Slashdot Mirror
The Jungle
asterisk5 writes: "The New Republic has an article from Seattle about the unions moving into new economy companies. Good stuff about the rise and fall of the Bezos cult of personality." When the illusions are stripped away, it's not pretty...
"But these guys aren't trying to get that -- they're trying to go back to the old days, where philosophy majors answer the phones sipping their latte's while debating the finer points of Aristotilian thought. "
Ok I'll let this one go because it's idiotic and it's a blatant lie
"I don't believe it is in any employee's best interest to organize when it's self-defeating -- i.e. it will cripple or destroy the company."
So what? People should have the right to extract their revenge on their employers especially if the employers are acting like morons. Revenge is a perfectly good motivation for doing something. If the company is cutting costs then it's dying anyways. All the people who work there (except the management) will get screwed over when the bigwigs cash out. Once the telltale signs of inept management start the employees should immediately organize and start fighting to get any piece of the carcass they can. It's either that or get shafted. The employees of any company do not owe that company anything. No allegience, no loyalty, no mercy. If you don't like your bosses or if they are treating you like you don't want to be treated you SHOULD fight back as hard as you can. Simply quitting does no good because they will get their jollies beating up whoever replaces you. It's better to organize and fight back because it makes their lives harder and it's only fair to give them headaches. Quitting simply encourages them to treat other people like shit too.
"I think you're tremendously simplifying the situation to state that management at Amazon don't have a clue to run a business. They obviously do know how to run a business -- they've taken what was in 1994 an insane idea, and turned themselves into the leading online retailer. They're also far from going under. No I'm not an investor in Amazon, but I am a satisfied customer. "
In the entire history of the company it has never turned a profit. It's prospects for turning a profit are dimmer then ever. It has basically spent the investors money to try and establish themselves and has failed miserably. If a company is unable to make a profit in six years it's fair to call the management inept and stupid. They have not only failed their employees they have failed their stockholders as well. This company is going to die pretty soon now and hundreds of people are going to be out of jobs except of course the top level management. They have already cashed out. At this stage they have nothing to lose.
War is necrophilia.
I'd agree that most conditions unions at one point protected workers against are now covered by other protections. We do owe a LOT to the people who helped make things as good as they are these days and in some lines of work I can where unions might still be useful.
However in tech work I refuse to pay any stupid fees to a union that may or may not work to my best interest. I am smart enough to make my own demands to my employee and if they don't meet my demands to my satisfaction I'm sure I can find someone else who will. Every day I increase my knowledge and experience which increases my value and career options. If I get to a point where my worth isn't clear enough to my employer for them to keep me happy and I can't find a better job elsewhere then to me that is a clear indication that I need to get myself in gear and find out what I'm doing wrong. Laziness is my own fault.
Rather than have a union I'd be interested in seeing not for profit groups take hold to help techies train and find jobs as well as helping people from other backgrounds revamp their careers by adding techie skills. Possibly a workers union for foreign workers at US tech companies would be useful as I've seen them exploited sometimes due to the fact they have a lot fewer options to jump to someone elses train if desired.
I guess IF the unions were available on an opt-in basis only then I'd be cool with it. If I was forced to join to work in the tech industry I'd be rather pissed and probably spend a great amount of time trying to waste the resources of the union and otherwise poisoning it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How exactly did unions help the 26,000 workers who just lost their jobs at Chrysler? Here's a quote from CNN telling you what a great job they did:
The United Auto Workers union, which represents hourly workers in the United States, had no immediate comment on the closings and staffing cuts.
No comment, eh? Wow, there's a powerful statement. Gotta have those guys on my side, I tell ya. I keep seeing all this pro-union schtick, but it's awfully silent about how ineffective unions seem to be these days in the places they're already in effect.
What's your damage, Heather?
Amazon is struggling to even stay in business. Do the unions care at all about that? No. Those guys don't even stop to think about how they can help make Amazon a success. Instead, all they care about is themselves. They'll take the whole company down in order to make sure that they get what they want, even if it hurts a lot of hard-working people with families to support - hard working people who are doing good things for Amazon, rather than trying to spread the cancer of a union.
As a person who's started up companies before, I know that it takes a tremendous amount of cooperation and drive to make that company a success. If everyone isn't playing on the same team, even great prospects can quickly sour. Unions act only to divide the company up between "us" and "them".
Just take the primary subject of that article, Alan Barclay. He was planning things, talking with people, firing off emails, and generally focusing himself upon setting up a union. Hey, here's a tip, Alan: Maybe if you had spent all that energy on making Amazon more of a success, you wouldn't have gotten laid off. Odds are, you and a couple malcontents were starting to make yourselves dispensable. Next time, throw some of that energy into your job.
Especially in this day and age when anyone with technical skills is highly valued throughout the market, unions are evil parasites.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
You can believe whatever you want and I can believe whatever I want but it does not matter. What really matters is what the employees of amazon (or any other company) feel. After all they know better then anybody the pulse of the company.
The bigwigs at amazon got stock options and sold off stock at $400.00. They got cold hard cash for that. Maybe they bought a million dollar house maybe they bought a bentley maybe they spent it in las vegas it does not matter. They got their cash out fo the company. The poor slobs stuffing boxes got jack shit. All they got was their near minimum wage job. If they feel like company is about to go under it's in their best intetest to form a union and fight for whatever they can get. No it won't be a million dollar house but maybe it will be enough money to pay the bills for a month while they look for another job.
In our capitalist society it's every man for himself. Unfortunately the lowly worker has no weapons to fight the management unless they organize. Once the ship starts sinking nobody will try to haul the drowning people into their lifeboats. Not one manager or major stockholder will offer to put an employee up for a couple of weeks because they are broke and can't feed their kids. You either get organized and fight like hell or drown in the wake of the yacths the management is using to flee the wreckage.
Ask any corporation CEO (or a liberterian) and they'll tell you the same thing. The company owes you jack shit. You only get what you can negotiate. They don't like unions because it empowers the workers to negotiate better deals.
War is necrophilia.
You seem to feel that the corporation has a right to do whatever it wants to assure it's survival even if it means replacing their employees with third world labor. If that is the case why would you begrudge the employees the same right? If the corporation has the right to organize, plan and execute an operation which would financially cripple human beings why don't those human beings have the same right to organize, plan and execute a plan that may cripple the corporation?
It's a two way street. Corporation has to survive but so do the employees. The amazon.com employees know the business is going to fail any day now and they will all be on the street. This is not because they failed to pack enough books in an hour it's because the management didn't have a clue of how to run a business that can turn a profit. They have all been living high on the hog using investors money. They have already cashed out, they have their million dollar houses and bmws the employees OTOH will get jack shit when the company finally goes under.
A union represents the best (maybe only) chance they have to try and make best out of a crappy situation.
War is necrophilia.
"Unions were necessary a century or so ago, when we didn't have the tremendous opportunity of mobility and communication that we do in our present society. Today, unions are as anachronistic to a good economy as homeopathy is to good medicine."
As long as corporations organize to keep workers wages as low as possible unions will be needed to organize workers to keep wages as high as possible.
War is necrophilia.
"we all have an abundance of choices."
Shouldn't one of those choices be to form or join a union?
War is necrophilia.
A union can only succeed in its stated goals if it can establish a monopoly over labor. Market monopolies are rare to nonexistent. If you support the success of unions, then you support a government-propped-up monopoly of unions over labor. If you simply wish people to be free to unionize if they wish, then more power to you.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Unions in technology area BAD idea. Tech labor is still way too valuable, and techs hold most of the power. You don't /have/ to work 70 hour weeks in this industry. The people who do usually want to because they expect a big payoff (IPO what have you).
RIGHT ON! My girlfriend works for a unionized company, but I don't. My company just got taken over by a bigger one, and when I told my boss I wanted a 100% pay raise to go along to the new company, he had to scrape his jaw off the floor. I got it, because he knew I was worth it, and he didn't have a choice, because other people were jumping ship rather than relocate.
But if I'd have been a member of a union, I'd have been screwed, because my pay rates would have been locked down. I would have had to go through a chain of people to get any negotiating done, and everybody else would have wanted a piece of the same action I got. No way, folks, I work hard for ME, not for anybody else. If you want to get ahead, you just work hard. Amazing how people will take care of you if you're actually worth something to the company.
Besides, all these companies that are laying people off just plain wouldn't have hired so many if they had unions, anyway. My girlfriend is overworked to death, because her bosses would rather pay union overtime than risk hiring more union staff - people they can't lay off when times get thin. Does she like the overtime? No. Can she do anything about it? No, because her union bosses tell her that's the way the contract got negotiated, and it protects her job. Whoop-dee-doo. In the free market, she could bend her boss over the table, but not with a union.
Don't get me wrong, unions are great in certain circumstances. If you're an unskilled worker, and you want to protect your job, it's awesome. If you don't have the ability to go out and get another job easily, they're the best. But for tech people, who can find another job at the drop of a hat, they're a pain in the butt and a barrier to better wages.
What's your damage, Heather?
I've been a computer geek for over decades, and until recently have felt that labor unions have no place in the tech industry.
The reason I felt this way was largely a result of my (admittedly superficial) encounters with unions thus far. For example, if you are exhibiting at a computer show, you're not allowed to touch your own stuff. You are required to hire Teamsters to carry your stuff in and out of the building. Once your equipment is in your booth, you are not allowed to plug it in; you have to hire a member of the electrician's union to do that for you. Depending on the city in which your exhibiting, this process can be anywhere between a minor hassle and a sadistic nightmare only hinted at in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. You're busy, you're trying to get stuff done. But if you even think about doing something that's Somebody Else's Job, they'll jump down your throat.
Another fine example of excessive union activity is in the motion picture industry. This little excerpt from the film, The Wizard of Speed and Time should give you an idea of what it's like:
Director's Union Office:
"Hello, hi."
"Can I help you?"
"Uh. yeah, how do I join the Director's Union?"
"You need bring a copy of the D-O-mumble signed by your studio producer before you can pay your initiation fees and be cleared by union council, thank you..."
"Uh, excuse me, what's the initiation fee?"
"Seven thousand dollars, with a hundred dollar application fee, two hundred dollars every quarter, and ten percent of your salary."
"Seven thousand dollars! What is that for?"
"That's the amount you pay to get into our union."
"Well, what is it, like Social Security? I get it back when I retire?"
"Absolutely not! What is your classification?"
"Well, I'm directing special effects with a small crew."
"Well, then you must have an Assistant Director, a Second AD, and a UPM, all signed with the DUA."
"All I'm directing is animation!"
"Well, then discuss that with the Animator's Union."
Animator's Union Office:
"So, uh, what's your animation classification, huh?"
"Well, a lot of everything. Cartooning, kinestasis, rotoscoping, stop-motion..."
"WOAH! Well, cartoon animation alone is twenty-one hundred dollars, plus a fifty dollar entry fee, and a hundred dollar quarterly dues."
"Well, what about filming animation?"
"Well, then ya go to the Camera Union."
Camera Union Offices:
"No sir, the studio hires the next man on the roster."
"Well, how do I get on the roster?"
"You have to be in the union."
"Well, how do I get in the union?"
"When you're on the roster."
"You mean I can't join unless I'm already a member?"
"That's correct. Then you need thirty consecutive days camera operation, a complete physical exam, the producer sends a letter, and you pay your fees"
"Well, fine, I've done ten years of camera work!"
"Then you've worked in violation of seniority! You'll have to start all over as a film loader."
"Look, I'm just building a small set and filming it!"
"That's entirely another union! Set and Modelmakers. Next door."
I see software engineering as a primarily creative exercise. I don't especially want some self-appointed organization telling me what kind of work I can and can't do, and for whom.
However, I've recently come to the opinion that unions may well have a place in the tech industry, most particularly in the support sector. Some months ago, there was a Slashdot story about a guy's experience as a phone tech support person. I found the environment described utterly horrible. Individuality is forbidden; lying to customers ("Are you a supervisor?") is encouraged, the company has no loyalty toward its employees, the system is setup assuming people are going to be used up, burned out, and tossed aside. And if the quality of service sucks, that doesn't matter. Call volume is what matters; let's churn those calls through, people. Hang up in the middle if you have to, helping the customer is not the object of the game here, it's cranking those numbers...
I think that's reprehensible. This is not Dickensian England, this is 21st century America. I think a labor union representing phone tech support people would not only improve their working conditions, but also improve the quality of customer support. I'm sure there are several other low-level areas in the tech industry that could benefit from collective bargaining.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I know that many here on Slashdot consider unions to be beyond the pale, and be instruments of socialism,
And herein lies the irony. I've lived in Britain most of my life, and seen unions there and in the US, and was watching the world in the 80s when the eastern block and Russia were still Communist. I've never come across a country, no matter how "socialist" in the eyes of the redneck slashdotter, that tolerates "real" Unions.
Wait, you jumped from socialism to communism rather quickly there. That's called a non-sequitur.
Most *socialist* countries, like those in Europe, have unions in most all fields of employment. Communism, although it shares a lot of philosophies with socialism, is a different enough animal that you can't just swap the two terms at will.
Unions feed off capitalism. Capitalism feeds off working people. Working people feed off unions. I can't see it working in any other context.
Unions were necessary a century or so ago, when we didn't have the tremendous opportunity of mobility and communication that we do in our present society. Today, unions are as anachronistic to a good economy as homeopathy is to good medicine.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I pretty much agree with this. Even Ayn Rand agrees with you (read 'The Fountainhead', in which Ayn Rand mentions unions and what she sees as their proper role (which is NOT no role)).
The main problem is that Unions have had a history of being corrupt and promoting the interests of their management above the interests of their members. There has to be some recourse against behavior like that. For this reason, I think open shop laws are a good thing.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
In other words, no, you don't support the freedom to work. Why don't you just come out and say it?
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I didn't get that at all from his post. All he's saying is that the "high-tech union" movement we've been hearing about recently generally involves employees in positions that correspond directly to positions in traditional industries. He didn't say those people were stupid or incopetent, just that referring to them as "high tech workers" is somewhat misleading. By your definition, everyone who is not a physcial laborer is a "knowledge worker", making the term meaningless.
I can promise you the smooth, comfortable-with-customers-and-people programmers are outnumbered by the socially-inept by at least 50 to 1.
And I'm sure you have evidence to back that up. Your complaints about alleged lack of respect would be much more effective if they were not filled with ad hominem attacks and blatant stereotyping.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Knowledge worker doesnt really mean you are knowledgeable. A lot of people that fit the description (i.e working in internal development and so on..) are not very highly educated, but just people that have some form of experience. The computer industry, and especially coders are often people who are self learned, and therefore not knowledgeable per se, if you define knowledge as something measured by public institutions, if you dont, you are probably assuming theese workers are to semi-dumb I think the definition is in what sector the persons work, what qualities are regarded as important within this business. The dominant businesses in the tech age are IT firms, and everyone working in theese businesses are "Knowledge workers" because they all make the wheels go around in that part of the economy. Unions are good ideas, because, face it; if you are 18-30 years old, and a hot shot, you pretty much can demand what you like from your employeer, but your time is short, because there are hordes of other 18 years that are ready to take your place for much less pay, not to talk about more skilled high tech workers from developing countries..wouldnt you wish you had some rights ? Who will fight for you when your firm is acking to replace you because you need some time off to take care of your family after spending 2 days at the office..
There is a difference between what you want to do, and what you can do.
Being in the shadow of the biggest concentration of unions (Detroit's "big three" auto industry), I would say you are completely wrong. A union is kinda like Communism, it looks great on paper but it never seems to work out like it did on the big chief notebook.
Case in point, in Ford one cannot move a monitor on ones own desk (move it over a foot to adjust for glare, etc) you have to have one of the "union" guys do it. If you do move your monitor, you get written up and the company pays the union worker for the "work" that you did... just to justify that some dumbass actually requires a job. The tech guys are not allowed to put the $50k cad workstation they built on an engineers desk they have to get a "union electrician" to plug the cables in. How completely idiotic is this? They build it, installed it, but they can't plug it into a 110 volt outlet in the wall. What they would actually do is, tell the union guy how much the workstation cost (do you want to be responsible for it, scares most union guys), and if he would let them do the work, the union guy could take credit and the pay for it. Useless absolutely useless, all from the outgrowth of unions, and the belief that because you hired a dumbass, you should never get rid of dumbass screwoffs. (Don't even get me started on the union seniority bullshit, how old you are, not your performance determines how much you get paid... ugh).
Spelling and grammar checker off because I don't care
He wanted to bring the company back to its early, heady days when philosophy majors eagerly manned the phones and managers worked hand in hand with frontline employees. Barclay didn't just consider Amazon's recent turn toward corporate hierarchy, rigid work rules, and outsourcing a personal betrayal; he considered it a betrayal of the company itself.
This guy is angry at Amazon because it couldn't create utopia. Doesn't this strike anyone at a tad bit unfair? There were massive political movements, much bigger and larger in historical importance than Amazon, whose purpose it was to create utopia.
Utopian politics has failed. "Salvation" will not come from society, or from a for-profit company.
What's more, the doomed Seattle division included some of Amazon's most senior employees--people like Barclay, a company old-timer at 33 months--whose institutional knowledge and superior skills supposedly made them indispensable to Amazon's mission of becoming the "earth's most customer-centric company."
This article has nothing to do with customers. It has everything to do with the opinions and grumblings of the Seattle employees.
Look, there are no *right* answers when it comes to cutting costs. Clearly the Seattle center had very qualified and talented people, but they were a DRAIN on company resources both in money and politics, from my understanding. Perhaps there's more to it than that, but clearly management had to make a trade off. Was it the right one? Probably too early to say. I usually don't support layoffs unless it means the company's existence is in jeopardy. Perhaps this was true in Amazon's case.
"As an employee," he wrote me, "any illusions I might have had about the nobility of Amazon.com have been shattered."
Companies definitely should have a higher goal beyond making money -- a goal that justifies their existence in terms of what they *do* beyond making money. Companies that are in business only to "make money" will have a difficult time of things (see GM since the 1970's -- still the world's biggest company, but still slowly dying.)
And profit is the measurement of the effectiveness of that work. A bankrupt company does no one any good. Wall Street gave Amazon a long time to operate in the red, but it slapped it with a ruler to say "get profitable -- now".
The nature of the corporation is that it is very rare be a pillar for "noble" causes. One can only be noble only if one is, and has traditionally been, a continually profitable company.
So yes, Alan Barclay & co. were hopelessly naive. So too, apparently, is Jonathan Cohn, the author of this piece.
The new, information-age economy required workers with greater skills than, say, your typical stock boy or secretary. To attract such people, companies would offer lavish benefits and unparalleled creative freedom. The regimented, top-down management structure of yesteryear would disappear, replaced by a new paradigm of fluid, democratic workplaces where even frontline workers received autonomy, high wages, and partial ownership of the company via stock options.
No, Jon, that's the romantic view of the new economy. People got really carried away with themselves. A lot of these issues really need to be thought through still.
We know the economy is changing. It's becoming more knowledge-based, which places emphasis on the brain instead of "making and moving things". Indeed, the real "scarcity" in the digital age is going to be talent and creativity.
The trick is that it's going to take time to figure out how to operate under these changes. Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the biggest problems we have right now -- and we're trying lots of ways to accomplish it, including workplace democracy, etc.
The trouble is, there are always downsides to these solutions. Workplace democracy, for instance, assumes that one can just vote managerial responsibility out of existence. This doesn't work in the real world -- there needs to be an entity in the organization that is responsible for performance.
Galli, who had spent the last 19 years at Black & Decker, wasted no time in imposing business discipline.
Certainly, Amazon has made major mistakes: bringing Galli on board was tantamount to placing a revolver against the head of the company's culture.
But at the same time, one needs to balance that with the need to be profitable. Galli probably was one of the few who knew how to impose cost conscious procedures on a company that needed them fast. What would have preserved the company's culture more would probably have been an internal movement towards cost consciousness.. but this would have taken a tremendous amount of time over hiring someone with the skills to do this -now-. Which would have been better? I think Wall Street had lost patience with Amazon's desire to be "different" and just wanted to see results, so Galli probably was the proper choice for the time.
As for his tactics, were they really that bad? Is there something particularily wrong with allowing people in New Delhi to answer email? This is providing workers in a third world country *much needed jobs* and giving Amazon a relief value for their skyrocketing costs. It's a win/win situation, with a tradeoff that it can screw over some employees. But how else does one get profitable unless it makes difficult tradeoffs?
Also, one must temper the union apologist rhetoric with the fact that the majority of workers @ Amazon.com were *NOT* in support of a union. This was an "enlightened" (ahem) minority that was supporting it.
If Michelle Gray never grew disillusioned, it's partly because she never developed illusions in the first place. She understood that capitalism can be cold, even in the new economy. A pretty jaded perspective? You bet. And it happens to be right.
Oh, please. This is one of those "Jerry Springer" moments, the ones at the end of the show where he looks at the camera and tries to make sense of the whole situation. Jonathan Cohn is blatantly trying belittle this person because she doesn't agree with his views that a union is a Good Thing. He's making light of the fact that the world is a complex place that requires complex and difficult decisions and trade-offs, with sometimes *no right answer*. A union wouldn't change that, it would merely provide an illusion.
Perhaps that's the whole point of his article -- it's somehow more intelligent and noble to have an romantic illusion of what the new economy is than to deal in reality. I don't know why, but I perfer dealing in reality -- it leads to fewer letdowns.
-Stu
I mean, who _else_ would be so likely to accept the notion that Free Trade means, "Ever lose your job to a guy in Korea who works 18 hours a day in leg shackles for a bowl of rice, because he's cheaper to hire than you? YOU WILL!"
One thing Marx missed, however- he's assuming an _industrial_ proletariat. This is railroad-era thinking: this is a condemnation of capitalism in which the barriers for entry are as high as, say, a software company wanting to sell a new word processor. When Marx was writing this stuff, access to industrialisation was severely limited, networking was severely restricted, and your marketing was entirely a matter of brick-and-mortar installations, a whole network that had to be supported. This is why small craftsmen were ground under the wheels.
2001 turns out to have eBay and UPS and Napster and Slashdot and Linux (as examples of these _types_ of services). Marx would've loved Linux: it's controlled by the proletariat and gives all the tools of virtual industrialization to the proletariat. This is a really big difference from the industrial-age world Marx knew. How big, remains to be seen. Clearly, the bourgeoisie still retains a lot of power to put up barriers to entry- we see this most easily with Microsoft trying to technically produce obstacles for Linux, because they are unusually aggressive for bourgeoisie. But it's also seen in the consolidation of vast media empires that control what we hear and see for news and entertainment. Yet, at the same time, the foundations are crumbling, and individuals, artisans, craftsmen such as Marx talks about, begin to have an unprecedented ability to network with clients, customers, helpers across the globe, and the ability to interact AS IF they were industrial titans, in some cases.
An example: suppose you make cars, and you need a certain steel bracket. Traditionally, you need to order 100,000 of these brackets from somebody, or invest in the heavy machinery to fabricate them yourself. Either way, someone makes lots of brackets and keeps them in warehouses and they sell, or not. But with computerised order fulfillment systems (not to mention computerised fabricate-to-order systems!) you can order 100. Possibly in the future you can order 10- or 1- without nasty price hikes. Compare the history of record and CD pressing with mp3.com's pioneering 'DAM' CD system, which is now widely imitated and improved upon, and which allows fabrication of _single_ CDs for order fulfillment- or the history of T-shirt and mug printing with CafePress, which likewise allows fabrication of _single_ items for order fulfillment.
These issues _are_ the foundation of the industrial age: both ability and necessity to mass produce. Now the ability is still there- but due to the ever-increasing sophistication of the machinery, the necessity is not- which is enormously significant.
If you want the world forced into a Communist Revolution for good or ill, keep on encouraging barriers to entry, 'free trade' and the ability of large corporations to exert economic leverage against smaller players and/or individuals. Down with Napster, down with eBay, down with libraries, and everybody aboard the corporate ferryboat- which will not wait, and has no stops because you've no business choosing where you want to go!
If you want Marx to be a footnote to history, support every form of decentralisation and breaking of the barriers to entry that you can. Consider the right of a crappy garage musician to put mp3s on Napster for free as MORE important than the right of Britney Spears to earn record companies billions. Support Linux and open source and fight Microsoft's efforts to create a world where Windows is required for most internet tasks (Active Directory, etc ad infinitum). If Apple tries the same stuff, fight them too!
The only way to _make_ Marx irrelevant and useless is to _remove_ the problems he identifies, or at least have a good hard try at it. If you decide he's a creep and do everything opposite to what he demands, you are only creating the pressing need for just such a revolution as he agitates for- and that might not be the best thing. It's better to say 'No revolution here today, thank you- now here's what we'll do instead' and GO AFTER the problems he correctly identifies. Do that and all the ranting about bourgeoisie starts to look foolish. Marx is like Linux, fighting him and what he believes in only makes him stronger...
In other words, no, you don't support the freedom to work. Why don't you just come out and say it?
Because the phrase "freedom to work" is really just a rhetorical device -- no such freedom exists -- if it did nobody would ever be allowed to be fired because this would violate their freedom. Instead the device must be understood in terms of what it really means: enjoying the benefits of a unionized environment without actually paying for them. This is exactly like not paying taxes but enjoying the benefits of roads, police protection, and so forth.
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
You don't. You can always work in a non-unionized company just as you are free to move to a third world country with minimal (or no) taxes. However, taxes and dues are what provide a safer and fairer place to live or work in.
Socialism is little more than a description of the intended relationship between the state and the individual, mostly whether the state is a representation of the will of the people and a legitimate tool to be used in any affairs of social interest, as opposed to a dangerous organisation possibly answerable to the will of the people but on no account to be involved unless absolutely necessary. Communism, as implemented by the USSR, can be seen as fitting within that definition. But that definition is too wide for anyone to legitimately claim that the socialism is an infringment on personal liberties, per se.
Britain's Labour Party until recently had a clause in its constitution, put there by the socialist wing of the party, the communists kept out. That clause stated that the party's intention was to secure, for the people, the means of production. It was essentially a nationalisation clause. In the mid part of the century until the late 70s, that's exactly what Labour went on to do, nationalising all aspects of public transport, steel production, coal mining, gas and oil extraction, even the motor vehicle (British Leyland nee Rover, Austin, etc, albiet to rescue it from bankruptsy), and computer (ICL) industries. The proposers of these policies were not communists. But putting industry under state control supposedly in the name of the "workers" was the major economic policy in the USSR.
In this context, the relevence of Unions, that's important.
I disagree. It's easy for us, the majority of which are single and highly skilled, to assume that the freedoms that apply to us apply to everyone. If I were married with children, my mobility would be hampered by a range of factors. If I were married, with children, and without the skills I have now, I'd have to accept most jobs in the locality I was offered.Of course, while unions remain relevent, they also have to get their acts together if they want to actually make a difference. Part of that has to be removing the irrelevences that undermine people's confidences in them, in Europe the number of people who run them to promote their brands of political ideology, in the US the whole mob thing. There's no reason someone should feel that they have a choice between being unprotected by a union, or joining and funding something they find obnoxious.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
A majority of the employees in such a business as Amazon are not technology workers. They are phone support, packing, shipping, billing. Hard labor and/or mundane clerical operations. Individually, they are powerless; however, they do have the power to communicate with their fellow workers and join together to protect their rights. They should have the right to do so, read the declaration of independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Notice that governments are formed primarly to secure these unalienable Rights. Why? United we stand and divided we fall. There is no reason why Amazon should afford to pay it's top execs millions in stock options while the line workers are working in poor conditions. When you negotiate as an individual with a company, you are negotiating against a united management. It is only just and fair that individuals have the right to negotiate with management as a whole, so that the barganing power is more evenly distributed among the parties.
The author of this article is spot on. As for the author for this comment, I say, grow up.And giving power to union leaders solves the problem? Not if history is any predictor.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
But someone who isn't a member of a union operating in a workplace shouldn't be surprised if their pay and job security is different to that of their unionised counterparts. It would seem likely that an employer looking to lay off people would seek to fire the non-unionised people (assuming the number of people in the union isn't less than the number of layoffs they want to make...) first unless they really were substantially more important than the unionised people. After all, sack 'em and what come back do they have? That's an unfortunate observation, but that's the way it would work in practice.
Well, if you're going to join a union, you should be required to pay the dues. I don't quite understand what the objection to that would be. If you want to take advantage of a service, you need to pay for your fair share. You didn't think what?--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I don't want someone telling my employer that I'm only allowed to work 40 hours a week. I don't want them telling my employer that they have to keep me on staff as long as the quality of my work reaches acceptable levels of mediocrity. I want to know that the quality of my work is what matters, not the fact that I show up every once in a while and perform to a minimal acceptable standard. And most important of all, I don't want to be let go because some other employee they have can't be fired because he's been there too long, even if I am more productive.
If I want to work 80 hours a week knowing that the experience and stock options MIGHT someday make me successful, then thats my choice and not the choice of a union. If someone doesn't like it, they can switch careers. There are no illusions in the technology industry. I know that not everyone who goes into it turns out to be a millionaire after 3 years. If the fact that the average passerby thinks this and finds its not all glamour as they had expected, well SORRY. Go back to whatever it was you were doing before you made that tragic mistake. SORRY if you didn't know you might have to spend 10 years of your life sitting in your bedroom hacking on your computer into the middle of the night, forgoing a social life, to achieve what some of us have. Thats the price for some of our "overnight" successes. You should accept nothing less. And no union better tell you otherwise.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Unions tend to function in an US vs THEM atmosphere. Many small companies function in a team atmosphere, where most everyone is working more or less as an "US". Note that I did not say all small companies, because you see many variations, including the family business, and the pointy haired boss in his/her own small business. Some of these make you wonder how they survive. And if you look around, many businesses do not survive their first year.
The problem (of us vs them) can come in when the group gets sufficiently large that you do not have a chance to know everyone. It can also come in when you have people schooled exclusively in the older schools of management.
One of the problems that promotes the segregation of managers is not the sheer volume of data, but the fact of people who would be clueless as managers on the general team getting all confused and spreading that confusion to everyone else with every new bit of mis-information they create in their minds as they try to understand things.
These folks naturally tend to corrupt data, adding in their own pre-existing fixed ideas and confusions, and making a splendid mess of things. You definitely have a problem when the majority of people in the company fall in this category. This is where you get companies who need to "hire an adult" to run things for the creative types.
When you have a company that has grown to be very successful, it is easy for the various branches and depts to devolve into fiefdoms, etc. At that point you are doomed to the "us vs them" atmosphere.
Unions thrive on this and promote the Us vs Them atmosphere. Unions are a cure for abuses of management, where working conditions devolve towards a state of serfdom or slavery. They are there to make sure that the rank and file have a voice of some sort.
Unfortunately, unions can be very clueless as well. I can recall a company or two that agreed to union demands, and then went bankrupt. The owners decided that it would be easier just to cash out. And then the unions said "oops, we didn't know". This is where the unions get the reputation in management circles of being parasites.
So all and all, it is a mixed bag. It cries out for a different business model.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So you defend the freedom to work? No union-only shops? No required union membership? No required union dues?
I didn't think so.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
But remember, for each one of us sitting comfortably in our cubes or dorm rooms there are 20 people working in a fab actually making the chips to run our computers. I'm not talking about engineers, I'm talking about the grunt-level fab operator actually running the equipment. Some companies treat this rank and file quite well, most treat them as disposable. Do they need to unionize? Possibly. /. readers have degrees or are working towards them. It is easy to forget that the majority of the nation doesn't have a four year degree and the earning potential that goes along with one and the mobility that goes along with their earning potential. /. readers, including myself, don't need unions, but there are a lot of people who do.
I know that in the short history of modern chipmaking there have been numerous cases of people being 'asked' to work more than their usual 12 hour shifts, or being routinely exposed to hazardous chemicals, or other abuses.
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of
Union workers teach our children, police our streets, deliver our Amazon.com orders, and build our cars. America has lost touch with the real reason unions exist, including the unions. But thats no reason to say that they aren't necessary.
These are breasts; this is source code.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
You're absolutely right. Were that we lived in Utopia.
In reality, however, many people still don't have a viable choice: they can't afford downtime between jobs, or they can't afford to move to a better job, or they can't afford to upgrade their skills, or et cetera.
And even for those people who are professionals and could leave, often can't: they love their jobs and have commitments to their clients. It's just that their employer is an ass. [I'm thinking specifically of government services, here; certainly our BC government has an appalling employer history with regards to teachers, health providers and such.]
Your points re: the downsides of unionization are pretty much on the mark. I just don't think the employment picture is as rosy as you paint.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
And skills are one of those things that you need to have time and money to develop, yes, even if you see a really cool course advertised on an infomercial!
The majority of low paid people working for my employer have two or more jobs - I know, I've talked to them. They and their families can't afford to live on what my employer pays them alone. They don't have time to get the skills to make themselves more valuable. And they made their "choice" about marriage in a world where it was the "done thing". To not marry, and not have children, would have been against all of the advice of their peers and society in general. Frankly, most people don't have the foresight (or alternatively BO!) that ensures most geeks don't get married at 20 and have babies shortly afterwards.
I appreciate you were able to see the choices as they happened, made the decisions early on in your life, and hey, that's great. But pretending that that means other people aren't trapped into little employment hellholes simply because they made decisions which many would argue are the natural ones to make, at least for the sake the survival of the human race, isn't fair.
And there's definitely a choice they have the right to make, which is regardless of what the situation might have been in the past, they have the right to decide to team up with others and force an employer to stop treating them like shit. They don't have to put up with bad working conditions because an employer knows they wont leave because they don't have enough money, skills, and mobility.
Their right to unionise is not anulled because you made a choice which happened, against all the advice of your peers and the rest of society, to be the right one in your teens and early twenties and you're worried that if they get paid a living wage and can take 20 days vacation a year, you might not get the bonus you feel you deserve.
A better question is why should your employer treat a set of employees with contempt just because it holds you in high regard. This isn't a zero sum thing. Those employees are necessary for the employer to continue to operate, indeed, it's unlikely you would have a job at all if they weren't employed too. If they weren't at all necessary, the employer would have no objection to them going on strike.--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Marx defended the idea of the working class, but he held great contempt for the workers themselves. He synthesized statistics, rarely visited real workplaces, and spent a great deal of his life loafing on the sofa, sponging money from his friends and leaving his family to starve.
And all the talk of last years marketing and industry buzz. Where is the surprise that it wasn't all it would be cracked up to be? Did Barclay expect Bezos to give him a rubdown everynight after making his bed a putting a mint on his pillow?
Unions in technology area BAD idea. Tech labor is still way too valuable, and techs hold most of the power. You don't /have/ to work 70 hour weeks in this industry. The people who do usually want to because they expect a big payoff (IPO what have you).
This is nowhere near a situation similar to autoworkers where they are being treated with low wages and unsafe working environments.
This is nothing like the steelworkers who have been losing jobs by the thousand due to companies closing up shop.
Grow up, update your resume, and find a new job.
If he's as good as they told him he was in the first place, he shouldn't have a problem.
You know, I'm a union geek, and, at least where I work, this is so much horse shit. My supervisor, the safety officer, and myself all ask that any moving of hardware be done by me. This is more to keep stuff from getting broken than anything else. I plug the plugs into the walls-- our electricians are too busy doing real work to even consider being pulled off the job to put a plug in an outlet.
I work in a major state university, and no, I don't fuck off-- I'm at least as busy and harried as any sysadmin in the private sector, and, at least from what I see around, I'm quite a bit more competent than most. What being in a union means to me is, that I get paid overtime for working more than 40 hours a week, and that my pager stays on my desk when I go home at night. As I'm 44, and have a family, this is quite a benefit in itself. I get fair benefits and pension. And I can't be fired because my boss has suddenly decided that he can hire some kid fresh out of school for half of what I make.
Most of you ./ers are fairly young, and don't understand a lot of these issues. But just wait until you have a family or the job market becomes saturated with geeks (which, while being possible, isn't probable, as geekliness isn't a product of training).
Before I started geeking full-time, I did lots of history-- that's what my first degree is in. You folks who work for wages would do good to take some time out of your busy schedule (that is, if you're not working 70-hour weeks) to read a bit of labor history, to find out what the work world was like before unions. I think you would find it quite informative.
This works much the same way at UPS. I'm in management, and although we don't always follow the rules to the letter, management personel are forbidden to touch boxes. And if an hourly employee were to monitor the amount of time a supervisor is handling packages, they get compensated for that amount of time since its time that was concievibly "stolen" from an hourly employee.
This doesn't turn out to be quite the crisis it might seem though. Ironically, many of the unionized hourly workers are only interested in working the LEAST amount of hours as possible and the more work someone else does the less they have to do, and they're not about to complain about it.
Obviously there are also exceptions. For demonstration purposes we can handle packages, or in an emergency sitution its acceptable. And this isn't something that produces a large number of complaints when half the workers are new hires who aren't completely aclimated to the workload yet and find that ANYONE helping out is a blessed relief.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Well, professors, probably the most respected (and certainly the most educated), group of professionals in existence, are either unionized or unionizing in quite a few universities...
How can this be scored +4, Informative, when it's fictional?
Stories like this abound. I generally investigate when they come up in organizations I'm supposed to be helping.
Invariably, they come back to some manager who wanted to save $500 from his budget by having his secretary run to Office Depot and buy 7 or 8 power strips, when code (and common sense) required installation of additional outlets. Someone reports it as a fire hazard, the manager gets all up in a huff, makes up some ridiculous story like that quoted above, and it passes into legend.
Never yet have I seen a situation where people were not allowed to plug 110v plugs into outlets, or move things around on their desks, because of "union rules". And until you can provide concrete proof (Lord knows I've tried to find it), I'll assume you just like the sound of the fairy tales so thought you'd pass them on to the kids here.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The average factory in 19th century employed a large part of all local workers, and they did not have a choice - they had to work for what the factory offered them or be unemployed.
Monopolies can onlybe dealt with by other monopolies, and so workforce monololists - unions were created.
Now, however, the situation is completely different - in workforce market there is free trade; You don't like one company, there are hundreds of others you can go to. This way people can NOT be oppressed by their employer; Abuse can only happen if it is hard to leave.
But, if the unions make it into the high-tech world, then the monopoly issues will start again, but from other side.
Unions will probably start protectionism (only union workers will work here), thus limiting specialists from other areas of education or world from working; And probably will make 'experience' (in years) matter far more than your capabilities, which is a Bad Thing.
We want a free market of workforce, where anyone can work for anyone he wants, and the best people get the best positions.
The only need free people might have to union, is to fight against a monopoly, otherwise it will just hurt anyone.
I may disagree with your opinion, but I will defend to death your right to speak it.
What good will a union do for these people?
The statement in the article concerning unsafe environments in Amazon's warehouses baffle me. I can't speak about the US but in Canada if I found myself in conditions where people are "fainting and vomiting from the heat" I know damn well that one call to my province's Ocupation Health and Safety office would get the company in big trouble.
I can't imagine this being any different in the US, in fact I'm 95% percent sure that if such things were to take place in a union shop, the first thing the union would do is place a call to the government types anyways.
The simple fact is that a lot of the abuses you use as an example from the industrial revolution have now been deemed unlawful and there are angencies to deal with this stuff. A union doesn't change that.
I do however, understand layoffs, I very recently got let go myself. I'll pick myself up and get something else, there's lots of companies that need my skills right now. When it gets to the point that I can't find another job then I guess I'm screwed. Probably should have gone to university when I was 18 rather than starting a corespondence degree at 25. I fail to see how a union will change that. I also fail to see how a union would have saved my last employer from sliding into a revenue shortfall, I'd still be out of a job, I would just have taken home less money the past 6 months because I was paying union dues.
The USSR and satellite nations used to have official, approved, unions answerable to The Party to which the employers were answerable too. But unions independent of the political structure were illegal and their leaders subject to imprisonment. The argument was used that in a workers paradise, unions were unnecessary. For obvious reasons, this wasn't true.
The most public example of anti-Union behaviour by the communist block was Poland's crackdown on Solidarity, the independent Polish shipyard(? IIRC) workers union.
Britain, which some slashdotters apply the S-word to as often as they do the USSR without differentiation, doesn't legally recognise the notion of Unions, despite having one political party (Labour) answerable and funded by them. Virtually every piece of industrial action done by a Union is illegal, and that Union's assets are liable to the siezed if the employer pushes hard enough. Again, the most evident example occurs in the 80's. Margaret Thatcher goes to war with the NUM, wanting to close a substantial part of the coal mining industry. The NUM at the time is run by a die-hard democratic communist called Arthur Scargill, and a political war breaks out which is far more, on both sides, about ideologies than it has to do with the economic viability of the mines the government proposes to close. Thatcher wants Scargill silenced, and unions emasculated. For the most part, she succeeds.
What I find interesting is that, for all the rhetoric about unions representing "socialism", in terms of what a union should be doing, the communists almost certainly had it right in a sense. The job of a union is to represent the workers. The communists saw unions as redundant in their world because that's what the Party was already doing. But, counterwise, it means unions have a major role to play in any capitalist economy. And in many ways, if it wasn't for the fact that unions in many countries were run predominantly by communists, and that unions are associated with rights for workers, I think that'd be pretty obvious.
Unions are simple examples of people organising together to improve their working conditions. In a pure capitalist, free market, economy, that's exactly what you'd expect people to do, to have to do if they stand any chance of getting decent conditions amongst employers who are ultimately answerable to their shareholders, not their employees. And here's the irony - this makes them a component of capitalism, a way of making capitalism work at every level, not the enemy of it unions are often portrayed as being.
Unions feed off capitalism. Capitalism feeds off working people. Working people feed off unions. I can't see it working in any other context.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.