From our Swindon Correspondent:
From the BBC
Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.
That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.
The union said it would challenge the results.
“Employers have a huge advantage in these situations,” she said. “They have almost unlimited money and almost unlimited access to the workers to bombard them with messages of anxiety and uncertainty and we see the result of that here.”
I’ve worked in a number of factories and warehouses in the UK. Most of them have little union membership, many have none. No-one cares about forming a union. Most union membership in the UK is in the public sector. Effectively, people have a monopoly employer, which is the government. I suggest this is why unions are so anti-privatisation. Once you have private schools and hospitals competing for people, who needs the unions?
The one defence of minimum which I think has some credibility is that it has replaced the need for unions.
Whether that is enough to outweigh the downsides is another argument.
Min wage? Not really. It’s not like the union could extract more money than what the market will bear.
No, you cannot maintain higher wages than you are worth—not by legislation, not by acquiring coercive intermediaries with pinkie rings. You can at most cripple the employer on which you depend.
In my part of the world, unions commonly charge dues as a percentage of basic pay. The percentage may be five to seven and a half per cent. That kinda prices them out of the market. Our employees just don’t want to be organised.
Most of the bargaining is done at industry level by something called a bargaining council, from the settlements of which individual employers are not allowed to opt out.
And then they wonder why our national unemployment rate is 35% (or was pre COVID).
Amazon, by the way, suddenly reversed field for this election and decided that voting-by-mail was too dangerous.
The unions don’t understand economics – wilfully – as for them it’s all about power and nothing to do with helping workers. In any event any unearned increase in pay simply ends up in higher land rents, especially for housing land. And I agree, that once you have very cheap very flexible and very reliable personal transport it is far far easier to set one employer against another as to who gets to employ you. Which then of course illustrates why there is so much effort going into CO2 and global warming lies – ‘they’ need to stop you having… Read more »