Unionization Wave 'Swelling' in Seattle, with Votes at Local Verizon, Amazon Fresh, and Starbucks Stores (seattletimes.com) 103
The Seattle Times surveys the landscape after a historic unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in New York — and finds the same sentiments are spurring activism by workers three timezones away:
As the world watched thousands of Amazon warehouse workers in New York form on Friday the company's first U.S. union, a handful of employees of a Seattle thrift store celebrated their own victory. Sixteen workers at Crossroads Trading Co. in search of higher wages, more hours and better benefits voted unanimously Wednesday to form a union at the chain's store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Organizers at Crossroads said they built off the momentum and union support in the neighborhood from another successful union drive at a Starbucks store just a few blocks away.
Now, a group of security workers who have contracts with Amazon, Microsoft and Sound Transit are taking a similar tack, hoping to use the swell of enthusiasm created by Amazon workers in Staten Island to bring more workers in Seattle into the union fold....
Since Amazon Labor Union started organizing — unofficially with a walkout in 2020 in protest of the company's treatment of workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic — the union wave appears to have swelled in the Seattle area. A group of workers at an Amazon Fresh store in Seattle's Central District organized to form Amazon Workers United, and now three more stores in the area are starting their own drives, according to organizer Joseph Fink. Workers at Verizon retail stores in Everett and Lynnwood are currently casting votes in a union election. Ballots were sent to workers in March and votes will be counted this month. In Seattle, a Starbucks retail store on Capitol Hill became the first unionized store in the region....
Watching workers at companies including Starbucks and Amazon face anti-union tactics did stoke fears of retaliation for union efforts at Crossroads, said Emma Mudd, a sales associate and one of the lead union organizers. But it exposed the playbook that companies might follow — and showed what workers could do to push back, engage one another and put public pressure on the company.
"It was helpful to have tangible examples, because we did have conversations to prepare for union busting," Mudd said. "It was really helpful to see how those workers were able to push through it."
Now, a group of security workers who have contracts with Amazon, Microsoft and Sound Transit are taking a similar tack, hoping to use the swell of enthusiasm created by Amazon workers in Staten Island to bring more workers in Seattle into the union fold....
Since Amazon Labor Union started organizing — unofficially with a walkout in 2020 in protest of the company's treatment of workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic — the union wave appears to have swelled in the Seattle area. A group of workers at an Amazon Fresh store in Seattle's Central District organized to form Amazon Workers United, and now three more stores in the area are starting their own drives, according to organizer Joseph Fink. Workers at Verizon retail stores in Everett and Lynnwood are currently casting votes in a union election. Ballots were sent to workers in March and votes will be counted this month. In Seattle, a Starbucks retail store on Capitol Hill became the first unionized store in the region....
Watching workers at companies including Starbucks and Amazon face anti-union tactics did stoke fears of retaliation for union efforts at Crossroads, said Emma Mudd, a sales associate and one of the lead union organizers. But it exposed the playbook that companies might follow — and showed what workers could do to push back, engage one another and put public pressure on the company.
"It was helpful to have tangible examples, because we did have conversations to prepare for union busting," Mudd said. "It was really helpful to see how those workers were able to push through it."
Surprises for everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Real wages have not kept pace with inflation, so this may be an effective way to correct some of that.
At the same time, it seems a lot of workers don't understand the first thing about how businesses work and/or they wildly overestimate the value they provide, and as such think unionization is going to lead to piles more money.
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Amazon Fresh and Starbucks are special cases. They have pricing power and can easily transfer their added costs to the customers. If they are smart, they'll itemize that additional cost on each sales receipt. Just like sales tax.
Re:Surprises for everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, just hear me out on this one. Companies could give some profits back to their most important asset, the employees? Wages are certainly not following the rise of profits.
Re:Surprises for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
"Employees are our greatest asset" is lip service. You can be replaced with another drone at their discretion.
Impossible (Score:3)
*This is a real thing anti-Union people believe.
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DMV employees are unionized. It such fun getting a driver's license. My last visit only took five hours and that was just to fill out some forms.
Non-sequitur.
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The highlight was when they all simultaneously closed their windows and took an hour and half lunch break with a hundred people waiting in line. We were still standing there when they came back.
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It is also amazing that while a customer might be at their window two or three minutes, that they spend at least five minutes spraying and cleaning, etc the window before they let the next customer approach.
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This old argument. Yes, COVID is probably not going to kill you. Even if you're fat, old, or sick, you'll probably survive it. Diseases can hurt you in more ways than killing you.
Let's compare it to polio. Most people survive polio, the vast majority of people who contract polio (95%) don't even have any symptoms. But for the unlucky, polio leads to all sorts of crippling damage, even though almost everyone who gets it lives.
We beat polio by mass vaccinations, by isolating people who've had it, and by bein
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Have any jokes about airplane food? Your references are decades old.
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Wait, airplanes have food?
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Ignore the lies. No one could possibly bring food on an airplane and the companies flying them would never make any effort to provide it themselves.
Re:Surprises for everyone (Score:5, Informative)
I'm calling bullshit on that. The average wait time at a DMV in the United States is 44 minutes. And, it turns out, the longest wait times are in anti-union states like North Dakota and South Dakota. Here's a list of the average wait times at the DMV broken out by state:
https://virtuaq.com/blog/2019-... [virtuaq.com].
Re: Surprises for everyone (Score:1)
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My anecdotal data. When I moved to Arizona in 2003, I took a half day off of work anticipating a long day at the DMV. I needed to get my driver's license, and transfer the title and registration for both my car and 2 motorcycles. I grabbed a number, and before I could sit down, it was called, and in less than 15 minutes, I walked out with three license plates, my new physical license (hard with my picture and all) and the three new titles and registrations AND I had been registered to vote. In less than 30
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This is garbage, in Arizona Iâ(TM)ve never spent less than an hour waiting. Iâ(TM)ve been a dozen times over my life at all different times.
The only time I've spent an hour waiting was when I was young and didn't know to avoid the peak hours. Typically is only 15-20 minutes.
I must live in a blue state!
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Your link is pre-COVID. I have my RealID now and I will never go back again to a DMV unless I am forced to go again. Whole reason I had to go was just to verify that my face matched my IDs.
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During COVID, the DMV wait times got even shorter, because in most states you had to make an appointment online and so your wait time was 0 minutes. You just showed up and walked to the window. After lifting the COVID restrictions, wait times have not gone up.
Plus, the discussion is the effect of unionization on DMV wait times. Your DMV was unionized before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID, so I don't see how your assertion that the reason wait times are long (they're not) is b
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Cool story bro. I live in a shitty state and getting my license renewed takes all of 10 minutes including them printing it.
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The biggest mistake I made was going in at 10:30AM on a Saturday. That was probably the worst possible time to go in.
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That has nothing to do with being unionized, it does have something to do with being lazy fucks.
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I'm a shareholder. I want to get paid out of those profits first.
On the other hand, I am happy about that major jump in AMZN [yahoo.com] share prices when "I did that" Joe took office. If you really want to find out where those company profits are going, just take a look at who [nypost.com] is standing at the head of the line with their hands out.
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I want to get paid out of those profits first ... If you really want to find out where those company profits are going, just take a look at who is standing at the head of the line with their hands out.
Capitalism still works when instead that attitude takes a back seat. In fact, it works better.
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Re: Surprises for everyone (Score:3)
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Employees only want compensation based on company profits when company makes a lot of profit. When company makes little profit or lose money, their attitude changes from "we are responsible for the company profit" to "we are not responsible for company loses
And nowhere is that more true than the C-suite. Top level executives are rewarded even if (or sometimes specifically for) running a company into the ground.
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Should employees give money back to their employer if the company is losing money? Or is it a one way street here?
I get it's hard and takes work to leave a job when you have no marketable job skills. My first job I worked my way up to General Manager at our city's largest movie theater and made around $7 an hour (this was when minimum wage was 5.15). It was easier to stay there and bitch about my unfair wage then to find a better job.
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Real wages never keep pace with inflation. It will be a good way to breathe a breath of fresh air into union corruption and influence peddling.
What corruption? (Score:3, Informative)
By the 80s there were cameras that could record when the strike breakers busted heads. That meant no more need for the mob, and after a few rounds of arrests the problem went away.
Of course thanks to Reagan so did Unions. [compactmag.com] But that's besides the po
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there hasn't been corruption in Unions since the 70s.
Uh yeah. [nbcnewyork.com]
Tell me again how corruption isn't a part of the Union leadership job description. [usnews.com]
There are crooks everywhere but unions seem to attract more in leadership roles.
better labor laws can help and fake 1099'ers (Score:2)
better labor laws can help and fake 1099'ers needs to end.
It's not just pay but us labor laws are behind the EU
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So I started reading comments and thought to myself why not socialize all businesses and make all workers join unions. And here you are. When ever a person starts a business and gets a business license the type of business determines which unions the workers will belong to.
All workers, all...workers, have to belong to a union. No right to work states, no owner operators. No self employment or contractors. The kid with a push mower will have to join a union. Baby sitter, pool cleaner, dog walker, all uni
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Re:Surprises for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like you're also in need of a little business 101 instruction
Your comment would have been better if you had just tried to make a point without trying to make it into a "dig" on me, especially since in doing so you've made some incorrect assumptions about me.
In wage negotiations, all the workers are doing is demanding a fairer share of the profits
Hehe, this is sometimes true but often not true at all.
Also, "fair" is such an interesting choice of words and kinda reinforces my point. While I do assume in the specific case of Amazon, it could afford to give many of its workers some sort of a raise, even then it's not entirely clear cut what a "fairer share of the profits" would even look like. Are we talking gross profits or net profits? Both can provide a distorted picture of what is "fair" and neither tells the full story.
And either way, if you don't have any long term strategy, don't care about future growth, don't care about investors (especially those who were still willing to bet on your company when it was losing millions every quarter), don't have to worry about competition, don't care about more innovation, don't have to worry about weathering economic downturns, etc., etc. then it's easy to look at the balance sheet and say, "that should go to the workers". But even if you get that far, should every worker get the same increase? Should it be proportional to their current pay? Should it be related at all to the value they actually provide? (and if so, who determines that and how?)
FWIW I like companies that are generous to even the lowest-rung employees, and I guess for some people it's satisfying to imagine all companies being run by Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold, but the reality is far more complicated.
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Don't forget, there's generally 2 reasons to unionize, wages, which aren't too bad for some of these businesses and workplace health, which is crap at Amazon and perhaps others. Things like being able to take a pee break, sick leave are examples.
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Re: Surprises for everyone (Score:2)
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Seems like you're also in need of a little business 101 instruction: In wage negotiations, all the workers are doing is demanding a fairer share of the profits,
People want the most they can make. Using the excuse that the company makes profits is just a tactic to not loot greedy and plays the part of victim.
If it was really a symbiotic relationship where workers took part in success and failure, then they would also willingly take pay reductions when there were no profits.
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People are tired of doing shit jobs for shit wages and watching the spoils go to the top 1% who essentially do nothing but absorb resources.
This system was traditionally possible because there was always more drones than jobs and the companies controlled virtually all of the information which employees received about the company. Thanks to technology
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Despite what you see and hear, there are a lot of people who need jobs. These past two years have been devastating to not only businesses but to individuals as well. Some of them have no choice but to work in what most would consider substandard jobs to keep afloat.
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Questionable? Hardly -- I live a block away from the place.
It's a popular and highly-trafficked store, usually with throngs of fashion-conscious Seattle-ites milling about inside and on the sidewalk right by it.
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.epi.org/publicatio... [epi.org]
It’s time the workers get a piece of the record profits produced from their labor. During the time of COVID, when millions of workers lost their jobs, billionaires increased their net worth by $8 TRILLION dollars (2020-2021) in a single year. https://www.forbes.com/billion... [forbes.com]
Funny how federal dollars handed to business is deemed "stimulus", even when workers are laid off. Yet when pittance token dollars are given directly to the citizenry, it's villainized as feeding the lazy or a budgetary burden. The wealth gap between have's and have nots exceeds the gilded age and has not been this perverse since the time of the Pharos. A reckoning is coming.
Distribution (Score:1)
A co-worker of mine once complained about how much the CEO and President of the company, both of whom started the company, earn. I did the math and if all of their compensation, including stock dividends and bonuses, were distributed to all the employees equally, we'd all get a $240 per year raise. If you included all of the executives it would be another $100 or so. It would be a fraction of a percent. It wouldn't have covered inflation back then, much less now.
I agree with you that CEOs are overpaid, but
Re:Distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anecdotal evidence [merriam-webster.com]
JBMcB retold an unverifiable story about someone, no one here on Slashdot knows, and expected us to then take this story of theirs and apply it as a general rule to everything at topic.
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an unverifiable story about someone
Maybe. But let's play with some numbers. I pull the 2022 Lockheed Martin proxy statement off the top of my junk mail pile. Add up the total compensation of the principle officers (page 54) and come up with $56,016,000 for 2021. Divide that by 115,000 employees and get $487.10 per employee. So, not too far out of line. And that's grabbing ALL the exec's compensation. Leaving them destitute beggars, working as slaves.
I know. This won't satisfy those that think a socialist worker's utopia can be funded on t
Substantiation (Score:2)
Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy's total compensation package for 2021 was $212 million.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com].
Amazon employs roughly 1 million employees.
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/... [geekwire.com]
Using Windows Calculator, disbursing Jassy's entire yearly compensation to all Amazon employees would yield a roughly $212 raise for every employee, per year.
Average Amazon salary is around $48,000 per year. That would be a raise of roughly 0.5% on average.
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/S... [ziprecruiter.com]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Because double standards are OK when your group does it, amirite?
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And what is the consequence to a CEO if the screw up, lets say the loose there job without some sort of golden parachute? They have got more money in one year than the employee would have got in a life time. A CEO doesn't bare any more personal risk than a employee. Paying someone more doesn't mean they are less likely to screw up. And CEO screw up as well they usually are very good a blaming other people, most screw ups CEO does don't end a company especially if it is already highly successful.
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> but distributing their pay back to the other workers usually doesn't make that much of a difference
That's only true on paper, in reality the scope of changes that will follow from bringing a company's highest levels workers' total compensation packages to within a more reasonable multiple of the lowest worker's total compensation package are much larger than that, and have much more profound effects. Like on productivity to name just one.
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Do you know what would improve productivity even more? Firing all the people who sit around an obsess about what everyone else makes.
That won't work, and firing the few that might qualify is even likely to make matters worse.
Fairness is actually a really big factor that drives human and economic health, at all levels.
Re: Distribution (Score:2)
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A co-worker of mine once complained about how much the CEO and President of the company, both of whom started the company, earn. I did the math and if all of their compensation, including stock dividends and bonuses, were distributed to all the employees equally, we'd all get a $240 per year raise.
Dear employees, are you willing please to donate 0.5% of your salary to the CEO so they can afford a second megayacht? Ha ha, just kidding, you don't get any choice and we're doing it anyway.
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Blame the board of directors who give out bonuses, cheaply priced stock options, and other incentives for performance objectives like laying off 10% of the workforce while increasing productivity by 12%. Consider the case of American Airlines in bankruptcy. Then CEO Tom Horton was going to be granted a $20m bonus for navigating the airline through the process by the board of directors as part of the official proceedings. The Bankruptcy judge, said no. Once the bankruptcy was closed out, the board went ahe
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Right, why should a CEO that turns around a bankrupt airline and keeps tens of thousands of employees working get a bonus? Perhaps the board of directors felt saving the airline from liquidation was worth $20M once they were out of bankruptcy - if he failed, what would he have gotten? Not $20M, that's for sure.
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
CEO pay has increased 1322% since 1978
Only if you cherry-pick a specific segment of CEOs as your link does.
while worker wages have stagnated
Worker wages have soared more than 400% over the same period.
Wages have only stagnated if they are adjusted for inflation. But since you didn't adjust the CEO salaries for inflation, you are not being honest if you don't do the same for wages.
The disparity between executive pay and hourly wages is a serious problem. There is no need to exaggerate and mislead.
Who's cherry picking (Score:1)
Yeah, the CEO of Bob's Plumbing in Burbank, Idaho is, technically, a CEO, but Bob doesn't wield power on a global scale or write the laws our Congress passes.
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If you think that there should be no difference in how the CEO of a small company in a single city should be compensated compared to one that's overseeing a vast multinational company doing business around the entire world and employing and overseeing orders of ma
Yeah we do (Score:2)
The reason there's a difference between the CEO of a megacorp and the CEO of a mid-sized company is that the CEO of a mid-sized company doesn't get invited to the White House and doesn't have so much money that he can buy off 2/3 of Congress to pass laws nobody wants past except him.
CEO is what we call kings a
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We are explicitly referring to elite CEOs
If you mean "elite CEOs" you should have said so, and you should define what counts as "elite". Top 100? Top 500? The article you linked uses the top 350. Why 350? Because they went down the list of CEO salaries and found that a cutoff at 350 gives the "scariest" number. Obvious, that is an attempt to mislead rather than illuminate.
Using nominal dollars for CEO salaries while using inflation-adjusted dollars for wages magnifies the gap by a factor of 4. That isn't just misleading, it is outright lying.
I don't HAVE to say so (Score:2)
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it's well understood by everyone. Including you.
It is not understood and is not even true. CEOs at all levels are doing well. Starting and running a small business is the most common way for Americans to become rich. You are trying to frame this as 350 rich guys versus "the rest of us", which is nonsense.
Since the 1970s, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have declined for the bottom 20%, stagnated for the next 20%, but have risen significantly for the top 60%, who are mostly college-educated salaried workers. It is not the top 0.01% vs. the 99.99% but rath
Cut the Horseshit (Score:2)
When we say "CEO" we all know what we mean. We mean "CEO of mega corporations".
I, for one, did not know you meant that. I've heard that (or a very close) stat repeated many times, and never knew it was misleading in this way, which is almost certainly deliberate.
Nor did I know about the one-sided use of inflation adjustment, which sinks the whole talking point to the level of an outright lie.
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Nor did I know about the one-sided use of inflation adjustment, which sinks the whole talking point to the level of an outright lie.
Exactly. This type of misleading bullshit, spewed by folks merely regurgitating meme talking-points without questioning what they read/repeated.
The easiest way to disprove thisBS is track the federal minimum wage from 1978 to 2022, it hasn't "stagnated"
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> 1978 to 2022, it hasn't "stagnated"
Looks like it's not stagnated but gone down:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Are you also only including wages of workers from those mega corps?
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Money that keeps people working has more value than simply handing workers money... it's "teach a man to fish" kinda hung.
Now as I recall the complaints about checks sent to individuals were of two major types - those that thought it wasn't enough (how can a family of four in Manhattan live on $3,500 during apandemic?) and those who thought it was wasteful to send out $3,500 to every American that ever filed an income tax return regardless of their employment situation, need, or anything. (Why, it's almost
Corruption on top of curruption (Score:1)
I'm not sure what benefit is gained by piling more corruption on top of a corrupted system. It's bandaids stuck on top of bandaids.
Peal all the bandaids off, debride (this will hurt), and start over.
Unionization is a domestic jobs killer (Score:2, Insightful)
The offshore sweatshops and automation industries wish unionization well.
It's better to provide free training for jobs that are difficult to automate and have long term income: Electricians, welders, plumbers, HVAC techs, machinists, nursing, etc
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"Electricians, welders, plumbers, HVAC techs, machinists, nursing"
I.e. Union jobs
Should be a great experiment (Score:2)
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Unionizing crappy jobs doesn't make them stop being crappy, and it is possible for a union to price itself out of a job.
Remember the Hostess Baker's union strike? Hostess shut down, 18,000 employees lost their jobs, and the new owners of the Brad were non-union...
https://www.cnbc.com/id/100678... [cnbc.com]
Good (Score:2)
When people's pay gets cut or eaten by 30 years of wage stagnation to the point where they can't keep a roof over their heads they don't just say "welp, time to eat a bullet). They look for better paying jobs. Your jobs.
Sure, most of them wash out, but a lot of them don't. And don't think your boss hasn't noticed [newser.com]. Even if he doesn't fire you and replace you with somebody younger and cheaper what do you think is gonna go throug
Management is always "organized" (Score:4, Interesting)
...and we all know that an organized group is at huge advantage over a disorganized one.
Americans always argue politics as if America were a separate planet, you rarely hear other perspectives raised. America is particularly low in unionization. Even nearby Canada, much influenced by your culture and even more by your economy, somehow manages to be a competitor, selling at competitive prices, and good place to send work to, is much more unionized than the USA. Germany more so again, and nobody disparages their productivity.
If unionization were as inimical as the opponents say, then America would obviously be outcompeting more-unionized nations. They're not. They do well, but not particularly so.
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Even nearby Canada, much influenced by your culture and even more by your economy, somehow manages to be a competitor, selling at competitive prices, and good place to send work to, is much more unionized than the USA. Germany more so again, and nobody disparages their productivity.
Is it possible that when GM or Chrysler manufactures automobile engines in Canada they enjoy certain tax advantages that a domestic Canadian car company wouldn't be entitled to? Or when a Foxconn plant in Mexico sends laptops into America, they enjoy lower wages and no import fees? Or do you think NAFTA has no influence on propping up our Canadian and Mexican neighbor'seconomies?
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NAFTA is dead, it was renegotiated by Trump. He made the usual Trump-noises about how bad NAFTA was for America, but then the renegotiation was almost invisible. Example: his favourite topic was the protectionism of Quebec milk farms. The old version held America down to 3.25% of the market, or something, and the new version, was 3.6%. Nearly all the other changes were similarly-minor tweaks.
Your thesis requires that American trade negotiators walk into negotiations with the huge advantage of having 9
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Even nearby Canada, ... somehow manages to be a competitor, selling at competitive prices,much influenced by your culture and even more by your economy,
I've seen their prices. And the long lines of BC license plates lined up at the Bellingham, Washington Costco.
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Not remotely my point. The point was that highly-unionized countries fare well on the global productivity index in terms of $/hour-of-work, so unionism cannot be automatically associated with lowered productivity.
The fact that some products are cheaper across a border, creating lineup for SOME products, is irrelevant. Many things are also cheaper in Mexico, people go there just to buy them, but that hasn't cranked up a movement to make America's economy more like Mexico's.
Haha good for them (Score:2)
Generally a good thing. (Score:2)
There are some qualifiers though. In higher-tech settings, unions achieve worker protection at the cost of agility. And that's a valid tradeoff for big, wel
Just leave (Score:1)