Amazon Ordered to Hold Another Union Vote in Alabama (usatoday.com) 107
America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) "has ordered a new union election for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama," reports the Associated Press, "based on objections to the first vote that took place in April."
The move, announced Monday, is a major blow to Amazon, which had spent about a year aggressively campaigning for warehouse workers in Bessemer to reject the union, which they ultimately did by a wide margin....
In a 20-page decision, the regional director for the NLRB focused much attention on Amazon's installation of a U.S. Postal Service mail box at the main employee entrance, which may have created the false impression that the company was the one conducting the election process. The regional director also refuted Amazon's position that it was making voting easier and was trying to encourage as high a turnout as possible. "The employer's flagrant disregard for the board's typical mail-ballot procedure compromised the authority of the board and made a free and fair election impossible," according to the decision. "By installing a postal mailbox at the main employee entrance, the employer essentially highjacked the process and gave a strong impression that it controlled the process. This dangerous and improper message to employees destroys trust in the board's processes and in the credibility of the election results...."
A repeat of the election means another battle for Amazon with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (or RWDSU). The first election garnered nationwide attention and put a spotlight on how Amazon treats its workers. It was the biggest union push in Amazon's history and only the second time that an organizing effort from within the company had come to a vote.
In the first vote, 47% of the workers ultimately didn't cast a ballot.
In a 20-page decision, the regional director for the NLRB focused much attention on Amazon's installation of a U.S. Postal Service mail box at the main employee entrance, which may have created the false impression that the company was the one conducting the election process. The regional director also refuted Amazon's position that it was making voting easier and was trying to encourage as high a turnout as possible. "The employer's flagrant disregard for the board's typical mail-ballot procedure compromised the authority of the board and made a free and fair election impossible," according to the decision. "By installing a postal mailbox at the main employee entrance, the employer essentially highjacked the process and gave a strong impression that it controlled the process. This dangerous and improper message to employees destroys trust in the board's processes and in the credibility of the election results...."
A repeat of the election means another battle for Amazon with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (or RWDSU). The first election garnered nationwide attention and put a spotlight on how Amazon treats its workers. It was the biggest union push in Amazon's history and only the second time that an organizing effort from within the company had come to a vote.
In the first vote, 47% of the workers ultimately didn't cast a ballot.
Collective bargaining (Score:4, Insightful)
Eventually someone at Amazon will figure out that robots don't collectively bargain, discriminate, or file lawsuits.
Re:Collective bargaining (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's a matter of cost. The more expensive and risky (not just financially, but in terms of lawsuits) it becomes to hire humans .. they would be willing to buy and pay for more sophisticated robots. Right now robots are more expensive than humans for certain tasks.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Eventually someone at Amazon will figure out that robots don't collectively bargain, discriminate, or file lawsuits.
Amazon warehouses are already highly automated, but humans are still needed.
The first vote was two-to-one against the union. The 2nd vote is unlikely to have a different outcome.
Amazon pays well and the workers know that a union is unlikely to get them a better deal. So why pay dues for nothing?
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Amazon pays well
So clearly you work for Amazon, right?
Re: Collective bargaining (Score:2)
Do you have an actual argument?
Re: Collective bargaining (Score:5, Insightful)
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2 to 1 with less than 50% voting, sounds like if everybody voted it might win.
It's bad enough that you hate anything good, always take the despicable side of any issue, but your persistent inability to math is really grating.
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No one wants to hear your long-debunked anti-union propaganda.
America was at its best when unions were strong.
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They do go out of their way to help problem employees. My wife is forced to belong to a union as a nurse. The only time the union ever does something for employees is when someone is written up multiple times for doing things life threatening to patients and on the verge of being fired. The union jumps right in to defend that employee. Never mind all the other due paying nurses whose jobs are made harder by the one person the union thinks is worthy of defending. They siphon dues off everyone's paycheck
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If they could do it they already would have. Reality is that building a robot that can pick up and pack an arbitrary item, any shape, any material, hard or soft, is way beyond our ability.
It would need major advances in computer vision, robotic arms and AI to make it work.
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Or they could start forcing their suppliers to switch from retail-friendly packaging to standardized robot-friendly packaging. FedEx and even the USPS (to some extent) does that.
Amazon is big enough to do it, especially if humans start being too uppity.
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Would have been a better FP?
But Amazon has certainly figured that out and is trying to eliminate the humans as quickly as possible. But there's an underlying paradox because robots don't read many books.
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Why do they need robots to read books? Of course, they could make robots to draw a salary, make purchases, and read books if it becomes a requirement. Why not? Is that what you're getting at?
Re:Collective bargaining (Score:4, Informative)
Why do they need robots to read books?
Probably a vague reference to Ford's quote: The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers. Ford is said to have doubled the minimum salary he paid his workers, and as a result those workers became Ford Company's customers and Ford sold more cars than any other car maker.
In this case, the OP's point may be that robots won't be Amazon's customers. I'm not sure how much of a loss would this be to Amazon though.
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Ford was obviously either wrong or fooling. Think about it, if he is correct, then why can't robots do the purchasing of their own products and get the same result?
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Ford was forward thinking. You can't seem to see past the next quarter.
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What does the quarter have to do with my logic? Your claim is that highly paid workers are needed to buy products. But my question is, if that is true, why can't robots do that purchasing too? Just program them to buy random factory products, the same as humans would.
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The premise is ridiculous, but for such a scheme to work, you would have to be paying your robots a salary so they had revenue to buy your products with.
Since the main benefit of using robots is that they have fixed up front cost and then very low cost per unit of work done, compared to normal paid labor which has low up-front cost but much higher cost per unit of work done, you would basically be back where you started had you just stuck with hiring people.
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Except with a robot you don't have a fear that they might suddenly sue you, falsely or not, for harassment or workplace issues.
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Keep moving that goal post...
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Looking over this branch, I call a penalty on 95548 for "intellectual dishonesty".
However I will note that I was considering Ford and my own https://wt.social/post/the-fut... [wt.social] running joke called "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!"
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What goalpost. I definitively disproved the ridiculous theory that a company should pay workers to buy their own products. I should pay you $10 to bake a cake so that you can purchase it from me for $5? how does that make sense?
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I definitively disproved
You honestly believe that, given what you posted? Okay, this has been a huge waste of my time.
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Ford was obviously either wrong or fooling.
On the contrary, Ford's decision was shown to be very good in more ways than one. First, by giving workers a salary worth twice the industry standard he got better retention and worker participation. Second, as his workers now saw their product as something they themselves could obtain, they were motivated to increase the quality and innovate.
Ford was proven to be a visionary by the results: sales doubled within two years, and within 7 years half of all cars sold in the US were made by his company. He later
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NAK
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Until Amazon actually does it, it's irrelevant. Besides, if a job can be automated then it SHOULD be automated.
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If a job is automated then what does the unemployed person now do to make money?
What about jobs that customers don't want automatic?
I like real people as cashiers instead of auto-cashiers.
Even ATM's I use mainly because they are open more often as I go at night.
P.S. I used animated instead of automated.
I do like both kinds of movies and shows though.
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They live on universal basic income, which comes from taxes on the robot. It's kind of the same as how retired people live on pension. Think of it as the robot's paycheck being diverted to a human. How is welfare currently funded? From the work of humans, right? So why not fund it from the work of robots?
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If a job is automated then what does the unemployed person now do to make money?
If you think there will ever being a shortage of jobs then you don't understand the challenges humanity faces.
Don't kid yourself (Score:2)
Machines are always going to outdo human beings on repetitive tasks in the long run. Large companies and their investors will focus on the low hanging fruit first and the easiest things to automate but that doesn't mean they forgot about you. Even China is starting to automate
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Yes but if workers are cheap, automation will take longer. Have you seen factories in poor countries? Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] The factories there use a lot of human labor, whereas factories in rich countries use automation to build the same product. If something costs an extraordinary amount people will figure out how to automate it.
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Ah yes, that's how it works in communism (Score:2, Insightful)
Mother Russia hold second election.
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No. It's "first desired result."
Re:Ah yes, that's how it works in communism (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon illegally sabotaged the vote. They had things like mandatory meetings where they forced employees to view anti union material, for example.
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Amazon illegally sabotaged the vote. They had things like mandatory meetings where they forced employees to view anti union material, for example.
How could that be illegal? As long as they don't lie, they retain freedom of speech. More specifically, the owners do.
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Not illegal but definitely falls under coercion.
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It's not coercion unless they are compelling the worker to vote a certain way. Educating someone isn't coercing them to do anything. Information is not coercion unless it is false or contains a threat. I mean, if we go by that logic all advertising is coercing. Heck your comment itself is coercion. If everything is coercion your logic is flawed and the word is meaningless.
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Are the unions restricted from similar speech? Why should the employer not have as much opportunity as the union to sell their side to those voting? Why do unions prefer uninformed voters?
Let's also not forget that Biden appointed former union executives to the NLRB. The rulings on the Amazon vote are highly tainted by that fact. These people will rotate back out of the NLRB to their positions in union leadership once their stint is done. They will be rewarded for their rulings in their pocket books.
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I'm pretty sure the union can't force a mandatory meeting where every worker gets to see their propaganda.
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The mistake you're making is conflating what is legal with what is ethical.
As long as they don't lie,
Lying isn't illegal in most cases. It certainly isn't illegal in this case. I can guarantee that Amazon's anti-union propaganda, like all anti-union propaganda, is nothing but lies.
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Amazon illegally sabotaged the vote. They had things like mandatory meetings where they forced employees to view anti union material, for example.
Yeah. Perhaps you've never worked for a company that has mandatory meetings. I'm pretty sure that a mandatory meeting to view "anti-union material" would have everyone involved voting for the union.
"Filter error: Your comment looks like ascii art." Man, slashdot really needs to update this site some decade real soon.
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That sounds like a good way to get people to vote for a union.
But I do not know how this forgives ignoring people wishes.
"You voted for the wrong thing, so we will continue to hold votes until you get it right"
Let the workers decide if they want a vote, don't mandate it by law.
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From TFA:
"In a 20-page decision, the regional director for the NLRB focused much attention on Amazon's installation of a U.S. Postal Service mail box at the main employee entrance, which may have created the false impression that the company was the one conducting the election process. The regional director also refuted the Amazon's position that it was making voting easier and was trying to encourage as high a turnout as possible."
It was part of a pattern of behaviour that mislead employees.
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It was part of a pattern of behaviour that mislead employees.
According to a "regional director for the NLRB". Not according to a judge or a jury.
Now of course, we all know that the NLRB is not biased towards unions in any way and would never do everything they can to give them a second chance at a race they lost.
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It's the former union leadership people currently running the NLRB that's saying that those that voted were too stupid to recognize a USPS mailbox as nothing more than a mailbox. Amazon made it easier to vote. Should they have instead removed all USPS mailboxes in a 5 mile radius to remove any ambiguity of who was conducting the election?
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Amazon went as far as having the traffic light timings changed. https://www.al.com/business/20... [al.com]
Wonder what they're scared of? You or me asking to have traffic lights modified would be met with Oh we'll have to get quotes for a traffic study and it will take 6 months. Amazon makes a call and it magically happens.
Re: Ah yes, that's how it works in communism (Score:1)
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The Republican party agrees.
Amateur Communism (Score:2)
Party leader not elected in first election? Mother Russia hold second election.
That's the amateur-hour approach. The more efficient way to do it is to only have one choice on the ballot. That way you are sure to only need one election.
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Party leader not elected in first election?
Texas hold second election.
FTFY
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I think you chose the wrong analogy. In places like that you never need to redo an election because the elections are fixed so the Leader never loses, and what's more it's forbidden to entertain the very *possibility* that the leader did not win, fair and square.
You only need do-overs in places where elections are not supposed to be decided in advance.
Installing a US Postal Service mail box? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Who here thinks that installing a US Postal Service mail box is somehow "hijacking the process?"
Someone who had already decided the outcome of forcing a revote, and just needed the filmiest of excuse.
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See, it works like this:
- If the union had pushed for putting in a USPS mailbox but Amazon opposed it, Amazon would be preventing workers from exercising their rights
- If the union had won the vote, installing USPS mailboxes near voting sites would be hailed as the deciding factor in insuring proper worker representation
- Since Amazon decided to put the USPS mailbox in to streamline voting, but election didn't go the way the union wanted, it's a sign they're 'hijacking the process'
That's the basic logic b
Re: Installing a US Postal Service mail box? (Score:1)
Re: Installing a US Postal Service mail box? (Score:2)
The NLRB designed an escape hatch for itself so their opponent is damned no matter what.
This is a sure sign of dirty politics at play.
Re: Installing a US Postal Service mail box? (Score:2)
Like
"The tornado spared my house, praise God and his mercy!"
"The tornado destroyed my house. This is part of God's plan and I accept it."
The old fail proof escape hatch.
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It is actually a three part response:
"The tornado spared my house. Paise God and his mercy!"
"The tornado destroyed my house, but spare my life. Paise God and his mercy!"
"The tornado destroyed his house and killed him because it was his time, and now he is with Jesus. Praise God and his mercy!"
Re: Installing a US Postal Service mail box? (Score:2)
It didn't make sense to me either. Assuming were talking about the standard blue US post office box, I can't see how in any way this is "hijacking the election". Maybe employees seeing other employees putting in ballots and other employees putting pressure on them to vote for 'Amazon's guy'. Yeah, that's convulted and silly in itself.
Maybe the answer is stupidly obvious, but I just can't find it.
John Oliver has a Union Busting video (Score:5, Interesting)
In 100% of Unionization cases the company threatens to move, but following Unionization only 1% actually do
This makes sense. If you move a short distance you're liable to end up with another Union shop and out millions of bucks. If you move a long distance the cost is extremely high, requiring cheap labor and lax government to offset, and if you thought you could move to where labor was cheap and pollution was free you'd have done it already.
The other point I've heard made, that needs to be made again, is from YouTuber Beau Of The Fifth Column, who made the point that all the talking heads on cable news that attack Unions because you can do better on your own have agents. e.g. people they hire to negotiate on their behalf...
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Mod up. Too bad it wasn't FP.
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That's like saying people will buy your product rergardless of what it costs. So why doesn't everything cost 1 million dollars?
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They might not move a particular factory, but when it comes time to build a new one, they go to a right to work state, or a country with no unions at all. And when it comes time to close a factory, which ones will they close?
I swear, people like you and John Oliver must be entirely incapable of independent thought. Have you just never heard of the concept of opportunity cost? Do you have no concept of the big picture? Do you really not understand the difference between hiring an agent and being forced to ha
Not so much (Score:3)
Sort of like how Amazon tried to get New York to pay them to move their headquarters and build Jeff bezos a helicopter pad. AOC made the news that's the one w
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Liar. Netherlands is not "universal union membership" .. 18% of workers there are in unions compared to 10% in the US.
Reference: https://www.worker-participati... [worker-participation.eu]
Germany is also around 20%.
UBI derived from taxation of sales is the solution, not unions.
Check this out! (Score:1, Troll)
These are the same people, and was the official position of Hillary Clinton, to use a "card check" unionization voting system. What that means is not a secret ballot, so union people can come and lea
Mailbox Schmailbox (Score:2, Troll)
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Amazon cheats and you blame the union? Get real.
prison time (Score:1)
That's what you get in civilized countries for interfering with unions. And rightly so. Of course you have your own interests, but the workers have a right, by law. Guess which should be weighed higher?
But hey, land of the free(*)
(*) subject to terms and conditions, provided you have enough capital available, as long as supply lasts
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The workers voted overwhelmingly against the union. Not surprising considering this is in a very red state and many of those workers don't want the union siphoning off their paychecks to give money to political causes they don't personally agree with. That warehouse also pays well above average wages/benefits in that region. The union wasn't offering them anything useful. The workers that initiated the unionization drive did not do so for need of union. They did so for political reasons with the suppor
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Is that so. You sound exactly like the local manager who is reading off an anti-union pamphlet she got sent by headquarters.
Amazing (Score:2)
Re:Bezos is angry (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when I saw the story this was the only comment. Not such a bad FP, though it could have been better. Why such a low Score? But to respond along the Subject lines...
I don't think Bezos is motivated by anger. Nor by the possessions themselves. Can't remember which Amazon history book it was, but my feeling was that his motivations were more for dominance. He wanted to become a dominant seller and considered various categories before settling on books.
There were (at least) three factors that led to Amazon becoming the massive corporate cancer that it is. Most people skip over the luck factor and just forget about all the other companies that tried but failed and died. In the end there will be a #1 company (but for each metric). (Anyone remember Bookstop? Luck includes timing, and Bookstop was too early. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
The execution factor is also crucial, and you have to give Bezos some credit for execution. Your company won't even get the chance to be lucky if it can't execute well enough.
But the greed factor matters, too. This aspect always reminds me of the potato king billionaire J.R. Simplot. I remember a quote where he attacks the lazy fools who lose all of their motivation after their first $10 million. Maybe it was $20 million? Not one of his top quotes in websearch. Does anyone out there remember it? The book was about fast food, perhaps focusing on McDonald's? Obviously Bezos isn't easily satisfied.
Pathological greed cannot be satisfied, which is where we get to the threat of unions. Sharing more with you means less for me. HORRIBLE! The union MUST be stopped!
Lately I'm seeing it as a kind of Golden Rule thing. Cannot apply to everyone. If my objective is to be richer than you, then you cannot be richer than me. I'll bet Kant said something about it...
Disclaimer required? I am NOT an Amazon customer. My second and last Amazon purchase was 20 years ago. The idea of Amazon makes sense, but I saw something EVIL there, and nothing that's happened since then has changed that vision. But I have this "thing" about freedom.
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My second and last Amazon purchase was 20 years ago. The idea of Amazon makes sense, but I saw something EVIL there
In 2001? What were you objecting to? Their use of banner ads?
I'll bet it was the banner ads.
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No, I'm pretty sure that banner ads never bugged me, though it's a bit hard to remember the details now.
One aspect was the reviews. I definitely believed that Amazon was censoring any reviews that might discourage sales. However, looking back I now wonder why Amazon would bother with that clumsy approach. Even if they were censoring reviews in those days, now I'm sure Amazon just makes sure that each potential customer sees exactly the reviews that are most likely to push the right buttons to close the sale
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You're quite the prognosticator. In 2001, recommendation systems weren't exactly sophisticated. They were mostly "books in the same genera" with "People who bought this book also bought" at the high end.
I can't imagine anyone in 2001 thinking that Amazon, of all places, was going to dominate retail. It wasn't even profitable until the very last quarter of 2001! It really looked like it was going to be another victim of the dot-com bubble bursting until the very end of that year. I was honestly surpris
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Not at all. I merely recognized the EVIL while it was young and immature, like the recommendation system of those days. But it was quite clear to me which way Amazon was going, and, per my earlier comment, largely a question of luck how far Bezos would go with it.
But it is against my principles to participate in or try to profit from EVIL. I could have participated in the google or Facebook IPOs, too, but didn't. (Yet my most interesting personal job-related experiences along those lines actually involved a
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What tipped you off, or was this revelation more supernatural?
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Not sure if you're joking, but I have this thing about freedom. I like it. Amazon doesn't. Obviously. Even 20 years ago.
There's a Slashdot-friendly version of a "working definition" of freedom in my profile somewhere. That's probably less than 20 years old, however.
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I am and I'm not. I'm serious, at least. I think it's perfectly ridiculous that you're claiming to have seen the evil of Amazon today in 2001. The religious language you're using also makes it seem like it wasn't reason that lead you to abandon Amazon, but divine revelation. It's all very silly.
I'm a little curious about your opinion on eBay and PayPal at the time.
Re:Bezos is [an] angry [gawd?] (Score:2)
Hmm... Your tone is tending towards offensive, but for now I'll continue to treat it as a good-faith discussion. However I'm beginning to smell something funny around here. Lots of shallow Libertarians use various perfumes to disguise the essentially vile stink of their fake philosophy... So:
It is possible that I do see "freedom" as a kind of religion, but I don't think so. More like a job that I am morally required to do. Too much study of philosophy? But "freedom" and "evil" are two of my philosophic foci
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If it helps, I'm no libertarian.
It's starting to seem like your intuition boils down to "successful companies are evil", which may very well be true in the general case, but I wonder how you're able to function?
AT&T is the only mobile provider that works reliably in my area. They are, in my estimation, the most evil of all the telecoms at the moment. As I need a mobile to earn a living, my options are to sell my home and move just so that I can change providers or to write angry letters to the CEO and
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Excellent example, though I'm pretty sure it was accidental. But is it worth the details?
About 15 years ago a new ISP was born upon this big island, dedicated to the proposition of unlimited wireless data. (And now I must apologize to the ghost of Abe Lincoln.) It wasn't so fast, maybe 3G, but supported tethering through smartphones and basically satisfied all of my connection needs. Finally, a single device solution! (Before that I had used MANY alternatives, such as ISDN and ASDL, and was often forced to
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Well, you walk the walk. I can't fault you for that. I may try to do more myself.
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Like I said, being free is kind of a nuisance. Your mileage may vary.
Re: Bezos is angry (Score:2)
A statement like this means you are red, sir.
Please wait where you are. The MIB will arrive shortly to ensure you get the proper re-education that you need.