not necessarily. a large enough (100 warehouse) union presence would have the same effect that coal unions had in great britain in the sixties.
Just the threat of a strike would be enough to send your stock to the barbers chair for the week. Suppliers would be reluctant to extend long lines of credit to you during a threat, and your contract network of logistics would likely concentrate efforts to diversify from you in the nearterm.
the very real (and scary) outcome from the unionization of Amazon is that it will spill into other sectors that have spent the last four decades crushed under boot, namely trucking and logistics.
EDIT: the reason i believe unionization of the trucking industry is scary is that most logistics companies have operated for so long as bath-faith actors with impunity, they no longer have any experience or knowledge of how to properly negotiate a union contact in the face of a strike. In that they have become so divorced from the reality of fair labor practices, a strike is almost certain to occur and while labor demands may be reasonable, the response from entrenched corporate interest is likely to be petulant and childish.
The presence of a union does not threaten anything unless everyone believes they could strike if they wanted to. That remains to be seen especially when the union is not integrated with a giant national network that can ameliorate financial hardships in one place with dues in another, and the union is new.
That they can strike, and scab labor is not a viable option. My daughter did a stint at an Amazon warehouse. She was basically productive “enough” on day 1.
If you have a large enough willing labor pool, and a job that can be trained in one day…strikes basically are just bad PR. Amazon can weather bad PR.
Different areas have some interesting laws about not being able to fire unionized workers who are carrying out a codified labor dispute with no contract and other laws about not crossing the picket line.
You generally may not be able to fire unionized workers on strike (depending on what it’s regarding) but at least in the US it’s not against the law to hire temp workers during a strike. The only power a strike has is shutting down operations, if the strike doesn’t do that because of scabs, it’s essentially ineffective. In my opinion any labor union that calls a strike that doesn’t result in work stoppage is not helping its workers.
There has never been a better time for consumers to show solidarity with the workers that provide them with goods and services than now. The threat of widespread streaming subscription cancellations seems to have been a great help to IATSE during their recent negotiations - I hope to see more of that type of action / threatened action
My answer was in regards to practicalities, not political aspirations. Your answer is projecting a political struggle unrelated to my comment.
Strikes impact businesses that supply goods and services to consumers. They have impact, and it's this impact that gives them power.
If there wasn't an impact on businesses and consumers then they wouldn't be scary. If your political leanings are pro-worker then you probably agree and are happy that a strike is a scary prospect for consumers. Otherwise the strikes could be ignored.
I think the thing I'm saying is that consumers and workers are effectively the same group. Trying to separate "consumer" concerns from "worker" concerns is at least as political an idea as suggesting they should welcome a chance to show solidarity.
I think you're wishing they were the same, ideologically. I'm not judging your aspirations, but I am a consumer and I am certainly not in the same socio-economic group as Amazon factory employees - even if I do support some of their struggles.
> I am certainly not in the same socio-economic group as Amazon factory employees
This is exactly the point. Socio-economic groupings ARE political. You feel your interests are different from someone making 30k/year, because of the wedges driven into the working class, but in all likelihood you have much more in common with a warehouse worker than you do with someone whos income comes entirely from their ownership of amazon. Do you worry about losing your job? How many months unemployed before you lose your house? These are things that ownership class people don't have to worry about, but you and an amazon warehouse worker both do.
Ah, well I wrongly assumed you worked. You’ve moved into the owning class and your interests have been severed from those of working people. Congrats, you’re now living off the efforts of others, and caring about those people’s fate is now fully optional for you.
You worked, you gained capital, now your capital earns you money. But to pretend that’s anything other than you owning the means of production while other people’s labour does the actual production is just a lie. If you believe you deserve the fruits of their labour because of your past efforts, that’s one thing. To pretend it’s your money producing for others… well money doesn’t produce
I built things, and now people use those things to build more things. You're the one pretending that means aren't an integral part of production. How exactly can labor be performed without means?
You're making a very basic error here in devaluing the past work of others. If you correct your error, your rather strident ideology will likely disintegrate.
Think about it, maybe take some time and build something useful that helps others. Get back to me later.
Labor is performed physically. That is the method in "means and methods." Means can amplify and enable labor not possible and or practical otherwise.
Having built a means, and let's be real here: You could have funded the labor that created whatever means we are discussing here. That's not the same as actually building a thing. Now, many who do fund things participate directly. That's great!! (and something I believe makes better "things.") You could have done that too, and or both!
Let's talk about past work:
Say we have someone who made a tool, a means to better or possible labor. The product of their labor is some degree of wealth, right?
And while we are on the topic, wealth in the most fundamental sense, is defined by time; namely, how much of a person's waking time is purposed for them. Wealthy people self-purpose most of their time, if not all of it. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them.
One product of labor is the wealth needed for people to address cost and risks associated with continuing to exist. A food store, as an example, created with tools is wealth in that a person having that food store can choose to spend their time differently, purpose it, because the demand for food is met in advance, reducing cost and risk, which makes them able to afford to purpose their time.
They could invest that in better tools, means, or pursue the arts, or just relax, play, whatever. That's what wealth actually does.
Now, having created wealth, this person frees time and or depending on the means created, may free many other people's time. That's worth something, right?
I think so.
Now, let's carry on and say this person creates more tools, means with their bounty of time. That's an investment in themselves as well as others and the benefits are reduced costs and risks for them and everyone around them. More people are more wealthy, which frees more time and with that time comes more creation, innovation, arts, culture, the works.
That society, as it develops, becomes wealthy and can advance.
Notice I don't have money in any of that?
The reason I don't, is to highlight what wealth is, how it's distributed, and what it all means for the people involved. The actual work, wealth created, wealth maintained (it comes with it's own costs and risks), are all centered on labor.
It's not about money at all. Money, in the sense that matters to us continuing to exist here as people, doesn't actually do anything meaningful at all!
(this is why many people have strong, negative feelings about people born into or marrying into money)
Money permits things like leverage, usury, and other exploitations as well as decisions about who gets what and why. It does not, in and of itself, actually create wealth. Gamblers and money changers deal in money to get more money and when that's all boiled down, it's trading favors and or committments.
Take our means, tool creator makes a lot of tools. They could just share them, and many benefit. They could loan them out in exchange for things they value, and or could require others do, say, or avoid things desirable to the creator of the tools. And if that were unjust, others would simply make their own tools.
'nuff said there.
Now, let me visit wealth and society one more time.
A great many people in our society today are poor. Very large amounts of their time remain purposed for them. No matter our station in life, we all must deal with the cost and risks associated with continuing to exist here. Ideally, one's labor yields enough wealth to fund continuing to live and even more ideally, free time to persue one's own interests.
Today, roughly half of labor in the US does not yield enough to fully fund continuing to exist and or show up for work!
That scenario, when viewed through the lens I put here, is unjust and not equitable, nor sustainable. Say our tool, means maker demands large amounts of the fruits of others laboring with the means and or tools. And say they keep it to themselves, leaving most others to labor and remain poor in that very little, if any, of their time is available for them to purpose, build their own wealth, live a little.
How does that make any sense?
The answer is it doesn't. Not in the basic, human sense we all are forced to recognize and deal with.
You are asking others to value your past work as justification for your current position in life, when the real question is more like why so many remain poor, despite arguably fantastic past works?
Money is why. Money does a lot of good, and a lot of bad too.
Funding the making of a thing is not making the thing. Labor is what makes the thing.
Funding the making of a thing is a decision to make the thing, and money is one way we make those decisions. Others might be use or threat of force (having the army make people make things), or divine right (god says others have to make things), nobility (we are more qualified to determine who makes the things), and so forth.
With me so far?
Whatever it is you have done, if you did it directly through labor, or had a hand in it as part of shared labor, does not matter. The fact that you labored does matter, and it all has value. And that's great!
Funding things also has value, but it's not the same thing, and it's not an act of creation in the basic sense of creating wealth, and this is a point the other person in this discussion made.
A point I am making is valuing past works too highly actually does harm to society overall, and I've explained why and how that can be.
You do, when you speak of value. Money is how we measure value. Your monologue is a bit like talking about how tall things are and saying you haven't mentioned a unit of measurement and therefore the meter somehow a separate concept.
Value exists independent of money. Money is a way to measure value.
> Today, roughly half of labor in the US does not yield enough to fully fund continuing to exist and or show up for work!
Or they've chosen to volunteer their labor, as I do, because they don't need more income. Or they're studying to increase the future value of their work.
> The actual work, wealth created, wealth maintained (it comes with it's own costs and risks), are all centered on labor.
This isn't true. Perhaps I'm an artist and I live through selling my inventory. Perhaps I'm living on income from a hit app I published. There's plenty of wealth that isn't centered on current labor at all, especially in the field of technology.
> You are asking others to value your past work as justification for your current position in life
No, I'm not. The valuation has already occurred, voluntarily. I haven't asked; rather others have offered and I accepted.
> Money is why. Money does a lot of good, and a lot of bad too.
Money is a measure of value which exists independent of any currency system. Money isn't a why, it's just how we measure, and an intermediary form to allow value to be fungible. Instead of trading my hammer for my living expenses, I can trade my hammer for money. Money doesn't create the value of my hammer, it just measures it.
> Funding things also has value, but it's not the same thing,
I don't agree. Investment is a type of work like any other. Funding is, at its core, a value exchange. If what you say is true, and wealth is always a measure of labor (and I don't think it is) then it is exactly the same thing -- using money as an intermediate measurement.
> A point I am making is valuing past works too highly actually does harm to society overall, and I've explained why and how that can be.
I don't think you've made this point at all, much less having explained it.
Labor is how we create wealth. It is the only way we create wealth.
Wealthy people get to purpose more of their time than poor people do.
Time is money, money is time, OK?
Wealth can be assigned a value in terms of money.
Now, those who created the means expect to be valued and for the means to have value.
The basis for that value is the additional wealth per labor unit the means makes possible. As for their value... let's just call that a promise or suggestion of mutual benefit in the future and leave it there.
A great creator, innovator will make others around them wealthy, unless they require too much for having done the work. This is not hard to see.
With that in mind, let us further assign a dollar amount to all of that. Once we do, then we also assign dollar amounts to labor so they may be traded with greater efficiency and or flexibility.
With me so far?
When the dollar amount of that past work output is valued high, it can be said the greater percentage of wealth created by labor goes to those who own the means, tools.
Value too high, and labor fails to deliver enough value for the laborers. It may cost them more to perform the labor than said labor delivers to them.
And there is the harm done.
It may make more sense for laborers to abandon that expensive, though productive means, and secure more value per unit of labor, despite being less productive, and or potentially non compliant. They may simply employ the means and pay less, or nothing too, creating conflict.
Regardless of what the law is, or any of us may say or feel, the human costs and risks always present themselves and must always be met, or the people cease to exist.
Given how undesirable ceasingbto exist is, society often makes up the difference via subsidy, assistance of various kinds. This mostly assures more compliance, and does cost everyone.
And there you have increased crime, black markets of various kinds driven by people whose labor fails to generate enough wealth relative to their costs and risks associated with their existence and or showing up for work.
Taking money out of all that would look the same, just without the dollars.
It might look like that owner of the means having a large food store, or requires too much compensatory labor for their benefit, leaving the others in town poor, in that their labor fails to meet their collective costs and risks, which leaves them time poor, and therefore not wealthy, despite a means of being more wealthy available.
> Labor is how we create wealth. It is the only way we create wealth.
No. As noted above, wealth is also generated from capital. Sometimes in conjunction with labor, sometimes not.
> Wealthy people get to purpose more of their time than poor people do.
No. Everyone has the same amount of time in a day. A better way to phrase this is that some people produce more wealth per unit of time than others.
> Now, those who created the means expect to be valued and for the means to have value.
No. I would say that the means are valuable, objectively, and independent of the desires of their creators. The focus on expectations here is irrelevant.
> And there is the harm done.
No. The value is not a subjective moral figure, it is actual. It represents actual utility, actual demand.
There is much greater harm done by ignoring these types of objective economic truths -- the kind of harm that reliably destroys societies and causes mass famine and death.
> or the people cease to exist.
This is why we have what's called "tax and spend capitalism," where we take a significant portion of gains and use them to provide a safety net.
I've paid roughly half of all of my life's production in taxes, and much of this goes to providing these safety nets. I've additionally written grants and made other large gifts to support others. The amount I have left to live on might be less than 10% of the value of my work product.
Your suggestion that we might need to ignore basic economic realities to provide for others simply doesn't follow. We don't need to do things that way and when we have, historically, it has never succeeded.
>wealth is also generated from capital. Sometimes in conjunction with labor, sometimes not.
No, it is not ever created with
capital.
Capital does not have agency. It is a vehicle for the product of labor. By itself, it is nothing.
This can be confusing and hard to see. Take it back to basic principles and it becomes much easier.
>Everyone has the same amount of time in a day. A better way to phrase this is that some people produce more wealth per unit of time than others.
I do not believe you understood.
Our lives are roughly divided into thirds. One to sleep, one to work, one to live.
When costs and risks are high, more time is required to meet them, and when unmet, people cease to exist.
Poor people's lives are basically two thirds work, one to sleep. Essentially, very little time not purposed for them. They work all the time and have no choice in the matter.
This can also be expressed as having little to no free agency.
Very wealthy people have almost none of their time purposed for them. This can be expressed as having almost entirely free agency. They may work all the time, or be at leisure. Their choice.
But of course it is. If I spend a year writing a book, ownership of the book is now capital. I may sell copies of the book (in digital form to keep things clear) for decades to come. The capital resource in this case generates income without additional labor on my part after its construction, and no labor on anyone else's part, ever.
> I do not believe you understood.
I do understand.
Your perspective stems from a measure of free agency. Mine stems from a measure of relative value.
Your perspective is useful when reasoning about moral issues related to overwork. For example, we should provide for those who cannot provide for themselves - so they do not cease to exist as you put it.
It is not so useful when reasoning about how to value the actual work output.
It is capital. It is also a means. And it is a book.
Now you sell copies, right?
Capital did not sell copies. You did, and you had to labor to do that.
In the digital case, literally thousands of people and their labor copy, distribute and take payment for your book. It takes a lot of people to maintain that network your book is on.
Capital can amplify labor. That is a tool, device, mechanism.
Capital can compensate others for labor too.
What it does not do is create. That is what people do. That is what labor is.
This is reductio ad absurdum. According to you, all things are labor because they somehow intersect with a world in which labor is performed, no matter how slight the effect.
In reality, I do not labor when someone orders something from my online store. The process is automated. The income is passive.
In fact, according to your line of argument, capital investments are labor too. Even if we accept the argument (which I don't) it utterly counters your position.
>Everyone has the same amount of time in a day. A better way to phrase this is that some people produce more wealth per unit of time than others
How we value labor, other things matters.
Say we talk about the people who make our shit dissappear, cleaning up, etc...
Much of this work is done at a loss to those who labor to do it. They are poor, having to labor most all of their time.
Without them, the cost to us is much higher. Having to manage our own shit, where to store it, who takes it away, amd so forth. Doing that work would deny us our time, we would be less wealthy, and or need to pay more to have these things done, make arrangements, and forth.
Further, our current society is one that requires, does not even provide for people not doing that work. Essentially, no matter what any of us says, a large number of us will be doing that work.
How then is that work not valued well enough to provide for those doing it? We all have the same hours, and theirs very seriously improve our ability to make use of our time each day.
Which is it?
Do we value them enough to insure their labor is not performed at a loss?
Or, if we are to subsidize their labor, and any reason is fine, how come it must be so painful, looked down upon, seen as some crime or failure to obtain this subsidy?
You write about basic economic realities.
The fact is, how we value things, why we value them matters and those valuations are not physical laws. Economics is not an objective science either.
Perhaps we place too high a value on some things and people, while ignoring value on other things and people.
None of this says we need to work for others, but it does strongly suggest we could be valuing things a bit differently and arrive at a much better overall outcome for people than we see today.
>I've paid roughly half of all of my life's production in taxes, and much of this goes to providing these safety nets. I've additionally written grants and made other large gifts to support others. The amount I have left to live on might be less than 10% of the value of my work product.
Without specifics, and there is no need for them here to be clear, your emphasis on capital as means to create wealth speaks to your work product actually being compensation for a number of other people laboring to create wealth, in addition to whatever labor you contributed.
What really happened there is a lot of labor was performed, wealth created and the laborers compensated for your use of their time for something you then own.
At no time did capital create anything. Labor did.
As for paying for safety nets, of course! A lot of people labored on your behalf, and ideally their compensation for that labor was enough for them to meet their costs and risks and maybe have some left over for their own purposes.
A lot of people labor as much as they can, and that does not happen. This makes those safety nets quite expensive! And it can be objectionable. When the product of labor is high enough to accumulate capital, should hose actually creating it at least not be doing so for less compensation than it costs them to perform the labor?
Secondly, why should others subsidize all that? They have their own purposes to get after.
>Your suggestion that we might need to ignore basic economic realities to provide for others simply doesn't follow. We don't need to do things that way and when we have, historically, it has never succeeded.
I made no such suggestion. What I did do was clarify both the nature of wealth and how is is created.
I then spoke to value and potential harm, and benefit. One harm is mentioned above, and that is the overall increase in everyone's cost and risk due to underfunded labor.
As a consumer my concern is the products I order are delivered when I expect them to be delivered. I am not sure how that crosses with Amazon worker unionization concerns. If Amazon can satisfy my consumer concerns with or without unions, I’m satisfied. They are obviously doing that now. Showing solidarity…what benefit does that give the consumer? It just means sacrifice for me.
If you're unionized, collective bargaining. Unions that are stronger are able to better support each other. The better deal amazon's workers get, the better deal you can get.
Sure, if you're a high-payed tech worker, your own wage is pretty disconnected from the warehouse worker market - but not completely. And I bet you have friends and family who's wages are MUCH closer linked.
The impact on tech worker wages is probably negative because unionization is associated with lower profits. Especially for tech workers who derive the majority of their income from equity.
Highly unionized countries do not tend to have a higher per-capita income across all socioeconomic demographics when compared to the US. It's not clear that unionization is an overall net positive for higher income individuals.
Indeed. Granting a one group small ownership stake swings some of their allegiances towards ownership and away from labour. I would ask myself what cost that small slice of ownership you’ve been granted (play on words intended) comes at to the people around you. To me it doesn’t seem very different from buying off union leaders. Are you that easily bought?
I.e. maybe supporting unions leads to a smaller gap between your tech salary, and a warehouse worker. That’s still going to benefit you, in that the people around you are less desperate, and have more energy to put into their communities, etc.
Your rhetoric is disgusting and regrettable, but worst of all it's simply inaccurate. I support the right to unionize regardless of whether it benefits me personally.
It seems the area where you and I differ is that my commitment to telling the truth regarding the various economic ramifications is more important than my political ideology.
I do have a political ideology, but so do you. My overarching point as been to insist that socio-economic class, consumer and worker separation, and stock granting are as political ideas as worker solidarity and class consciousness. But you’re calling that untruthful, and ideologically motivated, and disgusting rhetoric, so I guess we’re probably done
I'm calling out your projections. Your posts are riddled with inaccurate blind guesses about me. None of what you're saying is correct, as a simple matter of fact.
I encourage you to take a break and think about your perspective. If your points are worth making should be able to make them without these ad-hominem guessing games.
Nothing about me is relevant when it comes to objective facts such as the way unions impact economies.
>If your points are worth making should be able to make them without these ad-hominem guessing games.
>Your rhetoric is disgusting and regrettable
This you? Feels like a bit of 'projection'.
The poster you're replying to is making general commentary about class consciousness between the consumer/worker dichotomy. You view yourself as separate from this. Okay great. His points really aren't specific to you, even in statements like "That’s still going to benefit you, in that the people around you are less desperate"
Replace <you> with <higher income worker> if that helps engage with the content. I have a feeling, though, if you view his argument (a very basic 'a rising tide lifts all boats' one) as disgusting, you're probably not very interested in trying to understand his point of view in the first place.
No, the poster I'm replying to is obsessively making guesses about who I am as a person, rather than commenting on the subject at hand. They've made a series of guesses. They guessed that I work and appealed to my identity rather than form a meaningful argument. After discovering that I don't work, they made a series of other inaccurate guesses about my economic background.
This is objectively regrettable. It's fallacious argumentation and in fact is against the rules of this forum.
My response is addressing these disgusting tactics. In contrast, I've said nothing about who this person is as an individual -- because it's irrelevant.
>No, the poster I'm replying to is obsessively making guesses about who I am as a person
The poster you're replying to has provided a synopsis of his argument; it has nothing to do with you. Part of the site's rules are that you should be charitable regarding how people phrase their arguments - just try to understand what he's trying to get at - it's very clear his argument isn't about you as a person. Focusing on this while ignoring the substance of his statements is obviously not going to generate a productive discussion.
Trying to use phrasing which allows people to relate to the discussion isn't 'objectively regrettable'.
Spinning this into a meta discussion about how the discussion should be framed is a waste of time, so I'll end my contribution here. I hope my notes help untangle the mess.
Your summary is simply not what took place above. I suggest you re-read the comment thread. Here are some specific links to help you improve your notes:
>Your summary is simply not what took place above.
You seem dead set on doing anything other than actually engaging with the substance of the post. I didn't say the term 'you' wasn't used. I said the argument has nothing to do with you, or perhaps more accurately, it doesn't rely on any lived experience you've had - you're irrelevant to the point being made.
Let's look at a sample argument: My eyes generally see things well, I see that the sky is blue, therefore, since I trust my eyes, the sky is blue.
In this argument, we have 1) A premise, 2) Evidence, 3) Rationale, and 4) A conclusion.
Let's modify the argument a bit. My eyes generally see things well, I see that the sky is blue - and so does everyone including you, therefore, since I trust my eyes, the sky is blue.
The element we've added here, that everyone sees that the sky is blue, is not evidence in support of my conclusion, because my rationale depends on my trust in my eyes, not my trust in everyone else's. Disagreeing by stating "Blind people don't see that the sky is blue, so your evidence is faulty and your conclusion doesn't stand - the sky isn't blue because of blind people" is a poor critique; there ARE weaknesses in the argument, to be sure, but that isn't one of them.
To return to this thread, you're attacking elements of the post which aren't the core of the argument; they're attempts to make the argument cogent to you (which obviously failed), but aren't elements upon which the argument relies upon.
Anyways, you're clearly not arguing in good faith - there's no attempt to interface with ANY of the content being posted. I'm done here.
Abclaw is entirely correct, btw. I don’t know you, it would be weird for me to make those kinds of guesses about your life and work experience. That shoulda been your first clue that I might have been using an indefinite “you” there. Have a good one!
That’s still arguing worker benefits. I am asking as a consumer, what is in it for me to cancel services I use and are happy with to be in solidarity? I don’t see any benefit, only sacrifice. So the only reason I see for acting in solidarity is if you are specifically politically inclined toward them.
Again you’re separating your worker identity and your consumer identity. You can’t consume if you don’t work. They are intrinsically linked, but you’re choosing to see them as separated. Yes, Maybe you give up your prime for a few months, but next year when you’re negotiating your salary, you have a stronger collective bargain position (unionized or non)
Your argument relies on an assumption. You make the assumption that my employer exploits me. They don’t. Perhaps Amazon exploits some of their workers (local drivers, warehouse workers, but tech…hardly). I’d argue that in 2022 with US labor laws…most workers aren’t exploited. Some think they are—some perhaps politically think this soft Marxism you are alluding to is a good thing.
So what we have again is a situation where a consumer like me is not in the position of a unionizing Amazon worker so we can’t identify with their labor situation. I don’t have a dogmatic political stance on them unionizing. In their current non-unionized work situation, I’m content to be a customer. In a unionized situation, I’m content to be a customer as long as the product they provide meets my needs. I don’t have a dog in their fight, so there is zero need to me to stop using a product I want to be in solidarity with them.
I don’t want to make assumptions about your specific work, so let’s talk about tech workers in general. As an example, Facebook made over $9 billion in profit in 2021. If you work for facebook, you were exploited to the tune of around 9bil/63k employees, so an average of 142k and change. If you distributed that according to current salaries, most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year.
Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist. From the people who serve lunch to the accountants to the coders. Yet that 9bil did not go to them, it went to the shareholders. That’s exploitation, pure and simple. You can support it, if you think it’s a good system, but it is exploitation.
Tech companies know that their workers are underpaid for their value - they wouldn’t have had to collude to fix wages if it wasn’t the case. Just because you think you’re very well paid, doesn’t mean you’re not being exploited.
All that is setting aside the very obvious reason you should have solidarity with amazon warehouse workers: they are human beings and they provide a service you enjoy, you should not want them to suffer.
> most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year.
so what happened to the providers of the capital that facebook was built with? How come they don't get anything from those profits?
I think your ideology is clouding your judgement on what counts as "fair", and this is making you think that workers who don't get 100% of the profit of the work they produce, must be underpaid or somehow is being exploited. The idea that capital provided upfront (to pay those workers, as well as plant and equipment) isn't in your line of argument at all.
> Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist.
without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist as well. It's both, together, that makes it work. The deal the workers accepted was to be paid upfront, at a fixed amount, for a fixed amount of work (counted by time, usually). Then, the shareholders gets the profit from the difference in sale price of the work. They take on the risk that the work is worthless in a changing world, a risk that the workers do not take (unless the worker chooses to accept payments in shares). I don't see this as exploitation.
> without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist
It’s pretty debatable how much of the money they raised was critical. They needed a bit of seed money, no question - and without regular injections of cash they would have had a much slower growth curve, for sure. They might not have been able to buy out instagram and whatsapp - but that didn’t create much value - those things existed without facebook. We might even need to account for the value that facebook’s rise took away from other firms, if we’re trying to calculate how much net value facebook’s investors have created - rather than just how much value has been enveloped into the firm - but let’s stay on point.
Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. A loan entitles you to get paid back, with interest. The interest is there to cover the risk that you might not get paid back.
What we have instead is “ownership”, which seems to entitle you to the profits of a company’s workers in perpetuity.
Numbers are a little thin, but it seems like facebook took on something like $1bil in various investments before their ipo, and raised about 16bil with their ipo (tho unclear if that 16bil went to the company, or investors + the company).
Facebook has posted profits in the billions for years now. If you only count earnings since their ipo, about $173bil cumulative going to investors.
At what point is the loan paid back? How much interest are they entitled to? At 9 years post investment they’ve paid back 10x what was given to them - that’s well over a 100% interest rate - and that is set to never end.
> Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan.
There are many ways to obtain capital - loans being one. A loan is guaranteed, often having a need for collateral. I highly doubt anyone would loan Facebook money without collateral at the early stage.
Equity ownership is not a loan, and it is indeed a perpetual entitlement to all profits. It's pretty much the only form of "loan" for a new business.
You still have not made any arguments as to why ownership is wrong, other than merely asserting it.
If tomorrow all of amazon’s stock disappeared from the ledgers, would anything change about the company? The warehouses would still be there, drivers would still do their rounds. It’d be a chaotic next board meeting, but that’s about it. Ownership contributes nothing to the equation, and demands a massive cut of what the real productive work produces. That’s why ownership is parasitic. As a general rule, why would we allow parasites? But even if you don’t want to see ownership that way, it still has undeniably and repeatedly lead to extreme concentration of wealth - which means poverty and starvation for the masses and superyachts for the few.
So you must feel then that tech workers at a company that doesn’t show a profit for many years or operates in the red during their start up phase should payback a portion of the the salary they collected during the time they were not profitable when they become profitable? Those tech workers would have never have received a wage were it not for the investors taking a risk and providing the patience to the reward. The tech worker who drew a salary during that time took zero risk and totally exploited the investor.
Ideally, the workers would be the investors. If we were being paid for the full profits of our labour we wouldn’t have these ultra rich investors - since they all got rich off profits created by workers in the first place - and we as workers would have plenty of money to put into new ventures. Instead of raising $x mil from softbank, you hire people who bring seed money from their previous job with them, and are willing to work for no pay for a few years on the promise of building something useful that gets them paid back and paid well going forward.
The idea that startup workers aren’t already taking on risk is weird. There’s clearly direct risk, and opportunity cost style risk already baked into jobs at new companies. A fee bad turns and late paychecks and you could end up homeless.
Investors risk… Not homelessness. Not poverty. They risk losing money they never earned in the first place.
One of the key evolutionary characteristics of firms is that they must self-appropriate more value in their network of transactions than they dispense. Their engagement with labour is no different; if they paid labour more than the value they received for work, they would go out of business. Maybe you're an exception where the firm is losing value or going dead-equal on the deal, but given that firms who habitually do that go out of business, you'd be in a tiny minority.
Accordingly the question isn't if you're exploited. It's how much. A firm is going to need to get SOME margin off you - that's fine. But how much is too much? What factors systemically result in them taking too much margin, etc. Having the discussion in those terms allows you to actually interface with the reality of worker/corporate transactions.
Your analysis assumes a zero-sum situation but this simply isn't the case.
The intersection of labor and capital is enormously mutually beneficial.
Regarding fair allocations of proceeds, one could just as easily argue that labor is exploiting capital, and that capital should take a greater share of profits. In fact, both outcomes are certainly, demonstrably true in different scenarios. In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
Your argument is in regard to the average outcome, and as such it glosses over the inherent give and take, risk and reward, present in a variable and chaotic -- but undeniably mutually beneficial -- system.
You are mistaken, the analysis derives out of one of the core elements of firm theory. It doesn't assume a zero-sum situation at all.
There's a lot of literature on 'the analysis', which happens to not be mine. It's actually one of the core elements of neoclassical economics.
>one could just as easily argue that labor is exploiting capital
No, one couldn't.
>In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
Depending on the jurisdiction, wages are provided a super-priority status. Other super-priority stakeholders are afforded equal protection amongst themselves. Priority stakeholders, such as lenders with security, are provided more protection than unsecured lenders, etc. Protection for missing wages exists solely due to rectifying legislation attempting to address of how disadvantaged a worker is when a business's assets are encumbered and they have no priority.
However, when it comes to managing risk, workers have to hope they'll get paid, while a secured lender can request assurances that potential super-priority stakeholders have been paid to determine the amount of exposure they're willing to entertain, and call their loans due in the event covenants and other monitoring systems indicate financial duress. Workers have no equivalent protective system.
Honestly most of these points feel like they're relatively uninformed and don't hold up to much scrutiny.
>> In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
> Depending on the jurisdiction,
Cutting through the unnecessary explanation, it appears you agree with me. In general, sometimes capital operates a wage paying business without providing a return to investors.
This point is observably true (otherwise a market wouldn't have losers) and I don't think you need to respond to it further.
I don't agree with you at all, for the reasons I've set out.
If you stopped reading after hearing that super priorities exist, and believed that their existence was proof that labour regularly defrauds capital, you'd have very much not understood anything.
Honestly, almost all of your posts here feel like they're exercises in ignoring content. I'm done.
So I am assuming that every product you buy, every merchant you frequent, every service you utilize…are only providers with active unions?
Willing to bet they aren’t…or you don’t know if they are or not, had no idea if they were unionizing or not, and didn’t think to even care before my comment.
I think it was less about unions and more about your sentiment of only caring about getting a service and not at all about the welfare of the people who bring you that service.
As for your hypocrisy accusation - we both know that’s not a valid argument. If you’re anything less than perfect you can't criticize? Nope.
Reality isn’t always virtuous. The smart phone in your hand or the computer you typed your comment on was likely developed by people who were likely unhappy with their working conditions and wage (assuming they even received one). You still bought it. You justified or overlooked the ugly to get the product you wanted or needed. Your shocked because I said it out loud?
The idea that the phone I own invalidates any efforts to improve things is a parody of an argument. If I had the ability to buy a phone that wasn’t made in terrible conditions, I would. If I had the luxury of being able to live without a phone, I would. I don’t, so the idea that now any criticism I have of workers conditions anywhere are invalid is laughable and ignores the numerous and very real ways I vote with my dollars for better working conditions
> If there wasn't an impact on businesses and consumers then they wouldn't be scary.
It's probably scary for Amazon, but I don't see why it would be scary for consumers. I use Amazon regularly, but if they had to shut down deliveries for a few weeks I would just order from eBay, Walmart or other sources. I can't think of many things that I can order only from Amazon.
You have to be really really a fan of collective action to do that. I don’t oppose unionization, but whether some random Amazon warehouse in Podunk, Idaho unionizes is simply not important enough to me to cancel my Prime subscription.
You gotta check downthread a bit where someone else straight admits it, but also just remember that overall the group on HN is much wealthier than average, some truly so.
Plenty of people here are legitimately not part of the working class even in a technical sense. eg they do not sell their labor, but are supported by exploiting surplus labor of workers.
It's entirely possible the person you're responding to is an asset owner, and is correct and sincere. If you depend on exploiting workers then worker power must be scary as hell!
Absolutely right that many people here are quite wealthy. Unions or not (I'm not expressing a stance here), I find it crazy that people can say it is a good thing for other people to be "under the boot".
What if the bottleneck of restaffing isn't training time but available labor pool? If Middle America Town #4 already has a majority of the young, able bodied labor force employed by Amazon then Amazon's leverage is heavily reduced; there may not be enough people to restaff.
But the fulfillment centers aren't all that remote.
Assuming the list posted here [1] is accurate, they tend to be located on the outskirts of cities. Looking at Virginia (where I live), the only one that I'd really consider rural is Clear Brook, but these days, that's effectively a DC suburb, with plenty of potential workers in nearby Winchester VA, Hagerstown MD, and the I-81 corridor.
Are they though? If Amazon wanted to stick it to the Unions, they could offer similar terms to the new scab workers and not to the striking union members.
