Organizing is going on right now at Amazon locations all over the world, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer corporation. After decades of defeats in the courts, “Right-to-Work” laws and (frankly) bad leadership within the unions themselves, corporations have successfully been pushing down wages, benefits, safe working conditions and employment fairness itself to where typical workers cannot ever buy the home they live in and are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. But Amazon’s amazing innovations in worker (and taxpayer) exploitation might finally break down the barricades that has been holding back union organizing efforts for decades.
From The Guardian:
Just a few months after Amazon opened its first New York-based fulfillment center in Staten Island, workers announced on 12 December the launch of a union push with help from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
“Amazon is a very big company. They need to have a union put in place,” said an Amazon worker who requested to remain anonymous. The worker has been with the company for two years and was transferred to Staten Island when it opened in October 2018. “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”
Please read the article for more accounts of how workers are abused by Amazon.
I worked a union job when I was younger. The work was hard, they pay just above minimum, but I had excellent health benefits. I paid for my insurance through my unions dues, and that amount was commensurate with what I was earning. Health insurance was the principal benefit of having a union job.
When companies started up the the new “Silicon Valley” back in the 70’s, the owners had many incentives to provide safe working conditions, fair employment practices and good benefits like health insurance. One of these reasons was to prevent unionizing. They figured they would be better off paying for these things directly to avoid an organized institution representing workers and making them do so. It worked! It cost them less and allowed them to slowly drain away all the goodies over time as the workforce increased and diversified, and propaganda efforts against unions slowly eroded public belief in them.
I left my union job job to work in a Silicon Valley job with better pay and equivalent benefits. I eventually returned to college, got a degree, etc., and I have never since had anything close to the level of health care coverage or other employment benefits that I did back then.
Now the ethos of “Entrepreneurship” (another word utterly bastardized by our corporate culture) is, “Screw the worker, push down as hard as you can get away with.” It is an unfortunate truth that our population is never on board with anti-establishment ideas until they are affected personally, and people have been slow to realize that that as union membership has shrunk, pay, benefits and working conditions have gone down. What’s terrible is that “Unionizing” has become a bad word to so much of the population who have never had the benefits of a union. That is changing.
Unionizing is the most effective way to fight back against the Amazon trend. Here are some other industries ripe for “Disruption” by union organizers. From Jalopnick:
Tesla Employee Claims It's Still Preventing Union Organizing
In a complaint filed Dec. 5 with the National Labor Relations Board, the worker—whose name has been redacted under law—claims that Tesla, within the past six months, has “with, restrained, and coerced its employees in the exercise of rights” protected under federal labor laws “by maintaining work rules that prevent or discourage employees from forming, joining, or supporting a labor organization.”
The worker also claims that Tesla has maintained rules that prohibit employees from discussing wages, work hours, “or other terms of condition of employment.”
Did you ever wonder why it is considered bad form to discuss how much money you earn, even amongst fellow employees, even when you’re on an even footing and want to share that information? Now doing so is a reason to be terminated in many businesses.
I sincerely hope that the auto worker’s union steps up their efforts at the Tesla plant. That situation has gone on far too long.
Here’s an industry that has abused workers since the very beginning. From Polygon:
Why 2019 could be the year video game unions go big
Earlier this month, a chapter in the United Kingdom officially became a legal trade union in that country. Representatives of Game Workers Unite tell Polygon that they anticipate multiple public efforts to form unions at major studios in the United States and Canada in the coming year.
“By the end of 2019, you’re going to see some public campaigns,” said Emma Kinema, one of the co-founders of Game Workers Unite.
Programmers, animators and other workers in this industry are still forced to work ridiculous hours in order to meet “deadlines” for the reward of a small bonus and a career shortened by carpel tunnel syndrome, but not good health insurance.
Everyone benefits when unions force employers to raise wages and improve working conditions. As union wages go up, all wages go up. Other industries must match or lose the better employees. So even if you, like me, are not in a union industry, please support their efforts.
If Amazon can be unionized, it would be a huge victory that inspires many others.