When I left Amazon (as an SWE), with about 11mo of tenure, I was apparently at about median longevity. Yes, some of it is their growth, but a significant reason is also that they churn through people unnecessary. It's ridiculous to me that a big tech company treats people so terribly and continues to get away with it.
I endured 13 months. In my mind, very little skill development happened during those 13 months. But here I am, years later, and that line item in my history still carries some sense of market validation - that, because I successfully navigated the recruitment funnel and was at one time an Amazonian, that I must have useful skills.
This was also my experience at one of the “prestigious” consulting firms I endured working at for a year. It took me three months just to proceed and navigate through all of their ridiculous hurdles during recruitment.
Out of all of the positions/firms on my CV, that one seems to carry the most weight to recruiters and other companies, despite it being the time where I did the least productive work in my life (So much so that when I was asked why I was leaving during my exit interview I straight up said “I’ve gotten dumber since working here.”)
Most of Amazon's employee base are in the warehouses, and there's a significant amount of churn there, especially seasonal. Being median at 11 months is really not that weird considering the sheer nature of warehouse employment there, and considering it's highly likely you were there through at least one Q4.
The tool in Amazon that shows how your tenure ranks is measured against _all_ Amazon employees. Warehouse, delivery, etc.
I was well past the 60% mark by the time I got through my first Q4 working for Amazon as an SE, and in to something like 90% by the time I got through my second. The figures the L7 engineers were bouncing around at that time were that developers averaged around 2 years.
Curious: Where do you feel the SWE people they churn through generally end up?
I'm a bit concerned about this one guy on one of my previous teams who moved from Europe to US to work on AWS. I don't think he was aware of the company culture.
The CEO of Cloudflare has said that he enjoys taking burned out SDEs from Amazon and giving them a happy life at his company. It's how, in his words, Cloudflare can compete at an engineering level with AWS.
Its a common stall tactic for large businesses to fire leadership after a Union is formed. It means you cannot facilitate a good faith negotiation and places the union in a perpetual limbo that can last years.
If you're wondering what the play from unions is after this, its "unexpected" equipment breakdowns and coordinated slowdowns because you now generally lack the leadership necessary to fire people or lead failure/productivity investigations
The funny thing is though that for warehouse employees at Amazon, their job is so simple and all of their work is wrapped up and recorded for KPIs that if they slow down or become unproductive, they could be fired electronically without even assuming that the slowdown was intentional.
They’re hamsters on a wheel and the wheel isn’t going to slow down just because they’re upset about their situation.
I moved to Seattle from my hometown of Phoenix out of college for my "dream job" at Amazon. I started interviewing for other employment after just three months. I ended up quitting after eight months.
Amazon is a horrible place to work. Six years is a lifetime there.
I have seen this sort of sentiment many times, and the narrative here aligns with the main thread. I also know a few in my circle who I respect and think very highly of, but only worked at Amazon for ~1 year, and all of these people have been very quiet about their experience at Amazon. Also, I understand that the leadership principles are taken very seriously. My question: How are the leadership principles used in a way that leads to such a bad experience?
The problem at Amazon as I understand it is extremely darwinian stack-ranking. The leadership principles don’t address this. Even if you have a team of 10 senior high achievers by every metric, some percentage of them have to be managed out every N months. It’s absolutely insane.
If Apple did this, they’d never ship hardware or software updates.
A small part of the problem that's I observed during my interview there is the person who interviewed me mentioned that the teams largely operate independently, and sometimes have competing ideas. First across the finish line wins.
Ultimately, this, I think, sets up a lot of perverse incentives. Engineers are encouraged to burn themselves out to beat their coworkers, and there's less value in maintaining a good product. Anyone who remembers the very early days of their cloud offerings could pretty easily see the results.
Amazon is a retailer, and the mindset of a retailer is squeezing fractions of a penny out of toilet paper vendors. None of the original leadership principles says anything about human beings.
Amazon's workforce has probably doubled twice in the last 6 years? So even without taking attrition into account (which is substantial in the warehouses), after 6 years you're in the 25% longest-tenured warehouse employees. With attrition I'd guess you're in the "top" 10%?
These managers are getting fired because they had been put in charge of stopping the union forming - this is a threat to the managers at other Amazon locations to be more evil - "pour encourager les autres"
Well the line you quoted says company not industry. Ecommerce is a relatively young industry anyway. And Amazon has been around since what, 94? So 6 years is over 20% of the time Amazon has existed.
Fair point. I just found it to be an interesting choice of words. Whenever they use the same term, in other industries, they are talking about double-digit tenures.
The main point is that this is a fairly unambiguous message to other managers, that allowing unionization to happen under their watch would be a careericidal offense.
That means that they can expect the warehouse managers to get pretty desperate, and probably break all kinds of laws and whatnot. It's just that the message is being sent in a way that allows the company to keep their hands clean, from the almost certain results.
The managers will certainly get fired, if unionization happens, and might get fired, if they get caught, spiking the trees.
Amazon's done this with most of their functions. Push expectations: claim no responsibility for outcome.
Walmart laid out the playbook that profits in a thin margin market require you being an asshole to your counterparties, but blackmailing them into still working with you via scale.
It’s not a technical term, so it’s always going to be somewhat of a matter of opinion. If I had to guess, you could only really be described as a veteran at some company if you had been there longer than most other employees. It seems like at least 60 or 70% of the employees should be newer.
> I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran."
What does it take to be considered a "veteran" in the military?
> The term "veteran" means a person who served in the active military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions other than dishonorable.
> 1. A person with long experience of a particular activity.
The military version is a bit different:
> 3. A person who has served in the armed forces, especially an old soldier who has seen long service; also called a war veteran to distinguish from veterans who weren't in armed conflict.
> c. 1500, "old experienced soldier," from French vétéran, from Latin veteranus "old, aged, that has been long in use," especially of soldiers; as a plural noun, "old soldiers," from vetus (genitive veteris) "old, aged, advanced in years; of a former time," as a plural noun, vetores, "men of old, forefathers," from PIE wet-es-, from root wet- (2) "year ... General sense of "one who has seen long service in any office or position" is attested from 1590s. The adjective first recorded 1610s.
You can see definition (1) dropped the "soldier" restriction, and (3) dropped the "old" restriction.
I therefore don't think you can apply your understanding of (3) when (1) was meant.
Around these parts, "veteran" is usually used to designate military servicepeople that served during times of active conflict, yet it seems pretty much any soldier that was honorably (or, at least, not dishonorably) discharged, is able to access the VA health system (we have a VA hospital in my town, and I know quite a few veterans). I'm not so sure about other benefits, like schooling, loans, and insurance.
My father[0] was a veteran. He's buried in Arlington. Got a silver star, a bronze star, and a purple heart. His GI Bill benefits got him a Harvard LLB.
I am not even close to a military veteran. I did work for a company for almost 27 years though. In this community, that elicits a lot more scorn, than it does respect.
I was US military for 11 years and can definitely tell you that, beyond the “on paper” definition I posted above, members of the military consider anyone who volunteers for military service and does their time to be a veteran. I’d definitely be interested to know where this concept of “you have to be in a conflict” definition came from. Is it from people who were in the military or just pop culture influenced misconceptions?
> members of the military consider anyone who volunteers for military service and does their time to be a veteran.
If you take the oath, go where you're sent, and do as you're ordered (within the law and morality), that's all that can be asked. Some find themselves having to do it with people shooting at them or trying to blow them up, like my dad and some of my uncles; others are more fortunate, like numerous other family members, including me. All are veterans. (And that goes for draftees too, although it's been 50 years since the U.S. has had a draft.)
I'm a not-so-young chap, so a lot of my compatriots are combat veterans (mostly Vietnam, and Iraq 1). They are the ones that have given me that impression.
In any case, my original post had nothing, whatsoever, to with military service, and I think we've just about exhausted this rabbithole.
You know those help wanted commercials Amazon floods media with, "We pay $15 to start, blah, blah. Start a new career."
I just assumed they were always hiring because of consistent growth.
According to the guy (forget his name. Wears a gold chain.) representing the union; Amazon fires a lot of employees. Many for no reason.
(I once read a restaurant success book. Everything he recommended made sence, except one, and it does make sence, but it's weaselly.
His recommendation to restaurants was to fire all employees every six months. Turn over the semi-skilled completely. His reasoning was a new employee didn't complain, didn't steal (this was before companies had cams everywhere, gps tracking, and wrist movment counters), and worked harder.)
I believe this is Amazon strategy.
It's usually a bit harder to fire union workers for no reason.
Fire them before they can see the inequities in the company.
Another benefit of firing workers early is it increases churn, which makes forming unions in the first place difficult, since it relies on trust between workers.
Having watched the HVAC videos about restaurants and walking freezers with doors left open by new employees causing problems for hardware and their operation in general. Maybe that isn't best solution. Then again maybe returns on other side cover any such issues...
Which I rather doubt that you can train them in all things in that timeframe...
You're completely right. Amazon strategy is to maintain constant turnover, so that employees never feel they have stability and can't complain of anything.
There's an internal tool showing how many total employees (~1m at that time iirc) where hired after/before you for . After somewhere between 6months-12months I was somewhere in the middle, meaning about 500k employees must have left and new 500k joined.
Just to give an estimate. Covid might have contributed to that though, probaly more temp workers than usual.
I see you think this is a win-lose system. Free markets, however, are a win-win system. Both parties must win for the transaction to happen.
The employer-employee relationship is just another transaction, and should be win-win. If a manager sees it as win-lose, he should be fired. The same goes for an employee.
I've been an employer and an employee, and always recognized that it should be a win-win relationship and approached it from that angle.
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.
> The managers were told they were being fired as part of an “organizational change,”
Nit: That language implies that they were laid off, not fired. The timing is a stupid move from Amazon, and these employees will likely be able to make a good case in court.
Being from Europe I have mixed feelings about unions here in the US...
On the one hand I think they are essential to tilt the uneven power dynamic between employer and employee towards the employee, and are thus dearly needed!
On the other hand, unions seem to often go overboard with impractical demands and are more political than in Europe, which damaged their reputation - I think - and contributed to their demise over the past few decades. Which is truly a shame!
(I'm reminded of alleged cases where only a union worker is allow to plug a power plug into an outlet at exorbitant prices. But this might a rumor too.)
When I worked at Boeing on the 757 gearbox design, at one point the box was put into a test rig to see how it would behave under load. I went out to the shop to in case any questions needed answering.
At one point, a bolt needed turning (don't recall why) and I stepped forward to do it. The shop union steward literally lunged in front of me, arms outstretched, to block me. He informed me that only a union mechanic can turn a bolt, and my job was to tell the mechanic (not the steward) to turn the bolt.
It was ludicrous. Evidently every job required 3 people - an engineer to tell the mechanic what to do, and a union steward to ensure the engineer didn't touch anything. Somehow this crazy system evolved.
It sounds like this is an example of things going too far, but I can totally understand a leader not wanting someone from a different department wrenching.
This bolt was probably inconsequential, but I'm guessing that he had to fill out paperwork enough times where some cowboy from the office fouled up a day's work.
I'm an engineer now, but I used to work on commercial boats. I came up with all sorts of semi-valid reasons to politely tell customers and superiors why they weren't allowed to do things (you can't drive the boat for "insurance reasons"). The real answer was: "I don't know how competent you are. The worst case scenario is that you injure a person or destroy valuable equipment. That probably won't happen, but a 1% chance of losing my job or having to deal with the aftermath is worth stopping you with a technicality."
Um, I worked on the design of that gearbox for two years. I knew it intimately. That's why I was sent to the test.
The test was to see if the box would crack, deform, or snap under the ultimate load. It didn't. But the test rig bent :-) hahahahahahahaha. Math works.
After seeing enough questionable crypto scattered around in code bases written by people who I can only imagine were trying to "demonstrate complexity" for their perf review, I now have half a mind to suggest software engineering have a system whereby only the crypto dev is allowed to write anything relating to crypto.
I’m also a European migrant to America and the way I see it is that while we kept our unions in Europe, America haphazardly abandoned theirs. The only remaining unions are the ones with the strongest power structures and the chances of someone misusing their power in such a power structure is quite high.
In my opinion workers in America (my self included) desperately need to re-unionize. While I do admit that my working conditions are personally no worse then back home (I certainly get paid a lot more here; though I wouldn’t mind some health care) that is not the case most for American workers, including close friends and family.
Most Americans are lacking basic labor rights that we in Europe take for granted, such as paid sick leave, parental leave, paid holidays, higher overtime pay, guaranteed rest period, heck they don’t even get mandatory breaks and refreshments doing hard manual labor. This is something that collective bargaining, cross industry worker’s solidarity, picket lines, and strategic voting got them in the early last century but they have since lost.
In Europe we don’t need it as much because we have maintained our unions (and most—but not all—of these rights). In Europe the unions don’t need to be as political because the political victories from the prior years still stand. In America, not so much.
With that said, this doesn’t mean America should just take any union. If the union isn’t working—or worse it is actively harmful—it’s leadership needs to be replaced. If you don’t have a union you should try to get one, and you should try as you can to elect a good and competent leadership that will work improve labor conditions for all workers.
> unions seem to often go overboard with impractical demands and are more political than in Europe
Isn't that partially because the US such an insufficient level of social benefits from the state (healthcare, pensions, paid time off, etc.)? The unions wouldn't need to "go overboard" if an acceptable minimum level was guaranteed.
Right. The problem with companies is that internally they act like monopolies: unopposed and and anti-competitive. Some force must act upon them to keep them honest, which is to say to keep them from racing to the bottom at ruthlessly exploiting their employees while lining the owners' pockets with their stolen wages. If the government were competent at enforcing the rights of laborers, then unions would not be necessary. Sadly the government is owned by those same companies and thus has little incentive to do so, thus unions (as flawed as they are) have a necessary role to fill.
TL;DR: it is possible to believe the unions are less than ideal while also acknowledging why they exist and why we'd be even worse off without them.
> If the government were competent at enforcing the rights of laborers, then unions would not be necessary.
I wouldn't say that, but unions should fill the same role that local government should fill. They should respond and resolve local issues specific to their area, so I wouldn't expect my union to negotiate my healthcare just like I wouldn't expect my town to negotiate trade deals with foreign countries. I do however want the unions there to deal with issues specific to my workplace, just like I do want my town to have a local government to deal with issues specific to my town.
> only a union worker is allow to plug a power plug into an outlet at exorbitant prices.
So I have first experience in this working around and with IATSE members. So in the world of events and movie productions there are union and non-union productions. But it is 100% one or the other. For example you wouldn't be able to hire a union head electrician and a group of non-union journeymen. And there are quite a lot of places that will try to do just that. The power outlet seems innocuous on the surface, but it can escalate quickly. And that event will have your name on the credits so you are responsible for what happens.
I wouldn't anyone to plug just anything into my personal network either.
> tilt the uneven power dynamic between employer and employee towards the employee
With here
> unions seem to often go overboard with impractical demands and are more political than in Europe
Gives you Union Employee who grab the power from the actual owners of the company. The relation is now even worse: The Union leader have both power, and no skin in the game. At least the employers cared about the longevity of the company.
Unions don't solve the power dynamics. They just tilt it to a new side. Worse: They encourage the idea that force (strikes) can yield power/money; which is why countries with Unions degenerate.
Of course, someone here is going to get angry because of the "poor" employees and their work conditions.
Why is it (typically) not a problem is Europe? Unions seems negotiate reasonable contracts, raises, and safety measures there.
And why is a union leader who abuses the power not removed from that position? It's not benefiting the union members.
In the end, looking at this in black or white (including your statement) is part of the problem. Unions are neither universally good, nor are they universally bad.
Unions are bad in France. There is a strike every other day + they are far from being fair rather than being greedy. So Europe is not an exception here. Here is a recent strike in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-security-workers-go-on-strike-...
Unions can be good if you have two rational parties negotiating reasonably. A greedy employer, and an unreasonable/powerful union and you suddenly unleash hell.
> And why is a union leader who abuses the power not removed from that position? It's not benefiting the union members.
He is benefiting the members in the short-term. And many of your employees can't see past that or read an accounting statement.
> In the end, looking at this in black or white (including your statement) is part of the problem. Unions are neither universally good, nor are they universally bad.
I'm not looking at it in either color. What I am saying is that Unions do not solve the power dynamic problem; and thus can't be the answer for either employees or employers.
The way you are presenting this it is as if we only have two options:
a) we give all the power to the union leadership: and suffer strikes every other day because an unreasonable and very powerful union leadership orders it, or
b) we give all the power to our bosses: and suffer poor working conditions, bad pay, hard working hours, loose our paid leaves, etc.
Frankly if these were the two choices I would pick option (a). Seeing how things turned up for America after they abandoned their unions, a strike every other day doesn’t seem too bad.
However this dichotomy is false, there are more options. A union doesn’t need to be unreasonable and powerful. A good union leadership will extend the solidarity to all workers (not just their members), and my experience with a striking workforce (the European country where I’m from also has a strike “every other day”) is that the leadership usually considers the wider implications. For example: striking kindergarden teachers are perfectly aware that they are needed for for other workers, which is why they usually try as they can to minimize the impact of the strike for non-member working parents.
I'm starting to think these Amazon's timing is intentional, they'll go to court, _and they don't care_; the cost is worth it to send the message.
There's also a good-faith possibility that the management of this warehouse was legitimately bad and promoted poor working conditions that lead to interest in the union.
I don’t believe they were a part of forming or attempting to form the union, but we’re the management of the facility. Maybe I misread it. Maybe they have a claim because it’s highly likely they were let go because they did squash the attempts at forming a union?
I don't have any experience with sklled trades unions, but labor unions are almost universally despisedby anyone with first-hand knowledge. They are largely organizations of professional-class parasites subverting the class struggle and sabotaging worker morale for corporate benefit.
Isn't this a good thing? If the workers were fed up enough with conditions that they formed a union, doesn't that imply the managers were terrible? Shouldn't terrible managers be fired?
For example, my wife is a unionized nurse. The best thing that could happen at her work is for her manager to be fired. The union has no power in that.
I'm an engineering manager at a software company. I get performance reviews twice per year. It's well understood that if I'm doing a terrible job that I will be fired.
Counter-anecdotally, a friend of mine is one of the leaders of the Starbucks unionization efforts in Oregon, and they adore their store manager. The complaints that are driving those union efforts are the result of corporate policies and in no way related to specific stores.
I can't say anything well-informed about Amazon specifically, but mega-corps tend to build lots of layers of middle management, then apply high-pressure incentive structures from the top that force middle management to do things that are unpopular with lower-level employees. When these policies inevitably backfire, it's the middle-management that gets axed for it.
You don't need a terrible manager to have a union. A union isn't an attack, it's a bunch of peers caucusing. That's anti-union rhetoric, the idea that if there's good management you don't need a union, and that having a union is some kind of insult.
In my previous job in Germany. Sector: Tech and Research. Excellent managers, amazing WLB (worked till 8PM once and the manager apologised next day), well paid: earning the median income straight out of college.
Had an excellent union and everyone in company hierarchy worked cordially and yet deferentially with them.
Unions are not necessarily a form of attack. Unionise.
They do because they can go to the executives and deny unreasonable goals outright, something to the effect of ‘how do you think four people with 39h of work weeks can do this’, implying that these hours are not going to increase so let’s hold our horses.
Probably because its easy and common to Unionise in Germany, they don’t have to go through hell and high water to form a collective (as silly as it sounds in the first place!)
No, it is anti-union rhetoric. Assembling a union isn't assembling an army. We can start saying that unions are only necessary when management is bad right after we start saying that management should only have meetings when their employees are bad.
edit: They only say three things - 1) unions aren't necessary if management are good people, 2) unions are an invasion of people from the outside who either don't understand how good our management is or are fomenting discontent for their own foreign purposes, and 3) management is actually fighting against you for you, because if they gave you everything you wanted the place would close down and you would lose your job. You're saying thing number 1.
Massive company, so an activist would need a lot of capital for any noticeable stake. Overall reasonable and relatively consistently increasing valuation, so there is little incentive. If the stock does very poorly while AWS keeps growing, so the company value diverges further from the value of individual divisions added together (sum of the parts value), you could expect pressure on this.
Investors like profit and they like growth. The moment a business unit isn’t growing or profitable, you need to start justifying why you’re keeping it around.
On the topic of write offs, losing money isn’t great unless it’s used to fuel obscene growth. You don’t spend $2 to save $1. The “we lose money on every sale, but make up for it on volume” model doesn’t work in the long run. More simply, a business is worth the value of all future cash flow, and it’s that simple.
> Why would they do that when one entity's losses can be used as a tax write-off for the other entity's profits.
Because it's better to not have losses than to use them as tax write-offs (also, because basically every use of funds other than retaining profits is already a tax write-off for business, and the ones that aren't losses contribute to future profits.)
Losing and investing money are different things. It's all fine for future to spend money on new warehouses, distribution hubs and better software. But there is expectation that this will at least increase revenue if not the profits. If it does not it is just waste that any company is better off with.
For real. Amazon's retail side is nothing but bad pr and other messy human entanglements. AWS is clean, profitable, and nearly ubiquitous. I definitely know which business I would rather be in
Why do we need legislation? Formation of unions is protected by freedom of association in the 1st amendment. Not sure why we need another federal bureaucracy to intervene in the negotiating process. Not sure why we need the whole all or nothing union voting process. What if 33% of employees want to join the union? What if managers want to join? Why can't they just join?
Because after WWII, when the US workforce had a lot of leverage and the power of unions was high, the US criminalized a bunch of things that unions do in exchange for a few token concessions.
Freedom of association isn't a serious right in the US. Every town has "gang member" registries. At least we don't criminalize political parties like the UK or the rest of Europe.
The fundamental purpose of the constitution is to limit government overreach. Limitations on individuals and corporations are enacted through legislation. Those limitations (in general) are necessary because without them, people with the most power abuse the people with the least, until there's a violent uprising. Today's legislation exists because of the last violent uprising in response to abuses of corporate power. Removing it wholesale, without replacement, invites that bloody history to repeat itself.
Wanna tweak it so managers can unionize? Sounds fine to me! Wanna make union membership optional through federal law? That's gonna be a fight.
That NLRB page does say that "supervisors who have been discriminated against for refusing to violate the NLRA may be covered", so I wonder if that might apply in this case? I suppose there's no way to tell from the outside, but if _I_ were one of those fired managers, I would be looking into it...
They are just another set of expendable cogs in the logistics machine of Amazon. They are incentivized to enact and enforce harsh management practices on those cogs further down the line while being subject to similar constraints coming from above them. Shit rolls down hill so they don't get the worst of it, but they are nowhere near the top of the hill and they still have to handle a miserable amount of it.
Part of middle-management with very little power outside following corporate policies. Might be able to do something not outright sanctioned, but the position really isn't much different from the workers in grand scheme of things.
My guess is that they didn't fire them for "letting it happen" exactly. They probably fired them because the employees would view those managers as someone they recently defeated over a major issue. Which changes the power dynamic in a way that's distinct from the presence of the union itself. It's a weak attempt to get some of that back.
I read somewhere that these particular managers were somewhat well-like by the employees. Now that may or may not be true...but if true, then it's a kind of "start a union, and the bunny gets it" situation.
I'm skeptical, because it seems like most of the anti-union activities are either dictated or run from HDQ. It doesn't feel like something where the local leadership was free to make their own plays.
> It doesn't feel like something where the local leadership was free to make their own plays.
Firing managers where unionization happens encourages managers where unionization efforts are under way to make their own plays, whether this is formally allowed or not, whether by company policy or the law.
Obviously, getting caught on independent, policy/law-forbidden, efforts would also have adverse consequences, so the incentive also is to not get caught.
All managers/supervisors and above have to participate in yearly training on Positive Employee Relations. At the Fortune 300 company I was at, this was a 4 hour session taught by legal counsel. It covered what you could and could not say to employees about unions, what to do if you suspected union organization activities, and how to communicate the company line about how unions were bad without running afoul of the NLRB
The fact that a unionization vote was happening would have been more than enough to start an investigation into management and firing management before the vote due to bad practices could have prevented the unionization vote from being passed. I'm not sure it matters much how much leeway the managers actually had in preventing unionization from happening. Amazon has been extremely cold hearted and calculating with the management of their logistics infrastructure. They are managing (ruling) by fear, not love. They could easily have prevented unionization by treating their employees like human beings and not robots, but they chose to go the dystopian route of extreme monitoring and pushing their employees to work as hard as possible. It almost feels like a move that Putin and other dictators would pull. They shift blame to those that are relatively powerless in middle management and make an example of them even though the fault lies with those at the top.
"letting it happen" could be many contexts as well, letting is happen could mean that the managers were soo terrible at their jobs that they allowed issues to fester to the point where the employees were disgruntles enough to vote in a union.
Happy employees do not vote to unionize. The "hot take" here is that Amazon management wanted to the managers to some how play hardball with the union, in my experience with issues like this normally management does the opposite and trys to "kill it with kindness" and attempts to stave off unionization by trying to resolve the complaints of the work force while balancing the needs of the company.
Sometimes the workforce is just too far apart from where management wants to be then I union is likely to form, but my guess is upper management at amazon feels these middle managers did not do enough to address the workforce's concerns.
That would make sense to me if this particular warehouse/region/whatever was characterized as having notably worse conditions than others. Reading about Amazon warehouses, it seems like a pretty universally bad working environment, regardless of which one.
My feelings are bit of a mix bag, some of the complaints I would agree, but some of them seem to be either employee or more likely media exaggeration.
I have no respect or trust of "main stream" media so the reporting on the issue has me questioning what the reality on the ground really is, and the reality from people experienced in working at other warehouses.
That corporation doesn't seem particularly effective at capturing marketshare (a proxy for the combination of price and quality). Total revenue of $16B across 4 major industries makes it a tiny player. Goldman Sachs had $59B in 2021 revenues alone, nevermind all the other big banks. The Wikipedia article further says "comparatively low wages [for managers] can make it very difficult to recruit managers from investor-owned firms". Given the impact that skilled managers have historically had on companies (ex: Steve Jobs @ Apple, Lisa Su @ AMD, Howard Schultz @ Starbucks, etc), it seems unlikely that such an organization could effectively compete against normal corporations led by skilled CEOs.
And before you say that competition is not supposed to be the point of production, your geopolitical enemies aren't going to care about your nice ideals. If they can outcompete your inefficient economy and economically dominate you they will. You can't beat the market, even under socialism/communism.
The moment you implement true Marxism is the day I will fuck off and play video games all day, and my feeling is many smart people I work with will as well. Why work hard to be the best at something if you aren't rewarded for it? I for one would not want to better the lazy bums in my community with my work and by your twisted logic in your post history that somehow implies all of Marxism is wrong as I'm a counterexample.
That's why I provided the Wikipedia URL. Here's a useful quote: "In 2012 Richard D. Wolff, an American professor of economics, hailed the Mondragon set of enterprises, including the good wages it provides for employees, the empowerment of ordinary workers in decision making, and the measure of equality for female workers, as a major success and cited it as a working model of an alternative to the capitalist mode of production."
The other standard source for a critique of Capitalism is in the early works of Marx, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital . In Marx' later works, he gets a little cranky for my taste.
Why is “spending 70 years growing a collective workplace to huge scale” more correct than “unionizing a huge ultra-capitalist workplace that exists right now”?
Guess we'd better hop in the time machine and go back to 1950 to start the American equivalent of Mondragon to preemptively destroy Amazon before Bezos is even born, then.
I am not greedy. Therefore, your statement is, verifiably, false.
And, it, in fact, matters substantially which economic systems we are "under" (note your own choice of phrasing). Said economic system is the water in which we fish swim. We can hardly see it, due to its pervasiveness; and it is constantly reinforced by the very Capitalist Corporate Media whose job it is to keep the brainwashing going.
Unions used to be pervasive in this country. My dad was a member of the USW (United Steelworkers of America) and many unfair and unsafe labor practices were checked due to union solidarity. (I am NOT saying unions are perfect in every detail, only that a properly functioning union is usually the better deal for the common worker.)
It boggles the mind how many people are opposed to collective bargaining, of all things. Give the least powerful in society a fraction of an ounce of power and it makes some people completely irrational.
> I wonder what will take for anti-union companies-can-do-nothing-wrong people to consider that maybe companies can be authoritarian and bad.
It will take an ideological inversion. Those people already recognize that companies can be authoritarian, but they see this as a positive thing (and often have a strong financial interest in it.)
How do they explain VAG being the biggest or nearly the biggest car manufacturer in the world then? Strong unions are a big feature of the German industrial landscape.
It's not unions that killed America dominance of car manufacturing it's the them versus us zero-sum attitude that pervades US life. Both the manufacturers and the unions in the US seem guilty in this respect.
The US is incapable of thinking outside of the "us versus them" box. For example, they don't see other countries as independent, they only see them as alies or enemies. It is a fifth grade mentality that permeates the whole country.
That's odd because Union membership has dropped off of a cliff.
Worth noting that Unions can be good and bad - and entrenched union that takes control of the workforce, the kind of place where they don't pick up a hammer unless it's in their job spec, or where hiring/layoffs are 100% controlled by Union ... that can be a problem.
But typically where Unions are formed there's probably a reason.
Walmart, AWS, and probably all of Fast Food / Service and Retail in the US need to pay more.
Sadly - it's not a ware between the 0.1% and the rest of us - though that is a war - the big war is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
At just past the median point in the US people are doing 'great' but below that it drops off a cliff. Most wages just don't enable anyone to live the American dream: own a flat/house, a car, a few appliances, healthcare, stable job, raise your kids and be happy.
America is turning itself in to a snapshot of the globe i.e. 'steep pyramid' instead of having a proper middle class.
It's obviously more complicated than that - a kind of break down in social structure esp. in the bottom layers etc..
Rule of thumb: where unions are forming there is probably a reason. Where unions are entrenched there might be a way to move past that.
Did you ever hear of "Union Busting"? Do you know that Ronald Reagan as President signed some of the most anti-union legislation ever?
One must be careful not to use 'union' as a catch-all to describe all worker groups.
At the moment, the Capitalists are extracting as much as possible from US Citizens through excessive price hikes (much over underlying inflation - this is well-documented). They will continue to do this until the median American sinks even lower in standard of living.
Your 'rule of thumb' is exactly right-on -- the first part. But the 'entrenched' --- we have to be careful of using the Crony Capitalist talking points frames. The point of the Capitalist is to keep as big a pile for himself, all others (except shareholders) be damned. That's how it works. It is a rapacious, greedy, antiquated way to organize human labor, production, and lives. I am hopeful that younger generations can recognize the brainwashing they are receiving from the Corporate Media, and can break free from these chains, and, eventually, replace this system of institutionalized greed with something that more equitably permits sharing of our resources.
And yet countries the world over turfed the one protection against the race to the bottom, which are tariffs. The auto industry still exists in North America because tariffs are still in place. Any time there's a significant economic imbalance of incentives, only tariffs will 'level' out the desire to offshore.
Unions may have been presented as the scapegoat and clearly they made raw profitability worse (by what margin is certainly open for debate), the large reason that blue collar wages have been deteriorating in real dollars since the 80s can largely be attributed to globalization and the elimination of tariffs. Argue about the net benefits to the world, maybe. But your loss of dollars probably wasn't the union bugaboo but globalization.
Free trade makes the vast majority of people richer. Yes, our shitty automakers were saved, but now everyone has to pay much more for cars. And American cars are still trash compared to japanese/german ones.
I think in a vacuum this is mostly true. Yes, if we open markets to automobiles the price of automobiles for consumers will drop. I'm not so sure it holds in the case when you consider us opening the markets for automobiles, vacuum cleaners, industrial chemicals, semiconductors, etc...
At some point you eventually reach a state where we don't actually make things anymore and the entire economy is devoted to serving those who benefit from that trade. You end up with an economy based on food service, hospitality, retail, etc. As the owners of those trade arrangements diverge further and further economically from the overwhelming majority of the population it breeds a kind of resentful desperation. When we have a healthy economy where most people can support themselves with a reasonable salary in a self-respecting dignified way without licking the boots of the upper class society is healthier. It's hard to see how we do that with free trade.
I think it can work. I do not share the view that it will automatically work.
Consider, for a moment, the US electoral system. In structure, it's largely representative democracy. The people who win the elections become the leaders. Those people make policy decisions, or appoint other people who make policy decisions, for a lot of people who then proceed to get very angry at those policy decisions.
But at the same time, a lot of those angry people did agree with the concept of what a government is supposed to do for its citizens. They just think it's being done poorly or corruptly. Some of them give up on the ideal being achieveable at all, and greatly reduce their idea of what a government should do, possibly to zero, with the idea that individuals or groups can do it better for themselves. Some instead yell loudly about the things the government is doing wrong. Which of these groups is right is irrelevant; all I want you to see is how a reasonable person can get to any of those conclusions given the current state of the world.
Now, back to unions. What some of us believe is that this issue of leaders not effectively representing people's interests is inherent to sufficiently large democratic systems - I'd tentatively put the threshold as "when you know more about the candidates from media than you do from knowing them personally", as that's the point where it becomes feasible to skew voters' opinions en masse. We don't see large unions as having sufficient protection against a charismatic but incompetent/evil person getting put in charge, and doing the usual things such people do with power. It's hard to get such people out of power; see your least favorite incumbent politician for an example.
I do happen to be in favor of voluntary unions, because for some people that risk is acceptable for the benefits unions provide. I am very much not in favor of any form of "you must associate with this union in some way to work here" arrangements, because some unions are useless or actively bad, and removing the option to not participate in those removes the only feasible escape hatch for those who need it.
More often than not, the problem is not "collective bargaining" per se. It's that unions are known to play the dumb game -- in France for example, the demands from unions are in general so far from anything reasonable that any union representative is viewed by anyone who ever so slightly understand how the economy works as a band of nonsensical fools who just need to be bypassed by whatever means.
So you think corporations should break the law? Workers have the right to organize a union, firing workers in retaliation for organizing has long been illegal:
In Amazon's view, they woefully performed in their functions. They failed in a very high profile task. Their (in)actions are going to cost the company lots of money. Leaving aside the exact task, these sound like typical reasons for dismissal.
I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran."
But it sounds like Amazon is sending a message to managers of other warehouses, to go as low as possible, to fight unionization.
Expect things to get ugly.