Wow, just wow. "Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts because you won’t have that almost $500 you paid in dues." It seems Amazon's main argument for why people shouldn't join a union is that Amazon's wages are so low that they cannot financially afford to.

That's almost like saying

"You're too poor to fight for your rights. Know your place."

> "You're too poor to fight for your rights. Know your place."

Well, yes. The goal of an antiunion campaign is the demoralization/ disempowerment of the workforce.

Notice also the recent push for "experimental polities", AKA company towns.

St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store.

For context about "experimental polities" like the failed Toronto SideWalk labs [1], I've linked an article below [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/sidewalk-labs-shuts-down-t...

[2] https://theconversation.com/will-silicon-valleys-new-company...

"But higher wages can buy many dinners."

"Explain how!"

"Money can be exchanged for goods and services"

But see, when your union negotiates, the result is uncertain. It might end up with you getting more money, with you getting the same amount of money, or with your union rep murdering a baby and then framing you for the crime. Do you really want to take that chance?

Or it might end up with you losing your job to a robot.

People will lose their jobs en masse regardless of unions. The concentration of wealth and capture of surplus that we will see in the coming decades will probably make feudalism look like child's play

It's not a foregone conclusion. While I'm sure some in the gilded age or in the 1920s thought that, it didn't last forever.

If you are unhappy with the terms or products of a company, you are free to shop or work elsewhere. That is the difference. "Capture of surplus" is hate speech - without those companies, there would be no surplus to begin with, that anybody could capture.

If you believe those companies will capture so much surplus, you could also buy some of their stock and participate.

The things you read I swear.

> If you are unhappy with the terms or products of a company, you are free to shop or work elsewhere.

If you don't work you starve, or at the very least lose your house, car, maybe even your kids. There is no "freedom" of choice, and this is painfully obvious to anybody who is not stuck neck-deep in dogmatic ideology.

> If you believe those companies will capture so much surplus, you could also buy some of their stock and participate.

Sure, let me just get a small loan of 300 mil a month to build my competitor to Uber.

If you're not independently wealthy you probably cannot even get 100k of credit to open a restaurant or a similar small business. Again, that access to capital (nevermind to education, connections, etc) is profoundly unequal, and thus that "just start your own business" is am absurd statement, is also obvious to anyone who isn't blinded by ideology.

> "Capture of surplus" is hate speech

Ahahahaha

Where there's a will, there's a way. Have you checked out crowdfunding these days? It's probably never been easier.

> you are free

This argument is made often and is patently in bad faith. You understand and I hope your readers understand there is a power disparity and a prevalent culture that has a certain effect on your ability to "be free" (of what? To go elsewhere and have the same shit done to you? To have your family go hungry because some HR shithead blackballed you?).

On a personal level I would ask you to stop actively trying to make the world worse by parroting capitalist propaganda built specifically to disempower workers.

Could you explain a bit more why it ought to be classified as hate speech?

Amazon will do that anyway if it's cheaper. It probably is cheaper, union or not.

Kroger is unionized and they pay 1/2 of what Amazon does in my area. I don't think unionizing low skill work necessarily leads to higher wages

And yet when comparing apples to apples, unionized workers apparently earn an average of 11.2% more[0].

0. https://www.epi.org/publication/why-unions-are-good-for-work...

In the end, we can also expect that Amazon's money will some day be exchanged for robots, and most of these employees will lose the Amazon jobs.

Only if the robots join the Union!

Simpsons FTW

Historians will be comparing the Simpson's to the Delphi Oracle in Ancient Greece, except one was pretty damn accurate.

This rhetoric is bad, but even worse is how the $500 is portrayed. At first glance, I interpreted it to be $500 over a much shorter duration, like on a monthly basis, versus ~$10/week, which even at $15/hr seems manageable enough if it means higher wages, better treatment and/or benefits.

That Amazon is fighting this so hard should signal that there is something meaningful to be gained by the workers. Hopefully they recognize this and succeed in organizing. The biggest question I would have is does Amazon pull a Walmart and just shutter the FC if they succeed?

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." - History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

Jeff Bezos is now seriously contemplating changing this to their company slogan: "You're too poor to fight for your rights. Know your place."

This is exactly saying that. It’s like we’re back to the 19th century.

I love this: "Make your voice heard! VOTE NOW AND VOTE NO." Those posters are all over the warehouses and it really feels like some 1984-esque parody.

> I love this: "Make your voice heard! VOTE NOW AND VOTE NO." Those posters are all over the warehouses and it really feels like some 1984-esque parody.

Make your voice heard! Tell Big Brother you love him!

I don't work there and I'm not a fan of unions but this makes me want to vote YES.

HEY BHM1 DOERS, why pay almost $500 in dues? We’ve got you covered* with high wages, health care, vision, and dental benefits, as well as a safety committee and an appeals process. There’s so much MORE you can do for your career and your family without paying dues. *Applies to regular full-time employees.

IF YOU’RE PAYING DUES… it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other. So be a DOER, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.

(sic)

---

Couldn't even include a stock-statement like "we got you covered" without a disclaimer.

"won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other" What the hell does that even mean? In a union you can't talk? As though you could be totally chatty before?

Which is hilarious, because talking during a shift is frowned upon even if it doesn't impact productivity. And if it does? Expect a call within the day

It means if you join a union you can't work unpaid and off the clock to be "helpful and social" with your coworkers.

It also refers to work rules that are designed to make sure that workers doing a task are the ones who have been trained for it. Sometimes the rules seem to get in the way: Do you have to call in an electrician to plug in a PC? Or can the guy in the next cube, who saw Norm use a plug strip on PBS, plug it in? The movie version of "A brief history of time" has Dr. Hawking telling an anecdote about nailed down chairs on a set.

It isn't always about neighborly overtime.

I kind of want a parody site, like "doitwithoutshoes.com", my first thought had been "doitwithoutjews.com" given it sounds the same, but obviously it would have to be very tastefully done to not come across as cheap or anti-Semitic.

The shoes idea works as you have to pay for them. Why pay for shoes? You know you get exactly the same benefits at Amazon while barefoot?

A classic similar example used to be the "godhatesfigs.com" parody of the Westboro Baptist church's similar slogan (sadly gone now) - with a bible passage where Jesus curses a fig tree.

Maybe someone should start a second union without dues? That would leave Amazon with no way to argue.

But what would be in it for union leadership under such a structure? (Not to mention that unions also have some unavoidable expenses, even if you didn't have a bunch of highly-paid union leader mouths to feed.)

Amazon would still find a way to argue. "If you're not a lowest performer, don't let a union negotiate for you and force your wages down to the lowest performing among you." or many other phrases that would appeal to those who think they're above the bottom already and plant fear that bargaining with the collective would lower their outcomes.

> But what would be in it for union leadership under such a structure?

An ego boost? I mean this seriously -- people love being moderators of Subreddits and admins of online communities largely deep down for the ego boost.

A union really needs not much more than a Discord server and maybe a Zoom membership to organize strikes and whatever else they need to do.

Unions need more than a Discord to organize. They may need to compensate union leadership for time taken to organize away from their work duties, pay for events, pay for mailers and other communications infrastructure, and of course pay for professionals like labor lawyers.

No union will have much luck performing collective bargaining against Amazon without working alongside experienced lawyers.

These costs don't have to be huge, but they aren't zero.

You also need a well funded strike fund so your threat of a strike looks more realistic on paper.

> pay for events

What events? If it's to discuss a certain issue, that can be virtual and almost free. If it's a social event, meh, there are enough of those already and people can self-organize them. Hell for $500/month I could organize social events where everyone goes to Michelin 3-star restaurants every month and rants over gourmet dinners about their bosses.

> pay for mailers and other communications infrastructure

Use e-mail. I don't even check my snail mail box anyway unless someone tells me to expect something by e-mail, and even then when my snail mail box gets too full I usually just dump it all in the recycle bin, so it's not an effective way for a union to communicate with me.

> and of course pay for professionals like labor lawyers.

What if they just split the lawyer fees evenly?

Assuming an experienced lawyer charges $1000/hr and spends 100 hours on a case, and there are 1 million people in the union, that amounts to about $0.10/person/case, a far cry from the $500/month they seem to be charging. Even if my numbers are off by a factor of 100 it would be only $10/person/case, and if the union won the case Amazon would probably have to pay the legal fees anyway.

Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.

I think the $500 figure is the number that AMZN pulled out of a hat, and I think it is a yearly number, not a monthly one.

That said, it sounds like you haven't dealt with the real world logistics of large groups of people. From both a practical and legal perspective, there is a lot to cover. The finances need to be kept up to date and audited. You mention, in jest, that you could bring all these people together for a dinner at that price. Getting 15 people to agree on a time and place for dinner is close to impossible if you've ever tried it. Nevermind getting a warehouse full of people to show up.

100 hours (2.5 weeks of labor) for lawyers to come to an agreement for the 1mm workers you cited? Not possible, especially with an adversary like amazon.

Email as communication? Maybe, but does it qualify for legal matters? Voting? Have you ever tried to send a million emails? There's a reason that there is an entire industry built around bulk emails.

A union is more like an independent HR office than anything else. Think of how many resources HR uses, and that gives you an idea of what a union needs

> I think the $500 figure is the number that AMZN pulled out of a hat, and I think it is a yearly number, not a monthly one.

A coworker in a non-unionized position said that the didn't like unions because of the dues. When I told them what the dues were, their opinion quickly changed. The funny part is that unionizing would only bring about small benefits in our case since the existence of unionized positions with the same employer reaped benefits for all employees.

And for what it's worth, paying $500/month in dues implies an income of about 30,000 to 50,000 per month. Not only is this outside of the target demographic of unions, but it ranks up there with taxation levels (with much richer government services). Suggesting union dues of this level is either an unintentional mistake or disingenuous anti-union propaganda.

>Getting 15 people to agree on a time and place for dinner is close to impossible if you've ever tried it. Nevermind getting a warehouse full of people to show up.

Any reason why "show up at 8" wouldn't work? It doesn't have to work for everyone if they can be recorded, summarized, or otherwise disseminated.

Alright, split the fees! Now you need someone to count the days paid out, calculate how much each member has to pay, send payment requests, follow up, manage the account, ...

A professional Union needs funds to do its work. Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues. If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.

The imaginary alternative would be to have somebody do this for free in their evenings and on their weekends. Have you ever tried to manage even a class representative and budget for your kids' school or a little league or any other kind of long-term engagement? Already at that small scale things tend to break down quote easily and few stay involved more than a few years. How can you expect volunteer union reps to work 8h+/day, spend their nights writing legal briefs, researching, organising events, managing members and expenses, etc while being up against an army of professional lawyers?

Unions brought the five day work week, end to child labour, 40/38 hour weeks, the right to breaks, vacations, medical leave, ... If you don't have those right now then that's likely because you are in a non-union workplace (and/or country).

> A professional Union needs funds to do its work.

Absolutely true.

> Over time the benefits members get more than pay for the union dues.

That strikes me as an opinion that could use some supporting facts. It might be the case, but union fees are the same order of magnitude as many workers' savings rate. If the prospective member saved those fees over a lifetime, would they be better off?

> If there's a strike at least in Europe the union will also use the dues to cover the salary for the days striking.

That means that union members are buying insurance against there being a strike declared. Would they be better off to pay smaller dues and bear the risk themselves? If all possible strikes are union-wide, it seems like this insurance can only be a losing gamble for members, all the while creating a fat piggybank for union leaders to raid/drain.

Numerous studies say union workers make more on average even accounting for dues. I'll give you 1.[1]

Unions have to disclose financial statements. Leaders can't just raid the strike fund. And there won't be a strike fund unless most members vote for it.

[1] https://illinoisepi.org/site/wp-content/themes/hollow/docs/w...

If I'm reading that study correctly, those figures have an R² of around 0.23, which is quite low for explanatory power of wages as dependent on union membership (quite low as in the "none" or "very low" range)

>If it's just a town hall to discuss a certain issue, that can be virtual.

Virtual isn't the same as free.

>Although this may sound a bit naive I feel like $500/person/month sounds like there is some massive inefficiency in use of resources.

Nobody knows what the union dues will be if the union wins, but they will not be 500 per month. It might be a fair guess that they're 500 per year. About 20 per check if you get paid biweekly. The dues will be decided on by union members through some kind of democratic process.

Union dues are very typically 1 to 1.5% of pay.

>But what would be in it for union leadership under such a structure?

Altruism maybe? The structure costs would probably be harder to cover than finding mad amazon workers who want to improve working standards

That would leave the job either half-complete, done by an overworked person, or available only to independently wealthy people.

Meh, I don't think so. You probably couldn't pick a random union member but there's gotta be someone smart, driven, and mad enough to do it for free and do a good job at it. Hell, if I had the skills and resources to, I would.

You are advocating for slavery, unpaid work.

If you willfuly agree to unpaid work, you will be such a bad union leader, don't bother.

You missed the entire point.

Doing something that helps you and helps your similarly-situated fellow worker seems like something that would qualify you for a union leadership role.

Further: People do all kinds of unpaid work to make their community or shared experiences better without (most of?) us accusing them of advocating for slavery.

Slavery implies force. What I said explicitly required volunteering.

That's like calling volunteering slavery. Am I a slave for working at my hospital in the summer?

Unpaid work isn't slavery, it's volunteering. It's only slavery if (for example) you're locked up in prison and beaten by a guard if you don't do it.

Crazy idea: Decentralized DAO platform on blockchain that essentially has an automatic union for all companies and all employees. Pick your company/union join get access to anonymized matrix chat, feeds, emails, meetings, etc... your id and employment status would be validated by verifiers, and you can organize without anybody knowing who you are if you want.

There could be optional dues, as well as some built in DeFi applications for investing in blockchain that could pay a dividend to the unions and their leaders.

How will your second union enforce the contract you negotiate without lawyers? When you want to file a grievance, the shop steward walks you down to the nearest free legal aid office?

At this point, there are probably at least some firms that fear Amazon more than unions. They could financially bootstrap a union for a few years as a destabilization effort.

I'm thinking of the line "the capitalists will sell you the rope you use to hang them."

“Be a Doer”

I can’t help but think if this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VJqr6LBFelI

Can’t imagine this word could be used unironically

That website feels like it should be in a museum

Interestingly it looks like it was made with squarespace, I'd assume they would have people in house for something like this.

It was probably made by an anti-union consulting firm they've hired. They don't do union-busting in house, they hire the experts.

The Pinkertons have been fighting workers for more than a century, I'm sure Amazon is disappointed Pinkertons can no longer gun down troublesome workers without consequences.

Pinkerton entering the graphic design biz.

In 1874, apparently, with the invention of the wanted poster: https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/6296

Google always uses agencies for one-off marketing and lobbying sites like this. I guess Amazon does the same.