Unpopular opinion and it's not applicable to the US.
Because it's unpopular, it also won't get discussed anywhere... ( My perception could obviously be wrong, bit it would get silenced immediately for bringing it up)
We have a powerfull union here in Belgium ( connections with politics) and since a lot had already accomplished, they keep fighting for ridiculous things for the mere purpose of keeping themselves relevant.
One of their most favorite is classifying teachers as very hard labor. Coming from a background where my dad worked 18/24 and 7/7 that stings. I know multiple teachers and I don't consider that hard labor. It's important labor, yes. But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions, not much working hours and a lot of vacation.
Keeping your course up to date every year is not stressful ( if that even happens. A lot of professors copy-paste their work)
Important note: depending on the students age they teach ( toddlers, middle aged, adults. I do believe it gets harder and they need to add more hours. But classifying everyone as one is a mistake in my POV.
I see you're somewhat bitter about this topic. Is that a good way to present your argument though?
It seems to me that this kind of sentiment ("I've experienced hardships or know people who did, so why does this group deserve better?") is quite prevalent here in germany as well.
I think this is a common trope among richer countries at least, and probably one of the most effective strategies or rhetoric patterns to stall social progress.
Sometimes I'm catching myself thinking along similar lines, and when I do, I'll try to step back and try to examine why I'm having these thoughts, and if there's actually an argument against having changes like this. Is there any disadvantage for me, or for anyone really?
Labelling something incorrect is what I l'm suggesting what they are doing. To stay relevant. So members keep paying their member fees.
I'm not saying it has any disadvantages to me and that shouldn't matter at all.
Eg. Teachers here in middle school are labeled as a physical heavy profession and receive advantages.
Explain to me what is exactly physical heavy about teaching.
And it's not just that. Working for the government here in general is labeled like that and it's just a reminder of the past ( in my opinion) to keep their benefits ( early and big pension).
Does that disadvantage me? Yes, because I don't have a physical profession. But neither do they.
I think it's more of an insult to those that actually have a heavy physical profession and have potential health problems because of that.
It seems like the issue you’re pointing out relates to how groups get classified in a ‘physical heavy profession’, no? If the requirements are ‘low’ for that, it sounds like the label itself may be inaccurate and causing unnecessary confusion
Misapplying overloaded labels to sneak into benefit pools a group doesn't belong to is the bread-and-butter of bureaucracy. Once a union has solved the problems that lead to members losing fingers, they turn to regulatory capture like this.
> But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions
In Ireland there’s a reasonable respect for education – depending on socio-economic background and attitudes young people pick up from their parents – and teaching is still a stressful occupation.
I’ve known a lot of secondary school teachers and unless you’re lucky enough to teach in a well-run school with a majority of students whose parents value education, there’s a huge amount of stress dealing with adolescent behaviour.
In some cases, the teachers are trying to improve the lives of students whose parents who can’t cope because they’re single and struggling to provide for their family and don’t have the time for parenting. In the worst cases, the students have parents who are involved in crime or addicted to drugs.
Bad management of a school by the principal and other administrators can compound. I once lived with a teacher who came home from work crying on a weekly basis because of the abuse she got from anti-social students and the lack of proper disciplinary or management backup meant that the were no serious consequences for abuse of the teacher (or the students who were there to learn). There are many teachers who regularly put up with abuse and harassment that would not be tolerated in any other profession.
The “non-working” hours are spent correcting homework, preparing and refining learning materials, doing administrative paper-work to show what students are attending and/or doing work, follow-up with phone-calls to parents, etc.
I know I wouldn’t want to work as a teacher if the wages were doubled: certainly, the holidays certainly don’t go far enough to balance the day-to-day stress.
BTW, I wouldn’t want to be a nurse either. That’s another profession I have a massive respect for.
> But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions
Well, it's labeled "heavy physical activity". I did say it's important work ( eg. Respectful), I also said that's exactly why it could be political suicide by just mentioning it. I also didn't think I dispresected teachers themselves, but directed more to the unions.
Also, special needs are separated and are also labeled "heavy emotional work" here.
In this case, i'm talking about the heavy physical.
Also, the examples you mentioned:
Correcting homework is to be done during a normal workweek. Since no teacher here stands in class full-time ( ~ 26 hours in general).
Contact with parents is 2 days per year during normal days ( mo-fr)
Administrative paper work is done during class, at the start.
Labor was once fighting for their rights with rifles and unprecedented multicultural unity. Workers knew their enemy very clearly and knew how to attain their goals. The alternative was starvation and corporate enslavement.
Now the concern is deleting tweets. Embourgeoisiement has slowed and confused the struggle of labor. The reckoning of the owner class is long overdue, as evidenced by this typical hubris.
In today's world, this reckoning must be at once international and complete. We have the infrastructure for liberation on a global scale.
Love the wink-wink nudge-nudge hint towards violence typical of the radical left, the planet over. The US is full of refugees from places that fought for 'workers rights' with 'rifles and multicultural unity' and never recovered. Check out all of South America, and even India, former USSR, China, etc.
Employment in the US is totally voluntary, with unemployment one of the lowest in the developed world, immense competition for tech talent, and you think this requires 'reckoning of the owner class' - which is often the SAME workers' 401k accounts?
What exactly is your ideal - that 'workers', who are also 'owners', fight themselves?
It's ironic that these workers "liberation" movements have resulted in the worlds largest slave labor camps and poverty on a scale never seen in free market countries. Not to mention genocide on a scale surpassing the nazis.
Poverty is just another form of slavery. Using your line of hyperbole I could also say the same for any developed capitalist nation.
Now more to your point. The worker movements in the developed west was not shy to use force.
An example in England would be workers marching to a factory owners house demanding better working conditions or else they’d kill him. I believe similar events also happened in the US.
I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense. Elon mixing his personal and business facing statements on his personal twitter account were his doing. He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.
By your logic, Elon could tweet Tesla's financial results on twitter during a quiet period before public release "because first amendment". The first amendment doesn't give you carte blanche to break the law without consequence...
> He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.
If equality before the law were a meaningful concept any longer, the distinction between business accounts with SEC constraints as modifying the 1A might be coherent.
These days the government enjoys the tyranny of selective enforcement (e.g. riots vs. "peaceful protests") to the extent that regarding your point as a fair one is challenging.
Thats complete nonsense. This isn't the private company making a decision on its platform, this is a government agency forcefully having a tweet removed.
Furthermore, the idea that the federal government can coerce private companies into taking actions which the government is explicitly Constitutionally denied (censorship) is scary in the extreme.
People need to think these things through ahead of them getting too far into Godwin's Law territory.
If I were to believe that the US Constitution made it impossible for the government to prevent companies from lying to employees about their rights, my conclusion would be "wow, the US Constitution is a pile of trash, let's get that fixed", not defending the megacorporations that are actively lying to millions in a desperate attempt to siphon more money out of the populace.
I don't understand the fascination of some sects of the United States with defending such obviously detrimental practices with "well under an extremely loose reading of this amendment it might technically be allowed, and as we all know amendments can't possibly be changed so there's nothing we can do".
I wish the NRLB would be much harsher against business owners and executives who engage in anti-union rhetoric and behaviors. People have the right to form unions, lying about losing benefits and lowering pay should be handled much more harshly, there should be actual penalties instead of just having to read a statement and delete a tweet.
I disagree. It should be a free market. If the employees don’t like their treatment they should leave and take a different job. I am sure there is a UAW job out there to be had.
The most likely outcome from this is that Tesla moves more and more production out of a California and into a more business friendly state, such as Texas.
calling it a free market is laughable naive. the market is lopsided in favor of businesses because many laws at the state and federal are explicitly pro-business and anti-union; see "right to work laws", the 1947 Taft-Harley act, etc. - especially over the past 20 years
and saying workers should just go and join a union backed job is even sillier when <15% of all full time workers are apart of a union [1]
Right to work is pro employee. If unions want membership they shouldn’t be able to coerce it. They should have to earn it and compete for it. If a union can’t survive based on voluntary membership then that tells you something.
it is the state infringing in the market on the side of business and capital by restricting the ability of workers to collectively bargain with employers
workers are less well off but it's ok because "individualism"
No one is being restricted from bargaining collectively. They’re just being given the choice to opt out. Unions just get upset because they lose their monopoly status to police workers voices who disagree with their position and politics.
Right to work is only anti union because it allows employees to choose whether or not to join a union. Forcing an employee to join a union is absolutely not pro-employee.
Right to work is not pro-business. It simply reduces some of the extra-contractual powers that labor laws give unions.
These laws are violating the right of business to freely contract, while reducing the opportunity for those who don't have unionized jobs to compete for those jobs. So Right to Work is anti-'exploitation of businesses and outside workers'.
In the free market, should businesses not be able to freely agree to a contract? Most anti-union laws limit the types of contracts private actors are able to voluntarily consent to, which seems less of a "free market."
Any situation where one group is forced to go along with what another group wants is tyranny, regardless of the sizes of the groups. When the first group is large and the second group is small you have an oligopoly or dictatorship. When the reverse is true you have tyranny of the majority, which isn't much of an improvement.
The democratic ideal is people coming together voluntarily to work toward their common interests, with no one being forced to participate against their will. The right to secede is key—it's not a legitimate democracy if you aren't allowed to leave.
I don't agree. Ideally, everyone could make their own decisions for their own so they aren't forced to go along with others. In that case there isn't even a need for democracy. But frequently, that is not possible – what you call "tyranny" I consider unavoidable and democracy the best way to deal with it.
Majority rule is inherently better than rule by any specific group in two respects: One, more people benefit from it. Even if you have two blocks who always vote together, it's better if 60% benefit at the expense of 40% than vice versa. Two, that doesn't actually happen: Sometimes you are on the winning side, sometimes on the losing one so it somewhat (not perfectly) cancels out.
And democracy isn't just majority rule. Separation of powers and a catalog of fundamental rights are also important to ensure everyone's interests are considered when making a collective decision. So is a culture of just doing so, when voting and in general.
And that is where we disagree. Aggression is often an easier path to achieving your goals—maybe the only viable path in some cases—but it's never "unavoidable". You just have to accept that you won't always get what you want.
> … it's better if 60% benefit at the expense of 40% than vice versa.
Maybe, if you had to choose one or the other. If you're of a utilitarian mindset (I'm not, so this 60%-vs-40% argument carries no weight with me) it would depend on exactly how much benefit vs. how much expense. And it seems to me that democracy more commonly results in a vocal, activist, well-motivated minority receiving concentrated benefits at the expense of the majority. The expense is just more widely distributed, making it hard to get the people on the losing side worked up about it. Example: If I can get $1000 in benefits in exchange for 5,000 other people paying $1 each, I have a strong incentive to lobby and vote for that arrangement. The 5,000 other people would each probably expend more effort fighting the measure (each time it's introduced!) than it would cost them to just let it pass. Not to mention that it makes them look petty and/or greedy, fighting over a mere $1 bill. Yet if the measure passes it would result in a net $4,000 loss to the group. Now repeat that for 1,000 other special-interest proposals… the group that benefits from each proposal varies, but in the end everyone loses.
> Sometimes you are on the winning side, sometimes on the losing one so it somewhat (not perfectly) cancels out.
While it would obviously be a very rare individual indeed who was always on the losing side, I wouldn't say it "cancels out" (even imperfectly). Some see a significant net benefit while others can expect a significant net loss. And then you have the net loss to society as a whole, both in terms of economic overhead (the transfers are not perfectly efficient, and also result in a less productive allocation of resources) as well as morally in terms of normalizing the use of aggression as a "legitimate" means of achieving policy goals.
> And democracy isn't just majority rule.
On that we agree, but in my opinion the "catalog of fundamental rights" recognized by all democracies which fit the definition of "government" (i.e. democracies which do not treat group membership as voluntary and subject to secession, or which fail to recognize and respect the natural personal and property rights of non-members) leaves out certain inconvenient rights which are equally or more fundamental.
Sure you could count every instance of someone not getting their will, which is unavoidable when decisions affect more than one person, as tyranny. But I don't think that's a very useful definition.
Unions are anti-free market. They are monopoly cartels protected by the federal government. If people who sell peanut butter joined together to sell their products at a higher price, the DOJ would bust them up. If people who sell labor join together to do the same type of rent seeking, congress sets up the NLRB to protect them.
They can however be replaced, in which case the company doesn't need to rehire the striking workers. Potato/potato.
That's not true if the company is in violation of an existing contract though, then the company is breaking the law and must rehire everyone, but I'll reiterate: they're breaking the law to begin with.
This free market you speak of is in fact fairly sensitive to initial conditions, and will never reconcile the interests of the rich and poor on its own.
Unionized workers get what they negotiate for. Given how tech works, a Tesla union very well could demand options. It is absolutely false that unionization precludes employees getting options.
Except they usually don't... Unionized industries tend to be adversarial - if the employees get a better deal, then the employer does less well. Therefore receiving options is a poor negotiation tactic.
Only in the US setup. Europe uses codetermination and other systems that align them with their employers. Although they tend to get paid less than US tech companies, but so does everyone.
What ? Seems like I am better of without a union if I am getting more pay?. Also where is the conversation around building a better product to add more value in this union debate?
You're getting more pay for a wild variety of reasons ( VC inflation, a lot of things that pay has to compensate for, etc.), nothing to do with unions.
In France, it's mandatory for companies with more than 50 employees to have workers council and that has to be consulted on serious decisions ( changing offices, firing people, layoffs, etc.) and has some limited negotiation power. They negotiate company-wide policies (accord) on behalf of the employees that have to be at least as good as the branch-wide policies ( convention collective) - e.g. all workers in media companies get 20 days extra vacation because that's what the branch collective bargaining agreement says.
Furthermore, oftentimes ( sometimes it's mandatory), there are profit sharing schemes, e.g
in my company 1% of the profits is shared among the employees, so your incentives are directly aligned with the company ( it comes to around a salary's worth of a bonus, so it's decent).
If they do, it's going to drive out tech employers from the UK just as employers in the UK primary and manufacturing sectors were driven out or bankrupted in the 1970s after their work forces unionized.
The 1st amendment does not and should not apply to business matters. You don't even need to look far from the subject matter, Musk has gotten in trouble before over misleading tweets. I don't see anyone bring up the first amendment when discussing corporate fraud. Why is it that executives can be accountable to shareholders but not workers?
"does not and should not apply to business matters"
The problem is this: At what point does something become a "business matter"? And yes, I have opined that the SEC is playing with fire and possibly sowing the seeds of its own irrelevance with it's threats to musk.
Hey let’s not make it a freedom of speech issue. If you speak the words “if you what I dislike I’ll beat you up” you’re not asserting a 1A right, you’re just a bully
In the end I think courts will say the promised anti-union rollercoaster and yogurt complexes must be built. Fraudulent promises as part of commerce and labor negotiation are excluded from protection under pretty much every interpretation of the 1st amendment out there.
IANAL, but if it's not in writing, I believe you have to prove that musk never intended to deliver, and that's gonna be hard to prove. Otherwise you can nail people down to a few hundred prosecutable offenses a year and that is not a recipe for social success when there are sufficient numbers of vindictive jerks around.
? Not at all. I'm not quite sure why people on HN think the 1st amendment is such a golden bullet, but it is not. There are lots of exceptions, including threatened retaliation, to what might be permissibly said in the workplace.
If, for instance, as you were hiring people, you told them "we don't hire black people", even if you did hire black people, you would still be opening yourself up to suit, even with freedom of speech.
It's not "free" speech when the audience is being coerced into hearing it.
Before you say it, yes, the workers are being coerced. The implicit threat is that they will lose their jobs if they don't listen to the employer's anti-union rhetoric.
"Oh, but they can just quit and not be forced to listen to it," you say? Well, no, the average American worker can't afford to just walk away from a job. Thus, it's coercion.
Would somebody like to explain how a job is a "free association" for people who may not be able to cover a $400 expense without borrowing money? Or are we just interested in hitting that down arrow hard enough to make it all go away?
Isn't the entire point of a union to give you negotiating leverage?
If you need the government to effectively do the negotiating for you by levying fines and such whenever the company goes against the union, what exactly is the point of the union?
The problem is that collective action is difficult before you have the union, and companies/executives have a lot of power to dissuade people from forming unions. In the past that's involved physical threats and actual violence. Nowadays I expect it's more posturing and economic threats, but they can still have the desired effect.
The point of these sorts of laws is to give unions a fighting chance to take hold in places where employees want them, but are afraid of retaliation if they tried to form one.
Don't roads exist to facilitate vehicle transportation? If you need to do construction in order to make roads, what exactly is the point of them?
I don't understand what your thinking here is. You're comparing the expected results of a thing existing with possible actions to facilitate conditions for that thing to exist. Why are these supposed to be somehow equivalent or comparable?
I think their point is that the American form of unionization is bunk. If you look to Europe workers are free to choose between many associations of voluntary unions which advocate for their specific interests. They are not forced to have a single representative for negotiations with their employer and are free to abstain from of participation as well.Much like the American voting system and American Congress, unions are winner take all majority rule. If you are in the minority of a union it may not advocate for your interest and you have no option to turn to.
On paper, that means you don't have to join the union in order to get a job - just pay the union fees and work under the union contract (which is to say, almost all the downsides of joining but without any actual say in how the union is run). In practice, I think people who do this tend to get blacklisted by the union and have trouble getting jobs in future. I know the Hollywood unions in particular are very aggressive and public about threatening anyone who takes that option with blacklisting, and there are zero consequences for them for doing this.
The law bans employers from requiring people to be union members before they are hired. In states without right to work laws it is still legal to require employees to join the union after being hired.
This isn't about any actual negotiation though. This is about a public statement aimed at discouraging even attempting to unionize. This is well before the point where the union and company would be negotiating.
I think it makes a lot of sense to regulate this kind of activity. It's not about forcing companies to 'give in' or not to unions, but about helping to protect the ability for the union to form in the first place.
We can argue forever about how much company statements might influence the ability for unions to form, but at the end of the day the actual regulation here is basically just stopping the company from setting up their own strawmen in hopes of influencing workers. Naturally, it's very easy to talk tough when you're just pretending to negotiate against yourself. Not doing this seems like a pretty mild restriction, so I don't think it's a particularly onerous regulation.
The workers aren’t unionized yet. What the law is clear about, is that you’re not allowed to threaten workers for the act of trying to unionize the workplace.
“We give our workers stock options now. We do not expect to do so under a union contract.”
I don’t see that as “threatening workers”, but as a reasonable communication between employer and employees and a proper counterbalance against union claims that the workers will be better off if they unionize.
“We give our workers stock options now. No other automaker working under a union contract does so.” is something that I don't think anyone could reasonably find as threatening (even I don't think the first one is either, some may).
As an employee, I benefit from more information from both sides of the issue rather than having the union organizers be able to communicate unfettered and the company communications be restricted from pointing out any possible or foreseeable downsides.
That's real easy to say when there isn't a union yet. And the company has zero incentive to give any kind of realistic and useful information in this situation. They can say whatever they want, and it doesn't mean anything. They don't even know what the non-existent union will want or care about later, so how they can have any accurate expectations even if they are perfectly rational and honest. The only purpose these statements serve is to try to prevent unionization.
Part of why this is not a simple "both sides" issue is because we're talking about one side that exists and one side that might one day exist. The non-extant union can't weigh in on company statements or make any statements of their own.
So these rules exist to help ensure the workers are not unduly influenced by the company when they consider making that union finally exist. I don't see a problem with this.
I agree that they shouldn't be unduly influenced by the company when contemplating joining a union.
But if they're paying the workers part in cash and part in options, and the union organizers are pitching that they'll raise their wages, I think it's fair for the company to point out that that is likely to result in moving some of the comp from options into cash.
Even that is itself a weird quasi-bad-faith statement though. A potential union would not be unaware of stock options, nor how to value them. They could just as easily request higher cash pay and that stock options remain as they are. That's a valid position, and arguably a likely one.
On what possible basis could Musk be making a fully good-faith statement that he has good reason to believe it is impossible for a union to negotiate on such grounds? Obviously he is free to stick on that point in actual negotiations, but again he can't in any kind of good faith negotiate in public with an entity that doesn't exist yet.
As for UAW, that's kind of getting into the detailed specifics of this instance. Maybe there's more room to argue for looser regulations when there are extant industry unions? But that would also seem to push things more in favor of larger, more encompassing unions rather than smaller more specific ones, which I imagine most people in favor of less regulation wouldn't be fond of either.
Everything you're saying applies to union organizers though, which do exists before the union is formed.
And the entire point is that the union forming could be bad for workers in various ways, so if I was a worker I would want to be made aware of what could possibly go wrong before I joined the effort to unionize and no longer had a choice in the matter after the union is fully formed and going strong.
First of all, that’s not what Elon said. He said something to the effect of “why do you want to join a union and lose stock options?” Just like someone who approaches you on a dark street and says “nice car, wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.” Of course, when you call the police, he’s going to explain that he genuinely appreciates a fine automobile and was expressing his concern given the troubles in the neighborhood.
Musk has a significant say in whether employees continue to receive options, and I can’t see why the union would ask to take that away, given that options are presumably very popular with their members.
Saying that life will get worse with a union is one thing. Saying that it will get worse because I will make it worse is another.
The union doesn’t exist yet at their site. The government provides the guarantee of a fair election on whether to unionize, free of threats from either management or the union. Once the site is unionized, the union can indeed defend itself by negotiating with management.
No, this is suggesting that government should enforce workers' rights to decide freely if they want to unionize. Companies routinely skirt this right by taking explicit anti-unionization efforts, and there are many firms specializing in this.
> This is suggesting the government should treat unions preferentially, not equitably.
Equity is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see how this law is treating unions preferentially, and am interested in how you distinguish it with the aforementioned minority shareholder protections.
The idea here seems to be that unions can interfere with the running of a business however they want (strikes, etc), but businesses should not be allowed to "interfere" with the formation of union, where "interfere" seems to be a very low bar in terms of what is unacceptable.
When I say equitable treatment, I'm looking for symmetry, and I'm not seeing it here.
Seems like you are saying owners of small businesses can get together and collude under a combined business, with shares and voting, but individual workers must be atomized or if they do try to coordinate to bargain against the businesses, they get no similar help to do so as the shareholders get.
The governments role should be to ensure a level playing field between employers and labor. That means the government at a minimum needs to protect those who want to organize.
How is anyone buying into the complete false statement/propaganda that what Elon said is a threat?
Has anyone commenting here even read Elon's tweet in question?
"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare." - Elon, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808
Edit to add: lots of Elon hate blocking critical thinking here on HN.
>"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare." - Elon, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808
This is literally textbook union busting BS. It's been the same line for 200 years.
Private companies are allowed to negotiate with unions, no? That's the point of a union - to have an organizational body that allows members to vote. All Elon is saying is that Tesla won't be providing stock options to a union. The union could still strike if they don't get what they want - but this being considered a threat or union busting is akin to a temper tantrum because you don't like that something you're currently getting (candy<->stock) then you'll no longer get.
It wasn’t a threat: UAW has never allowed that type of compensation in a union contract, and have specifically blocked attempts to tie compensation to performance in the past.
The point of the tweet is that Tesla workers are already treated better than their UAW counterparts. Why let the UAW come in and screw it up?
That's not a threat - that's called pointing out a fact, it's called reasoning, that employees would be doing themselves when balancing out the pros and cons; just because Elon's pointing out pros and cons doesn't make something a threat. The employees and union still have the ability to decide based on pros and cons.
This is being warped and a lack of reasoning at the same level of absurdity as changing master-slave language in programming to shallowly appeal/respond to racism issues.
Punishment? It's negotiation. It's Elon stating that Tesla won't be putting stock options on the table, but a union still could then negotiate - they could potentially negotiate to refuse to work unless they're getting stock but it sounds like Tesla is drawing the line there because they believe that their stock is valuable and will become much more valuable; employees will have to decide for themselves if they want to risk potentially losing out on getting stocks and weigh if that's valuable enough for them for whatever else the union may or may not be able to negotiate. Arguably, as Elon said, they haven't unionized yet because of that potential loss - but it's not a threat, and arguably the employees are smart enough to decide for themselves.
No, it's a fact - pros and cons. Tesla has no obligation to provide stock to employees - and so employees/unions get to decide what is the better potential option for them - and I suppose it's a risk for employees to unionize if they will no longer then be getting stock; unless a union somehow can force Tesla to give X stock to unionized employees, I don't know all nor have I thought through all possibilities - so there's possibly nuance missing but Elon's tweet itself isn't a threat.
Threat's the wrong word but purposefully misused, even if it causes fear or rather it will cause a fear of a sense of loss of value - because if employees value owning/gaining Tesla stock over whatever else they potentially could negotiate through a union, then there's certainly a fear of potential loss - but Elon pointing out that possibility isn't a threat itself.
Calling this tweet "anti-union" seems like spin. It is pointing out facts that one might want to consider before deciding to unionize. The fact that employees lose stock options when they unionize isn't so much a threat as it is a fact about how unions work because historically unions are against any kind of incentive or merit pay so they refuse options as compensation. It is a fact that UAW hasn't negotiated options as part of the pay for it's members at any of the other companies where it represents workers.
I'm a very pro-union guy, so I'll give my five cents just for the sake of discussion:
Firstly, I don't know the context in which this was tweeted, but looking at it, it's not in my opinion egregiously or "obviously" anti-union, but the definition of this is of course a legal one and not a subjective one, so it doesn't really matter what any of us "think" is anti-union, what matters is the legal text in the region where it is tried. With that said, I'd also like to state my opinion that I think it's at least quite unprofessional for any senior executive to voice any kind of anti-union sentiment regardless of how mild it is, I would expect that both parties keep to certain standards of discussion and avoiding bad faith, which in my mind means not discarding the entire raison d'être of the other party.
Secondly, pointing out that unions are opposed to individualized salary negotiations is hardly a criticism of unions as much as it is a statement of fact. If the unions cannot meet this point in debate but need to revert to legal action, I think that speaks to the sad state of pro-union ideology today.
I have a nuanced opinion on unions after dealing with a bunch of them in a former life as a construction inspector / structural engineer (EIT).
Some unions are great. IBEW Local 353 comes to mind. The best unions have slogans like "when the boss is well paid, we get what we want in negotiations" and the worst unions have essentially the opposite mindset. I've literally seen members from ATU Transit Union Local 113 throw an empty coffee cup on the ground during a nighttime subway construction project and say "job creation" during their duties.
There is a right way to do unions and a wrong way. Germany seems to get this better than North America. Too often in North America things get divided into pro-this or anti-that, instead of being a discussion on how to do something right or how to properly align incentives so that the right outcome happens.
I'm not anti-union. I like the protection that some unions provide their workers; especially in specialized, high risk trades like welding or electrical. That said, I don't think Tesla would be Tesla with a heavy union throwing unnecessary delays around. Their safety record is quite good and their compensation is better than average even without the stellar stock performance. Before advocating that Tesla should unionize I'd prefer to see structural changes in unionization come to North America so that we have an environment that fosters a healthier relationship between employer and union. I don't want every North American company rusting away like Detroit.
You're talking about whether the most visible champion of Dogecoin, whose formal title at his company is Techking, and who added a fart-on-demand feature to his products, and saying that one of his tweets regarding a currently non-existent party, a Tesla union organization, is unprofessional.
Labels like "unprofessional" are repugnant to some people, because they have been, and continue to be, used to justify arbitrary application of personal taste and frankly BS in the workplace, for example to bully people into wearing neckties.
I doubt this is a good standard to go for when trying to engage Elon. I do understand however that it's your opinion — no argument that you are free to it, and I even think it's productive to air it… in part because it gives people like me a chance to offer a counter perspective.
> I doubt this is a good standard to go for when trying to engage Elon
I agree, it's a much better to cut through the BS and go straight for the time that Musk and Tesla tried to have a former employee murdered by the police by accusing them of being a mass shooter[1] all because Musk thought the employee was a whistleblower for public safety.
I think that incident illustrates Musk's attitude towards Tesla employees well.
> You're talking about whether the most visible champion of Dogecoin, whose formal title at his company is Techking, and who added a fart-on-demand feature to his products, and saying that one of his tweets regarding a currently non-existent party, a Tesla union organization, is unprofessional.
You bring up a good point here and I think it applies to all of his ventures: Why trust anything the guy does?
However, when it comes to safety, the public must have trust. Very solid trust. Because 2+ tons of car at 70mph that claims to steer itself cannot be untrusted.
It's wise not to trust fast moving heavy objects, yes.
There's something to be said for a hybrid of human and machine attention though. From real world personal experience, there are some safety advantages.
I don't see why my personal opinion matters, but even if it does I don't have enough context to understand his tweet. He said:
"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare."
They won't have access to stock options if they make a decision to unionize.
It's simple but people seem to be trying to make it seem convoluted to try to maintain confusion to make it look like they have a case to call it a threat. It's ridiculous.
The actual solution in fact is to take the burden off of employers: we need adequate UBI so people don't need to work to survive (including covered healthcare etc), therefore if a company isn't treating or paying their workers adequately for the work at hand then they can simply stop working there - and that is them taking a stand against the company; taking income is also problematic - you're penalizing work getting done, instead a VAT on production is much better method of skimming off some value created to redistribute back into society; feed some of the ROI back into society, fuel the largest cog of capitalism - consumers - via UBI - and the system, society, will thrive.
I don't get it. Are you saying that unionised employees are unable to get stock options? It's meant in a literal sense? I thought this was about unions not liking stock options or something like this.
How can this be legal in america? Isn't it pressuring the workers not to unionise?
I'm not sure if it's the union who prevents stock from being part of the negotiations and/or Tesla, however to me it doesn't make sense to be illegal: if you have two choices for jobs at different companies and they both offer good incentive packages, both are good offers but in different ways - there will be pressure depending on what you value more. Perhaps you'll value higher immediate payout vs. long-term payout via a stock that you believe will go up - and you're willing to take that risk because you believe in what the company is doing - and you'll be working there to help make sure that it happens.
I can't understand the reasoning. It's tesla directly denying options to unionised employees, this is direct pressure. It's like denying a promotion based on whether you're unionised or not. Or denying certain benefits based on whether you're unionised, or closing a unionised brach etc. This has nothing to do with the choice between different companies. Tesla shouldn't be allowed to directly influence the establishment of unions using pressure. I really can't believe that this would be possible. It's madness. A company shouldn't be able to pressure workers into not joining the unions. A lesson learned through a lot of blood and loss of life in the late 19th, early 20th century.
A company can care enough for its workers so that they don't see value in unions. But it can't force them via pressure.
Weather unions would be anti stock option or not is debatable, certainly not a fact, and the tweet is absolutely clear cut a threat that workers would lose them if they unionized independent of what the union would do.
Can you cite any instance where a union representing blue collar workers has negotiated stock options or similar stock based compensation as part of their member's pay package?
Can you cite any instance where a union representing blue collar workers who already have stock options or similar stock based compensation as part of their member's pay package has lost them in negotiation?
(I have a gripe with the stock market so take this post with a grain of salt)
idk. In my experience I would much rather get payed for my work in money I can use immediately, rather then being forced to play a game in a system I don’t believe in. I’ve worked for a few companies which gave me stock options (one of them was really good) and in practice what you end up getting is less then a month salary at best. I think companies love to give stock options because it adds bells and whistles to your benefits, it looks like they are giving you more then they are. If I had a choice I would much rather see my salary go up as the company raises in value then to be handed out stock.
That said, I’m not well versed in union logic so I don’t know if this is the reason why unions are against this practice. I am just glad they are.
Correlation is not causation, and in this case it’s a stretch to argue that’s what he was saying. “Don’t vote union, you’ll have to move to Detroit!”
Has anyone seen joining unions actually cause positions that got stock to stop getting stock? Is this like an overwhelmingly common thing I don’t know about?
> Has anyone seen joining unions actually cause positions that got stock to stop getting stock? Is this like an overwhelmingly common thing I don’t know about?
It's an overt threat. Tesla has used it's stock compensation as a weapon against employees in the past. There are countless examples of people being fired days/weeks before stock options vested, essentially a form of wage theft:
or the deadwood that gets protected because they belong to an union. Or unions being against remote work because that'd reduce employee control. Or union leadership just using their membership to laze around. Or union opposing projects they don't like. Or union harassing (including physically) managers. And to say nothing of railway union who apparently have a Mission to gridlock the country every few years (usually around the time someone in the government check the deficits of the railways)
Even if all of these were true (I would describe most of them as a mischaracterization at best), do you honestly think that outweighs everything that I described? The worst thing that people can say about unions is they are bureaucratic and inconvenient. The worst things people can say about, say, working conditions in many non-unionized American workplaces are far, far worse. People dying, unfairly losing their job (and healthcare, and home), working incredibly long hours, unable to see their kid, unable to get adequate sleep, etc etc etc. I happen to think there are values other than "workers producing profit for their employers as efficiently as possible at the expense of anything else"
> The worst thing that people can say about unions is they are bureaucratic and inconvenient.
I disagree. Unions can lead to the death of entire industries - I have seen it with my own eyes. Inefficiencies created by unions lead to jobs going to places where such unions do not exist. Personally, I do believe the workers need to be protected, but if you protect workers then you also need to protect industries, and this opens a gigantic can of worms as it runs counter to globalization and free trade.
Maybe we need to open a gigantic can of worms that “runs counter to globalization” if we’re talking about sending those jobs to countries with unethical working conditions.
There are many examples in the manufacturing industry, though unions aren't the only factor.
> Maybe we need to open a gigantic can of worms that “runs counter to globalization” if we’re talking about sending
those jobs to countries with unethical working conditions.
I couldn't agree more, the problem is there are powerful interests that will keep trying to sweep this issue under the rug.
Yes, so unions tend to kill countries where they're too strong. They tend to promote short-sighted action that save/retain existing jobs. This makes it harder for the economy to change when it is needed which in the long run leads to failed businesses, an uncompetitive work force and unemployment. Maybe unions is like democracy in that they totally suck, but the alternatives are worse. However, unions should definitely have their power checked.
I'd say that, yes, work laws are better in France than in the US, it's rather obvious, but I can't say that the unions in France are a net good.
Also something I forgot to yesterday: unions that prevents downsizing or restructuring efforts to tackle industry changes, ending by killing the companies in question. Or, when a falling factory is about to be bought, imposing such constraints that all deal fall trough.
You forget, with a union, the world's richest man might get richer every day at a slightly slower rate than he currently gets richer. That's the real horror!
At what level does wealth go from "normal wealth" to "oligarch wealth"? Like, where is that line?
Also, on what planet could Bezos be described as an oligarch? Not this one. Everyone on the left and the right hates him for various reasons. The previous president hated him. This president just told his workers to unionize. Senators are constantly portraying him as Satan incarnate.
He has no political power in Washington. They hate him.
I'm not sure why people hate unions exactly. Seems weird to have "freedom of assembly" but then hate those that practice it for better negotiating leverage.
This isn't about "freedom of assembly". I'm extremely pro freedom of assembly. "Unions = always good" is just as harmful as "Unions = always bad" as "Rich man evil" or "Rich man good".
Eh? I hate lots of people who I nonetheless want to have freedom of assembly. Like anti-vaxxers. I want them to be able to say antivax shit but I hate them. What exactly is weird about this?
The former glory was holding colonies by considerable violence. If unions are the ones who stopped it, good. Through I strongly doubt unions had anything to do with that.
Ah, classic selection bias blinders on. Sure, great benefits for those who have jobs. What about for the people who can't get employed due to the conditions on labor? The young, poor, already jobless? Not so much concern for them, you got yours.
unlike the US, where working conditions for the poor are fantastic?
Don't get me wrong, France (and the EU) has its share of problems. But "better protections for their workers" is not one of them. EU countries decided to use a small portion of their enormous wealth building a safety net and decent worker protections. The US does this to a much lesser degree, preferring instead to center corporate profits and the wealthy.
This part. People point to things like wealth inequality but not point to median incomes or employment rates, or marriage rates or birth rates. its extreme selection bias. If france was a country its median income with be comparable with alabama.
This is not a particularly useful statistic unless you include the varying levels of public services.
I just did a similar analysis for a job in the US vs one in Canada. The actual salary in the US was much higher, but including healthcare expenses closed a lot of the gap. In some cases (e.g., chronic illness or young kids), the lower Canadian salary was a better "deal" overall.
Friend of mine moved to France from California. He said raising a kid in is way cheaper and less stressful in France.
Me I'm fully aware that I'm paying whats amounts to $900/month protection money in the form of health insurance. Protection money because really the co-payes I have to pay are close cost of actually providing medical goods and services.
I'm not sure how COVID has effected it, but for the past years France has had a higher prime age labor force participation rate then the US, so it doesn't seem to be causing that issue.
I am not sure the American underclass (a large part of Trump’s support base) is faring much better. Even with larger unemployment, inequalities are still not as bad as in the US. Several countries have similar problems, whether it takes the form of 10% unemployment or working-class poor.
The horrors of unions to me are represented perfectly in teachers unions, which repeatedly protect sexual predators and incompetent teachers [1] [2]. They serve their members to the detriment of everyone else, including the children they claim to care about (while enabling predators).
In fact, teachers are significantly more likely to be predators than even priests. [3] Thanks to unions who go to bat for them.
I had this naive image in mind that unions are labor activists mobilizing against exploitative corporate practices. What I witnessed opened my eyes to the realities on ground, that seemed like almost opposite. As usual, life is more complicated!
* The objective of trade unions is not to protect workers and improve their conditions (at least directly). It’s to protect themselves.
* In every organization, there exists people with diverse attributes: capabilities, attitudes towards work/life, etc. There are always people who don’t want to or can’t work; and guess what they do? They join unions to protect themselves. Over time union center became international house of suckers and weirdos, each worse than the other.
* In an effort to protect themselves, unions politicized the work environment. They put themselves everywhere in key committees, including a union committee having last word on hirings and firings. That made them unfirable. They exploited the coronavirus situation, to blame employers and opponents. A scientific project can become a playground for union politics. I believe in climate change, but not in politicizing it. They seize every opportunity to attack employers and those not aligned with them. The goal is to use any chance to perpetuate an image that they protect people.
* Union will plot against any excellence in organization. To minimize contrast, they work hard to fail good people and projects around, or portray them as worker-abusers (ie, the reason that they succeed is because they abuse people).
* Unions will fiercely defend status quo and do not allow any constructive reform. The area of specialty that they advertised for themselves was an ancient technology from 1980s (and even that they wouldn’t do it). Every time people suggested to reform the department activities, they refused the proposals. You may not believe it, but department told them, OK, you can keep doing your own activities, we don’t reform them, but other people can start projects in orthogonal directions not related to yours. They still refused (they didn’t want competition) and basically forced everyone to work on their ancient advertised area of activity.
* Union engaged in all sorts of abusive practices. It was disgusting to see a lot of them rarely showed up at work (which was strange considering that they put themselves in various committees). I asked a department manager (“responsable”) how come this or that guy shows up at work only few times a year. He said, if you are a known member of union you can do that, and this is an issue in France. They yell, and bully people, create a toxic environment for others, repel and fire those not blending in etc,
* Union members felt very entitled and justified their actions by making themselves believe a skewed view of the world. They felt that they are entitled to a life even with ZERO work, and world owes to them.
* Unions will be perpetually on strike. What makes you think they will be happy with a laid back 9-5 job with decent pay and great benefits? Even with no work, they still go on strikes. They take tax money from society with little contribution, and make your commute and life periodically miserable.
* Unions are especially problematic in public sector, where incentives are aligned with cronyism not meritocracy. A lot of people are hired who lack abilities to perform the work in question. They form large powerful unions.
Don’t get me wrong. There might be a place for “traditional” textbook unions. But I don’t know if it ever works in practice. My experience was negative and counterintuitive.
Close to zero progress in electrifying European produced cars. I would say unions are the cause for the delay resisting any change away from skills their members have, but obsoleted by electric cars with 1/10 the number of parts required.
VW group has twice the EVs in pipeline than Tesla. Sales are probably gonna overtake Tesla this or next year. They are not as fun as Teslas but they are solid products that people seem to prefer over fart mode that cost them extra $10k.
On what evidence do you say that? The German auto unions have been saying for years that the switch to electric needs to be planned and managed exactly so the sector remains competitive and can employ people
>VW, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche all German engineered and manufactured by heavily unionized workforces!
Sure, but for each of those there are 10-100 other smaller companies in automotive or other industries that don't have unions, and some German companies have stirred up quite a few scandals of not following the employment laws or abusing their workforce, which coincidentally was mostly immigrants.
Cherry picking the big, wealthy car brands to represent the manufacturing industry is like cherry picking FAANG for representing the software dev industry.
I didn't say unions are not successful, I said that workplaces like VW or Porsche are not the norm in Germany. They're like Germany's FAANG; very successful, but not the norm for every industry employee there since they don't all enjoy such good conditions.
I had a friend from France getting his undergraduate degree in the US Marvel at how much learning we were getting done, since we didnt spend half of every semester on strike.
There are good and bad unions everywhere, but I think the closed-shop restrictions in the US that force you to join a particular union as a condition of employment exacerbates the worst qualities of them here.
I don't know why you claim that smaller companies in the automotive sector in Germany don't have ununionzed workforces, but the IG Metall has a »Organisationsgrad« in this sector (how many of the workers are union members) above 90 percent (see https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/gewerkschaften-die-u...).
It's likely not as bad as in France, but in a shifting economy, German unions are still hurting the manufacturers. Just last year they got the CEO of Volkswagen fired for wanting to invest massively in electric cars. Workers specialized in ICE drivetrains can't have that. Much easier to block the innovation at board level than to retrain. That will go on until somehow union dominance is overcome or the companies are dead in the water against new competitors.
I actually read your comment in good faith expecting to see some actual union-specific critiques, but it is just an absurdly biased caricature of the very worst of people and motives who exist in every type of organisation.
Having read it, I now don't believe for one minute you "had a naive image in mind" before or "opened your eyes" after your experience.
Power in all forms corrupts whether its corporate, governmental, or union. No organization of humans is free of these sorts of things which is why individual freedoms are important. OP's naivety was the ignorance of the aforementioned condition of human organizations.
> Power in all forms corrupts whether its corporate, governmental, or union. No organization of humans is free of these sorts of things which is why individual freedoms are important. OP's naivety was the ignorance of the aforementioned condition of human organizations.
This isn't an argument against unions, it is an argument against any kind of human organization. Its more damning to how Tesla is now then to Tesla with unionized workers. Following your logic you should be all for unions and if you took it further, anti-capitalist.
Going through all of your point, it felt like every “unions” mention could be replaced with “management”.
Protecting themselves ? check. Politicized the work environment ? check. Abusive practices ? check. Skewed view of the world and cronyism ? check.
I think what you are seeing is just a reflection of who succeeds in French companies. Some chose unions, some management, some find other niches, but none of these seem attached to specific values to me.
You're right about that, but I want to support the original commenter a bit and point out that management isn't going away, and adding unions on top of that is not an improvement if they share the same flaws.
This seems like the equivalent of saying "prosecutors aren't going away, and adding defence attorneys on top of that is not an improvement if they share the same flaws".
Lawyers are famously hated around the world. But it's almost universally better to fight one if you have one on your side. Same with unions and companies. Having worked in two companies in the last few years in the same market, in the same area, one union and one not... The difference is night and day in favor of the unionized shop.
You have a point. Then unions’ raison d’être is to counterbalance management, so them ending up using the same tools and having the same flaws would still be OK to me if they provide an opportunity to get what you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
In a working market, pitching companies one against the others could have the same effect as unions, but I think there is enough implicit and explicit collusion and perverse incentives that we are far from that ideal.
This is the kicker with every one of these discussions, really.
The ceiling on bad behavior is set by management, because they can do all of those bad things people claim unions do, and more - right now. The union gives you recourse
There is a solution to this; the union has become a parasitic entity between the labour pool and the employers right, so you can just legislate their ostensible raison d'être out of existence. That is, enforce fair conditions upon employers at a government level. Then encourage every person to leave their union, because they have no need anymore. Obviously, requires a high integrity government, actual fair enforcement against all parties etc.
So let me get this straight. You are opposed to workers organizing, because in doing so the unions might show some of the same problems that are already an issue in organizations and the ownership which is naturally always organized.
Seem like a strawman, worker conditions are light years ahead where workers are organized.
You sound like someone arguing against companies or capitalism because tax evasion exists saying “maybe there’s a case for textbook capitalism but in reality it doesn’t work” when we have literal proof that not capitalism and unions work. Nothing is perfect and ofcause unions can be better and companies can as well. But the net effect of unions is positive, and they form naturally in every place where you don’t allow anti-union policies and anti union worker discrimination.
It was at a university and the union is called in France CGT.
The basic problem is, if we have such powerful semi-paralegal entity (considering its scope and power), it protects people in need, but what mechanisms do we have in place to prevent it from evolving into an entity protecting itself (or to a mixed state), attracting those with perverse incentives in addition to those in need?
I agree with comments above. I wouldn’t say we should rush to dismiss unions. It probably depends on a lot of factors, eg, on country and how it’s set up. However, we need to recognize that this is an organization functioning like any other, eg, a bank, it has internal motives and can, and will, use its concentrated power to produce good and bad results. We probably need a balanced approach, and checks ...
> It was at a university and the union is called in France CGT.
As a mostly labourer union, CGT is a minority in universities, especially among teachers and researchers (less so in administrative and maintenance departments).
Given that the yellow vest protests have been going on for two and a half years now, I would not hold up France as a model for income equality. The U.S. may be a decade in advance of most countries in this respect, but there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach.
> there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach
They certainly haven’t. However, the yellow vests movement fizzled out a long time ago. And union-bashing certainly isn’t the way to go if you care about equality, however imperfect they are.
Unions in France also are kinda racist; those shut out of the union system, that is menial workers, don't have a path into the same protections that unionised workers have.
Depends how you define equitable. Equity isn't just the GINI coefficient, it's also about social mobility. France is pretty spectacular in how the GINI coefficient is fairly low, but social mobility is arguably lower than it in more fiscally 'unequal' societies like the USA.
I thought there are 'out of pocket maximums' set by the government to avoid that? The most that individuals will have to pay out-of-pocket in 2020 is $8,200 and $16,400 for families.
There's a huge set of caveats for the maximum out-of-pocket. The maximum is only for "in network" care. You can very easily end up with out-of-network care for various reasons (including going to an in-network hospital but being treated by a doctor who is out-of-network without being informed of this fact). Maximum out-of-pocket for out-of-network is $40k per person per year on my insurance.
The conundrum is that anyone who can afford to shell out $500+ a month for the most basic plan doesn't need it / probably has a better plan through work. The complexity and cost of the band aid system we have now is a joke the world over.
No, they can't. When I was poor and working full-time for $15/hr the best I could get was a bare minimum healthcare plan that would have taken more than the free money I had after rent and food for the month -- and this was despite not paying any cost for transportation to work and not owning a car or buying anything besides rent, food and the cheapest MVNO phone plan I could find.
I didn't live in a high CoL area either. Everyone who isn't wealthy or socially connected to get a job that pays above average is priced out of visiting a doctor at all right now.
In many states right now, there are zero cost premiums for those who make within 200-250% of the Federal Poverty Line. Percentage varies between states, or sometimes even by counties. This was part of Biden's stimulus package and should help a lot of people.
that covers all our health insurance as well. There is no copay, there are no "your condition isn't covered anymore". The only issue now is wait times, but thats because we're balls deep in a pandemic.
There are unions in the US too.. My wife's workplace got unionized... initially the salaries increase a few percents but after that, it didn't appear to make that much of a difference.
In Eastern Canada our unions have become problematic too, though they're not as vile as France's.
My first experience were of course were teachers. At least half of them hates children but love being the boss in the room. Most of them quit before because obtaining their seniority, and they tend to be the more conscientious ones. In 6th grade I had a teacher fired because she physically assaulted me multiple times by hitting me on the arms, during most of the scholar year. Did I say fired? No sorry, only unpaid leave for one week, and she was replaced by none other than... her son, because seniority I guess. In primary school our physical education teachers were obese.
The whole region (multiple cities in a rural area) where I grew up saw auto dealerships workers on strike / lock out for years. It began at the end of high school, at the end of university it was still going on 5~6 years later.
My first ever was in a grocery store, I was fired because "finally the union wants that job".
Stories I've heard from others abound: solder a lose component on a PCB? That's tech's job. Caught talking to a union member alone? Let's just say if having half the people you meet giving you death stares not enough, then be ready to defend yourself against all paranoid claims made against you. Army sub-contractors caught stealing gas masks and laptops by MPs?? Nah, "you have to build a file before firing them". People who did the coop programs (5 paid internships) in unionized organizations came back with quite a few horror stories of their own.
The worse is that we're forced to join and pay (at least software is pretty much free from unions), so much for liberty of association. Most votes are held with show of hands. They can be done secretly, but the vote to do that is also a show at hand, good luck being "that guy" who defies the executives' wishes for a strike when the war chess is full. And that's not even mentioning the various corruption scandals involving intimidation, threats of violence and organized crime.
> Tesla CEO Musk's anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board
> Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s 2018 tweet threatening employees would lose their stock options if they formed a union was illegal and should be deleted, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board said on Thursday.
Aside from "watchdog" as opposed to NLRB, what's wrong with the title? The article describes a bunch of required actions besides just deleting the tweet.
Not the original commenter, but personally, omitting NLRB would be my main concern with the title. A "watchdog" seems needlessly vague as it could imply any range of organizations that report on this, but the NLRB is the specific agency tasked with overseeing and enforcing these union representation laws on a federal level.
The action desribed in that tweet would be illegal, but is the tweet itself illegal? Why should the tweet be deleted? I'd rather keep it for posterity.
If I happen to mention to you that it would be a shame if my associates and I were to decide to burn your nice little business down in the night, but maybe if you pay us that won't happen I would assume that you would know that a threat was being made. The arson is illegal, but so is the threat to commit it unless you do something that is to my material benefit.
It's very often illegal to threaten illegal retribution. Employees may not know their rights, and such a threat could discourage them from exercising those rights.
Deleting the tweet is maybe not ideal. Any future viewers of it should have the context added that it's an illegal threat.
I would say what happens to the tweet itself is almost an afterthought—it was one of only many violations addressed by the report, along with more mundane stuff, like contract provisions about employees speaking to the press (ruling: it's unlawful to prevent employees from speaking with the press as long as they make it clear they don't represent the company). The NLRB also required them to post notices addressing the tweet at all factories, and it was immortalized in a 55 page public document—not to mention all of the contemporaneous news reports. I think it's very safe to say that posterity is not going to have a hard time finding this tweet
> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
Meanwhile, The Intercept has mountains of evidence that Amazon itself knows that its workers pee in bottles[2].
It's so blatant that I thought the account was a parody, but it's real.
100% sure that wouldn't have happened if that tweet from @amazonnews didn't piss off some Amazon employee. They're really not doing themselves any favours by letting whoever posted those tweets to tweet from their official account.
This is the first time I hear about Amazon News account, but from a factual perspective, they are right, despite one like it or not. Sanders is indeed a powerful politician, which is what they said in the tweet. $11.75 vs. $15 is a 20% gap, which is quite a lot and is also a fact. Again, I'm looking at it purely from a factual perspective. It seems to me that the criticism mainly comes from people not liking AmazonNews being blatantly honest in their tweets and not giving a shit about political correctness. My impression is based on quickly glancing at the most recent tweets, so I could be wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Well they support a national $15/hr minimum wage, for one thing, though the cynical side of me thinks this is more to close the door behind them on competition and will result in further closures of small local alternatives.
Vermont has a tiny population, Sanders has massive influence. If he wanted to work on mobilizing change in his state he could. Now a better counter argument is he is elected to work in the federal government, so his constituents don’t expect him to effect change in their state law.
The one denying claims of pee bottles is factually wrong & is actually evident from the operations staff guidelines, which probably the one tweeting doesn't know about.
They pretty beautifully baited Sen. Elizabeth Warren into running her mouth today. She wrote -
"I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
If she brings an anti-trust suit against them, it will be so easy for Amazon's lawyers to argue that she is only doing so to violate their first amendment rights, which she full out admitted to today.
> the fact that Amazon warehouse / delivery employees have to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines?
Amazon does not want its employees to piss into bottles. But sometimes employees (predominantly male I hope) do piss into bottles, because they did not plan correctly, or just had to go while on the road. If caught, these employees (and their managers) are then reprimanded. If they get a chance to defend themselves, of course they claim it was due to the deadline, not poor planning or bladder control or uncommon hygiene ethics.
Amazon factually states: Hey, if we required our employees to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, do you seriously think people would work for us, and not 100s of other low-paid jobs which don't have that medieval requirement?
Politicians: Hey, this you?! I have lots of pictures of bottles with piss! Where is your snotty reply now? You say that your employees do not have to piss into bottles, so how come I have those pictures?! Huh?!
It is embarrassing to both sides. Especially for official government employees (who also don't have to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, but I am sure you can turn up at least some pictures: if not, find any traces of cocaine use in the Capitol, then posit that the US congress have their senators use cocaine in the toilet to meet deadlines. Or, you know, bi-partisan plan to have low-skilled employees share in the American dream made possible by Amazon, but I guess that does not fit inside a tweet).
The warehouse/delivery worker abuse at amazon runs deep, and it goes far beyond employees peeing in bottles. Checkout the Frontline documentary, Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos [1]
No, but solid rhetorics. This is the part you give proof of the fact that Amazon have their workers pee in bottles to meet deadlines. Not point to something else entirely that goes far beyond the things you pose as facts, which are not. Don't look at that! Look at this documentary that goes far far beyond it. Well played! And solid one for PBS for exposing the worker abuse that Amazon is now in court for! We need the free press to save worker laws.
Deadlines are calculated from the average worker speeds. Perhaps some Amazon employees really are below average, or do not give it their best at all, so they are forced to piss in bottles and poop into the delivery car before returning it to station to meet these devilish average-worker deadlines.
I would agree that is a terrible problem. Perhaps Amazon should focus more attention on catching such employees early and letting them go (or offering them potty training with quarterly evaluations)? But then where does the average go? Deadlines get even tighter! Or you could make your wage relative to your worker speed: the fastest people earn the most. Only if you think you still earn enough for shitty work will you then be forced to keep doing that job. Or should Amazon be more kind to these employees who can't seem to manage their personal hygiene or fall way below average worker speeds? Treat and pay them the same as the 99% employees who don't shit and deliver? That would lead to an equal outcome for sure.
Amazon doesn’t come out of this looking good either, but it’s pretty bad for a Senator to go around telling people that she’ll break up your company if you “heckle” her with “snotty tweets”.
Warren has been campaigning to break up large tech companies.
What is so unprofessional about that?
Clearly if she was to try and get them fined or broken up it would be through these laws.
She isn't silencing them. She's saying that there'll be consequences.
And Amazon's PR isn't a small company. They can take the heat.
I don't agree with you. A company that forces employees to piss in bottles and lies about it should have their lies face consequences.
Warren isn't removing their tweets. How are they being silenced?
Here is the quotes:
```
After she posted the video on Twitter, saying that companies like Amazon "pay close to nothing in taxes," the tech giant quickly fired back.
"You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them," it tweeted from its official news account.
"If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," it added.
Amazon said that it had paid "billions of dollars" in corporate taxes over the past few years alone.
Warren hit back, saying: "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon – your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did.
"But you bet I'll fight to make you pay your fair share," she added. "And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
```
You're being obtuse. You know as well as anyone that it doesn't matter if the homeless man in the park heckles Senators. That's the difference; Amazon has real power behind their words.
The problem is not that Amazon is criticising politicians. The problem is that Amazon doesn't need to care; it'll get loads of money anyway. I need to care about what I say, because if I upset people, they'll stop interacting with me.
If Amazon started running adverts about a giant space monkey that wanted to eat the moon, what would happen?
If Warren tweeted that she was going to break up amazon because they were harming consumers and mistreating workers, etc, that would be one thing.
Instead, she is going after amazon as a personal vendetta because she feels 'heckled'. She is explicitly attacking first amendment rights. It's a textbook case of corruption / abuse of power.
Instead of “Politicans should not express views I don't like on social media” how about “Politicans should not express the view that ‘people shouldn’t be powerful enough to be snotty to/heckle me’ on any platform.”
It’s the “so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” part that’s bad. Regardless of how you feel about her campaign to break up big tech, this is an appalling thing for a government official to say. I hate Twitter and Twitter culture as much as anyone, but “you shouldn’t be powerful enough to be snotty to a senator” is dystopian in my book.
But in this case the Amazon Twitter account is in the wrong while Warren is in the right. Amazon Twitter straight up lied. Warren is actively doing the job she was elected to do of motivating change to make laws and rules that will change the underlying foundation of the business landscape in ways that she and those who voted for her perceive as positive.
I presume the people that voted for Warren are on her side in this argument so she's being an advocate for their views.
Just because you think Amazon's employees being forced to piss in bottles isn't bad to you doesn't mean that others sees it as an injustice that makes people angry.
>Why is this only bad when Trump or a Republican does it?
Maybe treat each event on a case by case basis rather than a blanket rule?
Breaking up Big Tech isn’t an idle threat from Warren. It was an explicit part of her platform when running for president. She has always believed that some companies run afoul of anti-trust laws.
This far predates a spat with an Amazon twitter handle
But they can engage in virtue signaling like the rest of us.
But in all seriousness, it would be optimal for a society that values liberty and freedom to move away from platforms to standards. No need to breakup FANGS if NIST or something similar defines qualitative API standards for social networks, or more broadly societal network services. And this will also be a huge boon for the startup space and true non-predatory innovation in the virtual services space.
But the things they say about the laws aren’t very useful if you’re suing to get the law overturned. (Related, you can’t use defenses like attorney-client privilege if Congress asks you to submit documents, you just do it.)
> "I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
I thought I liked her policies but this sounds authoritarian. I'd prefer politicians stay tf off twotter unless they got the stomach for it. They're speaking about "authenticity" and the problem of people hiding behind handles whenever given the chance. But they are themselves only interested in "engineering consent" for those who bankrolled their move into office. The consensus should be that they have to be able to put up with a very wide variety of opinions (and most certainly the "snooty" kind).
>it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor
Wait till you find out how the electronics and clothes in your house are made and how the materials they're made from are sourced or what the workforce that picks the fruit and vegetables you see in the supermarket, endures.
It is rarely (never?) discussed in the west how all the consumer goods are cheap simply because the supply chain relies on poor exploitable people and exploiting the environment.
All we hear about is the positive spin, how capitalism and globalization have blessed us with cheap goods and how those poor farmers halfway around the world now have paying jobs, woo-hoo!
> nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.
Nobody seems to want to do something about it. It's easy, vote with your wallet. But since the choice is either A) help humanity by stop buying cheap consumer electronics or B) don't get any cheap consumer electronics to make your day 0.5% better, it seems we're stuck in exploiting humanity.
Not sure how buying expensive consumer electronics helps either, given how the excess profits continue to be captured rather than fairly distributed. There's even case studies celebrating these COOs turned CEOs for how well they've "optimised" their supply chains.
Well, my point was more to stop buying consumer electronics we don't really need, that just marginally increase our quality of life. Not that we should buy expensive electronics instead.
Another option legally would be to disincentive the purchase of materials manufactured in those overseas areas to which you refer, or tax the bejesus out of companies using them as labor sources. I think there’s room for talk of tariffs and tax penalties for offshoring labor/manufacturing, and I’m not really familiar with other levers to turn that would fix this. Efforts to enforce better working conditions in other countries come and go, are easy to game and are quickly forgotten.
The parts of our society that profit off cheap offshore labor are quick to spin stories accusing people of being nationalist/protectionist/racist, but their profit margin is being defended in the process and the issues distracted from.
At the same time, if I lived in a largely agrarian society and factory work offered me the choice to get out of poor farm labor work, I’d jump at it the same way my ancestors did. I feel most of us can appreciate the value and prosperity that the global supply chain has brought, while simultaneously lamenting the destruction of domestic industry and the exploitation that has accompanied it.
We don’t have to be all-for or all-against, though I think when “free trade” agreements come up, they should be regarded very suspiciously, and when accusations fly about nationalism and protectionism, those should be seen as the cheap and distracting rhetorical devices they are.
I tried that for a while. Some time later I found out that they source their products from the same factories and the only thing I've done is prove that marketing works if you wanna convince people to pay premiums for imaginary differences.
The percentage of humans living in poverty around the world has never been lower [0]. How is that just spin?
I also can’t relate to your “all we hear about” point at all. I feel like I really have to go out of my way to find any discussion about anything good in the world, the vast majority of what I hear is negative takes like yours about how everything is horrible and everyone is oppressed.
It really depends on the definition of poverty. I pretty much took the argument you are making for granted until recently. I mean, how can we argue against raising people out of poverty, right? But recently I watched this interview with Paul Kingsnorth and he makes a compelling case for why these numbers don't tell the whole story. I am linking to the middle of the interview more or less this is mentioned but the whole interview is quite interesting:
Inflation in different countries goes at different rates. You can't use dollar inflation for these conditions, as prices rise much faster in those countries.
As for Chinese people, it is amazing that they came out of poverty. But clearly it's not thanks to free market capitalism.
Those numbers mean nothing. First of all, anything before maybe 1900—1950 is meaningless, as no one was collecting data about how people actually lived. They are only estimates based on national fortunes, for periods of time when many people mostly lived off the land.
The poverty line is also arbitrarily low, with many countless people over the poverty line who are dying of hunger. A more realistic poverty line would probably be several times bigger than the current value, which would fuether skew the numbers.
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, the vast majority of people taken out of poverty were taken out by dictatorial China's social programs, not capitalism.
Wait till you find out that they have a twitter handle & department for Public Policy as well. Why does a global e-commerce giant even need one unless they want to lobby/pressurise politicians & govt's altogether
You started a generic ideological flamewar with this comment. Please don't do that. They're repetitive, predictable, and tedious—and inevitably turn nasty.
That logic doesn't hold if you share a belief in Tesla's stated mission "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport", and also want to be in a union -- which is a reasonable set of beliefs and desires to hold.
And I don't see how unions would be intrinsically incompatible with Tesla's mission or operations. There's no reason I know of to hold that it is an immutable fact that Tesla's workers are non-union -- so why shouldn't someone join Tesla and attempt to unionize.
Unionizing Tesla would almost certainly not "accelerate the advent of sustainable transport". More likely cause it to wither and stagnate for the gain of a privileged few as we saw with GM et al.
All German car manufacturers are heavily unionized. VW has one of the strongest unions in Germany and is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world.
That's fine for companies in industries that are reasonably mature. But if you want to start a new company in a dynamic industry, Germany is very much not where you want to be.
German GDP per capita is about 45k, as compared to 65k per capita in the US. But that hides a lot. Germany's most productive city is Berlin. Berlin's GDP per capita is....45k. The US on the other hand has cities like San Francisco, with a GDP per capita of 98k, fully 2x that of Germany's best city.
That isn't an accident. Germany and most of Europe have no tech sector to speak of as a direct consequence of their labor and regulatory policies. The EU is a huge economic block, comparable in scale collectively to the US or China, and it has a highly educated population. And yet, it has near zero presence in the most important industry of the 21st century. That's a staggering indictment of their economic policy. 2nd and 3rd tier US cities have more tech than Europe does.
Tesla would never have gotten off the ground anywhere in the EU, and our climate change prospects would be a lot worse off for it. If we want to solve the major problems facing the world, it's going to require major innovation, and that isn't going to come from EU style market regulation.
Where did you get this from? Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
Germany is highly federated, with large companies near or in small towns or cities that only exist because the company was founded there decades or centuries ago.
You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
> Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
I was using the city with the highest absolute GDP. That's a fair point that Munich has a higher GDP per capita.
> You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
My point about tech isn't so much the nature of the business, as the presence of a well functioning startup scene. I think it would be very very difficult to start a new capital and labor intensive company like Tesla in Germany today, and the non-presence of tech is just symptomatic of the difficulty of starting new businesses.
Compare the largest companies by revenue in the US to Germany:
Most of the German ones were founded in the first half of the 20th century, if not earlier (you have to be a little careful reading the list, a few say they were founded recently, but they were really just the mergers of old companies - there are a couple legitimately new ones though). In the US, there are tons of companies founded in the last few decades on the list. My argument is that the German economy is mostly sustaining itself on the back of its economic achievements prior to the institution of its modern labor policies. Economic dynamism has been hamstrung.
You are very much ignoring a lot of historical developments that lead to the situation that Berlin is in. Berlin used to be an industrial powerhouse, many well-known companies were founded there - Siemens for example. Borsig, Varta, Osram, ... had large factories in the city. However, after WW2, Berlin was divided and the western part hard to reach, so most companies relocated, most industries disappeared. Siemens moved headquarters to Bavaria. Despite all the self-inflicted problems that slow economic growth, the expectation that Berlin could or should be on par with other capitals is problematic.
It’s notable, but the question of why that is so and whether that’s problematic is not as clear cut as it seems to be. For example, germany has a traditional industrial base that consists of mid-size, often family-owned businesses. We even have a word for it - Mittelstand. Quite some are world-leaders in their field. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is certainly open for debate, but it’s not as simple as “no unicorn startups in germany - fail.”
GDP is weird. For instance, private healthcare pushes GDP up, but I'm not sure Germans would like to have a higher GDP and pay a bunch more for healthcare in a market like situation.
More generally, if you look at Europe there are actually far more startups. They generally have much lower valuations though, because there isn't as much capital going into VC.
And probably you should look at Sweden as it does better than the US on a per capita basis in terms of startups.
Actually Germanys economy is very differently structured than the US. A significantly larger portion the GDP is coming from relatively small companies (called Mittelstand in German). Those companies also often invest very large percentages of their revenue into R&D (typically much more than the big cooperations). For example a significant portion of worldwide advanced manufacturing is powered by relatively small German companies that nobody ever heard about,
GDP per capita has very little to do with it.
The main differences between the US and Europe,when it comes to tech are these:
1) VC sector in Europe is where the US one was 20 years ago.
2) The US, even though it has states, it's still pretty much one market,while Europe,even when talking EU, is a collection of counties with very different cultures, languages,and attitudes towards innovation (e.g. Scandinavia is almost cashless society by now,while Germans are obsessed with cash).
In Germany, there are a lot of so called 'hidden champions' - companies that are small but focus on some higher end, niche products, e.g. oil filters,special purpose ball bearings,etc. The same is the case in many other European countries. This stay small approach is hard understand from the US,or Chinese perspective,where if you don't make $1B in revenue, nobody's going to put you on a map.
>In Germany, there are a lot of so called 'hidden champions' - companies that are small but focus on some higher end, niche products, e.g. oil filters,special purpose ball bearings,etc.
Which is great, but manufacturing those products doesn't generate the kind of cashflow or global influence that US tech companies generate.
Curious how many people here praising these hidden champions has worked for or wishes to work for one. I worked for a couple and it was eye-opening on never doing it again and avoiding them like the plague since they provide no high paying jobs and generate nearly no innovation as they simply survive on having cornered a niche market where neither US nor Chinese companies bother to compete because either the margins or volumes are too low and the decades-long relations with their customers are more valued in those businesses rather than cheaper price or better products.
Not everybody can rake in billions each year. It's perfectly fine for a company to make a few good quality wares that sell well in a niche. Somebody has to make air filters, lighting, brake pads, ropes, etc., you know?
By your logic everybody should just try to become a tech mega corp and use VC until they set the latest trend or die.
>By your logic everybody should just try to become a tech mega corp and use VC until they set the latest trend or die.
Except that's not what I said. I said, competing in a market making widgets is not as desirable for a modern country/economy/company/employee vs one that exports software and innovation, like the US, as manufacturing, more often than not turns into a race to the bottom of reducing costs and I don't want to work in such an industry anymore since I saw how the sausage is made and I have goals in life that are not compatible with working in manufacturing.
>There is a lot of arrogance here on HN.>Somebody has to make air filters, lighting, brake pads, ropes, etc., you know?
Would you like to be this 'somebody' working in a factory making oil-filters or would you rather be in a a high demand, high paying job?
This is what's funny to me about the HN crowd. Saying they won't take jobs in Embedded Software/Hardware or the Video-Games industry because WLB is poor and it "pays peanuts" but at the same time preaching that 'someone' should work making stuff in factories, where salaries and WLB is actually poor. Not them of course, but 'someone' should do it.
> This is what's funny to me about the HN crowd. Saying they won't take jobs in Embedded Software/Hardware or the Video-Games industry because WLB is poor and it "pays peanuts" but at the same time preaching that 'someone' should work making stuff in factories, where salaries and WLB is actually poor. Not them of course, but 'someone' should do it.
Nice straw man you set up there. A company can make these things by building machines to do it. Funny thing: European companies are really good at making machines to do such things.
>A company can make these things by building machines to do it. Funny thing: European companies are really good at making machines to do such things.
Did you have any experience in this sector or it just an amrchair argument from an ivory tower of an white collar worker? Because I have first hand experience and factories, even in Europe still need quiet a few personnel.
And not all industries are automated, just ask people working in the meat packing industry or in Amazon warehouses, how their jobs are. Yes, in Europe.
I'm curious which companies you talk about, because there are a lot of statistics that many of these companies have significant higher R&D spending than most big corporations (certainly more than many famous SV companies). I also know of two people who joined one of these companies one came from a research postdoc position and made it to head of R&D (like a vice president I guess) within 5 years, another came from a slightly higher level, but also quickly made it to a similar position.
>That's fine for companies in industries that are reasonably mature. But if you want to start a new company in a dynamic industry, Germany is very much not where you want to be.
This reminds me about the time we wanted better safety gear to our milling machine and boss basically told us that if we focus on safety too much, we might aswell shut the shop down.
Sure, I work with the risk of injuring myself, so that you can make 10x my income.
An issue dear to my heart (lived in EU most of my life).
I think it's more complex than you state. The EU is indeed one economic block, but the tech industry is quite varied within that block. Amsterdam has a relatively small but growing tech scene and the Dutch gov has been entrepreneur friendly for as long as I've been here. I just saw in the news a couple of days ago:
"Dutch cleantech startup Sympower raises €5.2 million to boost the European energy transition".
Berlin has quite a lot of fintech startups. I know because I worked with one. Yes the red tape and German regs are a PITA and slow things down. But I don't think unions or regulations are the only reason we have less tech startups here. It's also a lack of drive and vision within the population, a cultural thing.
> That isn't an accident. Germany and most of Europe have no tech sector to speak of as a direct consequence of their labor and regulatory policies. The EU is a huge economic block, comparable in scale collectively to the US or China, and it has a highly educated population. And yet, it has near zero presence in the most important industry of the 21st century. That's a staggering indictment of their economic policy. 2nd and 3rd tier US cities have more tech than Europe does.
If I have to choose between having one of the two relevant industrial robot companies in the world (Kuka, the other would be Yaskawa, also not from the US or China), the market leader in automation systems, pneumatic systems, etc. (Festo) and "companies making money by systematic privacy violations" (Hello Facebook, Google et. al.) I know which I'd rather have. And which industry is more important.
I think the EU is doing just fine here. But thanks for the concern.
Unions in Germany are very different from unions in the U.S.
U.S. unions are much more adversarial, seeing themselves as the enemy of management. In fact it is illegal for a member of management to be in a union in the U.S.
In Germany, unions hold board seats and see themselves more as partners, invested in the overall success of the business. The principle of codetermination means that union members can be in management. In Germany, unions are much closer to trade organizations or professional organizations, rather than the worker-management divide in the U.S.
In terms of politics, it's hard to be cognitively captured by the whole "greedy corporations oppressing workers" meme when you are sitting on the board and realize that your livelihood depends on the business doing well.
Similarly, German CEOs do not have the astronomical executive pay that US CEOs have. They are much more down to earth.
Germany is a nation that has had social insurance since Bismarck, primarily to contain a vigorous and violent left wing movement during the Kulturkampf of the late 19th Century. German unions are often quite conservative with respect to the culture wars and are hostile to that movement, which has its base more in the universitites and eco-groups than in the heavily unionized shop floors and production lines.
Yet at the same time, Germany has had no minimum wage until 2015. The US had a minimum wage since 1938. This, too, is because historically German businesses adopted a much more cooperative relationship to workers.
So even though it's true that Germany has high rates of unionization and an innovative economy, that does not mean that unions in the US would lead to the same outcomes. German and US unions are different beasts.
> Unions in Germany are very different from unions in the U.S
Union shop or not, employers in the US are more adversarial, primarily serving the interests of shareholders and will usually not voluntarily give workers a seat at the table. Of course the American unions have to be different as the environment is less cooperative than Germany
European unions are completely different from US unions in how they act. UAW is the only car union in the US and recently had federal probes and they arrested like 15 people in the leadership (they were using union dues to buy ferraris, backyard pools, and other such things). They currently have a federal monitor making sure they reform.
UAW is the union trying to organize Tesla's plant.
I should also note that almost all Japanese auto companies in the US are non-union and it's been that way for many decades.
Another thing worth noting is that European nations have mostly nationalized labor laws. Worker’s rights which unions are bargaining for in the USA are national laws in countries like Germany and—to a much greater degree—Sweden. In Europe if you want more paternity leave, you don’t ask your union, you vote for a labor friendly party. Worth noting is that corruption also exists in unions in Europe. So corrupt union leaders is not enough on its own to spin a narrative where unions in America are uniquely bad.
If the narrative that unions hinder business growth was true, you have to provide with some mechanism for which that would be the case. An easy one is that businesses have to spend more per workers and hence cannot afford bigger investment. This sounds right, but it is anything but. If that were the case you wouldn’t see Volvo factories still operating in Sweden.
What is it precisely that unions in America are doing which is not a national law in Europe, and European unions aren’t doing which causes businesses “to wither and stagnate for the gain of a privileged few”?
Suggesting a union is bad because it'd be good "for the benefit of a privileged few" is a bit ironic when the company is mamaged by a man who is in the running for the title of Richest Man in the World.
He’s only the near-richest man in theory. If he tried to convert all of his company ownership into cash, the company value would crash so fast that he would probably be lucky to actually recover one fifth of his theoretical wealth.
That's a stupid argument, because none of the people on the richest people lists have any significant portion of wealth in liquid assets.
Wealth for good reason is not defined as amount of cash you own.
It’s not an argument, just an observation that you can’t eat Tesla shares.
You seem to be replying as though I’m saying he’s not wealthy? Obviously he’s extremely wealthy by any definition. But most ultra-wealthy people are a LOT more diversified in their portfolio than Musk is. Someone with a diverse portfolio stands more chance of being able to functionally realise their wealth—if, say, they wanted to donate a large chunk of it to some charitable cause.
An argument could be made that Buffet is far and away the richest person (in terms of realisable wealth) due to his highly diverse holdings.
Detroit did this to themselves. They failed to innovate and got beat by the Japanese on quality. That wasn’t the unions fault, but the union gets blamed.
The unions complaints were only that they were gonna get left holding the bag when things got bad while the c suite floated off with full pockets..and they were right.
I do admit we got some labor rights out of the union movement. But there has to be a balance between rights and duties. I am only talking about accountability. Also I work in R&D and hence my situation is a little different from manufacturing. Also FYI I do slave from 8am to 8pm on most of the days.
Are you suggesting that the labour movement is actually not the cause of (western-)Europe's significantly better labour/welfare laws than the US - which unsurprisingly happens to never had a European-style mass labour movement?
What makes you so sure about that? Do you have any examples of how unionized workers produce less sustainable business then non-unionized workers? I don’t think Detroit is a good example as auto-workers in Europe still produce plenty growth for their business, while mostly belonging to a union.
If the plan was to create a new collective with a charter that was consistent with the long view of Tesla while protecting and advocating for labor then you’ve got a fair point.
It seemed to me they were just going to join the UAW.
There are two assembly plants within a few miles of where I grew up in the US. Both Japanese car companies, to this day they aren’t union and they are doing fine. There have been a few dustups from the UAW over the years, but they were never successful in flipping the workforce.
I think the threat of unionizing might help keep Tesla more invested in avoiding the type of environment that would foster broad support of organizing within the company.
My Danish engineers union helps me look over employment contracts before I sign so I fully understand my rights and unenforceable terms, they tell me if I'm asking for too little in salary, and they give me great insurance rates (like USAA in the states) for home, salary, and dental. They're also there for me if I just want to talk about my career or need guidance. I'm not forced into being a member but I really value them. It's nice to feel taken care of.
Employers work with unions here. It's not antagonistic like in the US. I don't know where it went wrong but to me it's very much like the antagonism between drivers and cyclists in the US: cyclists and drivers hate each other there and both sides frequently try to provoke the other (Critical Mass is the most obnoxious thing I've ever experienced and I'm not even a driver). There's none of that here. We have a lot of public infrastructure to support cyclists here but even in cities with relatively poor cycling infra like Berlin that antagonism is missing.
If I had to guess it's that there's a culture of seeing-only-from-your-side of things in the States: you're black, I'm white, you're male, I'm female, you're an elite, I'm blue-collar and you'll never know how it feels to be me. And because you'll never know, you are my enemy.
Personally, I feel that a lot of this is driven by inequality. If you feel that nothing you do makes things any better, then you'll look to take out your frustration on other people, preferably people who don't have enough power to fight back (i.e. your fellow citizens).
When I was working 48 to 72 hours a week as an EMT, I didn't find many of my coworkers to be "mediocre lazy donkeys." Far from it. They were kind and hardworking people. They were also frequently subjected to incompetent or inattentive managers who didn't both knowing the company policies and had to be constantly reminded to see employees as people. As a union steward I had to call managers several times per week to straighten out issues that should have required nothing more than common sense.
The reality of things isn't generally dramatic and hyperbolic, like you make out. Managers weren't looking for opportunities to screw people, and I wasn't looking for opportunities to make it harder to do business. They wanted to get on with their day, and I wanted to help my coworkers have good jobs. Evil? Come on.
Did that include some power-naps? I don't know if the human mind can stay alert for that long without visual hallucinations and/or episodes of microsleep. My personal experience was that rhigs got weird after 36 hours of no sleep, then again I had no practice
Yes, when someone doesn't join your cause, you are generally going to be weaker. That's kinda how it works. Doesn't make it a tragedy of the commons though.
Is that sufficient reason to coerce others to participate? Why should people who want to collectively bargain have a veto over the people who don’t want that?
The other side of the coin is why should people who don't want to collectively bargain have a veto over the people who do? (Since that's what happens when management can circumvent the union -- the union loses its bargaining power.)
It is unreasonable to equate imposing something upon others and "imposing" nothing upon others. When all else is equal, the higher bar ought to be placed upon the imposition of additional layers of bureaucracy in other people's lives.
Why is it coercive to have to join a union to work somewhere? Work somewhere else. If that sounds coercive then so should having to work at tesla to begin with. I think wage labor is always a bit coercive but I don't see how having to join a union to work somewhere is worse. And it solves the free rider problem.
I agree with you in the case where a union was already in place when you joined. I'm talking about the situation where a new union is proposed in your current workplace.
> Work somewhere else.
You could equally say to any workers at Tesla who want to establish a union. Work somewhere else.
Tesla’s CEO is the richest human on the planet and we’re worried about workers taking too much? If Elon’s stressing over sustainability, let him take the pay cut.
GGP asked whether collective action returns a sustainable slice of corporate revenues, i.e. do unions demand so much that it harms the company. I’m saying that they should look at executive compensation through the same lens.
From what I understand, Musk as an already wealthy man would be able to easily protect his personal assets if Tesla were to declare bankruptcy. He would be fine, employees, living paycheck to paycheck, would not be.
And that appears to be another non sequitur. It was Elon's personal assets which caused those paychecks to exist in the first place. Elon has risked over 100% of his personal wealth on multiple occasions and there are moments in Tesla's history where if the company had failed, Elon would have fallen back into deep debt.
This comment seems really confused. It seems like you think Musk is “the richest human” in terms of liquid cash, and that that abundance of liquidity came from Tesla profits that could have been divvied up among the employees. Is that right?
No, I assume a significant amount is Tesla stock. Which could be used as compensation for workers, if Elon weren’t threatening to withhold it to prevent them from unionizing.
Tesla regularly compensates Elon with stock. In 2018, for example, Tesla gave him options valued at $2.282 billion — with a “b” [1].
That’s over four million percent more than the median employee’s total compensation. But he’d rather union bust than be a slightly less rich centibillionaire.
That's a non sequitur. What you have cited isn't Tesla giving its employees Elon's Tesla shares. Yes, Tesla did offer Elon share options. He still has to pay for them with his own money. The reason why these options are lucrative is precisely because the company (funded substantially by Elon placing his own wealth on the line) has risen under his stewardship.
Great, so bring a union in. Maybe median wages will briefly jump 10% or so in response to threats. Within five years the median wage probably won't be any higher. Probably lower if union action rattles investor confidence and Tesla's access to capital shrinks, leading to less future investment, in turn leading to less profit and fewer jobs at the company.
With all this talk of bringing in a bloated Detroit union bureaucracy into Fremont, you might as well plead with Tesla to focus less on US manufacturing over the next decade. Yay, everyone wins!
Contrary to your initial comment, it really seems like you have a problem with unions (also, respectfully, you may want to look up what “non sequitur” means).
This discussion clearly isn’t going anywhere, so I’m ducking out. Have a nice day!
And Tesla should be allowed every opportunity to stop them.
I guess Tesla broke the law in this case, but I do not really agree with the ruling and the law. Musk should be allowed to present the possible downsides.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It's extremely tedious and predictable and usually turns nasty. We're trying for something quite different on HN.
"Economies without property rights in capital" is a convoluted way of saying "economies without capital", and so of course those economies do not have to worry about any conflict between labor and capital, just as societies without higher education don't need to worry about SAT scores declining.
Low tech societies still have capital. I was looking at givedirectly recipient stories, https://live.givedirectly.org/newsfeed/search?search=Kenya+C.... Almost everyone uses their money to invest in their home, livestock, or children's education. The push and pull between capital and labor absolutely exists here.
> Low tech societies still have capital. I was looking at givedirectly recipient stories,
I was referring to historical low tech, small community societies, not any places integrated enough with the modern global economic to have “givedirectly recipient stories”. But, that aside:
> Almost everyone uses their money to invest in their home, livestock, or children's education
Neither a home nor children's education is capital. Livestock is, but plenty of historical societies didn't feature private ownership of livestock (though it's probably one of the oldest forms of private capital.)
There aren't really any communities large enough to be considered societies and are so cut off from technology that they couldn't be the recipients of givedirectly. Homes and human capital are absolutely capital.
> Labor, Capital - jeez there's plenty of countries built on Marxist ideology you are advocating.
No, there aren't. There are plenty of countries built on Leninist (and it's descendants, including Maoist) ideology, which advertise themselves as being Marxist as well, but Leninism sharply deviates from Marxism on a number of key points largely because Marxism is grounded in the necessity of starting with mature capitalism, and Lenin wanted a shortcut for the USSR (and later movements following Lenin likewise sought to bypass, rather than develope through and from, mature capitalism.)
Also, recognition of the existence of the conflict within capitalism that Marx’s proposals sought to address isn't the same thing as advocating Marxism.
Whether or not Leninism is real Socialism is a different question (there's a reason, though, why other socialists, including Marxists, have called it State Capitalism, though.)!
What is undisputable is that these are three different things:
1. Recognizing the conflict between labor and capital as a real and significant factor in capitalist society, and
2. Advocating Marxism, and
3. Advocating Leninism.
The societies in which Marxism has been most broadly applied are the developed “capitalist” societies, which have generally evolved from what Marx described as capitalism to what has been called (among other things) as “the modern mixed economy”, by adopting both elements of programs of various (in many cases, Marxist) critics of capitalism, or compromise positions.
There are also societies, which never were mature capitalist societies, that have tried to bypass mature capitalism and apply the Leninist course. Advocates laissez-faire capitalism like to point to these as a broad argument against socialism, while advocates of non-Leninist socialism tend to point to them as as arguments against the Leninism as a useful approach to socialism, whether or not they accept it as a genuine socialism.
That was certainly true under feudalism, which is probably why the modern capitalist center-to-right and pro-labor/socialist left all have roots in classical liberalism.
But as capital has matured, capital as a class has effectively subsumed the landed class, largely by driving land into fee-simple ownership.
I don't think it's fair to call a modern mixed economy "Marxist". Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization. He had no clear idea of how his world would operate, and that's why Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.
Marx's ideas were fundamentally negative in nature. He was opposed to things, and had sharp and perceptive critiques of capitalism, but he didn't really present an alternative. To the extent that he did articulate a vision, it doesn't really seem like, e.g. Sweden would really fit the bill, though.
> I don't think it's fair to call a modern mixed economy "Marxist".
It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.
> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.
Yes, he did.
> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.
Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)
> but he didn't really present an alternative.
Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.
It seems like we disagree about what it means to actually propose policy.
> Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo
Yep.
> The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program
The Communist Manifesto doesn't do much policy proposing. Workers owning the means of production is about as far as it goes, and to the extent that that his Marx's proposal...that isn't realized anywhere in Europe.
> but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany
These are both pretty short and vague, but they are policy proposals. However, they are both pretty clearly not an articulation of his vision for the post-revolution society he describes in The Communist Manifesto. They are pragmatic demands for political parties to make of their governments.
Let's compare. The Communist Manifesto:
> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Demands of the communist party in Germany:
> 15. Introduction of strongly progressive taxes and abolition of taxes on consumption.
So, here's the fundamental issue: When Marx is specific, he's mild. His specific ideas are totally bland, and not at all unique to him. He would be a footnote of history if his specific ideas were all he said. When we refer to "Marxism", we refer to the actually novel idea: Abolition of private property. But of course, it is here that he is vague. He gives no indication of how a society without private property might actually function. And it is into exactly that void that Leninism stepped. It did so because it had no choice.
Lenin understood that they didn't have a revolution to institute a minimum wage. They had a revolution to abolish private property. But Marx had no clue how to manage such a society, and as it turns out, neither did Lenin.
>>We've tried this. People died over it. We enacted laws to prevent it from happening, so that labor can stand on equal ground with capital.
This is simply not true, except in the most pedantic and disingenuous sense.
There were violent strikes by some groups of unionized workers, that broke the law, and that resulted in some deaths, if that's what you're referring to. There is absolutely no reason this thuggery should have been rewarded by giving the strikers what they demanded, which was the abrogation of the company owners' private property and contracting rights.
As it happened, US industry, and with it US wages, grew much faster before society gave into the unions, when the US was still a free market where people had a sacred right to freely contract.
Mostly I wanted to give a bit more historic context. Japan is arguably a more productive economy and a better place to live than India, and Pseudoerasmus suggests that this is at least partly because labour was not able to mount as effective a defense as in India.
India's GDP per capita is about 1.9k USD. The number for Japan is about 40k USD.
So even in the hypothetical world where Indian labour would somehow be so strong it would capture 100% of GDP, that would still be only about 10% of what Japanese workers get.
Now, of course, any nuanced argument will take into account that labour suppression wasn't the only difference between Japan and India.
But the important thing is that this shifts the context of the argument: instead of a knee-jerk attitude of 'unions are obviously good for workers in the long run', we have some more explaining to do.
(With sufficient mental gymnastics, you might stil be able to argue that unions and strong labour in general is good for standard of living. But at least now you have to engage in that gymnastics.)
> But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no?
Not sure what the laws are. There might be laws saying that you can't discriminate against people in unions, so in order not to hand stock options to unionized employees, they might have to withhold stock options from all employees?
> But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no?
I mean yes. And then a union could strike. At which point elon would have a decision to make: is proving a dumb point worth his business?
> Also FWIW Musk clarified
Presumably on lawyers advice.
> no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.
But that,as others have explained, isn't relevant. Nothing stops the Tesla union from maintaining those perks, and options aren't valuable at most auto companies anyway, so aiming for different perks is superior.
Is the implication here stock options are only offered to labor when its in a weak bargaining position because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?
Stock options are offered to people who are ready, willing and able to work harder or smarter in response to potential ownership. These are INDIVIDUAL contributions.
When a direct relationship exists between the parties, this is a possibility. When there is a third party dictating what happens, this is much less realistic.
Tesla is a publicly traded company. It's relatively easy to put a market value on their stock options.
> [...] because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?
Like twice as many stock options? I'm a bit confused. Stock options are fungible. You can make granting of stock options worth arbitrary many dollars, by eg increasing the volume or lowering the strike price etc.
Just a guess but union contracts typically fix compensation for a given role and seniority. So every role would get the same number of options. Not having control over how many options are granted (linking to performance) may mean the company doesn’t have much incentive to grant them to union members.
Just because one company is partially unionized that does not mean that all workers who wish to be part of a union try to work at that company. Maybe the working conditions changed (for the worse), or maybe the worker doesn’t want to move to another state just to work for a company that is unionized. Either way, it’s not like there’s a 1 company quota in every industry that can be unionized and then bam problem solved.
What do you mean in terms of falling to the wayside? It's a politically-appointed board, so you can expect things to change with each administration, but it's not like it did nothing during the Trump administration. This is a pretty good overview of the changes that happened and might be reversed over the next year:
Like which jobs? Amazon, McDonalds, Walmart all are non-union. Major union professions are nurses, teachers, plumbers, steel workers, automotive workers, none of which are exactly low paid
I think a prerequisite for union to be successful is that it's members have leverage by withholding their collective labor, otherwise how to they negotiate?
> Professional certifications, tests, dues, stupid rules about who can do what job when? No thanks.
That can be part of a union, but then they are democratic, so it depends on who you elect to run things. A bad union is just like a bad employer.
> I'll gladly collectively bargain for higher compensation and better conditions though.
I mean that's literally the point of a union. they are there to bring the money to take the employer to court. (ideally the threat is enough to get changes.)
I do think its cute that you think that a democratic union is akin to communism. There is nothing stopping a workplace from having more than one union, its quite common in the UK.
> There is nothing stopping a workplace from having more than one union, its quite common in the UK.
I really hope I’m misinformed here, but I don’t think that’s the case in the US and I think it might even be illegal to do it that way here :( It does sound a lot better that way.
> That can be part of a union, but then they are democratic, so it depends on who you elect to run things. A bad union is just like a bad employer
I think a bad union is more common than a bad company, since collectives run democratically produce less agile and less productive outcomes than collectives run executively. Unfortunately a union has to run democratically, because they seek to produce equitable outcomes, not productive outcomes.
To rephrase what I'm saying, I would prefer a single manager deciding how my job functions over a democratically elected committee deciding how my job functions, except when it comes to negotiating higher wages, compensation, obvious safety concerns, hours, etc.
> I do think its cute that you think that a democratic union is akin to communism. There is nothing stopping a workplace from having more than one union, its quite common in the UK
I don't think it is akin to communism, I just think the same failings that enable people to blindly prefer communism also lead them to blindly prefer unions. In my experience in the US, unions typically negotiate an exclusive and mandatory contract with the company. All employees have to join the union.
Reading the wiki on US unions, it seems the things I complain about are actually caused by the US federal union laws themselves. The worst part being:
> Once the union won the support of a majority of the bargaining unit and is certified in a workplace, it has the sole authority to negotiate the conditions of employment
[edit]: Too add, it seems clear that unions, as they currently are in the US, are useful for lower paid, low skill jobs. For higher skill, higher pay jobs, which this Tesla job may be, I don't think unions are an obvious good.
The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational. It does not need to be this way. Corporations are creations of the state. There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors. This board representation could support management that better reflects employee participation, e.g. Sociocracy. In this way, labour and capital could work together in a more integrated manner, avoiding much of this unnecessary conflict. Or, at least moving the conflict to more granular level of problem solving where views can be grounded in real-world challenges.
The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"
I could be wrong but... I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space. Relatively demanding, sure. I get it. We've all seen the article where some Amazon worker urinated in a bottle because "the job is just so ruthless!". They employ hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide. If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.
I could have sworn I read that if you are a hardworking Amazon warehouse worker, they'll train you for a more technical job. That seems like a pretty good benefit. I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box? Maybe drive a forklift/unload a truck with a pallet jack.
I feel like the same people who want Amazon to unionize so workers can get better wages + healthcare, also don't want Amazon to kill mom + pop shops. Ok... How is a mom and pop shop supposed to pay $20/hr with healthcare for a warehouse worker when they don't have AWS money falling from the sky?
"Relatively demanding" is an understatement. It seems as though you're really downplaying how much this job sucks. The awful nature of the conditions are well known:
As for people hired, try upwards of 600,000 in front line roles, with high turnover. They keep hiring because many don't last over a year in the warehouses. People need cash, and the hiring process is incredibly frictionless.
> I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space.
> I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box?
Amazon is also one of the richest companies in the world, largely dependant on the work of each and every one of those warehouse workers. Why is it ok for the company to try to squeeze every penny of profit, but not for employees to try to squeeze every possible penny of wage out of the company?
Amazon could probably make a great profit even if it paid its warehouse workers 30 or even 100 USD per hour. Why is it a priori wrong for employees to try to move the needle in that direction?
If that's unrealistic, still: Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
Not saying that they should, but there is a strange double standard in these sorts of discussions, where it is taken for granted that the company should seek to extract the maximum amount of profit from its workers, but the other way around is seen as abnormal.
> Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
Amazon’s moneymaker is AWS, not the warehouse. At least in my city, AWS salaries have went up a fair amount in the last year or two, which makes sense given that AWS generates lots of profit.
The warehouse on the other hand has much thinner margins and if they largely increased warehouse worker salaries they might not be profitable.
Amazon is made into separate business units, so increasing salaries in one business unit which isn’t very profitable because the other business unit is profitable is just bad business.
I doubt warehouse salaries are a significant percentage of costs for Amazon outside AWS. And the non-AWS part of Amazon is still significantly larger than AWS (revenue ~346 billion dollars vs ~40 billion for AWS) even if it is indeed less profitable. Warehousing is of course not that profitable, but it is a significant enabler for the sales of the rest of the business (perhaps even for AWS infrastructure).
> If that's unrealistic, still: Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
So, say Amazon's net income in 2019 was $11.5B, and that they paid employees about $25B. Even if Amazon's scale in 2020 required no additional workers, increasing wages for those existing workers by 84% would have wiped out Amazon's entire profit and more despite a banner year.
"How much better" would be things like AC when the weather is too hot (which it seems has improved after all the negative press), and other safety considerations as mentioned in all the articles.
I'm not for or against unions here, but I'm certain Amazon could do better.
> The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"
That might be the thing you're wrong about. It sounds like most of the Amazon unionization efforts _aren't_ necessarily about better pay. It seems like more of the focus is about better, more humane working conditions.
If Amazon pays its workers slightly above average that's great, but if they treat those same workers like absolute shit with inhumane working conditions, then that's a problem that a union can help resolve.
>> they treat those same workers like absolute shit with inhumane working conditions
I think this debate is going to be like all the others on the topic, if you have never done manual labor, warehouse work, or factory work you are going to talk about the "inhumane working conditions", and if you have done that type of work you consider an Amazon warehouse job to be a great job for an unskilled laborer.
I did 10 years in that world, the factory workers I worked with would have considered an Amazon warehouse job to be a dream job.
I feel dirty now for having defended Amazon, but the truth is the truth.
Any job that doesn't give workers time to use the bathroom when they need to is inhumane.
Any job that is too warm, and doesn't provide workers adequate water, breaks, or AC such that workers are feinting or suffer health consequences is inhumane.
If the working conditions elsewhere are worse than that, then it's not a positive mark for Amazon. It's a black mark for those workplaces.
> I feel dirty now for having defended Amazon, but the truth is the truth.
I don't know if you have condemned Amazon, so much as tarred other workplaces if they also fail to meet these standards.
I listened to a podcast recently about Amazon union drives and apparently the big gripe isn't wages but working conditions. The almost universal sentiment is that people are treated like robots. Breaks are so rare and short that pissing in bottles or defecating in bags is common. Sometimes people have to choose between relieving themselves and eating since the break is too short for both. Most of the people interviewed wanted more humane working conditions.
There are many worse places to work, but that's whataboutism and using that argument leads to a race to the bottom.
> pissing in bottles or defecating in bags is common
I'd be willing to wager this "fact" has been brought up more in this thread alone than has actually happened on the job. Makes for great sensationalism, though. The union cause would be much better served without this silly BS being shared like it's the actual cause of woos.
> The email [May 2020] went on to say: “We’ve noticed an uptick recently of all kinds of unsanitary garbage being left inside bags: used masks, gloves, bottles of urine.”
> Workers have previously told the Guardian they needed to urinate inside water bottles on a daily basis for fear of missing delivery rates. A forum on Reddit dedicated to Amazon drivers, which, while impossible to vet completely for authenticity, nonetheless shows hundreds of comments from drivers claiming they frequently have to urinate in water bottles for lack of bathroom breaks while on the job
It’s so common that within 16 hours of soliciting anonymous tips about the prevalence of it within Amazon, the intercept was able to fill an entire article with evidence of how common it is
Warehouse work used to pay more than $15/hr, and if you look at the stats workers in counties without Amazon warehouses get paid more[1]. Pay is closer to 20 an hour.
Unions can (and do!) negotiate working conditions.
Dunno about Tesla but based on everything I've read, Amazon's "blue collar" workforce appears to have productivity requirements that are mostly unobtainable without taking shortcuts (like skipping lunch and bathroom breaks) and these jobs appear to have an extremely high turnover rate, which speaks to the crap nature of the job.
A lot of people would not mind taking a small cut in pay for more humanitarian working conditions. People, generally, like being treated like people and not machines. But I don't actually think this is needed, I think Amazon can both improve working conditions and make a strong profit.
For a quick example, my cousin has a union job where a paid lunch break (half hour) was negotiated every day. Union leaders routinely make their rounds around the office to make sure everyone is actually taking their lunch break and not feeling forced to work through lunch.
Amazon is the company that knows its drivers are peeing in bottles to meet their quotas[1], but then tweets things like this in response[2]:
> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
> If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.
You're severely underestimating the punishing conditions of an Amazon warehouse job.
A picker has a tablet that alerts them of an item to get. A clock starts counting down on the time you have to get to the right bin, find the item, and scan it. The warehouse sorting algorithms created by Amazon engineers optimize for retrieval time - but the warehouses are so huge, this means in practice that you have exactly as much time as you need assuming you never stop moving. For your entire 8-9 hour shift.
A typical amazon warehouse worker is essentially powerwalking non-stop for 8 hours straight on hard concrete floors. Breaks begin at a scheduled time, but your break begins when you sign out of your device, then you walk some distance to the break room (typically a 3-5 minute walk), AND you have to be signing back in to your device at the end of your break time. In practice this means your actual resting time on break is typically 5 minutes or less for 15's, 15-20 minutes for lunch. You are not allowed to sit or rest anywhere other than the break room.
If you sign back in only a few seconds late from your break, a manager will speak with you about it. If you sign back in 30 seconds late a few times in a row, you can be fired.
It's true that Amazon pays well in the warehouse space and is constantly hiring people with no experience. However, this isn't because Amazon is a great place to work - it's because there is an incredible amount of churn. People burn out of Amazon warehouse work constantly.
If you search on google for Amazon warehouse stories, you'll find a lot of people talking about how physically punishing the job is, about the constant stress from 22-year-old "managers" doing their rotation through a warehouse and enforcing Amazon's draconian rulebook without a thought in their head about the people they're taking to task for coming back from lunch 30 seconds late.
There's a blog out there from a guy who worked in Amazon warehouses in the Midwest, who documented everything while looking into trying to organize. The stories he tells about the work environment are hair-raising.
Amazon has figured out how to optimize the physical output of a human being, squeezing every last ounce of productivity from them every second of a shift until they either quit from burnout or get fired for not "making rate" (total % of lateness picking or packing assigned items). The fact that Amazon has an endless supply of people signing up to work in this environment says less about Amazon and more about the state of the American economy and how many desperate people are out there who need to sell their physical and mental health to Bezos pay their bills.
I feel like I'm going to be remembering this post every time I click the "Buy Now" button from now on. I wonder if this means it's more humane to buy from third party sellers rather than Prime?
I don’t see why people expect existing US unions to improve the situation. They have entrenched political interests and represent many different industries. Once they’ve managed to get into an company, they’re repeatedly demonstrated they have no interest in listening to or advocating for the workers they represent.
I’m actually for having unions, but they should be limited in size, and it should be easy for workers at a given site, or with a particular job role to quit the union and form their own.
As it is, with an Amazon union, employees will have two abusive monopolies to fight instead of just one.
That's a nice local statistic but it's probable at this point amazon is depressing warehouse work wages that used to be quite a bit above minimum wage.
I agree, if one wants to avoid the conflict of a union a work place should be at least 51% employee owned. Short of having mandatory employee ownership unions are the next best thing, and one is far easier in the US.
Otherwise we have what we have now, rampant unfairness and tension but no conflict because the board can get away with whatever conditions PR allows them to get away with.
There are so many issues with simply saying 'workers should own 51% of the company'. That statement and causes so many issues in every aspect of how companies are now run an financed, its hard to even imagine what such a regulation would mean or how it would work in practice.
> Short of having mandatory employee ownership unions are the next best thing, and one is far easier in the US.
Again, just saying this is easy but what is the meaning of union in this context? What a union is and what it does has been wildly different thought history, form country to country and form industry to industry.
What are the exact powers of that union mandatory union?
These discussions are always so abstract, union are almost an article of faith for some people.
Because it is an unequal relationship to begin with. Finding consensus in a 100% worker controlled organization is already a lot of work. We know capital is pretty okay with propagandizing if you look at current unionbusting practices, and they likely have more capital (haa) to do it.
I admire that you keep an open mind in a subject that is normally extremely infected, but I think your perspective shows a slight lack of understanding for the history of labor conflict around the world. I don't know if you'll find it helpful, but I'll just chime in on some of your points:
> The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational.
Unionization is confrontational by definition because it's the materialization of completely opposing interests. A unified workforce that can make collective demands on their employer is economically never in the interest of the employer.
> There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors.
There is not a single doubt in my mind that this would be seen by almost anyone as an extremely left-wing policy. When you say "there is nothing preventing the state" I'm not sure what you mean, unless you have a country with a very left leaning populace there is no way this would fly. For an example from my country, have a look at "employee funds".[1] The purpose was essentially to tax companies, use the money to buy stock in the companies, and give ownership to a part of the companies to trade unions. So, in a way, exactly what you mention. Remember that this was attempted in a country that had a post-war social democratic majority for decades, and even then it didn't work.
> In this way, labour and capital could work together in a more integrated manner, avoiding much of this unnecessary conflict.
Again, the conflict between labor and capital is not "unnecessary", it's built into the power relation. While everybody benefits from the company doing well in the long run during an equilibrium where everybody's happy, in the short term, changes to the benefit of the employer are often negative to the employees, and vice versa.
I'm not sure why you are currently downvoted; it seems like a contribution to this discourse.
Even so, perhaps the reasoning frame you promote is one of our challenges. I see labour and capital as being in conflict when they are out of balance with regard to one another.
In particular, I do not think labour (or capital) must always be in the driver's seat. I think that every situation probably has a healthy balance of power, dependent upon the circumstances, where both capital and labour are respected for the contributions they make to the enterprise.
In Germany, for instance, companies are required to have union members on the board. From what I understand about the structure of unions there, it allows unions to advocate on behalf of employees while being less confrontational. It's ostensibly a more effective way for the two parties to collaborate effectively to everyone's benefit.
This sounds like "we don't need unions if we mandate unions". Many countries do this, and with success.
The actual only way that capital and workers can have a non-adversarial relationship is if the workers are in control of the capital. Otherwise capital will always be leverage used to extract surplus value from workers. That, on a large scale, is socialism by the way.
It automatically creates an adversarial relationship. Terrible way to live life on either side of that construct.
No one should be forced to work anywhere. Which also means working isn’t a right. Work somewhere that works with you and establish a healthy relationship. Set expectations and be clear on what is desired.
One spends much of their time working, to do it in such a way where a cordial relationship is not there; it might as well be no different than hell.
Find somewhere else to work if a company doesn’t work with your ethos. Unionizing to coerce and compel is so disgusting. It’s plainly a form of bullying. That’s no way to live life.
In many companies, you don't need a union to make it adversarial: it's already an adversarial relationship. It's a war with only one side shooting. The union just attempts to arm the other side. It would be great if leadership and employees were actually on the same side (rather than just in words), with things like employee representation on the board, and fair bargaining for wages with equal power on either side, but that's just not a reality at most jobs.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
To understand the political evolution of Western democracies, it is instructive to read about the alliance between rent-seeking labor unions and the Democratic Party in the largest Western democracy, the US:
It is also worth noting that virtually every major news company has a fully unionized workforce who essentially can't be replaced and have a financial conflict of interest in how the public perceives left vs right policies and parties.
> Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.
> Exactly. UAW does not have individual stock ownership as part of the compensation at any other company.
This is apparently "intimidation". And as for the guy fired
> In another incident, a union-affiliated worker, Jose Moran, accessed Workday, Tesla's internal HR system, to look up information about an employee who opposed the union. Moran took a screenshot of the other worker's Workday page—which included his name, photo, job title, and other information—and texted it to another union-affiliated employee, Richard Ortiz. Ortiz wound up using the anti-union employee's picture in a post on a private Facebook group for pro-union Tesla employees.
> Richard Ortiz was fired after the incident , but because Tesla did not have standing rules against browsing employees' profiles on Workday or screenshotting them , apparently that's not allowed.
I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.
> I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.
Unionized ESOP companies aren't uncommon.
You've got it a bit backwards about the adversarial relationship: having an ESOP and a union isn't some kind of organizational impossibility, and it can decrease the probability of a serious dispute between management and the union. [1]
Interesting, yeah those are good points. I can certainly see it reducing the severity of disputes in theory.
In practice though I'm skeptical. I've read a little about the history of UAW. They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game. Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.
I want to be pro-union but it's hard when you observe their real world behaviour. All too often they slowly strangle their company, making it less and less competitive and innovative and ultimately dooming it to defeat by new entrants who aren't yet encumbered by unions.
So it depends a bit on whether you talk about real world US unions like the UAW, or about what unions could be in theory and might be in other parts of the world.
Eg German unions have a reputation, at least compared to the US, of cooperating much more with their host companies. Similar also for Scandinavian unions.
It could also be the case that US unions operate in a country where power is held by a class of people who would really prefer their serfs to STFU and get back to whatever dangerous, ill-paid task they were assigned. When the most egregious wrongs are simply illegal and never happen then it is much easier for capital and labor to have a less adversarial relationship, but when you operate in a country like the US I would assume it is necessary for a union to be a bit more aggressive in its actions and objectives.
> It could also be the case that US unions operate in a country where power is held by a class of people who would really prefer their serfs to STFU and get back to whatever dangerous, ill-paid task they were assigned.
What makes you think European business owners are less greedy or evil? Capital is internationally mobile, and it's the same index funds owning a good chunk of all companies everywhere, too.
Business owners in Europe are not any less greedy or evil, they are simply constrained by laws and the political environment to be unable to commit the worst offenses.
Not sure. Workers in the US are better off than in Europe.
And within Europe, the places with the best off workers tend to be the ones with pro-business laws, like Switzerland (and in contrast to Greece or France).
It could also be the case that most people commenting do not have experience with very many unions and have adopted the portions of a goofy pro- vs anti-union argument that has existed in popular US culture since right-wing think tanks began poisoning public political dialogue in the seventies.
> They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game.
That doesn't really affect the feasibility or otherwise of running an ESOP as a union shop. On the contrary, I imagine that if you view the entire thing as zero-sum, you might be more prone to think about what is going to happen to your stock's value if you strike, or take steps that negatively effect efficiency.
If you're not thinking zero-sum, you can use some pretty handwavey logic for thinking the next bonus you demand doesn't really negatively effect people like your coworkers or the shareholders, since you're merely being compensated for your inherent greatness that will inevitably lead to the company's greater success, blah blah... congratulations, you appear to be in senior management.
> Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.
It doesn't seem unfathomable to me that a unionized company could develop something like the Toyota Production System. The German companies tout having learned from Toyota, and I don't know how true that is, but the successful, modern German car companies are all unionized. (in the greater context, Tesla is still nonunion and didn't appear to pay any attention to TPS when they brought their production online, which is maybe interesting)
And Ford gets GIANT markups on the F150s, they are super profitable for them and the best selling truck for many many years now. Toyota, Honda aren't even close to American truck and SUV sales.
So explain to me again how US autos aren't competitive with Japanese brands?
As an individual I feel like I have relatively more bargaining power, because when eg talking about pay I just need to convince the company to bump one total comp package, mine.
So I can negotiate much more aggressively and get more done, then someone who tried to get the company to raise thousands of pay packages.
Also, I have an easy time convincing the company that I am leaving (or not joining), if they don't accede to my demands.
No union can credibly threaten that all unionized employees will quit, if they don't get a 40% pay rise.
> I just need to convince the company to bump one total comp package, mine
> ...
> Also, I have an easy time convincing the company that I am leaving (or not joining), if they don't accede to my demands.
And when your aggressive negotiating is too much of a hassle for the company they just have to fire one "problematic" employee, you. And unless you have created a hellhole of a system architecture in your project that only you can maintain as insurance/backup to your aggressive negotiation, you will be surprised to see just how replaceable you are.
To be honest, I do most of the aggressive negotiations before I join the company.
So if that's too 'problematic' for them, they don't need to hire me.
If you want to negotiate just as aggressively while working for them, you have to have your outside options all lined up. Basically, yes, if you threaten to leave, you should not be surprised if they call your bluff and take wish you farewell.
Unions threaten that all employees will quit all.the.time. It’s called a strike. It’s their primary bargaining power. Yes, the workers will eventually come back to work, but only after they gain some concessions from management, and it can be a long time before they come back.
I know about strikes. They are different than everyone quitting.
> Yes, the workers will eventually come back to work, but only after they gain some concessions from management, and it can be a long time before they come back.
Workers don't get paid while on strike (they get some money back from the union that they saved there themselves). There's no guarantee that management will make concessions.
Yes, it can be a long time before workers come back.
Why are these things at odds? It seems like the ideal outcome for the union would be to have a significant ownership stake in the company and share in its success, rather than have an adversarial relationship and drag down profits. Making the company uncompetitive in the market is bad for the union in the long run.
Representatives of the union see the world differently. They don't see collaboration on the same goal, they see rich management exploiting employees to get even richer.
So it's really an us vs them mentality. Either I get richer, or you get richer. Don't expect these people to start reasoning about making the company they work for competitive.
Interesting that this would be the case in Europe. Germany has had 'codetermination' laws for decades, where they have (typically union) representation on the boards of large corporations[1].
This doesn't invalidate my remark though. Nothing says these union board members are there to make the company more competitive. They are there to provide better working conditions.
Still, the point stands that of all the European states, labor is arguably strongest in Germany, and at the same time Germany industry is extremely competitive. If strong labor was a huge competitive disadvantage you'd think Germany would be falling behind, but instead it's quite the opposite.
If I join a union at work, it has no bearing on my stock options. In the uk its illegal to discriminate like that, precisely because employers like tesla would make it economically impossible to join a union.
As an aside, if you take away the shares, there is little incentive to work together to increase the share value. So of course unions are going to be incentivised differently.
This is common anti-union rhetoric. Am I an owner, with my $600 stock, and can I convince 89.5% of the other stock holders to vote with me?[0] Doesn't sound like ownership.
Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants.
The threat was that Tesla would revoke stock option grants if the workforce unionized, or refuse to negotiate over the availability of stock options, which is illegal under current federal labor regulations.
No, most other automakers don't offer stock, because the UAW didn't negotiate that with other automakers. However, for most other automakers, (and indeed, outside of tech generally) stock options are not worth much because the stock doesn't appreciate rapidly and it's not worth the administrative burden of issuing/tracking options for share gains in the fractions of a dollar. Most other automakers do allow employees to purchase (actual) shares of company stock out of pre-tax income, which is generally a huge benefit for companies that actually make money and are valued on fundamentals.
> Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants.
This is true in the US, but it's not true in other countries which learned from our mistakes and implemented wage boards/sectoral bargaining, where a union contract applies to an entire industry at once. This makes the employer less likely to feel they're becoming uncompetitive by accepting the union, which is good since in the past they tended to react by having all their employees killed by the Pinkertons.
> Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants
If it was my factory, I would cut the stock grant and fire them all - unionized or not - to end a clear message to the other factories: "you only have one job, while I have more than one factory"
> Richard Ortiz was fired after the incident , but because Tesla did not have standing rules against browsing employees' profiles on Workday or screenshotting them , apparently that's not allowed.
The real question is if they'd have been fired for doing that if they weren't a union organizer. And perhaps more importantly, whether you'd be able to convince a judge that looking up co-workers on an internal directory and/or posting about them privately on Facebook is always a firable offense.
I don't quite get that objection though, why do you need stated rules that a certain internal site is internal information? Everything is assumed to be internal information unless stated otherwise. That violates any HR policy anywhere. More so the guy was putting it on facebook to literally get people to stalk the guy. So I'm surprised he didn't get criminal charges.
You don't need the rules to know that sharing information from internal sites might be prohibited. You need them to be able to prove that sharing information like this would get somebody fired. The other possibility (which the NLRB seems to believe) is that Tesla normally would have been OK with this sort of sharing or given only a warning, but this time was specifically looking for an excuse to fire the employee.
Do you have info on the stalking? It is common practice when organizing a union to note the likely strongly anti-union people, to not solicit them, and inform them last of the effort. I say this because I presumed they were just screenshotting the guy's employment photo and name, and posting in the private group, "don't solicit this guy, he might scupper the effort."
In the abstract I would agree, but there are degrees of offense before firing someone -- I would imagine I would not be fired for doing same when organizing who to invite or not invite if I was organizing a poker game ("invite anyone, except this guy"). So the actions here seem quite harsh and retaliatory. I haven't read the NLRB's report, but my thoughts are similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598779
Doesn't seem that way to me. As I said, one of the first steps in organizing is usually identifying your strong-no to strong-yes people, and building support among the yes side first. I don't have experience in organizing a workplace, but the information above is second-hand from conversations with people who have.
I have participated in "get out the vote" operations. In that case it's quite similar: you mostly want to avoid knocking on the door of likely-strong-no households, as you have so many likely-strong-yes doors to knock, and debating people on the doorstep is a waste of precious time when close to an election/primary -- so you can see the value in having a good data operation to know which houses are likely one way or the other, and spreading that knowledge to your canvassers.
I don't see how it isn't a firable offense given that it violates the confidentiality agreement that lists termination as a possible consequence of violation.
So it seems to me that what Oritz did must qualify as protected activity...
First of all, the system wasn’t treated as confidential information, and workers weren’t told that use of the system was restricted. Second, the data they extracted were simply names and photos. Third, they posted them to a FB group comprising Tesla employees. If you read the judgment, indeed, all of these actions are considered protected activity.
If you read the policy they had people sign (it is included in the official opinion linked in other comments) it would seem to be expressly included under that policy.
> To repeat the key info from this case that makes one question the NRLB ruling...
These issues (among others) are addressed at length in the NLRB's decision (https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45833d3fce) which takes into account probably thousands of pages of briefs, witness statements, and legal analysis.
The decision itself is only ~50 pages and is readable without a legal background. The section "credibility findings" which starts on page 32 might interest you.
Because of all of the above I disagree with the ruling. While yes Elon's tweet is borderline "intimidation", the guy was fired for very legitimate reasons, taking internal company information about employees and basically doxxing them on facebook. The NLRB shouldn't be defending doxxers.
He didn’t Dox them - he didn’t publish their home addresses or phone numbers, he merely said “these people testified on behalf of the company at a state hearing.” This is very clearly protected organizing activity, as documented with multiple case citations in the judge’s ruling.
In addition, the employee who was fired didn’t access the internal system. Someone else did, and texted him the photos, which he posted. The person who allegedly accessed the system only got a warning. So, if the concern is the improper access of company systems, then they punished the wrong guy.
Because it's unpopular, it also won't get discussed anywhere... ( My perception could obviously be wrong, bit it would get silenced immediately for bringing it up)
We have a powerfull union here in Belgium ( connections with politics) and since a lot had already accomplished, they keep fighting for ridiculous things for the mere purpose of keeping themselves relevant.
One of their most favorite is classifying teachers as very hard labor. Coming from a background where my dad worked 18/24 and 7/7 that stings. I know multiple teachers and I don't consider that hard labor. It's important labor, yes. But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions, not much working hours and a lot of vacation.
Keeping your course up to date every year is not stressful ( if that even happens. A lot of professors copy-paste their work)
Important note: depending on the students age they teach ( toddlers, middle aged, adults. I do believe it gets harder and they need to add more hours. But classifying everyone as one is a mistake in my POV.