My economics teacher in high school told us that we needed to shift people’s mindsets so that an assistant manager in a McDonalds had the same kind of pay & just as importantly status as a shop steward in a factory or a boilermaker, he said only unions could provide this and organising the service sector was what unions should be focused on
He said this is Melbourne (Australia’s manufacturing hub) in 1994, right in the teeth of the rapid offshoring of manufacturing jobs & the tail end of the early 90s recession
I think about the fact my school teacher was more farsighted than Australian Union leadership a lot
I mostly agree, but the bit about Amazon truckers peeing in bottles has always felt disingenuous to me. ALL truckers tend to pee in bottles, in part because the federal government limits their driving hours in ways that incentivize them to do this.
Amazon warehouse employees do not pee in bottles, and the company’s “admission” otherwise was just acknowledging the de facto working conditions of all truckers.
Beyond that semi-slanderous anecdote, I’ve never had anyone explain to me why Amazon was worse than equivalent jobs. My own family’s experience with Amazon, as well as that of all those I’ve spoken to who worked there, is that it’s a job with shit hours but decent pay, and which requires no resume to get the position. Frankly, that’s better than most “Mom and Pop” stores, where pay is worse and there’s no HR to protect you from abuse.
I've been thinking about the characteristics that make unions good or bad for a while and this is a really good clarifying post. I think maybe another couple of other reasons why unions can be harmful is using their economic power for explicitly politcal purposes, for instance I think it would be bad if massive strikes were called whenever a right wing politician won an election, as sort of happened in the UK.
The flipside to this of course, and actually the biggest reason I'm pro unions is that unions, along with religious organisations, seem uniquely good at solving co-ordination problems for politcal action among the mass of the people. In this way I see them sort of as a hedge against authoritarianism, with the hope being that in response to a Trump attempt to nullify an election unions would be best placed to carry out a vast general strike and co-ordinate a campaign of civil disobedience.
An interesting note - $35K per year is essentially the average wage in the UK. Really shows how the US is 20% ish richer.
I encountered a TikTok video in which a young man was discussing his experience as a barista, when a customer told him that he (the barista) should find a better job if he wanted better working conditions. His response was, "if you believe that baristas are something that society should have, but you don't believe it should be a job worthy of a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions, then you're advocating a permanent underclass. I believe that any job worth doing deserves a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions."
I can't understand why this is a controversial opinion. We can argue over which jobs are worth doing, but the market is a fine mechanism for making that decision. If unions are the way to make sure that jobs worth doing get a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions, then I'm all for it (and if paying higher wages means that Jeff Bezos will simply be a multi-millionaire instead of a centi-billionaire, that's a very small price for society, indeed).
I loved the apocryphal quote from Walter Reuther (a union organizer), supposedly to Henry Ford (though that is doubtful).
Henry Ford pointed out the new robots in the factory and said “ Walter, how will you get your union dues from these robots”. And the reply was “ Henry, how will you get the robots to buy your cars”.
May 17, 2022·edited May 18, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Unions seem strong in societies that already have a good social safety net. In the U.S context, it just seems to be mean to the unemployed, who now have an even harder time getting jobs, and don't have nearly the length of rope with which to hang themselves that their rich EU (that is to say, the rich countries of the EU) compatriots do.
Just from personal experience, the UPS driver union was pretty brutal to UPS package sorter guys who were trying to get in on the driving game. (I didn't want to become a package driver, but it was really hard to become one for the ones who did!).
People forget that it is the unemployed who are on the bottom of the totem pole, not the waiter or the UPS driver.
Worth noting that the Amazon union generally eschewed the fringe political issues that white collar unions take on. There was a minor kerfuffle when Smalls went on Tucker Carlson's show by the upper middle class moral panic demographic, but it doesn't seem to have hurt Smalls.
Also worth nothing: "59% of the American labor force and 63% of potential union members say that they would prefer for their employers to stay out of social justice issues."
Given the environment this occurred in, it'll be to Smalls' credit if he keeps the union from just becoming another Dem organization.
Working conditions are a big part of this. Some of my son's friends have 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. Once I ran into one at the mall and asked him what he was up to. He said he was waiting there because he was had a shift later and *he didn't know when he would start yet*. Even the day he was supposed to work he hadn't been given a schedule!
Since then California has passed some laws restricting that particular form of employee abuse, but that it happened gives some indication how bad things are for lower-end retail employees.
The idea that competition is a check on union excess is only valid if there are non-union competitors. That is true for now, but with union mania and everything from Starbucks to Apple stores to Google trying to unionize, there is a possibility of excessive success. If all the coffee chains are unionized, they can in fact all block useful automation. I’ve been to a robot coffee shop and drank a robot latte and that is clearly the future - much better than dealing with a human manually pushing buttons on my behalf.
What I don’t understand is why employers don’t preempt unions and just treat employers better. I realize my experience is somewhat unique, but my first job was bagging groceries for Market Basket - a family owned company with competitive prices. They gave every employee - including myself - a bonus whenever a new store opened, which was quite frequently at the time. For adults who made a career there (managers, butchers, bakery staff, etc), my understanding is that it was a decent middle class wage. I even got a scholarship for college after working only a few years as a teen.
So maybe my experience with business is unusually positive. I don’t understand the impulse to run a business and treat employees like shit. I think Amazon could do even better in terms of working conditions, and so too could other businesses. What happened to employee happiness being something you can market?
Thanks for the article. I think many non-management service jobs focus on primarily entry-level or part-time employment options. I will concede that for many workers these have become full-time jobs but I do not think they were intended to function as career employment.
To change this mindset service jobs could benefit from a kind of gradation that you find in the trades or crafts. For example, you have a “Journeyman Plumber,” a “Craftsman Carpenter,” a “Master Welder” and so forth. The gradations provide a standard across various industries to denote the level and artifice of a worker in the trades. The idea being that a worker starts their career as an “Apprentice” which is the entry-level position with commensurate pay and responsibilities. From there they build on their skills and capabilities through a graded system of career progression that (theoretically) boasts recognition across state and corporate borders. As they progress they are able to charge more for their per hour labor. This added a measure of professionalization to the trades and manufacturing laborers and I think it gave them more cache with the general public.
To use a crude translation there could theoretically be industry standards for baristas. Entry-level workers would start a formal barista apprenticeship course and progress all the way to a “Master Barista” with commensurate pay and benefits as they upskill themselves. The technologies for plumbers and electricians changed markedly over the past 100 years. However, the trades’ quality standards evolved with technological advances. I think a similar mindset would be helpful for service employees by employing the correct level of nuance in crafting work standards for these new “trades.”
I used to be fairly indifferent towards unions. Why? Well, growing up in the South I didn’t know many people in unions and the ones I did know were more “professional blue collar” class (ship captains/engineers) who didn’t seem like it mattered much for their jobs.
My own father grew up poor in Massachusetts the son of a laid-off railroad worker after the war, and he ended up after his military service in the 70s working as a welder for Union Carbide in a union in the TN/KY area. But he has always told me the union rules made him feel like he was cattle. He said a bell would go off at certain times and he was forced to stop what he was doing and take a break. He didn’t like the rigidity of the rules like that. He left that job and has done fine in other non-union jobs the rest of his life, though ironically towards the end of his career has just joined a union again (he’s an F-16 flight simulator tech).
But mostly after reading *you* over the years I’ve softened to unions a bit, mostly because I do think service workers need more respect in our society, and if they want unions giving them what they want is a form of respect imo. I do think the practical benefits may not be as large as hoped (compared to, say, public sector unions) for the workers, but any improvement in working conditions is better than nothing. I still come back to the respect thing. I realize there may be downsides I’m not considering, but I just keep coming back to how we can somehow provide more respect to people. And I think more service unions is worth a try at least.
I've never understood why there is so much focus on votes to unionize. The votes just seem so superficial.
If you have enough support and organization that you can win concessions by credibly threatening a strike if your demands for wages and conditions go unfulfilled, then you are doing the union even if you lost some vote to unionize. By the same token, if you don't have the backing to credibly threaten to strike, then you really aren't doing the union even if you "won" the vote.
In the case of retail and Amazon warehouses, the proof of concept for automation is already very strong. And frankly the appetite for paying even higher prices for coffee (or anything these days) will be limited. I wouldn’t expect unionization to have any other effect than job losses.
There seems to be a cultural 'preference' for 'makers' i.e. artisans/factory workers are seen as better/more useful than people with similar pay in other occupations (say, farming or lodging or fishing). I attribute that in part to the fact that, by making the objects we rely on for our comfy lifestyles, we could see their value very clearly.
OTOH, we live in a capitalistic system and it's true that your paycheck is responsible for a lot of the value you get attributed to by others. I used to be a broker for a while. The skillset is not very different from a waiter (I got to handle several phones at once, they got to handle several plates at once, we both got to remember orders, relay them correctly and we both can have bouts of high activity creating a fair bit of stress/fun). Yet there were no doubts that brokers were more respected than waiters.
So maybe baristas or Amazon warehouse workers with a bigger paycheck will get valued on par with artisans and mechanics? It'll be interesting to find out.
My economics teacher in high school told us that we needed to shift people’s mindsets so that an assistant manager in a McDonalds had the same kind of pay & just as importantly status as a shop steward in a factory or a boilermaker, he said only unions could provide this and organising the service sector was what unions should be focused on
He said this is Melbourne (Australia’s manufacturing hub) in 1994, right in the teeth of the rapid offshoring of manufacturing jobs & the tail end of the early 90s recession
I think about the fact my school teacher was more farsighted than Australian Union leadership a lot
I mostly agree, but the bit about Amazon truckers peeing in bottles has always felt disingenuous to me. ALL truckers tend to pee in bottles, in part because the federal government limits their driving hours in ways that incentivize them to do this.
Amazon warehouse employees do not pee in bottles, and the company’s “admission” otherwise was just acknowledging the de facto working conditions of all truckers.
Beyond that semi-slanderous anecdote, I’ve never had anyone explain to me why Amazon was worse than equivalent jobs. My own family’s experience with Amazon, as well as that of all those I’ve spoken to who worked there, is that it’s a job with shit hours but decent pay, and which requires no resume to get the position. Frankly, that’s better than most “Mom and Pop” stores, where pay is worse and there’s no HR to protect you from abuse.
Unionization is still fine though.
I've been thinking about the characteristics that make unions good or bad for a while and this is a really good clarifying post. I think maybe another couple of other reasons why unions can be harmful is using their economic power for explicitly politcal purposes, for instance I think it would be bad if massive strikes were called whenever a right wing politician won an election, as sort of happened in the UK.
The flipside to this of course, and actually the biggest reason I'm pro unions is that unions, along with religious organisations, seem uniquely good at solving co-ordination problems for politcal action among the mass of the people. In this way I see them sort of as a hedge against authoritarianism, with the hope being that in response to a Trump attempt to nullify an election unions would be best placed to carry out a vast general strike and co-ordinate a campaign of civil disobedience.
An interesting note - $35K per year is essentially the average wage in the UK. Really shows how the US is 20% ish richer.
I encountered a TikTok video in which a young man was discussing his experience as a barista, when a customer told him that he (the barista) should find a better job if he wanted better working conditions. His response was, "if you believe that baristas are something that society should have, but you don't believe it should be a job worthy of a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions, then you're advocating a permanent underclass. I believe that any job worth doing deserves a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions."
I can't understand why this is a controversial opinion. We can argue over which jobs are worth doing, but the market is a fine mechanism for making that decision. If unions are the way to make sure that jobs worth doing get a living wage, respect, and decent working conditions, then I'm all for it (and if paying higher wages means that Jeff Bezos will simply be a multi-millionaire instead of a centi-billionaire, that's a very small price for society, indeed).
I loved the apocryphal quote from Walter Reuther (a union organizer), supposedly to Henry Ford (though that is doubtful).
Henry Ford pointed out the new robots in the factory and said “ Walter, how will you get your union dues from these robots”. And the reply was “ Henry, how will you get the robots to buy your cars”.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/#:~:text=Henry%20Ford%20II%3A%20Walter%2C%20how,to%20pay%20your%20union%20dues%3F
Unions seem strong in societies that already have a good social safety net. In the U.S context, it just seems to be mean to the unemployed, who now have an even harder time getting jobs, and don't have nearly the length of rope with which to hang themselves that their rich EU (that is to say, the rich countries of the EU) compatriots do.
Just from personal experience, the UPS driver union was pretty brutal to UPS package sorter guys who were trying to get in on the driving game. (I didn't want to become a package driver, but it was really hard to become one for the ones who did!).
People forget that it is the unemployed who are on the bottom of the totem pole, not the waiter or the UPS driver.
Worth noting that the Amazon union generally eschewed the fringe political issues that white collar unions take on. There was a minor kerfuffle when Smalls went on Tucker Carlson's show by the upper middle class moral panic demographic, but it doesn't seem to have hurt Smalls.
Also worth nothing: "59% of the American labor force and 63% of potential union members say that they would prefer for their employers to stay out of social justice issues."
Given the environment this occurred in, it'll be to Smalls' credit if he keeps the union from just becoming another Dem organization.
https://americancompass.org/essays/not-what-they-bargained-for/
Amen. A bigger middle class will be a boost to economic growth as all the wages will be spent.
Working conditions are a big part of this. Some of my son's friends have 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. Once I ran into one at the mall and asked him what he was up to. He said he was waiting there because he was had a shift later and *he didn't know when he would start yet*. Even the day he was supposed to work he hadn't been given a schedule!
Since then California has passed some laws restricting that particular form of employee abuse, but that it happened gives some indication how bad things are for lower-end retail employees.
The idea that competition is a check on union excess is only valid if there are non-union competitors. That is true for now, but with union mania and everything from Starbucks to Apple stores to Google trying to unionize, there is a possibility of excessive success. If all the coffee chains are unionized, they can in fact all block useful automation. I’ve been to a robot coffee shop and drank a robot latte and that is clearly the future - much better than dealing with a human manually pushing buttons on my behalf.
What I don’t understand is why employers don’t preempt unions and just treat employers better. I realize my experience is somewhat unique, but my first job was bagging groceries for Market Basket - a family owned company with competitive prices. They gave every employee - including myself - a bonus whenever a new store opened, which was quite frequently at the time. For adults who made a career there (managers, butchers, bakery staff, etc), my understanding is that it was a decent middle class wage. I even got a scholarship for college after working only a few years as a teen.
So maybe my experience with business is unusually positive. I don’t understand the impulse to run a business and treat employees like shit. I think Amazon could do even better in terms of working conditions, and so too could other businesses. What happened to employee happiness being something you can market?
Noah,
Thanks for the article. I think many non-management service jobs focus on primarily entry-level or part-time employment options. I will concede that for many workers these have become full-time jobs but I do not think they were intended to function as career employment.
To change this mindset service jobs could benefit from a kind of gradation that you find in the trades or crafts. For example, you have a “Journeyman Plumber,” a “Craftsman Carpenter,” a “Master Welder” and so forth. The gradations provide a standard across various industries to denote the level and artifice of a worker in the trades. The idea being that a worker starts their career as an “Apprentice” which is the entry-level position with commensurate pay and responsibilities. From there they build on their skills and capabilities through a graded system of career progression that (theoretically) boasts recognition across state and corporate borders. As they progress they are able to charge more for their per hour labor. This added a measure of professionalization to the trades and manufacturing laborers and I think it gave them more cache with the general public.
To use a crude translation there could theoretically be industry standards for baristas. Entry-level workers would start a formal barista apprenticeship course and progress all the way to a “Master Barista” with commensurate pay and benefits as they upskill themselves. The technologies for plumbers and electricians changed markedly over the past 100 years. However, the trades’ quality standards evolved with technological advances. I think a similar mindset would be helpful for service employees by employing the correct level of nuance in crafting work standards for these new “trades.”
I used to be fairly indifferent towards unions. Why? Well, growing up in the South I didn’t know many people in unions and the ones I did know were more “professional blue collar” class (ship captains/engineers) who didn’t seem like it mattered much for their jobs.
My own father grew up poor in Massachusetts the son of a laid-off railroad worker after the war, and he ended up after his military service in the 70s working as a welder for Union Carbide in a union in the TN/KY area. But he has always told me the union rules made him feel like he was cattle. He said a bell would go off at certain times and he was forced to stop what he was doing and take a break. He didn’t like the rigidity of the rules like that. He left that job and has done fine in other non-union jobs the rest of his life, though ironically towards the end of his career has just joined a union again (he’s an F-16 flight simulator tech).
But mostly after reading *you* over the years I’ve softened to unions a bit, mostly because I do think service workers need more respect in our society, and if they want unions giving them what they want is a form of respect imo. I do think the practical benefits may not be as large as hoped (compared to, say, public sector unions) for the workers, but any improvement in working conditions is better than nothing. I still come back to the respect thing. I realize there may be downsides I’m not considering, but I just keep coming back to how we can somehow provide more respect to people. And I think more service unions is worth a try at least.
I've never understood why there is so much focus on votes to unionize. The votes just seem so superficial.
If you have enough support and organization that you can win concessions by credibly threatening a strike if your demands for wages and conditions go unfulfilled, then you are doing the union even if you lost some vote to unionize. By the same token, if you don't have the backing to credibly threaten to strike, then you really aren't doing the union even if you "won" the vote.
> 1 out of 153 Americans is employed by this company
As a heads up the article you linked to is talking about American *workers* in particular. When we look at all Americans, it's closer to 1/200.
In the case of retail and Amazon warehouses, the proof of concept for automation is already very strong. And frankly the appetite for paying even higher prices for coffee (or anything these days) will be limited. I wouldn’t expect unionization to have any other effect than job losses.
It'd be interesting to see.
There seems to be a cultural 'preference' for 'makers' i.e. artisans/factory workers are seen as better/more useful than people with similar pay in other occupations (say, farming or lodging or fishing). I attribute that in part to the fact that, by making the objects we rely on for our comfy lifestyles, we could see their value very clearly.
OTOH, we live in a capitalistic system and it's true that your paycheck is responsible for a lot of the value you get attributed to by others. I used to be a broker for a while. The skillset is not very different from a waiter (I got to handle several phones at once, they got to handle several plates at once, we both got to remember orders, relay them correctly and we both can have bouts of high activity creating a fair bit of stress/fun). Yet there were no doubts that brokers were more respected than waiters.
So maybe baristas or Amazon warehouse workers with a bigger paycheck will get valued on par with artisans and mechanics? It'll be interesting to find out.