> What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?

Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]:

"""Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks."""

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...

The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this.

Here’s the most recent instance:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...

San Fra public employee payroll takes the cake.

Average compensations (total headcount)

Nurse $293,000 (1471) Firefighter $192,000 (902) Police officer 3 $216,500 (821) Sergeant 3 $265,188 (500) EMT/Paramedic $194,344 (419)

"A fire prevention lieutenant made $415,111 – more than double their $184,791 base salary with a whopping $230,320 in overtime"

I'm all for competitive pay, but this is clearly out of whack.

Recall the Spanish airtraffic controller strike of 2010. On average, they were making $400k/year with some double that, yet had the balls to go on strike. Federal gov't and military stepped in and took over, ending the gravy train.

I wonder when the tipping is point is going to come for the U.S.

With that said I'm always skeptical of these numbers - you don't exactly see SFPD officers vacationing in Marakesh and flying first class, but that's typical for stripe new grads.

Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.

In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.

Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.

The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.

Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.

Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.

For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).

Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.

> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.

Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.

> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.

Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up

Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.

That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.

> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.

You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.

> That may be true for base salaries,

That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.

> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.

It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.

> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse

No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.

This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.

Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.

French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)

We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.

Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you.

When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.

One of my first jobs was working part-time in a grocery store: collecting shopping carts, "clean up in aisle 7", stocking shelves, etc. I was 16 and forced to pay dues to a union. The dues were deducted from my minimum-wage paycheck. I had NO opt-out option. I worked maybe 10 hours per week? I was a high school student. I got ZERO benefit by paying union dues. This extortion was corruption in itself, nevermind the executive-level corruption that makes headlines every few years.

The most famous example is Jimmy Hoffa, whose story has been made into films... including one in 1992 with Jack Nicholson.

“ Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials.”

One example of many.

> This sort of thing happens in private corporations

Private corporations have a mission to make money. Unions have a completely different mission.

Private corporations also have a pretty consistent thread of corruption, a similar example to the one you gave being HSBC laundering money for drug cartels. Again, pretty comparable.

This isn't to say corruption in unions hasn't been part of why they've declined, its almost definitely part of it. While a corrupt corporate leader generally creates more money for its stockholders a corrupt union rep often costs the rank-and-file members which can greatly sour their opinions of unions as a whole. But there's nothing inherent to unions with regard to corruption, people in power often take advantage of their position no matter what type of structure they have that power in, and the point that it appears, at least to some people, that unions are held to a different standard than other types of organizations is worthy of being discussed.

However, after that corruption was cleared up and the pensions moved to Goldman and Northern Trust, the funds were destroyed and benefits to retireeswere deeply cut.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-teamsters-pension-...

I had to keep pausing and checking if something was real as I couldn't believe how bad things got

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-willi...

This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.

The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.

I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?

Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.

Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?

If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.

Normally, you negotiate your contract because your company wants you, and finding someone else that would agree to the contract is a non-trivial amount of effort, so they'll hear you out. In these people's cases, all they'd hear is "lol, no" if they tried to negotiate individually, because they'd have virtually no power. As a result they're trying to find leverage in numbers: We want the freedom to negotiate all our contracts to our advantage, otherwise we're striking.

Allow me to put things differently: There is no law that says that Amazon must accept whatever terms are put forth by these unions. Amazon can, if they wish, outright refuse their terms and tell them that the contract is as-is and will not be altered.

While I'm not saying this is your case, I am puzzled at people who argue against unions with your last line, because it really does cut both ways. "If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it". Well, a union is a form of negotiating said contract, and to the companies being proposed those terms: "If you are unhappy with the terms, don't sign it". Makes sense, right?

There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts.

> How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms?

They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread.

>What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.

Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.

In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here.

Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.

In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.

Not really. If every Amazon warehouse organized, you would still need Walmart, Target, etc warehouse workers to organize to achieve something comparable. And in the U.S., they still wouldn’t have the same bargaining power because solidarity strikes and similar tactics are illegal. But I agree that labor laws are not deterministic, as the teacher strikes in red states have recently demonstrated.

We’ll also have to see what extent states will further block organizing activities if this starts gaining traction in places like Alabama. Given things like the extremely violent police response to protests, I’d wager “pretty far.”

Not gonna look up the actual figures, but safe to assume that amazon US is bigger than all retail (certainly online retail) in the netherlands, belgium or whatnot.

But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.

In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.

Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage.

My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks.

Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.

One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions.

Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living.

Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers.

There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.

They basically are. They negotiate the minimum benefits the company can offer for a particular set of workers, which includes benefits and salary, ie. total wages.

> One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization.

True, but it is hastened by unionization. Automation always has a cost involved. Sometimes it's worth the cost, and sometimes it's not based on the cost of the human labor that is being replaced. If the cost of the human labor goes up for any reason (such as unionization) then the cost of automation looks more attractive.

True in a technical sense, but misses the point. Sure, there's technically a price point at which automation is "worth it." If labour costs more, demand for labour is lower. That might be because of automation, or any of many ways that demand reacts to price: efficiency, decreased production, increased capital expenditure, outsourcing, whatever.

So really, the true generality is not that "the biggest thing working against unionization is automation." The biggest thing working against labour is wages. Higher wages, less demand for labour. This is also true about anything, not just labour and it's somewhat banal. If cornflakes or netflix cost more, people will buy less. That doesn't mean you always have to price to lose money as a business. Same for labour/unions.

In any case, the bigger point is that if some job is almost "worth automating" at minimum, market or union wage... That's not worth defending. It will probably be automated soon anyway, and there's little to gain by defending it.

>> Unions are about minimum wages.

This is very far from true. For one thing, most people don't earn minimum wage. Most union workers don't. No one wants to. In fact, neglecting the lowest rungs is a habitual mistake of unions.

Starting from the premise that unions are about minimum wages misses most of why the current amazon stuff is even interesting. Depending on what kind of union(s) they form (getting back to my original point) unionisation could mean a pretty wide range of outcomes. Amazon has a big pay scale. There's nothing to say that unionisation means nothing for those at the $200k point on that scale.

The basic premise of an amazon union is (1) amazon is very profitable (2) Negotiation power/leverage is always relative to the size of the pie. A union is what you negotiate with, profit is what you negotiate for.

Bluntly, amazon have $100bn in profits and 1 million employees = $100k per employee. Rarely has a plumper prize been seen on the horizon.

Therefore they have now negotiated the minimum wage for an actor. It's still higher than the legal minimum wage, but it's still a minimum wage. The studio would pay less if they could.

That's what unions are all about. Setting the minimum compensation for a particular worker.

Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees.

I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.

Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more.

That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.

I hope we can avoid massacres this time.

Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...

And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...