To me a more reasonable explanation than any in the article is that after losing the vote, Amazon looked into the warehouse and decided part of the problem was that the managers were making the situation worse. This could have been that the rsi injury complaints were true and unaddressed promptly. Or that the managers came off as cold in communications. Or 5 other things they could have done better.
Could be many reasons I guess. But maybe we should apply the Labor–Capital Razor: what signal does this send to the remaining managers? And what are they likely to do in response?
If GP is correct, then that signal would be, "Treat everyone who works here more-fairly and address their concerns in a timely manner. It is in everyone's best interest."
In that case then the concerns of the workers could have been addressed by going over the heads of the senior managers to the higher-ups. Which provokes two questions:
- Why did it get to the point of a strike if this was just a case of bad internal communication?
- Does this theory really gel with how aggressive Amazon has been against unionization activity? Apparently they could have just met the concerns of the workers immediately.
EDIT:
> If GP is correct, then that signal would be,
On second thought: I am talking about the likely signal that they want to send to other managers, i.e. how they will interpret it. And to just spell it out: I think they will be more wary of associating with unions.
This seems like one of those optical illusions that can look either way. Duck or rabbit? What color is the dress? Young lady or old hag?
Managers are obviously fired because the union was formed. They shouldn't let another form. Are they expected to respond by creating a trustful and inclusive environment, or by ruling through fear?
Got that message of: we’re all just one big family where everyone loves each other. Now, don’t you call Child Services on us when we discipline y’all a little, ya hear?
And, what you said can be totally legitimate parenting. I'm not making a call here, just calling people out for jumping to conclusions when there are other valid interpretations.
Although I have to admit many industrial unions today have become "another authority", fundamentally, unionisation is about workers talking to each other and finding alignment in what they want out of work. Not another authority.
At some point in your life, you'll find that something you always thought was true and couldn't understand how anybody could see was false actually could be understood to be false by a totally reasonable person. At that time, I think you'll understand what I mean.
Unions are created because of unacceptable conditions. Fix those conditions in time, and no unions. No fear required.
> Unions are created because of unacceptable conditions
No. Unions are created because it gives workers several tools to counter the power imbalance inherent in the boss-worker relationship, the most immediate tool being collective bargaining.
Even in places where working conditions are acceptable—by some threshold of acceptable—unions still have a place. In Europe, for example it is not uncommon for the union to engage in outreach and mutual aid to education on labor rights and intervene when rights are violated.
In places where working conditions are not acceptable, the union does empower workers to rise up against their bosses for better conditions, this is enabled through solidarity between workers. After the conditions are fixed, that solidarity is still required to maintain them.
Very true. However labor violations are seldomly this clear cut mustache twirling villain you would see in the movies which affects all workers equally. Most often it is some mundane error done by a clerk in the HR department that never gets corrected until—by luck—a well meaning lower manager spots it, and goes to the union to demand a correction including back-pay.
This is the reason why outreach is an important part of the union’s job. These errors exists sporadically and will persist uncorrected while the workforce is uneducated on our rights.
At some point in my life I’m going to realize that the documented violent history of labor-capital was all just a fabrication and it just so happens that the standard American anti-union talking points—America might have the most violent labor-capital history of any Western nation, by the way—were reasonable and based in reality? No, I don’t think so.
Besides, your comment is just a generic relativistic refrain and doesn’t contain any argument at all. No: not all viewpoints are reasonable.
I'm not saying they all are. I'm saying mine is, and you don't understand it.
Unions were certainly critical at some point. I've read The Jungle, I get anarchy, etc. We live in a very different world now. I'm not saying unions were never valid, I'm saying that it's possible to make them unnecessary.
Management culture flows from the top. If the managers are pressured by corporate to be utter assholes, and then they get fired because that resulted in unionization, the fault's not just with them, but also further up the tree.
This seems like CYA from someone further up. Bad thing happened, someone must pay for it, we found someone, they are paying for it.
> To me a more reasonable explanation than any in the article is that after losing the vote, Amazon looked into the warehouse and decided part of the problem was that the managers were making the situation worse.
You’d think that Amazon would be smart enough to look into the apparent problems before the vote, and make a show of addressing them to forestall it, if their concern was the actual labor conditions driving the desire to unionize and not the failure of worksite union-busting efforts leading up to the vote.
> Not if it was literally covered up systemically at each warehouse where the issues lie?
So, you think that they managed to systemically cover up their misdeeds from higher management before the election, but conveniently failed to continue that coverup after the union election.
I mean, sure, you concoct a strained narrative which makes this a noble move by Amazon’s higher management, but...why strain to do that?
--
I once wrote a status report where I reported that I thought something would be a problem blocking my progress if it weren't resolved.
My manager's status report said that there might be a issue.
His managers report said everything was on track.
--
If you don't think that the upper management got into hot water and then started paying a lot more attention to their on-site managers after the Union vote, you and I live in different worlds.
It’s the Amazon senior manager cabal which manages to coordinate better and have better information across the whole company compared to the Amazon executives. You have not heard of it?
Most unions don’t allow managers to join, as they’re generally considered to be part of capital’s collective bargaining side, if not part of capital themselves. I think most modern labor theory includes a “professional-managerial class” to account for this.
There’s an argument to be had about where this line makes sense in modern megacorps but local managers in blue collar work tend to hold a lot of power over their employees in particular regardless of the shape of the corporation they’re under, so it would be surprising if they could.
Edit: fair points in the replies about management unions and that I was focused on a North American perspective. I was interpreting the post I replied to as saying the managers would join the union (as in the same one), but they didn't actually say that.
I can definitely believe that things would be different in a less union-adversarial environment. But it's still pretty unlikely that warehouse bosses at amazon would be welcome in the same union as the workers, or be likely to manage to unionize themselves successfully. The incentives just don't really align well in this context: corporate has too many carrots and sticks.
This is one of the ongoing problems with discussion about "unions"
"Unions" in the US are very very very very very different legally than "unions" in EU and other nations, personally i think they are so different we need a different term for them...
The closest we have to a EU style union would be something like SAG, or the other entertainment unions, which often referr to themselves as Guilds.
The employment unions like being formed at amazon are different animals all together which have ALOT of downside for even the workers in them.
> which have ALOT of downside for even the workers in them.
Do you have examples?
As someone in the UK I don't see anything different between the Amazon workers Union and the unions here except for age and experience.
They all just want to not be treated like dirt.
The big difference (and please correct me if I get UK info wrong, I am not an expert in UK Labor, I am versed in US Labor) that in the UK you have sector unions, not enterprise unions. A company may have employee's working under several unions, and I believe there are even competiting Sector unions that an employee can choose to join finding the union that best suites them
In the US, typically, the is a 1:1 union, enterprise relationship. If you want to work at company X, you must join Union Y with no options to join a competing union, no options to opt out, and no regress if you do not feel the union is representing your interests.
referred to as "closed shops" there is large amounts of corruption, favoritism, and other negative quality to many US Unions.
Certainly over time they will consolidate, but that goes back to my point about age. If other warehouses unionise, at some point they will group together to prevent the closure of warehouses just because Amazon doesn't like the people working there.
I understood the US has the same situation, with groups like United Farm Workers or the Federation of Teachers.
>>We have unions for a particular company for example, here is the Wikipedia link for the Nationwide Union
The question I would then have is do the employee of Nationwide have to join the Nationwide Union or could they if they wanted choose a different union, or no union at all. Practicality or downsides aside is it legal for them do make that choice.
That is not the question, they claimed that the UK doesn't have enterprise unions, but sector ones.
Closed or requirement after hire is both illegal in the UK, and the EU, as well as not popular positions for the unions. In that sense we are not the same but, again, that wasn't the discussion.
I am the person that made the claim, I am pretty sure I understand what I am trying to talk about.
This seems to a terminology / definitional problem we have, something I am trying to get beyond because like I said from the beginning a "union" in the US is not the same as a "Union" in the UK/EU, that is my point from the start
So when we have these international discussions and people from the UK/EU are aghast that anyone in the US would be opposed to Unions they are talking from what they understand from the Unions on their nation, which IS NOT what we have here in the US.
My attempts to convey the differences has failed with terminology issues and technicality gotchas largely due to a massive political bias in favor of unionization so any time anyone tries to convey a negative about a union is gets drowned out either by people not in the US that have no idea what a US Labor union really is like, or by people in the US that only understand the concept of a US Labor union but not the reality of it
You haven't been forced to join a union in the US - or pay dues if you don't join - since 2018 when the SCOTUS ruled against the practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_v._AFSCME). You could potentially start a competing union for, say, pipefitting, but the NLRB needs to approve it (federal agency). But now you are fighting management and a national union that already absorbed local ones over the last 150 years. Unions tend to consolidate over time because it gives more negotiating power for the members.
That is a misinterpretation of that ruling, which applies to non-union members being forced to pay dues
Union Shops, where by in Non-Right to work States the union negotiates with the Employer (private not public) that all employees of the group will be represented by the employer the employer can still be required to force employees to join the union with in 30 days, normally this is an automatic process for "union shops"
Again this varies by state, and Right to work states can not have such a provision, however Janus decision DID NOT outlaw union shops.
Also none of your comment seems to refute or attempt to explain the differences between UK or other EU unions and US unions, which is the context we are discussion, gotcha technicalities do not go to this over all conversation which is the vast differences between how unions operate in the US vs other nations.
That is a technically in terms only. So apologies for using "closed"
[1] instead of "union"[1] shop which are functionally the same thing, and Union Shops still very much exist which is clear from my description of what I was talking about in my comment, (i.e I clearly stated employees were required to join the union post hire)
Right to Work states are a counter to Union Shops, which there is active efforts to do away with Right to Work laws
[1]Closed Shop
A company that only employs union members and requires them to secure and maintain union membership as a condition of employment.
[2]Union Shop
A company that doesn’t require employees to join a union in order to be hired, but they must join within 30 days of employment.
I added an edit explaining my own misunderstanding. I'm pretty sure I added it before you posted this, so I'm not sure how you missed it, but it's there.
I did miss the edit. I guess I assumed for something that bad, you'd just delete that part of the comment.
The point stands, that you would never have made such an unforced error if you didn't have such a laser focus on a comically uncharitable interpretation of the original parent's remark. As if the existence of manager-banned unions could ever be relevant to a comment specifically suggesting what a manager should do.
What was going on in your head? "Hm, someone suggested a manager unionizing. Oh! He must mean one of the unions that ban managers! What an idiot!"
I misread "join a union" as "join the union." Literally I mistook one article for another, which is what I said.
I feel like you're kinda throwing stones in a glass house here by imparting a whole bunch of really bizarre motives to me (I certainly didn't call -- nor did I think anyone was -- an idiot), apparently not reading my entire post, and then accusing me of not reading things charitably. I can assure you I am a fallible human being capable of misunderstanding things people say without malice.
Many people just plain don't know that unions (at least in north american blue collar work) are often not open to even middle management being members. I was simply trying to add information to the thread.
Anyways, deleting the part of the post that made a mistake would have made all the replies awfully confusing.
You're missing the key takeaway. The issue is not that you misread a comment. The issue is that your reply is non-substantive, and that you would have picked up on that, had you entered the discussion with a healthy, productive attitude, rather than the attitude you apparently came in with, of "how can I show myself to have superior knowledge?"
Let's say you hadn't misread the comment (i.e. it was as you originally perceived). Would your reply be helpful then? No. The parent was obviously suggesting that managers face workplace abuses that could be remedied by unionization. Even if they had said "join the union" -- as you leaped at the chance to correct -- was your comment substantively replying to this (actual) point?
No, it wasn't. Whatever the structure of unions-as-they-exist, the proposed solution most assuredly does not involve "join a union that prohibits you". So the existence of unions that prohibit managers isn't relevant. At most, if you really needed to show off your knowledge, you could have said something like:
"That might help -- but, nitpick, it would probably have to be a separate union from 'the' one representing warehouse workers, as there are reasons that US unions separate out representation by role. <insert historic and legal context>."
But then, phrasing your objection appropriately like that makes its value to the conversation seem even more dubious. Whether or not unions prevent this kind of manager abuse is irrelevant to the implementation details of how those managers unionize.
>I feel like you're kinda throwing stones in a glass house
No, the situations aren't the same. You recognize your comment would be irrelevant had you correctly read the comment you were replying to. But even if I had read your full comment, my reply would still be relevant, as a guideline for how to notice when you might have misread someone, and how to ensure that you're substantively replying to a charitable reading of someone's remarks. That advice is still relevant, and still serves as a useful takeaway.
I’m curious why this strikes you as a more reasonable explanation. It seems to me that you would need to make more assumptions to arrive at this conclusion than to arrive at other alternative conclusions.
