Good. Speaking as a foreigner, it's unbelievable what gets tolerated in supposedly the richest country the world has ever known. I'm sure the company can agree to let people go to the toilet or whatever and we will all roll on.
A lot of people are confused about the use of the phrase "richest country" so I will offer a definition. It's the country able to write the biggest check for something.
Per capita or other distributional measures don't come into the typical usage.
Huh? Among OECD countries, the USA is tops in Household disposable income[0] (which, yes, factors in social benefits like health care) and Household Net worth[1], while being about average in (relative) Household debt[2].
Relative to the vast majority of westerners, the Average American is absolutely killing it. It's a shame that so much rhetorical energy is expended in a constant attempt to gaslight Americans about their financial situation in comparison to the Europeans. The reality is that the average American makes almost 50% more than the average EU resident[0].
You're not disagreeing with my comment? Yes, America is very rich and a lot of Americans do well.
But since you posted these links, it's fair to note that they don't rebut some of the common critiques of American wealth:
- the OECD wealth figures apply to the average, not median, American. Our wealth is very unevenly distributed, so our average is not a good measure. (Also the $182k figure in the OECD doc is nearly double the $104k US Census counted[1].)
- as widely documented elsewhere, American finances are much more precarious due to the design of our labor markets, social safety net, and (especially) healthcare system. Americans in general have more of their financial security at risk at all times than EU residents. And we have to save for more big expenses (like college) than residents of other countries. So having more wealth does not directly translate into more financial security.
Given the budget deadlocks, the government shutdowns, the constant temporary budgets, I'm not sure that I would say that the US is "able" to write a check for much of anything, at least not without a multi-year debate and an election or two to decide the issue.
The US Government spent approximately $5 trillion in 2020 and will spend between $5 trillion and $7 trillion in 2021. Roughly $5 trillion of that is committed and generally not up for debate. That's the relevant range.
>> supposedly the richest country the world has ever known.
Which numbers are you looking at? Countries like Norway, Ireland, Qatar or Switzerland normally top the lists of richest countries today let alone ever known. The USA doesn't break the top 10 on the list published by the CIA. Only after removing alleged tax havens might it hit #9.
Such as median wealth per adult? USA is #22, behind the likes of Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada and Australia. Nobody debates that the US has an elite pool of the super-rich. They do run the show, but that doesn't make the country as a whole very wealthy.
It's the richest country in the world by GDP. Possibly also by wealth, though we're in hock, our fixed assets are worth ridiculous amounts. The wealth is extremely poorly spread out, however. So it depends on how you want to slice it.
Largest yes, but "richest" suggests some sort of per-person metric. A hypothetical country with ten billion people could have a very large GDP or asset pool while still being very poor.
Well how would you explain any of the Nordic countries if you thought there was a connection between GDP and Unionization? Norway has 70% of their workers covered by a Union contract and has a higher GDP per capita than the US. Along with some of the lowest levels of inequality of any nation.
Norway is running on a natural resources boom. They're basically Saudi Arabia but with lighter skin and more human rights (and arguably are more homogeneous culture, no 1000yo religious disagreements or 100yo arbitrarily drawn map lines to create issues like the middle east oil states have).
They openly admit they're boned if the wells run dry or oil goes out of fashion so they hedge by investing in everything else with the game of making enough money in a short enough time (off oil) that they can fund themselves with the appreciation on the nest egg after oil is no longer a money printer. (Saudi Arabia and other wealthy oil funded states are doing similar things to diversify/hedge against future income reduction)
Who knows. May be that's because Norway has a higher average IQ [1]. May be that's because Norway has a lower cultural diversity index [2]. May be cold climate is the factor: those who didn't work froze to death way before industrial era.
You are basically hinting that low unionization made the US rich but Norway got rich despite high unionization because they have higher IQ or it’s cold there. I would call that cherry picking.
>May be that's because Norway has a higher average IQ [1]. May be that's because Norway has a lower cultural diversity index [2]. May be cold climate is the factor: those who didn't work froze to death way before industrial era.
Here, the bit where you said that cold climate resulted in Norwegians have genetically higher intelligence than other countries.
I’m no dog whistler. I am very clearly and unabashedly making the assertion that there probably are benefits to having homogeneous culture. If you have any arguments against that statement itself, please make them instead of attacking my character.
It’s pretty anti-intellectual to shut down some hypothesis just because you don’t want it to be true.
Please also note two things that I am NOT saying: I am not stating that there are no benefits to a heterogenous culture, and I am also not saying that one type of culture is necessarily better than the other in all respects.
I’m just sad that there’s topics that are not really possible to have any kind of rational discussion about just because they might lead to un-comfortable conclusions or even if they sound like they might be too close to “forbidden thoughts” (even though they are not, I don’t think anything I said was actually “racist” and deserved your dog-whistling comment)
Another possible reason is that there are unions and then there are unions. The same way as bringing democracy to Libya does not magically make it prosperous [1].
So to bring this back to the topic at hand you think that the Amazon workers Union drive is on the "military intervention in Libya" end of the spectrum... For some reason?
It goes both ways. A reasonable union wouldn’t have a chance in the US because employers would run roughshod over them. I think German unions work pretty well because there are laws that give them a guaranteed position so they don’t always have to fight for survival. In the US they constantly have to fight which attracts people with extreme behavior. Being reasonable and moderate doesn’t get rewarded. You could say the same about US politics in general .
The SEIU in MN is the go to example around here; they got the government to consider personal care assistants (typically family members) to be considered public employees, automatically taking dues from their Medicaid benefits.
To say that that left a bitter taste in people's mouths around here toward them is an understatement.
Speaking as an American, I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years, and it’s one of the many tech companies that have emerged only in America. Europe hasn’t produced a single large tech company despite similar population size and an even better educated work force.
Maybe foreign countries should learn why America continues to create superstar firms in every industry.
I think innovation based on providing minimum wage jobs is not much of innovation, it is a story as old as humanity. The case is even worse for the low salaried work force of the gig economy where a job no longer even qualifies you for 'job' benefits.
If you think other regions aren't producing value in the tech ecosystem, nationalism is getting in the way of your eye.
Perspectives vary. That's what I made on my first job out of college in one of the bigger cities in the Midwest (not Chicago). It was fine for that. I didn't have extravagant tastes, but I didn't penny pinch. I had enough room in my budget that I could have saved probably a few hundred dollars a month.
It's worth calling out that my car was paid off (and a Prius so gas/insurance was cheap), and my rent was really low ($300 a month because of arrangement with the landlord). Work also covered almost all of my insurance, which I think is unusual for jobs in those range. If those things weren't true, I probably would have saved little or nothing unless I started cutting back and focusing on buying cheap food to eat instead of just being happy with cooking instead of eating out.
Home ownership is possible if you save for years, or if you can get a grant to help with the downpayment (had a friend who did that). It's not pleassant, but it's doable imo.
I don't think you could have a family on a single $15/hr income. Even at 2 $15/hr incomes I would think it was hard, but I don't have children so maybe they're cheaper than I think. Although no one has ever said their children were cheaper than they thought.
$15/h is a bit more than $30k per year. Taxes are quite low for this income bracket, so you get to keep most of it. As a graduate student I got to live on about half that much for 5 years. The rent on campus was low and the health insurance was cheap, but neither was free. Living in campus meant I didn't need a car, but in my last year I did buy one, a 13 year old SUV for $1350. Accounting for inflation, that would still be less than $2000 in today's money. Out of curiosity, I just checked on edmunds.com, and you can still get a 13 year old SUV of similar condition for a bit less than $2000 today.
So, I think it's possible to make a living on $15/h. Is it ideal? No.
Why are people "proud" of something that they had no involvement in, has no connection to etc etc? Like, were you involved with Amazon at all, other than perhaps being a shopper and maybe owning some stock?
Also, you are proud of a company that squeezes the living daylight of its workers? That treats its suppliers like crap? That is doing every trick in the book to discourage unions?
I'm proud that my country has a system that enables entrepreneurs to build new enterprises that rise to such heights without being torn down by outside forces. All of the reasons that enabled Amazon to be formed, protected, and grown to its current situation is a reason to be happy for the American economic and political system.
Take off your rose tinted glasses and join reality. This happened in America and not Europe because America allows these “superstar firms” to exploit the working class in order to achieve their success.
If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear.
If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear.
I wonder if this is actually true, looking at how much a company like Amazon rakes in. They have cash to spend. They could probably spend it towards living wages & safety measures for their workers & still have a hefty sum left over.
If the US introduced "proper workers rights and labor laws" today Amazon would probably be fine. In fact they might even be better off long term since it would greatly increase barriers to entry for any future competition.
The interesting (and unanswerable) question is what Amazon would look like today is those hypothetical "proper workers rights and labor laws" had been in place 20 years ago.
> If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear.
Whatever the rights and laws you consider are "proper", if that resulted in the death of all large corporations, I would argue such rights and laws are "improper".
I like corporations. When the pandemic occurred, basically the only thing that still worked like normal was my internet, Netflix, and Amazon. The Postal service was a piece of shit. So there's one data point!
Amazon pays its warehouse workers very well by European standards, so clearly that isn't the whole story. Where are the people demanding that European warehouse workers be paid the same wage as Amazon warehouse workers?
Do you think a European warehouse worker would feel "exploited" by the much higher wages Amazon pays?
No company is going to walk away from $20 trillion in GDP just because they have to pay their workers a bit more. American consumers are the biggest spenders in the world and Amazon needs to operate here if they want to snag a chunk of that.
Spot on. Who needs five weeks of vacation and years of maternity/paternity leave, or an affordable university and health care system? The important thing is to create technology companies with incredible ideas like "shipping items really fast" or "youtube but we call it Prime Video." And most importantly, to make it profitable by squeezing employees to the fullest extent of the law.
You would think all these highly educated Europeans would understand that it's better to dissolve their unions so they can work two jobs to support the kids they never get to spend time with. They don't seem to understand that the true meaning of life is to be be exploited by large corporations. So sad.
>> I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years
That is a very modern american trend. In the past, citizens were proud of inventions. Germans were proud of BMW cars. Americans were proud of American rockets. The Japanese were proud of their electronics. Now Americans are proud of having the best mall, the most profitable distribution platforms. Ok. Cultural values changes. Maybe I'm old but I would rather be proud of technological innovation than marketplace innovation.
but Amazon is a technological innovation. You don't think they have advanced logistics working behind the scenes? Their warehouses are full of robots! They made serverless computing a reality. Their topic of technological innovation just happens to be a shopping website.
It is a website where you buy things that are then delivered to your house. They may use all sorts of fancy tech in the back room to enable that function, but it is just a website for buying stuff. Being the best at something is very different than creating something actually new.
I wasn't aware that you previously had access to same-day delivery of basically any consumer product imaginable.
I agree that it isn't "sexy", in the same way that SpaceX or Google are "sexy", but that doesn't make it "not a technology company". There's plenty of sexy tech companies out there doing fuck-all for anybody but collecting nice VC paychecks.
If you're making the same argument as Peter Thiel, that there's a lot more 1-N (incremental) innovation now than there is 0-1 (brand-new) innovation, I agree and I think that sucks. I think that's why many people (including myself) cheerlead for Elon - he's actually leading companies doing cool sci-fi-style innovation.
Lol. Not everyone lives within sight of an Amazon warehouse. I ordered 4 books yesterday, prime + sold by amazon. Delivery estimate is by end of next week. That isn't all that different a service than was available in the 90s when I would have just called a store and had them mail me the product. And if you think Amazon carries a wide ranger of products, just look at any number of Chinese alternatives to see what 'selection' actually means.
Aliexpress sells pure tat, it's not exactly a home for trustworthy branded products. Amazon is getting worse by letting resellers of poor quality Chinese knockoffs commingle their products in amazon warehouses.
I live in the North of England, not exactly an urban hub.
As soon as somebody invents matter teleportation I'm sure we'll get a better service. For now, I'll keep considering amazon a best in class service for their scale. And it's definitely a technology company.
Innovation in wage theft or shirking of regulations/tax evasion is not innovation. Amazon built itself on ignoring expenses and processes everyone else has had to deal with for ages.
Props to em for having a logistics network, but if the abuse of their workforce is what keeps them competituve, I'd frankly prefer their collapse, as I'm not sure the distribution model we've settled on now is any better than what it replaced given the way it's adversely effected local brick and mortars.
I'd rather everybody have a shot at being a distributor than only a single monolithic company outcompeting by ignoring half the pre-reqs of business.
In obstructing the exercise of the right for labor to organize, and hiring union busters, even if plausibly deniable, or circumspectly justified through fiduciary duty to shareholders, course.
It's not a legitimate strategy. Labor has the right to organize. End of story. If they've gotten to the point of Union building, obviously, a non-trivial number feel they are being taken advantage of, and believe energy investment in collective bargaining is the way to go. That is their choice, and as much a free market exercise as anything else.
Businesses don't have a right to deal only with workforces who do not organize. They might be able to orchestrate things to prevent that momentum from building; but if you know it's happening, beyond stating your case, as an employer, it is your duty to remain hands off and let them sort it out amongst themselves. The American Laborer has been shortchanged long enough. The growth-at-all-costs economy is a crime against the nation as a whole.
I don't agree that any employee has a right to extort the owner - work stoppage, barring the company from hiring other labor, being impossible to fire. I philosophically disagree.
Then you also should support the practice of employers not extorting labor or the public at large, and there being a rough process to bring everyone to the table to rationally negotiate a consensus on where the ground rules are when a critical mass of individuals notice a common line of divergent expectations, yes?
That process is called unionization, and collective bargaining. The thing you don't like, is that Unions can also utilize network effects to a similar degree that owners and management can, even if it is now technically illegal due to the Taft-Hartley act to secondary strike, or wildcat strike. It is also, by spirit of the law, illegal to overly frustrate unionization efforts. So if one side is going to play fast and loose with boundaries, I wouldn't expect a great deal of sympathy when the other side does as well and you find yourself on the wrong side of it.
But take heart, don't be a dick, and be open with your workers, treat them with respect, and recognize they could be helping someone else so a replacement of higher quality is not a given and you'll likely never have to worry about a big unionization push! Realize that shareholders aren't the be all end all of the world, and that while they will flee at the first sign of rough times, a worker treated well will weather the rough times for the company, and the other people there.
Unions are the lesser of two evils. Too much paperwork and drama! Save everyone a bit, and don't make it worth their time. That's all it takes.
United Auto Workers union settles corruption probe with Justice Department
“During our five-year investigation, we have uncovered a startling level of corruption and fraud by a number of senior leaders of the UAW.”
The probe has led to the convictions of 15 people, including two past UAW presidents, three Fiat Chrysler executives and a former GM board member who was a union leader.
The United Autoworkers Union, one of the largest in America, robbed its members of tens of millions of dollars to enrich the corrupt union officials at the top.
Two of the largest public sector unions in the country lost more than 210,000 so-called "agency fee members" in the wake of last year's Supreme Court ruling that said unions could no longer force non-members to pay partial dues.
Even though unions were preparing for a mass exodus in the wake of the Janus ruling, the numbers are staggering. In 2017, AFSCME reported having 112,233 agency fee payers (compared to 1.3 million dues-paying members), but that figure dropped to just 2,215 in the union's 2018 report. The SEIU reported having 104,501 agency fee-payers in 2017 (compared to 1,919,358 dues-paying members), but just 5,812 of them at the end of 2018.
Unions can't get their members to voluntarily join and pay fees. If they really were so good, why do they need coercion to get people to join? All union membership should be voluntary. Convince people to join and pay fees by their own free will, don't force them by law or social pressure.
Are there some one-off cases of bad situations at Amazon? Yes, for sure. Just as unions are not a panacea, neither is every warehouse in an 800,000 person company.
At this point, you are simply arguing in bad faith. Nobody is claiming that unions are a solution for everything. But companies like Amazon go to extraordinary lengths to prevent unionization, while at the same time treating their employees like shit. And Amazon is not alone in this. In the US, companies are generally hostile to unions. And they make sure they fund anti union politicians too.
Unions have their problems, nobody is disputing that. Even with all their problems, it is better to have unions than not have them at all.
Also, it is not one off case with Amazon.
Have you thought about what a person can do with 200B dollars? Why would one need that much money? Sure, if they made it without fucking up the environment, without treating their employees badly, without bending tax rules etc etc, then more power to them. But that is not the case, is it?
In combat sports, there are weight categories and there are strict rules. Know why? It provides a level playing field. In today's capitalism, there is no level playing field. It is like a 100 pound man (workers) fighting a 300 pound man (wealthy companies with politicians in their pockets). If you want to continue to argue that unchecked capitalism is the way to go, it is upto you.
>Maybe foreign countries should learn why America continues to create superstar firms in every industry.
I must have missed those American high speed rail or 5G companies, and if I take a look at global construction firms I see a lot of Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and South Korean names, but barely an American one. The US has really been great at putting apps on our phones, but the country kind of forgot how to built things in the actual world. Which by the way at this point manifests in a very physical way in the infrastructure of large American cities.
The US might be the first country where affluent upper middle-class people get their groceries delivered by drone within the same day, but it seems to be forgetting how to built roads and subways for everyone else.
To take one of your points, America doesn't need high speed rail. There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable[0]. They are a huge suck of government funds, avenue for corruption, and ultimately are boondoggles that are not as efficient or needed as planes and busses. Especially in a country like the USA that is so spread out, very few places make sense for rail lines.
>There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable
Neither are nuclear power plants, is that an argument against them? I guess in the US nowadays it is which is why its nuclear infrastructure is decaying as well. Many of the arguments in the paper seem terrible and seem to be in reverse fashion. It says that gas is cheap so rail is unattractive. Absolutely right, but that's terrible, so make gas more expansive with a carbon tax while you're at it. It says American cities are designed around the car. That's terrible as well, redesign them. Any serious argument about high speed rail looks decades into the future anyway, so you might as well fix cities while you're at it.
Planes aren't a substitute for the kind of benefits that rail gives you. With rail you can get from one metropolitan area, centre-to-centre to another one over medium distances in two hours. That's terrible with a plane or a car.
Also, the US overall is spread out but many of its population centers are not. The North-East seems like a great corridor for rail, covering 50 million people give or take?
> Neither are nuclear power plants, is that an argument against them?
I'm pro-nuclear, but as a society we need to think hard about what things we subsidize. Subsidizing says, "We acknowledge this is not self-sustaining, so we will make taxpayers pay for it, enriching some subset of society at the expense of others."
So is nuclear, which by your admission is unprofitable, the best way to get clean energy? Or are there things we can do to adequately price externalities caused by other forms of electrical generation? Why not wind or solar?
To circle back to rail - I'm definitely not convinced that we need to invest insane amounts of time, money, and physical space to high-speed rail. The northeast corridor already has rail - does it need to be a bullet train? Would it be better to invest that money in clean(er) airplanes that use less carbon? What about electric cars, electric busses, and something exotic like the hyperloop?
Just parroting that "High speed rail good! All other travel bad!" does not make it so. We have ample evidence that high speed rail is not the panacea that proponents make it out to be. In fact, the governor of California recently cancelled their attempt at a bullet train from LA to San Francisco because it was a giant over-budgeted disaster. https://reason.com/2019/02/14/californias-bullet-train-proje...
Speaking as a senior software engineer, where I develop software to bring food to my table, Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up under anti trust rules.
Amazon as a business is about rent seeking and taxing internet commerce and engages in predatory monopoly behavior. They are actively suppressing tech competition and free market activity in e-commerce space.
The Amazon workers union should expand to cover he entire country.
Anyone that thinks this is about free market and Amazon is just a private company doesn’t have a clue. Amazon is quasi government actor now, where they are the only game in some small company towns. Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post and exerts undue influence on many politicians. Amazon has contracts with CIA and military.
As a software engineer, do you want a future where Amazon is the only employer and can undercut the salary to their liking?
I ask every amazon delivery person that comes to my house how they like working for amazon, I've not got one single negative remark! Amazon delivers on time mostly and even through weather. USPS on the other hand which has multiple unions, don't delivery if there's a dusting of snow on my drive even though their motto says that doesn't stop them... I've also asked many usps employee's what they think of their job, and overwhelmingly they are bad reviews... ?_? I am curious the outcome of a unionized amazon will be, but I sure hope there's a competitor that can swoop in and still deliver to me in a timely fashion
Alternative interpretation: unionized employees feel more secure in their job and therefore will be more honest when random people ask them about it. Or maybe they didn't even know where to start. The only people I've ever heard have no complaints about their job were people who had so many complaints that they put on an easy-going front to avoid dumping their problems on someone who's trying to make small talk.
It's like when you're teaching and the students don't understand a thing you said, they'll have no questions. It's always the kids who understood 75% of what you said who has a question. One of the goals of every liberation movement (labor, feminism, racial justice, etc.) is making people aware of their shared struggle and it's causes. The Teamsters are far from radical but the fact that things can even be negotiated at all has a way of making people aware that decisions of management are not forces of nature.
I've never once told a customer at any job that I worked at that I dislike my job because while I didn't like my job, I needed my job and didn't want anything to put that in jeopardy, like my boss finding out I told someone I don't like my job.
Why would those workers have any incentive to tell you the truth? Esp. since you were probably recording them with a doorbell surveillance device owned by their employer as you asked ...
You've got to be a paid shill or blissfully ignoring.
If you were making a low wage and easily replaceable would you bitch about your job to random people who asked you if you liked it or smile and say its great?
The people doing deliveries aren't the ones working in the warehouses (which are unionizing). Most of the delivery drivers work for third party contractors.
If the warehouse workers were happy with the status quo, why would they be trying to unionize in the first place?
> Because Alabama is a right-to-work state, there is no such requirement that a worker in a unionized workplace pay dues.
I think that is incorrect. AFAIK, you do not have to pay the portion of union dues related to political activity, but you do need to pay the dues relating to workplace bargaining activity.
Naturally, the union accounting shows that well over 75% of the dues go to these activities that you have to buy with dues, even in a right-to-work state.
That bargaining activity component is called an “agency fee”, and companies also can’t make it mandatory in right to work states. You may be thinking of public sector unions, where mandatory agency fees were often assessed until they were ruled unconstitutional in 2018.
I find it confusing because of all companies employing warehouse employees Amazon pays the highest $15/hr minimum wage and provides health benefits on top.
Amazon is asking for $15/hr to be made national minimum wage, but getting no support right now. Tell me again why isn’t $15/hr minimum wage getting any support?
$15/hr is the median wage for everyone in some States, and not that far below the national median. It would destroy businesses that can't afford to subsidize that wage with high-margin tech business on the side like Amazon can.
It is extremely distortionate to set the minimum wage at the current median. There is not remotely enough margin available to make that reallocation possible without radically reducing income for the majority of workers either through job loss or income reduction.
There are arguments that the Amazon is pushing down warehouse worker salaries [0,1] (i.e. $15/hr is certainly not the highest warehouse worker wage).
I read this campaign mainly as a public relations move in attempt to undermine union bargaining for substantial material demands, and am happy to hear other views.
National minimum wage does not make sense because cost of living varies per state; so small buisness would get hit hard in some states. Now, if Amazon wants to pay $15/hr nationally then good for them!
Just a reminder that the current minimum wage is below the poverty line in all 50 states.
Those small businesses that would get "hit hard" by a $15 minimum wage? We're indirectly subsidizing those businesses with our federal taxes; those businesses are value-destroying enterprises.
(Edit: It's not just small businesses getting this taxpayer subsidy. Walmart and other large employers similarly transfer wealth from taxpayers to their shareholders by relying on government welfare programs to allow their employees to continue to do their jobs. In a very real way, Walmart dividend checks are paid in part by US taxpayers.)
I'd think that's the point behind most push from big business for a higher min wage. For them, it's another form of regulatory capture. Amazon or McDonalds can afford $15 nationally, but small mom-and-pop firms?
This seems to be such a hard concept for people, in Canada cerb caused a a lot of people to say “but that’s more then I make/I can’t pay people more then cerb” - then maybe your business isn’t viable and should stop?
