
Employees at Amazon's New NYC Warehouse Launch Unionization Push - aaronbrethorst
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees-at-amazon-s-new-nyc-warehouse-launch-unionization-push
======
nimbius
to the employees at Amazon trying to unionize: good luck...this is a hard hard
road in the US.

I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually
unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and
unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack
of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst
before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we
habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations
until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half
their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year.

Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six
of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the
property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in
and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.

~~~
schnevets
I'm glad to hear your story had a happy ending (with the notable exception of
those injured by the old owner's negligence). I do wonder how much better the
US economy would look if these kinds of investments against corruption were
more commonplace.

------
Rainymood
My gripe with the American unionization debacle is that it's a self-fulfilling
prophecy, you're the pillars keeping the problem standing. It's the same with
tipping. If everyone suddenly stopped tipping, then people would not have
enough wages to meet their obligations. This results in people not being able
to pay rent etc., however, this also leads to a walk-out of the servers that
don't want to work for under minimum wage anymore. The problem is that people
that are tipping and servers that are encouraging the tipping are keeping the
problem alive.

It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers,
yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their
obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you
are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.

That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of
technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of
course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and
wealth.

So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of
problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex
question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right
direction.

I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely
missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!

~~~
defaultprimate
What's the "problem" with tipping?

~~~
parthdesai
Why don't restaurant owners increase the food prices and pay servers a fair
wage? Opening a $100 bottle of wine or $400 bottle of wine requires same
effort, why do i pay extra for a $400 bottle of wine?

Now if you bring up the "service" provided argument, That is literally their
job. If they are getting paid a decent minimum wage or little bit more than
that, i think it's fair. Do you tip McDonald's employee? Do you tip your
garbage men? Do you tip the people who helped you at the clothing store?

~~~
leetcrew
I worked as a server in an American restaurant when I was in college (not long
ago).

my perspective as an employee: I definitely would remember which customers
tipped well. anyone who walked into the restaurant would at least get the
minimum treatment my boss expected, but I would often go above and beyond for
people I knew tipped well. I usually averaged around $12-15/hr after tips, in
a state where the minimum wage was $8.50 or so. this is just speculation of
course, but I really doubt I would have made that much money if it had to come
direct from the business (ie no tipping culture).

my perspective as a customer: tipping allows me to decide whether I want to
pay extra for good service. if I just go to some restaurant occasionally, I'll
just tip 18% or whatever and they at least won't spit in my food. on the other
hand, if I go to some place all the time, I can tip 25% or more and get great
service every time I go.

tipping allows people who care about good service to pay for it, and it allows
servers to allocate more of their time/attention to their best customers.
having experienced both sides of it, I'm really not sure what the problem is,
unless you're just visiting and don't understand the system.

~~~
davidcbc
In general none of this is really the case though. The people who tipped you
well were probably just good tippers. Now maybe you do make objective
judgments about the quality of service that you receive, but the general
population doesn't.

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tipping-doesnt-reward-
good...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tipping-doesnt-reward-good-
behavior-1301325538049)

[https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...](https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=articles)

~~~
leetcrew
I've read similar studies before. I certainly believe that customers aren't
objective judges of service quality, but I simply can't believe there is no
correlation between tips and service quality. everyone in the front of house
knows who tips well and treats them at least a little differently.

I suspect the causality is reversed. rather than good service being rewarded
by good tips, people generally tip the same amount wherever they go, and after
a while they start to get recognized and receive better service.

------
effingwewt
I just want to say, threads like these almost always make me embarrassed to be
an SE. For every level headed or compassionate comment, there are 10 more not
understanding the problem from the pedestal they don't realize they are
standing on. 'why not get another job?' 'no one is forcing them to work'.
Seriously sometimes its disgusting and akways frustrating that wome people
cant seem to even realize the bubble they are in.

Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these
workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered,
regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are
being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see
things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family
member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were
instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'

~~~
CryptoPunk
You're missing the point that people are making when they say "they have a
choice". They're not saying their lives are not rife with hardship and very
difficult choices. They're saying that their lives are not being made worse by
some employer somewhere offering them a bad job. You can't place the burden of
providing them with a living income on the first person who hires them. It's
just an immature way of assigning blame and responsibility, that resorts to
first association thinking. It's not rational/correct.

It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking
vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics
as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down.
Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It
eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone
any favors by reducing their employment options.

Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in
the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be
outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated.

An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well
as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-
interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it
will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic
control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by
idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically
unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their
wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or
contract.

------
stfwn
Good!

> [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot."

Freudian slips.

> She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees
> are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets.

Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by
which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new
major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with
tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at
profits.

> “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring
> their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team
> for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement.

Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’
at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably
“you’re fired.”

~~~
steve19
Why is it disgusting? In a lot of job people are expected to rush to get
things done. I know a lawyer who was fired because she didn't get a payment
executed by 5pm (it ended up costing someone a lot of money)

~~~
chimprich
It's disgusting because it's undignified. Workers should receive a decent wage
for work performed, not pressured to perform as fast as possible for gimmicks
in an ever quicker race to the bottom to see who can wreck their health the
fastest.

It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.

~~~
orbifold
They literally can’t afford it, they have razor thin margins. Their business
model depends on inhumane working conditions, which is why I would be glad to
see them go (not that this will happen, but at least in Germany they have
received some pushback against their practices)

~~~
chimprich
Amazon the company made a profit of billions this year. Amazon the store is
nowhere near as profitable as AWS etc. but they can still afford it. The lack
of profits in retail is from choices of going for aggressive expansion and
going for those thin profit margins. They don't need these sort of demeaning
gimmicks.

~~~
orbifold
They made no or almost no profit with their retail business for years, that
was the only way they could expand so quickly.

~~~
jsjohnst
Taking no profits in retail was a very intentional decision they made. Bezos
has talked publicly at length about it.

------
tootahe45
$19 an hour for warehouse work? I can see why they need to unionize instead of
just finding somebody willing to pay more, nobody else is going to pay that
for any comparable unskilled workload.

~~~
stfwn
You gave them a 2% raise, the article mentions $18.60. We don't know if this
is before or after tax, so let's say it's before.

If they work 40h a week, rent a single bedroom apartment at ~$1600 and the
cost of living for one is ~$800 this leaves 2976 - 2400 = ~576 a month without
special circumstances. In this case they don't have a car, drinks or meals
outside the home, going out (movies/etc.), alcohol, dog, sport membership or
travel and certainly no family. If they have _one_ family member at ~600 a
month they are down 24 dollars a month so they'd better not. [1]

Simply seeing that Amazon is doing so mindbogglingly well for itself that the
value of their assets has grown by 52.65% in 2017[2] and while still holding
~22 billion dollars in reserve[3], workers are not adding _some_ value (as is
required in a Keynesian capitalist system) but _an insane amount_ of value.
And it is all trickling up while workers cannot afford to have a family.

[1]: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Long-Island-NY-
Unit...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Long-Island-NY-United-
States)

[2]:
[https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/...](https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/balance-
sheet)

[3]: [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/256-billion-apple-cash-
amazon-...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/256-billion-apple-cash-amazon-
microsoft-google-combined/)

~~~
prepend
At this wage, it would be unwise to live alone in a single bedroom apartment
and would be much smarter, although more difficult, to get roommates to reduce
rent costs by 25-50%.

~~~
jgh
LOL this is such a typical HN reply. "Just get room mates". Come on, the
solution is to pay people so they can live a decent life and have a family if
they want to.

~~~
prepend
Why would it be my employers obligation to pay me what I think I need because
I want luxuries (like a $1600 apartment by myself)?

The typical HN reply may be trying to help figure out a problem like “if I
only have X dollars how can I maximize.”

Reality is that unskilled labor doesn’t get everything they want. Fortunately,
they get everything they need. A better example would be healthcare, but I
think Amazon’s fulfillment center workers have pretty good insurance.

~~~
jammygit
Its a luxury to live without 2 roommates? I mean, I guess they won't die if
that's what you mean.

~~~
prepend
Yes. Definitely. It’s not essential. And it costs more.

It’s not a Rolex, but I was pretty happy when I was finally able to live
alone.

I was thinking in terms of Maslow [0] as it’s somewhere, I think, around
esteem.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

------
tjpnz
Clearly the two are miles apart but I've long been curious if any of the
attitudes Amazon has towards Warehouse staff filter through to those in
engineering roles. I would be especially interested in hearing from any
Amazonians here.

~~~
sosilkj
the new york times has addressed this. the short answer is: apparently yes.

"[Amazon] is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable"

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-
amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-
wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html)

~~~
jkingsbery
I work at Amazon as a Senior Software Development Engineer. (Obviously, my
opinions are my own, and I don't speak for the company in any official
capacity.)

I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my
personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will
depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear
that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be
limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team
have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to
deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never
seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that.

At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have
people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do
because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with
train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many
people around.

------
deanCommie
When Amazon first launched they only had a few FC's in the US, and as a result
claimed they did not need to collect local taxes because they didn't have a
"presence" in all the states of their shoppers.

Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and
insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes.

Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open
local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed,
lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local
brick and mortar retailers to compete.

The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch.

The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon
is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and
automation (who isn't?)

If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's
quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.

And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with
millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as
millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars.

I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial
social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of
the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic
Income).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

~~~
krapp
>If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's
quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.

It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort
as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to
affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology
at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.

~~~
prepend
Actually, workers increasing the cost of labor will certainly accelerate
deploying automation.

There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of
humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.

Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center
unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as
to make robot deployment feasible.

But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.

I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity
and that’s directly in worker control.

~~~
krapp
>When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.

Assuming that's true for the sake of argument, I don't think the wage of the
average Amazon warehouse worker is anywhere _near_ that tipping point. 50 to
100 Kivas cost between $2 to $4 million and I guarantee they are not hassle or
maintenance free, and _all_ they do is move shelves around. Automating the
rest of the warehouse process adds orders of magnitude more cost.

------
BenjaminBlair
It's sad to read how the workers respond "they are talking to us like we are
robots". Commodified labor is what they are, ever since the Fordist model of
capitalism people have been gradually reduced to salary numbers and I for one
am happy to see people standing for their rights. Or to remind they have
rights, to begin with. Just I think there's not much left of the Left, a lot
of people make it less about the economy and more about their hurt ego, at
least that's what I think about postmodern leftists which I happen to know
quite a lot.

------
sascha_sl
If any company needs a strong union to push back against working conditions,
it's Amazon.

Or Tesla.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
>Or Tesla.

They are already the target of many union's campaigns (some aren't
straightforward, one can say) but for reasons that aren't related to working
conditions and are far more threatening to unions's future:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-
electromobility-j...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-
electromobility-jobs/switch-to-electric-cars-threatens-75000-german-auto-
industry-jobs-idUSKCN1J115L)

~~~
sascha_sl
Ah yes, I forgot the inscription on the architrave of the Reichstag actually
said "Der deutschen Industrie".

The amount of lobbying involved in keeping the german automotive industry
going despite them mostly missing out on recent developments is staggering.

------
intralizee
It appears a lot of people desire suffering in the comments. Surprised we live
in modern times and it's acceptable to not want others to be able to afford
decent living. The ability to own a house/place of their own and with
supporting kids if they choose. Minimum wage these days can make it impossible
to live such a healthy lifestyle; with how prices are going up on everything.

~~~
mychael
Can someone add a link to this ^ comment from the Wikipedia entry for "Straw
Man"?

~~~
intralizee
I wrote what I'm observing from the comments and without it being used in
anyway as an argument. Shouldn't you respond to me in a way of asking are you
making an argument before proposing the straw man argument? Or do you have
such poor foresight that you had to look like an aggressive jackass.

~~~
dang
Please don't break the site guidelines just because someone else did. They
explicitly ask you not to reply to egregious comments (a.k.a. feed trolls):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
CryptoPunk
This is why the US and other liberal democratic countries can't have nice
things. Anytime a company starts to produce huge returns for the economy in
the form of export revenue, it is chased out of the country by unionization
and other wealth extraction schemes, rationalized by maximally viral populist
ideologies and narratives, like anything based on class resentment.

------
jammygit
If they held a fundraiser to help them succeed, I'd chip in.

------
asianthrowaway
I'm surprised Bezos doesn't empathize more with the working class, especially
given his own humble origins. In fact, I find it hard to discern his
personality.

~~~
ForHackernews
Humble origins? Didn't he famously start Amazon with a $300,000 loan from his
parents?

I don't know what you consider humble, but my family does not have a spare 300
grand to gamble on risky investments.

------
chobeat
or every company in the USA given the surreal working culture and level of
exploitation that is common throughout the nation.

~~~
alecco
You obviously never been out of your first world bubble. Sure, there are some
industries in USA who work very hard. But you got options.

You don't get into finance/medicine/tech startups to have an easy work life
balance.

In many other industries American workers are considered lazy by Latinos and
Asians.

~~~
adrianN
Don't you think it's reasonable to compare a first world country like the US
with another first world country like France or Germany?

~~~
alecco
Are those Amazon competitors? Europe is highly regulated and unionized within
its borders.

Realistically think of Mexico, Canada, and China.

~~~
chobeat
Countries don't compete with companies. What are you even try to say?

~~~
alecco
>>> Don't you think it's reasonable to compare a first world country like the
US with another first world country like France or Germany?

I was obviously replying to that.

~~~
perfmode
It makes no sense.

------
apexalpha
Americans are always up in arms defending capitalism. But don't you realise
that in a free market labour should be allowed to work together? It is in
their best interest to do so.

~~~
jswizzy
Unions are mandatory to join it's not a free market you can't negotiate your
own pay.

~~~
apexalpha
Everyone in the union decides that it is in their best interest to use
collective bargaining. And hearing the stories from the bottom 30% of the
American workforce I can't say that they are wrong.

~~~
CryptoPunk
No, the majority of employees in a work unit make that determination. Majority
will overrides the individual's contracting rights. And it is not in people's
best interest to undermine the free market. It totally impoverishes people.
Laws robbing people of their freedom make society poorer. The US would still
have a manufacturing base if it weren't for laws subordinating employers to
unions.

