Amazon workers in Delaware reject trade union membership

Amazon is not Italy.

I hear the working standards in some amazon warehouses are deplorable.

Yep, I heard that people are actually being forced to WORK there. It's frankly horrific,

Re: Why?

Union have a place, however in the UK they are very heavily politicised. Take Len McClusky's Unite which has been placing candidates for Labour Party seats in the next general election.

Politicians are bad enough, but if a Union were to take over the running of the country I can only envisage a disaster.

UNIONS

Interestingly:

France, closure of a loss making tyre factory.

Union so entrenched that they refused to negotiate any changes to contract, especially productivity whereby in any one 8 hour day the average worker was productive for only 3 hours. The factory is now closing down. Union response, kidnap managers and refuse to let them leave the factory.

Scotland, loss making refinery, Unions asked to negotiate to bring costs down and make the plant more productive. Entrenched Union refused, Union official sacked from this loss making refinery for working on Union business when he should have been working which in turn resulted in a strike.

Owner of refinery stated, if they refuse to negotiate and cut costs he will close the factory. Union calls his bluff.

Owner states the refinery is loss making and he will now close it.

Union panics Scottish Government panics.

Factory stays open after Union backtrack and runs away tail between its legs.

Union would have been responsible for the loss of over 1000 purely on the grounds of intransigence and thinking the were more powerful than anyone.

Re: Why?

Having willingly joined a union shop in my youth I found that with after each annual contract was negotiated my situation was worse between the theoretical raise, increased duties, shorter breaks and subsequent increase in dues that it was previously. After a few years, I left to find a similar job at a non-union business and feel I made more as over the years my job was essentially the same and I got an annual raise after my performance review without months of contentious contract negotiations. Fortunately, I lost that job when the employees decided they needed a union and I refused to join and it became a closed shop. I say fortunately because I was nearly 25 at the time and decided it was time to finish my studies and abandon the world of manual labor. Now I bump into the same problem with professional organizations and their own old-boy networks and thankfully even that seems to be changing for the better with globalization.

Granted, none of my early jobs were particularly dangerous if you paid attention but it wasn't exactly tea and scones either. In the long run, my experience with unions has taught me that monopolies and monopsonies are bad and it doesn't matter if your talking about products, services or labor. You may hear stories about the bad XYZ worker at ABC agency that is a lazy incompetent oaf but because of union contracts is nearly impossible to get rid of even if there is an available non-union XYZ worker who is unemployed, likely because they don't want to join the union.

Re: Why?

What I don't understand is how someone on minimum wage can be represented at a local level by a union official on 3-4 times that minimum wage- that is then represented by the union chief on 10-15 times their wage - and at a national political level by a party that has a multimillionaire leader whose private Oxbridge education means he will never have to Labour for a single day in his life. But then what do I know

So stop whining and become your own boss.

Capital has so much power

Derp.

Re: Why strikes down't work.

Yeah, can't have the plebs being overpaid, that's a management perk.

Re: It didn't go my way. It must be a conspiracy!!

Yeah, that's the only possible interpretation.

Re: Unions are generally devices to give jobs to union leaders

They failed to mention the pressure from the unions to influence the vote. Threats and violence are common to those who openly go against the mob.

Re: It all boils down to Morality

From my outside view of the situation, if conditions in Amazon were so bad then the staff would have been voting to unionise. The union picked the workers to ballot and you would hope they picked a set they thought they could win.

Now, you can conspiracy theory all you like, but if you gave those workers the chance to vote for the union, and the company put pressure on them to reject, you'd expect them to vote for the union who would then be in a position to protect them from the company.

History has shown that Unions have their place - without them rampant exploitation of the worker takes place. But give them too much power and stifle the business - just look at the thriving UK car industry. It's a balance.

Re: It all boils down to Morality

I've worked for them. None of you have touched on what is happening in even more enlightened warehouses.

Think pig farms run by bastards.

Now think of Amazon as a nasty version of a pig farm run by horrible bastards.

And the pigs are cannibal.

Thinking about it now, it is a perfect Dosadi Experiment.

And proof that evolution is a baaad thing.

Someone tell me it got started in 1984.

That would cap it all.

As far as unions go, in the 1970's (not counting US dirty tricks and the like) large manufacturers when they reached a production peak and needed to scale back, used to look at the line and find faults that would go unnoticed when their product was selling well. They would find a snag and make the proles at that part of the line suffer.

This would bring the unions in trying to get it sorted out. But no dice, the bean counters wanted them all out on strike. You can find recollections of this from any large manufactury. They are ony anecdotes now but they happened. Globalisation only happened because the ploy was unsustainable. That and the fact that there was no health and safety for people in India (for example) where the garment industry fled after it was found out that the managers had been cooking the books about cotton worker mortality.

Yes unionisation can be unsustainable and corruption gets in everywhere as does incompetence. The alternative is the high turnover at Amazon. That only happens for a reason. Most people will work in atrocious conditions for basic pay if there is no alternative as long as they have hope.

That's what keeps Amazon going.

I don't have an answer. I have an opinion:

When they have screwed everyone enough times where they are, assuming the market remains the same, they will just move elsewhere when the workers unite or individually, just refuse to eat any more shit.

Re: Seems they're getting less and less popular

Your attitude is fine, it is perfectly reasonable to want to hit someone who condemns the mayor for shutting down fire stations but has no issue forcing the same mayor to pay 6% pay rises for tube drivers whose salary is 3 times the starting salary of a fireman or constable.

And why do tube drivers get so much? In case someone throws themselves in front of a train. Which has to be a much worse experience than recovering the remains of someones family after a house fire.

Re: Seems they're getting less and less popular

"Is it media bias"

Yes it is

Re: does the US have an "all or nothing" law?

Depends. Delaware being a Blue state, I'd bet on all or nothing. Red states tend to have right to work laws. The theory behind force unionization is that non-union workers shouldn't benefit for the negotiations the unions take on. The bit that ignores is the unions engaging in non-negotiation activities that they charge to everyone and lie about it because of the SCOTUS Beck decision.

Re: Naive question...

This puzzled me, too, so I wrote it off as the US being utterly terrified of anything that might be considered "socialist".

Re: Propaganda wins

"I think IT would do well with a professional organization rather than a traditional union"

We do, its called the BCS

HA