If workers are all it takes, why can't all of the workers quit, reform a new company where they control 100% of it, and then put Amazon out of business?

If AMZN is a $2T company and has 1.5M employees, every worker can become a millionaire if they just do this one simple trick. Why don't they?

I'm also confused about what role you think investors should play in business if money is unimportant. What would YCombinator look like? A bank that just loans out money for a fixed interest rate?

If management was all it takes, why can't they fire all the workers and work the warehouse floor themselves?

but nobody is making that claim

> why can't all of the workers quit, reform a new company where they control 100% of it, and then put Amazon out of business?

A dude called Karl wrote a book that answers this.

>I'm also confused about what role you think investors should play in business if money is unimportant. What would YCombinator look like? A bank that just loans out money for a fixed interest rate?

In my libertarian-socialist days, I have actually gave some thought to this question. The best I could come up with was 1) variable return lending or 2) profit sharing agreements with a sunset duration.

Both seem like a more expensive option for companies in an environment with economic growth. The beauty about selling stock/corporate ownership is that you never have to pay your investors a dime as long as the company has growth prospects. The return for investors simply comes from sale to other investors.

When a company issues a bond or makes a profit sharing agreement, they actually have to pay that back. Maybe in a growth environment, they could perpetually use new loans to pay old debt, but this would put them at the mercy of the outside lending rate.

By way of example, instead YC buying 20% of a company, it could receive the rights to sell a 20-year contract for 20% of the company profit.

Honestly? Unless you want to confiscate the money, then you have to persuade the people who already have it that is worth their while to give it to you. Usually that entails handing over some control and some chance of getting paid. You may be able to change some of the terms of the contract, but as an overall structure I don't see any possible alternative in this time and place.

That's the whole point of joining a union it turns a unilateral contract negotiation, where one party has no leverage, into a bi-lateral contract negotiation. The worker's leverage in the negotiation is to withdraw all labour halting production. The downside is that you don't get paid while you are on strike and it only works really well in industries where there is a labour shortage or it takes time to train up new workers who need experience and qualifications that are hard to obtain: pilots, train drivers, doctors, police all have very effective unions in the UK at least.

The difficulty that the amazon workers face is that they turn up and a screen says pick up these things from these boxes and take them over there, put them in other boxes, stick postage labels on and put it in the back of the truck. It doesn't take much training to do, so workers who unionise are very vulnerable to being fired until enough have joined the union to hold an effective strike.

Unions are always going to naturally form in a pure libertarian society where the only rules are freedom of contract. Usually they are restricted by government regulation.

I would be interested to understand how unions work in the UK, but In the US, much of their power comes more from regulatory protections than collective labor value and free contracting.

Union members bled and died to get those regulatory protections in the US.

Is that supposed to mean something? lots of people died for the Third Reich, but that doesn't validate it.

It doesn't mean it's good, it means some people cared about it very much.

You don't have to be a member of a union to work in particular trade in the UK, apart from maybe Doctors who have to be members of the British Medical Association which I think is a regulatory body and a union combined although I might be wrong about that. For example Teachers, I think there are a couple of different unions they can choose from but they don't have to be in one of them to be a teacher. Is that different to the US?

In the US, there can only be one union by law.

If you don't like it, you can't pick or make another.

By us law, you are usually allowed to quit the union, if you do, you still have to pay the union part of your salary.

In the US, workers can't join or start a union unless 51% of all workers vote to join them/let them.

If all this sounds crazy, polarizing, and like a recipe for conflict, you are correct. I think the European versions of unions makes much more sense, and are closer to free association

In a pure fantasy libertarian society where the powerful actually respect the rights of the powerless, then yeah, unions would form organically. In the world that has actually existed throughout recorded history, those contracts are "do what we say or starve, we've made sure everyone else gives the same offer", and unions are put down by force.

As a libertarian, I suspect most of us would disagree with you on what rights the powerless have.

For example, libertarians do not believe people have a right to food or shelter. You only have a right to keep and use your body and your property.

This seems to logically resolve to "unions wouldn't form, because workers would be preoccupied by starving", which may unfortunately be true, I'm not sure.

It depends on a lot of factors like the scarcity of labor, availability of capital, and coordination capacity of workers and owners.

for example, if you have a scarcity of labor, then labor sets the terms. AI architects could form a union any day they want, they just dont want to.

> a unilateral contract negotiation, where one party has no leverage

A myth. Employee has leverage.

Depends, if you are unemployed in the UK you get some income in social security benefits but only if you are actively seeking work or disabled and unfit to work. So if amazon opens a warehouse in your area and advertises for jobs you basically have to go and have an interview there or you will lose your benefits. You also will lose these benefits if you act like an idiot in the interview or you later get fired for misconduct so people are kind of forced to work there until something better comes along. The problem is compounded if you are living on minimum wage in council housing or a cheap rental in a deprived area because there are long waiting lists for subsidised council houses in parts of the country where there are more jobs available and where private sector rents are totally out of reach for people in minimum wage jobs so you can't easily move somewhere else for a better offer.

Without knowing all the details , that sounds awfully a lot like communism, and trust me, you don't want to live nor work in such environment. It may look great on paper, but its simply not working long term, we humans are deeply imperfect. If there is law broken, system and its protections should deal with it.

A genuine question - can't people simply stand up and vote for better employer with their feet? Amazon ain't some 200-year old business that whole generations of towns evolved around with no other option in sight. Even then this should always be an option unless you live in some communist (eh) dictatorship.

A Boogeyman argument against unionisation and a Let them eat cake argument to dismiss their position.

Apparently there are a lot of communists around here... Judging by all the down votes. HN is a very toxic place these days

Yes, I would prefer the investors, because I believe in property rights.

> The people who actually do the work?

Surely not even this union is dumb enough to think the workers can control the owners.

Strikes prove that workers can and do control owners.

what do local shop closures as reaction to union movements prove?

It proves that corruption is tolerated in the US.

Influence != control.