The general issue with the largest employers in the neoliberalized countries (Amazon, Walmart) relative to the outsourced sectors (manufacturing mainly) is that wages are now much lower for the blue-collar worker, who is now doing service/shipping (~$15/hr -> ~$30k/yr) rather than manufacturing (~$30/hr -> ~$60k/yr).
Amazon employs about one million people in the United States, and unionization and collective bargaining could easily result in a doubling of their labor costs. This would certainly benefit the local economies surrounding Amazon warehouse locations, but would mean profits and dividends would fall. This is a significant number, an increase in labor costs by about $30B per year.
Amazon's gross profits vary year-to-year, but are on the order of $150B, so they can clearly afford to pay their workers a wage that would allow them to move up to respectable middle-class status - and this would also likely result in less employee turnover as well. The investors and executives would have to absorb the costs, but isn't that reasonable?
Amazon as a whole is profitable, but AWS subsidizes the rest. Amazon retail loses money because it's constantly undercutting competitors, and investing heavily in further CapEx to reduce costs.
If they had to pay living wages to those employees, they would stop being able to undercut every other business.
Without Bezos, when will AWS be spun off? It's a stock payoff for execs waiting to happen, and the execs can only turn a blind eye to that for so long.
Well, if Amazon spun off AWS they would have no choice but to treat all the retail-side issues (counterfeit goods, BS reviews, garbage search results, shoddy delivery subcontracts, facilitating the sale of stolen merchandise, warehouse working conditions) as actually worthy of Day 1 focus. Are they ready to do that? Unfortunately it's not as glamorous as building rocket ships, buying news companies or building web service infrastructure...
I'd expect that an across-the-board increase in Amazon prices would be a side effect of unionization and wage increases, perhaps by 10%. I don't think that this would reduce consumer demand much, however, or make Amazon a non-viable concern.
This is a fun soundbite, but it's completely arbitrary and meaningless. You could just as easily and accurately come up with something along the lines of "if a union causes its employer financial distress, it is a liability".
>"if a union causes its employer financial distress, it is a liability".
Except that has been an actual feature of unions. Plenty of unions have agreed on work reduction and other cost abating ways to help a struggling company continue to function in times of distress. Workers plenty well understand that a failed company provides them none of the benefits of the union.
They might want to be somewhat careful here so as to not piss off the provincial government. As a foreign, anglophone company, I’m sure there’s a rule or inspection they can produce if they need to to make Amazon’s life miserable. And they won’t care if Amazon leaves.
> They might want to be somewhat careful here so as to not piss off the provincial government. As a foreign, anglophone company, I’m sure there’s a rule or inspection they can produce if they need to to make Amazon’s life miserable.
I don't think the government will get involved at all. Seems they had these specific labor laws for decades. It'll just go to court and get settled there.
I doubt Amazon are the first to try skirting these.
Unions and vaccines are similar in that they are a collective action against which people only complain due to their effectiveness.
That is to say, all the libertarians complaining about unions and vaccines can do so comfortably only because they have never been exposed to the horrors they helped to prevent .
People "only" complain due to their effectiveness? OPEC is also a union, have I no grounds to complain about them? What about when meat packing companies cartelize together to raise their incomes?
Competition is a good thing whether in labor or oil or chicken markets.
OPEC is a cartel. In most econ 101 classes it is used as the most prevalent example of a cartel. I have never seen anyone argue that it is a labor union.
A cartel is a set of profit seeking firms in a specific industry who hold enough market influence to dictate price. It is the coordinated actions of an oligopoly to manipulate the market. You don't need to own the full market, you just need to be able to influence the market as a whole.
A union is, on a very surface level similar to a cartel, but unions are monopolies of labor, and do not represent the firms themselves.
They are both attempts to manipulate markets through group decision making, but even academically, they aren't seen as the same thing. There is a reason that cartel formation is very illegal while union formation is a protected right.
No because the company has other options for labor - it can fire it's entire workforce and rehire, or relocate. The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets.
>No because the company has other options for labor [...] The same can't be said for cartels which have complete control over their respective markets.
that's like saying OPEC isn't a cartel because you can still get oil from russia or canada.
I'm not convinced that a single labor union has the power to influence the labor market outside of the specific company the union represents. This is not the case for OPEC who has sufficient power to manipulate the market.
> isn't that union-busting and/or illegal?
It's supposed to be, but it's often the case that corporations are not penalized to a sufficient amount (or at all) to deter this. We've seen many cases where it's cheaper for the corporation to pay these fines and continue doing what they are doing - in that sense the current laws are ineffective.
Not in all industries or countries. This only applies to extremely weak unions. It is very difficult to hire non-uaw members for instance. There was a huge multi-month strike brining massive work stoppages a few years ago over this issue. Same with Kelloggs last year.
What are you talking about? OPEC is not a labour union, which is clearly what’s being discussed here. You may as well say a horse is a duck because they both shit.
OPEC works the same way as a union. They are both groups of competitors that band together to form a cartel, using similar tactics to increase the price of the product the sell. In one case, oil, in the other, labor.
OPEC is made up of oil producing countries and their combined output. They are extremely similar except that one deals in labor, and the other in petrochemicals.
One is big enough to influence the global market price for it's product, the other is small and localized and has effectively no influence on the going market rate for it's product.
On a local level? Maybe? But consider that the US workers of the most valuable car company in the world (by a factor of about 3)are not part of the UAW, so it's debatable at best.
Tesla is a tiny, tiny company. Tesla's market share is about 2.5%, or 14% when only looking at electric vehicles.
It's not even in the top 10 of car manufacturers by revenue. In fact it's only like 1/5th the size of the tenth place (Hyundai), or about 1/14th the size of the first place on that list (Volkswagen). It's not going move any car markets on its own, regardless of what goes on at Tesla.
So yeah, valuation is completely detached from (current) reality in this case, and Tesla is not a great example.
We could look at the biggest manufacturer instead, but I'm sure most people have heard of VW's union by now.
Restricting competition to raise the cost of the product sold. That's why unions hate people who cross the picket line. If you willingly compete, you undermine the whole strategy.
That's so interesting. Most people tend to call that a monopoly and use the word union for something else. What made you choose to use union for this behavior instead?
Well unions really only work well when they have a monopoly. If a plant want's to go on strike over something, but that means only 10% of the workforce is walking off, that's not as effective as if the union was in a monopoly position.
In fact this is why the Clayton Act specifically exempts unions from anti-trust law, and it's why "Right to work" laws are so controversial - they reduce the monopoly status of the union.
I get all that. I also understand that unions function as a labor monopoly. What I don't get is not simply referring to unions as unions and monopolies as monopolies as is the common practice.
Correct me, if I'm understanding but your point seems to be this
Unions are a monopoly so it makes sense to call OPEC a union.
Let me refer us both back to intro to programming and frame this in OOP terms. Just because a Cat has an IS-A relationship to Animal, does not make all Animals Cats.
Yes, I put it in those terms to help remove the blinders some people have on. In a strict sense, I guess you could that OPEC does meet the definition of a union, in the sense that it is a group of entities coordinating together. Just like the EU, a marriage, the commonwealth, or the USA.
We're really just splitting hairs at this point. My main point is that the motives and tactics of both OPEC and the UAW are identical.
However, first, many workplace safety rules were promulgated by govt commissions formed in response to specific events. They could be established via a one-time campaign, without a permanent institution like unions... just like many other safety and other standards - we don't have an all-encompassing seatbelt-union or anti-smoking union or low-car-exhaust union, just one-time campaign followed by a pointed intervention. Even such easier-to-violate, more nebulous policies as 40-hour work week generally persisted, and spread around the world, despite decline in unionization.
Additionally, salary and working conditions for many occupations (e.g. software) are great based purely on market forces, without unions. It's not a given that most of the good impact of unions wouldn't have happened without them.
But again, sure, I did grant some credit to unions for that. However, one may also grant nukes some credit in saving many lives by ending WWII early, and yet not be pro-nuke.
Why do you choose to judge unions on that one episode, and not many of their negative impacts?
Complete nonsense? I provided several well known facts about unions, but instead of refuting them or providing some counter it was hidden away by union groupies.
Sure, let me post them again with links to some sources.
1) Union racism - I thought there was even a congressional testimony by a union leader against allowing Blacks moving to the North to take jobs, but I cannot find it now. However, while I thought it was a 1950-ies problem - [1, including describing a system that goes beyond personal prejudice; etc.], while researching, I found it may STILL be a problem! [2]
2) Union-mafia connections [3, etc. - well known]
3) Anti-immigration stance of unions [4], incl. e.g. famously Cesar Chavez using union power to help deport undocumented immigrants via both law and with violence [5]
4) UAW role in destruction of American auto industry. This one is really typical, the union was milking a recently over-concentrated auto industry when the rest of the world had no auto industry to speak of. At the first sight of competition the whole thing collapsed. [6]
5) Unions preventing and protesting automation of ports, and successfully preventing the govt funding of it during a supply crunch [7] [8]
6) Generalized corruption. Too many small examples, here's a recent one in UAW [9]
7) Featherbedding. Similarly, many examples, some I know personally, NY infrastructure is the most prominent [10]
8) AMA limiting residency spots, med school accreditation, hospital certificates of need, etc. => limiting physicians per capital, producing more expensive healthcare.
9) Police unions... need I say more?
With a cursory search you can find much more in each category, and probably more categories too.
Why would you expect anything else? Think about a union from the first principles, it's as if someone wanted to make a basket case for every possible misaligned incentive.
* Unions have ultimate, NIMBY-like rent-seeking incentive, based on restriction and exclusion of other labor (as demonstrated above, up to racism and anti-immigrant violence when viable - but also via certification beyond any practical necessity, etc.). In a market labor would get wages it deserves. Union incentive is to milk a company for as much extra as it can instead AND ALSO to exclude other labor.
The bet is that even if the company dies, workers will just go to the next one. Or the company can continue as a zombie, with union maneuvering to get as much of the spoils as possible. Sometimes it doesn't work, as with Detroit where it didn't work and industry went abroad; notably, the key union achievements were at the time where the "abroad" was undeveloped and/or bombed out.
Public sector unions are an ultimate racket here, as public sector cannot really go under (I hope) so it can be rent-seeked-from forever.
* They have nothing to gain from progress or innovation that may eliminate jobs or make them more efficient (hence fighting port automation, or at least making automation useless by featherbedding like in NYC).
* They generally are monopolistic, but instead of being broken up/regulated/at least frowned upon like many monopolistic companies, their monopolies and/or coordination with each other is encourage.
* If those weren't enough, long-term, they have basically unaccountable leaders operating over a base of people who, rightfully, are not very engaged in the union politics. Perfect breeding ground for corruption, especially combined with the above two - you cannot run most companies with incompetents and mafia members, you will run them into the ground; but you can easily run a union.
Aside from gangs/mobs/cartels/armies/etc., unions are truly the most harmful institution even created by man. If I wanted to invent an institution with worse incentives from scratch I couldn't have come up with anything so bad.
You have a very misunderstood perspective of both the rest of the world and unions.
Its okay, just continue take reap the benefits of their efforts while you vociferously argue against them.
This is vacuous (checks out to "you are wrong" without any evidence or even counters to my post above), irrelevant (the original article is indeed about the US company and US unions) ad hominem (I probably know more about labor history and I ve lived in 3 countries of "the world").
2 things I learned from participating in the comments to this post so far:
1) unions are even more awful than I originally thought.
2) when I tried arguing with hardcore creationists in the aughtts, I thought that they must be the most dishonest and incompetent interlocutors in history; I was wrong - that was before I met union activists :D now that I think of it, it makes sense, Earth being 5kyo does sound more believable than unions doing good :P
The linked piece is pretty biased, describing a text message and literature as "harassement"; have you seen the tatics the unions use to recruit and try to certify?
The law says the worker has the right to listen to the employer. If I get propaganda posters and text messages - do I still have that right or is that taken away from me? If it is taken away - harassment
It's a testament to how effective propaganda can be when you see how easily you can get people to vote against their own interests.
It's crazy to me that anyone who works in these Amazon warehouses votes agains tunionization but they do [1]. Even in the successful vote, there were still a lot of "no" votes.
Unionization in the US is the lowest of all OECD nations (~10%) [2]. Is it any wonder US workers don't get paid maternity leave, often don't get health insurance and get 2 weeks vacation?
This is why wedge issues matter. They sow discord to prevent class solidarity. You know who actually does have class solidarity? Billionaires. And the politicans they own.
I had to laugh at this one. When I worked construction plumbing (non-union, "free-to-work" state), I received 0 days vacation and 2 days of sick pay per year.
You're saying this is a testament to the effectiveness of the propaganda and I'll back that up, anecdotally, having worked around those very people that vote against their own interests.
I was even rejected from taking two weeks off when my son was born. Needless to say I was there for his birth and his first few months, but some that I worked with were not there for their children's first days.
That really depends what the unions demands are and whether a worker thinks they are achievable or desirable. That's going to vary from location to location and from worker to worker. AFAIK, Amazon pays better than competitors assuming you can meet the work rates. If you can, you may well think that even higher pay is unlikely. And if the union is directly seeking things you are NOT willing to risk your job for (political campaigns for instance do nothing for me) then again, why vote yes?
> Even in the successful vote, there were still a lot of "no" votes.
I'm gonna steelman those no votes. BigCos don't like unions to the point they can and sometimes do close the place/warehouse alltogether. This is worse than working in non-union shop, especially in economically depressed area.
Every Amazon warehouse that unionizes make it less possible to close a given warehouse to snuff out a budding union.
Amazon is spending millions on union-busting lawyers. From the article, workers had to go to mandatory anti-union classes, which is pretty funny coming from a company where you could get written up for "time off task" by taking a bathroom break.
The propaganda the company is pushing is that the company and the workers are working together. They are not. Those workers are being exploited. Bezos considered turnover desirable.
To be fair, outside counsel spend adds up quick—a couple million isn’t really indicative of much, and is probably comparable to what unions are spending on these campaigns.
>>The propaganda the company is pushing is that the company and the workers are working together. They are not. Those workers are being exploited. Bezos considered turnover desirable.
While it is propaganda to claim the interests of the workers and company are aligned, it's also propaganda to claim that they're being exploited.
A voluntary market interaction, that 95% of the world population would jump at the opportunity to engage in, is by no reasonable definition, exploitive.
And society at large will not benefit from forcing Amazon to give Amazon warehouse workers above market wages.
Lower turnover will also turn Amazon warehouse work into another union cast, that benefits those who got in early, before union walls closed the door behind them, while making it more difficult for new workers to get a job with Amazon.
Amazon itself is also likely to slow its hiring if union action forces its labor costs up.
It's a fundamentally fallacious notion to say "Other people have it worse, why would you want better for yourself?". That's part of the problem with this satement: "A voluntary market interaction, that 95% of the world population would jump at the opportunity to engage in, is by no reasonable definition, exploitive." It applies equally to a statement like this: Other companies struggle with profits when they have union labor, why shouldn't amazon be forced to unionize their employees?
The other part of the the problem with that statement of course comes from the dictionary definition (one I think most people would consider a reasonable definition), it says:
making use of a situation or treating others unfairly in order to gain an advantage or benefit.
Punishing (the term they use is penalizing because it sounds nicer) people for being people and needing to use the restroom is unfair. So is punishing people for delivery delays caused by traffic. Both of those seem pretty unfair to me - maybe I'm unreasonable for thinking a person isn't at fault for traffic?
>>"Other people have it worse, why would you want better for yourself?"
"I want better for myself" != "if you don't offer me better, you're exploiting me". The implication of your assertion is fallacious.
>>making use of a situation or treating others unfairly in order to gain an advantage or benefit.
Nothing unfair about offering a wage for a job, and someone accepting it.
>>Punishing (the term they use is penalizing because it sounds nicer) people for being people and needing to use the restroom is unfair.
It's not a punishment. It's the terms of the deal, to ensure the employer is getting a certain unit of work for a given amount of pay.
In a free society, companies are allowed to offer such terms. What's fair/unfair is determined by the conduct of the parties to a deal, and the terms of that deal. If the conduct conforms with the terms agreed, then we in a free society should tolerate it, rather than punishing the company for it.
I guess that might be true if you define "free society" as "a society which maximizes the allowed types of financial transaction". In that case, I'm sure you'd agree that a truly free society is one in which people are born as slaves because their ancestors sold the labor of their descendants in perpetuity.
No, it's not. You simply use a contrived definition of exploitation that begs the question. Anyone would agree that a set lord monopolizing all the land and asking serfs to enter serfdom contracts for the right to till it is exploitative, and a similar mechanism is at work. It's all a question of degree.
My definition is the conventional one. Exploitation when used in the social context generally refers to some kind of non consensual interaction where somebody who is not capable of giving consent like a child is manipulated into accepting something that is not in their interest.
It does not refer to a job offer that is the best one on the market that is available to a person.
Your definition implies that a job offer that 95% of the world population would rush to accept, that is above market rates for that job and which is voluntary according to any court of law, is exploitation. By what standard can you describe it as such? It is a completely arbitrary definition, unless you are citing marxist theory which says that all investor profit is exploitation, in which case you should disclose your ideological suppositions from the outset so that people understand you are not referring to exploitation in the way it's conventionally understood.
As for land, that is completely incomparable to a company. Land is a public resource in a sense so if a Lord monopolizes it they're depriving others of something that they have an equal share in. And no single company or cartel of companies, has anything approaching a monopoly on the job market. So your comparison is wrong on two levels. It's telling that arguments trying to justify the socialist claims of exploitation have to make inappropriate analogies. The substance of the claim cannot be justified on its own grounds.
Germany in theory has laws against that. But this still happens - the problem is that you can’t just make “close warehouse” illegal and then things come down to what you can and cannot prove about the motivations of the company. And that’s often hard.
Definitely, I agree with you. Some protection is better than none, but this is a very hard goal to achieve. Fundamentally, I believe that the goal can only be achieved by normalizing unions - if you know that there‘s a high chance the next warehouse you open will unionize as well, the gamble becomes unattractive fast.
[citation needed] The warehouse where the union was established is still there. I can't even find information about any of not-unionised ones closing. Can you link information about any profitable Amazon warehouse which was actually closed as a result of union organising?
Also with the current Amazon's turnover rate you can't count on working for more than a year. Their annual turnover is over 100% for warehouses so it may be a loss for the area, but on a case-by-case basis those people would be looking for another job soon anyway.
I think that's an unfair characterisation, I doubt most people making the statement are arguing that people are stupid, but more often that they have been lied to/duped by people seeking to use their support for policies they might otherwise disagree with or vice versa. E.g. people who rail against Obamacare in one sentence and praise the affordable care act in the next are not inherently stupid, they have more likely just been repeatedly lied to/misled
"I would never join a union" is a pretty easy thing to say if you are in a job with decent pay, a labour market that wants your skills, and have reasonably good working conditions.
Which is good right?! Nope! Labor markets can reach a point where each job added does not create enough productivity to cover its cost, every next job after that is inefficient ("slack").
With an unemployment rate as drastically low as many right to work states, wage inflation becomes a big issue, so companies hire less efficient employees.
I've worked for Teamsters Local 284 as a loader and unloader for UPS. Everybody talking about Amazon propaganda, you haven't seen anything until you've seen Teamsters propaganda. You feel like you've joined a church, it's ridiculous. And I've never in my life worked at a place where there was an outwardly combative relationship between management and staff. No cooperation whatsoever. I wouldn't go back to the teamsters because it's gross and creates dysfunction.
My wife worked for the National Education Association for 15 years. I can't recall a single positive comment that she made about the union. The way the contracts are structured, educators get locked in to their home district after 5-10 years. They are useless for mediating anything but issues that are already written up in the contract and the ability for loafers to coast for the entirety of their career is commonly discussed and real. She would avoid the union because it coddles losers and doesn't lift a finger for staff dealing with real issues.
The only partial success story with unions that I'm aware of is with my brother, a lineman for AT&T. He's had that job for almost 30 years (through a variety of telcos ultimately renamed AT&T) and has been a member of the Communication Workers of America. He talks about endless frustration with the union, that the reps are useless and that the contracts they negotiate are terrible. But he does have the ability to tell his management to fuck off if they ask him to do something dangerous (which happens rarely but enough to matter) and he takes advantage of that from time to time. He might re-up for a union, i don't know.
Some people feel that they’ll do better negotiating with a multi billion dollar company. Others are unable to think ahead/strategically and focus on the 3% fee or whatever.
When you’re working for a company that manages you as tightly as Amazon does, it ridiculous to not have a union, if only for having some recourse with respect to work rules. My wife works for a local government where a bunch of the guys made a big show out of opting out of the union, they regretted that when a new administration came in and started targeting them for petty rule violations - eventually they were all forced out and replaced by cheaper people.
Because there are plenty of times they make things worse?
Let's assume the absolute best of intent, no corruption, etc.
There is some good, of course. I won't deny this. I'm not going to talk about the upside, but please don't whataboutism me simply because i'm going to talk about the downsides - you asked whether it is irrational. It is no more irrational than any other moral/ethical/etc viewpoint that someone chooses over a financial one. I am plenty aware of the history and good they have done, and the horrible labor practices they helped put an end to.
I just do not happen to be an ends justify means kind of person.
their are a few countries where union equivalents have an explicit goal/requirements/etc around societal good - i have no issues there, the rest of this is about the ones that don't.
For unions, overall, their goal is not to help society, it is to protect and help their members. They have no duty to society whatsoever. In the extreme, that ends up bad for anyone not their members.
That is, they do everything they can only to get their members more money, more benefits, protect their jobs, etc.
This sort of thing comes at a cost too.
So they make it harder to fire bad cops, bad teachers, etc.
When a municipality or state would be bankrupted by paying pensions, the unions will force them into bankruptcy at a cost to everyone else.
The unions will first force them to raise pensions, too, to unpayable levels. The state/municipality has essentially no practical power against its workforce in that situation, so it agrees, again, at a cost to everyone else.
The unions of course, do not care about the consequences for anyone else. They want it paid anyway.
I have no issue with pushing for a living wage, etc. But again, it's for their members, not for everyone, except where they believe it will generate more union membership.
So sum total, they do not care about anyone else. Literally. It's not their job.
This is awesome for their members. Horrible for everyone else.
So no, it's not irrational. Not everyone wants to group themselves with organizations designed to literally not care about anyone else.
Follow the US-style unions to their logical extreme - everyone in society in is a union, divided by job. Yay!?
I think that ends very badly for society - you really think the unions won't paint other jobs/unions/etc as the enemy?
They do in plenty of cases already!
So - i think it will end up the same sort of strong polarization/hate that exists across political affiliation, but across jobs instead. Great.
I don't think European programmers are unionized? I'm in the Netherlands, and while there are some small upstart unions for software engineers, there has been no collective bargaining action (certainly not at any significant scale).
I'd be happy to be disproven (go unions!), but I haven't heard of other countries that have unionized programmers.
1. There aren't many countries with unions for programmers. 2. Programmers earn less in general in Europe, so that proves nothing. 3. Companies pay differently in different european countries and we pay more taxes and less in healthcare costs, etc.
All you can say at that point is "I'm too lazy to confirm or disprove it". If you want to disprove his statement for real, you're going to have to put in some effort looking things up.
Union are not born out of nowhere. Those exists to balance relationships. Most of the work a union does not get publicity but can is really important by ensuring of the well being of employees. Union do not create problems, they just give visibility to problems which are already there.
Of course, like everything, some unions takes bad decisions, but that's just a small part of it.
As the other other poster says: whatever those interests are, you cannot fight for them alone vs a trillion dollar corp like Amazon, so that point is moot. Collective action is the only way you stand a chance.
Okay. So your company treats you like shit and you quit. Where do you go now? You need to sell your labour to survive, so you lost all your income. Your employer has other sources of income, has reserve capital, so that even if your job was critical and production is now shut while they look for a replacement (unlikely), they're gonna be fine. But you need to eat tonight. Not next quarter or next month or even next week, tonight. You need to pay the bank/landlord a steady sum or you'll become homeless. And god forbid you get less than perfectly healthy.
So you don't quit actually, because it is not possible for you to quit.
Capital has far more power than a (so-called) "unskilled worker", especially if there's no collective action. They have all the leverage, the worker has none, so they can dictate the conditions, i.e. the bare minimum for the worker to survive and continue working, and the worker has only to accept.
The employer owes you nothing. You're citing your difficult circimstances to justify getting the government to seize control of an employer from its shareholders, in dictating its hiring decisions.
But as a practical matter, opportunities expand faster when labor markets are free, and capital owners are secure in their rights.
Employment growth has been widely observed to be stronger where labor laws are less restrictive.
Detroit was the richest city in America in 1950. Within 40 years of the UAW Union taking over the Big Three automakers (membership rose through the 50s and 60s, peaking in 1979), the big automakers have lost their market dominance, and Detroit is a shell of its former self.
>The employer owes you nothing. You're citing your difficult circimstances to justify getting the government to seize control of an employer from its shareholders, in dictating its hiring decisions.
It's not about "difficult circumstances" at all. It's about the fundamental divide between those who need to sell their labour to survive, and those who can extract rent without working due only to having a monopoly on capital. It's a qualitative distinction, of class, not a quantitative matter of being more or less poor.
Also I did not even say anything about "government seizing control". But I will say this: the current economic system based on joint-stock ownership of firms by capital monopolists is an entirely fabricated system, and not a rule of Nature. So don't argue "but you would seize property from their rightful owners" as if the very particular system of property rights currently in force wasn't a social invention enforced with violence by the state.
>Employment growth has been widely observed to be stronger where labor laws are less restrictive.
This is simply not true. Notice how the best countries to live in the world are invariably those with more labour protections and a mixed economy with heavy public participation. Limiting ourselves to the US, compare the standard of living in the gilded age vs the golden age of American labour organisation.
>Detroit
Also, it's very rich trying to link the downfall of American industry to unionisation... I could go on for an hour about this topic.
>>and those who can extract rent without working due only to having a monopoly on capital.
No capital owner has a monopoly on capital, and capital owners do not collude to act as one with respect to recruiting workers, making your claim totally specious. Also, typically businesses don't extract economic rent. Investment is a difficult and risk-filled enterprise, that adds value to the economy, making it by definition, not a form of rent extraction.
I suggest putting aside Marxist narratives and studying mainstream Economics, which would dispel you of these fallacies on which your claims of class victimhood rest.
>>This is simply not true. Notice how the best countries to live in the world are invariably those with more labour protections and a mixed economy with heavy public participation. Limiting ourselves to the US, compare the standard of living in the gilded age vs the golden age of American labour organisation.
You just criticized me for making the correlation equals causation argument with respect to Detroit and then you go on to make a far more egregious use of this argument in claiming that conditions being worse in an era 80 years prior tell us the policies in place 80 years prior were worse.
A rational analysis compares the trajectory of an economy relative to its contemporaries when trying to use comparisons between different eras to decipher what works. The fact is wages and productivity grow faster on average in countries where labor markets are more free. The Nordic countries saw far faster economic growth relative to the rest of the world when they were more free market economies and have been leapfrogged by Singapore and Hong-Kong in life expectancy since abandoning those free market policies and embracing socialism-lite.
>>Also I did not even say anything about "government seizing control"
The government mandating companies to enter into collective bargaining to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker is the government taking control of the shareholder's negotiating agency with respect to their property. Without this compulsion, the ability of unions to extract economic rent would be non-existent.
>Detroit was the richest city in America in 1950. Within 40 years of the UAW Union taking over the Big Three automakers (membership rose through the 50s and 60s, peaking in 1979), the big automakers have lost their market dominance, and Detroit is a shell of its former self.
Oh yeah blame the unions for the downfall of the american auto industry. It had nothing to do with the biggest recession in the last 40 years and the fact that no one wanted new cars when they were losing their house to the banks.
That prosperity almost certainly more to do with the post-WW2 economic boom than anything else. There are arguments to be made against unions but citing what happened in the golden era of the '50s-'60s isn't one of them.
Because workers' rights are a zero-sum game. There is a total amount of power that can be had in the workplace, and it is either held by the owners or the workers.
Do you really believe the owners will simply accept lower profits and not just pass on the cost to the consumer? This is how you get increasing costs but no actual improvement. Wage-price spiral.
We all have the right to discuss our opinion of what is best for each other. The OP there isn't arguing for taking away the right of someone to decide.
A much better question would be – why does the American ruling class deny basic human rights – decent wage, affordable health care, good education, safety?
You want $100/hour to pack and move boxes? Start a moving company.
Healthcare isn't a right. It is a luxury. Self defense, free speech, freedom of movement and association; those are human rights. Healthcare is only expensive because of the multiple layers of government and private corruption, litigation, and pie-halving. At the same time, Healthcare can save your life; what is your life truly worth? A $10 co-pay?
If we had a good education, then people wouldn't be whining about $18/hour.
Safety? Such as being insulated from ideas & opinions you don't like, or having zero risk for electrocution in electrical contracting?
1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and
well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing
and medical care and necessary social servicess, and the right to security
in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or
other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
"The average starting wage of $18 an hour will be effective in regions where labor markets are tight, while the company will continue to pay a minimum wage of $15 an hour, said Dave Bozeman, vice president of delivery services at Amazon."
That still doesn't answer the question. Nor does it address the issue of people who abuse policies, such as those who hide in the bathroom for 1/8th of the shift.
This isn't the 19th century anymore. Unions had served a good purpose, but in no way do they serve the interests of everybody, especially in modern society given labor laws. My experience in several unions only demonstrated how corrupt, inept, and self-serving they are.
Could you please elaborate in what way exactly the union "binds you to lowest performing co-worker"? As it stands your accusation is both vague and a classic anti-union scaremongering buzzword.
1. I 100% support unions in general and in principle; and 100% support their causes
2. All (every.single.one) unions I've actually personally seen or experienced, in North America, in real life, absolutely were about lowest common denominator.
All unions I've witnessed were solely about seniority. Merit, hard work, initiative, skills, etc were simply not in the contract / not relevant / not a consideration in any sense. Best performing / hardest working, and worst performing person are paid exactly the same, if they are at the same seniority level. So in the most obvious sense you tie yourself to the lowest performing worker. I have literally, literally seen a person competent to operate a machine, replaced by union with a person not trained to operate machine, because of seniority. It was something out of Kafkian Monty Python but it happens frequently.
All unions I've witnessed spent majority of their time, energy and credit fighting for the lowest performing worker. And not in the emotional movie starring Will Smith poor downtrodden worker. No, I mean poop on the factory floor, come to work drunk, then not come to work, then lather rinse repeat, for months. And I mean every one of those words literally, and no it was not a "friend of a cousin of a brother of a guy". It is extremely damaging for the morale of any good worker, and for the relationship with management/business, when union behaves like that. You don't feel like they're a partner, you don't feel they have your best interests in mind.
The slightly more office oriented unions I've witnessed were still suicidal, in the sense that they never ever ever looked at business and the market; they'll strike for a month to get them something that'll close the business in a year.
So, I fully understand that I am lucky, privileged, and have the absolute luxury to not need a union right now. I fully understand that may change and I may be having short sighted perspectives. I firmly believe unions can be a necessary force for good. I fully agree that if you're in a Amazon warehouse today, you probably darn tootin' well want to be unionized.
But I also fully understand how somebody might not be 100% ready to sign "Yes" even without fear mongering and propaganda and bullying, i.e. for legitimate personal and general reasons. In my mind it's still a different kind of propaganda / blindness to believe that every vote for No is because of intimidation (and let's not forget unions can and do intimidate in their own way. Try to cross a striking line or fight for meritocracy or against seniority or not toe the union line and see how long the smiles last. It's ultimately just another kind of bureaucracy / social institution with its own life and rules). Not everybody who wants to have a meaningful discussion and present/is aware of multiple sides to an issue, is "classic anti-union scaremongering".
Both the highest and lowest performing co-worker have some shared needs and goals. The article mentions a few of them (for example toilet break time and respecting safety protocols). Keep in mind that the highest performing person is one minor injury away from being below average for a very long time.
I'll highlight that the scope of my comment was deliberate, precise and narrow. The broader issue of unionization brings in other factors but we're talking about Amazon warehouse workers here.
These workers by their nature are highly replaceable. Replacebility is built into the system. It's desirable for the company. It's horrible for people and completely unnecessary.
What are you? Some star performer who can pack the boxes 10x better than the next guy? That's not a thing.
Are you better negotiating alone against a big corporation? It seems that you are overestimating your personal bargain power. (And maybe overestimating your own ability)
This. After my experiences at a union shop, I would never vote to unionize, seems to serve only to keep useless people around with management having to play hot potato with them as they're too hard to get rid of. Oh and as a bonus you get to pay for wasting half your day on useless people.
Interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed: Any thread on HN related to unions soon gets newly created accounts arriving to spread anti-union FUD talking points.
Right; It's not because anybody in any forum bringing up any dissenting points, immediately gets downvoted and called (and I quote from this thread) "classic anti-union scaremongering propagandist shill" and worse. No, it is definitely an anti-union conspiracy, and we are all definitely willing to discuss all sides of a contentious issue. /s
For what it's worth, I've been on Hacker News for many years, and it is against my better judgment to comment on this topic with my ID and name. Just look in this thread to the one-line reaction posts; turn on the "see dead posts" and check out how quickly opposing opinions are downvoted and flagged; and put yourself in position of anybody having even a slightly dissenting opinion or wanting to present both sides of an issue or a different, personal perspective. HN can be brutal.
The interesting phenomenon I've noticed on HN are folks who have never worked a labor job in their life pontificating on how unions operate in the real world.
It makes you really wonder about the other decisions being made for society by this group of folks who have outsize power at the moment.
Whatever their interests are, they will be easier to achieve by unionizing. Not organizing only makes your interests irrelevant. That can hardly be in anyones own interests.
That is clearly too broad a brush. Collective bargaining is useful if your needs are aligned with the collective, if not they may be at best unhelpful and at worst actively counter productive (for instance if you have some personal circumstance you wanted to negotiate beyond the terms of the agreement, rather than negotiating with a boss or two you now have to negotiate with your representative organization). Not to mention various forms of corruption that can take hold in such arrangements.
I wonder if the rather abhorrent means of union busting has led to an extreme reaction of causing passer bys to take a cartoonish slant, as though unions can only do good in the world and only if they can overcome evil corporate interest. Unions have some clear advantages, but are far from a panacea of aligning interests for all parties.
This seems to me to be yet another fault line on which propagandists at the dials have managed to convince people to coalesce into tribes strong enough to use absolutist language where nuance is required.
> for instance if you have some personal circumstance you wanted to negotiate beyond the terms of the agreement, rather than negotiating with a boss or two you now have to negotiate with your representative organization
Why ? I don't think unions forbid any direct negotiation. Or this is a US-thing ?
I would imagine it's dependent on the specifics of the agreement, but as I understand it yes it would not be at all uncommon for the union to have incentive to stipulate members cannot negotiate outside of the union terms.
Thank you for some subtlety. I have friends that want Bezos beheaded and want the NYPD union defunded. Put most broadly: you are advocating for the creation of one union advocating for the reduction of another at the same time. And that's ok! Unions are humans and big groups of them need to be kept in check.
Sure, I agree with you, there are nuances. But it's also quite clear individual workers benefit from unionizing almost always. Corporations are large and have an enormous advantage in negotiation with a single, replaceable worker.
Well "almost always" is a step in the right direction, though I'd say is still a tad too strong. Probably favorable working conditions are reliably improved by unions, but there are also probably reliably less jobs to go around in union situations. And of course the specifics of the job also probably matter quite a good deal. I would be content with something like "Amazon warehouse workers would likely have reduced hours and improved medical benefits with a union."
I realize mine is not necessarily a majority experience, but as a young single no-debt high-performing worker, I can negotiate a lot more effectively by myself than I could in a union because I can argue purely on my own merits and if the employer is unreasonable (and not all are) it's fairly easy for me to switch employers. I even moved to a different country early in my career for a better career opportunity.
So no, unions are not in my personal interest. Though as I said, I can appreciate there are others who are less mobile or less inclined to negotiate as aggressively for whatever reason for whom they are useful. As long as unions don't get in my way (e.g. by mafia-style locking down an industry I want to work in) then I have no problem with them.
You can still negotiate and be in a union. Nobody takes that away from you. The union negotiates minimal conditions for all like minimal wage. You are a top performer - go the exact route you've described - nobody will stop you. It can work or not as you've said and the solution would be to find a new job.
This is 100%, extremely, dangerously, completely, utterly not the case in any North American union I've witnessed in North America.
(it probably explains why it is difficult to have meaningful conversations and everybody attacks each other, if we have such radically different experiences and knowledge of union laws and procedures)
FWIW, from my experience, In North America, it is the whole point of a union that "everybody gets the same" --> pay scale in particular. To make it explicit - if I'm in a union, I know EXACTLY how much anybody in any particular position makes. I can look it up in the pay scale table. I know how much my teacher cousin makes, I know how much my government friend makes, I know how much anybody at my brother-in-law's factory makes, by looking at the pay scale table.
I would be eager to hear about other countries. Maybe unions are different in Europe or Asia or Africa etc. As I indicated above in a more detailed post, I am 100% supportive of unions in general, and have had 100% negative experience in North American unions in particular.
(Preface: This is simplifying and likely wrong to some extend, but my mother held a somewhat high post in a german union for a while, so I have some exposure)
In germany, the union does not directly determine the pay rate. Membership in a union at a very fundamental level allows you to participate in the union activities, access to their resources (+) and the right to strike for work-related reasons (++). Unions can participate in the organization of the work place when there are sufficient union members in a company by forming a workers council (Betriebsrat), which must be involved in certain kinds of decisions, for example firing people. Forming a workers council is a deliberate act - union membership is required, but there’s not automatism. None of this limits the ability of each union members or employee to negotiate pay rates.
On the employers side, you optionally (+++) can negotiate (or join a pre-negotiated) Tarifvertrag which covers topics such as pay grades, work time etc. There’s for example the TvÖD (Tarifvetrag öffentlicher Dienst) which covers all employees of the state/local governments, teachers etc. There‘s the option to join a Arbeitgeberverband (employers union), which then can negotiate that contract with the unions, so that the employers side gets a better negotiating position. A Tarifvertrag can be declared as „allgemeingültig“ which means that it covers all employees in a certain sector and the employer must conform to it, whether they like it or not.
But even the Tarifvertrag only sets a minimum bar - every employee can negotiate better rates. Whether that succeeds is a question of its own - for example teachers usually can‘t negotiate a higher salary since their individual negotiating power against the state is veeeery limited. But that’s not a legal requirement or limit - übertariflich (above Tarif) is a common word found in job descriptions where the employees have more leverage.
That said, there’s still problem you can have in unions - nepotism, people using a union job to slack off, protecting employees that should be fired are things that happen. But those happen in every power structure - I’ve seen the same thing happen where „favorite“ employees have been shielded by their boss from negative consequences. So that’s a fairly unspecific point to hold against unions - at least the representatives are elected by the workers and egregious examples are usually purged sooner or later.
(+) for example legal advice and also legal services - my mother fought their employer over employment-related matters and the union sent their lawyer.
Thanks very much; though I'm from Europe, I left too young to experience unions there, so it's always enlightening to learn more. I have also understood from other folks that in much of Europe, unions have more of a seat at the business table as well, planning jointly for company's future and mutual success. Sadly, the unions I've experienced in North America have been much more "us vs them" in attitude and contract. :(
> You can still negotiate and be in a union. Nobody takes that away from you.
Not correct for any union job I've held, or even heard of.
> You are a top performer - go the exact route you've described - nobody will stop you.
I mean, I guess you could try this - or just go to a non-union shop and make real money if you are a top performer. Unions in the US are not made for top performers capable of advancing their careers rapidly. I think you will find plenty of people stopping you in this scenario.
If the subject in question somehow did manage to follow your advice and somehow get paid above their peers - from my direct personal experience I'd expect a very toxic workplace up to and including physical violence once the other members find out. You would be seen as a scab.
In the US I believe there is no direct dealing, though I may be mistaken. Not sure about Canada. Presumably unions work differently (and likely better) in your country.
That's too broad, you can negotiate things like salary independently. Other things you cannot, and it's often to prevent them from saying "Sally agreed to lower her vacation time to 2 weeks, is that ok with you too?"
I still didn't hear how it prevents you from switching employers.
> That's too broad, you can negotiate things like salary independently.
For example I worked with a school where the area management and the union set salaries and individual teachers could not negotiate on their own. I'd say that's pretty typical in unions. It's also the case in for example the NHS and British railways (topical at the moment.)
> I still didn't hear how it prevents you from switching employers.
So what happens if you ever stop being a young single no-debt high-performing worker. For example because you marry. Because you start having kids. Because you’re injured in your workplace. Because some medical procedure bankrupts you. Because you grow older? Solidarity is always give and take. You give while you can, so that someone can give to you when you need to.
You definitely can try to ride all of the ups and downs your life has in store for you but if you’re unlucky, your life will have something that you can’t handle on your own.
You think there are Amazon warehouse workers negotiating? You know this isn't really a full-day interview process, get to know the team kinda job right.
Is it actually true that most people feel efficacy over their union’s policies? The only unions I’ve been involved with or heard of where fairly indifferent to most of their members’ preferences.
Being in a democracy means you have a chance to influence the decisions, yet you end up with decisions not only you as a minority don't like, but even you as a majority don't like.
Very concrete example - in the UK most unions support one particular political party. If you don't like some of the positions of that party - for example you support the Greens or you’re a Liberal, or don't like what Labour did during the wars, or hated Corbyn, or hate Starmer - then you might find it offensive to join a union that campaigns for Labour.
A more concrete example - in the UK the unions support Labour on the basis of workers rights, that is to say a part of their program. If Labour tomorrow say - we don't care about worker rights and want to remove the minimal wage - they will get 0 support from the unions.
Just because you have alignment with someone does not mean it's all or nothing and you agree with everything. By that logic we need 60mil ppl in the House as everyone will have their own views.
+ being in a union is not the same as supporting a political party. The unions didn't go around and say: "This war... Best thing ever! Everyone - support it pls" at least AFAIK - happy to be proven wrong
Right now there's thirteen top level comments on this story, and only one of them isn't heavily downvoted, flagged, or dead.
At least some of the comments on this story objectively shouldn't be flagged, because they're made in good faith by reputable accounts, while most comments could be taken straight from Facebook.
On a five hour old submission with 200 votes you'd normally expect some worthwhile discussion, but the few people who try are struggling.
>If they know they are going to take a hit? Oh now its 'regular people' in the comments going to bat for a company everyone hates these days.
>I have to say the worst by far is Amazon. Every post about them has this shit happen.
>Obvious shills in the comments, flamebait and wars. When they can't get them to flag and get a post off the front page they do their best to muddy the waters.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
Part of this can be explained by some long-established accounts that used to frequently defend American companies being banned, e.g. CryptoPunk [1], for being too incendiary.
In any case, I'd suggest trying to quantify the number of new accounts taking the pro-market-freedom side, and the number taking the pro-government-intervention side, to see if the data bears out your assumptions.
Some people don't feel safe using their primary accounts due to the vitriolic responses. The community collectively creates this culture, but it's particularly spread with strong toned comments and perspectives that leave little room for discussion.
This mirrors real life interactions with union organizers in my family (as workers). Anything less than rah rah the union you get shunned and ostracized as some business shill. These bullying tactics are why I avoid unions.
> If union organizers repeatedly approach me is that harassment then as well or even more likely to be harassment?
no because those organizers aren't harassing you, they're fighting for truth and justice, so are not held to such petty standards like respecting the law /s
Canadians do not refer to themselves as "American" in the same way that the Irish don't refer to themselves as "British" despite living in the "British Isles".
If you insist on calling a Canadian "American", you'll quickly find they stop inviting you to social events. Because we're polite, but a bit passive aggressive.
I agree with your main point, but I'm not sure the analogy totally works.
People sometimes confuse "British" with meaning from Great Britain or from the U.K. I would guess that plenty of Irishmen would take exception to having their island treated as a de facto part of the U.K.
"British" means someone from the UK or an overseas territory/dependency. Therefore the Irish are not British and are rightfully miffed when called as such. Even though Ireland is in the (poorly named) British Isles.
"American" means a citizen or national of the USA. Therefore Canadians are not American and are rightfully miffed when called as such. Even though Canada is in (slightly less poorly named) North America.
When I lived in South America many people took exception to referring to US citizens as 'Americans'.
For most of SA, 'American' can refer to something of the American continents. Even more interesting, the middle school geography that I took taught that there was only one American continent.
So by that standard Canadians are 'American'. But yeah, as someone who now lives in Canada: don't ever think that Canada is the same as the US.
The difference in defining continents is where the confusion mainly arises. Canadians are "North Americans," unless you are in Europe, then they are just "Americans." So what are people who live in the USA? United Statesians? Americans-not-from-Canada-Mexico-or-anywhere-south-of-that?
Here in the UK, saying someone is "American" generally means they're from the USA. However, many of us have trouble distinguishing between Canadian and American accents (except of course French Canadian). That often leads to confusing Canadians with Americans.
> If you insist on calling a Canadian "American", you'll quickly find they stop inviting you to social events. Because we're polite, but a bit passive aggressive.
Yet there has been a record number of Canadians moving to the US and getting American Citizenship, despite the last administration.
The full name of the country is United States of America. The USA is the only country with the word “America” as part of the name of the country. But it is not the only United States since Mexico is the United Mexican States. So “America” is the less ambiguous name.
(BTW the reason I use US-American is that I’ve learned from my Latin American friends that they also consider themselves American. My Canadian friends do not..)
There's nothing incorrect about the fact that "American" refers specifically to the USA. Compare this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans
> Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States of America.
so there are plenty of languages that do make a distinction between "American living on the American continent(s)" and "American from the US". Full disclosure: I'm from Germany...
Minor quible, but most spanish speakers I know refer to people from the USA as Americanos. Estadounidenses gets used as part of legalese and in the context of non US nationalism.
One more data point. In my experience in Spain people definitely use estadounidense outside of legal documents.
You could hear, or read, "la artista estadounidense", for instance.
"Americano" is used too, as well as "afroamericano" (not "afroestadounidense").
I'm a native Spanish speaker and most, if not all, people I know use "Estadounidenses" or "yankees" (colloquially). I do see "Americanos" used in translated media though.
It's funny: when Americans realize we're saying the name of a foreign city badly, like Peking for Beijing, Canton for Guangzhou, and others, we move to assimilate our naming to that of the natives. Why is it that everyone insists that we refer to ourselves by the wrong name? Is it even possible for us to be wrong about what we call ourselves?
They're not insisting anything though right? They've only said it's funny and confusing. That you consider them to be insisting is interesting. I'm British so I've never been on the receiving end of any of that insistence, but from your response I assume it must happen frequently.
What I really want to contribute here though is that your "we" from "what we call ourselves" doesn't include me. Like a lot of people outside the US, English is my native language and calling Americans Americans has always given me pause for thought. So I put it back to you:
Is it even possible for us to be wrong about what we call you?
Just as a note: Peking was a corruption by French missionaries, not Americans.
In general, these kinds of errors come from historical limitations: orthography, linguistics, &c. At minimum, it’s respectful to try to adapt based on our better, contemporary understanding.
> Just as a note: Peking was a corruption by French missionaries, not Americans.
What? Peking wasn't a corruption at all. It accurately reflects the pronunciation encountered by... most Europeans who interacted with Chinese. Mandarin received official status in the 20th century.
>There's nothing incorrect about the fact that "American" refers specifically to the USA. Compare this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans
> Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States of America.
That Canada is also located in America, and if someone from Canada identifies "America" with the US they are belittling their own country? I mean, the sentence wouldn't have been less understandable if they had used "US-style" instead of "American-style"?
I didn't downvote you but to explain what you see as an inconsistency: all forms of language and terms don't always match the mathematical/geometric/spatial definitions.
- geometry view: North America is the continent and both Canada & USA are spatial subsets
- conversational language view: "America" is linguistically used as synonym for "USA" without any confusion because of context
Same idea as recent news headlines that say, "Asian powers are unlikely to ease Russia's economic woes"[1]
If one is stuck on the geography fact that Russia is actually the largest country in Asia and bigger than China, that headline makes no sense. (Why can't an Asian power like Russia ease its economic woes?!?) But if you accept that "Asia powers" is often a synonym for "China/India" that excludes Russia, the intended meaning can be parsed.
"America" was originally what is now called South America. Mercator then called "America" both North and South. Then common use in English forced "America" to mean United States of America only. Schoolchildren in the rest of the countries are told "America" is a continent united by a continuous mountain range going from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. I guess this will go away once education is globalized and homogenized into mainstream corporate narratives.
Yeah, sorry, if North and South America are all one continent, then Europe, Asia, and Africa are all one continent, too. In fact the Darien Gap is completely impassible, very much unlike the Urals or the Sinai.
>Yeah, sorry, if North and South America are all one continent, then Europe, Asia, and Africa are all one continent, too. In fact the Darien Gap is completely impassible, very much unlike the Urals or the Sinai.
North America and South America are treated as separate continents in the seven-continent model. However, they may also be viewed as a single continent known as America. This viewpoint was common in the United States until World War II, and remains prevalent in some Asian six-continent models. The single American continent model remains the more common view in France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, and Latin American countries.
The Darien Gap is "impassable" only because it is a protected forest and therefore roads and railways are not allowed.
Can't say for everyone else, but here there are America and South America. Therm term North America is a pretty much used only in geo and historic contexts, almost never in a political one.
Ahh I didn't know that. I remember being there in high school and our tour guide laughing when we said there were 7 continents. Here it's always "N.A."
I feel your gripe, in Québec we sometimes make a point of saying "états-uniens" (rather than "américains") which rolls of the tongue smoothly, but United Statians doesn't ring as well in English. What good word is there to call Americans other than Americans? I've never heard someone use another term in English.
However if it's belittling Canada, it's certainly belittling the other 55 countries of the Americas that seem forgotten in this thread (say 54, Mexico is mentioned).
"US Citizen" or "from the US" tends to get used if trying to avoid the word American or be more specific. But "American" is definitely much, much more common.
I mean, that works for people of any country/region, but it doesn't really solve the misnomer that is the name designating habitants of the USA. That is, if it even is a misnomer for being "non-inclusive", after all the USA is the only country with America in it's name, while the preceding part of the name is kind of descriptive. We don't use "Democratic Republics", "United" and "Islands" for designating people from countries with those, maybe it's fair to do the same with Americans (tho Americans say the US/United States so it's also fair to use that as a base for the name).
"US citizen" excludes a huge number of people who live in the USA but do so without the benefits of citizenship, so that isn't great either. "American" being synonymous with "people from the USA" may not be completely accurate but it seems the best of available options.
Which is something I've heard for the first time in this thread. I understand it's true, but isn't it a bit of a legal formality? When you go thru Mexican customs, it says Mexico, not Estados Unidos Mexicanos or United Mexican States (from the North). The passport says Mexico in bold on top and the full formal name on the crest. The U.N. seat's plate says Mexico.
Americans tend to even abbreviate their country to the US or United States, which makes états-uniens fair game in my book. I could be off base, but do Mexicans ever designate their country as Estados Unidos?
There's a lot of ambiguity. Yes, many people outside the US use the term to refer to people from the US in general, but technically Yanks/Yankees are only the people from New England (the Northeastern US states). Someone from the US South or West aren't Yankees.
I thought this was referring to us-ians outside the us. Granted there are regional differences inside that are unknown outside. But to the rest of the English speaking world, yank is from the us. And Canadians aren’t Americans, Scots aren’t British or English and only a smaller portion of the Irish won’t get real offended if they’re not called Irish.
Significant differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada but unless they’ve visited they probably going to lump them all as Canadians. Pro tip: try not to do this, listen for the accent.
In English at least 'Canada is also located in America' is not correct. It should either be 'Canada is also located in the Americas' or 'Canada is also located in North America'.
> management has worked to isolate pro-union workers and threatened to relocate the warehouses if unionization succeeds.
> One worker said his life has become miserable since he uttered the word “union” at work. “Every coworker who talks to me, after a few seconds, they are interrogated by the manager. When they do that, people don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m being isolated,” he said.
Because it's vague and hearsay. The most frustrating thing about these debates is that the pro-union side are so hostile to anyone who questions anything, as though they assume that anyone who doubts the union must be a business owner. I'm a worker, I would like to be part of a union that worked. But I don't see unions that work, I just see unreasonable and propaganda-like articles like these. When there is a dispute, if I try to look at it dispassionately, I usually find that I disagree with the union. So where does that leave me if I want to improve my rights as a worker?
You can be anti-union, that's fine. It's even legit to be pro-union but to say that for you personally, you're such an amazing performer that employers are fighting over you and so maybe the union is good for most but not you personally. For example, maybe NBA players would make much less without the union but LeBron personally would make more. Maybe you're the LeBron of developers! (There's no debate on whether bargaining collectively leads to greater leverage in negotiation overall. It clearly does.)
And you're also not the person who wrote the initial comment.
But it seems dishonest of them if they first said:
> I fail to see how any of the things mentioned in the article are "intimidating and harassing"
...but to then shift the goal posts to saying that yeah, okay, the things left out would be intimidating and/or harassing but they just don't believe the allegations to be true.
>There's no debate on whether bargaining collectively leads to greater leverage in negotiation overall. It clearly does
Totally! That's why I want to be pro-union. I don't know much about NBA, but I don't think I'm a top 10th percentile developer. It just sometimes seems like all the unions fight for is the bottom 10th percentile.
I'd love to see a study on this topic. My priors lead me to believe gains are far more distributed and far more come out ahead, but I haven't actually researched the degree.
Wow, that is quite the reframing. It’s a union of the players, not everyone involved in making an NBA game happen. There’s no arena to employ people if the game doesn’t exist. And the history of professional sports is filled with worker exploitation. I would have thought an industry that is a true meritocracy might be the one place all of the 10x developers here might understand a union’s purpose.
No, it's a union; you can find them listed on the DOL website as a union if you look them up.
It's not uncommon for different workers to be represented by different unions in a single workplace. UNITE HERE, among others, represents some stadium workers.
I don't know if you've looked around the thread much, but there's just as many anti-union posts decrying it as communism, leftist propaganda and more. The idea that it's just the 'pro-union' side being hostile is a lie.
And more importantly you should consider who is pro-union vs anti-union. Considering you're posting in a thread about Amazon wielding its power to intimidate workers. To me, it doesn't seem like you're looking at this dispassionately: It seems like you've already staked out your territory and decided anything beyond that is wrong.
The most frustrating thing about these debates is that the pro-union side are so hostile to anyone who questions anything, as though they assume that anyone who doubts the union must be a business owner.
The same exact thing happens on the other side; those vehemently against unions assume you want to usher in a new age of communism and start implementing mass killings all in the name of progress and equality.
A cynical view might be those posters are there to stop you seeing and interacting with your fellow co-workers through what would normally be a transparent divider while a vote is imminent.
Can we not treat Hacker News like some Reddit thread, making low effort political jokes in an attempt to curry upvotes? If that's not what you were doing, and instead were being serious, then do note that Canadians ape American culture more heavily than any other nation I can think of, so this characterization is not correct.
Offtopic, but sometimes a witty (at best), or just butty (at worst), joke is made only for it's own sake, sometimes it's for other's amusement and sometimes it's for upvotes as well.
Yes, imagine a website publishing opinion pieces with diverse viewpoints, some of which you find repulsive... I fail to see how that is relevant for this particular article.
I just put a note. It's good to know what you're clicking on when you might not have heard of the website before. It provides something called "context".
I for one am glad that freedom of speech exists (in practice as well as theory) and that people can express those two opinions, one of which I agree with and the other which I don't :)
Because it's not presented as an opinion from a single viewpoint but as news, which we expect (perhaps naively) to be balanced and have multiple viewpoints. That's the failure.
Amazon employs about one million people in the United States, and unionization and collective bargaining could easily result in a doubling of their labor costs. This would certainly benefit the local economies surrounding Amazon warehouse locations, but would mean profits and dividends would fall. This is a significant number, an increase in labor costs by about $30B per year.
Amazon's gross profits vary year-to-year, but are on the order of $150B, so they can clearly afford to pay their workers a wage that would allow them to move up to respectable middle-class status - and this would also likely result in less employee turnover as well. The investors and executives would have to absorb the costs, but isn't that reasonable?