100% automation is a joke in any kind of reasonable time frame. The bosses use this to try and scare us into signing horrible contracts. Too much magic as Kunstler would say. By the time anything like that is feasible, society will have already totally changed to the point that what we fight for now will be long forgotten.
There won’t be any drones dropping of packages and Musk is selling vaporware with the Tesla truck.
Of course everyone loves Amazon and Tesla now, only their message is being told on media. This is where the Teamsters budget comes in. They have the money to spend on media to show a different story than the one that is being told by the Amazons and Teslas.
The RWDSU does not have that kind of power.
Indeed.
Some of us are supporting nurses unions, steelworkers unions, ect. with this message when they go on strike.
What story could you tell? The way Amazon treats their warehouse employees is well known. The easiest poll pull I can pull is from a Bezos quote from last year saying that 80% of the US population views Amazon favorably. On the other hand all unions combined were at 65% next year the highest they had been since 2003.
When two day shipping goes away those people will know to blame the teamsters and I can’t think of what story you could tell them that will make people on your side. During election season we had a senate race that cost $250mm for TV ads in one state that is the entire annual budget of the teamsters. A nation wide ad campaign costs $115k/30 seconds.
Tell them that a race to the bottom for working people’s compensation is a death spiral. And that maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late to stop it.
I wonder why health care isn’t more unionized. Its full of understaffing, mistreatment of existing staff and companies putting patient safety at risk due to it all.
Unions interfering with Amazon workers’ work seems a peculiar way to drum up support.
While a few people might fall for it, fantasy is unlikely to win over many. There is no race to the bottom.
I’m sorry, I didn’t explain myself well.
If the Teamsters were able to organize Amazon, and if, at some point in the future, Amazon workers were to enter into contract negotiations, with one of their negotiating tools being their willingness to go out on strike, and if they went out, and if other unions acted in solidarity with the striking Amazon workers, imagine how powerful that would be.
Union solidarity certainly seems to have helped with the Hunts Point Market strike.
Amazon is starting to seriously worry there aren’t enough people willing to work for them because of how badly they treat their workers and their high turnover rate.
At the beginning of 2019, Amazon employed approximately 650,000 people. Over the course of the year, they hired over 770,000 hourly workers—this basically equates to the entirety of Amazon’s work force leaving and being replaced—in the span of just one year…To sustain this churn of their work force leaving and being replaced, about 10 million people need to apply to work at Amazon every year, which is roughly 5% of the total work force in the United States.
Amazon is such a crappy place to work the US labor market may not be able to keep up with it.
And maybe you’ll say ‘then the free market will take over and raise wages, etc’. Yes maybe, but a union will also help improve working standards and reduce turnover.
Also this is done intentionally by Amazon supposedly, from the sounds of it to keep unions out. Make the job so shitty that there aren’t enough permanent workers who can unionize.
While this might not seem like an effective way of doing business, this emanated from the top—Jeff Bezos did not desire his hourly employees to stay employed for a long period of time, as he considered such a large and discontented work force to be a threat, Amazon’s former H.R. vice president told the Times.
Which is still not a “race to the bottom for working people’s compensation”, because there isn’t one. So telling them there is one is counterproductive.
Contributing to their high turnover rate is that a quarter of their workforce is seasonal. Yes, it’s conceivable for a company to have such high volume and high churn that they could run out of potential employees. But Amazon does rehire.
The question is not should, but will, and I expect the transient nature of the workforce doesn’t work in the teamster’s favor. I was much less interested in a union taking my pay at a short-term job than I would have been had I planned to stick around.
Which is what we’re talking about here.
Here’s an example of the robotic warehouse automation that I think Amazon would implement before it would allow a union to form. It’s a grocery store which packs customer orders in an almost 100% automated way. A few humans are involved, but it’s mostly for computer monitoring and for dealing with the few items which a robotic arm cannot pack properly. Unions wouldn’t matter in a warehouse like this since there are so few employees which would participate in a union.
