time - especially with respect to injuries. See:
A search for "Amazon working conditions injuries" on DDG or Google will return many of those, but also follow-ups by many media houses considered to be reasoned/reliable, rather than rabid and ranting.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but these anecdotes are there in significant numbers.
>people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions
It really sucks that we decided to bring back indentured servitude. Good thing those unions are there to help the worker and not just some parasitic middleman who sees an opportunity.
You live in a small town with small businesses that are undercut by Amazon's price and scale. Those businesses slowly die out as everyone in your region switches to ordering online (primarily from Amazon). Amazon opens a warehouse in the region to meet the demand and is now the largest employer around.
This exact transformation already happened with Wal-Mart in the 80s and 90s. Obviously no one is literally forcing workers to go to Amazon's warehouses but you can see how in essence this leaves them with no choice (i.e. forced).
I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2009 and haven't bought anything of Amazon's website since 2016 (I still bought Whole Foods and Woot for a bit, but I've cut those out too).
Newegg is a better place for parts, why use the Amazon stores for B&H and Adorama when you can .. just go to the websites for B&H and Adorama?!
I wrote this a while back. Amazon's has turned into a platform that's basically killed all the other parts sites and competition we use to have:
Do you have any evidence that Amazon has decreased overall employment? To me it is totally plausible that with the convenience of online shopping they have increased the overall “retail pie” and have not taken away from local businesses. So I would prefer when you make claims about how small business are dying out because of Amazon you provide evidence
I should have prefixed that this is drawing heavily on what I remember reading about Walmart and their effect on rural/suburban economies when they expanded. In that sense it is conjecture on my part as I'm not drawing on any studies about Amazon in particular. I only wanted to show how large corporations that compete directly with small retail employers can get an unfair advantage against their labour force.
My life was transformed with the growth of WalMart and Amazon.
The quality, variety, convenience and price of goods available to me all improved. The Mom and Pop who had been financing their lifestyle on the backs of the rural poor were forced out of business. I feel a little bad for them, but it seems wrong to elevate them over the rest of the population.
I don't think anyone here will disagree with you. They're just saying that this new system brings its own problems. Namely heightened labor monopsony. That doesn't mean we have to go back to mom and pop systems, but it probably does mean we should work on solving the new problems.
As Colin says, I don't disagree. I don't think twice about ordering an item on Amazon for $2 that a hardware store downstairs sells for $5. I understand why the store's margins need to be that high but I also need to make sound financial decisions and don't make enough to subsidize anyone else. At the end of the day I'm still contributing to Amazon's growth at the expense of a more fragmented market of small businesses.
Most of the world's natural resources and land have already been claimed. This means that most people have no choice but to work for the people who control those resources and land.
Not only that, land that once belonged to the people was privatized during the Industrial Revolution in order to create a landless class of people that needed to work in the new factories in order to eat. It was hard to convince people to work in them otherwise.
Land belonging to the people is a horrible system that creates huge inefficiencies due to moral hazard. If you look at the agricultural revolution in Europe, a major reason for increased crop yields was private property. Incentives matter.
You point to efficiency, but to achieve that efficiency, people were driven off of land that their families had lived on for millennia in order to create a class of people that were desperate enough to risk their lives and limbs, and their children's lives and limbs, in dangerous factories for wages they couldn't sustain themselves with.
Millions of people went from self-sufficiency to being desperately poor and without homes because their land was privatized by governments that were in cahoots with industrialists.
Please. It's the only option available to a lot of people anymore especially with COVID shutdowns but it's part of a larger shift to a knowledge-economy. There aren't many jobs for unskilled workers anymore and getting skills is too expensive for the poor. Ignoring that reality is ridiculous and only proves you don't argue in good faith.
Can I just point out that I think the "horrible working conditions" things is a little played up.
You want to know terrible working conditions dancing with a sign for 5 hours a day in the sun when it's 90+. I did that for 3 years and was happy to do the job, mind you this was only 10 years ago so it isn't forever. I made 7.50 an hour. I would've killed to get a job at amazon back then.
People are getting payed $16 that is incredible for an unskilled labor position.
> People are getting payed $16 that is incredible for an unskilled labor position.
That's one view, but it's only informed by "the way things are". Another view is based on the way things should be, that no one should have to work for less than the wage it takes to live a reasonable life. https://livingwage.mit.edu/ offers values for this.
I don't see why someone should work full time and still end up poor.
>I don't see why someone should work full time and still end up poor.
no offense, but this assumes too much about a person. you could make minimum wage $100 an hour, and there will still be poor people because some people make bad decisions. (not even taking into account that that would cause massive inflation etc). just giving a person $100 an hour doesn't guarantee they won't end up poor, as evidence by all the professional athletes that made millions and ended up bankrupt
another note, your link above gives massively different outcomes based on life situations (1 adult, 2 adult, 0-3+ kids etc). Do we need to make minimum wage such that it works for 1 adult with 5 kids who somehow got there with no skills whatsoever such that they are still working for minimum wage? Some people make poor choices in life, and we can't just raise minimum wage to a point that makes up for that. It's simply not possible.
Now, we can talk about other safety nets, such as a universal basic income, and universal healthcare, etc which I'm 100% for. The gov't should help these people, they shouldn't force small businesses to pay people more than the value they bring to the business. This is just picking winners, amazon will get bigger, and small businesses will get killed. Let the free market decide how much people are worth in the market to a business, and let gov't help keep people out of poverty.
they can afford to operate. workers have agreed to do the job for the price set today. you want to raise that number arbitrarily, which they can't afford.
This thread is very specifically about how Amazon workers have agreed to do the job for a certain price, and how Amazon is trying to stop that process from proceeding. Even by your own perception of the situation, Amazon is in the wrong.
People being able to feed and house themselves and their children is arbitrary?
That “agreement” to work for the current price is compelled by the threat of hunger and homelessness. It is not a fair and free agreement when one party has all of the power.
The very very very very least a company could do is pay all of their workers a living wage.
World average is 18K, that's adjusted for purchasing power parity. 32K is at least 2nd quintile, maybe top. Poland is a little less than 32K average, Japan is around 38K, OECD data from 2019. Somewhere between Japan and Poland is where the average worker starts to be poor. Interesting.
And that is at the present time, every generation going back to the invention of agriculture had it worse. Someone making 32K a year - PPP adjusted - is in what, the top few percent of all humans that have ever lived? Poor bastard. Learn to code.
In the same way that if everything is about politics, nothing is about politics, if everyone is poor, no one is poor. And if these people aren't making a living wage while making what the top few percent of humans have ever made, how did our ancestors manage to live and have children on a sub-living wage? Shouldn't they have died out?
I think in this case, "living wage" is just a propaganda term. "Poor" is too I guess. I guess maybe that propaganda term works on people, "living wage". It seems to be effective propaganda, seems to be working. I just cringe every time I read it. Adjusted for inflation, I made $7 an hour working in a factory. Decades later you're going to tell me that isn't a living wage, more than twice what I made back then wasn't a living wage? Was I lucky to survive?
That's bullshit by the technical definition of bullshit, and its propaganda.
Anyway, these arguments usually split people into two camps, people who worked warehouse or factory jobs before, and people who haven't.
> I don't see why someone should work full time and still end up poor.
Then focus on the right problem which is cost of living.
Focusing on salary doesn't fix the problem when you have markets that are heavily housing constrained and massive government meddling in education and healthcare that drive up the cost of both well in excess of inflation.
Increasing wages without addressing housing shortages, just puts more money in the pockets of landlords as those higher wages drive up rents.
Whether someone gets $1 or $2 matters not if you can buy the same amount of stuff with it.
In the overwhelming majority places in the country $16/hour is decent amount that goes a long way. That's over $40k at 50 hours a week. That's enough to live on your own in most places. If you have roommates, it goes even further.
The problem isn't the $16. It's the circumstances in very very few geographic markets where $16/hour isn't enough because cost of living is out of control in those few markets.
If you need to spend several paragraphs designing a pair of strawmen to illustrate your point, consider widening your view on this.
> That is good however to claim that he should get the same privileges and standing as his brother who spent years working hard giving back and making better long term choices is asinine.
Nobody is complaining that minimum wage isn't the same as a software engineering salary. Just that the floor is too low.
Unless you think all minimum wage earners are ne'er-do-well convicts with multiple DUIs?
the counter point is that minimum wage is artificial. if you aren't actually providing that much value, businesses will just cut the job altogether. if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.
on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.
if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.
give people a safety net so that they can not be in poverty, but don't force businesses to pay more than the market says a job is worth. kind of a silly argument on a post about amazon anyways, since they pay well above minimum wage, and in fact have campaigned on raising it (not out of the goodness of their hearts mind you, they want to put small competitors out of business and they know they can't afford a large min wage hike like amazon can)
> if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.
This is true, but becoming less and less true. Today there are all sorts of jobs that used to provide a living wage, that don't anymore. With no college and limited training, you could hire on at an assembly plant and make enough to support yourself. These types of jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer.
It's not always bad life choices. Sometimes it's choices life has made for you. Meaning: you were born in the wrong ZIP code, with the wrong parent(s), and sent to the wrong school. Choices other people made for you, rather than decisions you took the wrong path on.
> on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.
This is a really hard aspect to design for. I agree that we can't require that all jobs pay enough to support a single earner's ability to rent an apartment, feed themselves, pay for a car, auto insurance, healthcare, etc. If that were the case, I would never have found work in my teens and early 20s.
> if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.
I could not agree more. The labor market become so much freer when these things are taken out of the employment equation. My employer should not be anywhere near my healthcare. The way we allowed ourselves to tie those 2 things together is one of the greatest drags on our economy, and for labor mobility and opportunity.
If we had a UBI along with healthcare, I could see minimum wage being thrown out altogether. Employers would offer what the job is worth, and workers would work for what they value their own time at.
>This is true, but becoming less and less true. Today there are all sorts of jobs that used to provide a living wage, that don't anymore. With no college and limited training, you could hire on at an assembly plant and make enough to support yourself. These types of jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer.
raising minimum wage makes this worse, not better. even more jobs will be automated by technology removing even more unskilled labor jobs
>This is a really hard aspect to design for. I agree that we can't require that all jobs pay enough to support a single earner's ability to rent an apartment, feed themselves, pay for a car, auto insurance, healthcare, etc. If that were the case, I would never have found work in my teens and early 20s.
yup
>I could not agree more. The labor market become so much freer when these things are taken out of the employment equation. My employer should not be anywhere near my healthcare. The way we allowed ourselves to tie those 2 things together is one of the greatest drags on our economy, and for labor mobility and opportunity. If we had a UBI along with healthcare, I could see minimum wage being thrown out altogether. Employers would offer what the job is worth, and workers would work for what they value their own time at.
Your post is the very incarnation of the term "strawman". Less of this, please
(although I have to say that I found that part: "but spends several years "finding himself" aka partying, drinking and generally not doing much" kinda funny...)
What does that even mean? Live entirely alone in a 1 bedroom apartment? A studio? Live with roommates? What do their meals look like?
A "living wage" means absolutely nothing unless you define the expectations.
When I first moved to San Francisco in 2011, I was living on less than $300/month or so for 8 months or so. I slept on an air mattress and ate rice and beans prepared weekly from 25lb bags because it was cheaper that way. I spent less than a dollar a meal.
What expectations do we have that people learn to be frugal? Here's someone who lives in the SF Bay Area for $7000/year:
It's actually not hard to live on these wages if you're smart about how you spend your money. The only cost you can't really escape without moving is the cost of housing, and if you don't fix that problem, any increase in wages it just going to be temporary relief until housing prices correct.
A "living wage" doesn't mean "middle class". A living wage means that a person is able to afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.
> A "living wage" doesn't mean "middle class". A living wage means that a person is able to afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.
That's not middle class in traditional class terms (petit bourgeois) based on the manner of interaction with the capitalist economy, but it's pretty much requires being “middle class” by the modern American broad income categories standards, where middle class is the middle income category.
Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves - and somehow this would work out ok for the country as a whole?
> Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves
No, I'm saying that people who are below the middle income category (as that adjusts locally) often cannot reliably, securely "afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.". I'm not saying that they should accept that, just that if you are advocating for a living wage, you are, in fact, advocating to move the floor up to something that fits what is commonly styled "middle class" income currently.
Ok, I misread you. I'm not confident your assertion is true, but I don't know enough about the "living wage" analysis to be sure.
I guess one factor here is "middle income range", if well defined, will move if the floor is moved. In things like this, distribution is also very important.
There's a world of difference between saying that Juan shouldn't have the same privileges and standing as Jamal, and saying that Juan shouldn't get a living wage.
Do you have any statistics that can tell us how many "Jamals" actually exist in the US labour force? Because it feels like you are exaggerating a tiny tiny minority.
I worked in a factory building car bumpers. The work was so alienating that one day I "woke up" in the factory with literally no recollection of the last 2 hours. From all I knew I could have been taken by ETs but since my bumper quota was good I guess I just zoned out and became a bot.
And I still call Amazon "horrible working conditions".
The fact that it is better than being poor isn't saying much.
$16 per hour, at 2000 hours a year, is $32,000. The poverty line in the United States is around $26,000. "Slightly above poverty wages" is still pretty dang poor.
(And to forestall the inevitable adjustment of one's pince-nez to well-actually: that it'd be median or even above-median wages somewhere else does not mean that it is not poor in America, nor that the two situations can be reasonably compared.)
My first job in IT was back in 2005 and I was only making $25k/yr ($30k by the end). That did grow to the point where I can make six figures now though. But it took a lot of experience building.
What tracks are available for Amazon warehouse workers who want to move up?
I’ve been living in my car in SF for about 915 days, on less than $18k/yr take home. I’m so poor that I can barely get hired to a minimum wage job (“but you have a car,” “but you have an iPhone”). Everything I have is left over from a time when I made $200k/yr as a software engineer, and thankfully I’ve been given a lot of benefit of the doubt given my upstanding ways. (I was slandered, so people I meet see a good guy but when I interview they’re told of a violent bigot during the reference check, false).
I’m working on a book, or books, on the subject. It seems surprising to people that something happens called poverty with less than a certain level of income, that makes things get extremely hard and require great care to recover from. I was on track to get off the street and nearly did last year but faced a setback, and the pandemic threw a big wrench in my system this year (which is adapting, harder mode). My working budget has been $55/day or $375/wk or $18k/yr.
I went to your blog and listened to your post on "Interviewing Without Resources" and it feels like a non sequitur.
It felt like you see yourself as a victim. I've been out of work before, but I never saw myself as a victim or powerless. I knew what I was worth and yes, it does take a lot of work, but I found work based on my own skills and merits.
America is increasingly growing into a nation where we cloth ourselves in victimhood as virtue. We are literally in a space where no-body is in the office today. You could pick up a $130 ~ $160k job anywhere and move out to a suburb in Texas. All you need is half-decent Internet, and you'd basically be living as if you were making the $200k you had in The Valley.
Stand up for yourself. If you only see yourself as a victim, that is all you will ever be.
> America is increasingly growing into a nation where we cloth ourselves in victimhood as virtue. We are literally in a space where no-body is in the office today. You could pick up a $130 ~ $160k job anywhere and move out to a suburb in Texas. All you need is half-decent Internet, and you'd basically be living as if you were making the $200k you had in The Valley.
You're talking to someone who is homeless, who probably hasn't been able to bathe in a while given the pandemic, and who is probably wearing clothes that they've slept in for several years now.
Yes, there are employers that will hire people literally off the street, but they aren't hiring for $130-$160k IT jobs, they're hiring for manual labor jobs without benefits that are probably off the books and can't offer steady hours.
It’s not unrelated, when talking about pay and working conditions it’s all relative to the rest of the economy and sits in that context, pointing out other parts of that context is perfectly relevant (though it obviously can’t paint a complete picture).
We should of course be mindful of whataboutism when discussing these things but I think it’s a good idea to consider the economic and social context when talking about these issues, they don’t exist in a vacuum.
The discussion is about Amazon hiring Pinkerton operatives to spy on employees suspected of organizing even when they are off work. This was an interview with the journalist who broke the story as a continuation. [1]
Deflecting criticism with "some workers have even more upsetting conditions than these" doesn't help either party, moreover it actually shuts down an important discussion relevant to both. We shouldn't tolerate any business crushing dissent the way Amazon does; that's what is being discussed here.
I'm not talking about deflecting the conversation or shutting down discussions, nor am I even taking a side here (personally I don't have enough information about this topic to have an opinion). I just don't agree with pretending like the relationship between employers and employees exists in an isolated cultural/economic bubble. There are many ways it can inform what actions we should take--at the very least it lets us know if this is a systemic problem or an isolated one, which alone could dramatically change what course of action to take.
My point is that if we are interested in helping people in geniuly terrible working conditions there are plenty of people who have it far worse than those at Amazon and those should be the focus of these efforts and outrage rather than people making $16 an hour in moderately decent conditions.
People can care about multiple issues at the same time.
This discussion isn't explicitly about the working conditions of Amazon, it is about the highly unethical methods they use to crush dissent and workers organizing, namely the leaked documents that detail actions including the spying on workers suspected of organizing even outside of work by the Pinkertons.
This isn't the 19th century, this deeply upsetting and unconscionable behavior should not be tolerated in the 21st century.
10 years ago, warehouse conditions were the same or worse as they are now except you would be lucky to get $16/hr without a forklift operator certification or some other credential that made it more than just 'unskilled labor'
And ~160 years ago we had literal slavery, doesn't mean that people's working conditions currently are good, just because others were bad or even are still currently bad
> You want to know terrible working conditions dancing with a sign for 5 hours a day in the sun when it's 90+.
While dancing with a sign in the sun does lead to heat exhaustion risks, it's unlikely to lead to permanent disability, which seems like the inevitable outcome of working at an Amazon warehouse for too long.
> On June 10, the Oregon Health Authority announced a COVID-19 outbreak at Amazon's Troutdale warehouse that has now lasted 25 weeks and infected 97 people with the virus, making it one of the largest workplace outbreaks in Oregon.
It’s a very minor point but this article makes it sound like the generic term for a union buster is Pinkerton agent. Pinkerton is a private company who does security work these days, but has a long history of doing exactly this. Fascinating Wikipedia read if you’re curious.
(A quick search shows Lauren Gurley is a prolific writer on labor issues but doesn't mention any connection to the earlier Gurley - the names might be just a coincidence)
Indeed, everything old is new again. You know the saying, right? History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme. This is often attributed to Mark Twain, but there's no real evidence he actually said it.
In this case, I think quoting the introduction to the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx is more apt: Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: "Once as tragedy, and again as farce."
"Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs"
How does this match the title of the piece. Then,
"So I imagine that in the U.S., they're tracking labor organizing activity but not union members yet."
So they have no proof and this is all speculation. Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Amazon used some people to catch people cheesing their job application process and then because the US doesn't have strong unions and they know they look at labor stats for people joining Unions this "journalist" has extrapolated they are definitely "surveiling" people. This is really low quality.
Edit: I'm fine with the allegations being true, the point I'm making is this isn't the article that we should be discussing because it's lazy journalism -- another poster below me linked much more well thought out and written posts on the subject being discussed by this article.
Leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. [1]
This isn't "speculation" or "poor journalism", it is an assessment that exists within the context of a company that has been aggressively anti-union for years, for which employees are trained to rat out union organizers,[2] and, of course, in light of their retention of Pinkertons to infiltrate employee Facebook groups dedicated to organizing.
Fine but you had to use alternative sources to get that information.
This particular piece is trash because it didn't go get those leaked documents and then discuss them in depth like the vice link. That is real investigative journalism. This linked piece speculated the entire way through.
This should be dropped from the front page and we should be discussing the vice or gizmodo article which actually put in the work to go through the allegations.
The linked article is an interview with the journalist who leaked the documents discussed in the Vice and Gizmodo articles. I think this story is intended to be a continuation of the discussion on the original story.
Okay that is not particularly clear to me from the article and it's doing a disservice to the overall discussion then, imo. They should at least be linking to the original articles then to give context on that fact.
The reason I went looking for the Vice article in the first place was due to what was said in the first paragraph of the article:
>According to documents, Amazon reportedly runs a surveillance program to track activism among its workers. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine, who broke the story.
I'll fully admit I gloss right over the names of journalists typically in favor of reading the content of the article, though had I read that I still would have had to search for the story much like you did. I can take two things away here, I should slow down when reading an article and this article should still be more obvious about the work they're discussing.
Amazon had all kinds of issues in Poland. They were paying so badly at the beginning that many people who applied for the job were former convicts. Some of them took advantage of the opportunity and start steeling stuff from packages (inventing ingenious methods of smuggling them outside in the process). This was a plague at some point.
Eventually thiefs were caught and fired. But then they applied for the job again through agency and came back (Agency was an employer, not Amazon, so, probably Amazon did not have enough data to check who i who).
The fact that Amazon needs to employ top notch investigators is in itself rather hilarious. Those super agents are chasing people who earn about $610 a month (minus taxes).
Sure I don't really care about that though, I care that this piece is a really bad representation of journalism and the fact that it's on the front page instead of better researched and fielded pieces two of which have been linked in a sub comment here from another poster are not.
> > It involves collecting data, it seems, from Facebook groups, from social media. In some cases in the case of the Pinkertons, there is a line in one of the documents that we've obtained that says that Pinkerton operatives were inserted into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to gather intelligence on what their warehouse workers were up to.
The Pinkerton case seems to be one case out of several mentioned in the papers and while the stated reason is to sniff out the application process even that is in direct conflict with official statements by Amazon.
> So they have no proof and this is all speculation.
They list a few points they know about right before the line you quoted.
> Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Still a lot better than the copy pasted Amazon press releases after it lost the lawsuit in France. Those were pure fiction with Bezos in the role of the poor abused Emperor Palpatine.
"Pinkerton: for over one-hundred years, the ones to call when you've got a union problem."
I mean, that has to be their schtick, right, even if it's unspoken? Because that pretty much sums up what I know about Pinkerton, so I would assume they are happy with that.
As for the topic at hand, yeah well, that's what companies do...for over one-hundred years as well.
To the point where if someone ever introduces themselves to me as a Pinkerton employee, my first instinct would be to assume they're immoral and not someone I want to know.
It's a company with a history of supporting exploitation wherever it's gone.
By extension, anyone you meet who works at Amazon should be considered that as well. Google and Facebook too probably. Walmart? Honestly any corporation. Add anyone working for the government in there as well
I don't think that is fair. Pinkerton has a history of actual violence and in directly enabling the very worst tendencies of some of the very worst abusive labour practices. In terms of participating in oppression, the proportion of Pinkerton employees directly involved in making lives worse for employees is much higher than most other companies and at least most democratic governments.
Dito. But it's really far worse that Amazon is able to use literal Pinkerton agents, because it implies the organisation hasn't been torn to shreds as you expect it should have been.
Ah, lovely of Amazon to employ the EXACT same people that Carnegie and Frick hired to beat and kill steel workers in 1892. How long before Amazon has the Pinkertons open fire on the unionizers?
Great prescident, Amazon. No bad choices here. Just the honest, fair dealings of the richest man in the world hiring the same people who've been murdering strikers and unionizers since 1850. Stay classy Jeff!
Corporations are treated like people for certain elements of the legal process (like the question of civil rights) because they are owned and operated by people, as a way for those people to do things together as a group (like exercising civil rights).
This line is a strong indicator that you're with or have been influenced by the "I hate Citizens United" people, who never seem to bother to remember that Citizens United itself was incorporated as a nonprofit, making a movie about Hillary Clinton with (non-tax-deductible) donations, as an exercise in those peoples' first amendment rights — one which the FEC sought to stop.
Anyway, Pinkerton's corporation has been replaced by a successor legal entity wholly owned by Securitas AB.
A judge ruled that a corporation was a person for the purposes of granting first amendment rights to run advertisements endorsing or attacking political candidates. The Koch Brothers could then spend an unlimited amount of money attacking any candidates who proposed environmental regulations, for instance.
It essentially shifted the power in America towards whomever had the bigger megaphone and more campaign financing.
I don't have a ton of "legal" analysis but if you'd like partisan analysis of Citizens United I recommend the Libertarians — https://reason.com/tag/citizens-united/
(you will of course notice the usual partisan ramblings you'd expect from an overtly Libertarian outlet, but, well, they're the ones with interest and motivation to cover it).
But the amazing thing is that you can't say "look at this small nonprofit the FEC was trying to shut up" or even a talk that acknowledges the conflicts between what seems fair and enumerated rights. No, no, instead we must bring nonsense memes with negative information: "corporations and people are the same and Koch money has ended our democracy forever".
Interfering with unionization needs to be illegal, and not met with fines that affect only the bottom line of a balance sheet, but jail time for everyone involved, with mandatory minimum sentencing. If this is true Bezos should be behind bars.
How many corporate execs have actually gone to prison for wrongdoings done in the name of the corporation? There's Ken Lay from Enron, one completely random banker from the financial crisis of 2008, and not a whole lot of others I can think of.
Kenneth Lay died on holiday at a resort before he was sentenced. The conviction was vacated:
Lay, who at age 64 succumbed to a massive heart attack at a rented Colorado vacation home, was found guilty by a federal jury in May along with former Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey K. Skilling of conspiracy and fraud. The two were star defendants in the notorious business scandal, which vaporized more than 4,000 jobs and billions of dollars in stockholders’ investments.
But when a defendant who pleaded not guilty dies before sentencing, as Lay did, in most cases the conviction is wiped out on the grounds that the defendant did not have the opportunity to appeal, legal experts said....
To me, the lengths Amazon goes to discourage unionization hints at how vulnerable they feel they are to certain aspects of unionization (probably strikes).
This isn't that much of a surprise though. The more we automate stuff (excluding complete automation), the more important the squishy humans that keep everything running are.
At least in Europe, strikes don't seem to be the driving factor. They are hit anyway often enough by Verdi in Germany, and there is no way Amazon can prohibit people from signing up with a union. Not being able to enforce working conditions seems to more of a factor to me. Not that Amazon is harsher on warehouse staff than, say, DHL. It is more the monitoring and so on. No idea how things are in the US so.
Among other things the article differentiates between the internal Amazon org monitoring union-forming activities and the Pinkertons who were tasked with looking into warehouse workers for unrelated reasons which the NPR headline seems to conflate.
Pretty disgusting and completely unsurprising. Most of us (sadly) can't avoid if our companies use AWS, but a significant fraction can absolutely do without the "convenience" of Amazon, shopping at Whole Foods, etc.
I'm lucky enough to be able-bodied enough that I don't need package delivery, so I haven't used Amazon in a few years. I don't miss it, doubly so when articles like this come out.
I'm a brit, can someone give me an overview of the law on US unions? If one forms, are Amazon compelled to work with them like in European nations? If its still just At Will employment, I don't see how a union would make any difference there, Amazon can (will) just fire everyone who joins and replace them tomorrow right?
Interfering with a union or the formation of a union are explicitly illegal. This includes firing someone for trying to organize, at-will employment or no. However, this doesn't keep employers from trying, or from retaliation using pretextual explanations to avoid penalties. It's also common for employers to force employees to watch anti-union propaganda. Much of the overall culture in the US, as well, has turned hostile to unions.
State and federal law have been growing increasingly hostile to unions. Since 1910, if a union is formed by way of a majority vote of the employees, then they are required to represent all employees, whether or not they pay dues. Many states, including New York, California, and most "blue" states, allow "union shops", requiring all employees to pay dues whether or not they choose to join. But many, including most "red" states, have "Right to Work" laws banning union shops and allowing only "open shops". Any employee can therefore benefit from a union without contributing to it. The immediate free-rider problem cripples labor organization in those states. The problem is compounded by manufacturers moving their production to RtW states to save on labor costs. Boeing, for example, has moved much of its production from Washington, where its employees are unionized, to South Carolina, where they aren't. Membership has fallen from 20% in 1984 to 10% in 2018. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that unionized public sector jobs must all be open shops, overturning a 1977 decision. That covers about half of the country's membership, so we can expect it to weaken labor even more in the years to come.
The overall result is that the power of organized labor is a pale shadow of what it was in the mid-20th century.
Thanks. It doesn't seem like an Amazon union would actually have any teeth so long as amazon can either ignore them or fire/de-schedule workers that actually take any action (strike, work to rule, go-slow etc).
Pinkerton has a long history of criminal activity.
It's unbelievable that Bezos gets away with this with such minimal media attention. (Yeah, it's on NPR, but I highly doubt I'll see it on CNN, at the most, maybe Fox will say something because they view Bezos as a political enemy)
My great grandfather was a miner in southern WV during the time period where Pinkerton agents intimidated and harassed the families of union members, and often assaulting them. Eventually it all culminated in this:
It should be noted that Blair Mountain was the only time in history where US warplanes (very primitive at the time) dropped bombs on US soil directed at US citizens.
Who knows? There's people on here who will not like something you say in one thread, and downvote you on others. Hopefully not many. Perhaps my statement was viewed as off-topic?
I was downvoted rather aggressively in another thread for calling Trump "his orangeness" which my Trump voter friends and family chuckle at, but apparently is in bad decorum on HN. In their defense, they are just desperately trying to keep it all from devolving into Reddit territory.
History repeats itself. Check out the story of the Molly Maguires, a somewhat vigilante labor group in PA's coal region, who were infiltrated by an undercover Pinkerton in the late 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Maguires#In_the_United_S... I'm from the region of PA where this all happened, and it's a well-known story among locals.
In itself, this may suggest something is really going on here.
We're seemingly turning from ebb to flow in the union/anti-union pendulum. Meanwhile, amazon's employees are a genuinely vast group. Quantity is a quality, and amazon knows that scale can change how things work in hard to predict ways.
It's possible that amazon is ahead of the game. Most of what I've heard/read from the pro-union side is fairly generic. Why unions are beneficial generally. I definitely hear more positive sentiments towards unions, but...
I haven't heard much about goals, tactics, strategies, proposed unionisation structures. I haven't heard any ideas relating to novel 2020 realities: amazon's size, digital economics, amazon's record profits and market cap.
I haven't heard anything approaching deliverables. Pay rises? Who? How much? Benefits? Amazon have $250k aws engineers, part time whole foods workers? How does this relate to unionisation strategy or goals.
Even is the sentiment pendulum is swinging back to pro-union, a big role for unions still seems distant. It could take decades.
But at amazon they're blending them into the work force, is amazon contracting pinkerton or hiring their own? I guess it's just an undercover person on their security team?
We are letting amazon going way too far. This is unacceptable. A global coalition of trade-unions is mobilizing against amazon, https://makeamazonpay.com/
Also legislators should get more aware of companies undermining workers right. But I feel legislators to be part of the problem.
unionizing amazon would be horrible, I've been working at usps for 15+ years and unions are the reason for most of our troubles. Please lets not turn a company who makes a good product and pays people well for it into the enemy
Its safe to assume that as usual Amazon, Pinkerton, the unions and NPR/journalists are all being shady for their own self-serving reasons. Also, its appears they are all in bed with each other anyway. Some of them are trying to appear noble for extra credit.
"Here's $15 an hour...take it or leave, no one is forcing you" blah blah. It doesn't work that way in modern states. If you cannot afford to feed, shelter and educate your kids, that will fall unto others (Govt) since we've come a long way since Sparta.
Also, Amazon is closing stores left and right and turning maybe millions of small businesses into $15 an hour temporary jobs. The government has every right to get involved.
Some people in this thread propose a boycott to Amazon by not buying their products. But this effort is mostly null and void since the warehouse division is largely subsidized by AWS which is funded by most of the Fortune 500.
These boycotts might piss off an executive or VP within the warehouse division, but Amazon as a whole will continue to exist.
Personally, I have stopped using all AWS/Amazon.com/Prime services but I am only a minnow in this vast sea.
Its funny they don't care at all about the Indian labor organization which control > 50% of tech jobs at Amazon and are funded by the Indian government and their lobbying organization NASSCOM. Probably because > 50% of tech managers there are Indian nationals. In fact they promote Indian labor union formation there, which Amazon calls Bof's. They are absolutely entranced, though, in attempts to extract one more penny from blue collar jobs such warehouse, trucking, and security guards which are predominately staffed by white, black, and latino Americans.
Amazon's tech labor costs have to be in the tens of billions per year. They are paying SDE's, SDM's $200k-$1MM and but are surveilling $15 people who are stealing candybars.
Junk made in China by impoverished and forced labor + union busting and poor wages in fulfillment = Jeff Bezos and his executives becoming even fatter cats.
Both audio and transcripts are quite routinely cleaned up for broadcast and publication. Enough so on NPR / public radio that it's a signature. With some exceptions, but those are exceptions:
It’s no secret that pre-taped interviews on public radio are edited, sometimes considerably. Short silences and stumbles are “cleaned up.” Digressions or parenthetical remarks within an answer are removed in what are called “internal edits.” Often entire blocks of Q&A are excised. The cuts are made to bring the conversation down to time and present it in its most compelling form....
“Cleaning up” tape. This refers to removing ums and ahs, as well as stumbles and pauses, from an answer. Most of the time this is fine, as long as you are not removing something that suggested the interviewee was reluctant or unable to respond to a question....
My exposure to the darkroom began when I edited my first story. I sat at the digital editing console with a producer, listening to an interview with a source I had recorded earlier. With just strokes of the keyboard, he cleaned up and tightened the sound bites I was going to use, taking out sentences, words and even some of the pauses, making what are called "internal edits." Then the various thoughts were woven together technically in a way that would be totally hidden to the listener.
An intelligent verbatim transcript attempts to capture what was said rather than how it was said. The main priority being content and “voice”, while leaving out repeated words and fillers.
The aim of an intelligent verbatim interview transcript has less to do with depicting accents or involuntary vocalization. It has more to do with accuracy of the substance of the research interview, considering the meanings and perceptions created and shared during a conversation. And this is why this style of transcription is so popular, because it provides a more readable transcript while staying true to the voice and intended meaning of the participants.
Why is this problematic? I find the idea of unions distasteful. Why should all employees be obligated to join a union? It would make more sense if it was voluntary and people collectively bargain as a subgroup whose size is smaller than all employees. But forcing a single union upon all employees is just creating a separate parallel management structure, one that often tends towards practices that ultimately deliver less for customers by legitimizing things like tenure-based rules. Having a single union also eliminates competition - I just don't see why that is a good thing. And what stops employees from just forming their own company to provide a service that is contracted out? The company can choose whether or not to use their services based on their offer.
That sounds good in theory, but essentially gives the company the ability to play groups off each other. The entire point of unionization is to be able to negotiate on level terms.
This viewpoint also seems to assume that merit is the most important thing, and that unions should optimize for it. For a union, tenure is super important to maintain its strength. Corporations are held together with contracts and money, so they optimize for things that are legally safe and make more money than they cost. Unions are held together with only social fabric, so it makes sense to optimize for things that maintain continuity and cohesion.
I think unions playing off each other is a good thing. Competition is a great mechanism for preventing counterproductive policies like favoring tenure, avoiding accountability, and so forth.
There are also other benefits (unrelated to compensation) from having competing unions. To get more concrete about this, consider that the National Education Association (largest union in the US, representing teachers) is very politically biased and recently started pushing the NYT's "1619 Project" on educators (https://neaedjustice.org/resource/the-1619-project/). I find this to be unacceptable because it is weaponizing public schooling to achieve political ends, which is indistinguishable from what we label as "propaganda" in other countries (except that it comes from a big monolithic union rather than a government). Not to mention the 1619 project is factually incorrect (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...).
So if you're a student, parent, or educator who disagrees with the NEA's push with the 1619 project, what can you do? If you want to keep your job, you're obligated to pay the union dues, subsidize their institutional politics, and play along with union rules. Having several competing teacher unions, on the other hand, would allow for those who disagree with this politicization to separate themselves from the NEA while still having access to jobs and having the ability to collectively bargain as their own subset.
Put another way, unions as implemented in US law grant local labor monopolies to unions. Fundamentally, this is no different than when a big telecom player like Comcast has a local monopoly. We can see it's not healthy in that instance, so why is this any different?
It seems like you ignored my original post, which explained exactly why that idea doesn't work, and why your continued talk about "inefficiency" and ragging on tenure is ignorant.
I'll restate. Labor has to be a single unit in order to negotiate on equal terms with capital. Since unions are formed in a given workplace or industry, it's not like a union or local can negotiate with multiple employers in order to gain leverage. That concept kind of exists in the form of consulting agencies, but they fill a much different niche. Unions optimize their power structure for continuity and cohesion - the efficiency of their employer is highly, highly secondary. This is a good thing, as stable unions means a stable middle class, and low social unrest. Minimizing the labor cost of American businesses is not the end-all, be-all of social KPI.
Based on your comments, I'm guessing you have a specific political bent, but if you do the slightest bit of research, you'll find that people of all persuasions push their ideology via the School Board. Texas is a particularly famous example of right-wing ideologues re-writing history in their way. Unfortunately the humans seem to be the weak point of the system, so the only thing you can do is be involved and build a strong community.
And AFAIK in the US specifically, a union can only force an employer to accept them if it gets the majority on board to represent all employees, which means unions representing only some employees, while possible, are heavily disadvantaged, so pushing for covering all employees of a group makes even more sense.
Are you implying that they were less greedy at some other time? The whole economy is driven by greed. Always was, always will. You can get some exceptions here and there but the general picture is pure greed.
It would be interesting if someone had a meaningful measure with which to compare corporate greed of today to the greed of feudalism, the greed of colonial empires, and the like.
Well talking about Feudalism, the economy was very different back then.
Money wasn't yet able to buy you everything, your birth family would matter much more. So feudal lords weren't driven by profit (profit didn't really exist as a concept as it does today) but by other values like glory, etc. Not to say that they weren't greedy, because they were indeed, but they certainly didn't think about infinite growth or perpetually finding ways to make shareholders richer, like your corporate lord would today.
I thought the headline was a mistake and that these were “Pinkerton-style” agents.
Nope. They’re legitimately Pinkerton. Surely Amazon must know better than to partner with the most recognized name in anti-labor practices. Their PR guy needs to be sitting in on these meetings.
Why would you expect anything else? Amazon is a logistics company like UPS; if Bezos didn't squeeze every last drop of profit from their employees it wouldn't be world-dominating.
The world-dominating is largely a negative from my perspective: it pushes it's smaller competitors out of business which decreases the competitiveness of the market and extracts profits/wealth out of local communities where it would likely be spent productively into the pockets of Jeff Bezos and Amazon investors where it is not nearly so useful.
The services they provide have been of incomparable quality to any other offering in the US. They made free 2-day shipping and free returns the baseline. Amazon lockers provide online shopping opportunities to those not privileged to own a house with a secure front yard (I do wish shipping to amazon lockers was possible from other online-only retailers). And in truth the vast majority of amazon’s income is still invested back into the salaries of its workers and building infrastructure — they have notoriously thin profit margins outside of AWS. Bezos’ fabulous wealth comes from stock.
Edit: I’m not affiliated with amazon and my acquaintances had very stressful experiences working there. But as a customer I really appreciate their service
In Canada it is possible to order online directly to any post office via a special address and pick up there for free.
This is IMO a much better solution because post offices are already necessary and present everywhere, and individual retailers don't have to support the option to ship to them.
Thing is, he does. Else his wealth would quickly evaporate, and he'd be like the CEOs of Fedex, UPS & suchlike. The fact that most of his wealth is in stocks doesn't help.
https://explorepartsunknown.com/west-virginia/coal-minings-d...
Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.