Realistically an Amazon-wide union is the only way Amazon workers are going to get decent wage increases. If the USA is going to allow manufacturers to outsource the majority of well-paid (~$30/hr avg) manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China, without having any cross-border capital flow penalities (neoliberal globalism in a nutshell), then the major employers like Amazon and Walmart are going to have to double their wages.
Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.
Amazon has significantly increased wages. They were at the forefront of the $15 wage, more than double the federal minimum wage. I think at the time Walmart was at $10 or $11.
I live in very liberal SF but outside of my bubble, I hear people complain that it’s not possible to hire Nannies/housecleaners/employees anymore when Amazon and Starbucks pay $18/hr. Seems like the answer is easy: pay them more or make the job more desirable.
Amazon working conditions are challenging, and they have been super anti-union. But they’ve also done more to increase wages in the US than anyone in Washington in the past 15 years, arguably second biggest in past 40 [1].
Yes, a big chunk of the labor shortages in hospitality, child care, etc. we’ve seen the last two years is a direct result of Amazon hiring lots and lots of people. And as shitty as the conditions of those jobs may be, they’re often still better than where they’re coming from. Sticking labels to boxes and moving them around a warehouse all day may still be better than dealing with handsy bar hounds or screaming children.
I’m not here to say that Amazon is doing a great job and we should all be singing Jeff Bezos’s good graces. But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but on everyone who could want to work at Amazon but can’t because their jobs are more scarce, and by everyone who buys things from retailers (Amazon or not) in the form of higher prices.
Unionists like to talk about how the labor movement provided a lot of basic protections for workers and the 40 hour work week. What they like to talk less about is American unions’ frequent associations with organized crime, it’s history of racism and sexism, all of the environmental bills it has fought against. I could go on.
A union-free Amazon has driven up wages for workers throughout the economy. And it has helped keep prices low for everyone else so that even if you don’t earn as much as a Amazon warehouse worker nor shop at Amazon, you can still afford many basic necessities. So yes, I’m saying we should be singing the good graces of competition.
> But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but ...
I like parts of the analysis (if a big player has to pay higher wages, this will affect many in different ways). But I think it's hard to discuss what exactly the implications would be without a deeper analysis including numbers.
Without numbers, I find that participants in a discussion are often tempted to put a high emphasis on a certain argument or on the impact of a mechanism just because they have come up with that argument or mechanism. But actual numbers might imply a different weighting.
An example would be: With longer fingernails you might be able to swim faster. But to what degree?
While I like the idea of unions, I can say that they've been a disappointment in my career. One of my colleagues desperately needed the protection of the union at work when he got caught up in office politics. Some of his rivals for a big promotion got him accused of something that had nothing to do with work. It was all cancel culture. The union, though, didn't back him up at all. They make a big show about somehow fighting management for the workers, but in this case they were happy to help the management screw the guy over and end his career. Sure they're a union, but they're humans and sometimes they'll be aligned against you.
I’m reading this as, he made racist or otherwise hateful statements in a semi-public forum and nobody was going to put their organization’s name behind that. It’s an interesting problem. On the one hand it’s a free country you can say what you please and your employee can fire you for it. On the other hand I think it’s inhumane for someone to lose their job - and most notably healthcare - because they are one of a large number of knob heads out there and were unwise enough to advertise it.
I think someone who is willing to speak out hatefully against large swathes of the population based on things like sex and race are exactly the kind of people that should be ostracized. In the case of the work environment, getting fired. If they aren't, they stick around, making coworkers uncomfortable, possibly getting promoted and then ensuring the group they hate doesn't get hired or promoted
But HR departments are not usually doing that as a first step. They talk to the employee and try to get an apology if needed. The stories in the news are always egregious examples or people with a long history and it was the last straw
This is not a problem with unions as a concept, but rather with the huge, centralised, bureaucratic, political entities they have become in practise. That type of organisation has some benefits, but I believe federations of highly local unions would be more effective for helping individual people deal with specific pickles.
It’s easily possible to argue that the concept or structure of unions, and their relationships to business, as generally implemented, tends towards those corruptions.
> Amazon has significantly increased wages. They were at the forefront of the $15 wage
Warehouse workers before Amazon were making over $20/hr. Amazon seriously depressed wages for that kind of work. How do you think they got so profitable and outcompeted everyone else in that space?
Only been in a few rando warehouses, and I think the reason is most rando warehouses are inefficient. One worker may ship 15 packages an hour. I bet the Amazon packages per worker per hour is multiple times higher.
You’re saying conflicting things, Amazon “leads raising wages” to you but then “it’s not possible to hire X at rate Y so people have to pay more.”
Amazon has to pay more because their jobs are shit. They aren’t doing anything to raise wages they’re just trying to get people’s asses in the door. I’m sort of shocked you linked to the department of labor’s historical page as some sort of proof of your idea.
I can guarantee that wage is the minimum they can pay to get people in the door for the level of work required by them calculated by a legion of economists.
The fact you think Amazon jobs are competing with “Nannies/house cleaners/employees” is equally strange. Like somehow these jobs are related?! Why do you only compare those jobs to Amazon factory jobs?
Amazon rose wages and have some the highest warehouse worker wages around, to the point where they are creating upward pressure on wages in other industries.
Their jobs also are super stressful and burn people out.
These things are not contradictory.
Anecdotally, in support of the comment you are replying to, Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here, and $100-$150 a night isn't anywhere near enough to screw with her sleep schedule. She works $18/hr morning shifts and now owns a car.
This seems like a poor comparison. Your babysitter left a part time job (100/25 = 4 hours of work per day) for a full time one and can now afford a car.
Yeah; good for her. The point is that Starbucks and Amazon have created an ever raising floor for the price of labor.
They're low-skill/training jobs, so no skilled job is able to pay less than that. (Also, the Starbucks thing is part time, and she had babysat for other people too -- babysitting probably made sense at 2x the hourly rate of a part time job, but $25 isn't 2x anymore.)
I get the impression the dollar amount didn't change. Instead, the existence of the market did. (None of the other parents we know have been able to find babysitters either.)
Presumably, it'll even out after the labor shortages subside.
Have you tried offering $2,500 per hour? The market exists. There are babies that need babysitting, and people capable of babysitting.
What does not exist is an intersection of the supply and demand curves of people willing and able to pay what people capable of babysitting want to get paid for babysitting.
Are we talking about nannies or a sitter for a random single night? Are there no teenagers in the neighborhood who want an “easy” 4 hours work? That’s what we did with my son (late 90s). Same as my parents did with me and my sister (early 80s).
>their jobs are shit
I have a couple friends that have worked at Amazon warehouses and also worked at shipping centers for UPS and FedEx and they both told me that Amazon not only paid better but had better working conditions. Not saying that's the case universally, but I don't think it's right to uniquely criticize Amazon and not the industry at large, especially if Amazon really is a better employer than their competition.
The federal minimum is not really something that should be taken as a point of reference (from the employees side).
A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)
Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
>Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.
If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
> If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist.
I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.
Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.
> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.
Did early humans own the tools they created? Probably. Government limits this in almost all cases. Even the liberty minded founders of the USA created eminent domain which is not limited in which property the state can take, technically. The USA typically is supportive of private ownership, but not the originator. I think ownership exists inherently in humans. As does it's counterpart theft. We have decided that theft is bad and ownership is good over the millennia. It is possible we may change to not value ownership and theft would then have a more positive connotation.
Business cannot exist without two parties transacting. Businesses can exist without ownership. That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them. There does not even have to be capital exchanged. Bartering for labor can and does happen.
> That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them
That would be an insane stance to take. That is essentially arguing in favor of slavery, the idea that someone other than me owns my labour.
You can own the output of my labour if you have an employment contract with me where I trade you that in exchange for something from you, but you can't ever own my labour itself. That would be nuts.
Businesses can be owned by all of the workers collectively, its rather silly to assume that's not true and it needs a singular owner. There is zero reason why this would be the case. Groups of people can agree on things, believe it or not.
Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.
We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.
Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?
If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans
So, you would have the government step in and deny the right of an individual to earn what they may need at that moment, in their specific circumstance, to form a contract with another person - a business owner? The bureaucracy knows better, and if the individual can’t find another job at a level to even scrape by then the bureaucracy steps in again, but is this a path to a solid job in 20 years? The higher the wage, especially federally, the more dramatic and onerous the effect.
It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.
I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.
> I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.
This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.
Or employees could group together to form cooperative companies that don't simply work to extract from their labor and actually provides a decent living for everyone. There is no reason that we should be all working together as a group to make a few people wealthier when they didn't do any of the actual work.
We already produce enough food, goods, and housing for everyone in the country to live with their basic needs met. The only reason that isn't happening is because there is a small group of capital owners and corporations that work to create artificial scarcity. It's an absolutely disgusting practice that benefits nobody but people who are already rich
With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.
> If the USA is going to allow manufacturers to outsource the majority of well-paid (~$30/hr avg) manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China
What? You think overseas manufacturers are paying $30 an hour?
It wasn't high-skilled manufacturing that was outsourced. Welders and machinists still have near zero unemployment and make about as much as a software engineer. It was low skilled manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to China. Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
High-skilled manufacturing was absolutely outsourced outside of the US.
> Those jobs never paid anywhere close to $30/hour even in the heyday of unionized American manufacturing.
Auto factory jobs (which were outsourced) certainly paid that much and more in inflation adjusted dollars. From a book studying the auto industry describing average wages in Detroit,
> At $11.62 an hour in 1982 wages, Detroit's autoworkers, according to U.S. car companies, were simply too expensive, particularly with the added cost of pensions, health insurance, and union-negotiated work rules.
The decline of Detroit UAW auto industry definitely weren't outsourced. It certainly wasn't GM that opened car factories in Japan and Germany. And it certainly wasn't GM shareholders or executives that benefited from the rise of Japanese and German imports.
This isn't outsourcing, this is simply a case of American carmakers being outcompeted by better products from Japanese and European competitors. (A significant fraction of which were actually assembled in US-based plants owned by those overseas competitors.)
This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)
1. Both factors matter. Most manufacturing for the American automakers also happens outside of the US. That is outsourcing. People still buy American cars.
2. It does have to do with mobility of capital in that many of these "international" competitors are still reliant on American capital and are owned in no small part by American institutional investors.
> This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)
You are mixing in a moral argument about which is better but it is sort of irrelevant to the veracity of claims like "manufacturing jobs never paid close to $30/hr" and "high-skilled manufacturing was never outsourced."
> It does have to do with mobility of capital in that many of these "international" competitors are still reliant on American capital and are owned in no small part by American institutional investors.
The Japanese auto industry, like virtually all of postwar Japan, was almost entirely financed by Japan's persistently high domestic savings rate. You don't have to take my word for it, just look at the long and persistently high current account deficit Japan has with the US. Japan is a huge net exporter of capital, not importer, and it has been for 50 years.
The majority of the auto factory jobs that were (e.g. automotive assembly line work) are considered unskilled work; not even semi-skilled; never mind high-skill.
I rather think the point is that outsourcing of those jobs was proof of the assertion that unskilled manufacturing jobs at $30/hr (in 2022 money) plus rich benefits are not a thing that was sustainable.
Go ahead and re-read the comment you are defending. I think it has twisted in your memory to something much more reasonable rather than something that can be verifiably fact-checked as false.
If the jobs were to come back to the US, they'd need to pay $18+/hour, since they're worse than a warehouse job, and Amazon pays so well.
At that point, the factory owner is going to be focused on automation and robotics, so most of the jobs they offer will be for highly skilled positions (and pay more than welders or machinists make).
> since they're worse than a warehouse job, and Amazon pays so well
Not all warehouse jobs are equally terrible, as evidenced by the people working at warehouses other than Amazon's at lower wages. Amazon pays above the going rate for warehouse workers because of its reputation w.r.t. worker conditions.
> Not all warehouse jobs are equally terrible, as evidenced by the people working at warehouses other than Amazon's at lower wages. Amazon pays above the going rate for warehouse workers because of its reputation w.r.t. worker conditions.
I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse. It's easy for someone working as a developer to maintain that warehouse jobs aren't all "equally terrible." They mostly are terrible. The majority of warehouse workers would rather be working another job, especially Amazon workers. In many of their labor markets, Amazon is chewing through the available labor supply faster than it can be replenished. By the end of this year and especially by the end of 2024 in many markets Amazon will no longer have fresh workers. I wonder where you prime delivery will be then.
Further, Amazon might pay higher than average wages for the industry, but the high turnover creates an oversupply of warehouse skilled labor and actually depresses wages. They offer slight incentives for staying but then overwork their employees to encourage their resignations to hire newer, minimum starting pay employees.
> I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse.
I have, on multiple warehouse floors, for around 3 years cumulatively.
Meanwhile, it's obvious you're projecting your own inexperience. Maybe you're the one who should actually set foot in a warehouse before commenting.
> They mostly are terrible.
Then I'm sure you'd consider any job away from an air-conditioned office to be terrible.
Warehouse work is certainly hard work; picking and packing certainly entail being physically active. I won't pretend it's immune to asshole bosses or that injuries never happen; that's the nature of manual labor under capitalism. It's still vastly preferable to outright abusive job sectors like retail or restaurant work or customer service; I'll take walking 5+ miles through a pick path or packing 50+ boxes all day (even with leads and sups breathing down my neck over my numbers) long before I'd consider subjecting myself to snotty asshole customers berating me over their own ineptitude.
Amazon is the exception, not the rule. Warehouse workers outside of Amazon could certainly be paid better - all workers could and should, in many many sectors - but this assertion that a megacorporation with a specific reputation for abuse is somehow representative of an entire job sector is one of those baseless assertions that demonstrates considerable ignorance and inexperience.
For various reasons, I won't be replying after this.
> I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse.
I don't think that I should have said this, and my combative tone wasn't constructive to the discussion. It is my normal, sometimes incorrect operating assumption on this site that while the general user knows about tech that they know jack-all about working in retail etc.
> Then I'm sure you'd consider any job away from an air-conditioned office to be terrible.
Generally speaking, I do consider this to be true, especially in triple digit weather with high humidity which seems to be the norm moving forward. We are all less human and more prone to aggression in this heat. I am grateful that I have the privilege of working in an air conditioned office now.
> Warehouse work is certainly hard work; picking and packing certainly entail being physically active. I won't pretend it's immune to asshole bosses or that injuries never happen; that's the nature of manual labor under capitalism.
> I'll take walking 5+ miles through a pick path or packing 50+ boxes all day (even with leads and sups breathing down my neck over my numbers).
Neither of these descriptions provide a positive assertion of warehouse work being not terrible. Warehouse work often takes a physical and mental toll that makes pursuing opportunities to leave it absurdly difficult without social support. I think that your descriptions only further lend credence to my claim that working in a warehouse is generally terrible or at the very least not pleasant.
> It's still vastly preferable to outright abusive job sectors like retail or restaurant work or customer service
> long before I'd consider subjecting myself to snotty asshole customers berating me over their own ineptitude.
I recognize this misanthropy. I still have it from my time working
in retail and elsewhere. It'll be a cold day in July when I go back of my own volition. I get it. I really do. I'm not going to rehash my experiences here, but it sounds like you've had similar moments, hours, shifts, years.
I see that you've also fallen for that trap of hating one type of low income work more than another. They all have their shitty sides. I think all of our lives would be improved if the general public learned a shred of empathy and respect. I won't hold my breath, but sometimes I have hope.
> this assertion that a megacorporation with a specific reputation for abuse is somehow representative of an entire job sector is one of those baseless assertions that demonstrates considerable ignorance and inexperience.
Amazon typifies and exemplifies this trend of declining working conditions, respect, and exacting work. Also, maybe you should calm down and take a few deep breaths. Try getting more sleep, eating healthy, going for walks where possible, and limiting caffeine intake.
> workers outside of Amazon could certainly be paid better - all workers could and should, in many many sectors
I think we'll both find common ground here. I've often had enough of people expressing disdain for 'undifferentiated' or 'low-skilled' labor' being undeserving of income necessary to afford living. I think we could both find common sense and common views, but we have different outlooks on society. Given the quality of our discussion here I sincerely hope we don't have the displeasure of meeting. Vaya con dios.
> Neither of these descriptions provide a positive assertion of warehouse work being not terrible.
And you have every right to that opinion, but that wasn't quite the topic of the discussion; rather, the topic was whether all warehouse working conditions are equally terrible, and my experience (as well as the experiences of my coworkers during that time, some of whom came from Amazon) strongly suggests otherwise.
> I see that you've also fallen for that trap of hating one type of low income work more than another.
That's hardly a "trap"; that's a basic preference for doing hard work v. doing hard work while also being endlessly emotionally abused as part of the job description - and even ignoring Amazon, the former tends to pay at least marginally better.
> Also, maybe you should calm down and take a few deep breaths. Try getting more sleep, eating healthy, going for walks where possible, and limiting caffeine intake.
Maybe you should follow your own advice instead of yet again projecting onto me.
> I've often had enough of people expressing disdain for 'undifferentiated' or 'low-skilled' labor' being undeserving of income necessary to afford living.
And hopefully you realize that I already do agree with that disdain (as is obvious from the other comments of mine on this site over the last 10 years).
> Given the quality of our discussion here I sincerely hope we don't have the displeasure of meeting. Vaya con dios.
If we do, then hopefully it'll be under better circumstances, without the initial hostility.
I may be wrong, but besides and before the wage increases, it seems to me like the priority would be for decent working conditions, if what is published from time to time on media is actually true, the biggest issues are about lack of (normal, decent) pauses or rest periods, continuous summoning for increases in productivity, total control on the workers, etc.
> if what is published from time to time on media is actually true
That's a big IF. Unions were invented after the onset of the industrial revolution to combat truly unsafe work conditions in industrial settings where worker's dying was common.
OSHA did away with all that.
The current generation of "bad work condition" complaints is around getting adequate bathroom breaks.
What rock are you living under? Plenty of the documented absolute nightmare of working for Amazon in their warehouses is corroborated by their own internal analysis. Unions are for more than just making sure people don't die when doing their job. The union I am a member of more than doubled the wages of its members after its first 12 years of existence. Crucially it also ensures twice yearly cost of living adjustments. It is the only way for labor to have a meaningful negotiating position. There are shitty unions out there, but there are a lot of shitty employers too. Amazon's internal reporting shows they're going to exhaust the labor pool in several areas because they've cycled through everyone who could possibly work at the warehouses and fulfillment centers. People aren't leaving Amazon because they aren't allowed to use the bathroom. They're leaving Amazon because it is dehumanizing and miserable. Funny how the people who make the lowest wages have to put up with the most shit.
OSHA is always thrown around as either an overbearing force of oppression or a magical savior of the worker by anti-union people.
The reality is that it’s a toothless tiger by design. Many states do their own enforcement, and don’t exactly prioritize it — IIRC, North Carolina has 20% of the inspectors that it says it needs.
I’m sure your cushy IT gig requires you to stand for 6 hours without taking a piss. Try it sometime before attacking others.
OSHA did away with all that on paper. In reality, OSHA compliance varies considerably across manual labor jobs. Here's how:
Suppose you're a manager/foreman. You never outright tell your staff to ignore safety regulations; you simply give them a huge workload with a deadline and set of equipment that make it impossible to feasibly accomplish the workload within compliance. Your workers catch on that in order to get the job done, they need to ignore the safety regs. As a manager, you look the other way as they ignore the rules. If an injury happens on the job, you then blame the worker for ignoring the safety regulations, which of course you instructed them to follow. Follow up by giving them a drug test so you might even be able to get out of paying them workers comp.
This is how it works in the real world. Source: seen it, done it.
...
So why didn't you push back and hold the manager foreman's feet to the fire for the scheduling if you knew it caused OSHA violations?
If you do not push back against management, nothing changes, and unfortunately, to get anything provable in a court of law beyond he said she said... It has to be on paper/in an email.
Go on. Text your boss you can't get the job done on his schedule without violating OSHA standards. Then come back tomorrow and finish it. If they decide to fire you, sue. All the evidence you need will be discoverable.
Don't absorb risk for people not putting their neck on the line.
For heaven sake. You're enabling this type of behavior. Every manager will push and squeeze to get everything out of you they can.
Here's the secret though: It's their ass on the line if it doesn't get done. If they're a middle manager, they now have to go back with hat in hand and tell their higher up they made a mistake. That repeats for however many layers of middle management exist until resources get properly allocated. It's their business that takes the hit if it gets out to client's that project their having built is meat grinding their laborers.
You the end laborer, hold the power in this case. A manager cannot knowingly force you to conduct your work in such a way as your rights to a safe workplace are jeopardized. You have the power to expose it, and make it unequivocably known to your higher ups that these violations are happening. You can report your employer to your local OSHA enforcement arm.
A law on paper but never enforced is no law at all, and a workplace where everyone lets the boss abuse one another is the only outcome if you won't stand up for you, and sometimes, encourage someone else to stand up for themselves. I did it for my people damn it. You need to do it for yourselves and your peers. This is why labor organization is important. Businesses can abuse you because people don't act in concert to the degree the business does.
No work is so important it cannot be done as safely as possible. No one has the right to conspire to put you in harms way. An employer who provably does is not entitled to be an employer in the United States. That is a privilege, not a right.
Fight, damnit! Fight! Or vote with your feet by finding something else to do! If you don't set the bar for people to not work for, and refuse to make their life more difficult by making them accountable for their own malfeasance, you're passing the buck to the next crazy motherf'er who will, and we are in short supply.
The problem is chronic. Activists of all kinds have to eat, see the doctor, pay rent, and so forth.
Those things are currently damn tough for most people, and that's where
FIGHT DAMMIT!!
...breaks down.
You aren't wrong. Having been in those scenarios, when it was my turn to make the calls, the stuff got done safely, work / life balance is appropriate, and so forth.
It's expensive too! Tons of economic pressure on not doing the right things for and with people.
The farther away from the edge people are, the more they are able to do those things you say. The more robust their support network is, the more able they are.
This is pure historical revisionism concocted solely to diminish modern struggles for worker organisation.
Wages are and have always been the primary driver of unionising.
The main motivation was never mustache twirling capitalist charicatures shoveling children into furnaces as fuel or some other unambiguous evil that we have since banished. Conditions have always been part of the bargain, but the goal has always been first and foremost higher wages.
> Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.
Is it what usually happens when workers unionize? It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well.
> It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well.
Can you substantiate this claim?
With the vast majority of goods the price is set by the market, i.e. higher wages would indeed result in a smaller profit margin and not in a higher price.
It could be either. In most cases it is likely both (shrinking margins, higher prices).
The price is determined by the market. But there’s a demand curve. There are many prices that an item could sell at, with varying numbers of buyers at each price.
In a highly competitive market, the price should be driven down close to the cost of production. This allows the most people to buy at the lowest possible price, at the expense of retailer margins.
Amazon probably has the best cost structure of online retailers. Which means in many cases they are setting the floor on the price. If their labor costs go up enough to wipe out their margins, their prices must go up, or they must exit the market for highly competitive items. With less competition, other retailers have more leeway to increase prices.
As a society we may decide it is worth paying more for goods to ensure a fair living wage and safe working conditions. That doesn’t sound unreasonable. But to assume you can get that without increasing prices is naive.
I'd like to point out that amazon is making ginormous profits, meaning increasing wages and ensuring safe working conditions would hardly make a dent in amazons revenue.
Does Amazon retail make ginormous profits? Genuine question. I googled for a few minutes but, given the way the company is structured with regards to AWS, it doesn't seem simple (possible?) for an outsider to determine the margins on their retail operations.
I wrote this comment earlier today, but didn't post it. Now I do, and added some stuff at the end to hint the answer
to your question:
I worked for amazon logistics some time ago and the lack of future vision and aim for automating everything™ was the biggest reason for why I quit.
I wish amazon would invest more into automation, but at the moment humans are just so much cheaper that you’d rather hire 500-2000 people for a few months peak (prime day and holiday season), than invest in automation.
Actually, amazon itself does zero to none research and engineering in logistics by themselves. Instead, they only buy third party solutions (Opex) or the whole company (Kiva - now amazon robotics). And Kiva is only working on the six wheeler, Robin (arm) and Pegasus.
What does this mean? Well, amazon has more than one warehouse type: they have the fullfillment centers, where the six wheelers are used, but they also have IXDs (inbound cross dock), where EVERY product, which comes from the vendor and will be sold via fullfillment centers will go through. These IXD facilities have almost no automation, at least the ones which I visited (UK, DE, ES).
People are counting hundreds of shirt buttons by hand.
People are bubble wrapping hoes for gardening by hand.
People are bagging clothes by hand.
People are repackaging STANDARD SIZE cans (food and drinks) into boxes by hand.
People are palletizing STANDARDIZED CONTAINERS BY HAND(!)
People are putting a single scissor into a tote, because the computer told them so. Why? Because someone entered wrong dimensions BY HAND. (You could easily get the dimensions by scanning. Even taking a picture would be sufficient to get the correct dimensions into the system). [1]
Kiva's projects don't solve a single problem regarding: Palletizing, receiving items, sorting items in the RECEIVING part of IXD, labelling items, bubble wrapping items, bagging items, repackaging items into new boxes (literally putting item from container A into container B).
What made me sad is that amazon didn't even try to solve these issues. They just act like these problems don't exist and always show the nice fullfillment centers where you pick and stove.
To end my rant: Amazon was the worst company I ever worked for. Insanely slow, very inefficient and way too much nepotism. They lack the actual will and hunger for improvement. My main goal when I applied to amazon was to make an "all lights out warehouse". What I got instead was an enterprise which is rotten on the inside.
But hey, there were still a lot of brillant people, especially my manager (kudos to him!). Also, the engineers who worked for AWS were always very friendly and problem oriented (only had very little contact during outages though).
If the customer would pay the higher price, why not raise the price and "capture" this market inefficiency in the form of more yachts for the executives ?
The trouble with that argument is that you haven't justified why it should only cause downward pressure on prices when companies have to increase pay due to unions demanding more cash. The exact same process should drive down prices and the amount executives make all the time, which means that the price will already be near the optimum given a particular level of costs and that increasing the costs will increase that optimum price. (This is particularly clear in scenarios where this works so well at pushing prices down that the increased wage demands would lead to losing money on every unit sold at the original price. Obviously in this scenario the price must increase.)
Well, I don't think I said it caused downward pressure on prices! So I don't have to explain why that might happen.
Obviously, if workers can negotiate more effectively by being unionised, that exerts upward pressure on costs. Those additional costs can be met out of profits (i.e. shareholders pay, and execs get sacked) or "efficiencies" (e.g. automation, reducing headcount).
If you can figure out how to make a better product that you can charge more for, then everyone's happy. If you can't, then perhaps your competitor can, even if he's unionised too. Unions can contribute at least as much to product and process improvement as management can. In fact unions can be seen as an adjunct to management.
> In fact unions can be seen as an adjunct to management.
That's arse-over-tit. My view has long been that management's purpose, in a company that makes stuff, is to remove obstacles from production staff. In that respect, they are servants: rather like clerks, or office managers. Managers are an adjunct to production workers, not the other way round.
I don't mean to disparage either clerks or office managers; most of the ones I've worked with were pure gold. But I've never met a useful project manager; and as you get higher in the monkey tree, you meet people who are more difficult/dangerous, and less helpful.
/me retired, had time to reflect on my career. A bit.
I always liked computers as a teen.
I started work in a Big-5 computer company, and gradually moved to smaller companies. Me and big companies wasn't a good match, on reflection. But I can't see what I could have done differently, at the time. Even in the light of what I've learned since.
In the Metro NY and upstate regions, there is a supermarket chain called Shoprite that is unionized. Where I live, none of the other chains are union shops.
The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes. Prices are no different than anywhere else.
> The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes.
...Really? That's a straight detriment in my book, as a customer.
I would generally prefer to support a union shop, but I'm extremely fond of self-checkout—and, in fact, further upstate, Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.
One of the worst things unions can do is try to "protect jobs" at the expense of technological advancement, customer service, or improved product.
> Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.
Kroger did that here a few years ago. They pushed it hard. Got very little uptake. It's still an option, but they aren't shoving it in your face when you walk in. There are just a handful of scanners on a rack by the entrance, and I've never seen anyone using them.
Wegman's hasn't been particularly pushing it, and it's not dependent on hardware scanners—it's an app for your phone, that just scans barcodes with the phone camera.
My guess is that it reduces sales. If you can see a total dollar amount accumulating as you shop, you're more likely to stick to your budget, maybe select cheaper items or avoid impulse buys. If you don't know the total until you get to the checkout lane, you are more likely to just pay it rather than start setting some items out.
Does Wegman's pay you for providing them free labor?
You're subsidizing them at your own cost with self-checkout. After all, you are:
-Updating their inventory tracking system
-engaging with the regulatory framework of purchasing on their behalf
-being subject to their annoying "loss prevention hot days" where they turn the merchandise scales on.
I've started to take a different view toward these jobs over time. Being an employer is a high bar in the U.S., and if we (the taxpayers proxied through the markets/Federal Reserve) have an objective to have people participating in the workforce, then these "automated" checkouts cost workforce participation.
Which also means fewer training opportunities for low skill workers, fewer jobs of last resort, etc. Not everything is necessarily $$$.
Be a hell of an economics project to really suss out the difference in flow of money in grocers who took different approaches.
I could not care less that doing the scanning myself saves Wegman's money. It saves me mental energy and time because I don't need to deal with a human cashier, and I don't need to spend 10 minutes emptying a full cart, scanning every item, then packing them all back into bags and fitting those back into the cart.
In my experience, Aldi/Walmart/Lidl/Costco prices are much lower than Shop Rite. Also, Shop Rites are sort of like franchises, different ones have different owners and management.
I don’t know about Lidl, the the rest aren’t full service grocers either. I’m a big fan of Aldi in particular, but they don’t have a butcher, bakery, prepared food/deli, staffed produce. Awesome store for what they do though. Aldi also pays a premium hourly rate.
Walmart tries to do everything but they suck imo. The produce is garbage, but the dry goods are cheap due to their economy of scale.
Who is more efficient than Amazon/Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Staples/Costco/etc?
They set the bottom price, and if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins, then their costs increases will have to end up in either prices increases or them no longer selling the product.
The funny thing is that it is Amazon coming along and greatly increasing demand for labor (in conjunction with reduced supply of that type of labor) that caused all the other warehouse jobs and retailers to increase pay.
And I hope the labor continues making gains in their quality of life at work and pay, but I do not see this happening without an increase in prices for products (like we have already seen).
That’s assuming they keep their margins the same. The thing is Amazon isn’t manufacturing anything so their “thin” margins aren’t as sensitive to increased labor costs as 2-4% suggests.
Paying 18$ for something your selling for 20$ is a 10% margin, taxes and CC processing fees are similarly inflexible. So if 2-4% of the final price is profit then they could raise their internal costs by 10% and still be profitable.
My wife used to work in Halloween costume design for a wholesaler (and some of her costumes did end up in Target and Walmart, which was cool to see), and the retailers' margins on those were at least 50%.
As I said, the margin does depend heavily on the product, but do not assume that across-the-board average margins are anywhere near that razor-thin.
Yeah, and I don't think it would be terribly unusual for 50% markups to translate to low-single-digit profit margins in cost-competitive retail sectors - those both seem like about the right ballpark overall. Retail has a lot of costs and wages are one of the big ones.
To simplify, if you want to say develop new software you can call it a capital investment and pay for it with after tax money or call it operating expense and pay for it in pretax money. Guess which one is a better deal.
Regardless of how the expense is classified, the amount of additional money available for wages is still the net income figure. The owners will still want as much net income as possible. They are not going to want to waste money just so they do not have to pay 20% of it to taxes.
The trick means real net income is larger than what’s on the books/10-K filings. Misclassified investments are not wasted money, simply hiding how much money is available for other expenses.
It’s like the old trick of paying an offshore subsidiary in a tax heaven licensing fees to use your own IP with the added advantage of being able to directly profit from the use of these investments. Nobody looking at the books would think such things are actual expenses, but companies must pretend they are.
Treating workers like shit and churning them limits the workers they can hire and retain.
They even know this - Amazon is running out of eligible workers to hire. But the need to hit quarterly metrics forces the line management to make strategically bad decisions.
They are not willing to pay to upgrade all the old FCs, new international FCs, etc. i.e. “it’s too expensive”.
This is also clear in how Amazon waited till the pandemic to add self checkout counters to many Whole Foods. They spent “$4 BB on safety measures for employees” and called self checkout a safety measure to reduce employee to employee density and employee to customer contact. Again it was previously “too expensive to do in mass” even if only for the terrible press it would have brought out side the pandemic.
Not saying “they will never get to it.” They will. Or that it’s not worth it. But the other commenter is also right that unions and hire wages could drive a larger investment in automation earlier than it would have otherwise.
I don’t think you are taking the price increases and inefficiencies that a nationally isolated economy would produce into account. People with less disposable income would suffer most from this.
If you don’t like supply chain issues and inflation right now, you won’t like the model
you propose.
How much do you think Amazon can actually raise prices before people just shop elsewhere?
The simple truth is warehouse employee salaries aren’t significant because of throughput. Someone making 30$/hour vs 15$/hour sounds huge but when people are picking 300+ items an hour that’s 5 cents a pop. But, more realistic unionized job would be 17$/hour but only 250 items a sub 2 cents increase.
Why do you think it means less for executives? It could be that they pass the costs on to consumers. So everything at Amazon will be more expensive just to pay the premium.
A lot of people, even economists, conflate the freedom of trade with the free movement of capital. They are not the same and not equivalent. I like to point people to this comic [1] that someone made when the TPP was hot news as it accurately describes this in a very accessible way.
Neoliberalism serves the interests of the capital-owning class.
This doesn’t mean anything. Markets mature and margins decline. All firms have to compete for labor, and the market for labor has tightened. However during an inflationary environment it’s pretty easy to raise prices.
They’ll eventually build higher labor costs into their financial projects and pass along some of the costs. Shareholders probably won’t care much, because Amazon is still a good investment.
It's hard to believe this comment is for real? Labour rights - including the right to a living wage and civil working conditions - benefit those on the minimum wage more than high-earners. It's not a zero-sum game.
What about the people that now can’t get jobs at the higher minimum wage? (Or the more restrictive union-based hiring). They go from $X to $0 which seems quite a downside. So it’s disingenuous to argue that it’s strictly a benefit to all workers (obviously it does benefit many).
You’re right that higher labor costs will cause higher prices rather than lowering of stratospheric executive compensation. But, it sounds like you’re suggesting that this is some sort of intrinsic property of an efficient market. In reality the status quo prioritizes personal greed over efficient markets.
We're comfortable that you'll have to pay sightly more for disposable plastic crap if it means we're not destroying worker's bodies.
I'd argue that in the long term, having healthier & happier workers who see their interests aligned with the rest of the economy will lead Amazon workers to develop skills more in demand, commit fewer crimes, take better care of their health, and contribute to their communities
Why do libertarians and ancaps always sound like they took a 101 econ course and actually like it when people suffer?
2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
What a strange comment imo. I can’t take the ‘everything will go up!’ stance seriously while higher ups are buying 10 houses and private jets. The wage gap is atrocious.
By the way, Switzerland’s GDP is 748 billion vs the United States’ 20.94 trillion. Comparing them like that is meaningless and silly.
Everyone would get 213 dollars a year extra if just their CEO didn't receive any compensation. Amazon employs approximately 1 million people in the United States and Andy Jassy received 213 million total comp in 2021.
Their example was only a single person cutting salary, so practically meaningless. And I would also argue, in bad faith with the design of proving a point with bad data.
It’s something like $300-1000/yr more if we average over all Amazon employees, depending on who counts as “executives”.
If the high pay is truly attracting better performers (which I admit is unlikely) they could easily be benefiting the company’s workers a larger amount by increasing demand. Or maybe not and they are kinda useless , but in any case the total cost isn’t that high.
Amazon allegedly has about 1.6 million employees. Assuming that the "executive" class is a trivially small number of them, and that the average employee works say 2,000 hours per year, you're suggesting that the cost to Amazon of paying those executives is somewhere between $960B and $3.2T per year.
The high end of that estimate is about one fifth of the total earned income for the entire U.S. economy.
Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars. And if you claim that everyone needs to make decent wages, who is to define what "decent" is supposed to be? People will always be asking for more, never less.
> 2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.
Even if CEOs gave up their whole salary tomorrow, it would not change the pay of people working in very large companies with dozens of thousands or hundred of thousands of employees.
The social effects of this seem to be really good, if you look at quality of life in Switzerland.
If wages at the bottom go up and that causes inflation, the overall impact of that is wage compression, or in other words, reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.
I am not really a restaurant person, but when eating in LA or SF, while the prices were cheaper than Swiss prices, the difference was not huge after factoring in the "mandatory" tipping common in the US.
While I do agree in principle that rapidly increasing wages leads to price inflation, your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland (most recently was there on Saturday and will spend the next few days there starting tomorrow.)
> your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland
Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.
But... aren't wages in Switzerland also higher than their close neighbours? It's the same thing in Norway - everything seems expensive for visitors, but wages are much higher too.
Perhaps your parents shouldn’t have built their retirement future on the ongoing exploitation of lower class people? Might there be a systemic issue here?
Any kind of retirement future is fundamentally built on the labour of the still-active workforce, and will be for as long as labour is still required in order to produce goods and services. That's just inherent to the concept of retirement itself, no matter how that retirement appears to be funded - those retired people still need to consume stuff that requires workers to produce and they're not working themselves by definition. Every single retiree is taking a cut of the labour productivity of those still working whilst not returning anything, whether that's funded via shareholdings in their pension plan or a state pension scheme or any other form of pension.
More subtly, in the current economy there are basically only two pots that higher real-terms wages for workers can come from: taking from other workers, and taking from the retired. That's because the whole economy has a supply-side crisis in basically everything and does not have the capacity to supply people overall with any more than they already have. All the usual scapegoats, like the super-wealthy, just don't consume enough as a proportion of the global economy that redistributing from them would have an impact on ordinary people. (Often articles attempt to confuse people about this by using definitions of wealthy that include like a third of the US population, or by comparing net worth instead and tricking people into thinking it means consumption by ordinary people could be increased by that amount if it was redistributed.)
So basically, let's keep buying our average quality cars for more money, than allow free trade & importing better quality vehicles from a country that specializes with it?
For some reason, it was the growth of global trade that coincided with the growth of global GDP & the increase of the life quality of the earth population.
Globalism is coming from the same people that also want open borders for immigration. Should borders be open or closed? (European here, I have no stance on that, Amazon has no retail presence in my country and immigration is almost zero here)
Closed, of course (european too). It destroys capitalist job market by kicking out floor from workers. People ain't willing to do a job for peanuts? How about raising a salary (and automation becoming feasible)? Nah, let's important people who will work for less.
Yes, that means less for the executives and shareholders. They may have to sell some of their properties, oh dear.