Amazon Launches Another Union-Busting Campaign (vice.com) 86
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Amazon has embarked on a campaign to derail a nascent union drive at its warehouses in Staten Island on the heels of a historic union election at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, which the union lost in early April. On Monday, Amazon began displaying anti-union messaging on TV screens at one of its Staten Island warehouses, known as JFK8, which employs more than 5,000 workers. "KNOW THE FACTS BEFORE YOU SIGN A UNION CARD," one of the screens in the warehouse reads, according to a photo obtained by Motherboard. "If someone asks you to provide your personal information or sign a union card, do not release your personal information without knowing all the facts."
Unions must collect signed union authorization cards from at least a third of workers who are eligible to vote in a union election to qualify for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. In recent days, Amazon has also sent out notifications to warehouse workers on its internal portal, known as Amazon A to Z, with a list of reasons for not signing union authorization cards. "Speak For Yourself: Union authorization cards are legally binding and authorize the union to act as your exclusive representative. This means you give up the right to speak for yourself," the message reads. "Don't Sign Away Your Choices: Signing a union authorization card may also obligate you to pay the union a monthly fee," it continued. "We've only been out there for five days and they're already posting this stuff," Christian Smalls, one of the lead organizers of TCOEW, told Motherboard. "This is a union state," Smalls said. "There are husbands, wives, and brothers and sisters who are in unions. Workers know this is a bunch of B.S. and it's upsetting them."
Unions must collect signed union authorization cards from at least a third of workers who are eligible to vote in a union election to qualify for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. In recent days, Amazon has also sent out notifications to warehouse workers on its internal portal, known as Amazon A to Z, with a list of reasons for not signing union authorization cards. "Speak For Yourself: Union authorization cards are legally binding and authorize the union to act as your exclusive representative. This means you give up the right to speak for yourself," the message reads. "Don't Sign Away Your Choices: Signing a union authorization card may also obligate you to pay the union a monthly fee," it continued. "We've only been out there for five days and they're already posting this stuff," Christian Smalls, one of the lead organizers of TCOEW, told Motherboard. "This is a union state," Smalls said. "There are husbands, wives, and brothers and sisters who are in unions. Workers know this is a bunch of B.S. and it's upsetting them."
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Re: "This is a union state," Smalls said (Score:3)
typical NYC-centric world view leaving Philly out of the two categories it is best at. Being an armpit and being an asshole.
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I have nothing to add here but: LOL
Union busting?? (Score:3)
Re:We saw this movie a few weeks ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon knows that divided we fall. It's why politicians push social issues to drive wedges between us so we fight each other instead of fighting together against our economic oppressors, the political class and the banksters.
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I'm pretty sure the banks somehow amplify the worst opinions of all political sides just to stop a large group of people to start to demand that for example the banks have to actually respond for the horrible decisions they did and still do and not get bailed out every time.
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You seem confused about the most recent VW union election in 2019.
VWGoA and VW Chattanooga most certainly did NOT want the UAW representing their workers. They routinely ran standard-issue union buster campaigns against the UAW. They had line supervisors read reports with information detailing VW's misgivings about that particular union. Note that IG Metall has consulted with the UAW on unionization, and that the board in Wolfsburg has sitting members who are members of IG Metall.
Also the union vote fell
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As they probably should be.
Why should a company employ people who openly admit that they intend to hurt it if they don't get their way, rather than seek employment elsewhere?
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Know the facts (Score:2, Insightful)
How is suggesting employees make an informed decision "union busting"? It sounds like the union doesn't want to tell people what they're being asked to sign.
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Canadian here. about 15y ago some dumb shits tried to get a union in at a small mfg I worked at. While I didn't see destruction or physical assault, everything else OP said is spot on. Unions are in the business of growing their union, not of helping out the people who join. I agree that unions have a use even in today's society, but in some cases (like where I was) they were quite the thugs.
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I'd like other Ontarians to get similar benefits, but our anti-labour leaders won't let them. Frankly, they look like the thugs.
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I joined shortly before major department reforms were underway, and initially gave him the benefit of the doubt until finally he pissed me off by disappearing without notice and causing me to work through my lunch (he was also a steward but mostly acted in his own interest). Rather than get bound up ab
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Union thugs beat or kill workers who cross a picket line
Itâ(TM)s all true. Yesterday I was walking home when a car pulled up beside me playing loud gangsta rap. Suddenly, someone rolled down the window, shouted âoebreak yourself, fool!â then let loose with a spray from their AK.
I ducked just in time, although my little homey wasnâ(TM)t as lucky. The car pulled off while the dudes inside threw up hand signals and yelled âoeUnion thugz foâ(TM) life bizeeeyatch!â
Turned out
time to quit Amazon (Score:3)
I've been working toward dumping Amazon. Buying stuff elsewhere and such. I haven't had to buy anything there in close to a year, so I think I'm ready. Fuck Amazon.
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Should be the FP, for whatever the opinion is worth.
Regarding dumping Amazon, I can assure you it isn't a problem. I made a couple of purchases from Amazon, discovered what they were doing with my personal information, and stopped doing business with Amazon. Two decades ago.
Unfortunately, no evidence that such personal boycotts matter to the corporate cancers. None at all. But at least I feel better about it.
Oh yeah. About the story. My take is that there are various decisions to be made to optimize things
Unions built the American middle class (Score:4, Insightful)
It was not long ago that a single person working 40 hours a week with a grade 9 education could support a family, a house, a car, a couple vacations a year, and maybe even a boat and a lake cabin. This was not due to the benevolence of the Job Creators(TM), but through the power of collective bargaining. Unfortunately, Reagan/Mulroney/Thatcher successfully misinformed the public that "Union = Communism" and real wages have been falling precipitously since the 1970s.
By contrast, most reputable employers won't even talk to you unless you have not just a four-year degree ($$), but the right ($$$) degree from the right ($$$$) school. And then, when your resume doesn't say that you have 10 years of Windows 10 experience, the company will claim a labour shortage and bring a foreigner on a visa. (I have no problem with immigration and diversity, but I have a major problem with trillion-dollar corporations gaming the immigration system to suppress wages)
Bottom line - if you have to work for a living, you're a worker, not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. And if you're a worker, you need a union. Period.
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I wonder if any of the quick anti-union comments came from AstroTurf professionals.
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I wonder if any of the quick anti-union comments came from AstroTurf professionals.
Of course they did. Paid trolls infest all of the comment boards and /. is no exception.
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Sadly, I think a lot of the comments are actually in good faith. There's been close to a hundred years of anti-union propaganda and it doesn't help that some unions have been very corrupt.
The funny thing, in a sad way, is that the same people claim that Amazon, Facebook etc are extremely left.
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As regards this specific issue of unions, I would probably agree. Kind of a fetish about being the lone wolf? Also delusions of winning the lottery and a sprinkle of greed about not wanting to share the winnings?
But I am convinced that it isn't merit that made the extreme winners so rich. Yeah, there is a certain amount of merit required. Most of the winners are smart. Most of them (unless they inherited the money to buy the lottery tickets) had to work long and hard to get established in their fields of en
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Personally, I have a hard time believing that people would be paid to post here, but who knows. There are a lot of posters here that need to believe they're special and more deserving then the average person rather then lucky in various ways as you point out. It may be part of human nature, I know if I roll doubles, there's part of me that feels like it's a personal achievement rather then just a random event.
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About as many pro-union comments from the astroturfers. Anyone can be bought.
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Interesting speculation. The money doesn't seem to be there to justify your claim. Do you care to cite some evidence? For example, maybe you know of a billionaire union leader? Or is your claim that the union leaders are raking in the money, but just remain poor because they channel all the loot into their AstroTurf operations? Or maybe you have some kind of indirect claim? Boggled my imagination on that one, because it seems to require a labor union dedicated to making the boss richer at the expense of the
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https://www.opensecrets.org/in... [opensecrets.org]
That can buy a LOT of astroturfers.
And that's just what's recorded in the open. It doesn't take a billionaire.
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NAK
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By contrast, most reputable employers won't even talk to you unless you have not just a four-year degree ($$), but the right ($$$) degree from the right ($$$$) school.
That might be overstating things a bit. I have a degree from a small state school, and I've worked for two of the FAANGs, and get regularly courted by two of the others. Netflix won't talk to me, but whatever. :-)
And then, when your resume doesn't say that you have 10 years of Windows 10 experience, the company will claim a labour shortage and bring a foreigner on a visa. (I have no problem with immigration and diversity, but I have a major problem with trillion-dollar corporations gaming the immigration system to suppress wages)
True, but they don't have to pad the requirements. All they really have to do is get enough people to laugh at their salary offers. :-)
Bottom line - if you have to work for a living, you're a worker, not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. And if you're a worker, you need a union. Period.
Unions won't help with any of those things. The decline of unions has been largely because folks have watched as the union shops have steadily gone out of busin
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It wasn't the unions that caused the outsourcing. It was simple economics. US manufacturing was exported whether or not the shop was union because even with today's too low minimum wage
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It wasn't the unions that caused the outsourcing. It was simple economics. US manufacturing was exported whether or not the shop was union because even with today's too low minimum wage that cost is still higher than China which subsidizes the manufacturing businesses. You even noted the "cheaper overseas" part yourself. Unions had very little to do with that.
Actually, unions had a lot to do with that. Every time a union shuts down a plant for a week to demand higher wages, that's a huge cost hit on top of the higher operating costs in general. And the higher the wages go, the more incentive there is to move a plant overseas. That's not saying that unions caused it, per se, just that they helped speed it along.
Higher minimum wages can help, but only for jobs that can't be offshored, or with appropriate levels of tax benefits for keeping jobs onshore. At some
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My Dad worked at a union shop, good pay and benefits, the company was quite profitable, partially due to people like my Dad who liked to brag how he kept tolerances at about 25% of requirements, half a thou when 2 thou was called for, resulting in good product.
His company outsourced to Phoenix, $8 an hour workers who didn't give a shit and that profitable company became unprofitable as the product turned to shit. The same thing might have happened if the company stayed in Canada but got rid of the high paid
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Assuming you are American, you are a rare case as America is one of the hardest countries to move up the economic scale. As you found, it is possible, especially if it turns out you have a highly in demand skill, but for the average person, the leading indicator of your future earnings is what your parents earned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Unions built the American middle class (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes unions helped a lot back in the day. But today, unions moved onto becoming just political groups with little interest in actual worker benefits. And I will be frank, this is on all sides.
Police misconduct: The chief fires the bad apple, union gets their job back:
https://www.theatlantic.com/po... [theatlantic.com]
Teacher misconduct: School wants to fire (rightfully), union makes sure the legal fight will cost a million dollars. They are just held in payroll doing "research" (i.e.: web surfing):
https://nypost.com/2016/12/08/... [nypost.com]
Service employee: Fixing a machine, and you see a small electrical problem: stop work, since electrician union needs to send someone, even though a first year student can fix this in a minute. Costing lost productivity.
Overall unions have dug themselves into untenable positions. If they really want the best for the average worker, they would
(1) Proactively work on firing really bad apples, not protect them
(2) Don't sign up for a single political entity, but be more encompassing. This way 50% of the population will not actively try to avoid you.
Re:Unions built the American middle class (Score:4, Interesting)
Precisely which union?...sounds like a lie (Score:2)
LOL. Spot on. When I contracted to Fleet in Chicago, we wanted to move our monitors. Couldn't. Had to wait for electricians to come later in the day. We moved them anyway since they couldn't fire us. The union guys raised hell, but screw 'em, it was literally the monitors and keyboards as the IT connections had been done earlier by the IT union.
Since when has there been an "IT union?"
You're claiming someone says you need an electrician to unplug and move monitors?
Sounds like bullshit. I worked in Chicago for 8 years, including for the state and city government. I have never heard of such things. I was a student and moved many monitors and setup many servers. I have never heard of any of these unions you speak of. I knew a LOT of people employed in the tech industry. NEVER once has a union come up in conversation for anything computer-
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Unions have to be interested in politics because the employers buy politicians to get favourable laws.
Your few examples of unions doing bad things are anecdotes, not data. Overall unions do a lot of good, especially in Europe where they are more common and the laws empower them.
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Education in America is fucked up overwhelmingly because of a union.
Not the union for the educators, but for the administrators.
Bad administration is sucking the lifeblood out of education and their union is protecting them while they do it.
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Re:Unions built the American middle class (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not long ago that a single person working 40 hours a week with a grade 9 education could support a family, a house, a car, a couple vacations a year, and maybe even a boat and a lake cabin. This was not due to the benevolence of the Job Creators(TM), but through the power of collective bargaining.
Utter crap.
Factory workers temporarily had it very good, post WWII, because the rest of the world's industrial capacity had largely been blown up. Nice work if you can get it, but not exactly scalable.
Unions fastened onto that teat, and for a while management was (more or less) okay with throwing money their way since there was plenty to go around.
Come the 1970s - not the 80s when your bugaboos were in office, but the 70s - the gravy train started to end, as the rest of the world recovered and provided competition. But the unions still had a stranglehold on the industries they had glommed on to.
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The rest of the world recovered two decades earlier.
Re:Unions built the American middle class (Score:4, Insightful)
It was not long ago that a single person working 40 hours a week with a grade 9 education could support a family, a house, a car, a couple vacations a year, and maybe even a boat and a lake cabin.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but for argument's sake, let's assume that it is. How does an uneducated work force compete with a higher educated one, either foreign or domestic? The answer is that it doesn't. The fact is, a lot more people go to college now than they used to, and if you want to be competitive as a worker, then guess what? You need to be educated.
But let's assume that you had just that 9th grade education, and you joined a union shop full of a bunch of other people with a 9th grade education, and you successfully collectively bargain your way into forcing your employer to keep you. Great. So how does your company with a bunch of morons compete with another company in say Switzerland that is all higher educated when it comes to selling its goods to say Germany? The reality is that your company of morons is going to lose, which means they go out of business and you lose your job anyways. But hey, at least you collectively bargained!
Reminds me of that time the teamsters forced Hostess out of business and then the union declared it a victory for holding their ground, while the union management went home still being rich and the union workers were all laid off of their jobs that, at the end of the day, didn't pay shit to begin with, even with collective bargaining, and sure as shit didn't pay as much as being a union boss does.
Bottom line - if you have to work for a living, you're a worker, not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. And if you're a worker, you need a union. Period.
I really don't. I've done very well at negotiating my own pay, leaving to work somewhere else has either gotten me a big pay increase at the new job, or the existing job offering me a lot more. If I was forced to join a union, they wouldn't allow me to do that; they'd force me to bow down to the "seniority" of some dumbass that can't do his job worth a shit just because he's been there longer and they'd "collectively bargain" for him to get the pay increase instead.
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Reminds me of that time the teamsters forced Hostess out of business
Lost me right there. You have been propagandaized [latimes.com].
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Contrary view: Unions enforce conformity and hold back better workers so that the rest can retain pay parity.
If you're any good at your job, unions are poisonous.
If you want to work with good people, unions are poisonous.
If you want to progress in your career, unions are poisonous.
If you want to avoid giving money to some cunt that's going to get rich off the part of it that they didn't give to some corrupt fuckhead politician you don't support, unions are poisonous.
Fuck unions, they're poisonous shitty org
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It was not long ago that a single person working 40 hours a week with a grade 9 education could support a family, a house, a car, a couple vacations a year, and maybe even a boat and a lake cabin.
Unions priced that worker out of the market and forced companies to move manufacturing offshore. Pittsburgh did a great job rebuilding its economy from steel production to high tech, but the skills that are in demand today were not learned in grade 9.
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While it's definitely true that unions were the major driving force in decent pay and working conditions for American blue collar and no collar jobs, the destruction of those jobs was not caused by the atrophy of unions. In fact, a case can be made that those jobs were destroyed as collateral damage from unions, as global competition became a reality, especially from Asia with minuscule labor costs, while US labor costs remained high, thanks to unions.
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Wish I had some Mod points left. You are spot on. Unions have gotten a bad name but you are right - employers are gaming the immigration system to bring in lower paid workers at the expense of American workers. They are in cahoots with the universities who are jacking up tuition fees for fully guaranteed loans for degrees that, in some cases, will not lead to any job prospects.
In my line of work the hourly rates for independant contractors was higher in 2000 than they are today. Why? Offshoring and mass imp
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Union-busting execs in Korea end up in the pokey (Score:4, Informative)
This is what should happen [theregister.com] to the union-busting sons of bitches.
amazon is right this time (Score:3)
be sure you are actually giving your personal info to the union and not some scammer pretending to work for the union. You sure don't want your identity stolen.
.
Truly the Rockefeller of our times (Score:2)
100 years later. Same shit.
Wait for them hiring union busters straight from the Mafia again, to throw people out of windows.
No conscience is no conscience is no conscience.
People like that should be put in a nice competent asylum for the criminally insane.
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Lol
Like the unions never had anything to do with the Mob.
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It's frankly inexplicable why a union might look to organized crime for help in those circumstances, when clearly the sy
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Since you brought up the Battle of Blair Mountain, let's bring this story up to date with the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Massey Energy in general and Don Blankenship in particular were totally anti-union. Because of that critical safety precautions were circumvented in favor of higher profits. 29 miners died as a result. One of the biggest thing the coal miner's union is about is mine safety. It is unknown if a union had existed would things have been different but I thi
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Ask Jimmy Hoffa, maybe he could tell you. If you can find him first.
Unions Built the Middle Class! And thank you. (Score:4, Insightful)
In their history of over 200 years in the U.S. unions have won some absolutely crucial victories over predatory and abusive industries. A lot of what constitutes modern labor laws can be traced back to such wins. The American worker - even a non-union one - probably owes a debt to them.Now that quite a lot of the goals of early unions have, in fact, been enshrined in law, the question of unionization in its historical sense becomes much more complicated.
The problem is, all of the arguments for and against unions are... right. To some extent, at least. For organizations bent on efficiency and continuous improvement, unions can be a boat anchor. Some companies not steered by union considerations mistreat their workers. Unionization can make it hard (read "nearly impossible") to attract top talent. Unionization can make it easier for older staff to continue employment as their circumstances and abilities change.
While I don't live in the U.S., I do live in an area of Canada with low participation in labour unions. I'm reminded of the Maple Leaf strike of 1997, which went something like this (from memory... it has been a while):
Union: "These are our demands!"
ML: "No, and if you strike, we're closing the plant."
Union: "We're warning you - we'll strike!"
ML: "We're warning YOU."
Union: Strikes.
ML: Closes plant.
Union: "..."
I suspect that globalization is rendering the adoption of unions by industries with international considerations extremely difficult. Unless you convince the whole world to jump at once, or you finagle the government into imposing massive restrictions on external trade, the unionized industries will struggle.
I have never been in a union. The company I work for has a union component, but it's limited to certain regions, and came about because of the acquisition of unionized companies. I make considerably more than my unionized counterparts in those areas. In part that's because the company has enjoyed many years of profitability that allowed it to be generous. In part, it's because the company can pay me what it feels I'm worth, and not what a negotiated table of rates tells them they can.
It's all very complicated, but one thing is clear: unions adopt the language, politics, and rhetoric of wartime propaganda with such ease it scares me. A walk through any message board dedicated to covering a union action is eye-opening. The willingness to demonize and dehumanize the other side is unbelievable, as is the desire to incite violence, or to participate in it. A person in a union is able to do things that they would never consider otherwise. For this reason alone I'm glad that (so far) I've managed to stay outside of that system.
Not much point to this post, other than everybody's right, and everybody's wrong.
Amazon will win (Score:2)
Bottom-feeder workers with no education (the real, voluntary kind where one is curious about the world then invests effort in learning) won't revolt except against epic abuse and robots are steadily replacing them.
Identifying problems does not fix them, it merely improves understanding. US organized labor suffers from division, corruption and incompetence with no inspirational leadership in sight, and what person of virtue would want to join a union then deal with businesses, government and other organized
Bezos is a liberal hypocrite (Score:1)
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