I'm always confused by the framing of these articles. Are companies supposed to help unions form against them? If they supported unionization efforts, why not just save everyone the time and money and listen to employee demands without one?
It's like, you can love your wife as much as anyone, but you are not expected to help her get her own divorce attorney.
Yeah, companies are going to be against unionizing. That's the point of unionizing. That's the bar you have to reach.
That's such a bad analogy. Unions are only really brought up when people are being mistreated, underpaid, overworked, etc. People don't unionize when their needs are met (even if they should).
Your analogy doesn't work even if you also include the fact that the husband has been abusing his wife as much as possible without getting caught. What they are doing is making an active effort to make sure the wife can't get to an attorney at all.
I truly don't understand how so many can side with this abstract concept of a profit-seeking machine over human needs.
Poor Amazon might have to reduce their profits by 0.00001% to allow workers to pee while driving!
I think you are the one not understanding the situation. As you point out, amazon is a "profit-seeking machine". It makes perfect sense that they would not want unions. The wife-beating husband also is not going to want his wife to meet with a divorce attorneys and is certainly not going to take the initiative of hiring one for her.
Yeah it makes sense they don't want unions, but that's not the point of it. Anti-union behavior is still mostly illegal, isn't it?
There's a difference between expecting companies to help unions vs actively engage in shady behavior to avoid them.
In this case, we're describing what I consider a loophole, but it's still wrong (even putting aside the morality of it).
OP said the framing was weird, but expecting companies to not be that shitty is perfectly normal in my view. After all, we sometimes forget that at some point a human decided this was the right move.
The alternative is to normalize it and assume every company is the shittiest possible. On second thought that might be a lot closer to reality though.
Uhh, that's kind of my point exactly. If a husband is beating his wife, expecting him pay for her to have an attorney is such a weird expectation to have. If I am a loving husband, I can just stop beating my wife.
If Amazon can improve their working conditions, either willfully or through the enforcement of labor laws, whether or not they are anti-labor is kind of irrelevant.
In your analogy, the husband has a fiduciary responsibility to keep beating his wife. It's kind of a bad analogy.
If the situation was that the husband was obligated to beat his wife, forcing him to pay for a referee to control how hard he beat his wife would be a good thing.
Obviously it would be better if he just stopped beating his wife, but the guys in suits upstairs would be pretty upset about that... So let's limit the beatings in the meantime
At Amazon scales, you weigh in how much money you'll save by breaking laws and eventually getting a slap on the wrist fine versus all other alternatives. Unsurprisingly it's often much cheaper to be terrible to your employees and replace them endlessly, than it is to not be terrible. Especially once you make unionization nigh impossible.
It's definitely relevant to me. I would never work at Amazon because of these practices, even if they probably don't extend to developers (at least at the same scale).
Maybe it's not relevant for you but I'm sure it's relevant for many others too.
The government is compelled to argue against itself at trial. Manufacturers are compelled to inspect their own products. Banks are compelled to limit the money they lend out. Employers are compelled to allow unionization.
If we never compelled people to do something they didn't want to do, we would have no need for laws.
Besides, Amazon is allowed to fight unionization. The problem is using dishonest or abusive means to combat it. That means no classifying employees as contractors, no Pinkertons, and no Two Minutes Hate.
Are companies supposed to help unions form against them?
You're framing it as an inherently adversarial relationship. Owners of a company are allowed to coordinate, and do so by voting their shares to select directors and officers. Workers should be similarly free to organize in pursuit of their interests. In many cases, the interests of shareholders and labor will coincide because the workers understand a lot of things about the business that the shareholders (and indeed management in many cases) do not.
Like calling up the pinkertons and paying them millions is just the inevitable reflex of any fully evolved corporation lmao. Natural as breathing is for you and me.
It's like, you can love your wife as much as anyone, but you are not expected to help her get her own divorce attorney.
Yeah, companies are going to be against unionizing. That's the point of unionizing. That's the bar you have to reach.