Example of unions that are net negative for society: police unions, teacher unions.

>Monitor various collection platforms for incidents that pose direct and indirect risk to Amazon operations, personnel, or brand;

There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize. This author is naive to think that Amazon isn't dealing with state level threats. They likely need state level intelligence.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazo...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901142713/https://www.amazo...

I would honestly love to hear from those that aren't favorable towards unions about why it's acceptable for business management and ownership to punitively destroy jobs and value over ideological issues, but it's unacceptable for the employees to have that option as part of collective bargaining?

(0) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561830256...

This reminds me of how back in 2016 right before November US elections,I read threat intel reports and conference style presentations from threat intel vendors talking in detail about Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Steele dossier, this was before buzzfeed decided to publish it (all other media refused at the time). This is all public stuff now but big corps are very interested in learnig about the latest strategic intel so they can adopt. And that's perfectly fine so long as no laws are broken. This is similar to how big corps get a scoop on emargoed CVEs so they can patch before it's made public. A lot of times this is what intelligence community people do when they want to settle down and make money. I'll bet good money whoever they hire has background at FBI,NSA or DIA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345259

Even if not quite a dupe.

It's truly late stage capitalism if companies can impede labor organizing so brazenly in public like this and have only encouragement at the federal level to go further. HN a few days ago (the 787 structural issue) was also talking about Boeing closing plants and sacrificing safety to avoid union labor.

As in so many internet spaces, partisan zealots are degrading our ability to converse. I hope the mods figure out how to keep them from turning HN into yet another dunghole.

We build an economic system that rewards selfishness and drive for profit at all costs. Successful companies generate profit. More profit is generated by charging the highest cost for the lowest quality product and paying the worker as little as possible.

Unions threaten that profitability. Its simple math. Its cheaper to hire analysts to track and snuff out labour movements than it would be to capitulate to the demands of any labour movements that formed, such as wage increases or benefits.

Why are we shocked and appalled when the system we created does what it does best?

It's easy, spend 100M dollars on a law that makes warehouse labor a mandatory union.

Mom and pop companies can't afford to fill out government/union paperwork for their 3 employees and customers can't go to cheaper alternatives.

But this means Amazon and Amazon employees win.

Reducing profits is a different thing. Business can still be booming while profits are not through the roof.

I don't know for sure if that's what's happening in the threads you're talking about but it kinda sounds like it might be.

For some tiny job it takes less effort to just do it than it does to ask someone else, especially when there are all kinds of union rules. One task leads to another, and then you need to find someone else to do that job.

Most people also think they are smarter than average. I have seen people that thought they were great at negotiating their own wages/benefits in a ritualized yearly pissing match with their boss only to be outdone by new hires. Lots of overinflated egos around that would rather rip their own arms of than pull on the same rope.

It wasn’t widely in the news back then. But I also don’t want to be part of an union and most of the unions I’m aware of in North America are not shining examples. So I’d be ok with working there today given what I know.

People tend to forget that unions represent the existing employees, not aspiring hires. This can actually work to the detriment of juniors and newcomers to the industry. It can also work to the detriment of teams where it becomes intensely difficult to fire people who are legitimately underperforming. The public school unions keeping bad teachers on the payroll but keeping them idle in empty rooms is a prime example. Police unions defending bad cops is another very relevant example. If you’re an aspiring teacher or police officer with motivation to do well, why should those union employees take a spot on the job that you could otherwise occupy and do better? Switching the rules of the game to favor seniority doesn’t benefit people who rank low on the seniority ladder.

"having a supervisor sit in a car while observing union activity and talking on the phone, even if the conversation is not a report on the union activity."

https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

There is a good argument to be made that increasing the GDP is a moral imperative [0]. I know it's increasingly trendy to think all of capitalism is evil and we should tear the whole global economic system down (and to tweet about it from your iPhone while sitting in your air conditioned home, eating your meal delivered by Doordash). As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be, and there are lots of things in the world that should be improved, it's also true that for the vast majority of people in the US and around the world, their living conditions today are much better than they would have been at any other time in history. Which is the simple result of compounding economic growth.

Talking about "changing the world" by building an app sounds a bit quaint and too self-serious these days, but I really don't think it's true that the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society.

[0] https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/essays/economic-growth-moral...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource

Edit: Turns out it was IATSE

2. What Twitter would have needed was a counter-intelligence analyst (reactive), as opposed to Amazon's proactive intelligence post. Now that I've written it out, what twitter needed was better security - not COINTEL.

3. If companies start dabbling with intelligence and counter-intelligence against political actors directly (instead of offloading to state apparatus like the FBI), then we are reaching Deus Ex levels of Dystopia

I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(

The bulk of PROFITS is in AWS.

The bulk of ECONOMIC ACTIVITY is in amazon.com sales.

god does that man suck

So where do the violations of law come in? A lot of it comes from very murky, subjective boundaries: employers can't threaten to shut down a plant or time wage increases in a way to interfere with a union organizing campaign. But a lot of what union avoidance specialists' work involves is consulting at exactly how to do the above in a legal way. It will end up in court, and if the consultants did their job right, the employer will win.

Beyond that, you get into activities like firing workers purely because they're involved in union activities: here the labor avoidance consultants will sometimes help with building a paper trail to target workers viewed as problematic. Another illegal activity is spying, either on union meetings or workers and organizers when they're off premises. Oftentimes, employers want to do this on their own volition, and union busting consultants actively work to curtail this (or at least make sure any firings happen in a legal, documented way).

In my ideal democracy, I do expect pushback, but I'd like for it to come from actual voters. If you believe that not only are "corporations are people (my friend)", but should be able to go mano a mano with individual politicians (not lobbying), here's a quick thought experiment: how would you feel if that sentence were from a document by TikTok Inc?

You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.

As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.

Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.

However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!

I haven't read through it yet, but it's relatively short, and it was recommended to me as a good starter.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wag...

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...

> Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.

>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.

Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.

If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.

It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.

Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.

Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.

In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.

There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.

By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.

I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.

1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power. 2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.

I am not wrong:

"According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

> I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s.

They are as relevant as they were in 1776:

"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith

Unions fail primarily because they are a very shoddy bandaid. When you have commodity labor, in which each worker is the same, a union has the capacity to plausibly represent them as a group. That cooperation gives the workers negotiating power. There is A) no reason to suspect that that negotiating power cannot or will not be abused, and B) the premise is usually false. Police are the obvious target here on both counts, as a police union is nothing more than a private army, and policing is far from commodity labor. It matters a lot who my police are. I think that teacher's unions are probably a better example of the problems though because people tend to think of the police as an outlier.

The adversarial situation you want to avoid already exists: Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible; you want to get paid as much as possible. All you're doing by disdaining collective bargaining is sacrificing leverage.

Our owners are not as naive as we are: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/24/when-rules-dont-apply...

You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world.

First of all, it's widely known that Amazon already has a rigid employee structure that pays according to the internal pay scale. This alone shuts dispels the "omg unions keep top performers down", because internally your only shot at a pay increase is to run through their promotion obstacle course.

Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power. They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason. Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress.

SAG-AFTRA represents both movie stars and B-list actors you've only ever seen in infomercials.

> Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.

SAG-AFTRA represents every American movie star, the same movie stars that can command multi-million dollar contracts with their own terms with the help of the union.

Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?

I'm still kind of talking past the other person, and vice versa, but it's hard to have a good conversation about this, and I think it's important to say something to express my opposition to Marxism (though that's debatable---if nothing good/useful can be said, it's very debatable).

I would not have said anything on most discussion forums, but if there ever was a place where it's appropriate to speak up against Marxism when it rears its head, YC News is it. I think I can voice my pro-capitalist position politely and it's OK here, even if there is no traction in the conversation. I wouldn't do that on, say, reddit; I think it would be rude in that context, unless I can actually foster a meaningful conversation.

> the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low

Valid statement about the Internet in general, but culture can change, and we should strive to be better than that. In my own commenting history there are certainly bright and dark spots. I try to do the best I can.

That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ...

Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.

Nobody is forcing you to work a union job. You're free to take a non-union job or quit at any point.

I disagree. Not every company is public, first of all. So not every company is beholden to shareholders who demand endless growth at any cost. There are lots of private companies that are content with the size they are at, and with the revenue they are generating and aren't tempted to start squeezing their employees.

Negotiating power is derived exclusively from the ability to walk away. When walking away from your employment means being evicted, starving, and being unable to afford medical care, your ability to do so is crippled.

This can be extended to other social services such as childcare.

At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.)

I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.

In the US, for example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

I mean it was actually part of a war (at least it’s called such) between companies / government and organized labor!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War

History is full of private interests using the full might of the state and any trick they can think of to prevent unions.

So yeah, one is more likely than the other.

Yeah, no. We must be living in different countries. There are lots of large, powerful, popular British unions in a wide variety of industries.

I'm mostly centrist/moderate left. None of this rings true.

Typing on phone so excuse the brevity.

> Each location should have its own union

You might as well go all the way, and condemn any union with more than one member.

The whole point of a union is to have an organization representing the workers that has enough power to negotiate with the employer as a relative equal. Your "single site" unions would be pointless in many cases. They'd have no power, because the employer's power to close and transfer work between sites would completely undermine the union with little disruption to the employer. Just look at how Walmart handled it's only successful unionization effort:

https://apnews.com/3d709955866a71cc82d641b848714fd0

> The United Food and Commercial Workers is seeking an injunction against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to prevent the giant retailer from eliminating meat cutting departments at 180 stores with prepackaged meat....

> The decision to eliminate the meat cutters came just weeks after the butchers at the Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart voted 7-3 to join the UFCW, the first successful union vote in the country at a Wal-Mart, a company well known for its opposition to organized labor.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...:

> The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Walmart's (WMT) recent closing of five stores was done in retaliation for a history of labor activism at one of the locations, rather than because of the plumbing problems the retailer cited, The New York Times reports. The union is asking the government agency for an injunction that would require Walmart to rehire the 2,200 workers who were temporarily laid off or affected by the closings.

Your "single site" unions would be anything less than a sham to neuter unions was that if businesses were also forbidden from expanding beyond a single site, so each location would have to be a totally independent business. So instead of the Walmart corporation, you'd have 11,496 independent retail businesses with no common ownership or management structure.

I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation?

I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?

So, yes, they killed him and were rightly imprisoned for manslaughter.

Another possible part of such collective agreements is that the employer will withhold union dues and hand them to the union no matter if the employee wants to join or not; to prevent the 'free rider' effect where some employees get the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for the representation (the appropriateness of this argument can be debated, but that's at least the stated intent).

In about half of USA ("right to work" states) such agreements are illegal, and in about half of USA unions can have such practices.

Murder does require intent, but it does not necessarily require an intent to kill that person; if you intend to "just" assault a person but they die, that's murder; if you intend to kill someone but kill someone else whom you did not intend to kill, that's murder.

"extreme indifference to human life" (again, intentional) is generally considered murder - e.g. if you'd intentionally burn down your neighbour's house without knowing or caring if anyone's inside, then if someone dies, it's considered murder. And UK, where the incident happened, has the concept of felony-murder where any death (even if accidental) that happens in the process of felony can be considered murder, because the felony that endangered people's lives was intentional.

I wouldn't have any trouble believing there were more attempted murders on the part of the anti-union side, or that this example happened differently than described, but what was described was clearly a (successful) attempt to kill someone.

“Shooting a gun”, or “shooting guns or beanbag rounds, etc”, or whatever is specific and relevant to the topic clarifies thought and improves our thought. The opposite approach occluded and damages our thought.

And since language is how we discuss politics, we need clear language in order to truthfully and honestly discuss politics.

:-)

To quote Orwell from Politics and the English Language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

“ Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

“ Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining).”

Well, that particular Wikipedia article is not a complete guide to the English language or the topic of understatement. Taken in isolation, it doesn't prove the existence of the sort of phrase in question.

I guess if this were in court, I'd lose my case because I didn't spend enough time researching.