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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...
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.